Another Birthday Gift for Ron

[pete_darby]

A quick synopsis of my favourite gaming moment....

Actually, it was in Castle Marrach, an online text based game.

The set-up is that all characters have been brought back from the dead, with a single hazy memory of a previous life, in an isolated castle.

My character, Albion, was built entirely around the concept of survivor guilt: he'd been in charge of a castle that had been overrun, women & children slaughtered, etc etc.

One evening another character turned up: her character was, on the surface, just another hedonist, never mind the previous life. Albion did his usual moping about the impossibility of redemption, and she just went hell for leather for him: this new life is reward, or at least recompense for the old one.

Turns out her backstory was as a disfigured berserker/assassin in a previous life... and she had no regrets about it, or about living it up now she was reborn physically whole.

Attentive students will, of course, have spotted the set up here: Albion's premise was "old failures must be paid for", the other's was, essentially, "Hakuna matata".

Add to that busked hints that she may have been one of the leaders of the army that destroyed Albion's castle....

At the time, it was obvious to both players that we needed to keep this going, but from an internal cause point of view it was hard to justify (wouldn't these guys just avoid each other?). Now, looking at it with nar eyes, the mutual premise of "must old failures be paid for?" is what drives a fascinating story. Albion remains one of my favourite characters, but I'm really at a loss for situations for him to address his premise in....

The real tragedy being that a new job and a new baby put a kibosh on late night Marrach sessions... and I'm damned if I can find the transcripts now.

Anyway, happy birthday, Forge!

[MPOSullivan]

alright, i don't know if this is exactly hitting Ron's button in this thread, but i figured i'd right this out, seeing as how i've had a bunch of great RPing experiences in my career as a gamer and i've been kinda bummed lately, so maybe reflecting on better times will cheer me up a little.  and there's nothing like a party to get rid of the dulldrums of everyday life.  ;-)

so, anyway, as i said above, i've had plenty of satisfying role-playing exeriences in my time as a gamer, both GMing and being a Player.  There are any number of moments in my previous games that i could point to and say "hey, that was a fun character" or "this was a poignant moment".  I've had to play some difficult characters in my day like a faerie knight dying slowly of lung cancer, or a mentally retarded man that had accidentally killed a boy and didn't even know it.  Hell, in a fantasy game right now i'm playing a sixteen year old boy that had been raised his entire life with the understanding that he was a girl.  but there is one that seems to jump ahead of the pack.  I was running a game of Nobilis with a couple of close friends and we had been exploring the ideas of growth and passion throughout the course of the game.  

During the first session one of my players, portraying the Power of Passion, needed to flesh out one of his Anchors.  I asked him, briefly, what he wanted for the NPC.  He said he wanted one that he could hate, so he thought maybe a sterotypical thirty-something stock broker would be fun.  We named him Cal and he rather quickly took on a mind of his own.  He developed into an adulturing, hedonistic roman god of a man.  He was in his mid-thirties, had a trophy wife, no kids, a great drug dealer that delivered and an American Express Black card.  He was the kind of guy who had grown up watching Wall Street and could recite every line of Gordon Gecko's without even having to think about it.  

Over the ensuing sessions, Dan's PC, the Pwer of Passion, took great pains in slowly unravelling Cal's life, a life Dan felt had no passion in it.  First he stripped away Cal's wife by taking over his body and revealing his affairs to her in a rather embarrasing way.  Then he eroded his connections in the business world by taking him away from important meetings and such, and just kept on going down the list, slowly wittling this former God of Commerce down to a simple husk.

The final act on the part of the PC was quite simple.  During a conversation that the two were having in Cal's apartment, Cal was admiring himself in the mirror in his living room.  He was flexing his muscles and admiring his tan while arguing with the Power.  At the end of the arguement, the Pwer decided to cast a minor Miracle on Cal, further inflating the passion that Cal had concerning his body to incredible proportions, forcing him to study himself in the mirrors in his house for weeks.  When she finally returned for him a month had passed and Cal had wasted away to nothing, his eyes were sunken and his skin gone sickly pale.  He had shattered every mirror in his house, then every reflective surface, like all of the windows, the front of his television, the display on his cell-phone.  He even scuffed the surfaces of his hard wood floors with brillo so they wouldn't reflect back upon him.

When the Power returned he simply stared at her, none of the anger and hatred in him that had previously marked his voice.  He simply said "You've destroyed me.  My wife, my job, everything that i wanted to be is gone.  Are you happy now?"

And the Power of Passion said "Yes."

*****

alright, why was that so cool a moment for me and my group?  well, not only was it just a cool scene that had been played out over months of gameplay, but it also did something else.  It explored.  It asked the question "what is passion?" of the players, myself included, and got some answers, different ones for each of us.  In my eyes, passion was something that arose in beauty, it's something that i felt when i looked at art, mainly because i like to think of myself as an artist and art inspires me.  Dan's idea of passion was more classical, a love or belief that defies worldly pain and hardship.  

that scene, that moment also encapsulated the themes we were exploring.  Not just passion, but change and growth.  It was at this moment that Cal was changed, utterly and to his core.  A hedonist had now become an ascetic.  Pain had showed him the way to a different kind of life.  he was finally ready for Passion, at least the kind that Dan was going to instill in him.

Sadly, that was to be the last session of that game.  The following week i moved cross-country to be with my brother before he shipped to Afghanistan with the Army.  I'm heading back eastward in a counple of weeks for vacation, so i may just be able to pick up a loose story thread or two.  we'll see....