The Blog of Roon

Passions of the Tide is moving from a mailing list to the GM’s message board, starting (we are told) some time tomorrow. Lurkers are invited. If you’ve always wondered just what an RPG played online is like (it’s fun!), or whether my RPG fluff can really be as bad as I say it is (trust me, it’s worse), tune in.

Campaign and character background:

The Abyssian Empire of merfolk, led by Emperor-King Mithondion, has been fighting the savage fish-men for generations. A desperate but lucky victory against insane odds catapulted Nacreon, head of House Amyriand, into an Abyssian generalship, which he later lost (to General Krill) owing to his death-before-dishonor tactics costing too many mer lives. Wealthy but old and tired, Nacreon now lives in the city of Abyssia with his daughter-in-law Tamasi and nephew Nikolao; he has no other family living.

Tamasi is from deep undersea; the merfolk there are easily distinguished from the Abyssians of the shallows by their blandly pale coloration (sun-sea Abyssians have skin and scales colored like tropical fish), and are roundly despised in Abyssia proper. Nacreon’s son Garion married her (spurning her two older sisters for reasons unknown) for her substantial dowry, but he died in battle before he could make much use of it. Since Nacreon’s wife died, Tamasi has been shrewdly managing House Amyriand’s wealth as well as her own (from the dowry Nacreon allowed her to keep).

Young Nikolao had one arm crippled in a battle with the fish-men. The experience turned him into an anti-war activist, but it has not slowed his substance abuse or his sniffing after attractive women in the slightest.

Isleen is a Seer, a diviner. Divining has generally fallen into disfavor in Abyssia, so much so that Isleen’s talent cost her her family’s acceptance. She is apprenticed to House Amyriand’s chief diviner Muireann, as well as performing sundry tasks of librarianship and translation.

An updated list of NPCs important and un- is available here.

The story so far (abridged!):

Both Isleen and her mentor Muireann woke one morning from True Dreams of Mithondion with one arm cut off at the elbow, surrounded by members of House Amyriand. The dream sent Muireann into a frenzy, such that Tamasi and Isleen had to leave breakfast to deal with her. Just then, a messenger came with a request from one Court Minister Rilagan for audience with Nacreon and Tamasi. Nacreon set the audience for later that afternoon.

Isleen learned that Muireann had also had a vision of her own impending death. After consulting with Tamasi, she got up her courage to tell Nacreon of her own dream, but she informed neither him nor Tamasi of Muireann’s additional vision.

Shortly before the audience, Nikolao fell victim to a poisoning attempt while sleeping off intoxication in his quarters. The guards who pulled him from his room took him to Nacreon, where he fought unconsciousness to tell of three servants who had been nearby. Tamasi, worried both that he would talk himself to death or that the Court Minister would arrive in the midst of the fuss, carried him to a dark guest-room. This turned out to be precisely the wrong thing to do; Muireann informed him that the proper treatment was sunlight, and detailed Isleen to take him out to the gardens to get it. As he recovered, Nikolao began a flirtation with the young seer which Isleen has thus far diverted wittily.

Rilagan arrived with two pieces of news for Nacreon and Tamasi. Item the first, that the fish-men have offered to start peace talks (despite available evidence pointing at the fish-men having rather the better of the conflict at the moment) and Mithondion is prepared to come to the table. Item the second, that to allay any appearance of negotiation through weakness, Mithondion’s son and probable heir Pirion will ally himself with House Amyriand by marrying Tamasi.

Shocked and repelled (though for different reasons), Tamasi and Nacreon tried to gain time by pointing to Nikolao’s mishap—surely the Emperor-King cannot ally with a House under the cloud of attempted murder? Rilagan told them bluntly that the marriage was the Emperor-King’s will, and there would be no delaying it.

A very unsettled House Amyriand met for dinner that night, only to be unsettled yet further by Muireann’s interpretation of her dream: “I saw those dining here tonight… acting as conspirators in Mithondion’s death.” Grasping at straws, they decided to play for time once more: Tamasi would write to court to insist that all formal courtship rituals be honored, and meanwhile Nikolao would try to get to the bottom of the attempt on his life.

Tamasi got no response to her letter, and Nikolao had no luck finding his would-be assassin. Two of the implicated servants were clearly innocent of any involvement; the third was found on House Amyriand’s grounds a week later with his neck broken. Tamasi called the household servants together to insist that anyone with knowledge of either crime come forward, warning of severe consequences should anyone be found out; thus far, no one has.

Some weeks passed, with no word from court. Then Pirion, at the front, was reported to be coming home—and bringing a fish-man ambassador with him! Nikolao and Isleen were dispatched to court to learn the news. They are meeting with the Emperor-King at present in game-time. Mithondion has restated plans for the marriage, but indicated that Rilagan overstepped his bounds in declaring it to them before Pirion could return home to observe proper form.

The Princess Ireth, Pirion’s older sister, has made an appearance as well, accompanied by an odd undercurrent of Sight in Isleen whose import Isleen has not yet determined. Ireth demanded of Nikolao whether his acquiescence to weak counsels (i.e. the peace talks) resulted from his injury leaving him unable to fight. Nikolao glibly and suavely told her that his spear-arm was just fine, but the disability of his shield-arm meant he was a danger to those fighting with him; just so, the unthinking use of force without accompanying statecraft endangered the Empire.

Awaiting the return of Nikolao and the apprentice seer, Tamasi engaged Nacreon’s aid in making plans for the household to escape the city should that become necessary. Nacreon told Tamasi horrible war stories from his youth to explain why he could never countenance peace with the fish-men. Tamasi admitted in return that her loyalties were divided; she had House Amyriand and her own people to think of, as well as the Empire. She demonstrated one of her people’s native talents: showy bioluminescence. Nacreon informed her that he was aware of another ability her people in general and she in particular possessed: deadly unarmed fighting. Startled, but gratified that he could overcome prejudice to value the talents and their possessors, she admitted that she was so trained.

They have waited all night and into the next day, but still Nikolao and Isleen are not back, as they arrived too late for the previous evening’s soiree and perforce spent the night in the palace before they received audience. (Now I am veering slightly into hasn’t-happened-yet, but so be it; I’ll retcon this post as needed.) Nacreon at last fell asleep; rather than wake him, when Nikolao and Isleen returned she sent them off to catch up on their sleep before dinner.

When she retired to her own rooms, a letter from Pirion awaited her. In contrast to Rilagan’s rude condescension, this letter was gracious and deferential, piquing her curiosity by claiming to have made an extended visit to her people, though arousing her concern by an expressed wish to bind them even closer to Abyssia. She took the letter with her when the call to dinner came.

And so things stand at present…

The latest news is, as always, in the London Times.

That telegram about Lord Butterfield got sent without Shirley’s knowledge. He did indeed write it, but its mere existence convinced Lord Butterfield’s flunky to make the appropriate appointment, so he did not think it necessary or quite proper to send it.

Odder things have happened during the Ellipse, however. And Lord Butterfield certainly had it coming to him.

What I want to know is how long Col. Davis cooled his heels in Arkhangelsk dancing attendance on Lord Butterfield. Shirley is finishing the race secure in the knowledge that he and Margaret can’t win, given Davis’s formidable two-week lead. Shirley outright doesn’t want to win; the idea of profiting by a race that has killed so many people shocks him right to the core of his decent little soul.

Margaret agrees with him, though not with the same level of vehemence. They’ve discussed it behind closed doors… and what else they may have been up to behind said doors is ever so None of Your (or Anyone’s) Business.

If Davis sat around, though… ah, well, there’s always Lady Bonnet to win in place of the Addams.

I think I feel sorry for Griegson. Whatever Percy and Addison had on him, it must have been nasty. Stealing and destroying evidence is bad enough, but he can’t have wanted to commit that murder.

Shirley’s face when he sees the story dated 16th June will be a study. He’s, um, a teensy bit nervous about Meeting the Family. Meeting half of England and Scotland along with the Family is if anything worse.

In Passions of the Tide, Tamasi and Nacreon are awaiting the return of Nikolao and Isleen from court, where they have just met the rude, cruel, sexy, and entirely too powerful warmonger brat Imperial Princess Ireth.

If Tamasi does marry Imperial Prince Pirion, at some point there will be the undersea equivalent of a Kilkenny catfight. Ireth is just about everything that Tamasi despises. (Well, except for the sexy part. Tamasi’s neutral on that.)

Over on the message boards, we’ve been getting downright apocalyptic. Conspiracy theories galore, stemming from the unexplained absence from court of an NPC with plenty of perfectly good reasons to be absent.

In the Grand Ellipse, Shirley is antsy about an intrigue in Arkhangelsk. The representative there skips out on meetings. According to the servants, it’s because of summons from a lady of doubtful virtue. The so-called liaison started just as Vroomfondel would have been escaping Irkutsk—so although it may well be nothing at all, Shirley treated it with kid gloves.

They seem to have escaped with their tokens, however, after a bit of necessary grandstanding on Shirley’s part, so onward through Europe to the Channel and Glasgow!

(For Li’s edification, I was considering everything from having Sasha fake a temper tantrum to having Esperanza sneak onto the house staff and steal the book and tokens—this was before I found out they were in a locked safe. That, I assume, was to keep them away from Vroomfondel?)

This week’s WISH asks about physical and verbal schtick that helps with characterization.

My characters do verbal schtick, practically all of them—from not speaking at all to very odd speech mannerisms indeed. What I don’t typically do, I notice, is come up with the schtick beforehand, during character creation. Each new character’s speech tics develop during play, and eventually become habit.

This isn’t to say their speech necessarily comes from some great well of fundamental character knowledge. I happened to be reading Jane Austen when the Grand Ellipse started, and that’s how Shirley got his strait, studied, over-formal mode of speech. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to write without contractions? Sheesh.) Shirley, by the way, has a voice very like that of David Wenham playing Diver Dan on Seachange. The accent is all wrong, of course, and the inflections are a little different, but that is Shirley’s voice.

Verbal tics? “To be sure” and contraction avoidance are his major ones.

Tamasi is also formal and studied in her speech, but generally less stilted (and certainly less British!) than Shirley, with an edge of long-repressed frustration that the warm-hearted Yorkshireman doesn’t have. Her verbal tic is opening or closing statements with “Well.” By itself. Almost a scop’s Hwæt!

Hannah gives me a chance to remember how I talked when I was growing up in North Carolina. Not a rural Southern accent by any means—I never had such, growing up in Raleigh—but the elongated vowels and the speech rhythms and the word choice. Hannah, like any educated Southern woman, has a repertoire of obscenity-avoiding exclamations that constitute her verbal tic.

The oddest speech I’ve ever entertained as a player was Rat’s low-class, sentence-fragmented idiolect. That her problem was lack of education rather than lack of intelligence showed when her thoughtful, formal lizard-man mentor started teaching her his language, and when speaking it she sounded just like him. I enjoyed switching verbal horses in midstream.

Shirley, to unnamed flunky at British Consulate, on hearing the schedule for entertaining Ellipsoids, after a long minute of lively laughter:

My dear sir. In the course of this journey I have talked down an attacking footpad, evaded thugs staging a strike, helped avert a mob-lynching, survived a poisonously overcooked roast, passed over half India in disguise, ridden out the worst Pacific storm anyone can remember, crossed from Japan to Russia in an experimental air vehicle, pulled through a potentially lethal lung infection in the midst of the Siberian wastes, nearly frozen to death, clung to horseback for better than twenty-four hours at a stretch, outlasted biting insects the size of rats, and had my transport demolished by a wild boar. My wife and our wards have similar tales to tell.

If you truly believe Lord Butterfield’s schedule can delay or interrupt our journey home, you are tragically mistaken. Kindly produce the book and the tokens, before we are forced to provide any unhappy proofs of our determination.

Every word is true, by the way; Shirley isn’t even bothering to exaggerate. (Well, okay, maybe the mosquitoes weren’t quite rat-size.) And, um, there are a few things he isn’t even mentioning. What can I say? Been a long, strange Ellipse.

And Heaven protect the British Consulate if the flunky doesn’t come across with the goods. See post title for what will happen.

The Ellipse is back; see the London Times for more of our favorite folks’ adventures.

My brilliant shortcut to Arkhangelsk didn’t gain us any time, damn it. Well, it was still brilliant. And it gave poor Shirley a chance to feed himself up a bit, after the brutal time he had in the taiga. The dark horse Col. Davis, however, seems likeliest to win, given that there are only two legs of the journey left. Place your bets…

Davis appears to have slipped through before Vroomfondel could meet up with his boat. Which leaves Vroomfondel for… Shirley, Margaret, and Lady B, the three people on earth who most despise him. Glee. Or something. Shirley is an avowed pacifist, but some people are just a waste of space.

There would seem to be only two reasonable explanations for Griegson’s perfidy: bribery or blackmail. My bob’s on the latter. As for whoever hurt Arthur Byrd—you aren’t out of the woods by any means, laddie. Shirley’s got ways and means of tracking you down. Just you be glad you didn’t seriously injure Shirley’s brother-in-law, because Shirley in a courtroom with a personal stake in the outcome is a frightening object indeed.

It was sweet of Libby Wells to testify to her employer’s good character. Bit late, but still sweet.

Tamasi’s life would be ever so much simpler if she could just tell the prince “Buzz off, fish-boy; I’d rather marry a remora!”

But of course it’s not that simple. She just got a letter from him that sent her straight into what my Psych 101 book called double approach-avoidance conflict. Given that when she first heard about this she wanted it to All Go Away, that’s pretty good progress for a single letter, from his point of view.

And he accomplished something else, too. She was considering playing sick or running away. Not now. Now… now she wants to see him.

Only a very self-confident GM would dare pull the “it’s all a dream” stunt. Only a superlative GM would make it work.

James did it. Drat him. Every single one of us Passions players opened our email this morning and stared drop-jawed, thinking Nikolao and Isleen had suddenly died.

But what do you know, Isleen is a seer and her visions come through dreams. So it didn’t happen; we just have to figure out what it means.

Drat him again. That shouldn’t have fooled us. But it surely did. Nice work.

House Amyriand is finally starting to come together. They’ll be just about ready by the time the real fun starts; they’ll know what they’re good for, and where they have to cover for each other. Which is not to say I expect these people ever to be a model of familial harmony, just that I don’t think they would have had much chance of making it as four individuals with no interconnections other than belonging to the same household.

It’s a curious crew. An aging ex-general, an ex-soldier flirt with a disabled arm (who appears to be hiding a bit of a Secret Identity), a foreign widow with some uncanny capacities, and a smart and good-hearted but painfully young diviner. Not your typical bunch of characters by any means, which as far as I’m concerned is all to the good. Experience, youth and charm, muscled conscience, and heart—a combination with potential. Despite narrow vision, bitterness, distrust, and naivete.

We still don’t know what’s up at court; Nikolao and Isleen are chatting on their way there. Tamasi and Nacreon, waiting at home, have had their first honest conversation in years, possibly ever. Tamasi demonstrated a little of what distinguishes her people from Nacreon’s, and to her vast surprise Nacreon simply accepted it.

(Don’t think I spilled all the beans about Tamasi, however. She’s not the type to tell all her secrets in one go; I’ve got a few small things and one HUGE thing in reserve still. Timing on the latter, however, does not depend on me.)

Well, the news is in; at Nacreon’s behest, Nikolao is off to court with Isleen to discover the discoverable. Only the GM knows what they will find out…

Isleen can ponder her discovery of Tamasi’s besetting weakness—books and libraries—as she goes. Some people are gentle(wo)men scholars, some are gentle(wo)men and scholars—Tamasi was a young scholar before she ever became a gentlewoman.

And Tamasi, as she waits in her rooms for their return, can ponder Isleen’s fears and Muireann’s apparent addiction to tranquilizers. (I-as-player know what Muireann’s problem is, but Tamasi doesn’t. Isleen knows too, but has loyally held her tongue.)

Not to mention the possibility alluded to in the title of this post. Exactly what’s up with the royal marriage proposal nobody knows—and nobody knows what Tamasi is thinking about it, either, now that she’s had a bit of a chance to recover from the initial shock. But she has been thinking about it, no question, and I rather suspect that none of the other characters would be entirely comfortable with her thoughts.

And this family is so dysfunctional and Tamasi is so intimidating that nobody’s yet asked. Heh.

Of the three servants implicated in the poisoning, Tamasi spirited away the one most obviously uninvolved (and most nastily abused by Nacreon’s guards), Nikolao took another under his fins, and the third—has disappeared. Hmmm.

Crud. You know, I just realized Tamasi hasn’t given any orders to eliminate the vector through which the poisoning occurred. And I don’t trust the guards to think of it themselves. Need to fix that.