On the Weird Character - A Primer on Lordsmouth Denizens

My biggest issue with Lovecraft (outside of the obvious, of course) is his character work. When you read a Lovecraft piece that protagonist always share a handful of traits and they never falter. First, a Lovecraft is always an academic, either latent or active - and that is how he places himself into these stories. Second, they're always paper thin and develop no character and have no real arc other than existing as a vessel to witness the unspeakable and then to fill with madness or existential dread. I absolutely detest this because it is boring, but at the same time I realize that it isn't about the character. A Lovecraft story is about the atmosphere, the dread, the build up to a cosmic cacophony - and then the crescendo of indifferent doom. 

A Roleplaying game, however, is completely about character. Even if it isn't the main party the characters will always be the center point of the story. Is it the king that gives you the quest to slay the dragon and collect it's hoard? What about the prince or princess that needs rescuing? And of that ancient elf that carved the monolith that looms over the fortress that is cursed - why did they curse it? A roleplaying game will always come back to a character from which the story is derived. Unfortunately, for the reasons that I listed in the previous paragraph, a Lovecraft protagonist will make a very poor character in a roleplaying game. It will be like a king who wants you to slay a dragon, or a prince or princess that needs rescued for the hundredth or thousandth time. Those kind of stories are boring. 

Characters - A Process

Now, you're probably thinking that I have introduced a problem but I have presented no solution. What is the solution to stale characterization? The simple answer is dynamism and flair. You want a character that can be visualized easily and a character that has shifting allegiances. My aim is to populate Lordsmouth with characters that are outlandish, grotesque, sympathetic, and reviled.

In Lordsmouth you can never really know who your allies actually are. I have been rolling over some mechanics in my mind, but the one that keeps coming to the forefront is the hexflower. It can give the character a sort of an artificial memory so that they can react to the player appropriately. Take various moods, dispositions, and ideals and combine them into the hexflower that will then lead into a series of tables to decide how they're feeling, what they share, and how they react to the party. The only issue that comes to mind is that this would lead to convolution. Is it worth it to the DM to roll to figure out if the character, after a partially successful mission into the womb of the Furnace Mother, reacts poorly to the party's news of defeat? 

An inherently imaginative media, the roleplaying game, calls for imaginative descriptions. You can feel out a character by what they look like, their mannerisms, and how the come across. A character should make an impression.

The Class Strata Of Lordsmouth

 Lordsmouth being an early industrial city in the heart of the dark Appalachians, I personally imagine the every daycharacters being simple, rural folk mostly. Cultish and clanish in their familiar devotion. Taking your pretty standard inbreeding tropes and turning them up to 11. The smog and the shallow gene pool as twisted them into almost inhuman creatures. They're more of less the Oompa Loompas in a dark, sinister Chocolate factory. 

Next are the masters - conniving descendants of the outsiders that have put themselves in positions of power by bringing in wealth and technology to the backwoods  and building their fortunes upon the backs of those that toil in the bowels and guts of the Machano-Gods. They've grown fat and lazy with hedonistic pleasures and seek only greater experience, more power, and further wealth so that they can extend their reaches further into the bowels of the mountains and the wombs of the forests surrounding the decaying city. Their ancestors brought the plague of industry into mountains and now there is only torment. 

Any weird city needs a clergy though. The grotesque and twisted priesthood devoted to the buried God. Mostly skeletal figures that can be seen blowing and winding through the warping streets of Lordsmouth, oft chanting a bizarre tongue. Thought to be prayer to the God that sleeps below the city, it is a hymn and a lullaby - prayers asking that they never rise to show the city it's face. The priesthood swells their rank through festival - once a decade they hold a great sacrifice and each denizen must offer their youngest male to the order.

Among these are the weirdos and freaks that have drifted into the city and never found their way out. They've built their homes in the metal bones and industrial viscera. They seem to be the few and the sane within the city, serving the function of running small outposts within the walls to forge some semblance of a life. Most are scarred from the past or from the present of being stuck within the city. Most are compelled the stay, be it through magic, madness, or misfortune. They often run small shops or farm the bowels, planting diseased crops between the cracks in the cobble and concrete. Few make their living delving into the outer ring of decay and pulling back artefacts of a more ancient and more evil time. These spelunkers don't last long and more often than not end up missing.

A Wrap Up

Characters are important to a roleplaying game. They give the player a relation point and thus allowing them to give themselves over to the story and become their character. This can help build a sense of dread, by having a player let themselves go wholesale into a character and then pushing that character into the weird, the odd, and the strange you will give the player anxiety about their characters fate. This anxiety is what the weird preys on it. It is the penultimate food of the horror writer and its what needs to be sought out to make a campaign truly frightening and horrendous. If they can't buy into the characters then the threads of the story just float away and now you're playing a game.