Crap! Well, one of my erstwhile players has (of all things) been called away to China for most of the month of May. Since my campaign's kickoff date is this coming weekend, and since he doesn't want his character to just sit around twiddling his thumbs for a lot of the introduction, he asked me to see if I could recruit an understudy to play his dude during the three or four weeks he'll be away. Since this board probably has the highest concentration of gamers-slash-excellent-writers of anywhere I know, I figured I'd ask here first.
Anyways if any of you guys would be interested in a brief guest-writing bit, feel free to PM me, and I'll hit you up with the requisite info. It'd mostly be playing a standard first-level Rogue during some neat investigative sequences, while pretending that you don't know anything about how Ravenloft works. (since my players don't
) The premise of the campaign is that the PCs are Modern-Earthers who've been Freaky Fridayed into the bodies of Ravenloft natives; most of the campaign is going to revolve around them figuring out why they're in that situation, and what those natives had been up to previously. While I'm (secretly) writing up the backgrounds of the Ravenloftians, they have free rein to design their modern guys--so if you'd like a little background on the character you'd be playing, here's what this player sent me in lieu of a character sketch.
----------
Andre Viswanathan du Montserrat... son of nephrologists, banlieu bandit, and world-class slacker.
That's what he was, and there was no fighting it--eight years of medical school and five more in a lab at the Hopital Saint-Louis, and it was clear that Andre didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming the world-class researcher as his parents had hoped. So he turned to running drugs--though he didn't realize it at first.
Andre du Montserrat ran the yeast lab at Saint-Louis--that meant hours of peering through microscopes at the tiny dividing cells, freezing and refreezing, centrifuging and recentrifiuging. The process they'd been refining for those five years was perfecting a strain of yeast that would produce P57, an organic compound believed to be useful as an anticonvulsant.
And for other things as well--though it took him some time, and some getting into sticky situations, to learn what they were. He did it on a dare, at first, from his friend Peter Pond--he had a connection, a friend of a friend of a friend in the run-down immigrant suburb of Clichy sous-Bois, who was paying a high street price for this chemical which Andre collected in little tubules day after day. It was boredom, really, that drove him to it; boredom and something else perhaps, the urge that makes a small boy stamp his own sandcastle into the ground. The next evening, at beer-and-video-games at Pond's, he grinned and laid down the suitcase on the coffeetable, opened it; Pond stared at him slack-jawed.
"You didn't seriously?"
He felt like he'd found his calling. As he drove into the shattered suburb (the Algerians had been rioting again) he felt all of a sudden as if he were waking from a dream--he'd taken the magic pill, gone down the rabbit hole, and real life, if you could call it that, was about to begin. Half-Indian, indeterminably brown and anonymous-looking, he didn't raise any eyebrows as he sidled down the appointed alleyway. Up a fire-escape and into a bare-bulb back-room with a mattress on the floor and a card table; a one-eyed Algerian sat, clipping his fingernails.
"Hassan al-Hassan?"
The man looked up. He rapped a knuckle on the table wordlessly, beckoned to Andre.
And so it began.
His mother, Anjali, had been top-of-her-class in Hyderabad and went to the Institute Curie on a full scholarship. She never went back to India, hadn't taught Andre a word of Hindi; she was French through-and-through. She'd plucked his father, Renard, off the top branch, as she said--that the was way she went about doing everything--he was on his way to great things, she could tell, and, after all, so was she. Alas for their poor son Andre.
His business was thriving before too long. Hassan, the White Rabbit, paid him well for the P57. Paid in cash and hash, for which Andre had always had a passing predilection. But soon, Andre began to feel something he'd never felt before--ambition. He was determined to cut out the middleman and sell directly to whoever was buying this stuff. And thus began an adventure that would leave him bleeding, bruised, and dazed...
-----
Whew! So, if you're intrigued at all, let me know, and I'll put you in touch with the dude. Thanks a lot!