We Do WHAT In The Shadows!? - Ep. 3

In this episode we sadly see a loved one peacefully pass away as a result of a bloodthirsty murder. Also Guido moves to a new region!

Content warning: Profanity, murder

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Special thanks:

Tim Hutchings for designing this awesome game,

Epidemicsound for music

Transcript

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Introduction

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Hello, and welcome to Your Worst Nightmare, another RPG actual play podcast. Solotude, a journaling RPG podcast, is just me in a room, not to brag, with a journal, a solo RPG, and some damn good coffee. I play to see what happens in the story, I write in my fictional journal, and you get to hang out next to me by the fire. So welcome, I hope you enjoy our time together. Content warnings can be found in the episode description. This is Solotude, we do what's in the shadows?

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Intro

Musings from the shadows

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So, we've made our guy, Gi, uh, Guido The name was, uh, kind of a last minute addition I ended up liking it I'm not gonna explain why he has, and all the other monks there have Italian names since they're British exchange monks in Italy Maybe his actual Christian name is Guy, but he goes by Guido because, because of Italy I've got a few ideas about what I want to do at the beginning of each episode, because I want to ease my way in into actually playing, so let's go ahead and try something. I want to get to know our guy a little bit better by doing something I like to call Musings from the Shadows. I want to come up with something, like a factoid or something that Guido is up to, something he likes, about his eternal life. Granted, it's only just beginning, but he came up in a very opinionated household with a bunch of dads, and he's got some opinions about his life. Guido is really looking forward to getting a coffin. I mean, he isn't sure if having a coffin is part of being an actual vampire, but that's one thing he knows, and he's ready to get that shit pimped out. I'm talking velvet insides, crystal outsides, nice lower back support. He's gonna make a coffin for himself either way, just be sure, because it's not like his unholy sire Arnold the Athlete gave him a pamphlet titled So You're a Vampire that goes through a checklist. No. So he has to figure this shit out for himself. He's gonna make a fucking nice, an ace of a coffin for himself. And he's a vain guy. He likes all things pretty. I think that's where a lot of his spare time is going in the early

First prompt

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days. That's it. Let's move on to actually playing. We get to figure out our first prompt. So essentially we start from number one. and I'm gonna roll a d6 and d10, so a six-sided and a ten-sided die, and then we'll subtract the six-sided die's result from the bigger one. Here goes. First roll of the campaign. It's a two and a two, so it's zero, so we stay on one. Prompt one says, In your... Oh my god, this is off to a great start. In your blood hunger, you destroy someone close to you. Kill a mortal character. Create a mortal if none are available. Take the skill Bloodthirsty. Shit, we gotta kill somebody. We do have mortal people. We have Father... Augustus, Father Augustus. We have our brother in All Things Penis, Garibaldi. Gary, I guess. Then we have Veronica. We have the debtor, the smuggler who's been dealing cheap jewelry for our guy. Who do we want to kill? Why would Guy kill some one of these? Let's figure this out. Father Augustus, he likes. They have a good, albeit distant, relationship. But he respects, he's always respected him. It would be a dramatic move, and a good reason for that would be Father Augustus sees Guido in his vampiric form, sees what he has become, tries to save him, and Guido ends up... Killing Father Augustus. Augusto? Yeah. I like that. Let's go through the other two possibilities. So Garibaldi... I can see that happening too. If Garibaldi is going to start some shit again, maybe they have a sexual interaction again or something close to that, and Garibaldi acts like a dick, which we established he has done and it has hurt... Guido quite bad. That might be reason enough to give our guy a nice dose of bloodthirst. The third one I don't like that much. I want the troublesome person to be around for a longer time. Veronica. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'd like it if it built up to something a bit more. I really like the idea of murdering the head monk. How does it happen? Is it an accident? The actual prompt says, in your blood hunger, you destroy someone. So it's not like an accident. It's not like falling down the stairs and then being like, might as well eat him. I don't think it works like that. Guido has been distant. He said he's... Okay, so... Guido has told the monks he's sick. He's been living in the garden shed where he crawled into. He's been in there for a long time, for weeks now. And he says to the monks that he's sick, he might be infectious, and please leave me alone while I try to figure this out. Father Augusto senses a disturbance in the faith. He feels like there's something is wrong, something unnatural is happening in the garden shed. And I assure you it's not the first time. That fucking garden shed has had so many demonic possessions and poltergeists and stuff. It's like Father Augusto has a kit ready to go. He packs his shit, he comes over to the garden shed and tries to figure out what's going on. Our guy gets annoyed real fast. He realizes he can't persuade Father Augusto to leave, and a fight ensues. Since our mark is the burning right hand, for some reason, for now, I really wanted that there's... Putting a glove on, it works. That it won't burn the glove off. Because I really like the aesthetic of taking your glove off and just the hand bursting into flame. So that's what happens. Father Augusto is burned. His body is destroyed. So Father Augusto is trying to exercise this garden shed demonic spirit. That's what he thinks from Guido. Guido breaks Father Augusto's body. In his anger, he kills him. And eats him. I don't want our guy to have to hide somebody. He fucking drains the Holy Spirit out of him. And it's so tasty. It's delicious. Yeah. Okay, so I'll mark the new skill. Our guy is bloodthirsty, and that's a skill we can use. It's a skill we're likely to use. We didn't end up... using any of our current skills in this one. We didn't check one. I think that's it. We need to wipe Father Augusto from our character list. We gained a new skill. The only thing left is to figure out where to put this experience. Since the game mechanics say that a vampire may have five memories, and three experiences per memory. If an experience logically, narratively fits into one of the already existing memories, we can just stick it there. So a memory can have three separate experiences kind of painting a more detailed picture of this one aspect of the vampire's life. There's also another rule for the vampire actually keeping a journal, which is I'm kind of already doing like an in-universe diary. I imagine this is the diary I write for Guido is actually Guido's diary. It's the one he's writing. Mechanically, a journal can contain up to three memories. So now, since... In character creation, we had to create five experiences and stick them into five different memories. Our memory slots are full, so I think we should wipe one memory out now, since this experience doesn't really fit with any of the pre-existing memories, which are childhood, learning music, codependency on Garibaldi, traveling for holy ball tournaments, and the temptations of the muscled hair. I don't think this fits into any of them, so we make a new memory with a new experience. I think the childhood one, the oldest one, the one where Guido wrote in as a 10-year-old, where he explained his existential... view on life and kind of a desperation that he has had with himself for some reason since he was 10. Fun fact, the memory I wrote up for Guido about the birthdays, like what is even the point of birthdays since it's just another year closer to death, that's an actual thing I said when I was five. So, yay! Yeah, I'm gonna move the childhood memories into my diary. So, narratively, this means the vampire forgets his childhood. And Guido quickly writes his experiences in a journal. From now on, he does not remember his childhood in the monastery. He can read about it in his journal if he likes. This mechanic... This mechanic is so cool. Since... Since he starts forgetting his memories from his early childhood, he starts forgetting his close relations with the brother monks and especially Father Augusto, in his new life he has no space for childhood. Makes perfect narrative sense. Then let's move on to the next one.

Second prompt

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Here it goes. It's a five and a two, so it's a three. We move three prompts forward, so two, three, four. We're now landing on prompt four, which says, you are exposed and flee to a neighboring region. Lose any stationary resources. Check a skill. A mortal flees with you. What new name do you adopt among these strangers? Ooh, interesting. I was hoping we'd get something that gets us out of the monastery, or that's probably a move I would have wanted to do either way. So, we're now exposed. Makes sense. I think it really makes sense. The monastery is a small place. It has a few dozen... dudes hanging with other dudes, having a dudely and godly old time. It's not a large place, and it's quite intimate, so when one of you turns to the forces of darkness, it's kind of hard to disguise. So maybe Guido tried to... disguise himself as a human? And his body reacted in all sorts of ways... while doing the monkly shit, like praying. Yeah, his body reacted to prayer and communion and all the monastery stuff. It became apparent quite quickly. A mortal flees with you, I think it's quite easy to say that it's Garibaldi. For whatever reason, What if Garibaldi now loves us? What if this is the thing for Garibaldi? Before, for Garibaldi, it was just a mess of confused sexual lust and early 20s feelings. What if he's really into this vampire shit? The fangs do stuff for him. And the burning right hand. So Garibaldi comes with us. We didn't really have any stationary resources. We can take Father Augusto's loot. That's one of our resources. We have a whole bunch of jewelry and trinkets. Though that's not really our resource since it's beauty. Our beauty is super easy to take with us. We have a bunch of creams and lipsticks and exfoliators and... Mascara and shampoo. All these fancy things normal people can't afford. Yep, we pack all that shit up. And then we have the baby blue handkerchief. Those are our three resources. The prompt says we have to mark one. So what that means is we use one resource... in the process. So one of these is central somehow. I think we could do selling the jewelry, and that's how they get enough money to move to a region close to them. But I don't like that. I think Guido is vain. Guido wants to look good and make an impression wherever he goes. So, let's use Father Augusto's lute. I put a little checkmark there. What this means, what using the lute here means, it's not the fleeing, per se, where it's used. It's how they make a living with garibaldi. They become street musicians. They play the lute and they sing. Guido can't play the lute for very long until the strings snap. He can only do like a short fiery piece, but he can sing. That's what they do. They move to... I'm gonna have to learn some Italian geography. They're in Umbria in the Apennines, like right smack in the middle of Italy. I don't want them to go to Rome yet. They go to Florence, Firenze. It's not super far, and it's a different region, so it matches. It's a very artistic art history renaissance city, even if I believe the Italian renaissance is kind of waning already in the late 1500s. But still, it's like less than a hundred years from most of the great Renaissance artists. And it's super easy to see that a person who values beauty so much, that they'd want to go to probably one of the most beautiful cities in the world. He wants to go to a place where it is beautiful to live, where he can feel... Where he, with great humility, thinks he'll fit his surroundings. Yeah. Okay, so the only thing we have unresolved is what new name do you adopt among these strangers? I'm fully committed on keeping the guy gag going. So... Guide? The Guide? He's called The Guide. As in Person Who Guides. And he continues murdering people, people he doesn't know, and he's not going to hide that side of him from Garibaldi. Instead, Garibaldi is really into that. Garibaldi loves it, and becomes kind of enthralled with that side, the dark side of the world. And since Guido does love Garibaldi, at least he thinks he does, he loves the attention he's getting. He's getting the kind of attention from Garibaldi he wanted to get, but never did. So now that kind of gives him motivation to keep the bloodthirst up, since Garibaldi is into that. Okay, so how does the name The Guide fit into this? I think Guido gets pretty well known for singing, for becoming like a lifestyle guru. He sings songs about how you should solve your problems, and he's like an ancient oracle. He becomes like a half-mystical figure in the streets of Affirente. He doesn't just sing pop songs or take requests, he... gives out advice. It's mostly just quotes from the holy ball rulebook, since that's the philosophical basis for his whole worldview. And also he guides people around. People ask for directions, he directs them to a place where he can kill them. And this is what he does with Garibaldi. They trick someone to a remote place where he burns them. I want him to have to sear the flesh first to corrupt the being he's about to consume. Only then he can eat. Only then he can feast on the tainted flesh. And it happens quite a bit. They get by with the money they get from playing on the street. No holy ball, I think. It... The only spiking he's practicing is spiking deez nuts. No, the only spiking he's practicing is spiking people's necks. For the bloodthirsty murder of Father Augusto, I created a new memory called Murdering Loved Ones. And I feel like that's a memory we'll get to happily fill out in the following centuries. But where do we stick this one? Hmm... Learning music? No, codependency on Garibaldi. I feel like it fits pretty well. There are other parts in this experience as well, but I think that fits... I think just framing it through that device, that memory, Story-wise, this is the road to Garibaldi's heart. And Guido is very pleased and happy in his unlife and his new abilities, since the easiest way to a man's heart is through a decapitated head. And I believe this is also the essence of Holy Ball. I feel like I'm really getting into the headspace of the Austrian inventor monk Arnold E. Weichneger. So we now have two separate experiences in the memory codependency on guttivality. I love this. We could have also checked the beauty skill on this one, but I feel I kind of wanted to save it for the most horrible situation where I could possibly use it. And I think that's it for today. I hope you're as excited as I am, because I really want to see where this guy's life is going. I try to keep these actual play sessions quite short, as short as I can, and then I'll write up the journals so you can enjoy more detail in that. So, broad strokes in these actual play sessions. Details and more character voice, I guess, in the journal entries. Yeah, that's it. Guido Lanzoni and I will see you in the next episode with the journal entries for these two prompts. I'll catch you on the streets of Florence. You bring the loot and I'll bring the crescendo

Call to action

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of death. Thanks for listening, folks! My name is Auri Itemäki, and Solotude is my personal project. I really hope you enjoy your time with it. Additional episode music and sound effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Theme song courtesy of me! You can follow Solotude on Instagram at solotudeshow. If you got something you wanna say, drop a message or comment. I'd love to hear your ideas, suggestions on where to take this format and this show. Also, please rate and review the show so people can find it. There's no budget, it's just me. So it would be awesome if more people found the show. Solo 2 drops every week. Every other week there will be an actual play episode, and on the off weeks I'll do a proper journal reading with music, sound effects, and a whole lot of drama. Thank you again for listening. Bye!