[My Life With Master] Concerning Carlos Armani

[Kirk Mitchell]

Last night while out for dinner at a friend's place, I ran a short test prep session with one of the players in my new group so we could get a handle on the system, the creation and wrap his head around the concept of narrativism. Needless to say, if something this cool can be churned out by two people at 3:00 at night, I have very high hopes for when I run a real session with the full group.

This is what we made...


The Town

Fear: 3
Reason 4

The town is all that remains of a once fine city, the victim of an ongoing economic disaster. Its people, who still remember what it was like before, must resort to less than decent activities to earn their daily bread. At the centre of the dessicated city sits the University campus, surrounded by boulevards of overgrown manors clung to by their formerly wealthy residents. On the outskirts of the town squats a Church with immense volumes of records, and a sprawling graveyard that peppers the hilsides.


The Innocent

Sarah is a beautiful young woman in her late teens pure of mind and spirit, kind to her friends and her family, is paying her way through University by prostituting herself to those who still have the money.

We chose to include a single Innocent in the town for two reasons: we thought that there was an interesting potential that the Master might at one point desire Sarah, and following on from that, it added the potential for a violent and horrific escalation of the situation later on in the game.


The Master

Carlos Armani is an amateur psychologist residing in his sprawling family manor. He was expelled from the city's University for his radical ideas regarding human sexuality, spirituality and freeing the human subconscious. Convinced that his theories are correct, he engages in weekly necrophiliac rituals in which he dresses up the corpses of women he deems to be suitable, either "plucked" from the townspeople or "harvested" from the Church graveyard, like dolls and violates them. Determined to take revenge upon his Colleages at the University and earn the praise and admiration of his idols, he works nightly on his secret thesis explaining in detail all of his theories, sending his Minions out to gather research and sabotage the University staff.


The Minion

Frederich is a mistake of mythic proportions, by an accident of genetics completely incapable of making any form of human contact: He is invisible except when viewed in through a mirror. Exceedingly strong, except when the moonlight touches him, Frederich is Carlos Armani's harvester of the townspeople. Week after week, night after night, Carlos orders Frederich to go out into the town and gather, steal and kill. Consumed by his self-loathing, saddened and weary by the constant violence, he watches the townspeople unseen. He watches Sara as she goes about her business, as she works on her studies. And the glassmaker's daughter who lives down below the boulevard occasionally sees glimpses of a man in the mirrors she works on, and is both terrified and intrigued by his continuing appearances.

Self-Loathing: 1
Weariness: 2

More than human: Exceptionally strong except when touched by the moonlight
Less than human: Invisible unless seen through a mirror

Connections:
Sarah
The glassmaker's daughter

We also blocked out some ideas for other Minions, because none of the other players were around at the time (and this was just a test run). Ideas included a dressmaker who prepared the bodies for the rituals and a body that was used in one of the rituals that was successfully reanimated. Then I quickly ran the other player through the general gist of the conflict resolution system and had we a good long discussion about the Big Model. His previous experience is a limited amount of D&D 3.0, so he's having a bit of difficulty with how to approach the game (the idea that every single detail of the character doesn't have to be mapped out by stat after stat is something quite foreign to him), but I'm confident that should clear up fairly quickly once we get started.

Again, I must say I'm really looking forwards to running a proper game with the full group. I'd really like to use these characters at some point, because I really quite like them, but it is unlikely that I will if I'm going to start a new game with the group. It is slightly unfair to come to them with the Minions and Master already created and deny them the opportunity to have their own creative input and create a Master they will fear and Minions they will feel for. So if anybody wants to steal anything from here, feel free! I'll be posting a write-up of the first session as soon as it happens.

- Kirk