See P. XX: What Happened in This is Normal Now

 

A column about roleplaying

by Robin D. Laws

This column concludes a four-part series illustrating what might happen in your grand Yellow King Roleplaying Game arc with a precis of what happened in mine.

It’s the present day. Not in a weird, post-revolutionary New York City, but in Toronto. Where everything is safe and ordinary. Where the characters we saw in the previous sequence of YKRPG lead quotidian lives, as drifted versions of their formerly hard-nosed, war-damaged selves.

In our sequence of This is Normal Now, the PCs looked like this:

 

Player	Character	Job	Drive	Freaking Weird Moment	Familiar Face
Chris	Alex Chavez	Barista	Greed	boss was murdered by an invisible stalker	na
Justin	Walter van Sickle	Technical Writer	Adventure	went to a Fringe play and doesn’t remember anything from intermission on & usher said play hadn’t happened that night	Lester Steele – (former silver cartel) boss
Paul	Georges Dubois	Landscape Painter	Thirst for Inspiration	aced his med school exam but exam he submitted was not what he wrote	Jordan von Sommer – (former preppy cop) – university pal
Rachel	Judith Dortmuth	Photographer	Malleable	at her friend’s photo opening, with playfully occult portrait – one of the portraits winked at her	Neera – TTC bus driver
Scott	Gavin Byrne	PKD Lecture organizer	Wants a Weirder World	woke up on the slab in the Process building	Tami Akana – his boss in this world, People’S Deputy
Sue	Sara Delaney	Barista – / Aspiring Actress The Munchie Zone, next door to Cannabis Connection	Learn Real Magic To Make Herself a Star	tried to cast a spell and actually succeeded in levitating an object	Jeff Gill aka Creepy Carcoscan Guy – boyfriend and fellow barista — a not so successful classical musician
Jurie	Jack Vanderbos	Marketing Coordinator	Escape from Mundanity	Checking Tweetdeck for his clients’ social media & led to weird meme / bot campaign about #foxes — all trace then vanished	Edmund Dawson – (former dissident) – hangs out in the park wearing tweed and being wise & playing chess

 

The Familiar Face entry notes the counterpart of a GMC from the previous sequence, drifted to the mundane reality of this one.

Chris went through a record number of characters in this final installment. The above entry notes his character as of the conclusion. His first character, Jerry Jean-Leon, appeared in this reality as a security guard, working at the weed dispensary owned by Scott’s original PC, Ben Rodriguez—who in Aftermath had been the Government Lethal Chamber technician.

What can I say? The mind-bending swirl of our 2018 had the Shock cards coming thick and fast, and, well, emotional casualties occurred.

The introductory scenario from the book, “Entanglement,” took two sessions, bringing the group together and showing them that they were all somehow connected by a supernatural conspiracy.

The following two sessions led them to investigate an up-and-coming local politician with unsavory links to Carcosa and associated atavistic philosophies. Through Jack’s marketing agency several members of the group were outfitted with wristband style personal assistant devices called Urchins. Though otherwise eager-to-please, these mobile devices could not be removed by ordinary means. When they started to rewrite Jerry’s past recollections, he fatally shot himself. (This was the player’s choice rather than an exit caused by taking too many Shock cards.)

In the next scenario, Jerry’s rugged counterpart from Aftermath showed up in this reality as the group probed a murder connected to their coffee shop hangout. The players obligingly embraced dramatic irony, treating this previous player character (now played by me) as the obvious villain. The real bad guy, who Other Jerry eventually helped them take out, was the Carcosan assassin from the prior sequence, a dead ringer for Sara’s boyfriend.

The following week, Jack’s assignment to set up a marketing event at one of the city’s haunted locations led the group to the Don Jail, a prison turned historical tourist site. They identified an eerie manifestation on the cell walls as an incipient new gate from Carcosa. In a returning motif, a maquette of a winged Salome from an exhibit of Gus Morley statues at the jail vanished during their ghost-busting. Meanwhile, a person Chris’ first replacement character, Clark, recognized as a character from a Philip K. Dick novel, came around the dispensary looking for the right prescription to shield his mind from an alien satellite beaming Gnostic philosophy at him. Finally a sighting of the animated statue flapping around outside the coffee shop cost Ben his grip on reality, for the second PC loss of the sequence.

Week seven dealt with the consequences of that departure and developed ongoing plot lines. The group learned more about the Urchin and the company behind it, pointing to the existence of a schism within the Carcosan conspiracy.

The following scenario tangled Judith up in the murder of a portrait client, a Russian oligarch with ties to arms dealing and one of the two conspiracies. The killer? His daughter’s Pretty Polly doll, armed with a butcher knife. This led the group to a cliffhanger at the victim’s warehouse full of C4.

After the explosion, the group discovered that a villain from previous sequences, Addhema the vampire, was back in play, allied with the animated doll. This sent them to a library in cottage company that held a collection of books once owned by the American poet Aaron Ravenwood (a Paris PC), which held a tome containing the means of killing Addhema. The players did the GM a solid by declaring that one of their aunts owned a cottage nearby, allowing for haunted events in the deep lakeside woods at night. This plunge into bloodcurdling Canadiana claimed Chris’ second character.

When dawn came but darkness remained, the group realized that events had taken on a global scale. Putting to rest the ghosts they’d raised at the cottage restored the sun’s progress through the sky—but not before Chris’ third character, a rustic local Eliptony expert, also lost his grip for good.

Returning to the city, the group engineered a confrontation with Addhema and Pretty Polly. This did not go well, requiring their last-minute rescue by their pal, the Philip K. Dick character.

Now knowing the story of how the Paris characters originally unleashed Carcosa on the world, they realized they would have to travel back in time to stop them. Further research into Addhema’s backstory led the group to her native stomping grounds in Poland. There they found a haunted tree containing a gateway to Carcosa.

After various horrors exploring that alien realm, including a meeting with the PKD character in which he revealed himself to be the King in Yellow, they found the portal they needed. It took them to Paris in 1894, before the events of the first sequence. When the American art students arrived in the city, the This is Normal Now characters invited them to a picnic and efficiently murdered them.

They returned to our 2018 forever altered. Unlike them, it was now truly, genuinely, unironically normal, with all of the shocks of their last few months remembered but undone.

After more than a year and a half of epic play, the forces of Carcosa had been defeated for good.

But in that was in my game. In yours, they’re just getting started…

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The Yellow King Roleplaying Game takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines, pitting characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. When read, this suppressed play invites madness, and remolds our world into a colony of the alien planet Carcosa. Four core books, served up together in a beautiful slipcase, confront layers with an epic journey into horror in four alternate-reality settings: Belle Epoque Paris, The Wars, Aftermath, and This Is Normal Now. Purchase The Yellow King Roleplaying Game in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.