I love the game (even if it’s a bit daunting). I picked up the game after hearing Luke talk about Infection mechanics on a podcast. I had resisted getting the game for a while because of the Vaylen. Between the Borg, the Puppet Master, and especially the Go’auld of Stargate I figured the Vaylen were just more of the same. And then I read the book and found out how much more the Vaylen are. They bring a new depth and life to the trope and really make you think like a good scifi concept should. (Of course I rushed out and bought the graphic novels immediately too!)
So now I’m GMing a BE game and it’s great fun. I take the approach that I’m an equal participant in making the story and you have to let it go where the Beliefs of all the characters take it. But there is one idea I’d love to put in the game to see how it plays out. Since I’m probably not going to put it in unless it can happen as a result of events, I figured I’d toss the idea around here instead.
Take a planet with a fairly liberal and democratic government (in the classic sense of both words) where everyone - Human, Kernn, Mukahdish - has equal rights and protections under the law. So on this planet, the Vaylen are hulling people using Naiven worms that have never known sentience. They are discovered by a human force of somekind that kills or captures the leaders, but one of the newly hulled Vaylen escapes and then finds a lawyer willing to defend him and turns himself in.
They get their day in court and the Vaylen’s lawyer makes the argument that as a Naiven his client had no knowledge of the actions of the Vaylen that took his host captive and implanted him inside - he’s innocent of any wrongdoing. Further, without his host body he would be denied sentience and his host would never recover anyway.
I’d love to see that played out and in a series of DoW and propoganda rolls on both sides. I’d like to see what arguments there would be against the Vaylen that would compelling. That’s what makes them so interesting to me, they aren’t evil, they need to do what they do, but we must kill them all. There is no possible compromise.
