I'll be playing a vampire.
This puts me in the interesting position of playing a character who can look young but could quite easily be hundreds of years old. This means you have someone who grew up in a specific time period but has witnessed a lot of change whilst parts of themselves remained static or even, became more powerful. Unlike people who age and grow weaker with time, vampires generally speaking do not.
It's a curious mix to roleplay, when you think about it - on the one hand you can effectively play a little old lady, set and stuck in your ways, with lots of "old fashioned" opinions and values. Part of the characterisation is about being a bit vintage, not precisely lifted from the pages of Jane Austen, but the ideas we are raised with are very hard to shake. On the other hand, a vampire character can (and should) adapt and change - it's unlikely that very old fashioned characters would survive very long. And as they adapt, they get better.
Older vampires are more powerful. They are faser, stronger and have a whole heap of connections, resources and other skills accumulated with time. They can also get worse. Older vampires have had more opportunity to do all those awful, dreadful things that vampires end up doing. Throw in the supernatural strangeness of blood drinking, sunlight avoidance and a whole heap of emotional turmoil (vampires always have this, it's a vampire thing, I recently read Carmilla, it's clearly been a vampire thing since vampires have been written about).
If "Stuff Happening To You" builds character then that's a lot of characterisation to deal with. My usual way of writing characters is to write stories with them in it. Often these are vignettes taken from especially important or significant points of their lives, usually in rough chronological order, and this was certainly where I started.
However, this game is set in a small town in Scotland where the characters have been effectively trapped. Which means that a lot of them know each other, and in some cases have known each other for longer than most human beings have been alive.
This is what I like to term a Roleplay Challenge. Something outside your usual frame of reference or comfort level. My friend Miranda is also playing a vampire and looking at our respective timelines we realised that our characters would have known each other for a hundred years. We both felt that turning up to the first game without any preparation would be very, very bad form:
"Who are you?"
"We've been living in the same town since 1910."
"Oh."
*awkward silence*
So to avoid this, and because, frankly, it's fun, we spent a few hours last night going over a hundred years of history and attempting to write a hundred years worth of interactions.
What we set out to do was write two non-stereotypical female vampires who had a genuine bond of friendship that wasn't determined by male figures in their lives. A bromance, but for women (we're using ladybromance at the moment, even though it's clunky). Imagine a buddy movie for 19 century bloodsuckers. Who are women. And don't waft around in corsets or anything even remotely diaphanous.
Hard, isn't it?
There was an interesting opportunity in the fact that both of them were women. Male vampires might find themselves curtailed by the set up of being trapped in a small town, female vampires are, by contrast, freed because the weight of society has, in part, been lifted. There are no longer overbearing families, no pressure to marry and without that they start to "live" very different lives.
The only prejudice they have to deal with is that which they carry with them.
And so those prejudices were where we started. I've chosen to play a stoic, insular, not-very-bright rural peasant character who was born in the 1830s. Miranda is going to be playing an outgoing, confident, educated urban middle class character from the early 1900s. Even if they had both been born in close proximity, in "real life" these two women would have never met. The gap between them was massive, we realised, and we needed to build some bridges.
A lot of the resources we used were about social convention, which was of particular importance to women. We also used materials that we thought might be of interest to each of them: the suffrage movement was a natural choice for her politicised character, for mine it was more about thinking what a young woman with few life options would idolise or daydream about - stories about glamorous balls in large country estates became a feature.
We needed to get to a place where these two women could be friends, despite the gulf of class, politics rural/urban prejudice. We had to invent ways around all sorts of hurdles starting with the fact that my character is illiterate and her character would send around a calling card before turning up. We also had to come up with ways in which they could rely on each other and actually need the other, above and beyond them being the only two female vampire characters in the town for a very long time. We wanted their relationship to feel natural, rather than a forced effect because it was a nice idea.
Our process involved semi-roleplaying through a number of significant dates for the two women. We would describe how we looked, how we felt, then talk through a few sentences of dialogue in character and then discuss which way worked best. We spent a lot of time on their first meeting, then moved on to first argument and resolving the first argument. We added in their relationships with other people and how they came to find out significant secrets (or not) about each other. This all happened against a slowly changing landscape of political, social and technological advancement which gradually filtered in to some of things we discussed. Fashions allowed her character to move into trousers, something my character didn't do - we spent a long time talking over whether to skirt or not to skirt. The invention of the radio and then the cinema broadened my character's horizons and gave her a love of music and (what we would term "classic", she would term "modern") film.
There's a lot of give and take in these scenarios and at times it felt something like a script writing workshop where we tried to imagine what would give the best effect, the most drama or steer the characters in the way we wanted them to go.
The characters evolved throughout our discussion, becoming more rounded and deeper, gaining all those little tweeks and quirks that make a person a person. The output was a series of notes that we are both working on, and will no doubt continue to work on.
We did not exactly create War And Peace For Two Dead Women. Although I imagine we may end up that way if the shared googledoc is anything to go by.