Escaped gaming meme

[mithriltabby]

While I’m waiting for a fix for a bug that’s holding up testing...

One rarity in role-playing games is the character that you love to hate, one that’s so loathesome they’re fun to have in the game.

Ars Magica is a very interesting fantasy game set in medieval Europe as people thought it was at the time— so physics is Aristotelian and Pliny is an authority on zoology— with the addition of a secretive group of wizards called the Order of Hermes. The game makes no attempt to balance magi with other sorts of characters; a properly designed starting magus can take out a mundane army. (This doesn’t happen much in game because most armies aren’t thoroughly mundane, and a devout soldier praying for deliverance from the chaos and death being rained upon his fellows could really ruin that wizard’s day.)

Spells involve a combination of a noun and a verb, and have levels that run from 5 for trivial things to 25 for effective ones to 40 for impressive ones and on up from there.

Klopec (the creation of a fellow named Jeff) was built to cast the spell Clenched Grasp of the Crushed Heart, Perdo Corpus (destroy the body) level 40, as a starting character. It helped a lot if he actually had a human heart to crush as part of the process of spellcasting. To this end, his Virtues were an Affinity with Corpus, an Affinity with Perdo, a bonus to spellcasting while invisible (since invisibility is Perdo Imaginem [destroy the image], his Affinity with Perdo helped out), and a couple of other things to help.

But his Flaws, oh his Flaws... Tainted with Evil, the Blatant Gift (most wizards in Ars Magica seem creepy due to their Gift, and the Blatant Gift is much more so), Diabolic Upbringing, hideously scarred, and Infamous Master. He had something like a dozen personality traits, including Brutal, Callous, Sadistic, and Cruel, and the quoteboard saying “Cruel and Sadistic are clearly different virtues!” came from the character generation session. (After all, cruelty means he inflicts pain, and sadistic means he enjoys it.)

To top it off, Jeff made Klopec a necrophiliac, and gave him the voice of Peter Lorre. And Jeff does a good Peter Lorre impression.

In our very first adventure, which was a simple situation to get people used to the system, one of the castle’s kitchenfolk was carried off by a giant rat. The magi followed it into a crack into the caverns under the covenant and killed the rat, but the servant was already dead. Klopec, of course, harvested the heart. And Boris the violent Flambeau elementalist, seeing that we needed some light for navigating down there and wanting to annoy the namby-pamby Bjornaer, Criamon, and Merinita magi, cast a spell on the heart to make it glow. So we traveled underground with a glowing heart carried by an invisible necromancer providing illumination.

We met a cave giant (only 8’ tall) with a rash who was pretty much impervious to our spells. Thinking fast, Boris explains to the giant: “This is the Healing Heart! He can cure your rash if you will allow him to exert his magicks to heal you!” And Klopec says (you gotta imagine the Peter Lorre voice here): “Yessss, I am the Heeealing Heart of Jesus! Let me heeeaal you and you will neeeever itch agaaaaiin!”

Later on, Klopec animated the giant’s corpse as a zombie and rode around on it to avoid the effort of walking on adventures. He named the zombie Alexius, after the current emperor in Constantinople, but we kept calling it Stimpy because Klopec often made requests that would confuse the zombie’s abysmal intelligence, leading to him calling it various names, and we enjoyed hearing him say “Stiiiimpy! You stuuupid iiiidiot!”

I had all sorts of plans for making Klopec pay for the Tainted with Evil and Diabolic Upbringing. I had no idea that the very first time I would tempt him with diabolic power, he would start summoning demons, in direct contravention of the Oath of the Order of Hermes. That pretty much ended him as a character. I was kind of bummed out, as Klopec was really enjoyable as a foil for the rest of the characters.

Comments

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

I had almost forgotten your stories about him until this... I can't decide whether I'm remembering Peter Lorre's actual voice, or you imitating Jeff imitating Peter Lorre's voice, but the memory is very clear!