RPGaDay 2023, Day 8

Favourite Character ...

I have played a multitude of characters, and generally they’ve become of a type. Shaven head, loose clothing, move like a dancer (toe-heel, not heel-toe, digitigrade rather than plantigrade), flowing like a river, saying very little because their voice is entrancing, often literally hypnotic.

Master Axan (Mythras), Oshynn of Llysgaled (Harnworld), Ahrain Windspeaker (Traveller), Occar (Traveller), you name it - they’re all like this. And by the way, I’ve written fiction about them. If you give me tea and the good biscuits, I could post links some way down the line.

Point being, these characters are me, if I’d had the courage at age 18.

I’d always wanted to be a Goth, but I was too small, too strange, and allergic to the cosmetics of the day.

But I was hypnotic. Always have been. All it takes is holding the glance a little too long, or speaking with someone for more than thirty seconds, and you’re away already, your unconscious mind just drifting, letting go, so easily.

So deep.

Back in the room, now.

I experimented with various appearances. I got leather pants, jacket. I still have a black satin shirt someone gave me after our encounter ;) - a souvenir.

I loved the dragoon jackets of Adam and The Ants - they were a reminder of Bryan Talbot’s character Luther Arkwright - but there were no jackets for my diminutive size, 162 cm, 5’2” in real money.

I would have looked like “a bloody toy soldier,” according to my Dad.

So my characters come across looking like futuristic Buddhist priests - the robes or kaftans or flowing shirts and canvas pants, walking along barefoot or in barefoot shoes (I finally found a store which sells barefoot sole shoes for running or everyday wear only this year, 2023), and most often dressed in black.

This was something I’ve always wanted to do. The best I could manage was to wear all-black street clothes. It had to do, all these years. But deep down, I was all of the above characters.

Then this image came across the pages of 2000 AD.

This artwork by artist Tazio Bettin is one of the most sensual images to grace the pages of The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic. That character above is called Suzy Nine Millimetre. The strip is titled Azimuth.

The whole setting promised intrigue, possible sexual exploration, and so much sensuality. I was looking forward to it.

Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be the Sindex story.

No, not Sinfest. That egregious waste of bandwidth is an atrocity.

I mean this setting. Sinister Dexter.

Long, long story short - Azimuth is the name of the city. It used to be called Downlode, but it was gentrified by a rogue ASI straight out of Person of Interest.

Within a short space of time, I’d say a year or two, Downlode has become Azimuth, a place where data is the only commodity. It is soma, it is heroin, it is dreams and optimism and bank account details, and it tastes like honey and disappointment.

The only human in the above pic is the one in red. The Man In The Red Suit is Ramone Dexter, Downlode’s primo contract killer, a gunshark. This place is no longer his home, and he’s come back to kill the ASI that killed his city.

Azimuth is no longer about what I’d hoped it would be, a long slide through a silken boudoir of pleasure and courtly intrigue. It’s become a one-person war story, and the pretty woman in the first pic has yet to appear.

No, that’s not her on the left. That’s someone else. Another cadavatar that vaguely resembles our Suzy Nine Millimetre.

[lament] They brought Dexter in about four episodes into the strip. Impatient. They could have stretched the loveliness out to at least six months, let us fall in love with the place before the gunshark tore it all down. [/lament]

Though there’s a poignant twist. The rogue AI arranged to turn Dexter’s partner Finnegan Sinister through a tainted tattoo. Dexter had to kill his old murder for hire buddy. But the strip is still Sinister Dexter, because Ramone still has enough menace for both of them.

So that’s the thing about my characters in roleplaying games. They’re not killers. Not like Dexter is. Not like Suzy Nine Millimetre is.

I think I’m an explorer. Always have been. Always will be. What I explore is the depths of the human soul, and I can do that anywhere.

What is important is the expression of my findings, and I do that in my characters - the way they look, the way they dress, the way they move. The way I try to move, nowadays, emulating their movements so I know how to describe their actions in my stories and at the table.

I guess I’m really in the market for creating a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game of my own, now, which puts much detail into the sensory aspects of scenes and encounters - the emotions of trepidation as a young person visits an older, beautiful woman’s garden on a moonlit night when the magnolia scent is overwhelming and there’s a promise of something more than just an exchange of intel about a case; the raucous majesty of a banquet, in the domain of a host who has a penchant for always ending their feasts with an orgy; the joy of attending an opera, silk gowns, black tie, turning to terror when you suddenly realise that your partner siting right next to you in the gods has just been stabbed in the back, and you hear running footsteps receding.

Sensuality. Mystery. Intrigue. Hells, I’d even set it to music with a musical supplement with options for rules for Seventies rock opera, Broadway, or Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

As long as you do realise that the only reason why I’d want to market such a game is to provide my characters with a playground to hunt in, forever. Buy my game, and some day you might meet them there in your dreams.