Ron wants stories of favorite characters and cool role-playing moments, so I'll tell you all about Eszed and Szilvasi, the greatest double-act in history.

Two friends introduced me to Ars Magica a few years ago, and since it's pretty complex, rules-wise, we thought the best thing would be for me to roll up a couple of grogs (mundane characters who support the coven of main PC mages) and play them for the first session to absorb the rules a bit, then the next time we played I could create a magus and go on from there.

Well, I roll for char gen, and boy do I roll badly. Ars Magica uses a -5 to +5 range for basic traits, with 0 being dead average in each. Each of the characters I roll is going to have maybe one positive trait and an average value of -2 or -3.

'But hey' I think, 'they're only going to be grogs. What does it matter?'

I don't know where the idea came from, unless I'd been reading something about the subject, but I decided the first character was a castrato, it explained his ridiculously low strength stat, sounded interesting, and made him an amazing singer. I bought his Charisma scores up to a fairly high level, and we decided he'd run away from a monastery (where he'd been a choir, um, boy. He, quite understandably, had some issues with the church).

Our setting was 13th century Bohemia, so I twisted around the names of a couple Hungarian students I had and called him Szilvasi.

The other character had a -5 for Intelligence, the lowest possible value, and I got this wonderful image of a large man with Down's Syndrome, resolutely sweet-natured, but unable to make sense of the world on his own. I gave him animal-handling skill, because the party needed that, and again, just because it sounded interesting I scratched down that he had an empathetic mystical sort of sixth sense. His name (since 'Szilvasi' had got us laughing about Hungarian names) was Eszed.

They were gypsies. Eszed looked after the ox and the chickens and the goats. Szilvasi played and sang and looked after Eszed. Wendy's character, a young and hot-tempered hedge-wizard, tried to boss us around. David played a hermetic mage who was trying to get Wendy's character into hermetic training, and generally GMed.

Szilvasi and Eszed began almost as comic relief. I'm one of those role-players who likes funny voices and stuff like that, so Eszed immediately had a real stooge-like persona, and Szilvasi (inevitably) an outrageous falsetto.

Very shortly though, I started discovering things about these two characters which moved them far beyond charicature.

First of all I discovered Szilvasi's anger. He happened to impress the bishop of some place we were passing through (I absolutely killed on my Charisma or whatever roll it was to overawe him with Szilvasi's singing). The roll was so high that the only justification was that he was be offering Szilvasi a job on the spot. He practically begged the eunuch to come live in his household and be the cantor in his private chapel. Now this woud be any jongleur's dream, but I realised that there was no way, absolutely NO WAY that Szilvasi, who'd been mutilated by the church, was going to go back into an even remotely monastic enviroment. Szilvasi turned him down, which I think wrecked some GM plans, made the bishop into an enemy, and forced us back out onto the road.

Meanwhile Eszed is in the background. The typical moment for him was where he'd get some kind real strong feeling about something (that sixth sense), but be utterly unable to communicate it. 'Uhhhh, Szilvasi?' he'd say, and I'd mime his distress. Szilvasi would inevitably snap at him, which would hurt Eszed's feelings, and then Szilvasi and the others would charge ahead into trouble, poor Eszed shambling along behind shaking his head in horrified misery.

We played a couple of sessions, and I was having such fun with these two characters that I passed on the idea of making a mage.

The best moment of all, the best roleplaying I've ever had, came in our fourth or fifth session. We encountered some Fransiscan friairs -- I don't remember how it went at first; I think they were being chased by an inquisitor who'd also given us a hard time (in the 13th c. Fransiscans were still a heretic movement) -- Szilvasi wanted to sell them out, was overruled by the two mages, and took it bitterly. Anyway, Eszed was impressed by the Franciscans' care for animals, and they started telling him about Jesus, about how Christ cared for animals, and how Jesus cared for him. I pause and ask to roll for Eszed's mystic sense. It's off the charts. Eszed keeps asking questions, 'Jesus love me? love ME? uhhh . . .' Eszed prays all night long, and in the morning the two frairs offer him communion and give him a pure white dove in a cage. He is enraptured, 'Jesus love me, Jesus love ME!'. He opens the cage, takes out the dove, smooths it feathers, it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. He kisses it, and throws it into the morning light. The dove flies free and the Eszed and the two friars fall to their knees.

Meanwhile, Szilvasi, feeling ill-used, goes to a tavern. He drinks alot. Curses all priests in the most scatological terms (I recalled my Chaucer here), gets drunk enough and angry enough that he tries to take one of the prostitutes upstairs. It doesn't work of course, and he stands there breeches down, shouting curses at the girl and at the monks who did this to him until the bouncers slug him into unconsciousness and throw him into the gutter. When he wakes up, just before dawn, he's missing his lute and his shoes.

Szilvasi drags himself back to the stable where he and Eszed were to sleep, and passes out again. Eszed comes back home after his night of prayer, and his one thought is to share his rapture with his friend. He shakes Szilvasi awake and starts stammering about the light and the dove and Jesus and beauty and love and Szilvasi shouts 'shut the f--- up you stupid c---' and slaps him twice across the face.

*****

All that went down without planning or notes or anything like that. We made rolls at places where it seemed like we needed them, but it was all just riffing among the three of us playing -- there was more going on with the mages, so we'd cut back and forth to their scenes too -- and when we finished that scene we all had goose-pimples it was so dramatic.

At the time I didn't know how describe what was going on in a theoretical sense, but I've been lurking on the Forge for a few months, so I think it represented a huge discovery of Premise. Two premises, actually. Religion and Friendship. We didn't start out with anything like that in mind -- and remember, my character choices were made on the basis of nothing besides justifying some seriously unballanced dice-rolls during character generation -- but somehow we drifted into RP that looks alot like what Ron describes here on the Forge.

We, alas, did not continue past that scene. The school year ended, I got sick and went into hospital for a while, then I moved back to this country and Eszed and Szilvasi went into permanent haitus. To this day I've never played a 'real' Ars Magica character, but I still think, almost with reverence, of beautiful but broken Szilvasi, my befuddled and beatific Eszed, as the most real and moving characters I've ever played.

Hi there,

Now that's why people need to post this stuff in Actual Play.

"Howwww can I be playing Narrrrrrativist? I didn't think about Premise at all!"

That's how. What you're describing, Eszed, is what I and my friends discovered in playing Champions back in the early 1980s, and I know that it's a common discovery. The grim truth is that, in the absence of a solid Social Contract to sustain it (the Creative Agenda), and in the absence of a system that ties in a reward system, it tends to disappear when the group membership changes even a little.

Why isn't it just Character Exploration (cries the peanut gallery)? Well, that will come down to a group dynamic thing. Eszed, even though you were playing two characters simultaneously, I gather from your writeup that everyone was involved. Sometimes we call this "audience" around here, but I think some people mis-read that to mean "passive" or "disconnected," so I guess I'll just say "involved."

Were they involved merely in appreciating your histrionics? I don't think so. I think it sounds like Premise in action to me.

What I'd like to know now is whether you've had any similar experiences in which two players (GM or not), with one character each, achieve a similar Creative Agenda type interaction.

Best,
Ron

Best,
Ron

Happy birthday, Ron!

That's a great story. Really makes it hard for me to pick a story to tell. There are so many moments in roleplaying that have caught my imagination. But I guess I'll tell the one that comes to me the strongest.

Amazingly, it was at a cross-genre White Wolf LARP. This LARP was lax on the no-touching rule. All violent contact was banned, but other than that, it was on player agreement. Every player talks about it with the players they are about to come into contact with. If you violate that agreement, you get into trouble.

This game, at the time, also ran under the motto "Everything blows up on Saturday night." Literally. We had a bar that blew up every week, only to be replaced. IC violence ran rampant. And there were deep-seeded friendships and rivalries among every supernatural race.

Okay, so it was hokey. It still had its moments.

One of the longest running characters I've ever had in my life was handed to me as an NPC in this game. A Black Spiral Dancer. With me not knowing a thing about Werewolf. The Werewolf ST let me work out all the details of the character. The only thing about the character that was a requirement was a Pure Breed rating of 5. Yes, she looked just like the Spirals' ancestors, the White Howlers. It does get sillier, trust me. This all had something to do with a storyline wherein a pure-blooded specimen of each tribe was needed.

Once finished making the character (a Ragabash who had been kidnapped by the Spirals at age 7, raised by them, and thus didn't know anything but their party line), the GM set me out, telling me to run around, cause trouble, and let myself get caught. No problem.

So, I run around. No trouble to be had, except that about two minutes into it, I'm spotted by other Werewolves and the mighty chase begins. They catch me, drag me back to the caern (no, I didn't let them really drag me), and arguments ensue. We should kill her. No, we should cleanse her.

So they cleanse her... not even really thinking about the fact that cleansing a Spiral doesn't really work all that well if they don't want to change. Being a Ragabash, she went along with it. Hey, she's in a Gaian caern. What better way to mess things up than hang around, try to fit in, cause arguments and taint that source of power with her very presence? At some point during this time, GMs change, the new GM decides that the storyline was stupid, but doesn't get rid of the NPC, telling me to do whatever I want.

So she gets into a pack, builds friendship which are very real to her (if somewhat twisted in her mind), and actually falls in love with one of her packmates (a rather naive female Silver Fang who truly believed that everyone was honestly good inside). Some huge amount of drama later, something big happens (I can't even remember what it was anymore), which causes my character to break down into a pile of tears and proclaim her love for her packmate.

I have a problem that some people would love to have. I don't take my characters' emotions onto myself, but I show the physical signs of them. I have, in the past, had panic attacks because my character was upset. It's lame because I can't turn it off.

So there I am, collapsing onto the cold bricks of the square at the local University, into the arms of the woman playing my character's packmate, in tears. She collects me into her lap, gently caresses my hair, and tries to get what's wrong out of me, at which point, I tearfully and loudly call to the skies "I love you!" And once again bursts into sobs, my chest heaving.

My mother walks by, about 20 feet away, heading to some Changeling event she was playing in. She hears my yell (but not what it was I said), looks over, and immediately becomes worried. I'm her baby, and I'm bawling my eyes out. So what can a mother do? She comes over and asks if everything is alright.

Both me and the other woman burst into laughter. It was just too funny. And after explaining it to my mom, I gave her a hug, sent her on her way, and it took us about 2 seconds to get back into the scene.

Cool stories both. Can we have some more?

-Lisa

Happy Birthday Ron!

Is it sad that the character that I remember most vividly and my players probably loved more than anyone else was an NPC? He started out as an NPC in a campaign where I was a player and he was my character's best friend. I moved away and started GMing a game at my new location and I liked the fellow so much I plopped him down in that game too and he soon became the party favorite there.

I guess I should say a little more about him. His name was Thistle Thornapple and he was a halfling Fighter / Thief in AD&D 2nd Edition. His personality was such that he was always affable, completely confident, would talk your ear off non-stop if you let him and he always seemed to get the party into trouble. Also, he always seemed to have a scheme to make tons of money that was completely insane but always seemed to work.

As a player, I remember all the silly things we did with or because of Thistle.

I remember the DM just giving us a look of incredulity when we dropped everything and decided to follow up on Thistle's suggestion to "go to the Swamp of Old Guys where there's just treasure lyin' around on the ground." He had just had Thistle say that on a lark as one of the crazy things the halfling was rambling on about but we all just said, "Hey, screw it. That's sounds cool." Of course, "The Swamp of Old Guys" was really The Mere of Dead Men and was an incredibly dangerous and haunted place. The DM had to scratch everything he had planned and come up with something on the spot because he certainly hadn't ever expected us to take Thistle seriously.

Thistle challenged the Priest of Ilmater (the God of Suffering) to an eating contest. The stakes were if Thistle lost, he would wear boots (which he hated) for a whole day. If the Priest lost, he would carry Thistle on his shoulders for the whole day. Thistle cheated, of course, and won. The Priest carried him for the whole day while Thistle had gone a purchased a riding crop from somewhere. My character ratted him out after the day of watching with amusement. Then Thistle had to wear boot for a whole day. He went a bought a donkey and rode the whole time.

In the campaign I was running....

The party (affectionately called The Testosterone Trio, by me) had been royal pains in the ass of the "bad guys", a mercenary group called the Bloody Six. One of the BS was an accomplished Illusionist and with some spells caused the party to be implicated in several grizzly murders. So, now the party is in a seedy tavern discussing the fact that they are friendless, in a foreign city and wanted Dead or Alive for a reward of 10,000 gold pieces. Their only way out of town was hitching a ride with a privateer who wants 5,000 gps up front for berthing them and their horses on his ship. Suddenly Thistle's eyes light up and he says, "I know where I can get 5,000 gold!" No one in the party even questioned him. They just told him to do it. Off he goes. Long story made short. He turns them in for the reward and then helps them escape.

I won't even go into how he spent the whole party's stash of money on a book called, "How to Train Platipus" or how he killed the black dragon that fell on top of him.

Anyway.... I'm off. See ya.

Wait! Wait!

The first story was great. The second two are emphatically unwanted presents.

What's the difference? Reflection on the part of the writer. You're not doing this to impress me - you should be doing this in order to consider what it is you actually gain and enjoy from your role-playing experiences.

From Neylana, all I see from what's been posted is Drama Queen stuff - acting weird in public. From Andrew (Gaerik), all I see is a standard "it was fun playing this guy 'cause he was cool" post. I'd like to ask a little more from both of you. Check out Eszed's post again.

Best,
Ron

P.S. My birthday is actually in September. The recent "birthday present" threads are spinoffs from the Forge Birthday Forum we enjoyed last week, hence the name.

Ron writes:

What I'd like to know now is whether you've had any similar experiences in which two players (GM or not), with one character each, achieve a similar Creative Agenda type interaction.

Eszed,

Your gift post made me so happy. It reminds me of many of my favorite moments of play.

Eszed wrote: All that went down without planning or notes or anything like that. We made rolls at places where it seemed like we needed them, but it was all just riffing among the three of us playing -- there was more going on with the mages, so we'd cut back and forth to their scenes too -- and when we finished that scene we all had goose-pimples it was so dramatic.

Ron Edwards wrote:
...The grim truth is that, in the absence of a solid Social Contract to sustain it (the Creative Agenda), and in the absence of a system that ties in a reward system, it tends to disappear when the group membership changes even a little.

Why isn't it just Character Exploration (cries the peanut gallery)? Well, that will come down to a group dynamic thing. Eszed, even though you were playing two characters simultaneously, I gather from your writeup that everyone was involved. Sometimes we call this "audience" around here, but I think some people mis-read that to mean "passive" or "disconnected," so I guess I'll just say "involved."
(...)
What I'd like to know now is whether you've had any similar experiences in which two players (GM or not), with one character each, achieve a similar Creative Agenda type interaction.

I think I understand why that one scene with Larry and Frank was so much more intense than anything else: use of Director Stance, compatible issues between the two characters, etc. But it wasn't sustainable outside that two-character bubble.

Ron Edwards wrote: From Neylana, all I see from what's been posted is Drama Queen stuff - acting weird in public.

Ah! That did it. Very nice, and thank you.

Do you see the event as carrying the whole "evil transfigured" point to anyone else involved in the scene?

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Ah! That did it. Very nice, and thank you.

Do you see the event as carrying the whole "evil transfigured" point to anyone else involved in the scene?

Fan-tastic! I'm going to make a GNS point now.

(Pause while readers scatter to the winds)

This is Narrativist play. Did you use funky mechanics and Director Stance and all kinds of weird narration-trading? No. You addressed Premise, as a group, and that's all it takes.

Best,
Ron

Reading these posts has been really enjoyable, and resurrected some important (at least to me and my friends) early gaming experiences of my own. So, at the risk of joining the party late, I thought I would contribute one of my own.

The first game I played in where I started realize, even if only dimly, the power that this hobby could have was a Runequest game. Just to set the context, this was back in the day, you understand, when Chaosium was putting out tremendous stuff. The City of Pavis and Borderlands supplements had just come out, and we were their market.

So my friend had decided to start a game set in a small settlement that had been conquered by the Lunars. I can't recall the name of the settlement at the moment, but I'm pretty sure he had made it up and that it wasn't on any of the official maps.

After some discussion, I decided that I wanted my character to be the leader of a gang of resistance fighters who operated in the town. I can vividly recall the first session where my character, Dexter, led an ambush of a group of Lunar soldiers, who he and his fellows quite brutally murdered. At the time of the session, I remember playing Dexter as slightly sickened by his actions, but in subsequent sessions I imagined the character (and tried to play him) as hardening slightly as he got used to the grim realities that freedom for himself, his family, and his town required him to make. For one reason or another, Dexter's rebel activity started to attract the attention of the Lunar authorities and he was forced to go into exile.

Okay, so flash forward several in-game years later (although perhaps only a year of actual playtime). Dexter decides to return home, confident that he can now mount a more successful campaign against the Lunars. What does he return to? Well, for starters my friend had decided that the town's garrison of Lunar soldiers had increased several fold as a result of the rash of killings and various other mayhem committed by Dexter and his gang.

And here was one of the first things that made this experience important for me: I suggested to the GM that I wanted Dexter's gang to have survived during the years he was in exile, but that they had changed and become more thuggish, preying on townspeople and especially on those who were suspected of collaboration with the empire. My GM agreed. Although we didn't have the language for it at this time (these being the dark years before Theory, of which I am a staunch advocate by the way), I was basically acting in Director stance, making decisions about what the world of the game was like. I can't tell you what a big impression this made on me. It was like opening up a doorway onto a new world.

So, back to the game. Dexter comes back to discover that the state of his homeland is a disaster. But as the player of Dexter, I started thinking that rather than go the conventional route (i.e. the homeland is in tatters because it was deprived of Dexter's leadership), I decide that Dexter begins to suspect that he is to blame for the state of his homeland. After all, his Zealot-like attacks on Lunars has only served to tighten the screws even harder, to make life miserable for the people who have remained in the town while he has been off in exile on other "adventures." Dexter starts to become deeper and more reflective, I decide.

Still hanging on to my newfound Director powers, I tell the GM that I want the gang that Dexter left to be wary of and even hostile towards him since he represents not only a perceived challenge to the current leader's power but also part of the dismissable past, an annoying reminder of what they had been. The GM agrees and we play out various scenes involving confrontations of one sort or another between Dexter and his former gang, each one increasing in intensity and threats of violence. By now, I realize that we are sort of playing without a net and it is exhilarating.

On to the big finale so that I don't bore you all with lots of "my-guy" stories. The GM and I decide that the time has come for a the big showdown between Dexter and the gang, and especially for the throwdown between Dexter and the gang's current leader, an arrogant punk who I decide Dexter sees, depending on his mood, as either a shadowy, distorted image of himself or an almost identical copy of himself at that age. The big night arrives and Dexter makes it clear to the gang that he wants to end this one way or another. At this point in play, neither the GM nor I knew how this was going to go, although I think we each had some inklings. Dexter shows up at the designated spot, is encircled by the gang, and he and the gang leader square off. The GM says to me that the leader pulls out a gladius, and that's when it clicked for me. I tell him that Dexter has this almost inscrutable calm look on his face and says, "So you think that that (pointing to the gladius) is strength? It isn't strength. This is." At "this is" I tell the GM that Dexter grabs the punk's arm and pulls the gladius into his own chest.

The GM looked shocked, but his own reaction gave him the perfect cue for how to play out the punk's reaction to the events. The punk looked shocked, a little sickened, but then quickly regained his composure and fled with the rest of the gang.

After that session, we realized together that we had found a theme (or several themes in fact) but we also reallized that we had broken through to a new and more satisfying form of play. The punk became an obsession with Dexter and we played out some scenes where he tracked him down and tried to persuade him to leave the gang. Redemption became one of the themes of the game--Dexter's attempt to redeem the punk which was also an attempt to redeem himself. Responsibility for the past and for something greater than one's self also became a biggie. From there we started to play with a greater sense of the themes that were becoming important to this game: How do you atone for a past that has created tremendous suffering for so many in the present? How do you achieve a noble goal like the liberation of a group of people from colonial oppression without becoming as bad as the power you are opposing? How do you keep internal factionalism from dividing you against a common opponent?

This was immensely satisfying play for us because we had a sense that not only could it create a great story, but it could help us work thorugh some really important issues as well. Moreover, we were all bringing our full engagement to it. There was nothing half-hearted or half-assed about it. No bored sipping away at beers waiting for the next fight. The whole game was full of conflicts, even if the vast majority of them never involved unsheating a sword.

Damn, it gives me chills just thinking about it. Somewhere along the way after that game ended, our group lost its focus and although we continued to play, we never quite got the lightning to strike like that again.

So this is one of the reasons I am glad I found a place like the Forge, and games like Sorcerer, Dust Devils, and Universalis. This place makes you realize the incredible potential of this hobby, not to mention the immense creativity and intelligence of all the folks here.

Happy Birthday Forge!

Eric

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!

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....