The Blog of Roon

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.

Well, since the GM doesn’t seem to mind its being mentioned… the jaw-dropping plot twist I mentioned with regard to Passions of the Tide was a sudden marriage offer between Tamasi and the heir to the throne of Abyssia.

For all her training and her very real toughness, Tamasi panicked outright for a moment or two. Nothing in the sea she could possibly want less; she didn’t want to be where she is now, and she had had that forced on her in near-identical fashion.

A month has passed, game-time, and not a single further word has been heard. All of a sudden, though, the ostensible reason for the royal wedding seems to have been done away with—it was supposed to be a distraction from a political manoeuvre, but said manoeuvre is now about to take place in broad view of everyone. Perhaps Tamasi is off the hook. She’d certainly like to be.

The sudden political openness is owed to the same prince Tamasi was to marry, which leads me to wonder if he’s as unhappy about the idea as she is. She believed from the outset he hadn’t been consulted.

She wouldn’t find his distaste insulting, mind you. She’d do her best to put it to use. That would be an interesting talk, it would…

In the meantime, Tamasi is finally making a real friend. Lonely woman, Tamasi, and she has been so a considerable time. Not needy—Tamasi is quite self-sufficient—but unquestionably lonely. Convinced that no one in Abyssia could like her, an attitude that tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

She also embodies curious conflicts between stability and self-actualization, acceptance and rebellion, familiarity and challenge. Clearly the work she does is not sufficient to her considerable ability. She might indeed be better-occupied at court—but her instinct is to resist change with all her might. Not wholly without reason, I suppose; change hasn’t been good to her, and she’s had to work hard to make a place for herself. Nor is the social atmosphere of court congenial to her.

Still. We shall see, I daresay. Some people have to be pushed to their full potential.

House Amyriand is still talking over the varied events of the day around the dinner table. I do not know where the conversation will lead, but my guess at the moment (even though everyone at table is against it) is that Tamasi will have to bow before the inevitable.

This is something Tamasi is good at. She’s bowed before a few inevitabilities before. Maybe someday she will learn to rebel, but that time is not yet—and it may be never.

I thought this might be the case, but now I know for sure. Tamasi never lifts so much as a finger in her own (metaphorical) defense—but anyone who threatens those she thinks of as hers is asking for serious trouble. “Her people” is a set of concentric circles—her house and house-servants, her land and its tenants, her people of the deep sea.

(When I was a kid we had a dog who hated all cats except one. There were “other cats” against whom his anger was dire indeed, and then there was “his cat,” whom he understood he had to live with in order to stay in our house. Woe betide anyone or anything threatening his cat! Tamasi is more than a little like that dog.)

I wasn’t sure whether Nacreon and Nikolao were hers. I’m not sure she was sure. Now we both know. They are. They are the inmost circle.

And I’m also fairly sure that the Abyssian Empire isn’t in the circle at all. It will be interesting to see whether she finally adopts it, as she has Nacreon’s House Amyriand, or helps kick it to pieces herself.

I also learned this week that Tamasi is potentially a very scary person. She’s starting to make me nervous.

Tamasi dropped a bomb, but it didn’t go off. She has been informed that she has no choice but to go along with the stunner just dropped in her lap. Informed… frankly rather rudely.

She just told off the court minister passing along this information in no uncertain terms. This is not something Tamasi would normally do, but she does not countenance disrespect (well, except when directed against her alone by her family; that she tolerates).

And if the stunner does actually come to pass, she would be quite capable of making the court minister regret his rudeness, she would. Better he should realize that now.

If she’s really lucky, telling him off will send him and his stunners away… she isn’t thinking about that, but I am!

I am also learning that my fluff-writing has started to resemble Golden Age pulp fantasy in a startling and rather unsettling fashion. Ah, well. I never claimed I was good at this. At least it’s tolerably good Golden Age pulp—not quite Leigh Brackett, but not too bad.

(This is a great thread. I am loving every bit of it. And despite appearances, I don’t think Tamasi is being railroaded—I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen, and I am chewing my fingernails to find out!)

Gotta love a GM who can lay out a total stunner. James just knocked me cold (metaphorically). Tamasi’s going to have to play for time to think this one over. Not the kind of thing one can react quickly to.

Still shaking my head in disbelief…

(Crud. Now I know what Ocietrem was getting at. Tamasi is just too honorable for her own good sometimes. Well, if she has to call it off, at least there’s a convenient excuse.)

Update: Great response from Nacreon’s player. It’s becoming clear that as much as these people don’t like each other—they like each other.

I am thinking that I will return a bomb for a bomb. Ocietrem will just have to live with it. Mua-hahaha.

Update 2: The more I think about this, the more complicated and uncertain it gets! Now that is the sign of a good plot twist. Tamasi is going to have to ask for help working out what to do, which will irk her mightily.

A comment to Ginger’s latest Role Call response said, “The one thing I can’t stand is inter-party fighting or backstabbing, but that can happen in any genre.”

Yes, it can happen anywhere, but I must confess I don’t understand why internal party conflict is at all times and in all circumstances a bad thing. (Which is, just so we all understand each other, probably going a bit beyond what the commenter meant.)

The court minister in Passions of the Tide just dropped a bomb that is likely to separate Nacreon from the rest of his family. (Still some unknowns there, so don’t hold me to that—but it does seem likely.) I’m not afraid of that, and I’m dead sure Nacreon’s player isn’t either. Given the initial character designs, it was frankly inevitable. The resulting fights should provide lots of scope for verbal acrobatics and behind-the-scenes scheming. I’m actually looking forward to it.

Come to think of it, there have been some fairly amusingly dysfunctional moments already. Nacreon tried to have Tamasi write a flagrantly insulting message to the court minister; she flatly disobeyed his orders (and made him out a feeble old mer hunting for death’s door in the letter to boot) to maintain decorum. Tamasi made curt and unkind demands of a rather intoxicated Nikolao, who has since taken delight in testing her patience. And Nacreon neglected to tell Tamasi that she was wanted at the court minister’s audience; if both he and the court minister are quick, they might have noticed her momentary discomfiture, and there is nothing Tamasi hates worse than public embarrassment.

(Well, okay, a few things. But nothing relating to her personally.)

And it’s fine. It’s all fine. Even in a PBeM, where the lack of face-to-face interaction can flare tempers, everybody knows that it’s all character conflict, and isn’t to be taken personally.

Nor is Nacreon’s family going to fall apart at the seams, another fear of some gamers who believe that any party not completely united will eventually divide. Nacreon’s unthinking patriarchy, Tamasi’s sense of duty and decorum, what may (I’m not sure yet) turn out to be a surprising amount of decency and kindness in Nikolao—all of these counterweight the chaos. When the battle-lines are drawn, at least some of these merfolk will start pulling together.

Do I know exactly what Tamasi is going to do? Well, no; I don’t even know the full extent of the situation yet, nor am I wholly certain of the balance between Tamasi’s principles and her iron sense of duty. But I’m certainly not going to circumscribe her reaction just because she and Nacreon couldn’t see eye-to-eye even if placed face-to-face an inch away from each other.

This isn’t to say there aren’t limits. Launch a killing attack on another character, expect nasty in-game and out-of-game repercussions. That’s genuinely off-limits. (Which isn’t to say a non-killing attack might not happen—but even then, I’d give the other player’s character plenty of notice—and veto power, frankly.) Rape a character or NPC in any game I’m in without negotiating with the other player and GM first, and expect me to leave. Quickly. Even if I’m not running any of the characters involved.

The only times I’ve seen internal party conflict get out of hand were when the conflict was a proxy for unresolved conflict among players. It’s really that simple, at least in my experience. The really nasty thing about this is that it can’t be resolved in-game, even though at least one of the parties to the conflict usually thinks it can, if the group would only Do Things His/Her Way.

I’m interested in alternate views on this. (Hm. I think it’s a previous Game WISH. I’ll have to look up the answers it got.) My sense, though, is that forbidding characters to get mad at each other, much less fight, reduces the scope of a game practically to unplayability.

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…

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.

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.)