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....