This installment of Twelve RPG Prompts for Twelfth Month is one that I thought I wouldn’t be able to write about because I run games, not play them. It’s also a thing that’s interesting to the person telling the story and usually isn’t to anyone else. It’s the one statement that every player dreads hearing: Let me tell you about my character.
Let’s see if you decide to keep reading after the jump.
Tell me about your character in an RPG you’re currently playing or have played this year.
I really don’t play in games, but this year was slightly different: I’ve jumped into a few one-shots at two different conventions. I don’t really recall much of the characters at PortConMaine. ((Or MainePortCon? Whatever it’s called.)) In Tales from the Loop, I played Marianne, later Mary Anne because we were in the US, who was secretly in love with one of the other Kids and whose theme song was “Mad World” by Tears for Fears. And I played a Hacker in The Sprawl, but I don’t recall remember anything about him — not even the name — even though I loved the game.
At NewMexiCon, I played a 28-year-old Daphne Blake of Scooby-Doo fame, trapped in (Welcome to) Nightvale for a game of Dread. The tower never fell; everyone survived. 28-year-old Daphne had tattoos from every state, which someone thought was a tattoo of every state (or just the opposite with of/from there), which lead to her having tattoos of every state from every state. “That one of North Carolina? I got that in Utah.”
So that leads me to the other character I can remember: Hilton from Apocalypse World.
Hilton was a hardholder. She got the name “Hilton” after she murdered the previous Hilton, per tradition. You know those cowboy hats where the guy has folded dollar bills ringing the brim? Hilton had one of those, but it was keycards. She was the baddest bitch with a gun in the area and her town was Her Fucking Town and while I don’t curse that much, every third word out of Hilton’s mouth would have blistered the chrome off a car’s bumper. The mouth on that woman!
It was a typical Mad Max apocalypse, except we added in cold temperatures. There’s a light dusting of snow on the desert floor in the middle of July. We had someone from outside of town try to blow up lots of people in the center of town. Hilton dealt with that interloper by soaking them in a tub then chaining them to the rooftop overnight.
She wasn’t soft.
We ended the session with a sex scene between her and the Skinner, which we described as “intensely sexual, but there was no love present.”
I loved her. I wanted to know what was going to happen to Hilton because I know that somewhere, a few sessions later, there’d be a new Hilton.