Ginger Stampley, at Perverse Access Memory asks, in her 72nd Game WISH column:
Talk about a few characters you had to stop playing before their stories felt finished. Where do you think they would have gone?
Hmm. Two spring to mind that had seen enough play that I had a very strong concept of them, and that had already gotten some story arcs set around them. The first was back in my undergraduate days. Alas, I no longer remember the poor schlub's name, but it was probably something like Frank or Fred with a real-world-sounding last name. I'll call him Frank, I guess.
Since the game was set in my undergrad says, that means it was one of two systems-- either some variant of the venerable Dungeons and Dragons, or GURPS. In this case, it was GURPS-- a science fiction with both interstellar travel and high enough tech that it had a little cyberpunk in it as well. The background of the game was grim-- Mother Earth was dominated by megacorporations, the largest and nastiest of which was a weapons manufacturer that profitted by provoking wars between Earth's settled worlds, and selling to both sides. All the characters started out as people who had, in some way or other, pissed off said corporation, and the game began with all the PCs and a few NPCs in the prison hold of a ship heading back to Earth to stand trial for crimes real and trumped up.
Frank (we'll call him that) and his brother were squarely in the camp of "real crimes." They would have called themselves "freedom figthers" but in today's parlance, they were probably terrorists. We were a bit vague in determining just how careful they were to avoid civilian casualties, and whether they put office clerks for the megacorporation on their target list, or not. Not that they didn't have at least some justification-- their homeworld had been mostly depopulated by those weapons, and Frank's brother (another PC) had undergone extensive and not entirely voluntary modifications at the hand of that company.
Frank and his brother were two sides of the same coin-- Frank was the brains, and had extensive cybernetics to make him so, while his brother was the combat machine. They were designed that way outside the game just for that duality. Frank was the cold, calculating one who would sit in a dark room helping coordinate the rest of the characters' actions, whether it was through a combat scene, a burglary or infiltration, or talking their way out of a traffic ticket. Frank was the spider at the center of the net. His brother, by contest, was not nearly as bright or dispassionate, but he was one of the toughest bastards in the group.
All in all, it was a fun game with a good premise, and what I thought were generally good characters-- there were also gun-runners, smuggler-pilots, underground journalists, even a doctor who smuggled medical supplies where they weren't supposed to go.
What I would like to have seen out of the game-- and probably I'm expecting too much, in retrospect, because it was a college game, and we were not known for running the very deepest of character studies, back then-- was enough success to get us into some highly questionable ethical grounds. I would really have liked there to come a split-- even a temporary one-- between Frank and his brother. I'm not sure, looking back, how that might have happened, since both of them were ready to chew broken glass in order to get revenge, but it could, conceivably, have happened.
Probably, given our age, none of that would have happened, though. And as that was not only pre-9/11, but even pre-first World Trade Center bombing, it was a different world entirely. I don't think one could run that game, today, without the players feeling like there was a Moral To The Story breathing down their necks.
The other, more recent character, was a long standing, somewhat intermittantly played Amber character named Thomas, a son of Caine. In retrospect, while Thomas was a fun character, and the GM was one of the best I've played with, the game itself was more than a little frustrating. It kept starting and stopping, and stuttering forward in time, sometimes in large intervals. I think the game was actually falling apart and reforming in the background, but because all posts went the the GM and I was never sure which characters were PCs and which were NPCs, the situation wasn't always clear to me.
Thomas Cainesson was (for me, at the time) something of a rarity among Amber characters. He was, pure and simple, a Good Guy. Not all of this was detailed when I created the character-- much of it came out in play, and in flashbacks-- but Thomas had family issues. Thomas had father figure issues. THomas just never got along with Caine, no matter how much both of them tried. I no longer have a good idea of Thomas' stats, or his rankings in various auctions, but he was on the jockish side of things. His past, prior to the start of the game, was that he was a junior member of the Eric//Julian/Caine cabal, and led a substantial number of the forces of Amber in skirmishes with the forces of Chaos that never made it into Corwin's chronicles, because he might nto have been aware of them before the close of the books.
That's where it all started to go wrong for Caine and Thomas, because during the war, Caine let Thomas think he was dead along with almost everyone else. It was the "almost" that pissed Thomas off, and ended with him breaking first saving Caine's life at the final battle, then breaking Caine's nose out of frustration. Caine also concealed Thomas' parentage from him, which led to him accidentally almost killing his own mother just shortly after he learned that the woman was his mother. He concealed the existence of several siblings, and several of them came to very bad situations, as well, because none of them every had the full story.
Indeed, Thomas eventually had to put down one of his own brothers (Grey) by killing him over the Pattern of Rebma. How do you do that and remain a hero? You wait at the center, trick him into setting foot on it, and then break his neck with your bare hands. This is for "Did not detroy the universe" values of "remain a hero" in my book, but Grey really was one of the villains of the piece, as far as I can tell, because Thomas ended up going down as a true hero of Amber for that one.
Yes, old Thomas had family issues. Ended up giving Caine his blood curse, after a while.
Had the game continued-- and I wish it would have, if it could ever have stabilized-- Thomas would eventually have had to come to terms with the fact that he and Caine were just never going to get along. A lot of Thomas' problems were caused by Caine being Caine, but Thomas didn't help much. He was, despite his reputation as a man of action (which is how he thought of himself, too) rather reactive and passive, rather than active. He'd solve a problem if it were given to him by someone else, but he wouldn't initiate anything. And while he wasn't a lapdog about it, he continued trying for far too long to gain his father's approval and his trust-- and, at core, while he probably had Caine's approval, that version of Caine was simply incapable of the kind of trust and respect Thomas wanted.
He was getting there-- almost the last thing I remember from that game before it went radio silent for the last time was Thomas giving the kind of blood curse that only a son with centuries of grievances, who had just very nearly killed his mother (whom he knew and loved, just not as his mother) becuase of his ignorance, and who had probably caused her irreparable mental damage as a result.
Thomas had, right at the point, more than gotten over Caine. But he needed to play out the other half, where he realized that he had overreacted. He needed to suffer the consequences fo that overreaction, and realize that he was still just as much in Caine's shadow as before. He needed to stop reacting to Caine, positively or negatively, and start acting on his own initiative. He needed to be independent. Basically, aside from the war hero stuff, he needed to be a man.
Posted by John Novak at November 22, 2003 10:16 PM