Penny

The Sunday Group - Paranormal Detectives

OOC is up

https://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/182417-the-sunday-group-bumps-in-the-night/ooc#post-5129405

@POOHEAD189@Starboard Watch@Fetzen@Rapid Reader

The Sunday Group - Bumps in the Night

Welcome, please post proposed characters below in any CS format you think works. If I have questions I shall ask! Please dont move characters to the character section until they are approved.

Character Creation

**Please note that I will only be accepting a small number of Characters. This is so I can try to create a high quality personal dynamic. Please don't be upset if you are not selected if there is enough interest perhaps I will create a Wednesday Group and have occasional crossovers!**

I'm not a particularly stickler for character sheets but just so that others have a reference Id like to have applications vaguely resemble the outline below.

___________________________________________________________________________

Example character:

Name: Penny

Age: 32

Appearance: Tired and Stressed

Concept: Doctor Neutral

Powers/skills: Super judgey, Sublime arrogance, lofty ambition

Things Your Character Wants to Happen (probably wont):
Sleep

Things You as a Write Wants to Happen (Maybe will):
Successful group RP

Writing Sample? - Look I can't stop you from providing an writing sample but seriously, if you tell me you are an advanced RPer, I will take your word for it.

The Sunday Group - Bumps in the Night

Everyone has a story. You know the story. The one you Aunt dusts off every Thanksgiving when the wine is flowing and the sense is going? The one about the old house on the end of the street where flowers never grow and maybe old Sweeny killed his wife and hid her in the drywall. Or perhaps it was the time your grandmother swore that she saw something floating in a broken window grinning at her. Maybe it was you. Maybe you heard strange voices out in the woods, or glimpsed something in the fog out at sea one night. Maybe you saw the same pale woman everywhere you went for a week and you swear the bitch had no reflection.

There are thousands of stories like these and they all have one things in common. Ninety nine percent of them are bullshit. Of course ninety nine percent certainty means that one time in a hundred you’re dead.

There are things out there in dark. Sometimes they leave us alone, hell maybe most times, but sometimes the snatch up babies and sacrifice them in stone circles. Sometimes the feed on the minds of the living. Sometime they set fires for the joy of watching people burn.

Who do you turn to if something like that happens? Cops can’t help, write you a prescription and ship you to a mental hospital if you even mentioned it. You need professionals, and frankly there aren’t that many people stupid enough to put their heads in that particular noose. People who know, know enough to be fucking terrified. Usually they find the deepest darkest hole they can climb into.

Want to turn to the sort of broken desperadoes still stupid enough to stand in the line of supernatural fire? Good luck with that.

Welcome to the Sunday Group

This RP will follow the adventures of the members of the Sunday Group. It is a story about the occult world behind the world, and those brave or foolish enough to want to understand it.

Somewhere in a big city in America, there is a nondescript building. It is a few stories tall and it has an extensive basement. It could easily be the Law Offices Of Boring, Dreary and Bland, no one would guess that it is the home of one of the nation’s only occult detective agencies.

Employees of the Sunday Group are a diverse bunch. Small time magical practitioners, those with strange abilities, broken down cops who have seen too much, or just regular folk who saw something they shouldn’t and want to do something about it. Everyone who works for the Group has touched the supernatural world in some way or another, and for whatever reason just cant let it go and sink back into the comforting security of the mundane.

The World

The world is very much like our own except there is a secret magical world beneath it. It isn’t happy Twilight Magical though, think of it as somewhere between Harry Dresden and the Call of Cthulhu. Many of the trappings of any Urban Fantasy will apply here and I encourage you to introduce them into the setting. Think a shotgun filled with rocksalt will take out a ghost? Great, it is in. Want werewolves to have a silver allergy? No problem. Anything you want to introduce into the setting will probably be ok. If I have a problem with it, Ill ask you to reconsider privately.

Magic for the Modern Age

Some humans have the ability to handle arcane forces, either innately or through elaborate ritual preparations. Some people gain magical powers via congress with spirits or demons, even Gods there is always a price to pay for subverting the natural order though. Sooner or later the bill comes due.

Magic exists in the world in a multitude of form and traditions. It is even possible to do some magic by computer. I dont want to put to many restrictions on people here. Many types of magic do not require the use of spells or incantations. Some people might be able to move small objects with their minds, read the surface thoughts of others, turn invisible or any number of other small boons you might come up with.

While magic can be very effective under the right circumstances it isn’t a be all and end all solution. A powerful practitioner might be able to hurl a bolt of lighting but it is normally much simpler, safer and more effective just to use a gun. Magic is a tool, use it wisely.

Who are the Players?

The players will take the roles of detectives in the drama, but this won't be an RP solely about solving crime. Personal relationships between characters, their families and dependents will be crucial to the story.

Be connected! The nature of the world is such that all the brooding loners with a tragic but unknowable backstory were exsanginuated long ago. You don’t need to like people, but you do need to depend on them to survive.

What Can I Play?

You can play a human (or near human) with some minor edge over the rest of the herd. You cannot play an immortal dragon vampire samurai. Your character should have some life experience. I don't want to flat out say that they need to be a certain age but my personal preference is to avoid the teenage types who no sane detective would want covering their back when the tentacle hits the pentacle.

Notes On the RP

This will be a small group RP. I’m looking for 3-4 players tops. I want personal interaction to matter and I just dont see that in large group RPs.

This will be a collaborative rp and we will create the world as we go, feel free to introduce detail! I will exercise some limited forms of narrative control if necessary but my instinct is to let it ride if it fits in the framework of the fiction.

This will be an 18+ RP. Sex, drugs, sex drugs and horrible nightmares from distant space times ect.

Inspirations and Style

Inspirations for this include Call of Cthulhu, Harry Dresden, Supernatural, Delta Green, the Laundry Files. The goal is to be not quite as bleak as Lovecraft but to maintain something approaching that level of horror and danger. The protagonists can effect the outcome but plenty of stuff out there is well beyond the weight class of the Sunday Group.

How to Write a Collaborative Mystery

As long time Pennyphiles will know this is my third attempt to get his rp up and running. In the past one of the problems with it was how can we present a mystery in a way that lets players interact with the mystery rather than I as the GM doling out all the intel? Fortunately I have recently played an RPG called Lovecraftesque which has given me a potential solution. I'm going to allow players to introduce clues, and then have players formulate their best guess as to what is going on in the OOCs to steer the whole thing towards a coherent narrative. I may ask you to rewrite occasionally to facilitate this, or your character may simply be wrong or deceived about events you have describe.

This is somewhat experimental and may change.

Pacing

As my Father is fond of saying 'We didn't come here to fuck spiders.' What does this mean? I honestly don't know, but the tone of this RP will be active. I don't mind a certain amount of the internal life of the character being presented but wherever possible do something rather than picking up a cup of coffee and taking four paragraphs to do it. Quality is not quantity ect ect ect.

The Sunday Group - Paranormal Detectives

@POOHEAD189 Oh right, that is a thing people do for group rps. Sure! Ill have one up in the near future.

Men vs. Women Race to 1000: Version 2.0

-136

The Sunday Group - Paranormal Detectives

Characters should be human, any unfortunate bargains you have struck with eldritch powers are your own look out

The Sunday Group - Paranormal Detectives

Wake up sheeple, You call it the Malayan Emergency, I call it the Aswang war!@Starboard Watch

The Sunday Group - Paranormal Detectives

@Starboard Watch History as people know it is the same but there might well be otherworldly explanations behind accepted historical events.

The Sunday Group - Paranormal Detectives

@Starboard Watch Modern day

The Sinful Stars

Time passed slowly in the dark. Annika whispered her litany of protection through cracked lips, though if the Pancreator heard her, He gave no sign. As hateful as it was to admit, Engel evidently knew his business. The silver chains around her wrists were too tight for her to slip them, try though she might, through every iteration of Prana Bindu she knew she wasn't able to contort her hands or feet enough to slip so much as an inch. Attempts to break free with her psychic gifts were equally fruitless. The barrier Engel had erected was like a globe of water that surrounded her. Lash though she tried she could no more break it than she could shatter an ocean. Dark shapes flickered half seen in the gloom, shapes that were her own yet not. Perhaps, she could surrender to her Dark Twin? Perhaps she could succeed where Annika had failed. If Orion was already dead then...

A sudden groan in the darkness followed by a blistering oath broke her out of her bleak reverie. He had imagined she was alone down here but it appeared she was not. There was a rattling of chains, hatefully familiar, of to her right and then a muffled thud.

“May the Pancreater burn his marrow,” spat a voice in the darkness, oddly familiar despite the strange circumstances.

“Hello?” Annika called out, her voice emerging as a ragged gasp. It had been a long time since she had anything to eat and drink, and though her recent meditations shielded her somewhat from the effects of that, they were fast fading. The voice fell instantly silent and the noise ceased so completely that for a moment she thought she had imagined it.

“Hello,” she repeated trying to force her eyes to pierce the darkness. There was an unmistakable sigh.

“I should have expected to find you here heretic,” the voice replied wearily. Annika’s eyes opened wide.

“Mobian?” she demanded incredulously hardly able to fathom what the Avestii was doing in the dungeon.

“Do not befoul my name with your lips witch,” the voice snarled from the darkness.

“You should have killed me, if I get free of here I will see that you go to the stake for this,” Mobian growled. Annika was momentarily nonplussed until she realised that she was as invisible to Mobian as she was to him.

“I am a prisoner here,” she called, omitting the ‘you fool’, that formed in her mind.

“Spare me your pathetic rus witch,” the Avestii replied. Annika responded by rattling her chains, the best indication she could think of to assure the other priest of her predicament.

“An old trick,” he responded, though she thought his voice had lost some of its assurance. Annika heroically resisted the urge to grind her teeth.

“Well, why don’t you help me figure out a way to escape and then you can turn the tables on me,” she replied sarcastically. There was a long pause and for a moment she thought the other priest might have passed out.

“Acceptable,” he said at last.

“The Pancreator be thanked that your head isn’t quite solid granite,” she replied tartily.

“Do not make me regret agreeing to this,” Mobian growled. Annika briefly described how she had been bound, omitting any mention of the runic circle as likely to arouse too much suspicion without adding any useful information. Mobian was less certain of his own position, having been unconscious when they bought him down.

“You were an advisor to the Duke, why did Engel turn on you?” she asked once they had exhausted their meager options for the moment. Mobian huffed irritably and Annika could visualise his nostrils flaring with outrage.

“I thought the Duke was doing the Pancreator’s work,” Mobian admitted after a long moment, “cleansing pagans is a sacred duty after all.” Annika remembered her own assurances to Orion that the Pancreator had formed the pagan as surely as the faithful but she saw no benifit in a theological debate.

“In these times it is not a popular pursuit especially for the Hawkwood, though…” he paused before adding, “they aren’t as bad as some Houses I could name.” Annika addressed a quick silent prayer to the Pancreator for patience, and perhaps it worked, because Mobian returned to the point rather than launching into an attack against the Godless Republicans of Isktar.

“At first it seemed the Duke was just as I had supposed, a gifted and pious man but....” he trailed off.

“His prayers grew erratic and he seemed rarely to sleep, after that heretic loving knight of yours showed up I...overheard him speaking to someone that wasn’t there, I know it sounds like madness but it made me feel cold and wrong…. I conducted…” Mobian paused clearly unwilling to reveal the secrets of his order and rephrased he words.

“I prayed upon it and learned that it was more than madness though what I couldn’t say, before I could tell anyone of what I had learned I was set upon by the palace guard, they beat me unconscious and I awoke here,” Mobian concluded. Annika frowned, wondering if the guards were complicit as a group or if just a few were involved. It was even possible that Mobian was simply so irritating that innocent guards had been happy to beat the Avestii just for the chance to do so.

“So I suppose the question becomes why does Engel need two live clergy?” she asked.

“What? Engel? What has the chamberlain to do with this?” Mobian demanded. Annika described the events that had lead to Orion’s defeat, at the end of her account the Avestii was silent and the black anger coming off him was so hot she could nearly feel it.

“Of course, when I divined the Duke I found no taint, the heretic must be ensorcelling his mind,” Mobian said, his voice sharp with bitter hatred. Annika thought of the oily freezing darkness sliding down her throat and felt she understood the Avestii a little better than she had a few hours ago.

“Perhaps he means to sacrifice us to his Dark Masters,” Mobian speculated, “I’ve seen it before.” The words started something in Annika’s mind.

“Say that again,” she asked her the other priest.

“About sacrificing us?” Mobian asked, clearly puzzled.

“No,” Annika replied, “you said you had seen it before. I have an idea…”