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.