Transcript
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And no matter how powerful or perfect he becomes, I don't think that his family would ever recognize it.
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Oof.
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Mm hmm.
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Big oof.
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There's no audience.
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Like, no one wants to hear me ham it up when it's just four of us in a room.
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I apologize to all these cis straight men out there in the universe.
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I'm sure you exist somewhere.
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You'll find representation one day.
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Sounds like a hot mess.
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A hot gay mess, and I love it.
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Hello friends, welcome to Characters Without Stories, a TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled.
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I'm Star.
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This episode I'm joined by Juicy Garland.
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Juicy is a Boston area drag queen and super nerd.
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She's the original TTRPG drag queen, and she's on a mission to do big things with the Tabletop Talespinners Network.
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You can find her in All Our Faults, a Monsterhearts 2 actual play podcast, all around the internet at Juicy Garland and or performing in Boston and New Hampshire.
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Juicy, welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me.
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I'm so excited to be here.
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I'm really excited to talk to you.
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I know that we have talked about it, but I am a huge fan of All Our Faults.
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I think it's a wonderful, wonderful actual play and I highly recommend it to anybody who's listening, but also I did recommend it on the podcast a few episodes back, so.
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Oh, thank you.
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It's really great.
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Yeah.
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I actually just got done with the recording for all our faults before coming over here.
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Uh, just a little bit ago.
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I hope it wasn't too emotionally taxing.
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I cannot say I can neither confirm nor deny.
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In case anybody is wondering, Monsterhearts is a game about kind of teenage angst and the messiness of being a teenager, kind of growing into your body, and then also being a monster.
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Yeah, yeah, a lot of it is about sort of internalizing the struggle of having an identity that is developing and feeling strange in your own skin as you were figuring out who you are when you're young.
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Yeah.
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And I love it for that fact.
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Yeah, it's really great at capturing, I think, the feeling of being a teenager.
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And, and feeling like someone who is othered, which I think everyone at that age is, right?
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Like, Even if you were the most normal kid, you feel like you're someone who's other.
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Yeah.
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No matter what.
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You never really feel like you're fitting in.
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Juicy, how long have you been playing TTRPGs?
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God, um, for a hundred years.
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It's been 84 years.
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Now, I have been playing since about 2004 or 5.
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I, when I first got to college, so, a lot of my friends long before then, We're playing D&D, usually 3.5, and I was so jealous my friends were playing this cool hip game, the Dungeons and Dragons, and I never got to play it.
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And when my friends in college were playing D&D, I wanted in, so I finally got to play.
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And my friend, Sean, who is this huge neckbeard of a nerd, but a sweetheart, who I'm still friends with, now nearly 20 years later, my god, time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so, he introduced me to D&D 3.5, and I played lots of really effete half elves and half elf bards in particular.
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Who, uh, in my first excursion into D&D, he threw a small green dragon at us who, uh, murdered me and killed my first character, which, uh, died in a heap of fire and I would say glory if I wanted to be generous and I would say sadness if I wanted to be honest.
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Oh, that's terrible.
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Was this like the first combat that your character was in?
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Uh, it was the first.
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Session, my character was in.
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Oh, no.
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And yet you came back.
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Yes, it definitely set up a love of failure that I carry to this very day, 20 years later.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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When did you start playing games like Monsterhearts or games like Powered by the Apocalypse?
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I think you're a big Delta Green fan, right?
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Yeah, yeah, so I got a love of indie RPGs somewhere around 2010 to 2012.
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So I grew up in Western Massachusetts, particularly going to Northampton, and there was this comic book store which had a lot of indie RPGs, which has since closed, sadly.
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But they aggregated a bunch of indie RPGs that I would collect, and they were games that I discovered there, like, Monsters and Other Childish Things, in particular, which I obsessed over for a long time.
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And that carried over to me once they closed, wanting to go down to Cambridge, I live north of Boston, over to other, like, game and hobby stores to find the indie RPGs that I could collect.
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And I have so many games right now that I would love to play that my friends ignore me about, because they're all jerks, and I hate them.
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And.
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I have basically turned to actual plays as a means of conning other people into playing indie RPGs.
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And, uh, Tabletop Talespinners, of which I am part, has been conned by me into creating TTN Presents eventually.
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Which is a platform in which I'll be able to play a lot of these indie RPGs and to platform new games coming out.
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Where we will be able to showcase new GMs and indie RPGs in the field.
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Where we can just try new games and have fun with that.
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Yeah, I just obsess over new and interesting ideas within this space.
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Largely because I'm kind of bored of D&D 5e and the fact that there are such low stakes in that system.
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Hmm.
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What do you mean by that?
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It's just really hard to die.
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It's so hard to die in 5e and I'm frustrated by that.
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Please, daddy, kill me.
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I was just actually talking to somebody about this.
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I'm like, if I don't go unconscious in a battle, I It's not hard enough.
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Mm hmm.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I just, I just want stakes.
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I want to feel like my character has some kind of real serious threat to their life.
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I want to feel like when I am in battle or when I am fighting for something, that it means something.
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And if my character's life isn't threatened, I don't feel like it means anything like that combat is meaningless.
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Yeah.
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That's why I love Delta Green because ultimately at the end of the day, my character is on a slow downward spiral to death.
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Or insanity or both, uh, if I'm lucky.
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That's why I love that game because you fight in the face of failure.
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You find meaning in the face of meaninglessness.
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And I think that is something that I want to be able to find in the real world, and sometimes it's really hard to, but when you're put in front of these absurd circumstances, I think it's easier to find that meaning because it's sometimes so cartoonish when you're in front of a massive tentacle beast, or you're faced with a creature that wants to shove its tentacle down your mouth so it can reproduce as it takes over your brain.
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Those kinds of horrible things are so ridiculous that you can kind of cartoonishly find hope.
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And I, I love that hope in the face of wild, horrible meaninglessness.
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Wow, that's really profound, I'd say.
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I think that's a really interesting thing to take about games into your life, a lesson that you take.
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I don't know, I, I gravitate to those kinds of contrasts, always have.
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That's why I've always loved Lovecraft's writing, that's why I have so many, sort of, Elder God tattoos.
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I like the contrast of the horrible scale of Lovecraftian horror and the meaninglessness of the human experience.
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And I like contrasting those to defy those odds.
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And find a way to find meaning despite them.
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Yeah.
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Well, let's get into your character.
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Yeah!
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Juicy, who are you bringing to the table today?
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Okay, so, I have many characters that I have sort of written and wanted to play in games and then those games cancel.
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This is one of those.
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So, I, of course, am in All Our Faults, which is a Monsterhearts game, but I also sometimes, when I can rarely find the opportunity to have personal games, have those.
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This was for a personal game of Monsterhearts that fell through.
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And this was a witch skin.
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So for those who don't know, in Monsterhearts you don't have classes, you have skins.
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And in Monsterhearts you play teens or young adults who have a monstrosity or a factor of them that they keep secret.
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And this was a witch.
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I have never been able to play the witch, but that skin seems so interesting to me.
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And this character's name is Grammarye Praise-God Winthrop.
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That's quite the name.
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Can you tell me more about it?
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Yeah, so I really wanted to go to, like, I'm such a New Englander, I don't generally like outsiders, I will give you the coat off my back if I find you freezing, but I will also call you a jerk at the drop of a dime because I don't like the way you go slowly in a queue.
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Like, that's just who I am, right?
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I'm deeply impatient, but also, like, It's the difference between California and Massachusetts.
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California is nice but not kind, Massachusetts is kind but never nice.
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Grammarye Praise-God Winthrop comes from an old blood family in Massachusetts.
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Their family, this young, mask presenting, sort of non binary boy with a shock of white hair, pale skin, and sad boy eyes.
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He or they comes from an old, Puritan family.
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Thus, the Praise-God Winthrop, as the middle and last name.
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And Grammarye, because they come from a family of witches.
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And there is so much just cyclical family trauma built into this character.
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And that's really what fueled the, like, interest for me, was, I think, with the witch skin, there's so much built into our idea of what a witch is.
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But, I think that What makes a witch interesting is history.
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And, for me, what I wanted to build into this was that familial history, that cyclical trauma that never leaves, as the sort of emotional fuel for this character.
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So, Grammarye, Is kind of the black sheep of the family, because the Winthrops have a vendetta.
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The Winthrops have a vendetta because they have an ancestor who was killed during the Salem Witch Trials.
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Hmm.
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And I think it was Sarah Winthrop.
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If I went through my notes here, Sara Winthrop was hung, or hanged, as a witch, and this family has held a vendetta against the judges of those trials since the 1600s.
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Wow.
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And they have carried on this vendetta and their magic ever since.
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And Grammarye as the scion of this family has felt ill at ease with this vendetta that the family has carried, because since he was born, it never really made sense to him.
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How did the vendetta present in his family?
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How much did he know about it?
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Was he expected to carry this on?
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I think that everyone speaks of the other families against whom they had the vendetta.
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So there is the Stoughton family, a famous family in Massachusetts, one of whom was a, a judge in the trial in Salem.
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You have other family names.
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Whom Grammarye would recognize, but these are abstractions because they're 400 years ago.
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And they mean so much to Grammarye's mother.
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But they're meaningless to him.
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Yeah, I was gonna say, carrying a grudge for, god, like 400 years?
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Mm hmm.
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Why haven't they killed them yet?
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Why haven't they completed their mission against these families?
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I think there's a natural tension between the satisfaction of ending the vendetta And the delight of carrying it forward.
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I think that there's a recognition that they all delight in maintaining the Vendetta.
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It gives them a purpose.
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If they ended the Vendetta, there'd be no reason to still exist.
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Hmm.
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Why is that?
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Because then there's an emptiness.
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If you satisfy the vendetta, if you end, say, the Stoughtons, then suddenly that hatred has to dissipate and go away.
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There's nothing carrying the family forward.
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So the family then becomes meaningless.
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The family only has meaning because of the vendetta.
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So in that case, I think that they can't end it.
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If they ended it, they'd have no purpose.
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So.
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There's like an infinite cycle where they have to continue the hatred without ending the hatred.
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Do they go against the families in other ways, like undermine their businesses or something like that?
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Yes, I think there's a desire to prolong their misery ad infinitum, but in, I think, classically in the old New England WASPy way, through passive aggressive misery ways, right?
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You, like, ruin their holidays, you make them unhappy, you cut them off in traffic.
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The small miseries, not the big ones.
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I love that.
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So for Grammarye, who doesn't find purpose in the vendetta, what is their family to them?
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Disappointment.
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And that's part of it is that there was one connection in the family who was a positive connection, which was Grammarye's grandmother.
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But Grammarye's grandmother Prudence died and left behind a book.
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A book that Grammarye cannot read, but must decode.
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Hmm.
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And that's kind of Grammarye's present mission is to decode the book because maybe within the book there is validation within the family.
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Maybe if Grammarye can understand the book, Grammarye can then find power in a way that the family will respect.
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And that's what Grammarye, I think, seeks is validation.
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Do you think that Grammarye would get the validation that he seeks were he to decode this book?
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Oh, never.
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Yeah.
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That's the problem, is that Grammarye can seek validation, and no matter how powerful or perfect he becomes, I don't think that his family would ever recognize it.
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Oof.
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Mm hmm.
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Big oof.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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A question comes up for me talking about somebody who has actual magical powers, right?
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The witch skin actually does have some sort of magical powers, correct?
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They have the hexes.
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Yes, they're hexes.
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Yeah.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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And the two starting that I, I chose to have Grammarye possess were wither and illusions.
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So with wither, Grammarye could choose to use this hex to have someone, a target, lose their hair or teeth and have them like start to fall out over time.
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And then they could be effectively bald or their skin could be spotty over time.
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And then illusions is the other hex in which the subject would see snakes or bugs or demonic visions or false prophecies and they would see this everywhere for a time and I would have no control over those exact manifestations, but it would be whatever the GM or MC would see.
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So, those two kinds of things were what I envisioned Grammarye really having, simply because I kind of wanted to lean into the negative aspects of witch practice.
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Sort of projected in The Craft.
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Yes.
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I was going to say, this is really the touchstone for me.
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I'm like hair falling out, bugs and snakes.
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Yeah.
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So completely The Craft.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I was really thinking of The Craft as well.
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When I was putting this character together, I was thinking classic old New England plus The Craft.
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I think it's interesting to put actual magic in the context of the Salem witch trials, because obviously, historically, they're not actually witches, but they were deemed such by kind of this patriarchal system in power
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And the social mores.
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Right?
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Right.
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Exactly.
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But instead, you're saying in your character's history, that they did have magic.
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At least one of them did.
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And, like, in my mind, if you've seen The VVitch, right?
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Have you seen that film?
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I love that film.
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It's beautiful.
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Oh, yeah.
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It's so good.
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Also, I want to say, I love that you call it The VVitch because that's what we call it.
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Yes.
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That's how it's written, right?
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The two VVs, yes.
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The VVitch.
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But, I like to think of which magic of that period, in that mode of this dark, caustic force with the allure of Black Phillip as, like, the goat slash Satan, drawing in innocents, and then corrupting them, and those corrupted innocents finding the ecstasy of that hellish delight.
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I love that.
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So I imagine that Sarah Winthrop really delighting in this sort of orgiastic hellish delight, and then her being cast down by society because she was an outsider ultimately, and then the family, the Winthrops, all deciding to take her side and having a vendetta against the judges, not against Sarah, but against the judges for destroying Sarah.
00:19:26.085 --> 00:19:30.453
And that, that whole dynamic is so fascinating to me.
00:19:30.463 --> 00:19:41.084
And then through bitterness and just spite, which is the strongest force in the universe, like that's the fifth force is spite.
00:19:41.474 --> 00:19:50.079
And And that alone, just carrying through the family is just so interesting to me.
00:19:50.398 --> 00:19:55.539
Yeah, it definitely, of all of the negative feelings, has the most longevity.
00:19:55.589 --> 00:19:57.628
Mmm, it gives people longevity.
00:19:57.638 --> 00:19:58.659
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
