My Role Playing Characters

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A diary of my early RPG experiences, also known as The Quagmass Chronicles. I may be a little old to get into toys and games at but then, who cares. You’re only young once so you might as well stay child-like until you die and come back as a blood-sucking vampire. . I first heard of role-playing games in the 70’s when Dungeons and Dragons was all the rage. I was probably put off by the awful children’s cartoon series of the same name though. I wanted to play the Call of Cthulu, as I was and am, quite a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, but no one invited me to play. I was always crap at football and other sports, so no one ever picked me to join a team if there was still a cardboard cut-out as the last alternative to being lumbered with me. I think everyone, including me, thought I’d be just as bad and indifferent at RPG, but I was later able to prove that theory wrong. Some of my chums at FAB Café, Manchester, invited me to a game of Vampire: The Masquerade at a house in Rusholme, Manchester. I went along, primarily to watch. I stepped in briefly to play the first victim of a series of werewolf murders, and later took on the guise of a Gangrel character created by another player who had gone off to bed. (we played through the night, like real vampires, and dropped off to sleep one by one after dawn, but I was hooked. At first, it was admittedly boring, whilst waiting for the main players to create their character sheets. If you are going along to watch a game before playing one yourself (not all players approve of spectators) arrive a little later to avoid the part where character sheets are compiled. The game itself is immensely exciting By the finale, half of us were dead; many others, including myself, (as I lost both arms), maimed (all in the game of course. As players we were perfectly all right). The werewolves struck. We threw silver grenades; I tried to batter down the security fortress where our traitorous friend had sealed himself to protect himself from our counterattacks. One member trapped in his van by a werewolf was killed just as he killed it, because a colleague threw a silver grenade in the van with him, and blew him away to dusty death. Ha! For my second game, I was able to create a character of my own. From what I had seen, I now had some idea how the character sheets work. It was less boring actually completing one. I looked through the list of clans that my character could come from. I had no acting ability or experience. I never even did a school nativity play in a pre-atheistic Catholic upbringing. I wondered whether to play someone like myself, or someone utterly removed from what I see myself as. I settled on the Malkavian clan, a species of vampires fuelled by their own innate insanity. I played a raving lunatic called Quagmass, a name of my devising. I pictured him with wild staring eyes, frothing at the mouth, wearing a straight-jacket with the arms punched through to make it into a tee-shirt; ragged trousers, and bearing, brandishing a plastic whale called Fish (because it is a Marrilion fan) . The prop came from the bathroom of one of the people in who’s houses we played out our Masquerade. It seems to have adopted me. I have taken it along for subsequent games, provoking many ‘What’s the whale for? comments from people seeing it. I still own it. No werewolves appeared in this second game, but we were dealing with immortals, who are well known from the Highlander films and TV series. Fish and I have been commended for playing well, perhaps too well. Many fail to notice the difference even in breaks from the game when I am speaking as Arthur rather than as Quag, or Quaggy as my alter-ego is known. My character is a prankster; he has insights of wisdom in his childlike insanity. Some just mistake him for an outright loony. So far, he has painted a Rolls-Royce red, forced a lovely young female vampire to feel intense relief for a month, even when faced with impending tragedy, and insulted the Vampire-Prince of the city on many occasions. His best gag remains the quicksand jape. He convinced one vampire that his safe haven was safe due to being a dilapidated lunatic asylum surrounded by quicksands to which only he knows the safe paths. He took her there under pursuit by an immortal, to show her what she saw as a run down old hostel for winos, surrounded by harmless muddy fields, and the safe path, when she asked me about it, turned out to be the concrete path leading quite visibly up to the house itself. Under attack, Melissa (her vampiric name) proved able to hide by becoming one with the Earth, giving me the impression she had sunk in the quicksand, which I also believe to contain my creator-sire, Bogbrain. Later we dug Melissa up, and she got better, a fate rarely achieved by those drowned in quicksand. I am able to throw my voices, and that has helped us a bit too, especially when the immortals are after us. We tried making friends with one, but two of our pals have ransacked his house and smashed one of his priceless antique chairs and decapitated him. His fellow immortals may not now be pleased with us. There are hints and omens that Bogbrain may be up and about too - I do hope so. I would dearly love my friends to meet the one man saner than I. Seriously, Masquerade is a great game. Some players can lose concentration, which can be distracting, but most stay with it, fully absorbed. Arthur ‘Quagmass’ Chappell and Fish