The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: Grassy Gnoll

 

 

Grassy Gnoll: A Political Thriller

Buoyed by the success (and the income) from the "Castaways" plays, Marlowe next embarked upon this rather convoluted and abstract work, which treats the assassination of a conquering general as a vehicle to explore the limits and workings of political power. It also—apparently inadvertently—revealed more about the Cormyrean security services than the Crown considered safe. After the production was shut down, Marlowe was held without charge for several days and then quietly released. No further information about the incident is available, and the script of Grassy Gnoll was subjected to considerable editing, with several details altered before the distribution of copies was permitted.

 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: The Castaways series

 

The Castaways marks the beginning of Marlowe’s commercially successful experiment with short-form comedies featuring a recurring cast of characters. In the “Castaways” series, these are a group of social archetypes (or stereotypes, to the less charitable critic) stranded on a desert island and forced to build a functioning society-in-miniature to sustain themselves until help may arrive. 

 

 

In the early installments, Marlowe wrings great comic effect from this close-quarters class conflict; however, every well eventually runs dry, and increasingly she resorts to gimmicks such as “celebrities” (thinly disguised for legal reasons) becoming temporarily stranded with her regular cast. The last of these is a strained caricature of the adventurer Drizzt Do’Urden, whom a belatedly self-aware Marlowe uses to deliver the message “quit while you’re ahead.”

 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: The Devil You Know

 

 The Devil You Know: A Comedy of Bad Decisions

The poor choices of desperate people have always been a fertile ground for comedy as well as for tragedy. The Devil You Know gives us Nanton Vellay, a merchant with political ambitions and considerable liabilities who signs conflicting bargains with two separate fiends in order to eliminate both his debts and the rival who is blackmailing him.  In nearly any city the play should have been a great success, but in Neverwinter the story—and some of the names—called unwanted attention to a cult of Asmodeus that had infiltrated the town's government and business elite. In the early hours of a Sunday morning after the second evening show, the Hot Spring Theater mysteriously burned to the ground, and Marlowe claims to have barely averted several attempts on her life before making her way south to the relative safety of Waterdeep.

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: Faces in the Wall

 

Faces in the Wall: A Tragedy of Divine Justice 

Intended to be Marlowe’s masterpiece at New Olamn College, this "avant-garde" work rages against the Wall of the Faithless and calls into question the justice of allegedly good deities that allow it to exist. Reportedly, the original script passed by the faculty board was not the version staged for the public, and the opening performance was shut down before the end of the third, final act. Marlowe barely escaped blasphemy charges and was expelled from the college without receiving her degree. 

Considered purely as a work of drama, Faces in the Wall has many of the flaws of even advanced student plays. Most notably, its structure belies the “tragedy” promised by the subtitle. There is no tragic flaw to seal the central character’s fate; indeed, there is not even a central character. Arguably, there is not even a plot, since most of the play consists of “Faithless” victims telling their (admittedly powerful) stories of abandonment by the gods. Such monologues are often stilted, especially coming from younger poets, but Marlowe’s gift for poetic yet naturalistic expression is evident even in this earliest extant work. 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: From Netheril With Love

 

From Netheril With Love: A Political Thriller

A competent if mostly forgettable spy story, From Netheril With Love was noteworthy only for the location of its initial production—the Silverstrings Theater in Selgaunt. Sembian authorities shut the play down after its opening weekend—generous bribes seem to have helped it last that long—and Marlowe’s legend as the great “right play, wrong venue” dramatist of her era was born.

The plot of From Netheril With Love is fairly simple by the standards of the genre: a Cormyrean agent is dispatched to Sembia to prevent the murder of an important ally by a mysterious assassin in Netherese pay. The spies alternately seduce and attempt to kill each other, a cycle broken only by the climactic spectacle of the aforementioned assassination attempt. The dialogue is witty, the pacing is breakneck, and the ending leaps high over the roadblocks of plausibility.

 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe (Prologue): Who the Heck is Aphra Marlowe?

Table card created with MS Publisher and Hero Forge

 

In my first experience with 3rd edition D&D as a player, it was just me and the DM, and I ran a party of four characters. Two of these I'd converted from earlier 2e play: Conrad the farmboy paladin and Julie the irrepressibly curious elf mage/thief. To round out the party, I created two more characters: an athletic halfling cleric called Brother Murphy and a half-elf bard--Julie's cousin--named Aphra. 

Aphra, I'd decided, was an actor and a playwright, drawn more to the vulgar theater of her human father's people than to the sophisticated poetry and music of her elven mother's. Her tag quote was "Of course you don't have any lines. You're a tree." The campaign wasn't particularly heavy on role-play, given that I was juggling four characters, but somehow Aphra stuck with me after we left D&D3 behind for other games. She had that aura of trouble, fun trouble, that clings to great RPG characters.  She made a brief appearance in my 4e play (game-store Living Forgotten Realms), but didn't quite click with the system or the venue. 

And then I found an opening in a 5e mini-campaign. This was also public play, but we'd left the strictures of Living Forgotten Realms and Adventurers' League behind and just doing whatever the DM wanted to run. This is the period when Aphra got her last name (Kit Marlowe's rough-and-tumble life being closer to the D&D archetype than Aphra Behn's), her extensive collection of wigs (stored on a rack in her bag of holding), and her bibliography, which started as a list of titles illustrated by Playbill covers designed in MS Publisher.

So, anyway, the point of all that was to introduce the character who'll be the subject of the next several posts: Aphra Marlowe, enfant terrible of the Faerun theatrical world. (I used Forgotten Realms material out of convenience; most of the games I've used Aphra in didn't take place in the Realms, but it's a popular kitchen-sink setting and I've played and run a lot of D&D games that used it as a backdrop, so it was easier than making up cities and theaters and local politics out of whole cloth.)

Character Creation Challenge Post-Post Mortem: A Look at the Dataset

I'm not really a data guy, so this is going to be a pretty superficial analysis.

Including the Companion and Grog characters for Ars Magica and the Villain character for Princess of the Universe, I statted out 34 characters for this project. I was consciously trying for variety: not only of rules systems and genres, but also of types (bricks, brains, swashbucklers, faces, sneaks, etc.) and of demographics (species, ages, ethnicities, genders). I think it's fair to say I could have followed through more effectively on diversity.

When I'm actually playing, I'm inclined more toward faces, brains, and swashbucklers than I am to sneaks or bricks, and probably least of all to sharpshooters and petmasters. In addition, these days I prefer to play clear-cut heroes instead of morally ambigious or even villainous characters; I don't know how much of that is a reaction to the times we live in, but I'd guess a fair amount of it, though I wouldn't disregard my age as a factor either. In tabletop RPGs I tend to play cross-gender characters about 40-50% off the time, though as far as I know they've always been cisgender (and generally heterosexual, though I've never been particularly interested in my characters' sexuality so I haven't explored those questions much). And where human ethnicity has been relevant, my characters have usually defaulted to white. (For reference, I'm a cishet, middle-class white guy.)

I went into this project not expecting to play any of the characters I generated, which in theory should have given me some extra leeway to explore character ideas I might not be super comfortable playing in a live group. In practice, it didn't really turn out that way, and though the time pressure built into the project may have played some role in those decisions I doubt it was a significant factor.

So let's break some of this down. Out of 34 characters,

15 were male (and probably cisgender)

13 were female (and also probably cisgender, except one case which was explicitly cisgender)

6 were not gendered: two of these were explicitly nonbinary humans (Psi World, the hero for Princess of the Universe), one kept their gender shrouded in mystery (Ars Magica), one was a member of a nonbinary alien species (Teens in Space), one I left ungendered because I didn't see any reason to give them a gender (the villain for Princess of the Universe) and one was a crayfish, who I suppose probably had a gender, but it was completely irrelevant for the game's and my purposes (Creeks and Crawdads).

31 of 34 characters were human, including characters with super-powers but no explicit non-human ancestry and human brains in non-standard bodies. One of the remaining three was an extraterrestrial in an SF setting (Teens in Space); the other two were animals in animal-based settings (Bunnies & Burrows and Creeks & Crawdads). The absence of fantasy non-humans such as elves or goblins is primarily a result of the games I chose, most of which didn't have nonhuman options, though I certainly bypassed non-human options in the supers systems, Timewatch, Torg, and the one D&D-alike on my list (Warhamster Dungeon Adventure). 

More often than not, the human characters' ethnicities tended to default to white. (I'm including characters whose ethnicity I didn't establish during character creation, since that's how I'm inclined to roll when I'm not thinking about it.)  Most of the exceptions involved contemporary or historical(ish) non-European settings: either built into the game (such as Legends of the Wulin, Coyote and Crow, or Bushido), or posited for a generic rules set (Mini Six and Wushu, both of which I set in contemporary East Asia). Altogether, 11 of the 31 human characters were explicitly or implicitly persons of color (and that doesn't include the one explicitly Jewish character, who is overall coded white):

East Asian: Mini Six, Legends of the Wulin, Wushu, Bushido, OVA

African-American: Hollow Earth Expedition

South Asian: Lancer

Arab: Torg 

Latino/a: ICONS, Spookshow

Explicitly Mixed: Universe

Native American: Coyote & Crow

That lineup smacks of tokenism, and I'd like to do better in future attempts (though also without straying into stereotype or appropriation).

Agewise, characters ranged from teenagers (Hellcats & Hockeysticks, Teens in Space) to late middle age (Hollow Earth Expedition), though the vast majority of them were adults in their prime (i.e., between 20 and 40, or the species equivalent). I really didn't give age a lot of consideration when creating characters (both teenagers were created for games where PCs are expected to be teenagers), and it shows. (I also ignored disability almost entirely, with only one character having a physical or mental disability of any kind.)

As far as character types go, I seem to have achieved a pretty broad spread while still indulging some of my preferences for smart and/or agile heroes. The taxonomy used below is a very rough guide, and some characters will appear in more than one group.

Big Hitters: Big Lu (Legends of the Wulin), Tom Hayward (Clockwork & Chivalry), Harmony (The Well), Gretchen Hastings (Hellcats & Hockeysticks), Boomblasto (Princess of the Universe)

Detectives & Investigators: Taga (Coyote & Crow), Shiro Tanaka (Mini Six), Benjamin da Silva (Colonial Gothic), Veronica Garcia (Spookshow), Dr. Daniels (Timewatch), Brad Milgram (Unknown Armies)  

Faces & Schemers: Rinaldo of Piacenza (Ars Magica), Burrberry (Bunnies & Burrows), Cornelia Vane (Soap), Taga (Coyote & Crow), Shiro Tanaka (Mini Six)

Healers: Dr. Charles Sumner Thornton (HEX), Benjamin da Silva (Colonial Gothic), Dr. Daniels (Timewatch)

Petmasters: Alisha Shah (Lancer) 

Pilots & Drivers: The Falcon (Torg), Alisha Shah (Lancer), Yuka Asagami (OVA) 

Scientists & Gadgeteers: Bio-Battery (ICONS), Haruko Kenyatta (Universe), Veebolitt (Teens in Space), Mechanis (Princess of the Universe), Splitter (Creeks & Crawdads), Dr. Daniels (Timewatch), Brad Milgram (Unknown Armies), Doc Pliable (Capes)

Swashbucklers & Acrobats: The Falcon (Torg), Zara the Cutlass (Barbarians of Lemuria), Sabine the Cat (Jaws of the Six Serpents), Doc Pliable (Capes), Martin Yim Kwok-kwan (Wushu)

Sharpshooters: Gianna (Ars Magica), Tom Hayward (Clockwork and Chivalry)

Wizards: Matsumoto Yaemon (Bushido), Opacus (Ars Magica)

Sneaks: Kelvin the Uncatchable (Warhamster), Jer Landon (Psi World), Veronica Garcia (Spookshow)

There are two characters who, due to the way their game systems work, didn't really fit into my typology: Maria (My Life with Master) and Charles VIII of France (Statecraft). The role that a Minon plays in My Life With Master and that a head of state plays in Statecraft don't easily map on to traditional RPG character categories, though I suppose that if I had to force it I could call Maria a Sneak and Charles a Schemer. 

I've never been much for playing sharpshooter characters, and I didn't think to make the effort to include them, so it doesn't surprise me much to see only a couple of characters who fit that category. Likewise for petmasters; running multiple subordinate characters isn't usually my bag, but I liked the drone thing for Lancer so I went for it. With wizards, I think the main reason there's only two in my list is that a) engaging with magic systems adds time and complexity to character creation, so I tended to bypass it; and b) in most games it tends to require a significant enough investment of resources that your character doesn't have a lot left for other skills (e.g., I wanted to make my Colonial Gothic character a natural philosopher who also did magic, but I felt I couldn't split the difference without making the character medicore at both).  Also, when faced with a sword & sorcery setting I tend to swing hard towards swashbucklers, and that's exactly what I created for Jaws of the Six Serpents and Barbarians of Lemuria. I've never been averse to playing healers, though, so I'm a little surprised to see that I only made three (and that's counting Dr. Daniels' Reality Anchor skill as a healing ability, which I guess it is but he doesn't do physical treatment so maybe he should only get half credit).

So I don't know how to sum all that up, except that just creating a new character for a different and unfamiliar system every day took me far enough out of my comfort zone that I didn't put a lot of effort into pushing on other limits. (Also, I wanted to be respectful when addressing the experiences of groups that I don't belong to, and that requires time and energy that I didn't always have.) It's another argument for using either fewer systems (and so creating groups of characters), more familiar systems, simpler systems, or some combination of the three for next year's go at the challenge.

*********

While I'm here, I'd also like to talk a little about engagement. Most of the traffic to this blog, I'm pretty sure, has come from members of the RPGNet forums (where I've been posting the characters and post links in the Character Creation Challenge thread in the Tabletop Roleplaying forum), from my own gaming groups, and from my wife. I have no idea what has made certain posts more interesting than others, but there are definitely a few that got markedly more views than others. The Soap character from day 7, at 20 views, is currently the highest performer, followed by day 1's Unknown Armies character (17) and day 31's Universe (11, but I gave it some extra plugging). About half of the remaining character posts got as 5 or fewer views, but I think that may exclude all the people who just read whatever was on the front page without clicking to a particular post, so I can't say anything for sure. 

But I'd sure be interested to find out why it seems so many more people wanted to read about my Soap character than anything else.

 

Character Creation Challenge: Post Mortem

 

Image courtesy of TardisCaptain's Blog of Holding

Well, that was certainly a month. 

I got it done, in that I posted 31 characters for 31 games I wasn't particularly familiar with, all within 31 days, and I never fell more than a day behind at any point during the challenge. So, achievement unlocked.

But what did I learn from it? One of my goals was to make a better acquaintance with all of these games I had sitting around in my closet and on my hard drive. How did I do on that count? Not so well, I think. There was a decided If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium quality to my 31-days-31-games plan, racing from system to system without a lot of time to process what I'd just done. In a lot of cases, possibly most of them, I never got much past the character generation rules to get a feel for the game as a whole. (For instance, despite spending what must have been a dozen hours creating a character for Universe, I find that I still have very little idea of how the game is actually played. And although that's the most obvious example, it's far from the only one.)

Not surprisingly, I think the games I learned the most about were those with simpler rules systems: Wushu, Barbarians of Lemuria, Soap, Princess of the Universe. There were also a few games where earlier I'd spent some time really grappling with the rulebook, and doing the challenge helped me understand the game better: Legends of the Wulin, My Life with Master, and Capes are probably the best examples. Coyote and Crow might also fit into this category, but its release was late in 2021 and I hadn't got far into my first reading before I decided to include it in the project, so it's not quite something I picked up anew after laying aside months or years ago.

So which games, if any, am I more excited about now than I was at the beginning of the challenge? Not many, to be honest. The big surprise on that count is Barbarians of Lemuria; despite my reservations about the setting (which are pretty easily remedied, I think), I found the system really appealing--simple, but flexible and with enough moving parts to feel like different characters will play differently. Wushu also rose a little in my estimation, though I wasn't quite as impressed by it; I like both its similarities to and its differences from Risus (a system I've played quite a lot of), and I'm curious to see how it plays at the table (or on the Discord server, these days). (In both cases I was working from free-download versions and have since purchased expanded PDF editions.) On the flip side, I don't think any of the games turned out to be disappointments; then again, I don't think I went into the project with the kind of expectations that were likely to be disappointed. 

There were some games that I approached with an interest in playing that didn't dim after the character-creation experience: Capes, Coyote and Crow, Lancer, Legends of the Wulin, The Well. And then there are the games where I may have been in the right mental space to play them when I bought or downloaded them, but not so much these days, in particular Unknown Armies and My Life with Master, and making a character had little to do with the change in interest. But most of the games I used for this project were just games I had lying around and hadn't done much if anything with yet--stuff that I'd received as gifts (Universe), or as part of a PDF bundle (Colonial Gothic), or that I'd bought used because they were inexpensive and seemed kind of interesting (Soap).

As far as the characters themselves are concerned, well, I suppose it's to be expected that some would stick with me more than others. Time spent on creation was less a factor than whether a particular concept grabbed me (though time spent creating backstory was much more significant than time spent on calculating characteristics or spending character points), and of course characters created later in the month also have a certain advantage in claiming memory space. If I had to pick five favorites, I'd most likely go with these (in no particular order):

Big Lu, amiable lunkhead with a heart as big as his muscles, for Legends of the Wulin. Big Lu wasn't even my original character concept for this game, but he just sort of showed up. And he was perfect--for me, anyhow.*

Zara the Cutlass, farm girl turned dancer turned pirate turned mercenary, for Barbarians of Lemuria. I like the way the career system in BoL provides a quick method for building backstory, and I think I'd have a lot of fun playing this character.

Taga, smartass detective, for Coyote and Crow. I just think this would be a fun character to play in the very cool setting the Coyote and Crow designers gave us.

Cornelia Vane, scheming second-tier heel, for Soap. I don't know that I actually want to play the game, but something about this character just jelled and I'm very pleased with her and the little world I put her in.**

Dr. Daniels, time-traveling brain in a jar, for Timewatch. It's really the "brain in a jar" thing. No other reason, I just really like the idea of playing a brain in a jar.

I think there was a definite cost to undertaking the challenge. Not necessarily a large one, but a cost. I didn't quite let this project take over my life for the month, but I feel as though it came close. It bled into my work time, my family time, my housework time, and my gaming time; and it almost completely ate up my exercise time. I was thinking about it almost constantly--what's tomorrow's game? what sort of character do I want to make? what will I have time for? when will I fit in Ars Magica/Legends of the Wulin/Universe? how should I answer these character background questions? I think that better planning and a more measured approach might have helped me balance the challenge with the rest of my life--but then again, it's entirely possible that it would have sucked up nearly as much of my attention anyhow, as a New Thing with a Built-In Deadline is wont to do. (Certainly I saw Parkinson's Law strike me more than once last month, as games that should have required only an hour or two ballooned into five- or six-hour projects because I felt I had time to research details that I wouldn't have done with more complex systems.)

So, what now? I plan on taking the challenge up again next year, though within a more manageable set of boundaries. Until then, I'll post occasionally but less frequently; I have some other gaming-related stuff floating around that I've hoped to find a home for, and this is as good a place to put it as any. Until then, thanks for reading.

 

*I'm no wuxia expert, but Lu seems kind of simple by the standards of the genre, where AFAICT complex webs of relationships and motivations are more the norm.
**Also, I'm still inordinately tickled by the name "Mason Carpenter."