Wretched April, its aims and goals:
Setting and opening story:
- Establish Graydnmuch, a fictional post-industrial town in Yorkshire, England, as a supernatural place full of underground temples, called Wraeums, from which a peculiar energy flows. This energy can manifest as Baelies, a type of ghost local to Graydnmuch, each of which can take on animist traits or assume the role of various long-dead celebrities and luminaries. During April, these baelies tend to manifest as mischevious bunny spirits, known colloquially as Dworlems, who make it their business to bring civilization to its knees by possessing the citizens and filling their heads with whim, nonsense and irresponsibility.
Many of Graydnmuch's inhabitants have been mutated into animal-like bipedal forms by this energy and, because of that, have lost the right to vote, work, learn or marry. In reaction to this, a volatile arts and music movement is brewing, bolstered by the magical abilities many mutants have discovered within themselves and within each other. The police hate it, the conservatives hate it, the church especially hates it (partially because the mutants have cheerfully constructed their own deliberately-fake goddess, Mosephine, whose iconography now pervades the market stalls) and constant oppression falls upon the mutants; activist spirit follows and Graydnmuch's streets now play host to daily demonstrations and Mosephinite parades.
- The cellars beneath Graydnmuch form an explorable network and connect all the wraeums to each other, the largest of which has been harnessed by Spearmint Tower HQ, the biggest company building in town, which has been knowingly built upon that spot for mysterious purposes.
Let the player explore these tunnels and find their way into the corpo building, where the finale plays out.
- Graydnmuch is populated by interesting folk with motives and skillsets each their own; let the player create a character for themselves and recruit the rest.
A weird series of sinkholes has begun to demolish Graydnmuch's streets of late and the player will need to delve into these and rescue the folks trapped within, some of whom will be viable party members. One particular character - Hazel Quirk, who works as a mercenary under the codename Packhorse, returns from a previous game in the same setting and can be rescued from Spearmint Tower.
- The game should begin on April 1st, a date the locals dread, owing to the unpredictable and persistent nature of the Dworlems... and stuff worth worrying about does occur!
The player's avatar will be a lizardy woman called Shumnki. She has powers to combat the Baelies, although she doesn't have control of them yet. Furthermore, she enjoys the chaos and thinks the Dworlems are wonderful. Her priorities are to search these newly-exposed tunnels for her friends, Gammajyne - a permanently possessed woman - and Limmhesto - a bunny-type guy, as well as her lover and flatmate, Gene Ratsen. Your immediate quest becomes to guide her, and events unfold from there.
Shumnki can optionally be renamed and redesigned thru either a points-buying system, a single dice roll, or infinite dice rolls, depending on what suits the player most.
(The original idea was to allow the player to create their own character, but that dilutes the premise and requires so many more pixel people to be drawn! Apologies to anyone who associates roleplaying gaming strictly with rolling your own character; you'll have to settle for yet another Commander Shepard.)
navigation:
page 1 - setting |
appendices:
skills | town map |