Roleplay / Liquid Coral

In the year 2298 AD, 92% of the Earth’s surface is covered by the ocean, and most of humanity survives deep underwater. Built before the Deluge, the apocalyptic event that flooded the entire planet, domed undersea cities are home to the distant descendants of hundreds of millions of refugees from all around the world. Above the sea, successor states like the New Inca Empire, the Holy Kingdom of Tibet, and the People’s Republic of Colorado fight over the scraps of land left above sea level, and the residents of nomadic fleet-cities sail the endless ocean in search of resources to plunder. But for most of the dregs of humanity, the great domes at the bottom of the sea are the only home they’ve ever known.

If the corps and the warring gangs of Nemo don't get you first, the whispers from the deep will. But where there's money to be made, some daring few scrape for their due or die trying.

LIQUID CORAL is an ongoing game and world that runs using the Blades in the Dark setting, in the cyberpunk setting of Nemo. Each season, the players take on a new group of characters in an ever-evolving world. The first season followed the Trawlers, small-time criminals that slowly became wrapped up in an eldritch plot. The second featured the Moonshiners, smugglers struggling to take over one of Nemo's docks and repel old enemies, though one of their members has a darker purpose. The third season will follow AEGIS, a secret organization focused on Nemo's supernatural elements.

A Legendkeeper page with more information about the people and organizations of the Liquid Coral setting can be found here.

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This TTRPG includes the tropes:

Liquid Coral overall

• After the End: Nemo is an undersea dome created after most of the world flooded (presumably due to climate change).
• Bizarrchitecture: All around the setting, but especially at the hotbed of bio-experimentation, Qiandao Academy.
  Each building is a living creature, a great coral reef, walls of semi-translucent skin stretched over a two-story ribcage, a towering anemone with floors of classrooms in each frond.
• Body Horror: Every description of a Deep phenomenon is evocative but creepy as hell. To a lesser degree, things taken as commonplace by Nemo residents, like living squid-programs that plug tentacle-cables into your ear canal.
• The Caper: Each session of Liquid Coral is structured around one of a few kinds of 'scores.'
• Caper Crew: Season 1 has Yuri the assassin, Sauda the stealthy, Chou the tech expert, Luce the face and eventually supernatural specialist, and Carlos as the leader (until he dies and the role is taken by Luce). Season 2 has Hyde the tech expert, Bastille as the muscle, Sauda returning, Speaker the supernatural specialist, and San Manco the leader and face.
• Code Name: Every character in Blades in the Dark gets one, but whether they're referred to more often as their code name (Bastille, Speaker, San Manco) or real name (Luce, Sauda, Yuri) is mostly about player preference.
• Company Town: Nemo is more or less ruled over by the Nautilus Corporation, which has the power to enslave you should you ever fall into debt with them.
• The Conspiracy: Many organizations we know about, and some we surely don't.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Impossibly vast leviathans prowl the deepest ocean beyond the dome, and even lesser deep things damage sanity and memory, or can't be directly observed at all. Paranoia Fuel is the backbone of the setting.
• Crapsack World: It's a combination of cyberpunk and cosmic horror, so of course.
• Dark and Troubled Past: A good chunk of the player characters have this, notably Speaker.
• Dirty Cop: In this setting, overwhelmingly the most common type of cop. Cameron from Season 1 and Bastille's former coworkers from Season 2, notably.
• Disaster Dominoes: In Season 2, this happens around Episode 8, when the attempted attack on Hatter leaves Bastille traumatized, Sauda thrown under the bus, and the Moonshiners with their first unmitigated failure. In Season 1, it may as well have begun in Episode 2 (meeting their first Deep creature, the anglerfish bartender) and continued ramping up until the finale.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The evolving nature of the setting means that characters and locations with small parts in earlier seasons can end up with larger parts in the next. For instance, the characters barely interact with the weirdness of Qiandao in season 1, where they visit Lethe_Lungs, but it takes up a full session and a player's background and goals in season 2.
• Eldritch Ocean Abyss: A cosmic horror setting, deep underwater (also overlaps with Space Is an Ocean, or the other way around).
• Fantastic Drug: Nemo has a lot of new futuristic drugs derived from ocean creatures (spin, sting, etc.) as well as equally weird surface drugs. Shows up often both because each character needs a vice (drugs apply to both Yuri and Hyde) but because Season 2 gets involved in the drug trade. Overlaps with Phlebotinum Pills due to the biopunk setting.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: All the technology in Nemo is biotech-based, from the VR cephalojacks to the cargo-whales that function like living submarines.
• Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook: Several characters came out of jail in Nemo or the "Debt Forgiveness Program" worse than when they went in. Liqiang was a very small-time criminal in Luce's backstory, but when he comes back he singlehandedly fights the Trawlers, nearly killing several, and in season 2 is leading his own gang, the Checkers.
• Karma Houdini: More common than the alternatives. A cosmic horror cyberpunkish game has a lot of unfairness in it, quelle surprise.
• Limited Loadout: As a Blades in the Dark game, characters have limited inventory slots based on what kind of score it is. The inventory system has been described as Schrodinger's Hammerspace because, rather than having everything on their inventory lists, everything they pull out has retroactively been there the whole time.
• The Lopsided Arm of the Law: Institutional crimes go on without incident (just as they do in the real world) while the police force is either ineffective or just squeezing every coin possible out of more minor offenders (San Manco's audit comes to mind).
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Shows up often, from Deep creatures and the people that wield them to the frankly terrifying biotech that is more common and accepted in Nemo.
• Neuro-Vault: Referenced whenever the player characters deal with Thirdeye.net, a community that researches Deep phenomena, or while talking about explicitly criminal stuff over VR.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: It's a tabletop campaign, so obviously.
• Title Drop: So far has happened at least once per season, during the final episodes:
  • 1: And all of a sudden, [Luce is] no longer here. He's in another world, another life. Dreaming forever, the colours real and vivid as liquid coral.
  • 2: The Challenger Dome glows brightly, shifting colours, blaring shades of liquid coral casting shadowplays on the sea floor.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: People who have abilities to commune with or control Deep creatures tend to be rattled by the experience at best. Both Luce and, much more dramatically, Speaker end their seasons with a swan dive off the Deep end.
• Wretched Hive: The amount of underworld factions fluctuates by season, but there's always more than 20 competing criminal interests per season, including the protagonists. This doesn't even get into the 'fringe' interests (Deep cultists and other weird shit) or the just-as-unethical institutions; it almost makes one think there's More Criminals Than Targets.

Tropes for Season 1

• Air-Vent Passageway: Used a few times in this season, as they usually take the sneaky infiltrator approach.
• Amnesiacs are Innocent: The end of Daz's story is more than a little fucked up: he came to the Trawlers' base to get revenge on Carlos, then had his memories eaten by the lamprey, and as he and Carlos die together, he only remembers their friendship, with the last words, "You're beautiful."
• Bittersweet Ending: Liqiang gets away, Luce has been taken over by the lamprey, Carlos is dead and everyone else is traumatized—and despite a whole building collapsing on her, March lives. But the Colorless Way facility is gone, so they did what they came to do, and there's a sweet ending moment between Yuri/Gildong and Sauda/Sofi.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Used in the narration to illustrate that the characters don't yet notice something is wrong.
  There's the couch, the TV, the coffee table, the filing cabinet, the tank full of sting, the smaller, cylindrical tank with something that looks like a deformed, twisted human face growing from a pillar of flesh is pressed against the glass, connected by a thin umbilical cable to the man in the suit who is stabbing Chou in the gut, and a vase of flowers.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast: By the end of this season, one character is dead, one possessed, and the others traumatized and scarred from their experiences in a variety of ways, mostly due to their Deep involvement.
• Eldritch Location: The Trawlers first dip their toe in the Deep end by exploring a bar that most people can't see. It's been colonized by an eldritch creature that nearly kills them, but they later kill it and use the location as a secret drop point.
• Fate Worse than Death: The Echo Project created many human/deep symbiotes in an attempt to inoculate humanity from the greater existential threats, leviathans. The test subjects themselves didn't seem like big fans.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Many Deep creatures can inspire this to some degree, but Yuri's basilisk pattern takes the cake, something that would have killed him if he looked directly at it.
• Mind Virus: The Vang noovirus, one of these, is what the protagonists blow up the Colorless Way facility trying to stop. Afflicted people would repeat the phrase, "I think it's funny that Qiandao Academy lists a Professor Vang on staff when legal records conclusively prove that no such person has ever existed or ever will." (The virus also acted as a lure for Deep things and could turn people into symbiotes, so it's worse than it sounds.)
• Mugged for Disguise: Happens with a few guards in various episodes.
• Occult Detective: Started out as a combination of straightforward thieves and this. After they encounter the lamprey while investigating an occult technique the Hammerheads used on Mad Cunt Hudson's gang, things get much crazier.
• Organ Theft: At one point Carlos's body parts are literally stolen, but not from his body, from his doctor that keeps doing experimental cosmetic surgery on him.
• Psychological Horror: This season is heavy on the mindfuckery, at least compared to the second.
• Remember That You Trust Me: A tactic the Trawlers employed with trust passwords; sometimes only one of them would properly realize the danger of the Deep creature that was menacing them.
• Repressed Memories: Towards the end, the characters remember (and then promptly forget, due to Deep interference) their former teammate that was left behind in the Colorless Way facility. One of the big wham lines of the season, since even the players weren't aware of this.
• Spies Are Lecherous: Yuri, Sauda, and Chou (plus Gildong) are all unabashedly sexual in conversation and with each other.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: At one point, Chou is affected by a Deep creature that alters her perceptions so that she is trapped in an endlessly changing setting that she thinks is reality. Lethe helps, so she's not stuck like that forever (still with some Brainwash Residue, of course).
  Chou: "Dude you know there's no-one else I can copy off of than y-you..." her grip loosens, and she has another of those strange, full-body twitches, before she blinks at Sofi, no recognition in her face. "... who are you? Where's my husband?" she looks around her at all the others, leaning away from them. "What do you want from me?!"
• Unreliable Narrator: Extremely common, along with Interface Screw spoiler tags in the narration itself that only certain players are allowed to look at.
  "Well, it's probably not anything major," says the guy in the suit, helpfully, picking up a knife in a neutral way free of implications.
• We Do Not Know Each Other: Happens once or twice when players split up during scores.

Tropes for Season 2

• Apocalypse Cult: The Speaker gathered one of these (not even the only apocalypse cult in town).
• Darker and Edgier: The Speaker's ending actually seems more ominous than the first season's: it feels like something big is actually changing in the foundations of the world, many main characters from the first season are in on it, and they don't seem like the good guys.
• Lighter and Softer: After the constant nightmare of the first season, the second season—which is a lot more business and a lot less involvement with Deep stuff except for Speaker—feels downright cheery by comparison. The ending with the other Moonshiners seems hopeful, with Bastille retiring to the surface, Hyde trying to better Qiandao, and San Manco retaining the supply chain they worked so hard to build.
• Mob War: The Moonshiners end up at war for the first time with Captain Ahab and his faction controlling the docks—and win! Later, they also end up in conflict with the Tea Party but by contrast quickly try to make peace again because it's nearly impossible to fight March.
• Neighborhood-Friendly Gangsters: The Moonshiners are a welcome presence in the docks once ruled by Ahab, as well as the Brasiliero neighborhood of As Pirahnas and to the Depth Charges.
• Psychic Children: Season 2 brings us Speaker, who was able to commune with the deep from a very young age, and Owl, a member of the Depth Charges with similar powers.
• Submarine Pirates: Ahab's gang.
• Venturous Smuggler: The gang as a whole.

Tropes for Season 3—COMING SOON