The Cellar of Gelatin

Lost Girls: Against the Sculptor-Lords

A few minutes ago, my friend Weird Writer wrapped the finale of a planned 2-shot of her game Lost Girls. Here's a brief recap of what happened, and how I felt about it.

If you don't have an idea of the game or what it's like and don't want to read Weird Writer's (excellent) blogposts constituting it, here is my feeble stab at it: St. Tenebrae is a city that, among normal people, contains supernatural beings like ghouls, among them ghouls, wizards, and the unfortunate Lost Girls. The last of these are slashers, vampires, ghosts, empaths, and dolls, lost to the world and largely hunted or exploited. They band together in gangs and eke out an existence via foul magic and violence.

Game Report

Our gang was the Night Dahlias. Our contact and shot at escaping The Squats was Willard, a rat-wizard, with a face, without exaggerating, to match. Willard had some kind of beef with another group, the Flesh Sculptors, led by an undead girl, Annabelle, who mutilated bodies, including her own, and presented the gruesome results as photographic art. Willard, for reasons he did not deign to pass on, wanted to be a problem for the Flesh Sculptors. The Night Dahlias were his instrument.

In the first session, four of the Dahlias infiltrated an art show run by Annabelle. We had three persons of interest.

At the art show, the Night Dahlias confirmed some of the evil of the Flesh Sculptors — including that some of the victims were young boys — and ascertained that Annabelle was entangled with the Ghoul King: Not a real monarch per se, but a leader of that community of sapient flesh-eaters. His melancholic but not unfriendly brother, Rudolf, noted that a few of them were good meals.

Despite her partnership with Annabelle, Sarah made it clear at the end of the night that she wanted nothing more to do with Lost Girls like us. Eventually, at least one of the Dahlias would come to understand how she felt.

After the night ended in violence, as a silent crowd of paint-splattered killers descended on the gallery as the Girls escaped, we had acquired two useful things:

Despite our nominal resistance, the Dahlias proved a useful tool for the rat wizard, and he contacted us again with a menu of missions: 1, kidnap Pavato Lang. 2, attack the Sculptors at the head, via Annabelle, who was to be at the Ghoul King's house. 3, evade the Sculptor's monstrous enforcer and kill Sarah. He didn't bother to tell us the reason to do any of this. But he was paying, and, as a gang, we too stood to benefit from the Sculptor's losses.

The Night Dahlias opted for the second plan: Among our other reasons, we had seen Pavato defend himself at the art gallery.

We stole a pair of bikes to accomodate two more Night Dahlias and rode to the Ghoul King's house. Rosa used a scouting spell to explore the interior largely unnoticed. The ghouls occupied an existence similar to that of the Lost Girls: Sleeping largely in a communal bedroom, they had a happy family, recruiting children and teaching them to eat flesh while everyone involved mutated into doglike forms with pale faces and claws. The three Girls who snuck inside found a little girl playing with surgical equipment and corpses, and convinced her that we were there to give a present to Rudolf.

Rudolf was in bed, sick, but his room also had a stairway to the Ghoul King's room, which we happened to know he was currently sharing with Annabelle in the amorous sense. To cover our tracks, we killed him in his bed: Theodora, the magic-using vampire who spoke to him at the party, held his mouth shut while Velvet, a heartless Saphhire Girl, cut his throat, unfeeling. His re-deanimated corpse spewed a foul green fluid while Dahlia, a ghostlike Memory Girl, watched in horror. (The "orc" girls, less subtle or sentimental than their peers, remained on deck outside.)

Ascending the stairs to the Ghoul King's chambers, the girls attempted what amounted to a very messy surgical strike on the Flesh Sculptor's leadership. As Annabelle spat with a giant tongue that emerged from her stomach and the Ghoul King raked the Girls with his claws, Theodora summoned spirits of the dead to attack them while Velvet resorted to her pistol. Dahlia, perhaps conflicted by the heartless violence against the lovers, summoned the orc girls, distracted the reinforcement ghoul family, and fled into the night alone.

The wounds of the Ghoul King prompted Annabelle to concede the fight, and the Dahlias relented, on the condition that the Sculptors vacate the house. It was nothing personal, one of the Night Dahlias told her: Willard sent us. Annabelle quietly noted that Lost Girls don't know better: She, the Ghoul King, and their family stalked away into the night, insulted and degraded.

A few hours later, Willard knocked on the door. This time, Willard paid and explained: He had been hired himself by a wizard that had previously had Pavato as an apprentice. They (he?) wanted nothing more than to reduce the Sculptors to take Pavato back. Sarah was also no longer a problem, he noted. He didn't elaborate. We don't know what happened to her. It also turned out to have been better than expected to kill Rudolf in cold blood: The Ghoul King had been cultivating some kind of a sickness in him.

Before he left, Willard indicated he might call again: "I have more money," he said.

The Dahlias were left for the night in another family's house with the drawings of kidnapped ghoul-children on the walls, a basement of chewed corpses.

...

Aftermath

Lost Girls is grim and bleak, there's no two ways about it. Despite participating in Ghoul House siege, and as the GM noted doing nothing that couldn't also happen in D&D, the context of what we were doing — and, more subtly, the fundamental lack of differences between our actions and those of the ghouls, who certainly weren't angels — made me feel pretty queasy at parts.

Ironically, learning that Rudolf's death was likely a good thing in the end kind of worsened that sick feeling, for me. The poor bastard maybe didn't even know his own brother was using him as a petri dish. Betrayed by his brother, betrayed by us, and totally coincidental both times.

A few moments stood out to me that I'd like to recall later:

Character creation

Playing dress-up with a character is very fun. For posterity, my character's descriptions and inspirations:

Theodora Grimalkin, Twilight Girl. "Seems shorter than she is due to poor posture. Black plaid skirt, bolo tie with a cameo slide of a black cat. Straight gray hair, squinting green eyes, too-small glasses."

The gray hair and green eye details are inspired by those of one of my cats, Billie Joe. I've always wanted to make a character named "Grimalkin," also, so I took the opportunity when I got it. Her inventory also notes she wears heavy boots and carries a headlamp.

Marcia Lago, Slasher Girl. "Of imposing height, just a head shorter than her enormous sword. Wears a man's suit, pants pin-rolled at the ankles over black sneakers and sleeves rolled to the elbow. A scar on the right side of her scalp has left her with a rough facsimile of an undercut."

Her "huge sword" is an "odachii," or basically a two-handed katana, which can be preposterously huge. I named it "Miyu" after stumbling, via Google, on the existence of a manga called "Vampire Princess Miyu," which I know nothing about but has an excellent name. ("Vampire Princess" is not a type of Lost Girl, but perhaps in a lighter St. Tenebrae, it could be.) While I based her look on androgynous 80's alt fashion, it occured to me the morning after that the coincidence of a samurai sword and an overlarge man's suit probably made her look a bit like the protagonist of "Six String Samurai."

Ana Rosa's spell

Ana Rosa, one of the violent orc girls, had a spell that let her send a familiar-like shade of a black cat through an area: Her body, entranced, could do nothing more than lean and smoke and farm aura. As her player, Eterna, noted, it's a pretty classic familiar-type spell, but it had a lot of sauce, and probably saved our bacon more than a few times by keeping us from blundering into worse situations than the ones we got ourselves in on purpose.

Sharing a clove

Sarah learned the Night Dahlias were Lost Girls after Theodora helped her escape the art gallery. Thinking solely of what felt like an appropriate bonding moment, I had Theodora pull out her clove cigarettes and offer one.2 Weird Writer interrupted me: Theodora had been, well, masking her Lost Girl status all night, and this would effectively out her. As far as bleed in the first session went, I think this is where I felt it: I felt annoyed with myself for concealing who Theodora was all night, so presented with the opportunity to throw that off, I just went for it. The girls exchanged cloves and, unlit, put them away again. (Which makes Sarah's eventual fate even sadder. Theodora probably still has that cigarette.)

D&D-ness

Most of my roleplaying is D&D, especially of late. I often focus on keeping things "moving." This session seriously challenged that: Caught on the horns of the dilemma to act, at Willard's behest, or consider an alternative approach to get what we really want, I opted for the first more often than not. Which, of course, is what Willard wanted, and yet it's also what I freely(?) chose. The uncomfortability of how much of that was due to the manipulations of an NPC, a figment of collective imagination, is kind of mind-bending.

Concession

I've seen Weird Writer and NBateman talking about "concession" rules off and on over the last few weeks with interest. I don't remember who I read first, or how they framed it, but I remember thinking, "this must be handy for when the PCs get in over their head." I was surprised when Annabelle used it, effectively defusing the combat. It was a bit of a shocking moment. Queasily, I've come to think that if she hadn't done this, and we'd simply continued the senseless rampage, I'd probably feel less gross about the whole thing, which itself made me feel a little extra gross at the end of the game.

Losing Diana

It didn't occur to me until I started writing this that, in the first session, we met a Lost Girl who'd abandoned her group, and that in the subsequent one, one of our own elected to do the same. I guess that's not exactly emergent narrative, considering it was one of the player's own actions, but it hits the same note, I think.

In Conclusion

all wizards are bastard

  1. Sarah's plans, specific powers and fate remain obscure to us: Our only clue to her goal was her defamiliarized description of, you know, dance music. Amusingly, it is a known quirk of Weird Writers' that she doesn't care much for music. It's not out of the question Sarah's plans were as benign as she said.↩

  2. I don't really smoke cloves, despite hanging out with goths that do, so at least some of this was a desire to experience that vicariously.↩