Sophomore, First Week, Spring Quarter

Altclair is Naomi's campaign, set at the college of Altclair, which is somewhere in Minnesota, although modeled on the University of Chicago between the years 1987 and 1993. Think Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, GURPS Illuminati IOU, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Other source material (that Naomi's not familiar with) might include Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon and most of Charles de Lint. Players are me (Justin Thorne) and Josh (Michael Conoway). Manny (Jim Gaffney) dropped out, and Beth (Diometra) lives in Chicago, and is only an occasional player.

Naomi moved to Chicago, but I'm a year behind in my write ups, and she hopes to run a few more adventures via phone, email, and visits before I have exhausted my supply of material.

From the Desk of Justin Thorne

First Week, Spring Quarter, Sophomore Year

The balloon was great, Ken got into Oxford, and Michael has a serious problem with death. (1)

I got back from the first half of break planning to help on the farm, have a relatively quiet quarter, and work on the docks in New Orleans over the summer. Michael revealed that he had different plans.

He reasoned that if the only person who might be able to cure Ash's cancer is a woman who died in 1955, then someone should go back to get her. That's where he figured I came in.

It gets better: the best window of opportunity is during World War II in France. Michael can't go himself, of course. Jennifer has to take care of Ash and the kids. Ash isn't supposed to know this is going on, so he first has to survive the heart attack of seeing Genevieve before she can try to cure his cancer. Delilah has to stay on the farm to help Michael maintain his tie to the land.

Now, while I'm stupid enough to screw up my summer vacation, I didn't see any reason for Ken to screw up his. This meant I had to find someone as stupid as I am, but competent enough that Ken would figure I was relatively safe. I suggested Michael ask Marcel, since he, like Michael, is one of Ash's students. We wrote Marcel a letter.

Ken was even less thrilled than I expected and informed me that I was not going. After all, if Marcel thought this would work, he didn't need me. If he didn't, neither one of us should go. I said we'd wait and see what Marcel said, and we both avoided the subject. Michael agreed to see if Marcel would be willing to go alone. Marcel said that he owed it to Ash to try, and that, while he appreciated the offer, he didn't think he needed my help, and he had a better chance of pulling this off. He also had two other advantages: greater cash assets and no academic commitments. (2)

I decided to celebrate the restoration of my summer vacation of heavy manual labor with a couple of shots of Michael's vodka. This was a mistake, and I managed to upset Delilah again. (3)

Meanwhile, I took two more photos of the dragon, one from the ground, and one, at Sarah's suggestion, from the air. The aerial one is the only one where I can clearly tell that the hill is a dragon, although I can puzzle out a dragon shape in the other two. The aerial photo also shows that the dragon has grown by six inches. (4)

I owe Sarah a favor. It was originally two favors, but I've since paid off part of that debt. While discussing communicating via postal mage between the 40s and the 90s, Sarah let drop a comment about the PMs. I asked her how she knew what she knew, and she answered. She added that she would not enjoy collecting. As long as I was in her debt, I asked her to be kind to the neighbors, if possible. (5)

Sarah is afraid. As a result, I am scared, which would not be so bad if only she where getting some pleasure out of it. (6) And she's been having nightmares. I gave Michael my dreamcatcher to loan to her, and something far more powerful than my occasional nightmare shredded it. I can probably reweave it.

Sarah said that I owe her one less and that the shredded dreamcatcher was a warning. She also said that Michael should not have brought her back, but it's late in the game for that. At Michael's suggestion, I let her know that I feel she owes me one. Speaking of which, she was either unusually thoughtful or quite usually manipulative, but either way, she knows a bit more about me, she got in a dig at Michael, and she agreed with my suggestion. (7)

Footnotes

(1) Justin's on a minor flying kick, and he's continuing his performance art sequence. The first day of Winter Quarter, he flew into the cafeteria on a giant, neon orange paper airplane. (The first day of Fall quarter, he always walks into the cafeteria naked, for reasons going back to his freshman year.) For Spring Quarter, Ken covered the rental fee for a balloon as his birthday present for Justin. Justin didn't get to fly it per se; in so far as one does fly a balloon--I'm clueless on the subject--it was flown by someone at the balloon rental place. In response to questions about how he'd done that, Justin passed out the place's business card, once he landed and after Ken had kissed him in front of the crowd that had gathered to watch the balloon and given him the news about Oxford.

(2) In addition, Marcel has both mage and maker abilities, great skill as a stage magician, and firsthand knowledge of the time period.

Nevertheless, Justin asked Marcel if he wanted Justin to come with him. Marcel turned him down, but said that he appreciated the offer. He added that he knew how much courage it took, which utterly embarrassed Justin, as he had already decided he was stupid enough to go, and the only question in his mind was whether the situation merited getting into a fight with Ken, something he considered unrelated to courage.

Unfortunately, there went a quest that we'd all been hoping Justin could go on. One continuing challenge from Naomi's pov is that the PCs are smart enough to ask for help. Once Justin suggested asking Marcel, Naomi realized that he was a better person for the job than Justin, that he had reason to accept the job, and that Justin's presence would be superfluous. Rather than have Marcel refuse or accept but get into trouble, either of which would have been warping the character, or having Justin coming along only to watch the NPC solve the problem, Naomi accepted the situation, wrote it off, and had the NPC deal with it offstage while she came up with something else for Justin to do. I've done similar things when the cthpunkers were smart enough to hand a problem off to NPCs who were competent enough and motivated enough to deal with it. The quest Justin eventually went on was a direct consequence of Marcel's successful completion of the one we'd originally intended Justin to have.

(3) The previous evening, Justin had also been sampling Michael's booze (Michael's thinking of putting a lock on his liquor cabinet) and talking to Delilah. The last is always risky; Justin and Delilah communicate much better by note. The first is also risky, come to think of it.

I think Justin was trying to find out if Delilah planned to marry Michael once he'd worked out how to do this without curtailing Sarah's power. (Sarah made it clear that she wouldn't give up the power she got as land queen, although she would accept Delilah becoming Michael's queen and sharing the power Michael had. Justin figured this made Sarah the equivalent of the Lady of the Lake and volunteered to dig said lake.)

Delilah wasn't sure what she wanted, I think, and said something about marriage in general being a bad idea. Justin, drunk and well aware that he couldn't legally marry the person he's in love with, said, "You're right. Marriage sucks." If the conversation had ended there, everything would have been fine. Unfortunately, Delilah went on to say that marriages between Jews and non-Jews just didn't work out. Somehow, by the time this penetrated the alcohol in Justin's bloodstream, he heard it as a request to do research on the subject. So, the following evening, he told Delilah he'd done the research she'd asked him to do and handed her a list of several cases of successful marriages between Jews and non-Jews. She yelled at him to leave.

When Justin sobered up the second time, he was a little worried. As he explained to Ken, Delilah's insistence that mixed marriages never worked--not that they shouldn't happen or that she didn't want to marry a non-Jew--meant that she was lying to herself. This started Justin thinking about creating a magical mirror that would show the viewer the truth, as the viewer saw it. That is, it wouldn't show ultimate truth, whatever that may be, but it would make someone face what she thought the truth was. Justin still hasn't created such a mirror, which is hardly surprising when one realizes that one of the more powerful mages of Justin's acquaintance created something vaguely similar only with the help of half a dozen powerful mages.

(4) The dragon actually unfolded rather than grew.

(5) Sarah reads hearts. This is one of the ways she learns so much. (Another is her relatives telling her things.) She told Justin that one of the PMs was a woman over 50, and another a man under 20.

(6)Justin (some combination of worried and wistful): Sarah, you're scaring me, and your not even enjoying it.

(7) Justin decided that Sarah owed him a life since she sort of tricked him into fathering her son. Michael suggested that Justin odds of actually collecting would be better if Sarah knew that he thought there was a debt.

Sarah was not impressed by Justin's claim, commenting that he should have taken such things into account before spreading his seed so freely. She has a point. While she certainly pressured Justin into sleeping with her, it isn't exactly her fault he didn't worry about contraceptives. Justin still held to his position that Sarah owed him, although he was well aware that even if he did collect, it would be due to Sarah's whim. And, as Naomi acknowledged, if Justin needed to collect, Sarah might well go along with him, presuming she were in a good mood and it didn't cost her too much. Currently, Justin's unlikely to try to collect, having grown up somewhat.

Justin's comment about Sarah being either thoughtful or manipulative refers to her offer to let him name their son. Justin thought about it, said he'd get back to her, then called his mother to ask if she minded if he asked Sarah to name the baby Richard, after his stepfather whom he accidentally killed. As he warned his mother, if he suggested a name, Sarah would want to know his reasons. He wanted to make sure that his mother was okay with this and that she didn't mind him naming the baby after her dead husband. She didn't; she thought it was a nice idea.

Sarah made a comment about Richard being appropriate as it was the name of another bad land king, Richard I, who was always out on crusades. This was a dig at Michael, the land king planning to enter the Olympics. Sarah turned down Michael's offer to drop out, but she's not happy about having to do without him over the summer.

Justin thought her strategy in their ongoing game was to learn more about him from his choice of names. What he doesn't realize is that by letting him choose the name, Sarah is making him think of Richard as a person. This is something Justin hadn't been doing while Sarah was pregnant, especially given that there existed a small possibility that she might choose to abort both children she was carrying, or after Sarah died in childbirth, where, between the shock of her death and Michael's decision to bring her back to the world of the living, Justin had his attention focused on the mother, not on her prematurely born son who might not even live. Offering to let Justin name the baby was both subtle and clever of Sarah.

Natter

Comment to Paul Mason

re:Justin's frankness: What in particular shouldn't he have given away? He didn't tell Israel about re-awakening Caliban, although he assumed Israel would hear about it, nor did he mention Michael's advice about manipulating people. Remember that Israel had already gone through Justin's mind before sending him back to Minnesota. Justin's written report was the price for getting back faster. Also, Justin is occasionally a social chameleon, and he may have been picking up on the stereotype of Israeli bluntness. He said as much to Ken, adding that it was something of a relief to be able to ask point blank if Israel planned to kill him. Ken said that one of his ex-lovers was Israeli, and similarly blunt. How was Justin more tactful in the write up in #295, which was not a letter, but an entry in his private journal? Or did you mean "more discreet" rather than "more tactful"? Incidentally, at one point, I emailed the following to Naomi:

As I recall, Michael addressed Ash as Maestro, while Marcel used the term Magister.

And you know what term Justin uses to someone he greatly respects, what term the flamboyant theater major uses? Sir. Or M'am. Army upbringing.

(Yes, there are exceptions. But it's still amusing.)

-- -- --

Naomi's comment was that this probably came from Justin's stepfather, who likely demanded "sir", "at least when Justin was in trouble and knew it."

Comment to Matt Stevens

Good point about the need for PCs to be formally -allowed- to develop over time. I'm only starting to do it on a superficial level. For example, after some months of Altclair, I decided that Justin had knocked holes in the walls of his house when he was young, looking for secret passages, and sometime later, that his mother had decided that he -would- go to his high school prom (both of them were in a depression, as Justin had accidentally killed his stepfather), and while Justin considered asking a girl who got arrested a couple of days later for carjacking, it was more fun to be a wiseass and be the dj for the prom. Still, it gave him enough practice that he decided to be the dj for the senior prom during his sophomore year, when a lot of his friends would be graduating.

Comment to Myself

re:why carrying Michael's child doomed Sarah (though she got better): Naomi added that Michael was functionally a Celtic solar deity, while Sarah is the grand or great-granddaughter of a Greek god. Conflicting pantheons were definitely a factor.

Comment to Robert Dushay

Communication between players and between players and GM is essential, as is being open to a variety of options. For example, Naomi did not want me to have Justin bring an NPC to meet several other NPCs. First, she had to tell me this. Next, I had to be willing to agree that it was not Absolutely Essential to Justin's character to bring the NPC. Bringing Michael worked as well. I think this may be a good rule of thumb: Unless there is good reason not to, always have your PC try to include others in the action. They can always say no. On a larger scale, what Paul Mason said of GMs applied to players: The more flexible a player is in seeking to create inclusive, cooperative scenes, the less annoying the hopefully rare instances of monopolizing GM attention and insisting that the PC must follow a particular course of action become. At least, that's a theory. Another is: If you dish it out, be prepared to take it as well.