[S/lay] The Tulpa

[Eero Tuovinen]

I played more S/lay w/ Me today (two sessions in fact, but I'll tell about the other one later), this time with my young college-student friend Peitsa Veteli. Peitsa's a bit of an artist, so I asked him to check out the S/lay gallery project Ron's been musing over. As we also get along well and enjoy each other's company, Peitsa was one of the first people in Helsinki who occurred to me as somebody to play S/lay with. This is especially the case in ludopedagogic terms: I always make a point of getting Peitsa to try other games aside from old school D&D, which he's been rocking hardcore for the last couple of years.

(For reference, my last session in this series was In the Refugium.)

As Peitsa hadn't played before, I was "I" again. Here's Peitsa's hero:

I am myself. I am canny, brutal, experienced. I laugh at the gods. I delight in life. My foes meet death swiftly. I am a demon's child and heir to its power, but I am beautiful and good. I have wings, my face angelic, delighted and ever-young. My name is Sanquinius, son of a demon and the doom of the same.

Peitsa's big on Warhammer (or should I say, Games Workshop games in general), which obviously is British fantasy punk stylistically, and thus in direct descent from the phantasmagoric late sword & sorcery and underground fantasy, so he grogged the ethos (pathos?) of the game immediately.

I shall fly the clean, free air of the mountains, so as to close the gates of Hell whence my father came.

So yeah... a second visit to the mountains for me in as many sessions. I swear that this list needs something else to catch the eye of these Finnish minimalists, they seem to shy away from all the weird settings.

I didn't take Peitsa to the same mountains that we explored with Tommi, of course. Here's what I did:

Bhikkhunī Thubten Pende is the formidable leader of the Blue Mountain Cloister, an order of nuns perched high on the mountainside, above the prosperous valley. She's conscientious, yet unhappy with the undesired burden laid upon her by the Gramma Lama, the task she's been carrying out for 20 years. Thubten would love wantonly given the chance, despite it being forbidden; her duty forces her to be manipulative, and she is perfectly knowledgeable of what she is doing.

The Tulpa is a psychic emanation of bhikkhunī Thubten's devotions. It is akin to an amorphous cloud of poison and fangs, with a cloying smell mixed from her memories of childhood - but it can take other forms, any that her subconscious and externalized vices allow! It would kill you slow, with deceit if possible. It is ordinarily civil and hidden, yet comes out alone in the night to do what its subconscious perceives as the duty.

The play was effortless in general, although the hero's attitude and demeanor kept me on my toes yet again. I had a pretty good feel for my Tibetan setting, which juxtaposed interestingly with the decidedly Christian theological framework of Sanquinius's existence. S. was pretty single-minded to begin with (S/lay heroes seem to be that, I have no idea why!), but thawed somewhat when he was faced with the wanton private character of the abbedissa Thubten, and her worry and concern for her nuns. A few highlights:
- Sanquinius was jumped by the Tulpa in the night, when he brooded on the roof of the cloister after an improvised bout of love-making with Thubten. It being dark, and considering the nature of the Tulpa, S. could merely feel the movement of its massive girth through the night sky, akin to a sky-whale of some sort.
- Once Sanquinius put the cards on the table and demanded that Thubten help him find the hellgate he knew to exist somewhere within the cloister, she argued with him, and forced him to agree to protect the nuns after their usefulness to their patron, Gramma Lama, was ended. Sanquinius gave a pretty boy-ish impression here, really, in his eagerness to make grandiose promises to a woman he was crushing on. The cold-blooded way the ruling men of the religious establishment used the hell-gate in their spiritual exercises was pretty interesting, too.
- When the Tulpa haunted Sanquinius and Thubten to the caverns below the cloister, it grew more and more obvious that it was under no control of Thubten, whose agonised loyalties and externalized vices in the form of the tulpa were attempting to kill Sanquinius before he'd lure her away from her duty. Finally, when they got to the gate, the Tulpa took physical form as a clay-burned female being with the head of a poisonous snake. It bit Sanquinius in his wing, mercilessly pumping into him the poisonous feelings of abandonment that Thubten had felt as an 8-year old girl, chosen for her psionic prowess to guard the hellgate. I rather liked the details about her character, as was revealed in minor flashbacks and side-notes.

Peitsa was somewhat unlucky with the dice - you need to be sharp and roll well in this game to make it as a conquering hero!

Sanquinius drew strength from the gate to hell, for he was heir to its power; hellfire blazed in his eyes as he laid down the unmoving body of bhikkhunī Thubten and turned to face the tulpa in its corporeal form. The tulpa leaped, surprisingly agile despite its body of charred clay. Sanquinius dodged to the upper right quadrant, but did not gain the height, and was bit by the shrivelling poisolipsism. Feeling the detachment, he forced more power from the gate, causing it to throw its arch in the eagerness to obey; masses of stone started to drop, burying the cleft of hell, and everybody with it. Later, when the dust settled, the tulpa released itself by main strength; it dragged Thubten out of the rock pile, not realizing in its incomplete mind that she had been crushed to death in the cavefall. Sanquinius, on the other hand, finally woke from his grave injuries, but not where he expected: he was in hell now, having been dragged through the gate. With one wing shriveled Sanquinius expected to be an outcast, but his gorge rose when he realized that the hell-spawn thought him a match to his father, the way he succeeded in closing the cleft between the worlds.

Peitsa didn't expect that Sanquinius would survive with injuries when he chose to close the hell-gate and stop the local lamaic esoterica associated with it, but that's how the rules go, so Sanquinius lives to suffer another day, this time in his father's house.

I've got the sense that Sanquinius might have kept his promise and stayed on as the supernatural protector of the cloister (against patriarchal lamaic revenge and abandonment, when the nuns lost the hell-gate); he was bombastic and clearly the sort of fellow who's just looking for a place to belong and a girl to keep him in line. Quite tragic, he doesn't even know what happened to Thubten in those final moments.

[Ron Edwards]

Eero, are you playing these games in person or through some kind of text medium?

That was a great story. I would have been hard-pressed to reconcile "close the gate to hell" with "the clean free air of the mountains," but you found a way.

Sex with the Lover! It's sort of fun to play the wanton ones, isn't it?

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

We played in person with both Tommi and Peitsa. As I've mentioned before, I moved to Helsinki for a writing hermitage in the spring, so I've been residing at my brother Jari's apartment (he in turn moved up north to my place - we're executing the "country mouse / city mouse protocol" in the interest of shifting perspectives) here in the bohemian quarter of Kallio. I used to live here at the same apartment during my university days (playing everything from D&D to Sorcerer), so it's easy to host games here. The subway stops right next to the place, too, so it's simple for people to come visit me.

Thubten was an enjoyable character to play, I think. I have this pet theory that sex isn't a good move (in the sense of achieving your goals) for the GM to make in this game unless you show your work - depict why this Lover wants it. In this case I first made the move, and then filled in the background on what makes her tick afterwards.