Alicornutopia

(What the heck is a pataphor?)

My support still lies firmly with #3. I wouldn't mind a #4 campaign, but it sounds much less chewy and delicious.

If we do go with #3, would you be willing to produce more chewy and delicious information posts for us to consume in order to improve our understanding of the setting? I find that I'm much better able to absorb information presented in that style than comparable information retrieved on wiki crawls.

Pataphor (It was mostly a joke)

I'll endeavour to do so, yes, though for my own health I should try to limit how often I produce 4000-word posts...

I prefer 3 to 4 (though I admit I had been kindof hoping that 3 or 4 would be mashed up with one of the others; they seem amenable to it)

also :D pataphor

Mashups sound like fun too. I'm not sure how exactly they would work, though.

One simple example of a mashup is "like one of the others, but also you're all warforged."

My interest in 3 drops sharply if everyone has to be warforged, because StevenChainsaws don't yet come in that flavour.

my feeling about the warforged storyline is like, that might be cool for it to be a player or two's story arc/motivations, but i would find it boring if it were the *game's* story arc.

i was thinking that like 2 and 5 sounded like more immediate/object-level story/setting premises, while 3 and 4 sounded like more abstract, what's going on behind the scenes sort of premises. so you could mash them up like, for example:
4+5 = "the tribunal has an investigative research branch, intended to provide expert testimony on some of the more obscure and arcane cases brought before their judgement. rendering true justice and advancing the cause of knowledge will entail exploring a variety of far-fetched claims with an open mind, convincing an indifferent bureaucracy to listen to fairness and reason over routine policy and political expediency, and very careful navigation of how to handle inconvenient truths."
2+3 = "into the midst of the intrigue swirling about the twelve in the aftermath of the day of mourning, comes a prophecy. each faction maintains their own explanations for the mysteries of the world, for their own reasons. in order to decipher the true meaning of the fateful words you heard - and to know what to do once you understand - you will have to learn to tell truth from lies"

(i have no idea how well either of these suggestions works with what jalapeno has planned for any of the scenarios; these are just examples of how the premises might be combined)

Off-topic: If you like pataphor and interactive fiction, play PataNoir.

On-topic: I strongly prefer 4 to 3, and I think I'm probably not interested in playing 3 as you describe it. I prefer the X-Files-y vibe to the more Lovecraftian one, but also I'm pretty leery of the structure both from the postmodern elements and because being less amenable to episodic format makes it easier to get derailed if someone doesn't have enough time to spend on the campaign, or just isn't feeling it and wants to drop out.

I'm in favour of episodic format and not hugely invested in Lovecraftian vibes; the draw of 3 for me is that if the focus is on "weird end of the world shit" instead of "Lies In Science And Engineering", I don't feel compelled to put up a character who is into Science And Engineering, and therefore I can put up a StevenChainsaw instead. Maybe there are ways to combine the desirable elements of both? What are everyone else's relevant desirable elements?

Convenience link to the post with the scenarios since I just found myself compelled to look it up and had forgotten what page it was on. Convenience link to the more recent post about 3 and 4 for similar reasons.

I agree with PDV about preferring 4 to 3. I would probably try to play 3 anyway, but might not be able to maintain it depending on how much I needed to learn about all at once and how long the game would go on.

In more detail: I don’t particularly care either way where discovery comes from for the characters, I very much prefer the gradual introduction from #4, and I prefer the episodic nature in that it allows me to have a busy IRL week without messing other things up by not being there where the Prophecy needs me. I think I have a lower line for “maximum allowed amount of surrealism, symbolism, etc.” than most people, although I have higher tolerance for multiple timelines and controlled fourth wall breakage. Basically, I think #4 would be slightly more fun in an ideal world and more-than-slightly more achievable in practice; I would be willing to try #3 but might not be able to stick with it as long as others would want to.