Dang #3 (Le Mon Mouri)

[Ron Edwards]

Dang! Run #6: Le Mon Mouri

So we played it out yesterday: Lyonette's seance. Lyonette is a character who was clearly at the social center of all manner of fucked-up sexual and romantic interactions, as well as the prime Belle of Il-Dans-Chance. Sebastienne, my character, had alternately attacked her with Travay and engaged in play-acted "confidante" Ti-Bon-Ange chit-chat, as well as getting engaged to her ex-husband. But more importantly, it was clear to all of us that Lyonette was somehow the teflon-coated center of all the skullduggery that had resulted in the murder of Jasmine, the singer. In game terms, we are talking about major Ti-Bon-Ange, especially backed up with multiple Travays and schemes. In Le Mon Mouri, someone loaded with this kind of firepower can literally mock and gossip your character into a dissipating shadow.

I'll spare you all the setup - Here's the seance. we have Lyonette, her Respire bokor buddy, her disapproving mentor Therese, Bartholemew, Sebastienne (with Avarice shadowing her), and the mystic-type dude who's running the seance, Sasha. If the very idea of "seance" in Le Mon Mouri freezes your blood, then you're on the right track. The whole thing was an arrant ego-fest for Lyonette for all of us to invest into her memories, part of a complex, ongoing Travay.

Uh-huh. Or so she thought. Lyonette had no idea that she was dealing with the story's protagonists, pitiful little point-counters no longer. We came to kick butt and take names, even the two us with our Aspe ravaged down into the bedrock and crawling with Feb. Let's see ...

1. Sebastienne hit her with a Gros-Mal-Ange Travay which included reducing a photograph of her to ash with a waft of corpse-breath.

2. Bartholemew decapitated Bolo, much to everyone's relief - we never knew for sure, but we suspected his bokor abilities were substantially backing up a lot of Lyonette's Travays and schemes.

3. Sebastienne began a frightful Travay to reveal Jasmine's murderer - by replaying her own dismemberment in the previous, unrealized Travay that had been so frustrating in the previous run, thus becoming decapitated as Jasmine had been.

(Did I tell you about all the shenanigans regarding that poor head, including the poet who'd set it up as a shrine, or the doctor who'd used it to replace the torn-off face of another Sans-Souf to re-create Jasmine? No? Oh well. That's Avarice's & Bartholemew's story stuff, really cool.)

So there's Sebastienne's head, floating in front of Lyonette, rending the admission of the murder she committed from her ...

4. And then it turned out that Sasha was Jasmine's brother! A classic noir moment - the relationship map suddenly snapped into place, and the sleuthing had served its purpose, to bring moral outrage and utter villainy face to face. It was finally Avarice's and Sasha's combined Travay that did the job (a lock of Jasmine's hair helped, courtesy of Bartholemew), and forced Lyonette's motives from her. I'm leaving out all sorts of things like how Avarice was acting to help an NPC named Patrice learn why Jasmine died, or how Bartholemew was acting to help Nigel the poet ... but as I say, this was all pretty complicated. What matters is that a whole welter of heartbreak, adultery, and plain filthy arrogance was laid bare.

6. I'm kind of proud of my capstone action - my little monologue about how we are all dead, and how these "memories" are blaspheming the lives that each of us had lost, how all of this was a dance of puppet corpses and no lives at all, and whatnot (I'm paraphrasing, can't remember the exact words). I pulled out all the stops in order to get one last Gros-Mal-Ange attack in on Lyonette, hoping to take her to 0 and have her body fall apart as her grip on Death failed. "I am your best confidante, non? Then let me tell you something ..." and letting my Death, based on the poisoned memory, overwhelm her. It worked.

Tod, playing Bartholemew, had a few inspired touches to keep her from rescuing herself with her still grossly-high Ti-Bon-Ange, including smearing her memory-objects with Bolo's blood, then chopping her apart and raping her in the blood all over the seance table (replaying Sebastienne's death, you see).

Best of all, that final Travay rammed Sebastienne's Ti-Bon-Ange to zero. That's it, my friends ... but as it turned out, Avarice and Therese conducted a Travay to restore it back to 1. I was happy either way - the kick-ass climax, and finally, a moral position had been found, and a statement had been made. You can always trust a noir relationship map to deliver, if you don't force it.

Watching Julie GM all this was inspiring - she found, I think, that all her preparation was paying off triple as everyone's agenda kept igniting and multiplying everyone else's agenda, with revelations and payoffs proceeding out of it almost too fast to keep up.

I liked the final message I was able to deliver with my sort-of epilogue about Sebastienne, from then on. I left her at Grangou 0 - she would not mind, as she never planned to harvest Aspe again. Her Ti-Bon-Ange is 1, just barely flickering there. There are churches scattered all through Il-Dans-Chance. Every morning, Sebastienne goes to church, and she prays for the souls of the dead ... the real dead, who she and everyone she knows once were, and whom no one can recall.

Best,
Ron

[jrs]

he he he he he

I was concerned about this last session, because the previous one became so  bogged down in mechanics issues.  I'm so happy that the seance went as well as it did!  I was terribly worried about not over-scripting it, and I was pleasantly surprised at how the players took advantage of the situation and ran with it.  The galvanizing moment for me as the GM was when Bartholemew (Tod) wrapped a lock of Jasmine's hair around his hand before clasping Sasha's hand at the seance table.  Everything after that came together effortlessly.  

And, Ron, thanks for writing up our LMM sessions.

Julie