LibriumArcana.Games

The Guide wrote:You can’t sleep. It started like that for all of us, back when we were garden variety insomniacs.

Maybe you had nightmares – gods know we all do now – or maybe you just had problems that wouldn’t let you get a good night’s rest. Hell – maybe you were just over-caffeinated. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it was, eventually you got to a point where sleep became a choice, rather than a mandate … and then it just dropped off the list.

And then, and only then, something clicked.

That’s when you started noticing the extras. An extra door here or there. An extra window looking out onto a city packed with surplus buildings, hodgepodge towers standing shoulder to shoulder, roofs angling into one another. Clocks chiming the thirteenth hour and unfamiliar stars twinkling in the too-clear sky. Streets and alleys that weren’t there before, leading to late-night markets that sold things like laughter and indecision.

When you took a long walk down the streets of the Mad City, you stopped being a Sleeper and started being Awake.

But that click you heard wasn’t from the secret world snapping into place. It was the sound of the Nightmares flicking off the safety and pointing a gun at your head. When you crossed over you became a target. They can smell you now, if they get close enough. The Paper Boys are closing in, and you’d better pray you don’t become a headline.

You’re chum in the water, my friend, and it’s time you got ready for it – before the clock chimes thirteen again. You’re going to get tired, more tired than you ever have before, but mark my words: sleep isn’t just off the list now, it’s an outright enemy that’ll strip away your vitality and leave you vulnerable. There’s no going back, and from here on out, there’s just one simple rule that must dominate your life.

Stay Awake.

Don’t rest your head.

This game is primarily designed as a horror game that takes the character from their everyday waking world to one of nightmare and dreamscapes. It is a place where damnation and redemption are bought and sold at discount prices and your darkest desires, treasured memories and cherished dreams are but another form of currency. Every vice and pleasure can be had and given. To many it is home, to others merely a crossing point, and to some misfortunate ones their only chance.

What is the Mad City?

The Mad City exists in the same space as the City Slumbering – also known as the world you used to think was all there was. The origins of the Mad City aren’t known to anyone, especially those who live there.
What’s known is this: the Mad City is the extra place, the lost place where missing socks and broken toys come to live a second life. It’s where the thirteenth hour on the clock went, and forgotten constellations fled when their gods died. That door you thought you saw out of the corner of your eye opens into the Mad City, and every now and then, when the City Slumbering seems to swallow someone whole, it’s because they stumbled through such a door.

The Mad City is crowded, packed densely, and overfull. The Mad City squeezes into the forgotten spaces in the middle of the City Slumbering. It touches every part of that sleeping burg, whether it’s in the shadows under a child’s bed, or at the back of a dusty utility closet, or down an alleyway that only exists for a few minutes past midnight.

The Mad City has a timeless, if relentlessly urban, quality to it, and you can find folks in all manner of dress, carrying devices and driving vehicles from any year of the last century and a half, pretty much wherever you go in it. Anachronism is the mode of the day, and sometimes the people living there don’t seem to realize that it’s been a century since they first set up shop.

Did the Mad City come before the City Slumbering, or after? Or is that a chicken and the egg thing? Is the Mad City produced by the dreams of the sleeping, or the collective consciousness of the Awake? Does the Mad City have its own dark agenda, or is it simply an unthinking otherspace? Did the Industrial Revolution give birth to the Mad City, or is it an older thing than that?

Many such questions have been asked, but this game will provide no easy answers.



Is there anyone who would be interested in trying out this world of mine?

Either here or with the regular group. Here might be better. More time to think.

As I've been saying, I do believe I'd be interested, but I'd still recommend against the dice mod if possible - forum-based games tend to run differently than table-top games do. As Bloody Good said, they give you more time to think.

This seems wickedly twisted. I'm not sure how to play but I'd be interested. Love to have a bit more information.

I'm up for giving it a go man

you know me.

Alright a bit more information.

Creating Characters
All characters are insomniacs of some sort who have Awakened to the Mad City and who, eventually, are stalked by Nightmares (and other people and creatures from the City).

As the Awake, they have access to strange powers – ranging from simply being able to do certain things unusually well, to performing acts that are flatly impossible.

Answer Questions
But beyond being Awake, characters are also very much flawed, human people who have problems. These problems lead to too many sleepless nights and, thus, their current predicament.

To take a step back from the strangeness and the Nightmares and the Mad City, this means that every character brings a set of issues and events to the table that comprises his personal story. Setting aside the basics of surviving, a character’s story is about how he explores these issues, and questions whether or not he’ll be able to rise above them, and take his life back.

To get a grip on their characters’ personal story, and their connection to the setting, players must answer five questions, beyond the simple basics like “What’s your name?” The GM will look at these answers from time to time to get a handle on how the characters are proceeding in their personal stories, and the players will get a chance to make use of their answers in ways that guide the development of the game.

Here are the questions.

What’s Been Keeping You Awake?
This is the source of the character’s insomnia, and sets up what the character’s immediate history has been like.

Think about: What troubles him? What pressures turned him into an insomniac? Is he running from something? Does he stay awake due to nightmares or substance abuse? Has he lost someone dear to him and the grief is robbing him of sleep?

Why it matters: This answer connects the character to what all the protagonists in the game have in common – insomnia. It can drive further development of the character by offering opportunities for flashbacks. If it suggests something that the character is avoiding confronting, the GM may look to that as a source of ideas for what the character should face.

What Just Happened to You?

This is what happens to the character in his very first scene of the game – it’s not in the GM’s hands, it’s in the player’s! Such a moment should always feature a moment of high stress for the character. This may be different from what’s been keeping the character awake.

Think about: What would make an exciting, stressful scene? Is the source of the stress mundane or supernatural? Did you just lose your job? Did a monster jump out of your closet? Did you walk in on your wife and another guy in bed? Did you fall off a building – and land without a scratch?

Why it matters: Players get to set the tone for the entire game by determining the opening scene for their protagonists. This is a huge power, and should be exercised with discretion. The best opening scenes are the ones that say something about the character’s ongoing story – they imply a trajectory as much as an event – but so long as the “moment of high stress” requirement is kept to, all should be well.

What’s on the Surface?

This determines the first impressions the character gives off, and tells what is obvious about him.

Think about: What does the protagonist appear to be at first blush (as opposed to what he actually is)? How do others see him? What’s his physical appearance? What sort of personality does he have? Does he put his best foot forward – or his worst?

Why it matters: This answer will be a strong guide as to how the world interacts with the protagonist. It will offer ways in which the face he turns to the world can help or hinder him.

What Lies Beneath?

This speaks to the protagonist’s secrets, the part of himself that he doesn’t show to the world if he can help it.

Think about: What’s the protagonist’s real deal? What would be a surprising twist that plays counterpoint to what’s been said about him so far? What secrets would he give his life to protect? How does he see himself? What lies does he tell himself?

Why it matters: This answer can complicate the portrait of the character, and give him a real three-dimensionality. It plays strongly to character motive. In the absence of anything else, this informs what sorts of things might, over time, be brought to light – or be carefully, deliberately kept in the dark.

What’s Your Path?

This question addresses the character’s goals, and points to how – in a vacuum – a story about him could reach its conclusion.

Think about: Where is the protagonist headed? If a story were written about his life, what would its theme be? What are his goals? What does he want or need?

Why it matters: This is the ultimate question in a game where the personal journey of the protagonist is just as important as anything else. When the character isn’t dodging Nightmares or navigating the Mad City, this is what his mind is set to achieving.

Example

Rob’s protagonist is Gavin McNab, a protagonist whose child just got kidnapped by something from under her bed (“What just happened to you?”).
He’s been staying awake due to night terrors about losing his kid … and that was before it actually happened (“What’s been keeping you awake?”)
At first glance, Gavin appears to be a bit of a deadbeat dad. He doesn’t hold down a job really well, and his kid’s been living with his Mom. (“What’s on the surface?”)
The truth of the matter is that Gavin works for the Russian Mafia, and he’s been trying to keep his family at arm’s length in order to keep them out of harm’s way. (“What lies beneath?”)
Gavin’s story is about becoming the man his family deserves to have. In the immediate, he’s interested in recovering his child, but more long-term, he wants to get free of his Mafia ties, and become a better father to his kid. (“What’s your path?”)

Talents
Talents allow a character to stretch beyond the normal. In another setting, they might look like super-powers fit for folks in bright costumes and heroic ideals. But in the Mad City, among the Awake, talents are simply par for the course, and inextricably linked to exhaustion and madness.

Most all of those who are truly Awake have talents, and will use them in times of trouble, but it’s always with a price, and never ever done casually – misuse of a talent can send you into perilous slumber or inescapable insanity.

Talents of Exhaustion

Exhaustion talents focus exclusively on something the character can already do – but they make him supernaturally better at it. What the thing is that gets this boost is, at its root, pretty mundane – shoot a gun, run fast, jump far, add numbers, read books. But when the character taps that one particular thing he has a talent for, his performance is simply off the charts.

Example
Alia has a talent for Shooting Guns. Anyone can shoot guns, but Alia’s shots rarely miss their target, and sometimes she does so well that she can make some truly impossible shots.

Talents of Madness

Madness talents are the complement of exhaustion talents. Instead of enhancing what a character can already do as a human being, a madness talent simply allows the character to do something he should not be able to.

Our default assumption here is that a madness talent confers something that fits a supernatural or psychic sort of theme, but something that looks a little more like an overt super-power would be fine as well (such as “take no damage from bullets”).

Some madness talents ideas may seem like exhaustion talents. This is okay; the key to remember is that with a madness talent, the thing the character can do crosses over into being overtly supernatural.

Consider the preparedness example, below. As an exhaustion talent, preparedness would simply be a case of putting together solid plans in advance, and staying alert when things start to go all pear-shaped. But as a madness talent, it starts to cross over into molding reality – retroactively having prepared for something the character just encountered.

Remember, madness talents are madness talents because they do the impossible. They break the rules. What they do doesn’t make sense. They can’t be done. But the Awake can do them!

Sample Madness Talents
“I don’t blame you. If I had a case of bookworms as bad as you did, I’d be looking to vent some anger, too.”

Hypnochondria. You have the strange and unique ability to cause a target to become afflicted with the very illness you diagnose them to have.

Perfect Insight. You have flashes of insight that simply break the rules – no one should be able to guess as clearly or as correctly as you do.

Preparedness. You’re supernaturally prepared for whatever comes up – and you may, in fact, be bending time to make it happen.

Stoneflesh. You’re able to shrug off physical harm, causing opponents to waste their time trying to hurt you (in the fleshy sense).

Teleportation. You can shortcut reality itself, moving from one place to another without passing in between.

Some of these example madness talents work on a sliding scale of power. Using these powers causes a small amount of temporary madness that will shortly go away. However some effects drive your character a little further closer to the edge then others. Preparedness, for example, would allow your character to remember that he brought a flashlight when he finds the dark basement. This would warp reality only slightly to allow the flashlight to be in his backpack, causing only a minor bit of insanity. However, if you character were, for instance, to remember that he happened to stick a piece of paper in his front pocket that just happened to have the combination written on it to the secret wall safe he just uncovered... well that's a bit more mind-rending.

The Scars of Experience

As protagonists progress through play, they will explore their personal stories and, from a character story perspective, grow. But players may find themselves wanting some kind of tangible, on-sheet method for expressing character growth, and that’s where scars come into play.
A scar is, put simply, a short description of an important experience the character has had during play. This scar isn’t often a literal scar; scars are described in terms of lessons learned, obstacles overcome or as yet unbeaten, long-lasting injuries, and so on.

In later play, a scar can be used to grant the character a momentary advantage, as the protagonist sees a way to connect his past experience with his present troubles. This can be done in a relatively minor way, or in a major way.

Since scars are only made after an important, usually emotional or extremely trying incident there won't be lists of hundreds for each character. What the scars will do for the character is work as a temporary reprieve or change.

A player may choose to have his character make a connection to a scar, a traumatic event that is somehow in his mind connected or similar to his current one. It's a sobering event, one that should wake him up a little and clear his head a bit, leaving him a little less tired and a little further away from that edge of insanity. This would be a minor change. After the scar is used in such a manner it is no longer usable again for awhile. Given chapter lengths in games on this board it won't be that long, but it will be several pages or a few scenes down the road.

A major use, however, can be a bit more permanent. A major use of a scar would allow the player to change the character's madness or exhaustion talent, either temporarily or permanently. Temporary would be for the remainder of the scene. However, in utilizing a scar in this manner completely writes it off the sheet for use. It still remains on the list of scars as it's an important part of the character's history, however it can no longer be used and can never be restored.

These two options allow a player to use the scars in one of two ways. Banking them for the occasional much needed jolt of reality, or spending them for a one time cool effect. The choice is up to the character.

Character Sheet

My Name Is . . .
And I Am . . .
What’s been keeping you awake?
What just happened to you?
What’s on the surface?
What lies beneath?
What’s your path?

Talents:
Exhaustion -
Madness -

Scars:

Further examples and help with character sheets and creation:

The Five Questions In Play
The character creation questionnaire that players answer at the start of the game is more than just a portrait of their protagonists. It lives, breathes, changes, and grows through play. Here, we’ll discuss how that’s done.

Opening Scene
The question: What just happened to you?

As mentioned in character creation, this is the question that sets the character’s opening scene. Players may take this challenge head-on, describing the setup for an opening scene (“I’ve walked in on my wife with another man.”), or they may instead refer to a prelude (“I walked in on my wife with another man, and now I’m wandering the streets on a three-day bender.”).

The question isn’t just there to take up real estate on the character sheet after the opening scene. It’s the start of the protagonist’s journey, and that makes it half of his trajectory. Speaking of which...

Trajectory
The questions: What just happened to you? and What’s your path?

We’re calling attention to two questions here because they constitute two sides of the same answer. To put them another way, they might be “Where do you start?” and “Where does it end?” Together (and, sometimes, with bringing in a third question – “What’s been keeping you awake?”), they define the character’s trajectory through the game. In essence, the game is an exploration of what happens in the middle, between points A and B.

Playing the game is how the how gets discovered. You know where you’re coming from; you know where you’re going; and as you connect those two dots, however circuitously, you come to know how you’re getting there.

Look at these two (or three) questions as the central axis of the protagonist questionnaire. This is what matters, and this is how the game’s story is going to stay relevant to the protagonist’s story.

Example
Rob’s protagonist, Gavin, has more than a few problems going on. He’s been having nightmares about his kid getting kidnapped, and now a monster’s come along from underneath the bed and done exactly that. Looking to his path, we can see that he’s going to be set on recovering his child – that much was clear from the way it all started – but there are longer term goals there as well. Gavin wants to get free of his Mafia ties, and become a better father.

Rob’s GM, Lydia, looks at this and has some pretty clear notions on how to guide Gavin along this path. Early on, it’ll be about chasing down his kid, but as the story develops, the Mafia’s sure to show up, and even if Gavin gets his kid back, he’ll still have to go through several trials to really prove himself as the father he always should have been. In a total vacuum, Lydia already has enough material to tell a great, relevant story about Gavin’s life, and as the game progresses, she’ll be able to feature it strongly in her larger storyline.

Flashback
The questions: What’s been keeping you awake? What lies beneath?

There’s nothing saying that every scene has to happen sequentially after previous one, in terms of a protagonist’s personal timeline. At any time, the GM or the player can suggest a flashback scene, to the time before the character became Awake.

Usually such scenes will be pure roleplaying (not involving interaction and conflict), and fairly abbreviated in length. Ideally, they should explore some part of the protagonist that we haven’t seen before, or connect the events of the past to the events of the present.

Flashbacks can even occur in the middle of a “present-day” scene, but in most cases they should be particularly abbreviated since their point is likely to be all about shedding a particular new light on present events.

Example
At a moment of despair, Gavin has sunk to his knees, weeping for his as-yet unfound daughter. Rob, his player, cues for a flashback here, and Lydia, the GM, agrees to it.

Rob talks about a moment from Gavin’s past, when he woke in a cold sweat, thinking his daughter taken. But this is after his marriage hit the rocks; he drives through the night, coming to his ex-wife’s house, and vaults over the fence, coming to the window to his daughter’s room, and sees here there, asleep and calm, angelic. Looking ragged, he rests a hand against the window, watching over her through the night, until the sun rises.

First Contact
The question: What’s on the surface?

How a protagonist presents himself to the world is crucial to many scenes. The player’s answer to this particular questionnaire item (his “surface”) provides a strong guide as to how it might play out, whenever the protagonist first encounters someone.

Example
Gavin’s surface, as written by Rob, focuses on Gavin looking to be a deadbeat, unemployed dad. Lydia talks this through with Rob, and establishes that Gavin is looking pretty scruffy these days. He wears a cheap suit, and has the bloodshot eyes of a man who’s spent too many late nights in too many casinos.

A lot of this translates to bad things for Gavin. When Lydia frames scenes involving Gavin, she knows that a lot of people will react to that surface appearance, seeing a guy who probably can’t afford anything of fine quality. Con-men may look at Gavin as – potentially – an easy mark.

But it’s not all pure badness. Children are a mixed bag who may react in one of two ways to Gavin – to his paternal side, or to his unreliable, deadbeat side. Gamblers, homeless people, and other folks from “the life” that Gavin so thoroughly looks the part of, won’t react to Gavin as an outsider, either.

Revelation
The question: What lies beneath?

This particular question focuses on the character’s secrets, and gains power both in the lengths to which a protagonist will go to keep those secrets, and the moments in which the protagonist – intentionally or inadvertently – reveals some aspect of those secrets.

Concealing secrets, if that’s important to a protagonist, should be fairly self-motivating. Here, it’s the GM’s job to threaten those secrets occasionally, producing pressure on the character to prevent revelation.
Whether concealed or not, secrets tend to come to light sooner or later, and when they do, that revelation and its impact on the protagonist and the things important to him should not be ignored or brushed off

A revelation is in many ways a moment where the protagonist grows (or, at least, deepens as a character). It can transform who the character is in the eyes of others, and, at times, in his own eyes.

Example
Gavin’s “What lies beneath?” answer contains a juicy secret: he works for the Russian Mafia. Certainly, Gavin has other secrets as well, but this is the big one, which Rob chose to focus on when writing up Gavin. This is a strong cue to Lydia, the GM, to set up a plotline that drives towards revealing Gavin’s Mafia ties, and the mundane-world complications arising from that.

This will help root Gavin’s personal story in some elements of the everyday, and may develop in parallel to what’s going on in the Mad City – maybe even crossing paths now and again. After all, organized crime has a spot in any major city, even the Mad one.

Resolution
The question: What’s your path?

No other questionnaire item speaks more directly to the character’s goals than this one. The player’s answer to this question should tell the GM both what the character’s immediate goal or goals might be, as well as what the ultimate, final goal is.

Stripping away all of the setting and GM based plotting, this game should be wholly concerned with how the players’ protagonists proceed toward, struggle with, and resolve, the goals indicated in their path.

Example
As presented by Rob, Gavin’s story – his long-term goal – is his transformation into the man his family deserves to have. His immediate goals are about recovering his child, breaking free of the mafia, and becoming a better father.

Looking at this, GM Lydia knows to structure Gavin’s early scenes around his quest for his daughter. She also needs to keep in mind how she might offer Gavin a few Faustian bargains to get out of his mafia obligations and, once he does rescue his child, provide Gavin some strong fathering challenges.

Here is some background history on the Mad City and some of its more notorious inhabitants. There are others that I will post up later, but for the meantime these are the big ones.

Getting There

Getting to the Mad City is difficult for the sleeping, but terribly easy for the Awake. From anywhere in the City Slumbering, an Awake person can easily identify an entrance to the Mad City. It might be a window that looks out onto a constant and strange night sky, a manhole cover shaped like a crescent moon, or a bright orange doorway that nobody seems to notice.

The sleeping can be taken into the Mad City through such an entrance, but unless they are forced to openly confront the entrance’s existence, their minds won’t let them see it. Whenever an Awake person passes into the Mad City, the sleeping nearby don’t remember him stepping through a hole in the sky that wasn’t there – they remember him leaving through some completely normal and logical means. The entrances are only fully there for those who can’t dream, the Awake, and it’s the dreaming mind that likes to create safe explanations for the impossible.

Entrances to the Mad City needn’t be constant and reliable, and thus often aren’t. Even the Awake have trouble finding the same entry-way twice, and even those entrances that stay put and don’t change shape may suddenly start opening onto a completely different place. And unless someone is very, very lucky, an entrance very rarely takes them to the part of the Mad City that they most want to go to.

The City Slumbering

No game about the Mad City can really ignore the City Slumbering. It’s the place the protagonists once knew and thought familiar, but which may now seem just as strange as the Mad City itself.

Protagonists, who have become Awake, will find themselves feeling a strange, hollow sort of disconnection from the City Slumbering. Old friends will be difficult to talk to, passers-by will eye the character suspiciously, dogs will bark incessantly at their presence, and favorite foods will taste just a little bit like sand.

This doesn’t mean that the mundane world has forgotten about the protagonists (well, in most cases). The troubles of modern life may still dog them whenever they emerge from the constant nightfall of the Mad City and into the dulled and strange City Slumbering. They’ll still need to pay off that mortgage or alimony. Their girlfriends will wonder where they’re going at all times of day or night. Their jobs will, in all likelihood, fire them, if the Mad City proves to be enough of a distraction. The cops will still want to bring them in for questioning.

The Locals

The Mad City is home to the Nightmares, most certainly, but it’s also home to a large class of permanently adrift, largely “normal” people. These are those who did not Awaken, but who over the years stumbled, fell, or otherwise drifted into the Mad City and made it their home.

Unless you’re Awake, the Mad City can play a number on your memory, and this has most certainly happened to the locals. Time doesn’t pass in quite the same way in the Mad City; at the least, none of the locals have ever really shown signs of deep change. They don’t age, and their minds and attitudes don’t really grow and alter all that much, unless either a Nightmare or one of the Awake forces it to happen.

This is a large part of the relentlessly anachronistic nature of the Mad City. For at least the last 150 years (and memory being what it is, the history of the Mad City has been poorly chronicled), its population has grown every time someone from the City Slumbering goes missing. And those who end up here get stuck as the people they were.

Most often, those people simply fade into their roles and become locals. But sometimes those people Awaken, and other times they become Nightmares. And the Nightmares, when they happen, tend to happen underneath the surface (the truly horrific transformations seem to come about largely when one of the Awake snaps one final time). This has left, if you’ll pardon, a number of “sleeper agents” among the populace of the Mad City, people who simply seem to be people, on the surface, but if pricked or cut will rupture to reveal the true Nightmare within.

But in the end the bulk of the locals are of two types – those who have simply forgotten anything but their role, and those who have given themselves over into service to a particular Nightmare or other powerful entity. The latter group is difficult to distinguish from the former, unless that allegiance is pronounced and on the surface.

In either case, this means that most of the locals you’ll encounter in the Mad City are very much consumed with the work of the role they play there. A vintner will do nothing but distill spirits and produce fine wines, twenty-four-seven; a policeman never goes off-duty unless off-duty time is established as a firm pillar of fulfilling the role of policeman.
As a result, very many locals have a very colorful surface, but little depth. This leads the Awake to refer to many of the locals as “hollow men” or, simply, “shallow”. Which isn’t to say that you can’t form long and lasting friendships with the locals, establish ongoing history and relationships with them, and so on. The locals are still very much people; if anything, it’s more that their identities – at least in their original form – have been stripped away or otherwise mutated by exposure to the city’s madness.

The Thirteenth Hour

Every twelve hours in the Mad City line up more or less with the hours in the City Slumbering (save that the Mad City always repeats night-time; the sun never shines). But as with all things Mad, even time has something a little extra, outside of the sleeping city.

When the clocks in the Mad City chime thirteen, the City Slumbering forgets the Mad ways entirely. At the thirteenth hour, no passage between the two cities is possible; all the doors are locked tight, and woe unto anyone who tries to pick those locks. Rumor has it a thief tried it back in the early days (whenever those were), and in the two seconds the door was open it let Mother When into the world.

Nightmares particularly love thirteen o’clock because this missing hour traps the Awake in the Mad City. Officer Tock is, in particular, a big fan of getting a posse together and hunting down undesirables during this time.
Those who manage to remain in the City Slumbering when the Mad clock strikes this dark hour scarcely notice its passing – for them, a second has passed, and during that brief moment, anyone they left in the Mad City was unable to call for their help for a full hour. Many an ally has been lost to this cruel tick of the clock. It is truly the time when the most Nightmares are born.

The Bizarre Bazaar

The Thirteenth Hour is also when the Bizarre Bazaar does its best business. The Bazaar is the Mad City’s idea of a farmer’s market. Locals and Nightmares, often indistinguishable from one another, all bring their wares to some floating location and open up shop. Many stalls are closed outside thirteen o’clock, but some part of the Bazaar is always open for business, if less reliably.

While the Wax King’s coins fetch a decent rate of exchange at the Bazaar, the shopkeepers there much prefer to traffic in barter, and as it happens a number of wares are simply off-limits without some sort of trade being involved.

If anything, the Bazaar traffics mostly in intangible goods. By this, we don’t mean services, though many a service may be bought there (Nightmare and non-Nightmare prostitution hovers around the edges, to be sure). These are genuinely intangible goods – memories, hungers, fears, sensory experiences, the occasional pure moment of pleasure, and much, much more, is all for sale at the Bazaar.

But, being intangible, these goods can’t be handled easily, so they’re usually bound up in some sort of tangible form that echoes an aspect of what it contains. Broken toys and other lost items are a favored means of conveyance. Information about a child might be stuffed into the husk of an old teddy-bear. The memory of a lover’s caress could be tied into a scrap of perfumed silk.

In practice, the Bazaar is something of a genie in a bottle. You can usually fulfill your wishes there, but most often you’ll find that the price is more than you can bear.

The Bazaar is also a nexus, drawing together the Awake under the cover of the madening crowds. When the clock chimes thirteen, the Bazaar can offer a robust level of concealment and, thus, protection. Its enthusiastically chaotic nature is a particular thorn for the more order-obsessed Nightmares, particularly those of the District, and as such, Officer Tock and the Tacks Man have rarely made any headway rooting out corruption and fugitives among its many markets. This has made the Bazaar a favored recruiting ground for the occasional attempts by the Awake to find some safety in numbers.

District Thirteen

The City Slumbering once had the original District Thirteen, back in the early 1920’s, but an early push by the Nightmares, lead by the Tacks Man, stole into our world and ripped the place in total back into the Mad City itself. Reality conveniently supplied explanation in the form of a great fire that swept through the City Slumbering and left naught but ash and a quick forgetfulness of all that was lost.

Back in the Mad City, District Thirteen became the center of what passes for government and law enforcement, Nightmare style. Even the locals stay away from District Thirteen if they can, though the strange and Byzantine bureaucratic affectations of the Tacks Man and Officer Tock actually keep the Nightmares here somewhat in check.

Locals who do venture into the District do so because they work there, or because they’ve been summoned for judgment or deputization, or simply because they were there when the District was stolen and have grown complacent. They have managed by and large to work peacefully with the Nightmares, so long as they abide by the rules.

What those rules are at any particular moment is hard to say, however, and that has provided a certain amount of natural selection among the denizens who consider spending time in the District. Those who stay and survive develop a sort of natural instinct for what the rules are, or at least what they might be, and no small percentage of them become barristers and lawyers and advocates and bureaucrats and judges, who will defend and complicate your case should you ever come to trial there.

The Awake are often subpoenaed, but rarely put in an appearance in the courts of the District. And this is probably a wise thing; when charges are levied against the Awake, they most certainly contain myriad Catch-22 rules violations and other legalities that practically guarantee a conviction – and prison life under Officer Tock’s wardens is above all nasty, brutish, and torturous. Still, refusing to respond to a subpoena does amount to an admission of guilt, and once Tock’s lieutenants get a warrant for arrest, the usual protections of the District’s bureaucracy are gone, and the gloves are off.

Officer Tock
“The first thing I noticed when I entered the District was the eerie synchronicity of everything there – like it was all one big clockwork contraption, keeping a single tempo. It struck me as kinda beautiful at the time. It wasn’t until later that I realized that everyone there was too scared to do otherwise – and whose beat they were marching to.”
Officer Tock, the chief of police in the Mad City, always appears with a stopwatch for a face, the lower half split by a maw that would be toothy were it not filled with constantly spinning gears. Instead of a billy club he carries a long clock hand of dark metal, the end raggedly pointed and stained with old blood.

Tock considers himself responsible for the heartbeat of the Mad City’s bureaucracy. Ever-present within District Thirteen, he occasionally lapses into his “white rabbit” moments, when he becomes terribly concerned with things keeping proper time and making his appointments. There are a lucky few among the Awake who have managed to escape Tock’s clutches due to an important calendar item stealing his attention before he could strike a deathblow.

Clockwork Lieutenants

Tock additionally employs a number of Clockwork Lieutenants who look like policemen from all over the world, their faces frozen in stiff grins, each with a slowing spinning key in his back.

Other Minions

Tock has also been known to deputize certain among the human populace of the Mad City to work as his agents outside of the District. This is usually done by way of a piece of leverage or damning evidence that Tock uses to blackmail his deputies into service.

The Tacks Man
“He came at me, those pinpoint fingers of his screeching along the slate walls. I had to get away. Last time we met, he took my heartbeat. This time, he was after my name.”

The Tacks Man is the force behind the District’s Nightmare bureaucracy. A plastic push-pin sits atop his shoulders instead of a head, and his fingers all come to metallic points. He is dressed impeccably in the uniform of political power, a business suit that never gets dirty or mussed.

When the Tacks Man goes after his quarry, he’s not interested in taking it whole. He wants something his target has, and all he needs to do is get nearby to lay claim to it. Removing one of his fingers, he can pin something of his target to the spot – maybe he’ll pin an arm to the ground with it, or nail the last moments spent with a now-dead lover to his wall of trophies. When the Tacks Man kills someone, he does it by degrees. The longer the pain, the higher the yield.

Actually defeating the Tacks Man is tough, but as a small mercy, his pins aren’t nearly as bad to evade – which doesn’t mean they’re easy, but in the Mad City, you take what you can get. And besides, the Tacks Man prefers to use his pins after his prey’s already been rendered helpless. Struggling only damages the merchandise.

The Tacks Man is rarely seen outside of the District, and is a stickler for following the rules – even when it’s to his detriment. For example, it’s not the Tacks Man’s place to enforce the law; even when there’s a warrant out for someone’s arrest, he’ll usually send some of his Pin Head toadies, or his Needle Nose hounds along with (or separately from) Officer Tock and his minions, rather than get directly involved himself.

It’s a very special kind of quarry that draws the Tacks Man out of his lair – usually, someone with something particularly unique to lose. And when that happens, it’s pretty bad, because it means the Tacks Man is in it for pleasure, not business.

Pin Heads
The Pin Heads play as toadies and yes-men to the Tacks Man. In body, they are wiry, slender guys who have a forward-pointing straight-pin in place of their heads. Hovering some six inches above this pin is usually a hat of some kind, often a fedora; as a uniform, they’re perpetually locked into the look of a rumpled 1940’s reporter, all cheap grey suits, sweat-stained shirts, and threadbare suspenders.

This look is no accident, as the Pin Heads are all about nailing the story and reporting what they find back to the Tacks Man. Theirs is a 24-hour news organization, and they’re tireless in their task.

Of course, as the Tacks Man’s yes-men, they’re also very strongly motivated to report back to the Man only what the Man wants to hear – but the Man has a very keen ear for lies, so rather than go that route, they do what they can to make the story be what it should be.

Their relationship with the Paper Boys is tenuous and fickle. Sometimes they’re at odds, and sometimes they’re allies, but to date, whenever there’s been a dispute, one side has come out on top, while the other has conceded.

Those who study such things have suggested that the utter mayhem that would result from the Paper Boys publishing a story that contradicted one reported by the Pin Heads could throw the whole of the Mad City’s Nightmares into Civil War – with a high bodycount in the civilian sectors.

Needle Noses

The Tacks Man is particularly fond of his Needle Nose bloodhounds. As you might expect, they look like particularly large dogs, only with their head replaced by a sewing needle. The needle is threaded, and the thread runs down the length of their spine, ending in a wagging tail that draws in additional thread from an invisible spool.

The Needle Noses are expert trackers and are often loaned out by the Man in exchange for whatever passes for favors among the Nightmare kin.

Once they’ve caught someone’s scent, if they can then prick him with their needles, they can use their thread to weave the victim to the spot (and, as it happens, their needles can pierce nearly anything to do so). Breaking free from such a woven trap is difficult indeed, but the effect is usually felt less in getting stuck, than in getting slowed down long enough for whatever was following the Needle Nose to catch up.

The High School

The tallest buildings of the Mad City are home to the High School, a sort of finishing school where the children trapped there emerge as a special kind of Nightmare.

High School isn’t always in session; its schedule isn’t predictable; but it always seems to open a door wherever a large number of orphans set up shop. This keeps the urchins of the Mad City evasive, grouping only in small numbers, and always on the move. Young hooligans who get caught by Officer Tock inevitably get sent off to School for finishing.

The school’s headmistress is Mother When, an occasionally pleasant, usually vicious schoolmarm who might just be Death Itself. Graduates of the High School become the Ladies in Hating, personifications of jealousy and spite. Those who fail to graduate simply disappear; and at least while Mother When is in charge, little boys never graduate.

Mother When

“There, there. Patience is a virtue, my child. And you still have one good hand left to do your homework. Run along, now.”
Mother When first appears as a pleasant country schoolmarm, though her black-within-black eyes are a bit of a giveaway that not all is right. She carries a yardstick with her, and any child who doesn’t measure up gets cut down to size. No one has ever been able to report what that actually means, other than one more missing child in the Mad City. She’s also rumored to have a book for every person she meets that can tell her what awful thing is going to happen to them next, but no one yet has been brave enough to browse through her personal library.

Taking on Mother When directly will inevitably lead to dire consequences. Within the mythology of the Mad City she is as close to a personification of Death as the Nightmares get and, for all one knows, she may actually be the modern incarnation of that ancient concept.

Ladies in Hating

As something of a relief, if only by contrast, Mother When is more fond of making use of her graduates, the Ladies in Hating, to visit all sorts of nastiness on the children of the Mad City, and the Awake. Individually, any one Lady isn’t much to worry about, but they usually travel in groups of three to five. Their fondest ways of doing in their foes are with excruciating tea parties and vile dinner events where the main courses feature such delights as pan-seared class clown and hooligan in duck sauce.

The Ladies are, themselves, consumed with spite, malice, and jealousy – the three great virtues taught by Mother When in the High School. Even without Mother’s guidance, the Ladies are always preying upon the young for, above all other things, they hate and envy youth itself – perhaps because Mother stripped them of their own so forcefully. Stewing in such things when they became Nightmares has transformed them utterly, right down to their blood, which, if spilled upon a young girl, will either kill her or turn her into one of them.

Promising Students

The Ladies aren’t the only perils of the High School. Many a promising student, not yet graduated, attends there. While such students are nominally human – they’re locals, not Nightmares – their academic excellence suggests something chilling: they want to become Ladies. In all other ways they appear as completely pleasant and polite little girls – which most certainly helps them whenever they go for extra credit, by bringing in a new student, or participating in the undoing of one of the Awake.

The Rooftop Jungle

While the streets of the Mad City are dangerous enough, the real peril is found on the rooftops. Buildings in the Mad City are clustered so closely together that it’s really quite easy to jump from one building to the next – so much so that a hasty traveler might not look where he’s going, up there, and end up plummeting to his doom. But that’s a relatively minor risk, all told.

The rooftops are where many of the Mad City’s extra things – doorways and other passages in particular – get squeezed, when there isn’t room on the ground. This has several effects on the rooftop as a landscape.
First off, it’s an utter chaos. Nearly every surface is simply covered in doorways, windows, holes, archways, and even the occasional animate orifice. While these are often passageways to other places in the Mad City, they sometimes turn out to be some Nightmare beast’s maw in disguise, so it’s important to have some idea of where you’re going if you find yourself topside.

Many of the openings lead back to other parts of the rooftops, but the rest of them lead pretty much everywhere in the Mad City. Locals and Nightmares who’ve become familiar with the topside realm favor it as a kind of super-shortcut highway to get around the place. The Paper Boys in particular make frequent use of the rooftop shortcuts to run their routes and get the latest story to the hungry public.

This also makes it a favored hunting ground, and many a Nightmare simply set up shop on the rooftops. Jabberwock sightings are uncommon, but heard of; a certain doctor who experimented with reanimating dead flesh may have lost his monster here.

But locals and brave Awakened use this place too – but quickly, if at all. Learning your way around the rooftops gives you an invaluable advantage in surviving the Mad City, but make no mistake, many a guideless neophyte has been lost in just a few minutes up topside.
Everyone in the Mad City finds him or her self up there now and again. The smart traveler simply turns right around, and hopes that the doorway he came out of still leads where he came from.

Paper Boys

“Was that crinkling sound I just heard from down that darkened alley the newspapers stuffed into some derelict’s clothing as proof against the cold, or was it a pack of Paper Boys hot on the scent of a new story? And if that story is me… how long till I’m old news?”
The Paper Boys are probably the most common variety of Nightmare – created when some poor clod skipped right past getting Awake and drove straight into madness. In appearance, Paper Boys look like a demented origami artist’s idea of child made of smudged newsprint and crumpled magazines. They always run in packs, and, internally, seem to align themselves with a particular Sleeper newspaper – tabloids being their favorite.

Individually, in face-to-face combat, Paper Boys aren’t much to worry about, though they can stack up pretty fast. But what really worries the Awake about the Boys isn’t the fight – it’s how they’ll cover it in tomorrow’s top story.

Getting published in the Paper Boys’ favorite gazette is, pardon, bad news, because the stories they publish have a pretty nasty tendency to become true. But the good news – if there’s any – is that the story has to circulate to gain its power. Shut down the paper for the day and the story dies. Kill off a major distribution channel, and it’ll at least be diminished in its power.

Not that anyone’s ever managed to do that.

In the end, the safest thing to do when you see the Paper Boys coming is run the other way – fast. And hope you don’t hear the ringing of bicycle bells on your heels.

Roof Rats

“I’m gonna grab that one by his fancy newsprint pants and shake him until his coins come out! Who’s with me?!”
There are a few groups of locals who do brave a longer stay among the confusion of doors dotting the rooftops. Chief among these groups are the Roof Rats. Peculiarly, to a one they were once schoolyard bullies, and none of them appear to be any older than twelve.

Like nearly all locals, the Roof Rats are “stuck” in the roles they’ve adopted. They’re the bullies of the roof – this, despite a rather strong disparity between their actual power, and the power they act as if they have. They’re bent on a mission to take the lunch money from the Paper Boys that run their routes through the roof, and have even succeeded at their goal on occasion.

In all of this they’ve taken on an even greater than usual obliviousness to the circumstances and realities of the Mad City. Several among the Awake have tried to make it clear to them that their schoolyard war against the Paper Boys is incredibly dangerous – but they’ll have none of it.

The Air Fort

“Are we there yet?”
The sky of the Mad City has no planes in flight, but that doesn’t mean that lost aircraft don’t end up here. Inevitably, any planes that do cross over into the secret world lose all their bearings and come hurtling out of the sky. The architecture of the city being what it is, these planes inevitably run into the rooftops.

In the City Slumbering, you’d expect a plane crash to involve a lot of smoke and fire. Not so, here. Instead, fallen aircraft have imbedded themselves into the rooftops themselves, and in fact – for reasons unknown – all tend to cluster around a particular region of the rooftops called the Air Fort (so named by the Roof Rats, who use their empty husks as impromptu battlements).

On a first visit to the Air Fort, someone might recall the Flying Cadillac Ranch of the mundane world. It looks, simply, like some god decided they'd raise themselves a fine crop of cockpits and fuselages and tail sections, covering the entire history of man aflight. Some have even theorized that this is one of those places that planes lost to the Bermuda Triangle go, though no one’s really done the research to prove it one way or the other (too many other pressing concerns when visiting the rooftops, one supposes).

Occasionally one of the crashing planes will hit with such force, and at just the right angle, that some portion of passes through one or more of the doors that infest the rooftop landscape. This can result in some fascinating architecture down on the street level of the Mad City, as a wing here, a cockpit there, and so on, protrude incongruously from some building’s entrance or other aperture. These fallen aircraft provide some of the most interesting shortcuts in all the city, as, internally, the plane is continuous, but externally, it exists in a number of places. The views out the windows can be particularly delightful.

Stranger yet are the crashed planes that never lost their passengers. It’s said that there are a few where the occupants have become locals of the Mad City without ever really realizing it, lost forever in a plane flight that, simply, never makes it to its destination. Particularly disturbing are the ones where the captain never turned off the Fasten Your Seatbelt sign.

The Warrens

Counterpoint to the rooftops, the warrens beneath the Mad City are riddled with slick, intestinal tunnels that lead to ten thousand nowheres (nowheres that Nightmares and down-on-their-luck locals like to call home). In the middle of all of that is the Kingdom of Wax, where the Wax King sits upon his piles of coin, and jealously regards the world above, which he claims was once his own.

The Warrens are an easy place to get lost but, if you’re looking for the Wax King, at least, they’re an easy place to get found. His army of Blind Knights is always on patrol, and his Smothered Folk farm the sewage pipes for the runoff from broken dreams.

Nothing stays long within the warrens beneath the Mad City without feeling the touch of wax. The closer to the center of it all, to the Kingdom, the more of a risk there is that you’ll wake up one day with the wax crawling up your legs. It always closes over your face last, and when it does, you join the Smothered Folk in timeless servitude.

This has pushed the Nightmares, out of respect, and the locals, out of survival, to the furthest nowheres of the under-city realm. Some Nightmares craft their sections of the warrens into self-styled rival kingdoms, and may even at times wage war upon the King. But the King has never been defeated in the heart of his realm, and the advance of wax into the warrens remains inexorable.

The Wax King
“His head hung low, as though supporting a great unseen weight, and his features had a melted quality to them. The look was enhanced by his crown, if you could call it that. A great candle, as wide across as his head and lit by a blue, translucent flame, sat upon his bald pate, and as the wax dripped down the sides of his face and body to form his vestments, he beckoned me closer.”

The Wax King may or may not be a Nightmare. Certainly, the border is blurred where he’s concerned. He simply doesn’t have quite the same vicious streak that many of the Nightmares do, which has lead some to believe that he might simply be the oldest of the Awake to have survived the passage of time. Which isn’t to say he can’t be fantastically lethal if he chooses; it’s simply not his first choice.

At the very least, the Wax King is no stranger to mercy when offended, and is often inclined to give people second chances, in exchange for vast and often unspecified favors, upon which he always collects. This has allowed the King to gather no small number of the Awake to him, at times, who he delights in using as pawns against his rivals in the city above, or in the outlying Nightmare nowhere nations. At minimum, the Wax King is often the least of many evils whenever someone finds themselves against the ropes.

Some locals suspect that the Wax King is one of the big backers behind the Bizarre Bazaar, and they may be right. The King certainly has some kind of deal going on with the Bazaar, where he buys the memories that don’t sell, in bulk.

The Wax King’s Smothered Folk labor day in and day out to melt these memories down, breaking them apart into their component moments, and minting those moments into coin. It is this coin as much as any standard that serves as currency throughout the Mad City, though few have any idea as to its provenance.

What true power is contained within these coins, and what sway the Wax King has over that power if, indeed, it is there, is something that has as yet to be explored and tested. But the Wax King has a long view and a longer strategy, and like the slow-spreading wax covering his realm, his victories are merely a matter of time.

Blind Knights

The Blind Knights serve as judges, executioners and guides within the Kingdom. In appearance, they look like normal men and women, wearing dress from nearly any time period, as is the mode of the Mad City. Their sole aberration is in their eyes, or rather, the lack of them; instead of eyes they have a candle in each socket, which stays ever-lit so long as they live, casting a pale blue light over their surroundings.

The Wax King employs a number of Blind Knights to keep his realm safe. Individually they are formidable opponents, and are seldom seen in groups larger than two.

Smothered Folk

The whole of the Wax King’s peasantry is composed of the Smothered Folk, locals of the Mad City who have been enveloped in the Kingdom’s wax and transformed into silent servitors. As mentioned, they are farmers and coin-makers, and can serve other functionary purposes as well. Smoothed over by wax, their identities melted away, they are faceless and can, at times, seem even listless as they labor on.

In a fight or other conflict, they aren’t much of a threat, but there are an awful lot of them, and their numbers grow day by day.

Out in the Nowheres

The Nowheres beyond the Kingdom of Wax are just as scattered and colorful as the city above. Despite being potential targets of conquest, many such realms establish open trade and other business arrangements with the Kingdom.

Many of the Nowheres that still persist independently do so because they have managed to establish some sort of check against the brute military force that the Wax King is able to bring to bear. And sadly for the King, this tends to mean a stand-off; many of his agreements with the Awake are geared towards getting the Awake to address one of these checks and balances the outer Nowheres have arrayed against him.

One of the more successful areas of independence have grown up around a branch publishing office of the Paper Boys. This particular paper, The Nightly Revealer, tends to publish only one sort of article, as frequently as possible: tales of the murder of the Wax King.

The Wax King has made several efforts to send operatives out into the field to solve these regicides; if they’re solved, and the culprits brought to justice, then the culprits can’t have managed to murder the Wax King once he actually sets foot outside of the Kingdom (logic loopholes and other conundrums involving the flow of time in the Mad City tend to lead to headaches; don’t try to think about it too hard).

The Wax operatives have met with mixed success over time, but usually find themselves undone by some other story making it into the paper – often about them. And even when successful, the Revealer has proven quite adept at getting another tale of royal murder out on the street.

Other Nightmares have other means to prevent the Wax King’s advance, with the means itself often defining the nature of their Nowhere realm. The Most Puissant Black Wind’s realm is torn by constant gales, which snuffs out any candles that draw close – even the supposedly unsnuffable flames of the Blind Knights. Elsewhere, the Magnificent Howler has run an incredible amount of pipe-work through his underground lair, pushing a constant flow of molten rage through those pipes, keeping the temperature too high for wax to do anything but uselessly puddle.

Most of the Nowhere realms base their economy and industries on some sort of processing or use of the many pipes that run down into the Warrens from the city above.

The vintners Locke, Stocke, and Berell (all locals; not a Nightmare among ’em) do a fine business siphoning the residue of broken dreams out of the same feed lines that the Wax King’s peasantry farm, turning it into a variety of highly sought-after spirits. Their 1937 Hangman’s Regret sells especially well amongst their exclusive clientele, though sadly their 1952 Baby’s First Teddybear has had trouble moving (and, thus, gets shipped to the Kingdom at a discount to be melted down into coin). They don’t discriminate; they’ll sell to anyone (including Nightmares and Awake) willing to pay their price, and accept both barter and wax coin alike.

In the Howler’s Realm, the many shades of rage pulsing through the realm have bred some of the finest fighting men the locals have ever managed to offer. Rations are extracted from the ragelines, and the cooks who’ve made their homes there have created some truly remarkable, if utterly infuriating, curries and other sauces. Also, soldiers from past and forgotten wars gravitate there, not yet done with fighting. And as locals tend to, they soon forget anything other than their martial undertakings. Which isn’t to say that, aside from the heat, the Howler’s people can’t be hospitable – though hospitality often takes the form of cheerful, tireless sparring.

Well, now after that insane infodump, is anyone interested? If anyone has any questions or needs some help let me know. I've gotten a couple responses but no absolute signups or characters yet.

I'll sign up, I just gotta think of a character man

As I said, I'm interested - but this plainly isn't the sort of game that it would be quick or simple to make a character for. Its taking me time to tinker with character concepts - though the infodump you've given so far greatly helps with setting and such.

I'm aware that it'll be somewhat of a task to make a character for this. I was just after getting a general concensus of who is definately going to drop a character for this or not. I know you said you'd play as did DS. Frigid said he was interested but wouldn't have the time. Rukia said she was interested but never get a definite.

I'm still quite confused. Is it a city in the world, or a city in the dream? I'm always bad for games in dreamworlds, anyway. I've been a lucid dreamer all my life, I can't quite comprehend anything but being able to go 'This sucks, lemme change it' in a dream.

If I'm understanding it right Nit, it isn't exactly a dream, it's more like a Parallel world type thing.

ok here is a rough idea of a character i think i got the main points right if i need to change something let me know

My name is Matthew Raymond, I’m an engineer and my microwave just exploded. I haven’t been sleeping much because of my work; I’m part of a team designing concussive munitions. I’m not the head of the team yet I find myself doing all of the work, I guess it comes from a deep seated fear of failure and a desire to make everyone happy. Most people think I’m a hard working and fairly friendly individual, the kind of guy you can go to whenever you have a problem who will drop what he is doing and help you with a smile, some call me a door mat. The truth of the matter is I’m compelled to help people when they ask even though I don’t want to, the truth is I hate every one of my co workers. Every day they hand me their work rather than do it themselves I’d like put them all on the range during the next test then hack whatever is left of them into dime sized chunks. I find myself sometimes giving into random fits of anger usually I take my anger out on inanimate objects, but I admit once or twice lashed out at another person. Earlier tonight I was very tired and hungry so I put some leftovers in the microwave but forgot to take the aluminum foil off of them. There was an explosion and the resultant fire quickly spread throughout my house I tried to put out the flames at first but I had to run or i would have been trapped. So now I'm sitting on the curb waiting for the fire department. Maybe this is a second chance or something, maybe I’m supposed to start standing up for myself stop just being angry and take credit for the work I do. Maybe even expose my co workers for what they really are, a series of corrupt lazy self centered jack asses.

Talents:
Exhaustion: Matthew has a talent for jury rigging things, anyone can fix a leak with some duct tape but matt’s abilities rival MacGyver.

Madness: Stoneskin, if all goes according to plan matt could personally supervise a munitions test and live to tell about it.

Few things:

1) I hadn't planned on characters having scars until the game started and developing them in game. They're experiance points of a sort. What has happened in the character's background and past doesn't apply for scars at the beginning of the game. I probably didn't make this very clear, and for that I appologize and blame only myself. This is still very much a work in progress to say the least.

2) I'm looking for some sort of path for the character, a goal and objective set so to speak. It this case I'm seeing it as trying to learn to stand up for himself and to stop being a doormat and to get control of his anger. Is this right? Is there any other goals for the character that are firmer, i.e. finding some sort of revenge against those he worked with or finding a way to bring justice to the situation?

Otherwise the sheet looks fine. I might edit it to format it a bit but otherwise it looks good. Madness and exhaustion talents are both great.

B4UTRUST wrote:Few things:

1) I hadn't planned on characters having scars until the game started and developing them in game. They're experiance points of a sort. What has happened in the character's background and past doesn't apply for scars at the beginning of the game. I probably didn't make this very clear, and for that I appologize and blame only myself. This is still very much a work in progress to say the least.

2) I'm looking for some sort of path for the character, a goal and objective set so to speak. It this case I'm seeing it as trying to learn to stand up for himself and to stop being a doormat and to get control of his anger. Is this right? Is there any other goals for the character that are firmer, i.e. finding some sort of revenge against those he worked with or finding a way to bring justice to the situation?

Otherwise the sheet looks fine. I might edit it to format it a bit but otherwise it looks good. Madness and exhaustion talents are both great.

Thanks, I took out the scars and added a little to the path, looking to get a little revenge now...

My Name Is Samantha Harrison and I am am ex undercover narcotics officer.

What’s been keeping you awake? My addiction to heroine that got me kicked of the police force. I tried to quit cold turkey and faced horrible withdraws. I often feel paranoid and have hallucinations that tell me that I will die before beating the addiction. Every time I try to quit these things push me back into using.

What just happened to you? I was trying to score some dust but the dealer recognized me from when I busted him a few years back. He pulled a gun on me and as the shot rang out time seemed to stop. I was able to dodge the bullet and kill the dealer.

What’s on the surface? On the outside I look like your average stung out druggie. I have dark circles under my eyes because I can't sleep. I have nose bleeds and track marks. My skin is pale and thin. My hair is often a mess and my clothes wrinkled.

What lies beneath? I am still a cop a heart. The instincts are still there and I hate myself for having to deal with the criminals that I used to put away to support my habit.

What’s your path? I want more than anything to kick this sickening dependency. To become a cop again and a productive member of society.

Talents:

Exhaustion - I have always taken naturally to hand to hand combat. I seem to be able to anticipate my opponents moves with great accuracy.

Madness - I move so fast that time seems to bend around me.

Rukia,

When your character is attacked and shot at, is she within the mad city at that point? Otherwise her madness talent wouldn't work. They only work within the Mad City.

Otherwise, the sheet looks good though I have to question the madness talent a bit. Isn't there anything a bit more appropriate or creative then matrix-style bullet dodging?

Not that there's anything against it, in theory, except that you and about everyone else seems to come to talent first and foremost.

Character Sheet

My Name Is William Fountaine Hill.

And I am ...I was a salesman of Propane and Propane Accessories. I've worked for the same company for the past ten years. Until recently, I had a nice, normal, average life. Then there was a accident at work, and my life was turned upside down. A propane tank was leaking, and we never noticed it. Somehow something struck off the propane leaking from the tank. I was lucky to make it out alive. My life spiraled downhill, a week after the explosion, my wife left me for a younger man, leaving me with horrendous amounts of debt. Lenore's lawyer informed me she was seeking alimony...that they have proof I cheated on my wife. I'm broke, jobless...how could anyone expect me to cope? Well....I did...

The bottle was there for me..good old Jim Bean... It doesn't let me sleep, but for a little while, the worries are gone.

On the outside I may look normal, a guy of average height, though I'm a bit droopy. My hair is thinning, there's bags under my eyes, and I seem to have a permanent three day growth on my face. I'm surprised I haven't had a heart attack or liver failure by how badly I've taken care of myself these past few months..

What lies beneath? Inside...I'm not sure if there's much of a difference. I used to be young, vibrant, without a care in the world other than my wife and my life...

What’s your path? I just want to find my way home. I want to be ride of these things, find happiness one last time...

Talents:
Exhaustion - I can find anything...literally. For some reason, I can locate whatever it is I'm looking for. I still can't find that damn Maltese Falcon though for some reason...

Madness - In my delirium, in my insanity, I can go anywhere, bring anything to me.

Scars: n/a

B4UTRUST wrote:Rukia,

When your character is attacked and shot at, is she within the mad city at that point? Otherwise her madness talent wouldn't work. They only work within the Mad City.

didn't i do the same thing? I walked out of a burning building without a scratch

You're right, you did. I didn't notice it till you pointed it out. Damn 12 hour shifts screwing with me...

To make it clear; outside the mad city powers do not work. Inside the city, they work. If you haven't crossed into the city yet, you're not able to tap into them.

What’s Been Keeping You Awake?

Malcolm Corvin was living a reasonably happy life, working at a small advertising firm. He'd become used to slamming Sobe Adrenaline Rushes to stay awake the long hours needed to finish projects, sometimes not sleeping for a day or two at a time before sleeping for half a day, or longer.

He'd found a woman, named Angie, who appeared to like him for who he was rather than his money. They fell in love, and got married six months later, all seeming blissful.

It wasn't long before she didn't want him to see any of his old friends, saying that they were "bad influences;" or getting her name on all his finances and bills. When she divorced him in a horribly messy fashion, the prenuptial agreement she'd had him sign gave her the house they lived in, the two cars he owned; essentially nearly everything he had except for the clothes in his closet.

Worse yet, she'd arranged to have the biggest deal his fledgling advertising agency had ever landed crash, and crash horribly. She seemed to take malicious pleasure in ruining new things he'd tried, including dates with other women after he'd gotten over her - she'd manage to find out where he took a lady on a date, arrange a diversion for him to be away from her for a while, and then talk to the lady while he was away. One left immediately, and got a restraining order on him. Two others waited for him to come back before telling him off for being a wife-abusing scumbag, and one slapped him before leaving. The last maced him at their dinner table before leaving.

Finally, he legally got his name changed, moved halfway across the country, and got a job in the IT industry, working around servers for a living. He finds their presence much more comforting than peoples', now. He began buying energy drinks by the box, and staying awake for days at a time, getting obsessively involved with learning computer programming languages, and not wanting to sleep, lest he dream of his ex-wife.

What Just Happened to You?
Malcolm was returning home from a three-day programming binge with no sleep, and he felt like he finally was beginning to understand a few of the underlying laws of programming. He was musing to himself that some of the programming principles he was tinkering with had quite a bit to do with reality itself, when he got to his apartment. On the doorstep of his ground floor apartment, he saw what was one his pride and joy, the sleek silver Ferrari Testerossa he once owned, compacted into a cube, with a note attached. With a shaking hand, he opened the note, which contained only a few lines, which he'd remember for the rest of his life.

Thought you could run from me, huh? You agreed to be my little meal-ticket, and you running away like a bitch only makes me spend your money on finding you to make your life hell, meaning I have to put off buying my own private jet for another month. Your ass will pay for this. Here's a token of my esteem, pencil-dick. Take it as a physical sign that I'm going to do this to everything you've ever loved.

Love, kisses, and neverending hell for you,

- Angie

With that, Malcolm felt that everything was definitely going to go wrong.

What’s on the Surface?

A tall, handsome man in his late 30's or early 40's, purple circles beneath his eyes from the stress of not sleeping. He dresses in tasteful and attractive business-casual clothes. He take a detached view from everything - the observant might notice that he treats everything he gains as if its going to be forcibly taken away from him, so he enjoys it while he can, but never allows himself to be attached.

What Lies Beneath?
Though his tumultuous relationship with his ex-wife has hardened him in many ways, he simply wants her to leave him alone. Optimally, he'd hope she has a sudden shocking change of heart and tries to be a decent person and never does what she did to him to anyone else, but he knows that's too much to ask. Instead, he'd settle for simply being left alone.

He's tried filing a restraining order against her, but she sends minions. He's tried to have her arrested for harassment, but she never left fingerprints or a trail leading back to her - and it doesn't help that her brother works for the FBI.

Malcolm almost feels as if he's drifting aimlessly, having any lifelines he had taken away from him. Beneath it all, he'd love to find something he would enjoy doing again, a woman to love and be loved by in return, without having to look over his shoulder.

What’s Your Path?
His story is the story of a man who was shattered, and is now trying to pick up the pieces, and find a way to avoid being shattered again. He doesn't trust women much anymore, either.

Talents of Exhaustion
- Figuring Out How Things Tick: Malcolm's talent for being able to take in a situation, person, place, or thing, and size it up with all the details is simply astonishing. Not only can he pick up even seemingly meaningless details, he can add up all the details into a coherent whole with staggering speed. This allows him to understand nuances, weaknesses, ties to other people/places/things/situations, and other traits seemingly in an instant.

Talents of Madness
- Murphy's Law: As if manifesting his inner turmoil, he can focus on this turmoil, and force things, people, and situations around him to simply begin going horribly awry. Items break, people forget vital information or things, an assailant will injure themselves terribly on accident, security doors were left unlocked, and more.

I'll give it another day or so for people to sign up or say they want to sign up(glances at Frigid). After that I'll start.

all characters at the moment are approved, though do remember that madness talents are unusuable outside of the mad city.

Game will begin with characters making introductory posts leading them into the city and the time following that.