The Blog of Roon

So, that column of smoke near Irkutsk? I was half-right.

It was a supply depot. It just wasn’t the one Margaret and Shirley investigated a while back. It was the next one on. Selena Theopolis is now officially in bad, bad trouble; she can’t make it to Irkutsk with two depots destroyed.

The second destroyed depot ever so looks like deliberate sabotage. Three dogs shot, and unfamiliar footprints leading away. It does look as though the student made it out safely, at least.

Shirley and Margaret are going to try to track the perpetrator, along with their guide. Seems a shame to waste a visible trail. They’re also going to leave edibles for the dirigible crew when it lands, and of course they’ll send help on the double when they get to Irkutsk themselves.

Stay tuned. This could get ugly. Shirley would never shoot first—but Margaret will.

Oh, and my guess about the Scotland Yard mole was wrong, but even Li admitted it was plausible. Go me.

A couple new additions to the London Times.

The smoke column is from one of Selena Theopolis’s supply depots. Shirley and Margaret did an all-night ride to get there, fearing the worst, but the site was deserted.

The real question, though, is where Roland Carter has got to. At the rate witnesses to the Vroomfondel/Addison antics are dying and evidence is disappearing, Carter is suddenly very important.

If the Forces of Good are lucky, either Scotland Yard whisked Carter out of harm’s way or Carter decided to use whatever common sense $DEITY gave him and get out of the way himself. If the Forces of Good are continuing their current losing streak, Carter’s dead as a doorknob. As I wrote to Li, “Points for irony if he washes up from the Thames at the same place Jimmy did.”

It does appear, though, that Addison is out of the picture. (Sorry, Cathy.) Even in Vroomfondel’s yacht, he can’t get to the Arctic fast enough to cause trouble (directly, anyway) during the remainder of the Ellipse. If he’s smart, he sells the yacht to Andaman Islands pirates and lets the British Navy waste its time chasing them around.

I had a sneaking suspicion about the identity of the Scotland Yard mole earlier today. It fits right nicely with the way Li thinks—somebody in plain sight who doesn’t cross your mind until it’s too late. I won’t let on publicly, but I’m immensely curious to know if I’m right.

In Passions of the Tide, Tamasi broke her usual rule about not showing physical strength in public in order to get her poisoned cousin-in-law somewhere he could rest before he talked himself to death. She zinged him on the way out, and I grinned when he zinged her right back. (Yeah, she had it coming. Cheap shots all around.)

The court minister is now meandering toward their gates. Should be a couple of interesting interviews.

Okay, Shirley just hit the big-time—I’m thinking about writing a story about him completely unrelated to the Grand Ellipse.

I only do this with characters and games I really, really like.

It came about because Li introduced a friend of Shirley’s back home, someone who might be able to help him. Great huge stereotype alert—the guy is a hard-drinkin’ Scots journalist, now retired. He and Shirley are the oddest Odd Couple I’ve seen in a while, just irresistible subjects for a story.

So. Have characters, need plot…

Update: Li just suggested the mother of all set-pieces. Jehoshaphat. Still need a plot, though…

Tell you what, James doesn’t kid around. A few ominous visions to start—and then one of the family gets poisoned. (A PC, too, no redshirts here.)

Tamasi’s just trying to keep the house together long enough for a court minister’s visit this afternoon. And wondering when somebody is going to try to pin the murder attempt on her…

For you Grand Ellipse junkies (and you know who you are), the London Times has some new articles up.

Shirley hasn’t gotten to Irkutsk yet to see them, but he is going to go absolutely ballistic. Selena Theopolis missing? Vroomfondel and Addison escaped? And how many more ways could Scotland Yard possibly bollix up this investigation?

Okay. The inevitable hypothesis: there’s a mole somewhere in Scotland Yard’s London office stealing papers and generally making a mess of things. Obvious corollary: Nicky Finnegan was murdered by this mole. If you read the article carefully, you get the impression the reporter asked this very question and had it brushed off.

The question I would sell my soul (such as it is) for the answer to is how extensively this mole has been in touch with Vroomfondel and/or Addison. This could explain why the sting set up with Shirley as bait didn’t go off as planned. I don’t see any point in positing more than one mole. That’s just paranoid.

I don’t see any way that Vroomfondel can actually be on his yacht by 8 May; too much land to cover between Irkutsk and anywhere he could board it. Therefore he must have sent it some pretty specific orders by telegraph once he got free in Irkutsk. I do dearly hope they didn’t involve murdering poor old Father Dean.

Dangerous game, the Ellipse, no question.

Update: I am an idiot. I am a big fat idiot. Of course Vroomy’s not on that yacht. Addison is. Duh.

And somebody better put a serious guard on Roland Carter. If I were the mole, he’d be next on my list, the more so because he is now entirely unnecessary and knows entirely too much.

And if the Wilcox inquest isn’t reopened, Shirley will want to know why. Could the modus operandi and motive between that and Finnegan be any more similar?

Dipping a toe back into Game WISH with number 42:

Do you ever reuse characters from game to game? When you reuse characters, what do you bring from game to game: a name and a personality, stats, or more? What kinds of characters do you reuse and why?

I do reuse characters, but with limits.

I have never reused a long-running character. Any game I’ve been in long enough to have such a character ends up entwining that character with the setting and the other characters such that just yanking them out and replanting them won’t work. At all. Juskinah belongs in Zakhara; Afletana belongs to Hommlet and Elmo. Shirley makes absolutely zero sense outside of Victorian England (and precious little inside it, but that’s another story).

This is a statement of history rather than intent. Some of my long-running characters might be transplantable. Rat, for instance. To transplant them, though, I would want to transplant their histories, too—which brings up a point I hope someone has mentioned before me: game design and character transplantability.

D&D3e gaming depends pretty heavily on a world conception, typically a closed-ended one—mappae mundi contain the whole world, few or no unknowns, no strangers, no lost cities or realms, relatively easy travel. Moreover, no D&D game world contains all, or even a major subset, of the possible D&D races, classes, characters, monsters, societies, etc. This is a major brake on transplantable characters; they can’t take their world, and their history within that world, with them. Not saying this is bad or good, just saying.

Everway, on the other hand, starts from an explicitly multi-cultured, multi-worlded, open-ended perspective. This makes transplanting characters ever so much easier. Yes, Aquamarine comes from this world over here, through these gates, where…

(No, I don’t have a character named Aquamarine. Nick the name if you want to; I thought it sounded cool.)

The interesting thing is, you don’t need a multi-world system to facilitate character transplantation. All you need is a repeated construct through which characters can transition from one game to another. Ars Magica characters transplant easily from one covenant to another, histories intact, just as Everway characters can enter a new game by going through a new gate.

Short-term or one-off characters I am very willing to transplant; how much I take with me depends on circumstances. I’d love to play Aino and Ahti in another Ars campaign, with or without their brief covenant history. Stolid, capable, practical Bellis was a terrific character, and if I don’t play her again I will certainly play someone like her. (She deserves a special campaign; I won’t play her just anywhere. I finally decided to pull out of the Monty Haul campaign when I realized that Bellis would be wasted on it.)

I’ve also been known to reuse character concepts, without the baggage of history or stats. Fiera the werepanther has shown up in Rifts and again in Zakhara. Similar personality, obviously similar abilities, but expressed in two worlds and two game systems.

I’m basically in agreement with Ginger that the more fleshed-out the character, and the longer the history, the harder it is to transplant. As hard as it is to say goodbye to heart characters, they are the very characters who must remain in the worlds that gave rise to them.

After the dissolution of Afletana’s campaign, one of its players offered to fit us into a campaign he was running. I thought about it, but couldn’t find the will to do it, I fear.

See, the campaign in question, as it was described to me, was a Monty Haul dungeoncrawl whose tone was dominated by one new roleplayer coming from computer gaming (all numbers, no roleplaying) and one new roleplayer just finding her feet.

I’ve nothing against new roleplayers, but breaking them in via Monty Haul is more than I can happily put up with. So, though I value the players who went to the new campaign, I did decide to give it a miss. I expect more from my games than that, these days.

Which brings me to the lovely compliment I just got from James, GM for Passions of the Tide, on a longish post I sent in on Friday that advanced the plot in precisely no way at all, but offered some character hints by way of discursions on material culture, a meditation, and a peep into the mind of Tamasi’s lady’s-maid (who is not one bit fond of her).

I used to get in trouble for writing stuff like this to my erstwhile gaming group. I’m still not sure why. It’s just lovely to have my particular fluff-writing style valued. Thanks, James.

As for the Grand Ellipse, Shirley’s doing all right if you discount the lingering aftereffects of pushing himself too hard after illness and a truly horrible night (that near-suicide attempt) that ended in hypothermia. He and Margaret have just met up with Lady Anastasia Bonnet, whose player has apparently gotten a hint that all is not as it seems in the Addam household.

Well, it’s not, but I confidently predict that Lady A is going to have trouble figuring out the worst of the oddities, as the Addam household has become so terribly odd that getting to the Causes of Things is like finding an Ellipsoid in Siberia. Not impossible, but bloody unlikely.

Both Shirley and Margaret, owing to their personal histories and career choices, are at sixes and sevens with the Victorian British social order. Shirley has heretofore done better at concealing it than Margaret, but he is losing ground quickly. Lady A, on the other hand, is the quintessential Englishwoman (aside from an unaccountable fondness for hunting rifles). Who will no doubt be scandalized once she figures out what those crazy Addams are up to.

If she figures it out, that is. We shall see.

I see that some of the Lunar Ellipse characters now have daguerrotypes associated. I would do the same for Hannah, but in so doing I would give away a crucial bit of information about her. It’ll become evident just as the game begins, but for now I’m keeping mum.

Isn’t this interesting. The three Ellipsoids with most reason to loathe Lord Percy Cecil Longsworth-Brunfondle, 4th Earl of Wickhamthorpe, just happen to have ended up in the same place in Siberia.

None of them can wonder this, but I can—are we headed for a showdown with the fourth earl? We wonders, yes, we wonders… because our character may have a surprise or two to welcome the fourth earl, yes, yesssss, preciousssss…

The other characters will simply welcome him with firearms, of course. He’d do best to try conclusions with Shirley, all things considered.

Whew. The column of smoke Shirley and Margaret investigated was not a crashed-and-burned dirigible. That would have been bad.

It appears that the bored Russian grad students guarding a supply depot for said dirigible went on one last vodka bender and in the process dropped a lantern that set the coal store on fire. Idiots.

The other hypothesis is a lightning strike.

Signs of the grad students’ departure did not go in an obvious direction, however, so there’s some part of the story we don’t have.

Li being Li, we may have missed something obvious and sinister in our investigation. Well, no, not necessarily… Li could just be enjoying watching us gobble down red herrings. That does seem to be a favorite occupation of hers…

Tamasi, my Passions of the Tide character, is off to a roaring start—half the other characters thus far are scared to death of her, and the other half at least don’t give her any guff.

I find this highly amusing.

(Players are another story—the guy playing Tamasi’s father-in-law sent an entry this morning that had me laughing out loud, it did such a terrific job of making her life difficult. Beautiful work. Beautiful. Tamasi finessed it—I hope!—but it surely did get in under her scales.)

Tamasi is formal, dispassionate, wastes no words—and apparently that is enough. It’s achingly clear to me, already, that she’s got an Achilles heel (well, as much as a merwoman can have any sort of heel) that I hadn’t planned for her. We’ll see if anyone else picks up on it; thus far it is only implicit in her actions.

Nonetheless, quite a woman, Tamasi. I am enjoying her already. I am also enjoying writing the reversal of the usual light=good, darkness=bad trope; makes me think about what I’m doing. (Tamasi is from deep undersea, and is somewhat light-sensitive; darkness to her is a haven, light a painful interruption.)