P is for Narwhal

I've been meaning, for months, to blog a bunch about my favorite PC of all time. It was an Amber DRPG character, made by a good friend of mine, J. Starr Welty. Since it's an Amber character, and a picture is worth a thousand words, I put a few in-game Trumps of him just to the left of this paragraph.


The character came about because of a conversation Starr and I had at the used bookstore we were both working at. Someone was selling the store a copy of the Blue Planet RPG. Checking the binding, I flipped it open to a random page, and there was a picture of a dolphin. The text was about play Cetacean characters. The rules were pretty minimal, suggesting something to the effect of "the GM will decide what is and isn't feasible for a cetacean to have. For example, a dolphin with the hang-gliding skill would be inappropriate."

I turned to Starr and said "that's the difference between a game like this, and the Amber Diceless RPG. In Amber, as long as you had a good story to explain it, the GM would have no problem with a hang-gliding dolphin." Apparently that struck a chord with Starr, and that weekend saw the launch of the coolest (in other words, weirdest and most poetic) RPG campaign I've ever been a part of.

I introduce you to Lucid, the Parachuting Narwhal. A quick look to the right will show that he has a Narwhal body, plus little T-Rex arms, big Kangaroo legs, and a red parachute. What you wouldn't know by looking is that the Parachute is a magic artifact capable of sailing air currents between worlds or alternate realities, and that the Narwhal is an incredibly powerful psychic (1st Rank in Psyche plus a 10-point Telepathy power). You also wouldn't guess he had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from being tortured by Clowns. It sounds so goofy on the surface, but he was actually a very serious character and Starr put a lot of thought into him. Lucid was a complex, and truly unique. There's just nothing else like him.

He evolved significantly, having an awesome development arc over a couple years. Bits of his story have shown up on this blog from time to time, occasionally getting the "Narwhal" label. Sometimes it's hard to tell I'm talking about a Narwhal, since he eventually purchased the Shapeshifting power. I'd tell you more, but he's really Starr's intellectual property, and I'd hate to steal her thunder.

Lucid the Parachuting Narwhal was freakin' cool, and despites years of really good gaming before and since, he remains my favorite character of all time.

I wonder if they ever caught them?

This is old news, but I just heard about it today. The gaming-related implications are pretty wicked. There's some fun scenarios in that, I tell you. Roll for Initiative...

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.

Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.

'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'

Usually dolphins were controlled via signals transmitted through a neck harness. 'The question is, were these dolphins made secure before Katrina struck?' said Sheridan.

Reincarnation in Gaming

Reincarnation is a theme I've explored several times in gaming. I keep coming back to it in RPGs every couple of years. I make sure I never hit on it in two back-to-back campaigns, because I don't want it to feel like a mandatory part of Rolfe's GMing.

That said, I really enjoy what it does to storylines. Here's some examples...

1) I once ran an Amber campaign once where the Amberite PCs were incarnations of Chaosites from the days before the Pattern was drawn. Certain NPCs were holding grudges from things that had happened in a whole different lifetime. It really got the plots moving quickly, though was perhaps a little heavy-handed, to tell players "You hate him from the moment you meet him, as though he'd already done something unforgivably horrible."

2) In 7th Sea, Sarah's character was the reincarnation of the wife of a Senator of the Old Republic. Her character was an archaeologist exploring the ruins of that Senator's villa. Her past self had engaged in a sorcery-creating bargain with things beyond the veil, would her latest incarnation make the same mistakes?

3) In my current Scion campaign, I just dropped a bombshell. One PC was captured by a Villain who didn't kill her because she looked so much like his wife who'd died two thousand years ago. I dropped just the right hints, and the player jumped at them. The villain had turned to evil to get revenge at things that had been done to that wife. He felt remorse at his own gradual corruption and dishonor over the centuries. He fell upon his sword, leaving the PC with a lot of issues to ponder.

4) In another Amber campaign way back in the day, we had one PC and one NPC who were both suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder and Shape-Shifting. When the NPC got hit with a pretty nasty metaphysical attack, she split into parts. Each healed as an incarnation of a different one of her personalities.

I'm really looking forward to one day running a game where the PCs are reincarnations of PCs or NPCs from another campaign. It'd be especially cool if they were reincarnations from multiple campaigns or a whole other setting/system. Very Moorcockian.

Amber percentages on my brain

Wow, Jeremy, you really set me off. Okay, off the top of my head, I can name 20 players (Initials to make sure I'm counting right: AC, PL, SW, RB - not me, JM, HS, JL, C?, JD, SR, RL, EJ, EE, SB, LR, RD, AD, A?, GG, CJ) for whom one of my campaigns was their first Amber experience. There may even be more than that, but those are the ones I can think of.

This suggests to me that if you grab 100 random people with no Amber familiarity, and throw them in a campaign:
95 will make characters that have never been to Amber before.
90 will be an orphan or know for certain that at least one parent is dead
85 will choose that they've never knowingly met an Amberite before the first session
75 will play apparent shadowlings who don't know their Amber or Chaos Heritage
70 will take Sorcery and/or Shapeshifting but avoid Pattern and Logrus
60 will play characters taken directly from some other game, movie or TV show
50 will decide the other players are their enemies and try to kill their characters
45 will play a tech-based character despite the game providing no mechanics for it
40 will have Amber Devotees
35 will try to kill another PC no later than the 3rd session
30 will buy a ton of powers and relics they never learn to use
25 will make non-human characters
25 will take an item or follower with "danger sense" so the GM can't surprise them
20 will have Pattern - Only 20% of new players choose pattern at character creation!
15 will have Chaos Devotees
15 will have at least one Star Destroyer orbiting their homeworld
15 will choose to be an Amberite and have their Amberite heritage known publicly
10 will start with Advanced Shapeshifting
10 will have a PC twin
5 will be a Parachuting Narwhal. :)
0 will make a character that knows and loves both of their living (NPC) parents

80 will voice to me that they regret at least one of the decisions within 3 months.
60 of them will make one or more of those same decisions even if the GM says "I've been running Amber for 10 (or 15) years, and I've seen a lot of players do the same things, and I think you'll find you're going to be very unhappy with that decision. Would you please play an Amberite?"

I'm not including throne wars and store events in any of those figures, as that would at least double the count as well as force me to remember details on people I only gamed with for a few hours. Besides, in a Throne War I tend to give a lot fewer options for character creation and mandate every PC be part of the royal family.

Trust (Previously posted to a forum somewhere)

One of my favorite gaming moments was in an Amber DRPG campaign. It went as follows:

A PC had spent over a year of game time trying to make up with his estranged NPC mother.
Doing all sorts tasks and quests on mom's behalf...
Learning how to shapeshift into human form so the sight of him wouldn't reminder her of the traumatic events of her youth...
Killing all of mom's enemies...
Keeping all of mom's secrets hidden, despite lots of in-game time spent figuring out the deceptions in the first place...
Fetching the most powerful artifact in the universe, and giving it to mom...

So there they stand at the edge of the Primal Pattern (the magical scribble that defines and sustains the entire universe).

Son apologizes for everything he's done wrong in the past. He enumerates all the things he's done trying to get her love back. The roleplaying was really, really moving.

They embrace. Mom says "I forgive you. Do you forgive me?" He's distracted by the emotion of it all.
She steps back, and the PC sees the bloody knife in her hand. His throat gurgles.
Not only did she kill him, but his "divine" blood flows across and obliterates the Primal Pattern, unraveling the universe so Mom could create a new reality WHERE HE WAS NEVER BORN.

Gotta hand it to Starr, the player of the character that had just been outmaneuvered and murdered. Eyes bulging...

"After all that, she killed me! THAT'S SO COOL! I should of known she'd do that."

I asked Starr to be my co-GM in the next campaign I ran, as we clearly had similar ideas about what makes a good story.