Dreamation: Justice

Character: Justice the Raven of Ravenhall
Game: Fall of Magic
Episodes: 3
Theme Song: Dust in the Wind by Digital Daggers
Keywords: Watcher, knowledgable, angry

Everyone knows I love Fall of Magic. On the way to Dreamation, for the game I was facilitating, I had decided if no one chose it I was going to play a Raven of Ravenhall. And she would be a spymaster. That's all I knew. Somehow I associated ravens with spies, probably because of Leliana in Dragon Age Inquisition. It's important in Fall of Magic not to go in really knowing anything about your character because you find all that out in game. It's a difficult challenge. But the more I find you stay present and don't get into your head about the characters or your next scene, the better your play experience will be.

I didn't describe Justice until someone asked me to. I described her as nondescript. Darker skin, eyes, and hair, with a brown cloak and brown clothes and fairly forgettable in an almost magical way. She was the kind of person you'd have a hard time describing to the police kind of thing. Something about her just made you forget her.

The longer we pulled through play, the more it became instantly obvious that Justice wasn't her real name, it was another title, given to her by the Magus when they had turned her into a raven (a literal raven). She could turn into a raven for easier travel. She was inherently magical. And she was no longer really a person after that. I knew just by being her in scenes she had witnessed at least twenty generations of families come and go. She knew the story, intimately, of many places, and had placed things there long ago when the Magus had asked her to.

How old she really was, I didn't know and it wasn't important. She was old. And she was duty bound to the magus in a way that made her angry and frustrated. It was difficult for her to watch the two Stormguard men, an heir and a fugitive, throw so much away when it was so easily given to them. There was a disconnect for her in understanding struggles of those who lived short lives, as her life had been nothing but political movements since hundreds of years ago.

Naturally, I played her cool and irritable. This was a duty, not a passion. In a video game, she would have been an npc used to forward the plot. That was deliberate on my account. She was a character I used to facilitate the game via story by drawing new characters in and by pulling the plot together in interesting ways that tied many storylines together. I didn't get in the way of others' stories, I tried to be a little separate.

Until Steve Segedy sat down and played this gollum the Magus had summoned named Vago. I framed a scene saying Justice had once been in love with Vago, in his last time here, and that his eyes were familiar but not his profile. It was a heart breaking scene and gave some humanity to Justice in a way that I loved. Of course, Steve dug it and we had one or two scenes where it was obvious Vago was getting his memories back. It ended with Vago ripping his gollum heart out, giving it to Justice, and then dying. It was a horrible beautiful moment.

Justice used the last magic left in the heart to follow the Magus to their new realm and kill them. She wasn't going to let the Magus do this again to people, to bring about war and chaos and destruction and use people like tools. It had been established that he had turned Justice into a raven without asking and that there had been a war some six hundred years ago Justice and Vago both remembered fighting in. Except Vago had gotten to go to sleep. Which I felt was the Magus also taking love away from the two of them, knowing it would have pulled them away from the Magus.

Overall, Justice was an old, bitter character who was so frustrated by being used as a tool she finally fought back in the last scene. It was an interesting game. It was intense. And I loved playing Justice. I loved her story. And I loved that she became part of a mythology of another people, a god, a new magus, by accident and by killing the old Magus. Everything was a horrible cycle.

I feel like my challenges of playing a side character who was still present and compelling was handled relatively well. Her scenes were dark. I saw her afraid, in love, mourning, and in control. She had a spectrum of emotions and despite being ancient, she was also horribly human at the end. I loved it. I wouldn't play her again, her story is over, but I dearly loved having a complete story in those three episodes.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Campaign: Erusiniel

Campaign: Fawn the Midwife of Barleytown

Campaign: Cara Harrt