[MLWM] Procrustean Phrenologist

[Eric Borzello]

Earlier tonight several of my friends and I ran the Master/Minion creation session of a MLWM game we'll be playing for a few weeks.  This is the first session of MLWM any of us had ever played.  I was GM, the players were two guys who play in my other weekly game, and the other two where some of my other friends who are familiar with role playing, but haven't played very much.  I think the session went really, really well, and I can't wait to actually use the things we came up with.  I'll talk about what happened in general, and then give the stats we came up with at the end.

Process:
I started off by doing a little reminder about the general genre and setting of the game, specifically it was Gothic/Romantic horror in a nonspecific European village at around 1805.  We then promptly went off topic for about fifteen minutes.  However, in any given brain storming session I've been in this happened, so I wasn't very worried.  I then pulled us back to the topic at hand by discussing example Masters: like Dracula, Frankenstein, and so forth.  We were all still joking around, but I could tell that we were all mulling over exactly what kind of Master we wanted.

Then, the moment of truth.  One of my friends made a joke about a severed gopher head in a box (in context, it wasn't as abrupt as it sounds).  Then, I commented on phrenology, which is measuring the skull and brain to determine ones personality and temperament.  Next, one of my other friends mentioned Procrustes, the character from Greek myth who would stretch people on a rack, or chop off parts of their legs in order to have them match some ideal height.  And so, a Master was born.

Our idea was for a master who collected body parts in order to try to create the perfect person.  However, phrenology was thought to specific, so we used another more general (and also drawn from real life) school of thought which said that a person's build and features like arm length and foot size gave accurate measurements of their personality.  So, now that we had a master who wanted to build the perfect body.  We were left asking, "Why?"

The answer we came up with was that he wanted to make a bride for his son.  However, then we had the idea that the Master could instead by trying to make a groom for his incredibly masculine daughter.  This idea seemed like it could work, but would be bizarre enough to keep us entertained for several games in the future.  So then, I had a good idea.  I said to the group (which is all male), "Okay, who wants to play the daughter?"  My friends were briefly taken aback, and then saw the interesting possibilities of playing a daughter forced into a Minion role by her overbearing father, and who has difficulty interacting with others due to her appearance.  However, the bearded lady thing was deemed too cliched (and not that fun to role play), so we went with instead making the daughter incredibly unpleasant and vile.  This made it so that it was her character, rather than her appearance that kept her from happy marriage (plus, you get scenes about verbal abuse instead of putting on a paper bag).  Now that we had the daughter connection, it seemed that the Master wanted a spouse for his daughter. We decided that the Outsiders he sought approval from were polite society and his relatives, all of whom thought his vile daughter would never find a suitable match.

The next step was to make the minions.  The question we asked ourselves was, "What Minions would the master need to carry out his plan?"  We decided he would need an assistant to help with the assembly of the perfect body, and some muscle to actually get the parts and do odd jobs.  That took care of three of the four players (daughter, assistant, muscle) but left us needing to come up with one more.  We all tried to think of something entertaining.  The idea we struck on was that of a young orphaned waif, who the Master kept for his well formed (but currently underdeveloped) body parts.  We decided that we could make these characters work.

To spare you all the iterations each character went through, I'll instead talk about the general approach we used for the minions.  I played ring master, and would say "Let's discuss <this minion> now."  We would talk about that minion until I thought we were starting to run low on ideas, then I would say, "OK, all those ideas are cool, but we still need to hash out some details about <another Minion>"  We basically kept doing this, and ended up with better versions of each minion every time around.  Best of all, all of the players were really into it, and all of them said that they would be happy playing several of the characters.  Since I have heard that MLWM play is largely about having other players care about your character enough to listen to your scenes, I take this as a good sign.  Lastly, after we had made up the characters, I had each player set the Self-Loathing and Weariness values for their character.  It was cool that each player said something like, "Well, I see this character as more beaten down by life than full of self hatred, so I'll give 2 Weariness and 1 Self Loathing."  It may have been after the fact rationalization, but it seemed like they were extrapolating the stats from their internal ideal of the character's mental state.  

Things that went worked well for us or set up the rest of the game:
-My group and I basically ignored the numbers for the characters until the last minute, and concentrated more on making up people we'd want to hear stories about for a few weeks.
-We created every character jointly, but the player who was going to be playing was basically given last say over what was or wasn't included.  However, everyone contributed a lot to each others characters.
-We made a master who was obviously unredeemably evil, so I don't think  I'll have much trouble making the players want to kill him.
-The Master also has a ready made mechanism to put out a hit on the players' connections: "The shop girl in town has a neck exactly the right size, bring it to me!"

Below are the Master and Minions we came up with, along with comments:

MASTER
Sir Nigel Geldingworth
Occupation: Procrustean Phrenologist
Needs: Bodies and body parts
Wants: To make the perfect spouse for his daughter
Lair: Unkempt Victorian Style Manor
(not super original, but should be entertaining)

Minions
Temperance Geldingworth
Occupation: Daughter
Self-Loathing: 0
Weariness: 3
More than human: Can cow anyone into agreeing with her, as long as another woman isn't directly involved in the conversation (note: this is short term agreement, not long term agreement.  It basically means she can get what she wants in specific situation, as long as no other women interferes)
Less than human:  Excessively vile to others, except when given a sincere gift (limitation seemed pretty rare, but the player wanted it. If he wants his less than human to apply a lot, who was I to say no?)

William Fitch
Occupation: Tailor
Self-Loathing: 1
Weariness: 2
More than human: Can perfectly measure a person's size from their clothes, as long as the clothes aren't being worn (this is to help the master get the 'right' body parts.' It will also hopefully lead into a lot of hilarious garment theft scenes)
Less than human: Has extremely shaky hands (to the point of unnerving others), except when holding something sharp the size of scissors or larger (violently shaking hands + always carrying of sharp objects = awkward beginnings to conversations with NPC's)

Gunter, AKA Gunt (when the Master talks down to him)
Occupation: Odd-Jobs Doer, Philosopher
Self-Loathing :2
Weariness :1
More than human: Is extremely charming, unless he is observed by the person(s) he is talking to
Less than human: always uses too much or too little force unless he can't see, unless he can't see what he's working on

(This character doesn't seem much like the 'muscle' we started aiming for, but the player was hell bent on this character concept.  However, if he thinks he can make it work, I'm willing to let him try)

Bentley
Occupation: Waif, Orphan
Self-Loathing: 3
Weariness: 0
More than human: Is extremely stealthy, unless there is a mother around (he's an orphan, he has mother issues)
Less than human: Compulsively picks on anyone smaller/younger than him unless he is currently playing a game with them (he also apparently has trouble relating to others near his own age)

[Sydney Freedberg]

Sounds very cool -- we seem to have some parent issues here.... Please post more as you play.

Less than human:  Excessively vile to others, except when given a sincere gift (limitation seemed pretty rare, but the player wanted it. If he wants his less than human to apply a lot, who was I to say no?)

Aaaah, but this isn't GURPS where you try to calculate how often a disadvantage comes into play based on standardized probabilities. If "sincere gift" is the exception, then "sincere gifts" will fly sometimes. I played a Minion in this recent one-shot whose Less than human was "always lies, except when offered warm food" (more parental issues, by the way: a hungry orphan) -- and guess what, the GM aggressively framed me into Connections offering cold porridge and the Master offering hot soup.

[Michael S. Miller]

Hi, Eric and Welcome to the Forge!

That sounds like a great creation session. The steps you followed are very similar to what I do. Your Master creeps me out already. He's like Frankenstein, but more of a stickler. Yikes!

I've run the game a few times, and there's only one potential trouble spot I see in your post, and it's minor:

-The Master also has a ready made mechanism to put out a hit on the players' connections: "The shop girl in town has a neck exactly the right size, bring it to me!"

Although it's tempting, I find it best to not order minions to kill anyone Connections until very late in the game, if at all. It's so much better to simply order them minions to "bring me the shop girl." Then you can order them to "prepare the shop girl--strap her to the operation table" and "go fetch me this thing that I need to preserve the neck", etc. and get much more milage out of each Connection (and give them a chance to build up Love).

I look forward to reading about how the game goes.

[Eric Borzello]

Sydney:  I just realized I didn't say so in my post above, but the tailor and muscle are played by the more experienced role players, and the daughter and waif are played by the less experienced role players.  Consequently, I wanted to make it clear to the relative newbie that his less than human was going to see be almost continuously in effect.  I don't have a problem with it coming up a lot, but I don't want anyone being in a situation where they feel like they are being picked on because I keep bringing up their less than human.

Michael: Thanks for the advice.  I agree that a connection bloodbath seems like a good way to get all of my players to quit.  However, having the Master set up so that it is easy to put the player's connections in jeopardy if I want too seems like it will be useful to me later.  I will definitely make use putting connections in protracted jeopardy now that you've mentioned it.

[Sydney Freedberg]

I don't want anyone being in a situation where they feel like they are being picked on because I keep bringing up their less than human.

Sure, but remember you're bound by no rules of "realism" in this game, only by the rules of melodrama. You can frame scenes with elements that play right into people's "unless" conditions -- a sincere gift, a mother, a kid, a warm meal, whatever -- all you want, so effectively you as GM can switch the "more than" and "less than" off like a light for any character. (There's an example in the rulebook, I recall, of minion who's "hideously ugly, unless seen in reflection," which proceeds to say, well of course now his Connection should be the daughter of the town's mirror-maker, living in a house with mirrors on all the walls).

Also, clever players will figure out how to switch each other's "more than" and "less than" on and off as well, which in the game I played made for potent collaboration against the Master.