Hello I am new here. Hmm I even might be the first one to post here not because I found out about My Life with Master RPG but because I found out (and bought and read) "kätyrin osa". Name of the same game translated and sold at Finland.

I have to tell you, that arkkikivi Publishing did really just a splendid job translating the game. I have not actually seen the orginal English version, but the Finnish version has really clear and good language. I even like those "editors notes" which some of them (I heard) have not even been aproved by Paul Czege himself. But enough with the chit-chat heres how my first session worked out:

We (players + GM) decided to play classical dr. frankenstein story because 2 of 3 players have never even heard about it and I as GM thought I am enough familiar with it.

We decided fear 4 and Reason 5. These are our minion:

Friedrich (Hurzgclhlub) Farm hand/Hired man

More than human: Hardworkin except when master is watching.

Less than human: Stupid except when in conversation.

Contacts: Dr. Frankenstein's daughter "Emma"
Man who he thinks is his long lost brother.

"Igor" Butler

MTH: Hardworking except when full moon. (he will transform to a dog.)
LTH: Has no feelings towards others except for his connections

Contacts: Childhood crush Marie works as baker.
Grandmother "oma" (Little germanise joke) works selling flowers.

Adolf luffen Lab. assistant.
MTH: Good doctor except when operating on children.
LTH: lusts after blood except when his stomach is full.

Contacts: Linda Studies at university where Adolf was kicked out after failured operation involving children.
Old doctor called Marc (Is only one not including DR. frankenstein who knows he needs blood.)

Game session was pretty much me giving them booooring jobs like go get some food from store. Cook the food etc etc. There was one intresting part though were I convinced Adolf to go get a head of a dead guy so we can continue the experiments. He went in to the graveyard after forcing Friedrich to come with him. At his way there he actually came up with a birilliant lie to keep friedrich from knowing the true meaning of the trip. As they were diggin the hole they were actually spoted by a real graveyard worker. After failed attempt on talking his way out of this Adolf hits the graveyard worker with a shovel. (he actually dies from this but players don't know this yet) He discards "the unconsious" body and fools Friedrich again when he tries to ask what happened. Later the same day they robbed the morgue for another body ( for different parts) and now they are happily eating food at the castle where dr. lives.

Though this might not seem much It actually was about 5-6 hours of gaming (explanation on rules included) And I really had a blast. This is first Roleplaying book which I have SERIOUSLY tried gamemastering and it worked fine. Not too many rules and easy to use formulas on different situations. Just briliant!!

Any thoughts how should I continue this story? Tell me some good ideas for next scenes? No one yet tried to go against master what should I do so that they would try it?
I was thinking of planning out about 10 different scenes which I then can play out. (atleast some depending on how the story goes) Some links to Frankenstein's monster related pages (mayby plot summarum) would also help me a lot because I really don't seem to remember the plot excatly.

Also I would appreciate for some general idea which I could include in my session. Mayby something that would get a darker/sinister feel to the game because yet it has only been quite a humorous session.

Thanks in advance.

vhirvela wrote:
Any thoughts how should I continue this story? Tell me some good ideas for next scenes? No one yet tried to go against master what should I do so that they would try it?

Game session was pretty much me giving them booooring jobs like go get some food from store. Cook the food etc etc.

I was thinking of planning out about 10 different scenes which I then can play out. (atleast some depending on how the story goes) Some links to Frankenstein's monster related pages (mayby plot summarum) would also help me a lot because I really don't seem to remember the plot excatly.

Also I would appreciate for some general idea which I could include in my session. Mayby something that would get a darker/sinister feel to the game because yet it has only been quite a humorous session.

Eero Tuovinen wrote:

vhirvela wrote:

Example scene preparation:
The doctor asks the laboratory assistant to start experimenting with the effects of quicksilver alcaloids on humans, using Marie the baker as a subject. He should start poisoning the baker's food with quicksilver to study how prolonged exposure prepares a body for the galvanizing reaction the doctor uses when awakening bodies to life.

Also I would appreciate for some general idea which I could include in my session. Mayby something that would get a darker/sinister feel to the game because yet it has only been quite a humorous session.

Who are the Outsiders (Ulkopuoliset) in your game? That happens to be somewhat crucial to interpreting Frankenstein.

Yes that quicksilver idea is just fantastic. I will definetly use that, but if they would ask why marie why not someone else then I really don't yet know what I should say. Mayby it is easier to poison the ingredients of baker than to actually break into someones own house etc?

Outsiders are the professors of the university where victor was kicked out because of his radical ideas. In game session I am having them for dinner next day to explain what I have done so far and to show them my "monster".

anyway I m now thinking of skipping 1-2 weeks time that show ofcourse failed and victor was the laughing stock of whole scientific community so now he is whole more crazier and more desperate. I will start right from the scene where I ask my lab assistant to poison maries food. :)

vhirvela wrote: Yes that quicksilver idea is just fantastic. I will definetly use that, but if they would ask why marie why not someone else then I really don't yet know what I should say.

Christopher Weeks wrote:

vhirvela wrote: Yes that quicksilver idea is just fantastic. I will definetly use that, but if they would ask why marie why not someone else then I really don't yet know what I should say.

What you say depends on what they expect and how you're playing the good doctor. But he doesn't owe them any explanation of any kind. An appropriate response, particularly if it caught them off-guard, would be a sharp blow to the face. No dice, no appeal, the character is now sporting a big red hand-shaped welt for a scene or two.

Keep the players on their toes. Make sure they hate him.

Chris

vhirvela wrote:
Btw. Can contact "emma" also be "innocent"?

Since he's a Brain, if you don't like the idea of the Victor slapping a character, have him do it psychologically. "How dare you question my orders, you imbecile!" might be more appropriate for the master you're using.

Question: Why didn't you do a group master creation? Is this not in the edition (can't imagine that Eero left it out)? It's going to be more of a challenge to make the players hate the Master, because they didn't have a hand in creating him. When they do have a hand, they ensure that he's somebody they despise. As it stands, you have to make him somebody they dispise.

Look for any moral acts of the Minions, and have the master do counter to them. That is, if a Minion returns something lost to somebody, have the master steal something, or, better, have him send that minion to steal something. In general, make the master the opposite of what makes the minions human.

And, like Eero said, don't be afraid to leap right to the big action when you need to. Have the master threaten contacts by sending other minions out to do them harm (or to bring them back for harm). This is a classic and important part of play. If you really, really need to make a minion hate the master, send him out to do harm to his own connection.

If you don't take action like this, then the game might not ever reach endgame.

Another way to get this to happen is to ask the players for scenes. Often players will know better how to move the plot along than the GM does. This includes the players making up people to be contacts, for instance. Does the translation convey that the players have this sort of power? It's quite clear in the English edition.


On another note, some of those More Than's and Less Than's aren't particularly inhuman. For example, anyone could be "Hardworking." For a minion this should be "Work for Days On End" or something actually more than human. Good Doctor should be "Can Heal Anything except when operating on children" Stupid isn't "less than human," but "Dumb as a Stone" might convey something less than human. These are meant not to be "skills" but things that make the character simultaneously superlatively admirable, and pathetic.

Use the exceptions to these things as ideas for scenes. Try to maneuver the doctor into having a connection with a child, and then put have the child become injured and need an operation.

Overall, don't use "logic" or "what would happen next" as your guide for what's in scenes. Instead use, "what would be dramatic?" as your guideline. Use "movie" logic where people show up because it's interesting for that to happen.

Mike

Sure, just make sure that the players know it. There's no hidden rules matter in MLwM.

Actually, I personally don't name names or inform players how many Innocents I've included in a game. If an Innocent is present when we're getting ready to roll the dice, I simply say, "Reason is 6 in this scene." If there's only one NPC in the scene, the players figure it out and I'm not so cagey going forward. But I've always thought some fun would be to have an NPC Innocent hiding in a closet, or listening at the keyhole, so Reason was increased and suspicion of Innocence was thrown onto a different NPC. A subsequent scene with that NPC, where Reason was not increased, would suggest that someone was present but hidden during the earlier scene.

Paul

Mike Holmes wrote:
Question: Why didn't you do a group master creation? Is this not in the edition (can't imagine that Eero left it out)?

Another way to get this to happen is to ask the players for scenes. Often players will know better how to move the plot along than the GM does. This includes the players making up people to be contacts, for instance. Does the translation convey that the players have this sort of power? It's quite clear in the English edition.

Overall, don't use "logic" or "what would happen next" as your guide for what's in scenes. Instead use, "what would be dramatic?" as your guideline. Use "movie" logic where people show up because it's interesting for that to happen.

Mike Holmes wrote: Since he's a Brain, if you don't like the idea of the Victor slapping a character, have him do it psychologically. "How dare you question my orders, you imbecile!" might be more appropriate for the master you're using.

Question: Why didn't you do a group master creation? Is this not in the edition (can't imagine that Eero left it out)? It's going to be more of a challenge to make the players hate the Master, because they didn't have a hand in creating him. When they do have a hand, they ensure that he's somebody they despise. As it stands, you have to make him somebody they dispise.



Mike

Eero Tuovinen wrote:

Mike Holmes wrote:


This point bears repeating. There's no need to be any more sensible than the players in toto require for their enjoyment. Like in that demonstration game: nobody of us knew nothing at all about Rumania, but that didn't stop us from telling a story set in that milieu.

I have that hard to believe!...Ok I do believe that but I could never come up with that kind of communist talk which was included in the game. Many other aspects are far from the reach of my imagination. It was really really fun to read the full game journal!

Btw. Eero ever heard of a book called "Mustan myllyn mestari" (In english this is only my guess; "Master of the black mill") what I heard was that it has this master/minion thing just like in MLwM even to the "love will set you free" aspect which frankly I don't see in many movies/books that I have seen/read.

Would be great to list all the best books wihich have this master/minion relationship but that should go to another thread if anyone is truly intrested.

Also...

I don't really know are there any anime/manga fans here at this forum but I think both Naruto and Tenjou Tenge would make a great MLwM games. In naruto you would play as Orochimaru's minion (after episode about 80 No spoiling :D) Truly I can't think of a more Cruel master. In Tenjou Tenge you would play as Mitsuomi's (or possibly Shin's) enforcers. Again if anyone else is intrested lets make another thread and continue this there. I will surely write about my ideas there. But I don't want to make completely useless thread's if no one cares. :P

Väinö: I understand what you're saying about internal reasons of the Master... it surely helps to inspire roleplaying him if you can fathom what he's thinking. The main advice I'd have is to garner experience. It'll come with time, either you learn to "double-think" around the need for in-game motivations or you learn to invent them reliably. For example, to take the quicksilver thing, I didn't need an ingame reason to figure it out. But if I needed one, I'd allude to unspecified scientific principles. Surely you draw the line somewhere in scientific detail, if for no other reason than the fact that electricity and chemistry doesn't bring humans back to life in reality. As you're anyway fibbing with the science, you might as well invent more fibs. In this case it could be anything from "her father was a chinaman, and thus she has the appropriate regenerative traits required to amalgamize the quicksilver" to "only nubile beautiful virgins do the job because flogiston is repulsed by purity". Alternatively you could go with the Master having last spring tried to take the girl to his bed, and after failing wants petty revenge. All of these can be spinned into whole themes, as they define the Master and his experiments further.

So in summary, although you don't need a reason for the Master to do what he does, or at least you don't need it right away, it adds depth to the game if you can spout genre-appropriate stuff when the Master cares to explain himself. I had great fun with my Master's exploration of the darkest Africa in the scientist game detailed in the Isännän aika page. Whenever someone asked him to justify himself he started telling vague and threatening snippets of his time in Borneo, where he learnt things white man was not meant to know... the point of the game was in his medical experimentation, but the colonial background brought mysticism into the heart of London.

vhirvela wrote:
I have that hard to believe!...Ok I do believe that but I could never come up with that kind of communist talk which was included in the game. Many other aspects are far from the reach of my imagination. It was really really fun to read the full game journal!

Btw. Eero ever heard of a book called "Mustan myllyn mestari" (In english this is only my guess; "Master of the black mill") what I heard was that it has this master/minion thing just like in MLwM even to the "love will set you free" aspect which frankly I don't see in many movies/books that I have seen/read.

Would be great to list all the best books wihich have this master/minion relationship but that should go to another thread if anyone is truly intrested.

I don't really know are there any anime/manga fans here at this forum but I think both Naruto and Tenjou Tenge would make a great MLwM games.

Eero Tuovinen wrote:

Btw. Eero ever heard of a book called "Mustan myllyn mestari" (In english this is only my guess; "Master of the black mill") what I heard was that it has this master/minion thing just like in MLwM even to the "love will set you free" aspect which frankly I don't see in many movies/books that I have seen/read.


It's a great book, certainly. I don't think that it has ever been translated to english, but it's one of my Finnish fantasy favourites.

Actually after I did quite a lot of googling I found out that the book is translated to over 30 languages. English name of this masterpiece is: "The satanic mill" (Don't be afraid of the name :)

http://www.preussler.de/index1e.htm

I don't really know are there any anime/manga fans here at this forum but I think both Naruto and Tenjou Tenge would make a great MLwM games.

That's a fine idea. How about playing it? As for general practice, people are usually interested in actually played scenarios and things which require active game design - messing with the rules - to make them work. So if you play it or have trouble planning for it, do let us know.

vhirvela wrote:
What do you think about my decision? How should this kind of situation normally be handled and What would be the real villainy against other player roll? (If this kind of thing happens again. Ofcourse atleast this time if players would have been better at roleplaying this situation would have never risen.)

vhirvela wrote: What I was trying to say was: For me to roleplay master smootly. I need to know answer to "why" not just come up with a clever way to avoid the question all together. (I actually might avoid the question at our game session but I have to know a reason behind the order.) I just don't want it to be illogical because the minions can poison anyone with quicksilver if they like to. If there really is no greater reason to poison a contact they probably would decide to poison someone else.

vhirvela wrote: Btw: how can you have a Quasimodo type minion? What I mean is how can you have LTH sentence which gives player horrible thing sticking out of his back (or something similiar to that) but still have somekind of exception to the rule?

Good point, Chris. All masters, no matter their make up, all have one thing in common. They are insecure egomaniacs. So much so that all of their relationships are dysfunctional. Meaning that all they do with other people is try to enforce their will on them, and this primarily by preying on these other's weaknesses. Why does the master surround himself with people who are in some ways Less Than Human? Because he can always feel superior to these people. How does this manifest? By the master degrading these individuals. Alternately, to make the minions reliant on him, he'll heap praises on them (they are, after all, also More Than Human).

This is why the minion is linked to the master by Self-Loathing. The master is the minion's only source of self-esteem as the game starts. But it's a self-esteem that can only be had at the price of the same source also providing the impetus for the self-loathing. Once the minion starts to get some self-esteem from another source, Love, then it's all over for the master. Because Love doesn't have the downside that the master does.

This is central to play. Even if the master is heinously intelligent, and not given to violence, he can't help but do evil to make himself look good. Because he's only concerned with looking good - not to the minions, he doesn't care about them except as tools. He wants to look good to the outsiders. So he perpetuates the dysfunctional cycle on the minions in order to maintain his own fragile self-image.

As such, the master is capable of any evil imaginable. He may even do them unthinkingly as long as they're part of his goal.

So, Frankenstien wants to create life? He's obsessed with it. So let nothing stand in his way. From a story POV, put things in his way, and have him knock them down. What would piss off egor's player? Marie in the arms of Frankenstien? Well why would he do that? Well, it turns out that Marie has inherited a large sum of money, and Frankenstien needs it to continue his work. So he gets a minion to bring her up to the castle, and then seduces her (coldly, he doesn't really care at all).

See how it works.

1. Determine what'll piss off a player. Not the character, neccessarily, the player.
2. Find a reason why the master would do that. This then becomes in-game reality.

Don't try to create a reality, and then play the master "as he should be played." Instead create reality as neccessary to showcase how much of a villain the master is. And I mean everything, too, not just part of play. All of play should be trying to find ways to either make the master bad, or to make a minion's life interesting.

Mike

Christopher Weeks wrote:

vhirvela wrote: What I was trying to say was: For me to roleplay master smootly. I need to know answer to "why" not just come up with a clever way to avoid the question all together. (I actually might avoid the question at our game session but I have to know a reason behind the order.) I just don't want it to be illogical because the minions can poison anyone with quicksilver if they like to. If there really is no greater reason to poison a contact they probably would decide to poison someone else.

What if the reason is simply because the master has noted that one of the minions has a fondness for the baker and in his insecurity, he must be the center of their lives? The master, even a brain, isn't supposed to be the height of reason and logic. They are disgusting, tragic figures plagued by illogic. That's what must drive the dysfunction. At least that's my take.


Chris