[My Life with Master] "Some of the things the Master makes us do are pretty bad"

[Ron Edwards]

I hope Brian, Mark, and our other player, Sarah, don't mind if I describe the group as currently oriented toward (from?) the perceived dichotomy of OSR vs. "story games, " both rather dubious constructs as I see it, and lacking experience of Trollbabe, Dust Devils, My Life with Master, Universalis, The Pool, InSpectres, or other games or ideas from the Forge culture of 2001-2003.

So I figured this game would be a lot of fun as our group re-shuffles a little due to schedules, and before we kick into what may be a longer series of sessions with D&D 4E.

Our Master turned out to be Konrad Zenko: Brain + Feeder.
Need = blood from townspeople, and a lot of it
Want = get medical techniques (um, loosely speaking) adopted by Hapsburgs
He lives in a grand estate, enclosed by fence, rectangular mansion with hundreds of windows, many angled roofs; the grounds include an ossuary and a very modern medlab (for the time).

Reason = 2, Fear = 5, which means Zenko practically rules the place and people go in huddled terror of his whims.

The minions were nicely horrible and pathetic. Brian's Iganyov began with Self-Loathing 1 and Weariness 2 and gained 2 Self-Loathing in play. His More than Human was observant except when women are present; his Less than Human was a horrible burn-victim face except in the dark (his voice is nice). His Connections included the singer at the beer hall and his stepbrother (disabled veteran), and he added another soldier, Fritz.

Mark's Augustus began with Self-Loathing 2 and Weariness 1, and gained 1 each in play. He had a beautiful face except when cats are absent, and he was nearly blind except at twilight. His Connections were his mother in town, cat lady Jenny, later the little curly-headed beloved pastor's Innocent son Jude, as well as the same soldier Fritz.

I'm pleased to report that we usd the three special dice of absolutely the right colors, although the d8 was marked with weather faces instead of numbers, with sunny at 1 and a nuclear explosion at 8.

Most of the early orders and cringing self-disgusted submissive obedience in the game concerned the acquisition of blood, and almost immediately Iganyov tried to keep his stepbrother from getting siphoned, even kidnapping another soldier to serve in his place. This eventually developed into ridiculous but genuinely awful whose-blood-is-this scenes, as he decided he liked the other soldier after all, as he tried to get some from the gypsies camping at the estate (who were way too smart for him), as he even tried to bonk his fellow minion and get his blood, and finally I think they ended up with dogs' blood or something like that.

We met the local Innocents: Bette, the nurse in town, and little Jude, the handsome beloved pastor's child. Augustus, the awful evil creep-O minion, even lured Jude up to the estate as a special gift to the Master, and then ... ended up having tea with the little boy, patting him on the head, and sending him home.

I was especially pleased by the unprompted moment of moral clarity right near the end of the session, from Mark playing Augustus, who until his just-finished scene sparing Jude, had been the more atrocious of the two minions. That's where the quote in the thread title comes from.

Speaking of atrocity, Brian's numbers prompted a Horror Revealed, which turned into a terrible lab accident probably owing to the minions' shenanigans with the sources of blood.

At the end of the first session, Iganyov's Love = 3, Fear + Weakness = 7; and Augustus's Love = 4, Fear + Weakness = 7.

The second session brought us the arrival of an emissary from the Hapsburgs, prompting truly horrific ego monstrosity from Konrad, who apparently had blocked out the whole lab accident from his mind and didn't notice the gash in his temple, so he dressed in his immaculate tux which was promptly soaked down the right side with his blood.

Anyway, lots of stuff ensued, as it does in this game ... I'll try to abstract a couple of important points about it.

The minions slacked off a bit on gathering Love, which led them to do some pretty bad things to the emissary and his staff, and pumped up Self-Loathing almost to the point of more Horror Revealed. Then they made Connections out of some of those NPCs and worked on Love, so the effect was to keep the Horror from happening (Love was too high) but didn't stop them from racking up more Self-Loathing.

This effect was particularly hard on Iganyov because Brian rolled the absolute worst for Overtures in the history of dice-rolling, and ended with some kind of ridiculous Self-Loathing of NINE, which as I say, didn't prompt HR because of all the Love. The Sincerity die betrayed him at least three times. But he did end up with a Love of similar value which allowed him to try to resist the Master for real.

I'm not sure if I did the right thing by allowing a bunch of Overture scenes in a row, but the fictional circumstances seemed to call for it as the minions ran around the village marshalling all their Connections for help, and a classic "storm the mansion" scene did develop that way.

Our Endgame didn't last long, unusually. It's because Augustus was right there with Iganyov and helped both in the resist roll and in the following "try to kill him" roll, and because one of the Innocents was present knocking down the Master by a die. (They tried to get both there but failed that Overture earlier.) Anyway, Zenko seized Iganyov by the throat, but the minion battered him away, and then with Augustus' help, tore out his trachea in a crimson splatter of the very fluid that Zenko prized so much.

I hadn't told the guys about the Epilogue mechanics yet. They were like kids on Christmas morning as we went through the criteria. As it turned out, both had such rotten Self-Loathing that each had the choice between being killed or committing suicide. And most perfectly, Augustus missed getting integrated into the townsfolk by a whisker, which given his rolls and the arc of the character, made absolutely perfect sense. Brian decided Iganyov was killed by the Master in his death-throes, and Mark decided that Augustus drowned himself in the lake ... and I closed things out with little Innocent Jude arriving too late to stop him.

Brian: "That was awesome!" and then "It seems like it's pretty hard to GM."

Me: "Nope. All I do is keep  ordering you to do horrible shit." (Brian and Mark became very thoughtful. I think this might have been the moment in which they realized I was only playing bass the whole time.)

Best, Ron

[Justice Platt]

I wish I had, like, insights to offer, but I still want to say that you articulated one of my favorite parts of MLWM GM'ing extremely well. It's one of the things that makes the game so very strong, in my experience.

[Callan S.]

What made the minions beholden to the master?

[Ron Edwards]

Callan, this game has been out since 2003 and discussed hundreds of times. I don't think I feel like explaining it to you.

If this is supposed to be one of those "prompt an OMG realization of underlying assumption" questions, then it fails.

[Callan S.]

I'm asking about these specific characters, Ron, not the game. Doesn't even worry me if it's retroactively made history. Principles of feality due to lack of resources, like food or shelter or even ostricisation or a sense of needing to have an authority are interesting to me.

And telling me something is a fail, is a fail! There, dat's gotta be convincing! C'mon, why'd the sense of humour suddenly dissappear?

[Ron Edwards]

Oh. That's a pretty interesting question. I can say without doubt that the sense of humor had disappeared into parenting fatigue.

Well, I don't think any back-story was ever established for the minions, and I can't remember much of a backstory for any minion in the games I've played. Sometimes it's included in the concept, especially as reinforced by More than Human and Less than Human ... the most so as described in [My Life with Master] Radium power, I think. But the default in my experience is simply that the minion is hideous (or feels so) in some drastic way and therefore has "found a place" with the Master when no one else would have him or her, or at least that's what the minion believes, and the details and specific history are left unknown.