The Blog of Roon

Tamasi is bowing her head to the inevitable. The marriage proposal is the real deal, and the consequences of not accepting it are worse than those of accepting it, so she’s going to accept it. Little though she likes it.

She’s been widowed a while; she was married disgustingly young, and he died not too many years after. You learn what that marriage was like from her mental comment, “The second marriage could not very easily be worse than the first had been. She found some small comfort in that.”

The question is how, exactly. I’m pulling back from my earlier house-of-horrors conception of it (the less said, the better, believe me), because I really was being excessive. Still. It wasn’t a good marriage.

Looking at the context of it, it’s not hard to see why. A venal man whose father was a philandering blusterer, whose mother played the Noble House Slave Saint, who married the girl out of sheer perversity because she (unlike her two elder sisters) did not want him. A too-young girl unthinkingly accustomed to respectful treatment, who did not want any marriage at all (much less this one), who was backed into a corner by people she respected and told to accept it as fate, who had to cope with culture shock at the same time as marriage shock… put these two together, and the result is Not Good.

I suppose that’s enough, really. Nobody needs to know the gritty details. Pirion is going to have to work to overcome Tamasi’s understandable reticence about marriage—if he cares to do so at all, that is—and that’s all there is to it. She’s been cornered again. She has accepted it, but she doesn’t have to like it.

This week’s Game WISH asks how system affects character. For y’all non-game-geeks, every game system has a different way of laying out who your character is and what s/he can do.

Let’s just take it as read that system impacts character, okay? If it didn’t, we could just swap characters indiscriminately in and out of games using different systems (assuming roughly congruent genre, of course; one couldn’t swap Shirley into high fantasy, nor Renate into Victoriana), and you know as well as I do that just doesn’t happen.

The chief difference for me is how constrained my character is at the initial-concept stage, I think. Do I come up with an idea that fits the gameworld and the situation and then figure out how the system accommodates that idea, or do I have to start with system dictates?

Shirley, who is a GURPS character, is a good example of the former style of character development. I figured out that he was a cross-dressing barrister with some independent crime-investigation skill, and looked at what GURPS gave me to that end. He turned out just about right, I think.

Afletana, who is DnD3e, is a sterling example of the latter style. The party had just lost its main healer, so it needed a cleric. Ergo I had to roll up a cleric. It’s the system demanding that I plug a bad hole in the party’s abilities; it’s the system constraining what a cleric does.

Now, note that Afletana wasn’t a shallow or uninteresting character once I started playing her. It is possible to have fun despite a constraining system.

However. I do believe that the more a system constrains, the more its players are liable to cookie-cutter characters—at some point, even the most creative brain ends up in a rut—and the less likely they are to create real standouts because the system eliminates possibilities.

I’ve just about gotten to the point that I won’t play another DnD game unless I can see the gameworld in advance and it’s clearly a standout. I’m tired of the fighter-cleric-rogue-wizard Northern Melancholy treadmill. Time for something different.

Logs for the second part of Renate’s search for her brother and her family’s treasures have been posted. Capsule summary: Renate fails to regain the Golden Harp of Astrid.

Some interesting bits. Renate has settled into possession of three speech registers, not two: we already knew about her native sixteen-year-old drawl, and Emilia Eaglebourne’s bookish formality, but it’s become clear she’s got a third. I’m calling it the “respectful Southern child,” because it’s exactly what the polite kids sounded like in school in Raleigh. Lots of “sir” and “ma’am,” never bluntly disagreeing with a respected adult, careful but not stilted diction.

(I can’t quite hear it with a Southern accent, but that’s probably my distance from my childhood operating.)

This part of the hunt centered around Dorothy Durai. After reading the scenes at the Risen Octagon club (very ugly—Renate’s already having flashbacks) and afterwards, my husband shook his head and said in disgust, “She’s a spiritual vivisectionist. A soul-eater. A—well, the word is ‘vampire.’”

Renate knows that. Intellectually, anyway. Renate has dubbed her the Drifting Diamond, a hard woman wandering around looking for someone she can’t damage.

But Durai is that most dangerous of psyche-stealers, the pity-inspiring manipulator. And Renate’s too young and too innocent and too nice (in game terms, WIS 9) not to be sucked in. Not to mention that Durai completely flambéd her sixteen-year-old libido.

There’s going to be a major train wreck somewhere down the line. Durai knows it (and wants it), Godfrey knows it, and even Renate knows it, though she’d never admit it. But Renate’s also smart, and her fresh, not-yet-disillusioned youth gives her a certain power to resist corruption. Durai’s going to have to work for this one. Should be quite a chess match.

We also meet an old flame of Godfrey’s (I’m still trying to figure that one out), several more dragons, and the noble city of Ilium.

There’s a new gaming and comics store in town that’s worth a look. Its name is the inscrutable “Blue Dog,” and it’s across from Sole e Sapori, near the intersection of University and Frances at the east end of campus.

I dropped in yesterday, and will be going back. Clean, organized, good selection (if a bit heavy on the d20, not that I blame him), not cramped as too many game stores are.

Female gamers and comics fans note: the owner is a complete gent, none of those “What is that— that— er, what is that, and what’s it doing here?” vibes.

He didn’t have the book I wanted, but he told me when it would be in, and I’ll go back to him to get it.

The Dragonhunt GM left me an Easter egg on the nascent campaign site. Go to the mortal NPC listing and scroll down to the entry for Emilia Eaglebourne, Renate’s alter ego. It begins thus:

When she was only five, a young lass named Emilia defended her small farming village in the Patchwork Kingdoms against a band of thirty-one bandits from the next province. Armed only with an oyster fork, she beheaded fifteen of them, disemboweled fifteen, and then had the leader gnawed to death by ferrets.

Oh. My. An oyster fork?

Needless to say, it’s a complete tissue of lies, except for the mention of her defeat by Hyuri at the end. (She isn’t even twenty-one; she’s sixteen.) And it seems designed to get her into maximum trouble—Dark Eternal and an entire Lan’yarian army?

I think she just sank a bit deeper into the soup…

This week’s Game WISH asks whether characters in my games have, well, friends. Buddies. Pals. Outside the party itself, that is. NPCs who come back every once in a while to say hi.

Well, sheesh, yeah. Some more than others, but yeah. Otherwise, with what or whom are my characters supposed to interact? Inanimate objects plus a neverending string of faceless enemies, barkeeps, and gate guards? Sounds about as much fun as wandering a strange city blindfolded.

In some settings, recurring friends make more sense than in others. And they make more sense for some characters than others. Passions of the Tide centers around House Amyriand, which is a very closed circle, though indications are it won’t always be so (that dratted wedding is still on, so we bid fair to have to integrate ourselves into court society). And Tamasi for sundry excellent reasons tends to keep to herself. So thus far, her best friend is Isleen, another party member, and that’s perfectly fine. Things may change when Pirion and Ireth enter Tamasi’s life; we’ll see.

But Tamasi is a little strange, as my characters go. (Okay, all right, she’s strange, end of story. Stick with me here.) Generally, I actively seek out friends and allies among NPCs, and I get unhappy when GMs don’t feed my character’s social connectivity, treating their NPCs as mere information conduits. A central part of world-inhabiting just disappears when GMs do that.

I’m quite gleeful at the moment about how Renate in Dragonhunt is picking up friends. She started out with a family—a real, present, involved family, not the family-in-distant-parts that most characters have if they have any family at all—and they matter to her a great deal. In her first mini-adventure, she met a brash but kind competitive chef, and developed an interest in a pseudonymous swordsman.

(She was pseudonymous herself at the time, so she’s not about to hold his pseudonym against him. Even if it is “Coris Nightblade,” which is pretty awful. Though no worse than her own “Emilia Eaglebourne.”)

But Renate’s chief friend—and this answers the second half of the question, about henchlings and hirelings—is Godfrey Cuyler, her Jeeves-like personal servant. If you read this chat transcript, you get a fair sense of where their relationship is going. (You also find out what happened in Renate’s fight with the dragonlord, and you get a few good Wodehouse allusions, as both the GM and I are huge Wodehouse fans. For more such allusions, see actual game transcripts.)

I’m just tickled pink about it, because one of my favorite relationships to play out is mentor-student. Oh, and by “mentor” I ever so do not mean NPCs who come out of nowhere merely to mouth vague prophecies or instructions and disappear again. I mean a respected, trusted associate of some standing, with knowledge and wisdom surpassing my character’s but lacking omniscience, who cares enough about my character to teach and guide her. Godfrey is all of that.

And does Renate ever need a mentor! Goodness, she’s dreadfully young and green. The more I read her, the sixteener she sounds to me.

The GM pointed out to me today that his friendly NPCs exist to add depth to the gameworld, not to cause mechanics headaches. His solution to mechanics headaches is not to overuse combat-ready henchlings. To me, that makes eminent sense. I’m not munchkin enough to want a henchling or henchcreature just for the added power; taking them out of combat altogether means a better relationship for me and easier number-crunching for the GM. Win-win.

By the way, Dragonhunt may have room for another player or two. If you think you’d like to play one of Renate’s friends, look over the game site and send me or Alan email.

Renate’s gotten herself into the soup, as Wodehouse would have put it—right up to her neck, and possibly a little deeper.

And it’s all Godfrey’s fault, though if his resemblance to Jeeves is to be believed, he’ll find some farcical way out of it.

The gizmos she’s looking for were fenced to a dragonlord named Hyuri, one so xenophobic he never talks with anyone except to fight them. (Quite the student of human-style swordplay, don’t you know. Hobby.) And, worse luck, a scheduled fight just got cancelled owing to the challenger’s getting himself severely damaged somewhere.

“Ha! A substitute!” (Gilbert and Sullivan. The Mikado. Never mind.)

Renate picked up a swordsman at her inn who would have served the turn nicely. While they were still uncertain about his compliance, however, Godfrey (despite static from Renate) started bizarre rumors about one “Emilia Eaglebourne,” a redoubtable swordswoman.

(The surname is a not-quite-linguistically-accurate pun on Renate’s first and last names, and the given name is obviously from her brother Emil. I walked right straight into this one, because I’d been thinking about pseudonyms for Renate since David suggested that her initials “Rava” would be a good one. So, completely unforced and un-hinted-at, I let Renate call herself Emilia as soon as she got into the inn.)

The swordsman did his bit—but Godfrey is hellishly efficient as a PR man, it seems. Hyuri issued a public challenge to Emilia Eaglebourne the very next morning. For that night.

She’s in the soup, all right.

Well, it’s all over in the Grand Ellipse but the shouting, so it’s time for me to keep my promise and come clean about Shirley’s MacGuffin.

If you still want to know, that is.

A couple of people figured it out on their own. They didn’t seem too surprised by it. Sure you still care?

Really?

Okay, then. Whatever you say.

Shirley Addam is a woman passing as a man. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

The backstory was relatively simple: Elizabeth Addam’s brother Shirley died of pneumonia at age 16 (she was two years older; their parents were dead already, so they managed the family millinery shop) while preparing for a career in law. Elizabeth, helping him, had discovered that her aptitude was if anything greater than his—but the law was closed to women in the 1870s. When her brother died, she made a snap decision to take his place, and succeeded in the subterfuge by what she told Margaret was “the most grimly comic set of quick-changes and deceptions ever seen outside an operetta stage.” During a later stint in the Records Office, Shirley managed to substitute a faked death certificate for Elizabeth into the archives.

The echo behind the surname is I hope obvious to all. I deliberately chose a given name that is ambiguous or even feminine to a modern ear, though in 1882 it was quite firmly a man’s name (though see the Brontë book Shirley).

I did it because at first I couldn’t think of a female Victorian I would have any interest whatever in playing. I toyed with playing a guy, and I started looking up information on 19th-century British legal practice, and I noticed that there weren’t any women until nineteen-something—and then Shirley’s MacGuffin hit me like a ton of bricks.

I mean, what a great chance to do some gender-bending! And what a perfect setting for it! So I wrote Shirley up and sent him to Li, who clapped her hands in great glee indeed. I made his inclinations as femininely-stereotyped as his name, just to see how far I could go with it: a dandy, a stickler for propriety and courtesy, a natural empath, a do-gooder, a pacifist.

I also gave him considerable investigative skill—disguise, criminology, and so on—utterly without knowing that I’d put Shirley squarely into a little-known genre of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century potboilers featuring lady detectives.

Then I saw the Times writeup for Dr. Margaret Byrd (did anybody see the Masterpiece Theatre “Bramwell” series? Think Bramwell), and was immediately all like “Shirley has got to meet this woman.” A professional in her own right—how could Shirley not admire her?

But then, he also had reason to fear her. Shirley knew that ladies of his acquaintance generally had sharper eyes and more concern for propriety than the gentlemen, who pretty much accepted that anything in a high collar, waistcoat, and dinner jacket had to be a man. (I thought about this, and it seemed reasonable—the men would be the first to lynch Shirley if they knew, but the women, in their role as enforcers of social conscience, would be the first to find out.)

Nonetheless, they met in Alexandria, after a truly wonderful moment in which Lord Harston told Shirley that Scotland Yard had been investigating his background, and poor Shirley froze horribly thinking he’d been found out. As Shirley and Margaret ate dinner, I dropped mad hintz all over the place to Margaret’s player Alisa, with Li’s active connivance. Sure enough, Margaret figured him out from the feminine shape of his skull, and there they were.

(There’s some scientific basis to that, from what I read, though like most things it’s a matter of tendencies and averages. Do what I’ve been doing for months: look at the people you pass, dress them up as the opposite gender, and see if they’d get by. A truly astonishing number could.)

He was in serious trouble at the time—his exposure of the Finnegan-Addison link meant that Addison might come gunning for him at any moment. She insisted they travel together; he tried valiantly to get rid of her, but neither Alisa nor I intended that he succeed, so he didn’t.

Then I had an interesting decision to make: how has Shirley’s sexuality been impacted by his experience passing as a man? I figured it was safe to assume a tabula rasa, a person completely repressed and completely clueless. But Shirley’s been swimming for ten years in a sea of Victorian male attitudes toward women, including sexual attitudes. Could he fall in love with a woman?

Yes, I thought, he could. And he did, falling for Margaret hard in scenes of outright scenery-masticating melodrama. (I’m shamefully fond of writing melodrama. It seems to be my native mode.) He proposed in Osaka, after she cabled her family without his knowledge to ask if they would find his suit acceptable. It just so happened that in real-world time he proposed on Valentine’s Day…

He endured one more gut-wrenching happenstance related to his masquerade: in Siberia, he reluctantly decided he had to come clean with Margaret’s ward Esperanza. When he did—and doing it utterly terrified him—she told him airily that she’d known practically from the first time she sketched him.

Already sick and wretched (he was just getting over the nasty lung infection he picked up), he was quite overset by her casual demolishing of the deceptions his life depended on. Not just his life, now—also the reputation of his much-beloved Margaret. That night he contemplated shooting himself, not seeing any other way out given Margaret’s stubbornness—and darn near froze himself to death instead.

He came to terms with it; he had to. Being the sensible fellow he is at heart, he determined that loyal, trustworthy co-conspirators protected rather than endangered his façade, and he’s held to that ever since.

Which is good, because I just fed Li a gold-edged invitation to have someone else indicate a knowledge of Shirley’s secret…

I played my first session of Dragonhunt yesterday. Much fun was had by me, though can’t speak for the DM. He says logs will eventually be posted; I’ll point to them from CavLec when they are. (Just in case you really can’t get enough of my fluff—ha!)

It’s funny how Game WISHes have colored my gaming: I noticed right away when Renate picked up a verbal tic. It was “Oh. Damn.” Which says something about how catastrophic events were for her.

(Actually, reading over the logs, “Oh.” might be closer—it seems to be what she says when she actively reconfigures her mental gears to accept a new bit of information.)

This is the first character I’ve played who is significantly younger than I am, in both chronological age and general life experience. Renate’s sixteen, and she’s utterly callow. Smart and skilled, but callow. I don’t think I personally was ever that callow (close, but not quite), but Renate’s life has heretofore been rather more sheltered, and her family considerably more whole, than mine.

It’s kinda out of my experience, though I have a few friends from my teenage years I’m drawing from. I have to be careful not to overdo it, if in fact I haven’t already. But I like Renate; for all her clothes-horsery and teenage histrionics, she’s a likable kid, affectionate and loyal.

The brief summary: Renate is second child of the baron of a postage-stamp-sized barony. He has excessively high expectations of her older brother the heir, who in yesterday’s session skipped town to avoid being formally named heir presumptive. Renate has gone off to find him, and along the way retrieve three heirlooms stolen from the family a little while back.

She drove an interesting and rather direct bargain with her father: if she finds the swag, he has to lay off her brother. Ah, the fairy-tale expectations of youth.

I’m hoping to use Renate to explore questions of class-based privilege, if opportunity arises. I want to see how she manages to learn how rare and fortunate an upbringing like hers is, and what she does differently once she figures it out.

Playing by chat turns out to feel considerably different from playing by email or bulletin board. The chief reason is simultaneity, DM and players all typing at once. Conversation tends to advance in lurches, sometimes along multiple tracks (which now that I think about it isn’t too horribly different from real life!), and occasionally a tossed-out gambit gets ignored because it arrives too late and the convo has already moved on.

Also, I can’t indulge in third-person description and thought-elucidation nearly to the extent I do in non-simultaneous games. Probably good for me; I have to use words and physical actions almost exclusively to characterize—show, don’t tell.

The setting is such that I feel okay sticking with a largely contemporary, naturalistic voice. Besides, it’s good contrast: Renate’s retainer is a shadow of the inimitable Jeeves, so her scatterbrained blather makes his precision stand out, different though she unquestionably is from the inimitable Bertie Wooster.

Looking forward to a fun game!

Hearty congratulations to Colonel Daniel Davis, winner of the Grand Ellipse! What did I say about dark horses?

As for the thoroughly demented Vroomfondel, may he rest in pieces.

Shirley is currently meeting his new family in Glasgow, the train trip across Europe having proven uneventful. Thus far, no faux pas.