The Week in Stories - Many Games That Start With M

Monsterhearts, Monster of the Week,  Masque of the Red Death

We've played first sessions or early sessions of a number of games in the last week or so, so it's time to get down on the screen what I want to remember about each!

First up, we have Monsterhearts 2.  We've been trying to get this going for quite a while, but the scheduling gods have not been with us. It was the first game with a couple of new people, and Monsterhearts is a heck of a game to throw them into! (I think they had roleplayed before, but this was an introduction to what we so casually call "our style of gaming.") It demands a lot, if you're going to get the most out of it.

Delightfully, everybody meshed really well right away. We had in our group a Selkie, a Witch, a Fae, a Werewolf, and an Infernal. It was Halloween, with the prospect of a beach party that night, despite the recent disappearance of a classmate (merely the latest in a string of disappearances over the previous year.)  I was playing the Fae, and there were a couple of things I wanted to explore with this character, both of them related to my own teenage years.

The first is that my last year of high school was probably my pinnacle of being comfortable with being eccentric. (Not that I've been sparklingly normal in the years since, and as I get older I reclaim more and more of my weirdness.) I got good grades, I never hurt anyone, I was just a little strange, and I loved it. The Fae felt like a good way to explore that, and I gave her one of my quirks right away - that last year, I never sat in a desk. I would sit on top of the desk behind mine, if possible, or on the floor, but I was done with desks. I wasn't disruptive, I just wouldn't do it, and because I was a good student, teachers didn't hassle me about it. (I also tended to take my shoes off somewhere during the day, and then have to retrace my steps at the end to find them. Bare feet always, and that hasn't much changed.)

Click here to see a photo that, to me, captures Crow really well 

That's more of a surface thing, although fun. The other part was how very seriously I took everything. How even though I could tell something was a joke, I'd still respond seriously, because it felt more important to tell my truth than be funny. The Fae, with their absolute seriousness about promises and what people said they'd do, fits with that well also.  When picking options on the character sheet, I added that Crow (I've had a thing with crows recently, so that name jumped out at me) was fae-blooded, and came up with a story of being half-fae, her human father having a dalliance with a fae woman, then 30 years later, a baby being left on his doorstep. She passes him off as her grandfather, and what they both have in common is a burning desire to get back to the Fae Realm.

And when the GM asked us to pick something we wanted for the evening, it wasn't a great leap to say that she wanted the party to be the best ever, as much like the festivities she got to go to with the Fae once a year as possible. To do so, she wanted...chemical enhancement, to help her classmates let down their inhibitions. So of course she went to the Infernal. After threatening a classmate because she'd loaned him a pen, and he'd promised to give it back, and had reneged.

(Honestly, a lot of things happened, and I don't think I can get them all down and have this be a reasonable length, so I'm going to keep it to what happened to Crow.)

Later, she was at the beach trying to get it ready for the party, and changing into her particularly skimpy costume, and happened to be there at the same time as the Werewolf dropped by with her minions. That led to the most direct lead-up to a sex scene ever, as the Werewolf lacked subtlety, and Crow, modesty. It didn't feel like emotionally laden sex, but Crow asked Scarlett to save the first dance of the evening for her.

At the party, the Infernal was late (because he found out the drugs his Power had given him had nasty side effects and decided not to subject all his classmates to that), but that was enough to piss Crow off. Scarlett showed up in a costume designed to upset the Selkie, then turned the Selkie's upset back on her aggressively, and then, switching affect again, that she was there for a first dance with that sexy lady, Crow. Later, she chased the Selkie down the beach, and not in a friendly manner. No wonder Dominique was confused.

Sage, the Witch, came to the party but stayed up on the bluffs, gazing into the abyss to find out what had happened to the most recently disappeared classmate of his, a boy who he'd had a crush on. The answers were troubling, but the identity of the killer wasn't forthcoming. Heartsore, he stumbled down to the beach, just as Crow was passing out the substitute (and not as good) drugs that Xander the Infernal had brought. She asked Sage if he'd come with her into the Faerie realm, and he readily agreed.

There, everything seemed to pulse and breathe, and it made Sage uneasy, but Crow was finally content. She held out her arms to him, and he came to her. Afterwards, he took a sympathetic token from her, and she asked for his help in punishing Xander for having broken a promise.

It was a great start to the game, and I can't wait to see where it goes from here.

Monster of the Week

I have finally joined Bill's online game - we weren't sure it would work to have both of us on on the same wifi, but it seems to work okay. I had tried once before, using Roll20, but I have to say that the audio problems we had made it less than an optimal experience. Particularly the way the noise would cut out as each new person would talk, which meant there were a lot of pauses as people waited to hear if someone else would talk, or missed half of what someone had said. It's not insurmountable, but for anything even remotely near dramatic play, that seemed like it would make it much more difficult.

He'd moved to using Discord for the audio, and that seemed to work much better, although the fact that I'm getting over a cold meant that I'm sure I disturbed people with my coughing. But it was time for roving monster hunting! Most of the evening was spent setting up characters, and then we played very late, trying to get the first adventure in.

I'm playing Val, a Crooked, a former fixer who betrayed her former partner and left her for dead, before making a deal with the devil that comes due in a year. We also have a TV vampire host, part of a legion of TV host monster hunters; a Mundane who is a math professor; a Professional with a large organization behind him, and a holy luchador, out to make sure the apocalypse happens on schedule.  

Count Floyd and the luchador, Fantasmo! were both contacted before the mission started. Floyd was told merely to observe the monster we would find, not intervene, and Fantasmo! was told to help the monster in its task.

Alerted by a string of disappearances, the team headed to Detroit. After hitting a bar, they found a neighborhood that had been occupied the day before, but now looked like it'd been deserted for years. A youngster from the next street told them about a house that moved, and they were able to confirm this with some young men who were trying not to look scared.

When they tracked the moving house down, they found it occupied by a Taker. Fantasmo! ventured into the basement and found several young men rotating there in mid-air, being drained. He set them free, and the house started to fight back. Meanwhile, upstairs in the bathroom, Val came upon the figure of the Taker in a pile of stuffed animals. It attacked her, a slick heart held in a metal chest.

The professional tried to help, but was knocked down. Count Floyd, heeding his instructions, stayed out of the fight. But when Val called for help and Fantasmo! came to help his team out, he couldn't refrain from fighting the monster instead of hunting it. While Fantasmo! kept the Taker busy, Val was able to reach into the chest and pull out the heart, narrowly escaping having the rusty metal chest close on her arm.

For a first session, it was fun. I like Discord better for online audio, and I'm looking forward to playing more of this one.

Masque of the Red Death

We also got in a session of our Victorian game, Masque of the Red Death. Roydon, my character, had barely recovered from the bender he'd gone on after seeing his dead fiancee in the crowd at one of his magic shows, and later smelling her perfume in his dressing room. While his sister, Lady Felicity, and the scientist Hewitt took some of the liquid they'd encountered in last session to be analyzed, Roydon went back to the theatre and approached the seat in which he'd seen Carrie sitting. Using his mentalist powers, he reached out and discovered that what was sitting there had been the shape-changing creature that had killed Carrie, toying with him, enjoying the torment it was causing. Which meant (presumably) that Carrie was really dead.

When tracking the creature, he came across one of the leading member of the Daedalus Lodge, Mahi Dev, who was also tracking the creature, which she called a Rakshasa. It had also killed someone close to her. Maybe they could join forces....

(Felicity and Hewitt discovered that the liquid was alive, and seemed to have hypnotic/compulsive powers. And yet they didn't destroy it....)

Hewitt also found out that one of his upstairs neighbours, a medical student, had been dismissed from his position at the hospital for having asked too many questions about a secret ward to which a man who had gone suddenly blind had been admitted. He had snooped and found about a dozen men being held in appalling conditions, but when he made a stink about it, he was summarily dismissed and the ward quickly emptied.

When we travelled out to Deptford, Felicity did so with her mother in tow, and revealed that she'd been in contact with her brother, which distressed their mother. Roydon was still being obstinate and refusing to give up the shameful stage and being openly affected by grief. Felicity tried to reassure her mother that she was hoping to be a good influence on Roydon.

In Deptford and the nearby tony neighborhood, the team split up. Kim went to the home of the doctor who had been in charge of the special ward (but was not on any medical register) and found it being guarded by tough-looking men, and a light in the upstairs window. Hewitt went to the hospital and made his way to the deserted ward in the basement, seeing for himself the despicable conditions these men were being held in, and getting information from a friendly (or, at least, bribable) porter.

Roydon found the pub that the first disappearing patient had frequented, and was directed to his wife, who was greatly distressed that she'd taken her husband to the hospital, and now no one could tell her where he was. She revealed that the blindness had started very suddenly.

Back at Felicity's off-season house, Roydon came face to face with his mother, and that didn't go well. Then he found out that Felicity had told everyone about Carrie, and was upset that she'd betrayed his confidence. Felicity tried to reassure him that perhaps everything he'd been seeing meant that she was alive, but he shut that down. She was dead, he said flatly. And whatever had killed her was tormenting him, deliberately.

Kim and Hewitt came to the house as well, and the group started to make plans for an infiltration of the doctor's house, where, they believed, the patients were being held. Hewitt had brought a strap from the one of the beds he'd found in the ward, and Roydon took it to perform psychometry. He was immediately (and thankfully, temporarily) struck blind. He could sense some of the things to which the patients had been subjected, but even more importantly, could tell that the patients were feeling drawn there by a strange call....

The Week in Stories - Masque of the Red Death

In personal stories, the last little bit has been rough. It's now been 7 months since my mother died, and this week is the 7 year anniversary of my father's death. I am getting through, but I've been erratic in keeping up on book reviews and the Dust Cover Dust-Up, and finally decided to scrap the latter. I went through all the books by myself in the same way, and will post a Top Ten Books of the Year list soon, but I don't have the mental energy to detail my struggles to pick between dearly loved books this year. I quit trying to make myself do it, and I feel a lot better for that decision.

Another part of having a tough go is that it had been a while between gaming sessions, and I find that when I go without gaming for a while, my grump quotient shoots through the roof. Nothing like slipping into someone else's problems to help me blow off steam. So I was extraordinarily glad when we sat down for the second session of Masque of the Red Death, our Victorian monster hunter game. Yes, it's supposed to be a lighter game, but my character has some juicy bits.

Previously on Masque of the Red Death....

After writing up last session, I thought a lot about my character. I liked how he came out in the first episode, but it was definitely Roydon at his best, and his best wasn't what I was interested in exploring. I figured out that if I wanted his traumatic past to come up, I needed to do some serious thinking about what, specifically, would touch on his past experiences and what reactions might be provoked.

I did this in concert with another player, since she's playing Roydon's lover, and was going to take the brunt of whatever reaction he had. I wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything that would deprotagonize her character or make the game less fun! We both bought in to the idea of Roydon dealing with trauma, but we definitely needed to collaborate on what that would look like, with full veto power in her court.

Once the two of us were happy about the results, and excited to see them in practice, I forwarded the list on to the GM (also my husband), and he kindly included them on my updated character sheet for easy reference. This was good, since I came up with them about three weeks before we ended up playing and wasn't entirely sure I remembered them all!

I'll talk about them and how they ended up working so far, after a bit of a recap:

Episode Two: The Hampstead Horror

The episode began with our intrepid heroes being inducted into the Daedalus Lodge, the secret monster-hunting society behind the rather more pedestrian Icarus Club.

Lady Felicity decided it would be only kind if she picked up her brother and his paramour and gave them a lift to the club, although she started to rethink that as her carriage went into rather sketchy territory. Roydon was already in a bad mood, which had started when Abigail offered to fasten his cufflinks. He would treat her rather shabbily for the rest of the day, to her confusion and dismay.

Rather than talking for half an hour to give us exposition, Bill wrote a six-page scripted scene that we read each other, getting the lore we needed behind the organization we had just joined. (I think I love it more when the scripts are character flashbacks, but this was certainly an effective way to get that much info out in a way that engaged us all.) We also met the demon that had killed Hewitt's father, which he now carried in an "impenetrable" glass vial around his neck.

At the end of the vignette we read, there was a reference to a former monster hunter, Henry, who, despite being "the best of us all," still fell prey to corrupting forces. (I was delighted with myself that I figured out the reference from that alone.) After some in-character discussion with the members who welcomed us, we were taken on a field trip to see Henry's body - huge, distorted, who would have thought that Dr. Henry Jekyll would end up like that?

After our induction, we moved into a research phase, using Blades In The Dark-style clocks. We each got to come up with our own research project (or collaborate), and starting bringing in elements we wanted to see in the future stories. (I also got a clock for "Roydon Goes On A Bender," and that started filling up fairly quickly.)

Roydon started researching shapeshifters, looking for whatever had attacked him and killed(?) his fiancee. I made some minor progress, but nothing specific yet.

Then we want on to the third phase of the way Bill sees it going - personal scenes. We could either call for something or ask Bill for a suggestion. I did the latter, and he suggested we see Roydon and Abigail's stage magic show. That was a lot of fun, and went well at first. Roydon used his psychometry (I think this is my second character with that ability - apparently I find it particularly interesting!) to read the history of objects and stun his audience, although he was more cynical in an aside to Abigail than to the owner.

Then the whole performance went sideways. Roydon, looking up into the balcony, saw the pale face of his dead(?) fiancee there. He went white and walked down the stairs and into the crowd. Abigail tried to pass it off as part of the performance and bring him back, but he was somewhere else. The crowd came to their feet and surrounded him, and when he looked back, she was gone. After some stunned stillness, he stormed off, and Abigail managed to bring the show to a successful conclusion, but only with great difficulty.

Meanwhile, Hewitt went back out to Graydon House with his pet demon-in-a-jar and a magic detector. There, he was able to confirm that there was indeed a shit-ton of magic, but not a lot more. He tried to close the gap with magnets, but the sound of approaching heavy footsteps convinced him to beat a retreat.

Lady Felicity lunched at the Icarus Club, eating with a friend of her father, a rather pompous older man with an excess of harrumphing. From him, she learned more of the history of the past and present masters of Graydon House, as well as some tidbits from the less monster-hunty side of the world.

Kimball was walking down the street when he realized he was being followed. On eluding his first pursuer, he became aware of two more. Eventually, he decided to allow them to catch up, and found himself being ushered into a carriage occupied by Lord Somerset, head of the Foreign Office. Somerset had some questions about when Kimball had left the service and why. In particular, he wanted to know whether or not the experience Kim had had included seeing "the castle." Kim, confused, said no, and Somerset did not elaborate further.

We ran out of time for Abigail to have a scene, and she had been part of Roydon's, so we ended the game there. We're maybe hoping that Abigail can track Roydon down post-show and have it out at the start of next session.

Character Thoughts:

I felt like the triggers all worked fairly well, although at least one player took my shorthand list literally in a way that made me cock an eyebrow. One of them was written down as "cufflinks," and surprise, surprise, it doesn't mean that you show my character cufflinks, and he freaks out. It means that when a woman he cares about adjust his dress in a way that feels caring, that prompts memories of what he's lost and makes him push said woman (i.e. Abigail) away because he can't deal with the loss he suffered previously. It does not, oh hell no, excuse his behaviour, but it does offer some insight into why. (Amanda and I were all about playing out a relationship that might not be the best for the people involved.)

However, that shortform meant that one other player tried to show me his shirt sleeves at one point, going "ooh, cufflinks." Uh...yeah. That's...not going to do it.

If last session was Roydon at his best, this was definitely getting closer to the worst. He kept pushing Abigail away, often without even realizing that he'd done it, so wrapped up in his own pain was he. And we got to push on a couple of the sore spots, both ones that make him edgy, abrupt, and leaning towards drinking a lot. The only one we didn't get to really explore was the one that will provoke a different reaction....

That one was a tricky one to work out. I wanted something that made him very overprotective of Abigail, but it can't be happening all the time - she's the most physically capable person in the party, and it's no fun for her player if I'm constantly acting like she can't do anything. (Historical accuracy be fucking damned - I hate using historical settings as an excuse to make sure women know they would be treated badly at the time. REALLY? NO FUCKING KIDDING.) It's happened to me while playing female characters, and now, with my first male character, I didn't want to turn around and do the same to someone else, unless that was the specific adversity they wanted.


I feel like we found a good way to work the overprotectiveness in, given that entirely voluntary restraint. We found a specific, limited, and evocative set of circumstances that would make Roydon act uncharacteristically - notably, his default is to believe that Abigail is entirely capable and doesn't need protecting, so this should stand out as strange. It will be triggered when he sees something supernatural looming over Abigail when she's in a vulnerable position. It's specific because it will remind him of what he saw when Carrie was killed(?), it won't happen all the time, and it will be distinctly different from the norm.

I really can't wait. Oh, this relationship is going to get messy, and that's going to be interesting.

The Week in Stories: Masque of the Red Death

Character Creation

A week ago, we made up characters and started to play our first session of Masque of the Red Death - prep took longer than we're used to, so we didn't get a lot of playing time in, but character creation was fun. Amanda, whom I've played with for a long time, and I both wanted tarot readings to base our characters on, so she came over a little early and I did them for both of us. As always, this led interesting places.

Notably, the first thing that fell into place connecting the two characters was that in the "sex, death, and occult interests" (I think, but it could also have been in the "romance" spot), Amanda got the Ace of Wands. Which, in the Robin Wood deck, is an extraordinarily phallic card. A wand with DNA running down the middle of it, with two sunflowers as balls. So, she started off interpreting that as that she was in a relationship, but possibly a relationship that was only sex-deep.

Then I did mine next, and the very first card, in the "appearance, health, wellbeing" spot, was that same Ace of Wands. Which was interesting - I really don't tend to play male characters. I mean, I might have for a one-shot, but I've been more comfortable playing women or non-binary characters and given the general under-representation of those groups in the hobby, was good with that. But this seemed pretty clear - a guy, and probably the guy Amanda's character was sleeping with? We batted that idea around for a while, and decided that was the case. And also that the sex was really good.

However, another woman kept showing up in my cards, and where Amanda's cards had been almost all blondes, my reading was tending heavily towards dark-haired women. (The deck we were using has really no ethnic diversity, alas.)  And, in the "marriage" spot, I got the Death card. So it seemed clear that while my character and Amanda's were sleeping together, my character had lost someone he was in no way over. I decided it was a fiancee, and that it was in losing her that my character had had his first encounter with the supernatural.

(My darling husband Bill, as GM, had told us to think up a first encounter with the supernatural, and that it had to have a cost. I later saw the sheet where it laid out how to do that mechanically and was amused that I'd already incorporated no less than three of the "costs" into my character - losing someone close to my character, turning away from my family and friends, and an alcohol problem.)

Amanda and I collectively decided that her character didn't know about my character's deceased (or at least disappeared - the body was never found, and it's always good to give the GM some juicy potential for a lost love coming back as some kind of supernatural horror) fiancee. My character hadn't shared that, and didn't plan to.

Which gave rise to a whole bunch of little ideas we came up with about how much my character (Roydon St. James) thought about his fiancee. That he and Amanda's character, Abbie, had first slept together on the first anniversary of his fiancee's death, when he was looking for distraction. That the reason he always knew exactly how long they'd been together (8 months, 23 days) was not romantic - at least not for her. It's because he always knew exactly how long it had been since Carrie had died. Ouch.

When we sat down to game, I ran upstairs and grabbed the locket I have with pictures of my parents inside it - it looks like it could be vaguely Victorian, at least for the purposes of the game, so I put it on and tucked it inside my shirt - always there, always hidden.

In play, Roydon ended up being more gallant than I was expecting - maybe because some of the other characters kept questioning the abilities of his lover and of his sister (one of the other players came up with a backstory with similar parents, so it was a good opportunity to throw another connection in there), and Roydon kept coming to their defense. (That's part just him, part how much I don't really enjoy when playing a historically-rooted game means I get to deal with rampant sexism unless that is specifically the challenge I've asked for. Apparently that defensiveness extends to my male characters, at least in this case.)  Roydon and Abbie were sweeter than I was expecting, and that's actually a good place to start out.

Now, for the challenge. To find the small ways in which he is too wrapped up in his pain to be a good partner all the time. To find the ways in which he hides his secrets, the moments when they almost bubble to the surface. The times that remind him of the death of his fiancee so keenly it's harder to hide the pain. (Having his sister about is great - she'll likely spill the beans sooner or later.) When does he drink? What does it look like? When does he lose control, or almost so? How does he hurt Abbie inadvertently? I've shot this character through with fractures, now it's a matter of finding the right kind of pressure to bring them to the fore.