#and in one vampire game i was apparently such an awful player the gm had a nervous breakdown over it

[sluggybunny]

one day i hope i will be able to actually play a game of shadowrun. or at least play in any ttrpg ever again 🥲

[aspiring-dm]

Three-Headed Puppy Is Back On His Bullshit

So, some of you may have read my previous post about Paolo Manchado, the Cerberus from a game of Monsterhearts I’m playing in.  The game has mostly just been me playing and the GM torturing me with the awful choices I impose on myself.  Paolo has ended up being one of my favorite characters to play due to the deep, painful, emotional trauma I experience while portraying this innocent monster.  This post is going to be a more in-depth look at the first three sessions I’ve played with him.

So in session one, we’re off to a somewhat slow start that many powered by the apocalypse games experience where the GM is frustrated trying to figure out what the player(s) want to do and the player(s) are frustrated trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do.  I’ve never been a fan of any games that take place inside a school because the act of roleplaying the menial act of going to classes bores me sooo much (I was in many free text role plays on supercheats and figment that had this problem).  

Paolo is a Cerberus.  In particular, THE Cerberus “gave birth” to him, a phrase which here means he woke up in Unity, New Hampshire, knowing he was Paolo Manchado, son of Cerberus, put here on earth to ensure that the beings of light and dark remain in their place.  That goal makes up every fiber of his being the same way blood and bones make up you and me.  He gets very frustrated because humans keep trying to get him to feel human and he keeps telling them “I am incapable of feeling the same way you do about life, relationships, and purpose.  Not I DON’T feel the same way, not I WON’T.  I CAN’T.”

So we started off in a classroom, and then there was a car crash outside.  The car had crashed into nothing, so Paolo was searching around for invisible creatures, visiting her in the hospital, gazing into the abyss, trying to find answers but nothing was really going anywhere.  

Then he encounters Ronan, who directs him at Elijah, who he’s apparently trying to avoid.  Paolo could smell death on Elijah and chased him under a bridge, demanding to know what he was.  Turns out, he’s basically a zombie.  

Elijah’s backstory is that he was seduced by Ronan, who took him back to his cabin, starting making out, started getting handsy, started getting knifey, and then sacrificed Elijah in a dark ritual.  Elijah came back, though, now in undead form, with some dark violent tendencies he can’t control.

Paolo lets Elijah go and goes to track down Ronan, the true problem here.  Specifically, Paolo’s not concerned with the mere existence of zombies or warlocks in his town, just when they start interfering with mortal lives, which Ronan had willfully done.  After talking a bit to Elijah’s ex, Hero, Paolo manages to track down Ronan’s house.  They traded lots of high philosophy arguments that I forget most of, which mostly amounted to Paolo demanding that Ronan not hurt anybody else and Ronan shrugging and going “What can you do?  Gotta break a few eggs.”  Ronan is frustrating and clearly Neutral Evil.  His alignment doesn’t concern Paolo, though, only his risk factor of exposing the dark side of the world.

So Paolo leaves.  By the way, having been born without parents, or money, or a social security number, Paolo’s only possessions are the clothes on his back.  As such, he lives in an abandoned boxcar, like the Boxcar Children.  This is important to note because when he gets back there, Elijah is waiting, depressed.  They talk a lot about Elijah’s issues with being dead, his personality defects both before and after dying, his relationship issues, etc.  Then they both went to sleep together.  Before you ask, yes, there were gay vibes, but that’ll just make it worse later.

That night, Paolo discovered he had the ability to enter a sort of mindscape, which was essentially Elijah’s Metaverse Palace where there was a courtroom where he played judge, jury, defendant, prosecutor, and defense.  The people on the stand were all the people Elijah had fallen in love with telling the judge Elijah how quickly he’d fallen in love with them and what he did that drove them away.

Then Paolo discovered the ability to interact with these mind-Elijahs, and took the stand before taking the role of one of the attorneys.  Thus began a long and emotional and philosophical monologue by Paolo trying to help Elijah learn how to control his emotions, how to not love to eagerly, and especially not to love people like Ronan.  See, Elijah was still in love with Ronan, even though Ronan had only used him for the sacrifice (Ronan’s mind had also gotten pulled into this Palace).  A little bit of progress was made here.  

This was about the end of session 1 I think.

Later, Paolo went to Ronan.  He’d at some point looked into Ronan’s emotions (because these are powers a Cerberus has for some reason) and learned that Ronan was obsessed with being remembered for his “scientific” achievements.  So, Paolo went to Ronan and said “I am the only creature of my kind in the entire world.  Maybe you can put your... creative energies into studying me, rather than murdering people.”  Paolo is not confident in Ronan’s agreement having a lasting effect, but as long as it’s working he’s not complaining.

That night, Hero came to Paolo’s boxcar saying that Elijah needed help.  Paolo was apprehensive at first, because it’s not really his job to help in general, but when it came to his attention that Elijah was attacking someone he agreed to follow her.

Elijah’s dark side had given him a need to be feared, and was hitting a guy’s car with a baseball bat, with the guy inside the car.  Paolo transformed in front of Hero (his eyes turn black, his hands grow bone claws and fur, and his teeth sharpen) and tried to threaten Elijah down at first, but that didn’t work, so he then convinced Elijah to come back to the boxcar and talk.

Elijah, defeated, came to the boxcar and began smashing the door with his fist repeatedly, droning and punching.  Paolo had asked this before, but he asked it again, what did Elijah want.  Elijah’s answer was always the same: he either wanted to go back to the way things were before he died, or be able to move on and die.

Paolo thinks very hard, and very conflicted.  He and Elijah had become close friends over the course of these two sessions, but Elijah’s worsening condition made him a threat to the balance between worlds Paolo was sworn to protect.  Paolo asked this wanting an instruction on what he could do.  While he knew his purpose, he was very directionless on how to achieve it.  

Paolo asked Ronan if he could reverse Elijah’s curse, but Ronan’s experiments to look into such a task would be both risky and time-consuming.  Time Paolo might not have.

So, while Elijah slept in Paolo’s boxcar, Paolo stared at his confused and broken friend and made a horrible decision.  He set about the gruesome work of chewing Elijah’s head off.  He didn’t bother trying to clean the boxcar- he knew the police would find it.  He simply buried the head in the snow, left the body in the car (in case they could reconnect somehow), and wandered off into the woods.  He stopped in the cemetery where he made his new home.  The next day, on Hero’s birthday, he told her what he had done.  It broke her more than it broke him, to say the least.

While Elijah had been alive, he’d asked Paolo what kinds of girls he was into.  Quote, “What about Jessie Lynn?... She’s cute...”  After Elijah died, somehow the words stuck with Paolo.  He’d gotten very close to Elijah very fast and it ended very badly.  Paolo just wanted somebody he could be friends with and take very slowly, without needing to deal with the whole monster thing.  So he started talking to Jessie Lynn, who played a sort of Magic the Gathering Parallel that Paolo likes because Cerberus is one of the cards in it.  And they started being friends, and that’s where session 2 ended.

AND THEN THE BULLSHIT BEGAN.  Oh, you think murdering your zombie son who you wanted to teach how to love but whose psychological illness made him a danger to himself and to society so you ATE THROUGH HIS NECK was pretty raw and emotional?  Well session 3′s the game that made me feel actual anger and cry actual tears.  This is the game where Jonah starts yelling at NPCs at 1 AM and waking up his parents.

By the way, here and there have been some interactions with Jupiter, a ghost in Paolo’s class, but she doesn’t bother him too much cause she’s not very active and can never remember anything anyway.

Fast forward three weeks, Paolo and Jessi Lynn have been getting along pretty well, nothing super serious has happened except for all the student life trauma of finding out your classmate was mysteriously murdered, police had questions, etc.

Paolo gets back to his graveyard he’s been sleeping in, because that’s his life now, and he finds Hero lying under his tree.  Who knows how she keeps finding where he sleeps.  Anyway, she looks up at him and she’s a vampire now and says she needs his help and Paolo and Jonah both go “Welp.  This’ll end badly.”  She starts telling him about how she’s been on a drinking binge since Elijah’s death and she met this vampire and she asked him to turn him because he said she could see Elijah again, and she takes Paolo to the body of someone she killed.  Paolo at this point is honestly not very conflicted.  The vampire who turned her would only be a problem if she hadn’t literally asked to be turned, but Paolo still wanted to identify the guy so he could be aware of vampires in his town.

As for Hero, he sent her to Jessie Lynn’s house (the girls were both good friends) and tried to find out anything he could about the vampire, but to no avail.  He went back to Jessie Lynn’s house to check up on her when he heard a scream, ran into the room to find Hero feeding on Jessie Lynn.  Already Paolo is panicking because if Hero’s gonna have Elijah-like impulses, it won’t be good.  Paolo tries talking, he tries pulling her off, he tries hugging her, he tries playing wounded puppy dog, but I ROLLED SIX FAILURES IN A ROW during this whole segment, giving me two level-ups within ten minutes.  AND THEN I DIED cuz Hero ripped my throat out.  Luckily I had just taken a move last session that meant I never stayed dead, so a few hours later Paolo wakes up propped against the dresser, Jessie Lynn lying on the floor with a damp towel against her neck.

Paolo is thinking, one, okay this is weird, but of course since I’m the child of the guardian of the underworld, they’d just send me back.  Two, gotta make sure Jessie Lynn is okay, yep she’ll be fine despite the big hole in her neck.  Three, gotta find Hero.  Eventually Paolo finds her in a crawl space on the staircase and get her to talk to him, reassuring her that rumors of his death were greatly exaggerated.  

Then Jessie Lynn wakes up and Paolo keeps Hero hidden in the crawl space until there’s and opportunity for her to get away, and he tells Hero that if she can’t get into her own house (due to needing an invitation) he’s recently been sleeping near Ronan’s cabin in the woods, which no one lives in.  Jessie doesn’t remember much about the attack, and Paolo struggles to find a good lie, but luckily “I don’t know” seemed to work well enough.  While Paolo’s wounds have vanished, his clothes are still coated in his blood (which right now we’re going to pretend Jessie thought was her blood), and she offered to let him borrow some of her dad’s clothes while she washed those.  So the fanfiction begins, and then while Jessie is making tea and dinner Hero runs out the door.

Fanfiction continues, a moment where Jessie reaches for Paolo’s mug and he thinks she’s going for his hand so he reflexively takes her hand awkwardly.  Then of course they end up sharing the same bed, and then the smutty stuff began.

I’ve been portraying Paolo as semi-aromantic?  Not exactly fitting that label, the main idea being that as he is a Cerberus, he doesn’t experience the same range of emotions that humans do, but he does still possess a human-ish body with sexual urges.  I think it’s possible he’s capable of romantic love, but so far such a thing couldn’t happen with any creature from this world.

So anyways, after a somewhat awkward first time for both of them, Paolo basically confesses as much as he can about himself without outright telling Jessie monsters exist.  He tries to explain that if she had known the parts he can’t tell her about they might not have happened like this, but she doesn’t seem concerned about it at all.

So onward from there, Paolo heads out the next morning to the cabin to find Hero’s broken into it and slept on the bed.  Paolo scrounges up some clothes for her and gives her his hoodie hoping it’ll be enough to protect her from the sun, but it’s not enough.  Also we later retconned, because the fanfic nature of this game demanded it, and decided that Paolo made no attempt not to watch her change and Hero made no attempt not to be watched changing, which may or may not be relevant in future sessions, idk.  They decide they’ll have to wait til nightfall, and Paolo leaves for school.

Now, Paolo has never not worn his hoodie anywhere.  Given as its one of the only things he owns, he doesn’t really take it off much.  But in this case, he’s forgotten to get it back from Hero, exposing the snake tattoos on his back (there are many snakes, all of their heads coming to the back of his neck while the tails slide down his back and curl around his upper arms).  Several students were curious about them.  Things during the day with Jessie were about the same, except she kept giving Paolo playful looks of “I know what your dick looks like.”

Paolo spends that day trying to get Jupiter to not walk through walls and then spends some time with Jessie before returning to the cabin.  Having discovered that his blood sates Hero’s hunger and also he can’t die even if she overfeeds, he decides to become her personal blood bank to keep her from attacking people.

Then the two of them go shopping to get her some clothes that don’t look like they were made for a lumberjack twice her size.  She immediately gets into the vampire look, with the black, and the fishnets, and yadda yadda.  She also gets Paolo a black leather jacket, to which his response was “I already have a jacket though... I wear it everyday.”  She also insists he pick something out, so he gets a pair of fingerless gloves, which apparently Elijah also wore and Hero gets quiet for a moment.

Paolo then takes Hero home and invites her into her own house before her dad comes downstairs and grounds her.  Paolo returns to the cabin.  Previously he’d been sleeping outside under a tree because he didn’t expect Ronan would appreciate him breaking in, but now that Hero’s already broken a window and now that Paolo’s experienced what a real bed feels like, he decides to go in and sleep on the bed.

So, Saturday, Paolo and Jessie meet up and they decide to go help Hero (who at this point, I believe Jessie thinks she was sexually assaulted based on the vague approximations of what Paolo’s told her) and spend time with her while she’s grounded.  Paolo knows that grounding is a punishment given by parents to their children, but he’s unclear on what exactly that means, so he spends a little while just trying to find a roundabout way of getting Hero to say what grounding is without him directly asking.

Hero’s got garbage bags up on all the windows, saying she sunburns super easily now.  Jessie goes into another room to try to find something more permanent, leaving Hero and Paolo to FUCKING discuss the fact that Paolo hasn’t told Jessie Hero’s a vampire, or what he is.  This is the part where I started feeling Paolo’s anger and frustration, because they get into an argument and then Jessie enters the room and Hero goes “Hey, I’m a vampire, and it’s his job to kill me!”  Paolo tries to play it off like a joke, and then Hero shows Jessie her fangs.  Paolo, in his anger, just shuts down for a moment, goes to close the door, and slumps down in front of it, now trying to process in his head if this information is going to leave this room, or if he has to repeat what he did with Elijah with the girl he slept with and also Elijah 2.0.  Jessie runs out another door in the room, Paolo makes no attempt to stop her and angrily starts yelling at Hero about his job and how her actions were totally reckless, if Jessie tells anyone there will be panic on both sides of the divide and basically a war would just break out.  Hero’s trying to act like it’s not that bad and Paolo’s not having any of it, and he’s trying not to bring up the fact that it’s very possible he has to KILL both of them now.

So he leaves and tracks down Jessie hiding in the hollow of a tree.  Some notes about Paolo’s role play, his voice is always very ineffectual and emotionless, he often hums three times while trying to think about things he doesn’t find super serious.  In this moment, though, he angrily stands outside this tree and demands Jessie talk to him.  She tries to leave multiple times during this conversation, but he keeps stopping her.  Says “Guess now I have to tell you.”  He explains everything about Elijah being dead and Hero being a vampire and his job to make sure normal humans never find out about it.  Looking back, he never actually said anything about what he is, just his job.  And then he gets to truth of what happened to Elijah and he says “It seems manipulative to tell you this!  It feels like a threat, and there’s no way to get around it being a threat!” And he tells her that he killed Elijah.  Then she leaves, and he just stands there.  In his mind, he’s making a gamble.  He’s gonna hope Jessie doesn’t tell anyone, and if she does... well, he can start killing people later.  For now he just wants to feel like he’s accomplishing something, so he goes back to help Hero with her window situation.

Hero and Paolo have a long argument containing many typical elements of Paolo arguments, such as “it won’t be that bad if people find out,” and “you can choose your own destiny” vs. “I literally cannot I am not a human.”  Somewhere in here I started crying actual tears as Paolo’s defeated by the world.  He wants so badly to not have to kill anybody and he’s remembering how awful it was with Elijah when he failed him.  

Hero leaves the house for a bit, and when she comes back Paolo is still standing in the middle of the room.  He’s so lost on what he should do he can’t even figure out if he should go anywhere or move at all.  The first time she tries to comfort him, he turns away from her, in his mind the current situation is her fault to begin with.  The next few times he shows no sign of accepting or resisting.  She hugs him, makes him sit on the bed, makes him lie on the bed, and plays with his hair after calming him down a little.  She tries to get him to stop thinking for a bit, which only happens when she starts humming a song, but beyond that his mind is racing.  She falls asleep and Paolo assumes she expected him to, but his version of sleep is actually consciously gazing into the abyss, so his options are either think while conscious in this world, or think while conscious in the abyss.  The abyss is the more informative and intimidating of the options, so he just stays awake until she wakes up again.

That’s where we are now.  Fucking three sessions and Paolo’s already broken.  Oh: right after sleeping with Jessie he took the move Loyal, so Jessie’s basically his master.  ALSO, though, Jessie hates him now and wants nothing to do with him, so unfortunate timing on that.  *shrug*