Relevant Song: <a href="https://youtu.be/ImutnoiBixY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ImutnoiBixY</a> Synopsis: Remember Me is a post-dark fantasy mystery adventure about a small organization of human psychopomps called Requiem. You're a new member to Requiem being paired up with a veteran for training. Your job is to guide souls of the deceased to the afterlife so that they are not taken to Inferno to be tortured for millennia, and your first case is laying to rest the ghost of a member of Requiem. Poor Dymphna had strayed from her duties, fascinated and inevitably obsessed with an entity she called the Dark Theater and its Masks. From what Requiem gathered, it seemed to call to her, and she answered. And then she died. Requiem will be gathering for a wake next Saturday at 5pm in the Rectory on the 11th floor at the Building Betwixt on Cupboard Street, Aquarius in Sarcova. The Seance will take place immediately after. Bring any spells or gear you might need. Souls not prepared to move on tend to bring a lot of baggage with them, and entities. What to Expect: Post-fantasy means an ordinary world with a hidden supernatural element, but this is post-dark fantasy so expect themes of loss, betrayal, despair, exploitation, and manipulation. And torture. The creatures ordinary people aren't aware of are nastier than elves and fairies and only don't expose themselves massacring cities because it benefits them more to keep humanity in the dark. Mostly. This series should last about the length of a season, but it is a recruitment game, so you'll either be here a couple sessions or until I have to run a game to cathartically say goodbye to you. The veteran you'll be teaming up with is an actual player. It's just the two of us, so we're looking for a third (and maybe fourth) player to fill out the friend circle, so it's a circle and not a line. Solo games can be great, but there's something missing when there aren't two players to bounce ideas off each other. It's all theater-of-the-mind to allow for more freedom and creativity in combat, and I make unique, meaningful playlists of songs for each session. We play 5 - 6 hour sessions because we get lost in the roleplay. It's going to be a dialogue-heavy game with lots of NPC interactions and choices your partner is going to urge you to make to let you shine. There will be combat every session. I run sessions like episodes of a TV series so there's a rising action, climax, and payoff. But Monster of the Week is a fail-forward system, so the suspense isn't going to come from you potentially losing your character (at least until the later sessions), it's going to come from NPCs dying and digging holes for yourself and for Requiem you might not be able to dig yourself out of later down the line. Monster of the Week employs a Luck mechanic that essentially makes it so that you can always succeed, but you don't get Luck back and once you're out, you're as good as dead. Other than that, you just describe what you want to do and roll one of 5 stats. It's pick-up-and-play, so if you've never tried it, don't be intimidated. I do generally prefer deeper systems, but I wanted the emphasis to be on roleplay for recruitment, not learning a new system. Ultimately, what I'm hoping to find is someone who wants to be immersed in another world for a few hours each week, who wants to get attached to NPCs and worry about them during the week after the cliffhanger of them being abducted, who wants their favorite TV show to be the game they get to play in, who wants something they're not getting anywhere else and can't truly share with anyone else because "you just had to be there". I'm not looking for someone willing to detach from other hobbies to commit to mine, I'm looking for someone who is already detached from other hobbies desperately in search of something they're not getting anywhere else. Someone who wants the chance to tell their own story because all the stories told to them don't fulfill them. Someone like me. About the DM: "Give a man a mask, and he will show you his true face." I'm not going to tell you about me. I'm going to tell you about my latest and favorite PC, which will tell you both about her creator and your partner in Requiem, because I made her for his game. The only prompt I was given was to make a young character who needed therapy and liked Alice in Wonderland. Haley Ryan is an 18-year-old girl starting college in Morgantown, West Virginia. She was adopted at the age of 9 by her father's friend, Anthony Ryan, after her father abandoned her. Her biological mother was never in her life because she died giving birth, which Haley remembers her biological father yelling at her about while drunk one night. Growing up in a Christian household, Haley was mostly well-behaved but was able to get away with misbehaving with boys, leading them on, keeping them secret from each other, taking part in special moments of their lives all the while lying to their faces. It never got too serious until the coach of one of her boyfriends took an interest in her and later pressured her into an abortion. She was going to name her Alice... The system we were playing, Don't Rest Your Head, lets you have something called an Exhaustion Talent, an exceptional but strictly physical skill. Hers was Taking a Beating, because the guilt she felt from the abortion led her to join the coach's wrestling gym so she'd have an excuse to get beat up to punish herself for what she did. All of this subconscious, she had no idea. But her grades slipped and her parents noticed her withdrawing, so her adoptive mother, Linda, suggested an Alice in Wonderland themed therapy group to her. And she said yes. Haley's connection to Alice actually came in the way of Coraline (which her character art definitely wasn't reminiscent of, yellow dress, bluish-black hair), and wouldn't you know it, when the therapy group went on a camping trip to Twin Creaks and we were inexplicably pulled into Sonderland, some Coraline stuff started to happen. A lot happened, but to wrap this up, Haley went on a big adventure through the minds of a handful of the other therapy group members ending with hers (because of course her mind was the most resilient and suitable host for the exfo-hazard the not-Men-in-Black gaslit into believing was an info-hazard.) Unbeknownst to Haley, Sonderland had brought to life the lingering genetic material of her daughter still in her body, which had been with her all throughout her journey, battling the monster trying to hijack one of the therapy group campers to escape into the real world. In the final session, Alice forgave Haley and Haley had to take a beating from the monster trying to hijack her body, no longer for her own selfish sake but to protect others from what it would do to them if she let it out. Now, believe it or not you know more about me than the old ladies who see me all the time at church and think I'm such a great person. I'm not Haley Ryan and I've never had a child, but all the most important things about me are there if you have an eye for detail and can read between the lines. If you like Haley Ryan, you'd probably like me, if you got to know me. If you feel nothing for Haley Ryan, you'll feel nothing playing games with me. If you don't like Haley Ryan, you hate me. The games we play aren't always so deep. Sometimes I'm just an MMA Fighter, horribly distracted by a love triangle, as he tries to save the world from supervillains with his fists instead of the cool superpower he forgets he has. Sometimes I just have to battle aliens and demons in order to deliver an extra meat pizza to the President for absurd reasons most people wouldn't find funny. But sometimes, I'm a tortured crusader paladin in a godless world where ethically-sourced children are legally prepared as meals for wizards to enhance their magic and I have to go Deus Vult on the cult of necromancers who secretly rule the world. About You: If you're still here, I'm frankly surprised. It's gotta be a sunk-cost fallacy at this point, since you've read this far. Or you're the spice melange, perfect fit, read through all the lines, picked up on all the details, understand me as a human being, and had a prophetic dream about joining a tabletop group this week. Whatever the case, I've got a brief questionnaire for you to tell me about yourself, so that I can try to read between the lines of what you tell me. For fairness, I've given my answer to each. What is your Identity? Feel free to fill in the blanks, but I want to know roughly how old you are, if you're a guy or a girl, and what you do for a living. My answer: I'm a devout Roman Catholic man in his early 30s, and I'm a custodian. I'm also a failed novelist who can't put the pen down despite the crushing humiliation. I'm not a good person by most people's standards. I think and feel and believe the wrong things, and toward God, I routinely fail to live up to what I think and feel and believe. What is your Truth? Interpret as you will. My answer: For the sake of letting you determine how to answer, I'll abstain. Though, in a way, I've already told you. What is your Memory? My answer: My memory is the one thing I get to take with me when everything else goes back in the box at the end of my life. My choices, my experiences, my happiness, my pain. My memory is everything that matters when everything else no longer does. What do you envision when you imagine a campaign? My answer: I'd rather not influence how you answer this one, either. And, like before, I've already told you. Twice, arguably. Why are you still here? My answer: Because telling stories is all that I have. I don't detest modern movies and television shows, games and literature. I nothing them. You know that song "Nothing for Me Here" by Dope? That song is how I feel when I try to find something to watch or play. There are so many options and nothing's as good as the stories my friends and I come up with on our own in a Discord call. I'm here because I feel alone surrounded by 8 billion people, because even the ones who like me don't understand me, but when I write a sloppy novel or slap songs and scenes together preceding a boss fight, I've at least shown someone the parts of me there are no words to express. Also, I need breaks from the domestic abuse of being a wrestling fan. Any questions? Feel free to ask. If you've noticed the thread is distractingly light on details pertaining to the game despite all the painstaking detail I went into telling you about myself, it's because my friend and I have a huge backlog of campaign ideas we want you to be a part of for which this game is just a prolonged intro. There are whole worlds and series and different systems we want to explore with you. The question is whether or not you want to. Do you want to go on this road-trip with us through our Sonderlands? Unlike Haley, you get to decide if you're going. And I've given you everything you need to know to make an informed decision.