We Do WHAT In The Shadows!? - Ep. 4

It's episode 4! 

Vampire psychotherapy is in! Also we pack our bags (with 80kg of pure Garibaldi) and move somewhere new!

We also learn an important tidbit of japanese history, so pay attention.

Content warning: Profanity, murder, becoming a good husband

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Special thanks:

Tim Hutchings for designing this awesome game,

Epidemicsound for music

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

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, 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. This is Solotude. We do what in the shadows? So. I have before me, open, the Wikipedia page for 1582, which is the year we're currently on. The most interesting thing that happens around this time of the year is in Japan. June 21st is when the warlord Oda Nobunaga is assassinated in Kyoto. Guido's life, other than his name kind of sounds like Kyoto. Maybe there's a large influx of disgraced Nobunaga samurai who are traveling to the western countries. It's highly unlikely and historically inaccurate. But hey, so is holy ball, so who the fuck cares? I would like to incorporate some historical stuff, but there's not a lot happening in the summer of 1582, especially in northern Italy, where we're in right now. But hey, now you know. Let's get into the game. Do we have to recap something? I'll just do a very quick recap on my resources and stuff like that. The characters I've written down... The moral ones are Garibaldi and Veronica. We haven't seen Veronica yet at all. Veronica is the smuggler who sold Guido a lot of jewelry and stuff, and Guido owes her quite a bit of money, so I'm sure the debts will follow Guido at some point. There's the secret cabal cult. We didn't name any of the members, or I didn't name any of the members intentionally. It's just your run-of-the-mill elderly holy ball cult. You know? One of those. I know Hollywood has done it over and over again. With the Immortals, I have Angelique de Boulangerie, the Parisian noble vampire. And I also... The rulebook didn't make me do it. I did this of my own accord. Can you believe it? I wrote down as a character, an immortal character, Giuseppe the Giant, which was the jigsaw Frankenstein holy ball player that they space jammed our guy's holy ball skills into. The recap is already weird. I love it. What else? Skills, we have a few marked ones. We haven't used bloodthirsty sexual mastery or the new one, hypnosis. Resources, we still have unmarked beauty and the secret cabal. And those are what we're going to be working with. We're currently at prompt eight and I'm going to roll. Let's see where we end up. Uh, it's, uh, 1 minus 5. Oh, shit. 4 backwards? So, from 8 we move back to 4. Um, hey, we've done 4 twice already. Uh... So the third stage is the secret cabal. Without your knowledge performs a dark ceremony that changes a mortal character into a horrific alien and immortal thing. Convert a mortal character into an immortal enemy? What alien objectives does this new immortal pursue? Did the cabal manipulate you into helping with this creation? How does this change your relationship to the cabal? Well, the The obvious answer would be that they somehow turned Garibaldi against me. I don't like this, since I kind of already did this. I mean, not exactly, but they already created an immortal character, and they are my enemies, or they're not my friends, they're using me. And they're not helping me. No, they're antagonists. I don't like this. Don't tell Tim Hutchings, but I'll just ignore this and re-roll. Because it's not a fun one, because it's too similar. So it's a 7 and a 4, which, if we're at 8, 3... Right? Yes. 3, so 11. How do you find solace from the raging hunger within you? You may lose one checked or unchecked skill. This works. I feel like the prompts we've done have been very plotty. Or, like, story heavy. This would be a nice chance to kind of take it easy for a while and not worry about where things are going. and enjoy the present. The way we ended last time was that Guido is kind of getting frustrated. He doesn't like being in the position he is in, where everybody seems to be using him. Everybody comes up with a way to get something from him. Angelique wants to use him against the Zed family in Paris. The secret cabal wants to use him, or already is using him, to space jam their way into the championship. He has only been hiding and doing everybody else's bidding, so for the frustration he's experiencing, I can see how he would need solace, how he would need to find something that's his, that's his own. That's not for anybody else, not even for Garibaldi, it's just for him, for himself. I also feel like the way the last journal entry went is... Guido is starting to feel distance to Garibaldi. I know the way I've written Garibaldi is he's not the most attractive young man, but there's something to him, he's... He's a predictable man who worships Guido and, well, not really even Guido, just the monster in him. And that's fine for Guido, for now. I don't think there's a deep emotional connection between them. At least not until Garibaldi will agree to wear pants. Which is never. If there's one thing about Garibaldi, okay, it's the poor hygiene. He can't help it, he has a condition. But the other is he will not wear pants. That's his one thing. He's a man of principle, and that's the only principle he has. It's a no-pants household. Where was I? Yes. Yes, this is fun. I like this. So again, it's how do you find solace from the raging hunger within you? You may lose one checked or unchecked skill. So, I just recapped the skills, or the unchecked ones. The checked ones are music composition or holy ball spiker. Well, those are integral parts of his persona and identity. He's not going to give up music, balls, or God. God isn't a skill he has, but it's just something he really believes in. So there's sexual mastery, bloodthirsty, hypnosis... You know what? I want, since this is about Guido, his identity, his relationship with Garibaldi, I want to focus in on that. No world building, no plotty outside stuff. It's an introspective journal entry. We haven't had one of those. I want to write one where I don't have to explain stuff or do a lot of exposition. I just want to get in Guido's head and have him describe what stuff feels like. So there's the raging hunger, which he hasn't found a healthy way to express. I wonder if there's vampire psychotherapy. You know, there should be a healthy way to express your raging hunger. I don't know if that was French or German. I'm all over the place. I'm sorry. It's the coffee. I just had a shitload of coffee. And I blame the coffee makers of Finland. What if he lost the holy ball skills? There's been a lot of focus on the holy ball stuff. And I like it. I want to keep it in. And I want to build towards whatever... climax that's going to. But what if he loses his skills? Ooh, yes! I want to write, like, a psychotherapy session. So the next journal entry would be, or the entry for this would be, like, a therapy session with Garibaldi and Guido. Yes, that will flesh things out nicely. And that's where Guido realizes practicing the forms, the basic movements of holy ball... as designed by the muscled hare, the fiend of Vienna himself. It really ignites his bloodthirst. It makes him go crazy, it makes him want to bite people and... It makes him want to tear people apart. Since he can't really tear the ball apart, except with Garibaldi, of course, since the cult is space-jamming him. So he gives it up. He decides to give up his holy ball skills to Giuseppe the Giant completely. Not like they've been, they've been harvesting, they've been harvesting his or extracting his skills every night for a while. But he just, he doesn't want it back. It makes, it gives him calm. He still has the knowledge. He could still be a coach one day. or something like that, but he gives up his spiking skills. So through psychotherapy, behavioral or cognitive, we'll see. And after he's done with holy ball, he's free. I'd suppose he's free of the cult as well, or at least he's free to go to Paris, which is something I really want to do, because I want to get the years going. I don't want to get stuck in... our guy's 20s for a long time. I really want to get the clock going. So, with the cult's hunger appeased, I think he's gonna feel free. He's gonna feel free to move around. He's still gonna kill people, but he's gonna be professional about it. I mean, do you get bloodthirst when you eat a chicken? If you do, seek help. Psychotherapy can help you. And with that, I think prompt number... I think the first prompt is done. So let's move on to the next one. It's a six and a seven, so that's one step forward to prompt number 12. New laws or social mores? Mores? Mores? Um, make it harder for you to hide among the populace. How are you nearly caught and destroyed? Check a skill. Create a skill. Create a mortal criminal who assists you. Perfect. Fucking perfect. Uh, this is... Yes. I think this makes it, uh, this makes it super easy for Guido to move. This is exactly what I, what I, the kind of stuff I wanted. Uh... We can make this work very nicely. We'll move Guido to Paris, which is a natural way to bring about new laws or social mores. And he has a hard time blending in, especially since he's blending into the aristocracy. I already mentioned before that there's the religious wars happening in France. And they're still going on for over 10 years from now. So reading up very quickly, it seems that England and the Dutch Republic are backing the Protestants and Spain is supporting the Catholics. Yes, makes sense. And probably makes sense for... Well, I haven't really... I'm not sure if I ever made a decision on whether Guido is Catholic or Protestant. Catholicism would be the obvious choice, probably. Yeah, so politically he's going to be on the Spain side instead of the English. It's funny that the monastery was full of volleyball-playing English Catholics in Italy. Who cares? Weird stuff happens in the world all the time. Fiction shouldn't be any different. How are you nearly caught and destroyed? So I need to check a skill. So I use some kind of a skill to get out of being caught and destroyed and through the ordeal I kind of gain a new perspective. And there's a mortal criminal who assists me. Guido is almost caught. Okay, let's take a step back. They get to Paris. And it's a full-blown religious war. It's ideologically and politically very tense. There's new laws about not being able to go outside, or like, there's a curfew for a while, and that makes life harder for vampires, since they do have to get out at night. Makes it harder to hide among the populace. Guido will have to hunt We'll have to keep on going outside and taking bigger and bigger risks just to survive. He's caught when feeding by like a politician, like a bigwig of some sort. I'll check the skill bloodthirsty. I'm nearly caught but I murder his entire family. Okay, not he's okay. Yes, yes, I know what to do. I'm not gonna murder his fucking family, I'm gonna take over the family. Okay, so it's... Yes, let's do this. The mortal criminal who assists me is somebody who's getting me people to eat. This is somebody... Angelique hooked me up with somebody, and Angelique says that there's too much heat right now, we can't move with the family wars. I don't want to write a bunch of lore right now about the family wars, so Angelique will... ease us in into the aristocratic society. So there's a local criminal who arranges food for the vampires. There's not a lot of vampires because they wouldn't be able to keep it secret. But at least in the Boulangerie family, there's some. And maybe in the Zed family, maybe I don't want to get into what they are yet. I want to play to find out. I don't want to have any plans for them. The criminal who assists me arranges for me somebody to eat in a quiet, quiet place, and I stick my bitey-biteys in their neck and begin sucking. That's when a local merchant or a minor noble or something walks in and witnesses it happening. I kill him, checking bloodthirsty, and I raid his home and... I'm about to kill his wife. It's just the two of them. The wife is young. The noble man I killed, also young. I'm about to kill her in my bloodthirst when I don't. Guido strikes a deal with her. That Guido is going to take the dead guy's identity. Guido is going to try... to get into the nobility that way. And maybe Angelique encourages this. Maybe Angelique said that Guido needs more time to ease into the aristocracy. So he's just gonna fucking create a noble family. So I checked bloodthirsty, I gain a skill. Family man. Aristocrats? No, that's more of a resource. Being a good husband. I'm gonna do that. So he gains the skill of being a good spouse. Being a good husband. Maybe it was like an arranged situation where the wife did not care too much about the dead guy and she's not happy about the way things went, but Guido is going to be respectful. I want the skill of being a good husband. Guido is going to be respectful. He's gonna be there for her, and he's gonna find a way to make things work. Do I want it to be a noble or a merchant? Let's make it a merchant, like a shipwright. Okay, let's do a shipwright or, yeah. I'm not going to create a skill on how to make fucking ships. I'm going to be a good husband. That's what these fantasy games are good for. Heightened reality. So I wasn't destroyed. Instead, I gained a family business and a family. What does Garibaldi think of this? Is Garibaldi going to move in with us? I mean, he's going to have to. But I think at this point, Guido is going to feel like Garibaldi is... is kind of a pain in the ass Garibaldi will pose as like a brother or or a cousin who's in there to help out but since the shipwright was just was not a big wig let's change it so that it's a more minor position he had but somebody who was about to step up so a booming business about to happen so nobody really knows what he looks like the wife is good with the arrangement and is at least not, for now, not going to flee. She's not going to go anywhere. She's not going to report Guido or Garibaldi. Yes, I like this. I really, really like this. And the new laws and social mores are about that it's hard to go out at night and there's a curfew in place because of all the crazy religious people Doing a violence upon each other. This is what we're gonna do. These are our two entries for today. We got some psychotherapy with Garibaldi, and then we moved to Paris and gained a family. We're a family guy. I want to get things moving. This is the next episode. I hope we'll get some prompts that'll make it easy for us to do... A jump of a few decades, maybe. I don't want to jump into centuries immediately, but decades I would like to do. I'd like to get a broader perspective on stuff. And most importantly, while all this is going on, Oda Nobunaga dies. Assassination. Maybe by a vampire. Who knows? Maybe that'll turn out to be the single most important thing to happen in this campaign. That's going to tie everything neatly together. in a beautiful package of secret vampiric history. I doubt it, but who the fuck cares? We're playing to find out. That's what the kids are doing these days, and so am I. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week. Bye! Thanks for listening, folks! My name is Auri Itemäki and Solotude is my personal project. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Additional episode music and sound effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Theme song courtesy of me. You can follow Solotude on Instagram, at solotudeshow, and if you got something to say, drop a message or comment. I'm still absolutely figuring out the exact format of the show, so I'd be delighted to hear your ideas and suggestions on where to take it. I'd like to implement some stuff I didn't think of, so please, please tell me what to do, and I'll do it. No hypnosis required. Also, please rate and review the show so people can find it a little bit easier. I don't have a budget. I don't have a plan. It's just me playing a game on mic. So it would be awesome if more people found the show. Solotude drops every week. Every other week, there's an actual play episode, and on the off weeks, I'll do a proper journal reading with music, sound effects, the whole deal. So you can enjoy Solotude as an actual play podcast or as an audio drama if you prefer to just listen to the journal entries. Or probably the best experience is to do both. Up to you, I don't know. I'm not going to check hypnosis on you just yet. So thanks for listening, folks. And see you next week. Bye!