Chronicle Idea

I was watching the first season of CSI: NY last night. I got thru all but one episode. I'm not sure if it was panic, insomnia, or something else but it sure makes me feel like I'm really good at shooting myself in the foot.

Anyways, watching the first season gave me a number of ideas for a stories in a chronicle. It also revived my interest in a chronicle concept that I will never get to run.

Basically, the characters are the investigators of the unusual and strange. They start off as new hires in whatever professions they want and over time discover thru their jobs that the world is a dark and strange place.

Ideally, the characters would be Police/Law Enforcement types and work as a team. So obviously a bad chronicle idea for a LARP. Or at least a large scale LARP.

It is tempting to try and write a Style Sheet for this as practice. Call it the Special Investigations Unit.

What keeps this from ever seeing the light of day with me as the storyteller is that I would prefer the characters be mortals, or think they are mortals, at the start of the chronicle.

What if the ME got ghouled? Can't do that if he's already a Changeling.
What if the Honest Cop were wolf-blooded (kinfolk) to the werewolves? Can't do that if he's a vampire. (Shakes head at Forever Knight. Good show but are people really that unobservant. O, wait, Superman/Clark Kent.)

I mean there are so many possiblities with mortals and their stories that get overlooked by game groups because mortals don't have kewl powrz. And yes, popular fiction, in the form of novels, comics and film, are fully capable of covering those stories and satisfying the need to know that sort of story.

For me it isn't as cool as being Kolchak, who wasn't really trying to fight the darkness in the world so much as survive to see the sunrise and get his byline printed.

I've noticed with the CSI shows, I don't try to figure out what the main characters would be in the World of Darkness. I'm perfectly ok with the casts of all those shows being mortals. But I wonder what the various MEs would do if they encountered a werewolf attack victim and how the investigation of an impossible theft would be handled?

I mean how do you scientifically explain away the aftermath of Seperation or Form of Mist, when the digital evidence doesn't show tampering?

I think several of the shows have touched on the idea that there are things that cannot be completely explained by science. Often the shows push these things off onto the delusions of the mad. And that's fine for the shows, because they are mysteries that deal with science and fact and reality.

So, I am left to wonder what does a guy who's new to being a beat cop do when he finds dog prints that become larger and then human shaped?

And it burns my soul to know that I will never know, because it does not satisfy me to have the answer come from within. It's not as interesting to me, as knowing what a Foxdorean, Ryversong, or Gift of Isis would do with that situation and that character, for example.

Every situation is unique even when it is commonplace because every person is unique. And while two people may make the exact same choice, the how and why they make that choice will be different.