Current Mood:  thoughtful
So, after attending AIT with folks last night, it became obvious thart I needed to create a character that actually had some hooks that other folks would actually need to know about and find use for. That required actually coming up with a real character background, which I just can't play a character without. The irony was that Ki needed a decent character to get involved with, too ... and then the twisted idea to be an Embraced brother and sister who run an occult library/bookstore came up, and it just got weird from there ... ( Ryo and Eko Shinta ) Background In 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the temporary internment of Japanese living in the United States. Similar camps were authorized in Canada by the government of the day. As a result, 120,000 Japasnese and Japanese-descended citizens were rounded-up into one of ten "relocation centers." Ruby and Nicholas Shinta were a newlywed couple whose parents had come to America only a decade before. They were placed in the California relocation center together, and began to try and piece together what would become of their lives. That consideration was ruptured when Ruby was raped by a gaijin guard in the spring of 1943. When they discovered that the violence would have issue, they were devastated. By the time of Ryo's birth in '44, they were adamant that their child would be steeped in the culture of their homeland and not assimilated as their parents had intended them to be. Ryo's gaijin appearance and physical deformity were both hard shocks, insult to injury, for his beleaguered parents. They remained insistent that he be culturally Japanese, but their Asian distaste for the crippled and their hardness of heart at his white appearance made it impossible for them to truly love him. While the boy possessed a brilliant wit and devotion to learning, his parents kept him locked in small rooms, away from the eyes of their neighbors, bent over the accounting for their small laundry in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the Shintas were working at expanding their family. A brother and a sister followed, and as they grew older, they too took their parents' attitude toward the now bitter but unhumbled Ryo. Their taunts and petty cruelties hardened the boy and honed his distaste for humanity in general to a fine, keen edge. It was his second sister, Eko, who came thereafter, who provided for both their escapes. Eko was born sickly and weak, and the Shintas despaired of her ever finding her feet. Always small, she became hardy with amazing swiftness and was the true monkey of the family, often found climbing on the bookshelves or even on the rooftops. She seldom spoke, and when she did, it seemed as if she was deliberately leaving her listeners to make their own decisions about what she'd actually said, but unlike her older siblings, she did not antagonize her eldest brother but accorded him the respect her parents told her he was owed, though they, apparently, felt it was unnecessary from their perspective. Eko had a taste for fine things, things her parents' position could sorely provide. Her quick fingers and sharp tongue won her way into places she had no reason to be and out again with pretty baubles. Or books. It was the books which made the way for Ryo's departure. Once he was eighteen, and having read certain texts which his sister had mysteriously acquired from the better part of the city, a man came knocking at the Shinta door. Old, wizened, with wisps of white hair scattered across his bald pate, the man gave no name but the Shintas knelt with the deepest respect. He had come, he said, for the boy. When they pushed their second son forward to the man, he curled his lip distastefully and called out for the clever child. Eko ran to the back to fetch out Ryo, who emerged with a small bag of things and a couple of ratty books. The old man smiled, nodded, and they left together. Eko was not to stay much longer herself. Laundry had no call for her and there was a wide world of things outside to be had, so at sixteen she left the family household and never looked back. The next years on the street were harrowing and difficult, but there were people whom she knew who appreciated other peoples' things as much as she did, and they were willing to look after her good interests to some degree. It was there that she learned the axiom that was to change her life to unlife: Crime is an art drawn in the most delicate hand. Eko's life of crime ended abruptly upon her capture in the midst of a daring caper, having broken into a Toreador haven in search of a previously uncatalogued Faberge egg. Facing the inhabitant, the leech was entranced by the gracefulness of Eko's movements and the cunning of her plans, which the vampire had followed for some time and even had commissioned the current theft. Eko's life ended at the age of twenty, but her capabilities were only augmented by her new found existence. It wasn't until the late 60's that Eko met her brother again. He had been taken to the home of an even older geomancer than the man who'd come to the door seeking him and apprenticed to the wizened elder then and there. And then followed years of back-breaking work and study, during which he learned many arcane secrets. The ultimate secret, of course, was that the old master was older than he appeared and subsisted on the blood of the weak, a life which he was finally ready to initiate the boy-now-man into. Thus did Ryo enter the Chantry of the Tremere. It didn't take long for Ryo and Eko to learn that cooperation between them both was far more useful than working separately. Ryo's knowledge of the obscenities lurking in the back of the world combined well with Eko's ability to steal the icons of that obscenity. They built a small library of works of occult significance, but were forced to abandon it when the Kuei-Jin influence in San Francisco increased to the point they actively sought the Thaumaturges in the city for destruction. The pair moved to Houston briefly, finally deciding on their cover story. They would set up a small import/export bookstore/library to cater to their fellow undead occultists, and use it as a front to acquire, study, and sell stolen memorabilia of the dark places of the world. Where better to set up such an enterprise than Atlanta?
Yes, a half-Japanese cripple as a neonate Tremere, and his sneaky, thief-girl sister Toreador. If that doesn't hurt your brain, we just aren't trying hard enough to do psychic damage to you. But of course, the above begs the question ... why do systems based on MET suck quite as hard as they do? Though the new system where you carry 11 cards (1 - 10, plus an Ace) sounds actually quite usable to me given that I can't exactly throw much except rock. But I digress. LARP systems are pretty much inherently hard to design. You don't want too much baggage in the way of record-keeping because you end up with folks' hands too full of stuff to actually play. On the other hand, you don't want them to feel like the mechanics don't give a skilled character an advantage over the unskilled, so there needs to be a bit of crunch. But that introduces the issue of power-curve between established and new characters, and few game designers for LARPs have the cojones to introduce a system that deliberately doesn't introduce mechanical character growth. | 
tired![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
amused
creative
indescribable
mischievous
