Wednesday, April 16, 2008

LWaSH session 1: Character creation

Lost Worlds and Secret Histories

Okay, the Tuesday Night crew got together last night for our first Lost Worlds and Secret Histories session. Six players showed up for this one instead of the four which I'd originally been expecting. I kind of worry about the difficulties inherent in getting a total of seven adults with jobs and lives together for a few hours every week, but the two new players are awesome folks, and I'm really excited about having them involved.

Anyway, since we only meet for very short sessions (and have a fairly dire pre-game chatting problem), we only managed to make it through the first three phases of character creation, but it was loads of fun, and the characters that they're creating are cool as all hell. I'll have to see if I have everybody's permission to actually talk about my players by name (and hopefully link to their websites, too), but I figure it's okay to discuss their character concepts. So get a load of this:

  • Scottish street urchin raised by nuns and trained by the Vatican as a thief to retrieve sacred or dangerous artifacts

  • Intrepid girl reporter, socialite, and gay divorcee; sort of a character from the pulp subgenre of "thrilling romance", and also very Brenda Starr

  • Religious, gun-toting, supernatural-evil-fighting cowboy; sort of a latter-day Solomon Kane with a little Charlton Heston thrown in

  • Immortal, superhumanly-strong Serbian folk hero Kraljevic Marko, a legend searching for a place in the modern world

  • Tomboyish, chainsmoking daredevil pilot with a plane called "Blaze of Glory" and a mysterious connection to a Native American thunderbird spirit

  • ADOLF FREAKING HITLER. The idea here being that this guy, the real Hitler, was supplanted by a demon who then went on to lead the Nazi party and Germany itself. So this ought to be interesting.
Can you see why I'm all excited? This is going to rock hard.

Anyway, we're setting this game in 1937 instead of Spirit of the Century's default of 1922 or thereabouts. Also, instead of the Century Club, the PCs are going to be members of the Van Helsing Society, a group dedicated thwarting supernatural evils. We'll figure out the details together as we go along.

Next Tuesday, we'll do the remaining phases of character generation, in which they'll all figure out how they guest-starred in each other's adventures--giving them all some amount of shared history--and then we'll get to the mechanical stuff, choosing skills and stunts. Skills should go pretty quickly, but I should probably put together some stunt suggestions to speed that part along.

When they're done with everything, I'll be able to give them all their custom character sheets. I've almost got the design done already, actually, but I wanna type in all their info for them instead of having them actually write it all down all over again.

3 comments:

Brigid Keely said...

Ok. Dude.
http://www.angelicdreamz.com/store/basil_st_john.html
Basil St. John is Brenda Starr's long time love. These dolls of him? Are fucking HILARIOUS. I found them while looking for old strips.

Matt Sheridan said...

I can't believe you just made me go to a site called "Angelic Dreamz". But, oh wow, does it ever deliver. Get a load of that mustache.

Damn, "Basil St. John" is a fucking great name. It just about tells you everything you need to know about the character, right there. I had no idea Brenda Starr was so pulp.

Brigid Keely said...

Brenda Starr was written by a woman in a time when that JUST WAS NOT DONE. She used the name "Dale" to get her stuff even looked at by the syndicate. When she submitted under her own name, it was rejected immediately. I belive it kicked off around the same time as Terry and the Pirates and that ilk. Back in the day, there were a LOT of sexy, slinky, femme fatales with really and truely horrible names.