Hello Adventurers! Time for another Characters You May NOT Know! This one has been a character near and dear to my heart and is one of my first roleplaying characters ever! Excitement!  Recently he's gotten a new name, a new look and has officially become a Legacy Character as I've updated him for a new setting. So here I would like to share with you the origins of Kailius Cantilleon or "Experiment 001".

Officially this demi-human has no name, only a designation marking him as the sole creation of a failed bioengineering company. SAL Laboratories was funded and founded by trillionaire Samuel Augustus Lattimore who was himself not a scientist. Unlike other corporations of the era which were searching for paramilitary weapons or to change human understanding of the world, SAL Labs. was interested in only one thing: Immortality. Mr. Lattimore wasn’t old by any stretch of the imagination, but he knew that those days would soon slip away until he was nothing but a feeble old man.

Samuel was eager to  test this new technology and develop a way to keep himself not only alive, but young and vibrant forever. After his projects were turned down by both EGO and TAB, Mr. Lattimore took it upon himself to start his own research company.

He bribed those he could away from the leading companies and assembled his own team of scientists. SAL Labs. Had state-of-the-art technology and experiments were conducted with Lattimore’s own genetic samples. After all, his goal was to obtain immortality but he never said about sharing with anyone else.

The first and only living experiment was 001. Not given a name and isolated from all but the scientists who did the experiment. None of whom believed in demi-human rights. Lattimore himself had no love of the creature, in fact he had nothing but rage. While he knew he was giving the scientists his own samples, he was unaware that thing was going to look like him. As such, Lattimore himself never came to see his demi-human progeny.

Tests on the experiment had progressed for many years and over the years there was no sign that he experiment was aging. He was as young and hail as he ever had been, and indeed, even somewhat stronger than before.  Everything seemed to be going according to plan.

Until the night Samuel Augustus Lattimore was ready to receive his first injection of the Immortality serum. The scientists had created a breakthrough with 001. All evidence suggested that if Lattimore received carefully measured injections of 001’s Demi-Lifeblood, the substance that drives all demi-humans,  it would bond with his own cellular structure and he would halt the aging process.  As long as Experiment 001 was alive to give blood “donations” every month, so too would Samuel be alive. Of course Mr. Lattimore had every intention of having his scientists continue the experiments and remove the need for 001 to exist at all.

No one truly knows what happened that night, as the only witnesses are now deceased. Police reports detailed a gruesome scene . In the laboratory there was hardly a foot that wasn’t dripping with the blood of the slain scientists who were at first unrecognizable as each was savaged as though by some wild beast.

The worst of it, however, was in Mr. Lattimore’s bedchamber. Samuel himself was found, torn literally to pieces with fragments scattered around haphazardly, except for one deliberate piece. Mr. Lattimore’s head was impaled on a broken post of the bedframe. The words “Never Apart Again, Father” were written in blood upon the wall above the bed. The police never found the culprit behind the gruesome murders that day but have long suspected it was some Demi-human experiment gone awry. Conditions reported from the laboratory caused outrage for demi-human rights activists the world over who demanded accountability for the crimes of the remaining corporations. The outcry was fueled as much by fear as it was compassion. Demi-humans were beginning to outclass humans in every respect except for civil liberties, and the last thing the populace wanted was angry vengeful demi-humans vowing to kill all humans. Despite this, however, Experiment 001 was never seen to attack other humans. Before the police lost the trail early tracking reports did align demi-human killings in 001’s wake. Authorities has refused to comment on the matter and soon the investigation ran cold.

Last week the w shared his thoughts on crossplaying from a GMs perspective and touched on a subject I’ve been thinking about for a while: sex and sexuality within roleplaying games. There are a surprising few amount of gaming books and systems that deal with sex and sexual situations. 

Sexual interaction can be intimidating to some, others find it distasteful within the game setting, others simply don’t want to engage even in a fictional setting with their friends. But I wonder if there really is no place for sex in gaming, or if it’s simply not handled very often. Perhaps this falls under a broader cultural context where we seem to be far more comfortable with violence and death than we are with sexual acts. Sometimes I wonder if this is actually appropriate.

Sex is a difficult subject to tackle and I would not think any less of those who prefer it not to come up in game or who simply don’t play with these themes. I, however, have always used roleplaying as a way to explore themes and scenarios and I saw no reason to back away from an exploration of sexual themes. Thus the article today.

Now, I’m sure that a lot of folks saw one of the most realistic portrayals of tabletop roleplaying on TV in the episode Advanced Dungeons & Dragons on Community. Many adventurers I’ve talked to adored how everything was portrayed… except for when Abed and Annie had their montage of sexual exploits during the game session. Indeed, the length of the scene and the apparent detail they went in to were certainly played up for comedic effect, but it actually brings a very strong question of why seeing our hobby being portrayed as violent is perfectly okay but when it becomes sexual we distance ourselves from it. One answer I tend to come up on is that no one really plays sex right, even if there is a “fade to black” rule when it comes to the details. Sex tends to be seen as an amusing diversion, a joke or just something to put notches on a character’s belt. I’ve fallen into this issue myself! Especially in new World of Darkness where one can have a Virtue and Vice with Lust as an option for the Vice it seems like sexuality would get more facetime. But often it becomes either a joke or another utility. I wonder though, if this happens because sex is bared from the roleplay experience. Without being able to give it detail and depth, it tends to get played lightly and just touched on, which often pushes it to the realm of comedic relief. I had a character whose vice was lust and made the mistake of the first few times a new character was introduced to ask “Are they pretty!?” and it became a running gag to the rest of the group I couldn’t climb out of. Now, characters treating sex casually isn’t the same as players making it into a joke. I have had characters in open relationships, I’ve had promiscuous characters. How casual your character treats sex does not make the game devolve into sex jokes. There is nothing wrong with a character using their sexuality to their advantage either, in the right circumstances and as long as it fits the rest of the character. But like life, I find that you need to treat the sexual situations with some amount of depth or else they will feel hollow. Perhaps the detail that Annie and Abed went into was a little bit much, but the scenario of the bar wench wanting to be pleased sexually in exchange for [insert plot important thing here] actually isn’t all that bad of a plot direction at times. It gives the players a difficult choice to make in regards to their characters more personal and intimate moments, it forces them to think about what they would be willing to do in order to achieve the goal they are pursuing and, honestly, challenges that aren’t just death traps and epic battles can be a super awesome change of pace.

I find that sexual themes can also enhance the depth between characters (NPCs, and PCs alike). Romance and sex are a big part of the human experience and when that gets cut off for the sake of the game I am often left unfulfilled. Now, not every character I play needs to be enthralled in some grand romance, in fact most of my characters haven’t had sexual partners over the course of the game because they’ve been sort  of busy with the adventure and crisis de jour. However, I don’t remember ever being more committed to keeping an NPC alive as when my character developed a slow romance with the character. When sexual situations sprang up in game, we treated them seriously and as we would a sexual situation in life and just faded to black before the graphic parts. I’ve also had PCs form better ties to other PCs because of their sexual proclivities.

Sorry everyone for the lack of consistency in the schedule lately. This is mostly my fault, to be honest, as I’ve just been rolling botches on my organization rolls lately on top of having a reduced dice pool. Urg, my player really needs to get new dice. So, let’s dive right in to the long awaited part 2 for Crossplay Confusions! Last time, I talked about my experiences with being discouraged to crossplay and my problems with how these and similar situations were handled. This article I alluded to there being some solutions to the crossplay issue. The thing is, if people in your group want to crossplay? The easiest thing to do is to let them crossplay. As mentioned last time, if you can imagine your player as a six foot seven werebear, or a three foot gnomish sorcerer, you shouldn’t have a problem imagining them without (or with!) breasts. Now, I understand that as far as representation goes, this may make an unbalanced party as far as gender representation. The problem, of course, isn’t a single party having more men than women that’s the problem inherently for a single campaign. As mentioned last week, there is a problem with the male domination of the hobby and how the stories being told often focus on male protagonists primarily and this can create unwelcoming or even unsafe spaces for women in the gaming communities. These are larger issues that are not so easily tackled. However, I think it’s counterproductive to force people to play someone the same as their biological sex. I do not begrudge GMs making some restrictions on character creation, after all, for games and stories to work and for party cohesion one usually must make characters that will at least mesh well with the party. Disruptive concepts should, indeed, be banned from certain games. However, I do take offense when there are needless bans for arbitrary reasons. After all, if there is worry there will not be enough focus on women’s representation in your game it is not going to solve anything by simply having more women be party members. The GM must put forth the effort to give positive portrayals of women in their campaigns, both as allied NPCs, generic NPCs and villain NPCs. One can add focus to women and women’s issues in a game without forcing a player to play a woman. Now, I have heard of the problem where GMs simply ban crossplay because when their male players crossplay the woman they play tends to be a stereotype, becomes hyper sexualized, exists solely as the butt of jokes or as sexual objects to both PC and players alike. This is a problem that doesn’t simply go away by banning crossplay. If they cannot take playing a woman seriously and with respect, then perhaps one should look at how women are being treated in the campaigns in general. Simply removing the possibility to explore what it is to be a woman is not going to solve the problem of your players being unable to respect women characters or women as people. It would then be a time to take a look at your game and how you are representing women in the game and how your players react to this. If you’re always saving the damsel, or using strong confident women as sexy enticement for your players to do something, or if you just play shells of people when you put an NPC woman in then this can only serve to reinforce the impressions and the “otherness” and objectification of women that can help create these crossplay problems. What I would personally do, is I would allow the crossplay and I would simply call the person and party on their behaviour. I would teach by example with varied female NPCs (not just Strong Female Characters). I would research the problems that the players are partaking in and I would use the game to educate them on the implications of the actions. As I mentioned in Part 1, these games allow us the unique experience of exploring another person’s experiences. It allows us to move through a story and process themes we otherwise wouldn’t in our lives. Narrative and storytelling are such powerful tools of change. I don’t think that it’s a requirement of every game to be something progressive and I don’t believe that you NEED to learn anything from them inherently. These are leisure activities and I recognize it first and foremost as such. I just feel it can be a waste to simply shy away from a topic because it’s difficult. It’s hard to talk about these subjects without also turning it into a bit of a discussion of women in gaming as well because when the discussion comes up it ultimately comes down to how women are treated by the games and while trying to engage in the hobby.