Character establishment is one of
the most difficult things to get right at the start of a campaign. Each
character brought to the show by your players has to be grounded in the reality
that you are trying to create: if they are incongruous, or if they seem to
serve no ready purpose in the setting in which they find themselves, then
something is wrong and it needs to be fixed; sometimes even drastically fixed.
Once I tried to set up a Call of Cthulhu game with my regular
crowd, including our usual referee, who had been complaining of overwork and
broadly hinting that he wanted a break. I told everyone what era we were going
to be playing in, and sketched in a few broad outlines of the sort of social
class that would work most effectively in the story I was about to try and
tell. One by one, characters came back to me for approval and, at the last
minute, our customary ref. handed me his finished character. Everyone had given
me workable personas, characters that I could hook into the narrative with no
problem; this guy? He gave me an overweight German nurse; with chronic asthma;
who couldn’t speak English; and who had a club foot. And the barest minimum of
Sanity points. Needless to say, it disregarded everything I’d said about
creating characters for the game.
Now, I’m aware that people should
be allowed to play whatever character they want; and that Keepers should be
able to take almost any character and try to make it work in their scenario.
I’m pretty accommodating when it comes to things like that and I think I could
even have made a start with this less-than-inspiring character. However, this
event told me two particular things: one, this player didn’t respect the
guidelines that I’d put in place; and two, that he didn’t really want to hand
over the reigns of authority in our roleplaying crowd. That, in fact, he didn’t
really want to play at all. So I was
forced to cancel my plans and hand back the referee duties to their former
owner, who received them with a sense of smug satisfaction that his sabotage
had worked the way he wanted it to.
I’m a little off topic here (and
bordering on another that I could save for later) so let’s get back on track.
Setting guidelines is the first thing you need to do if you want to make sure
that your game has any kind of longevity. This isn’t a new concept; when we
kicked off a session of D&D, we
(and I do mean all of us!) would
always make sure that we had all our bases covered: Cleric for healing? Check!
Magic-user for supernatural encounters? Check! Thief for by-passing doors and
other locks, and a Fighter if he failed? Check!
The genre – those understood-if-not-openly-spoken
rules of the milieu – inform some of
our character choices. When playing Traveller,
for example, questions as to how one’s character came to be a star-faring
space-bum are central to the concept of the role; in Champions, there has to be some consideration of how your character
came to be a vigilante. Some games make this easy: Dungeons & Dragons for one and Teenagers from Outer Space for another; it’s just a simple matter
of making your character and dropping them off at the local tavern/high school.
In other games it takes a bit more work and Call
of Cthulhu is a case in point.
In these instances, you need to
overlay the basic rationale of the game – those stereotypes, tropes and
conventions that inform its flavour – with another set of strictures that
direct players towards the story that you want to tell. Again this is nothing
new: the simple decision to set your CoC
game in Arkham, as opposed to Brichester, poses questions – American or
British? - which your players need to address in creating personas that will
work in the environment.
One trick that works very well is
an oldie but a goodie; it’s been used by crime fiction novelists for almost a
century. It’s the Country-House Murder Technique.
In this strategy, all you need to
propose is that all of the characters are introduced to each other at the
family estate of a mutual acquaintance. In the early part of last century,
English upper-class twits were always choofing off to their friend’s family
homes for rest-cures, grouse-hunting, dinner parties, and so forth, often on
the flimsy excuse of a letter of introduction from some mutual acquaintance.
Wodehouse novels use this device all the time, as do those of Dames Agatha and
Ngaio. An excellent example forms the core of one of Saki’s best short stories
– “The Unrest Cure”. The practise was
not unheard-of in the US either, as even a cursory read of Piccadilly Jim will reveal.
Once this stricture is in place,
players need to factor in a high-level social status and a connexion to the
estate where the action will take place: a desire to examine a collection of
Hindoo idols on the premises? An escape from an overbearing Aunt with
match-making designs on the character? A burning need to sample the cooking of
the estate’s legendary new chef? This kind of cogitating leads to an
examination of the character’s family tree, social acquaintances and business
connexions, working out who the mutual friend who gains them entrée to the
estate will be.
Once the connexions are
established, the Keeper can structure their tale around the estate and its
inhabitants. Is the head of the house a secret worshipper of some blasphemous
abomination up in the attic? Or does the estate sit upon land claimed by a
local unholy cult as their own? The possibilities are endless.
I did this once to establish a
whole raft of characters for an upcoming campaign. My goal was to create a
headquarters for what I hoped would turn into a group of intrepid supernatural
investigators along the lines of London’s Ghost Club. To this end, I created a
village north of London, populated it with NPCs and told my players that they
could do whatever they liked in terms of character–creation, so long as they
were related in some way to someone in the village. ‘Sound like a lot of work?
It wasn’t really, as I shall explain:
All I did was breeze through a
bunch of Agatha Christie novels with my story in mind until I found a setting
that suited what I wanted. I found Murder
is Easy. Not only did I rip-off the setting, but I played out the whole
plot – murder; investigation; revelation – as a cover for the Mythos weirdness
that I was fomenting underneath. This did several things to my group structure:
First, the events of the story
brought everyone together as witnesses, grilled by the police; second, the
breaking of the Law cuts across social divides, providing excuses and
rationales for characters of different social classes to get better acquainted;
third, it gave the players a reason to get pro-active about forming a team to
search for clues and look for evidence. If you’ve read the book, you’ll be
aware that it takes place in a bucolic little hamlet, and village life imbues
everything with a quality of interconnectedness – nothing happens in a small
community that everyone isn’t aware of.
Having this as a setting impels
players to seek out NPCs and question them for information, and making everyone
related to a town NPC gave them opportunities to enlarge those characters and
their homes, and script out parts of the environment as their own: the stream
they swam in as a child; the graveyard where they thought they saw a ghost; the
church spire they climbed once on a dare, although forbidden to do so.
There is a downside to this
method, and that is it’s easy to confuse the murder events with any Mythos
events that you might choose to inject. Things have to be handled carefully in
order that useful (life-saving) information doesn’t get lost in the mix.
Check it out and see what you
think – Murder is Easy by Dame Agatha
Christie (I believe in America it’s entitled Easy to Kill).
Of course, this is pretty
elaborate extension of the Country-House Murder Technique and it needn’t be
this complex. Effective play is all about letting everybody contribute; placing
restrictions and guidelines on the Character Creation process is a way to make
people come to the party. A restriction isn’t always a limiting factor; sometimes
it can raise the bar to new heights.
Just one thing if you do decide
to use this technique, don’t let it transpire that the butler was responsible!
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