Once again I have been in the Big Smoke for the weekend, the last time that I will be able to get down there. It is my goal to keep things positive and my friend and his family is the most positive thing in my life. I wish that I could take a picture and show you all, but my friend is not even on Facebook, and I know that he would object to pictures of them circulating on the Internet. And I respect that, moreover that is my philosophy as well. My Facebook profile does not have any pictures of me on it. And I don't take pictures of people without their permission, which is the reason why I am not good at taking pictures to the travel blog that I occasionally try to contribute to.
Positive things in my life. I started Role-Playing again. You have to understand what that is and what it means to me. Role playing is a game where one person sets a series of challenges before a group of people playing one persona apiece. The players are playing one individual who has goals and desires that may be goals and desires that they cannot express in reality, but also live in situations and with difficulties beyond what people experience in reality and they live in fantastic settings that mirror our own reality a bit or almost not at all. These players try to get ahead in a world where they are the most important people in it. They are characters from the book that you are currently reading, they probably have more going on behind their heads though.
The Story Teller is the setting, the antagonists and the faceless majority that the players interact with. He is the plot and the integration of the setting with the goals and the desires of the players. He is the agency by which the players have fun or do not. At the beginning of play the setting is a cardboard two dimensional thing that changes the first time that a player dons the mask of his character and makes a choice to interact with it. The setting after that moment is forever reacting to that choice and the choices that were made from that point going forward.
I do not like playing as a player. This is an Asperger's thing, which stems from my own difficulty with social interactions. The hope is alway that my social awkwardness is not tied to my character and that my character will interact smoothly. It is dependent on the Story Teller to know where I find pleasure and what sort of interaction I prefer, because I don't often tell people and I generally take up a support role in groups.
As a Story Teller I actually excell. I tend not to play until I have a deep understanding of the setting in my mind and I can then have a feel for how the town where the players start out from, the nation state that the town resides, the trade network that the town is a link to and the world whose powers may react to the rumours of the character passing by. When a rock skips across a still pond the ripples spread out to the far reaches and edges; the frogs and the water bugs take notice, the fly leaps out of the way and the frog eats it. The stone settles to the bottom, after it's journey, scattering small fish. The rock disturbs the large bottom feeder and stirs up the mud. Such can be the passage of the player character.
My friend wanted to play for a while now, a few years actually. He had his character made up right from the start and he chose the setting. I just had to flesh out the setting in my mind and deal with my life in the of the past few years. The setting I worked on and off from the start, see the post I made about the slave states back in January. The tough part for me has always been one thing, thinking quickly on the fly and getting names and motivations of setting characters. My strengths are modifying the setting based on character's actions.
In this game, the player Exalted before the story started. The game we were playing people have two souls as the Egyptians believed, a lower souls the body and the higher soul the personality and experiences. The lower soul dies and goes away. The higher soul, when the body die, goes to the underworld where it waits reincarnation and is remade into a living person. The Gods created long ago a third soul that they joined to their champions to fight their own battle against the Premordials in a battle that paralleled the Greek Gods' battle against the Titans of that mythology. This third soul boosts the character into greatness and grants them powers beyond that of normal men. And due to the fickle nature of Gods, they were hunted down by lesser men in a period after the great war was won. But some of the powerful third souls still wait out of circulation, until the right person comes along who can bring change in the world. My friend's character is one such individual.
When he Exalted, burst forth with power that came with the merger of the Third and greater soul, he was being tortured for escaping for a second time both as a slave and throughing off his addiction to mind numbing drugs, he killed his captors with his barehands. He hid his identity by murdering all the witnesses to his crime that were aware of him and his capture that night. The night for him was burned into his mind with that of the unexpected power at came to him, but with all similar traumatic events, some of the details were obscured from his mind.
When he created his character, the setting that he chose had information about what was happening in the land and the rumours are flush through the land. I don't like to have the characters in my settings to have to compete with the canon story of e setting. When he read that there were a group of escaped slaves that were engaging in a desperate battle to free others and remain uncaught against the oppressive might of the Realm, he thought it would be interesting to find them and join up and to aid them in their plight. There were rumours that the attackers would occasionally kill oppressors and leave a bloody hand print at the scene as a calling card.
When my friend's character Exalted, he was not thinking clearly. The people that he killed bled freely and his killing was not clean in all cases. When e scene was discovered in the morning, bleeding dying men had crawled slid through the gore, bloody hand prints everywhere. When he killed, his hands covered with blood, evidence of his assault was spread everywhere he touched; hand prints everywhere. The calling sign of the merciless band of exslaves may have started elsewhere and may have been mythologized through the slave populations, but never before as boldly as was done on the walls of the domicile and impromptu torture chamber.
Without knowing so he created an uproar in the setting and was mythologized in the setting, without meaning to. Heading back into the setting after a few months to recuperate from the strangeness of his sudden and unexpectant second birth, he tries not to make waves, but is seeking oppressive slave masters and for away to dismember the Slave States from within. He tires to remain unobserved and he sees the nation with new eyes, not as a slave, not through eyes drugged to the gills, the populations docile and maleiable. He discouveres that the population he thought was one thing is another. That the oppression, while still there, has been contained behind many walls of security, passive and vigilant. The people from neighboring communities can not speak with their neighbours because they lack a common language. Towns are far apart and therek is untamed wilderness between them. The cities are filled with wards where languages are different from ward to ward and communication with the Realm's Bureacracy is through written transcripts and he, uneducated, cannot read. But luckily he does speak the language used by the administrators, the language of the Realm.
His first foray into the city he investigates who might be controlling the land and who he must focus his attention on, he scales the local palace and administrative building to find what he can find out. He Unfortunatly arrived when most of the head men were out of town, the local Patrician of the Realm and his family were in the Capitol and they had left only minor functionaries, monks of the Immaculate Order, the main religion of the realm is preached far and wide, but his only managed to gain a foothold outside the Realm in its Satrapies, like the Slave states, but the monks enforce the rules of the religion upon the local spirits and minor Gods through supernatural Martial Arts, based on the Shaolin Monks. There was one other there, the Dragon Lord. Dragon lord means that he is the commander of a thousand soldiers of a Realm Legion, which contains five dragons. Leader of a dragon does sound impressive, but the full Eighth Legion is spread across the four slave states. More impressively he is also the head of the local slave army, which amounts to about a tenth of the slave population, which number many ten thousand in this smallest slave state.
My friend's character executed a flawless infiltration of the palace seeking out the Patrician, only to be foiled by his absence. Seeking a secondary target, he looks for loot to steal or information that he might use for future assassination trips he finds the Dragon Lord, but does not know that he is indeed that person or what that means as his life as a slave before was that of the lowliest of the low and he had no knowledge of such things. The Dragon Lord awakes by chance and the Nameless, as he calles himself hides behind a fully dressed armour stand. The General, not expecting anything settles back to sleep, but is still suspicious from long years as a general and fakes sleep, gripping his knife under his pillow. The Nameless feels that the soldier has drifted off to sleep and takes one knife from e weapons rack and steals out of the room. The general then stirs after a minute and quickly begins to don his armour, which looks vaguely Japanese including face mask and informs the lead Immaculate Monk on the level before heading out to follow the intruder, alerting guards on his way.
The Nameless, unsatisfied with the creeps down e stairs to where his earlier sneaking revealed the presence of a guard, whom he has desired to interrogate. He takes great care to sneak up on him quietly, which takes time if you are not using supernatural powers, which he was not, allowing the General time to don his armour. As his interrogation wraps up the General stealthily sneaks down the stairs behind him. Distracted be the conversation he does not notice the general's quiet footfalls. Laying the guard's newly lifeless body upon the ground after questioning him, he turns to find general neatly drawing his sword and charging to attack.
This is a turn of events, because the character thought that he was unobserved and had been sneaking quietly through the palace. He quickly pulls his bow from his back as the warrior charges forth with a war cry. The soldier raises his arm to cut the intruder in half as e Nameless one set an arrow in place and casually aims for the eye hole in the mask and looses. The arrow buries itself deep into the eye and the warcry turns to a scream, but through force of will continues his charge. The Nameless one passes under his guard and slams his vambrace into the arrow in his eye, similtaneously mushrooming the shaft and breaking the tip which was lodged deeply in his brain, pulpifying what was left of it. The general drops dead. Alarm has been raised as the Nameless assassin dives out the sodden walls of the palace and into the quiet of the city and soon over the walls and away.
Imagine that you have been cloistered, shut away from the world your entire life. Imagine how your life was a slave in this fictitious nation. You were born to a drug addicted mother. You were likely born in a field and your entire childhood you were forced to do the most menial tasks, the ones that you could do, until you were big enough to carry heavy loads and work in the fields. From your earliest memories you have been drugged and addled, worked to the point of weariness and fed the most basic foods, lentil mash and water, for years. And then one day you are given chocolate.
The Nameless stole from caravans headed to the city, foods destined for the bellies of the Patrician class. He ate candied hams, cakes and sugar. Luxury foods rich in butter and fat after decades of gruel. He got to the Capitol city and found the Harbour, against the ocean, two things amongst thousands he had never seen before. Wooden castles on the sea. People that were white as snow, black as night, green like leaves and every shade in between. People who have never known the cruel stroke of a whip and people who got food and drink in exchange for shiny bits of metal and small slips of paper. Concepts like buy and sell, money, services, entertainment were all foreign to him.
He could hunt, he could clothe himself in the skin of animals, but he knew not how to interact with these people and he saw that if he were going to tear down this society he was going to have to understand it first. So he spent time watching people in the Harbour. Almost all the people here were foreigners and he felt they were better than the people that he had come to destroy, so he emulated them first, but he did not feel safe around them. Not feeling safe, he established a den far from the city in the woods amongst a thicket and copse of trees and buried his prize possessions so that they would not be found.
Quiet observation led to experimentation. Using coins that he took from the purses of unobservant travelers, he tried one thing and another until he got the hang of things. Then he decided that he would gain more knowledge and information if he made some friends or contacts of some of the foreign people and more specifically the kind that preferred to keep things to themselves and quiet.
After finding the local black market, he quickly set about gaining their trust by performing any task they desired as quickly as he could. He discovered that the movement of all people was strongly discouraged and that all free people had papers proving such and slaves that passed boarders had other papers that let them do so too. He had no papers and in any case could not read. Remedying the first problem was easy, as easy as attacking and killing a local slave Bounty Hunter called a Jackal, feared by all slaves as vicious hunters and killers who hunted escaped slaves. They were the only slaves in the Slave state area that had free movement between the settlements and who could one day buy their freedom, if they could acquire enough captured slaves. The Nameless One did not think anyone would miss one after dropping the last rock on his shallow grave and picking up his papers and equipment.
Two sessions over five hours of late evening sessions got us this far. I will have to do some planning to get a better story and a few names and places and objectives for my friend the next time we play. He wants me to come and stay with them for a week in the winter and that will mean a weeks worth of role playing. Which I am okay with. I like making plans and executing them. I like creating a fun filled story. I love the way that character actions change what happens within an established setting.
Many years ago, TSR published a Dungeons & Dragons story line called The Temple of Elemental Evil. It was a great story in a rich setting that I had memorized as only someone with AS could. The setting was published in the early '80s, and the story in about '84 and in the early '90s an update to the world where a horrible series of wars wreaked the continent about five or six years after the original setting time. The thing was that the story, the Temple of Elemental Evil, was wrapped quite closely to the story of the setting. Agents of the Temple kidnapped the son of the King of Furyondy, the son was betrothed to the only child of the neighbouring Theocracy of Veluna and these two nations of light were the beacon opposing the nations of Evil on the continent, the Nation of Iuz, ruled by the Demigod Iuz a demon of immense personal power. The kidnapped prince was held captive within the Greater Temple complex of Elemental Evil. The demon Iuz had invested part of his power therein. Two years later, the war would come and it would bring Furyondy to its knees and blowing out the candle of light on the continent. Enter the PCs, Player Characters. They stormed the Temple, they freed the Prince, the weakened the Demon Iuz. The Prince married the Priestess, assumed the throne and united the two nations, who together fought the war from strength on a demon who was weakened. My players knew that their characters had changed history. I know that they all look back on that campaign and remember it fondly.
Several years later, Dungeons & Dragons was revived and Greyhawk was returned as the principal setting and we all read it again. The setting had been changed, but something caught each of our eyes as one thing that had happened in that campaign years ago was mentioned in the setting that was so singularly unique that it gave us all a pause to see it in print in the knew setting. Perhaps I might even tell you what it was in a future posting.
