STATEMENT OF INTENT
An explanation of some of the thought that went into making this scenario

ON THE BEGINNINGS

Lord Putidus began as a sort of joke scenario. Frustrated by certain criticism of Bahssikava, I wanted to make something that I wasn't particularly emotionally attached to, so that when people criticized it, I wouldn't care. I decided to make a simple vampire story, like the first part of Stoker's Dracula (without the Victorian business that follows) or the Ravenloft book, I, Strahd. With that in mind, I created the basic setting for Lord Putidus.

Even from the first, Lord Putidus was influenced by the classes that I'm taking. I'm doing a lot of Roman civilization, so I thought it might be funny to set the scenario in Roman-era Transylvania, since it's a vampire story. I looked at a map and found out that Transylvania was Dacia, so I figured it could be set in Dacia. That was what gave it the local character (references to the Carpathians, etc). The Romans were only in control of Dacia from about 100 AD to 250 AD (give or take), so the time of the scenario had to be the second century.

At first, that was all. But then I started to make the first couple of towns, Umbratium and Timoria (whose names come from words for "shade" and "fear" respectively, and the province Ateria essentially means "The Black Land"). I wanted some Latin names for characters in Umbratium, and I'm not quite sure why, but Lucretia immediately popped into my head, so I named the bartender Lucretia. At that point, I realized what my scenario was going to be.

I wanted to take the Roman ideal and strain it to its limit. Lucretia was the foundational story for the ideal Roman woman, related by Livy and many others (including Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece). I knew the moment that I created Lucretia that she was going to be taken away by the vampire lord of the land and more or less raped. But Lucretia wasn't going to behave like Livy's Lucretia. She wasn't going to kill herself to preserve her virtue. She was going to commit suicide, of course, but she was going to kill herself because she had what I am going to call rape victim syndrome, which is not virtue at all.

I wanted to do to the foundation myths of the Roman Empire what Shakespeare did for Ancient Greece's foundation myths in Troilus and Cressida: tear them to shreds. Troilus and Cressida takes the Iliad and twists it around, so that all the fates are still fulfilled -- Achilles still withdraws from the battle, Hector still kills Patroclus, Achilles still kills Hector, and so on -- but the ways in which they happen are rather less than heroic. Achilles gives little reason for withdrawing from the battle in Troilus and Cressida; Homer's explanation that he is angry at Agamemnon's slights is not given anywhere. Achilles is still responsible for Hector's death, but only because he brings together a whole bunch of goons who attack Hector all at once.

Likewise, I was going to set up a story in which the Roman foundation stories took place, kind of, but in a twisted and perverted fashion. Lucretia's rape was the primary one, but the bravery of Mucius Scaevola and others were also going to be there.

About halfway through this thinking process, I realized that I needed a place for the party in all this. It's all well and good to have an interesting story that is going on around the party, as I did in Bahssikava, but one of the major points of a scenario is to make the player take part in the story; the party has to have a role in the interesting story for the player to be interested.

So what was the party's role to be? Well, to act out the fundamental question of this scenario: does the Roman ideal actually work in practice? Can one truly be heroic in the real world?

Scaevola's story suggests what I think the answer is: not always. Mucius Scaevola, in the source material, lost his right hand in a valiant effort that turned away the Etruscans who were attacking Rome. Scaevola in Lord Putidus loses his right hand in a totally fruitless attack on the vampire lord -- and the most devastating thing about his story is not that he is less than valiant, like the characters in Troilus and Cressida, but that he is valiant and it has absolutely no use. You can't kill a vampire with a dagger. Making the heroic stand that he does is completely futile.

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ON COMBAT

The no-magic aspect of the scenario seemed to fall naturally out of the fact that it took place in a historical setting; why would Roman soldiers be able to use magic? It seemed to me that any good Roman soldier would be able to forage in the wilds for nourishing herbs, though, so alchemy seemed like a natural substitute as long as the party was in the outdoors.

The modification of the party's skills was done for accuracy, then: removing the party's spells was a no-brainer, and Romans had little in the way of archery, so the substitution of thrown missiles (they DID have javelins) seemed natural. That created three natural classes of party members: melee warriors, javelin-throwers, and medics (First Aid users).

The consequences of this became obvious relatively immediately: the fighters have to spend AP healing themselves instead of relying on magic-users behind them to do it, or else the medics have to use First Aid. The first few combats establish normal tactics -- at first, this setup does not create many problems, because the easy monsters go down quickly to blessed and hasted fighters.

But what could create difficulties? Significant melee, obviously -- since healing is more difficult this way, any situation in which the characters sustain damage becomes a problem, because the warriors have to spend so many AP healing themselves that they can't attack.

I ended up choosing, also, to make the javelins quite strong compared to the melee weapons. Most people don't use javelins much, since they tend to be heavy and underpowered; people who didn't use the pila found the scenario to be too hard for a level one party, but people who did tended to find it not too hard.

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LUCRETIA

Lucretia's death scene was to be remedial work with cut scenes. I learned many of the things that can be done with them in Bahssikava, experimenting with all sorts of effects (making the screen shake, showing large pitched battles), but I wanted to take it a step farther: I wanted the cut scene to be interactive. Lucretia's death is a cut scene, necessarily so, but I wanted it to feel almost like dialogue: you can choose different things to say, giving replayability, but I felt it was tremendously important that you NOT be able to save her. Lucretia is already dead once you find her. It's just a matter of finishing the act.

The psychodynamics of the Lucretia scene are complicated, probably because they're lifted straight out of Shakespeare. I made the connection between the Lucretia story (as told by Livy, the version that I first ran into -- it's in Livy's History of Rome, 1.57-9) and Shakespeare's tragic heroines because of the coincidence that I happened to be taking a Shakespeare class taught by psychoanalytic critic and gender theoriest Janet Adelman at the same time as I was taking an Intro to Roman Civ class. It seemed that Lucretia's fate was an earlier and simpler version of Ophelia or Desdemona, the essentially good woman destroyed by the madness of a man. There were substantial differences: Lucretia was raped by a man who was not her husband, whereas Desdemona was murdered by her own husband (in a scene that significantly resembles a rape, notably).

However, I wondered: perhaps if Shakespeare had written The Rape of Lucrece ten years later than he did, around the time of Hamlet and Othello, he might've written it differently, so that Lucretia's death was not merely the product of her virtue, but a genuine psychological reaction to an unhealthy relationship.

Shakespearean themes, such as revulsion at flesh and obedience to a husband, played well into the rewritten Lucretia story. Lucretia isn't raped in her home by Sextus Tarquinius in this version: she is seduced out of her home into a place of madness by a Dracula figure, Putidus. The sexuality of the vampire story become the reason she is seduced; Desdemona's plea to go with Othello to Cyprus because she wishes to be with (and presumably that means sleep with) the man she has married should not be much of a stretch from here. Her purity and virtue are the reason that she dies, because she has completely bought into the idea that flesh is wicked (Hamlet's "too too solid/sullied flesh" speech and various other speeches from that point in Shakespeare's career are pretty much what I'm working with here), and the vampire motif offers yet another way to suggest this: by draining her blood, he is actually making her more pure.

That is, by removing what makes her essentially alive, she actually becomes more virtuous and more beautiful; this is the morality that a vampire would espouse. (If this sounds like a sideways jab at any religion or philosophy that says that all humans are inherently sinners and that life is primarily pain and suffering, then that's probably because it is.)

The Lucretia scene is supposed to be frustrating, significantly so, because you simply cannot save her. I wanted to mimic what the audience experiences in the final scenes of Othello: you want just to scream at her, "GET OUT OF HERE! YOU'RE GOING TO DIE!", but you can't -- if you try to say that to Lucretia, she closes up and tells you that you don't understand. You can't just shout at an abuse victim and expect that to work, especially not one who is as far gone as Lucretia is.

And moreover, you can almost get her to leave. You can put her on the edge of the stairs, but she won't go. She can't; she has too much psychological energy invested in this relationship to do that. Lucretia no more can leave that room than Desdemona can tell Emilia, "I need to get out of here, because I think Othello is going to kill me, and I think I should live." Both Desdemona and Lucretia know that the death is coming, but they cannot leave, because leaving would indicate that they want to live and that their desire to live is more important than their husbands' wishes, neither of which Lucretia can think.

Ultimately, Collatinus dies Othello's death, which is strange, because the image of his final lines turn him into the murderer of his wife. This happens because Collatinus blames himself for Lucretia leaving; he knows that she was bored with him, and he thinks that he was responsible for Putidus's seduction that ended with her death.

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FAUSTULUS

Faustulus's name is a diminutive of Faustus, like Marlowe's title character in Dr. Faustus. He was another name from Livy; Faustulus there is the foster father of Romulus and Remus, but he bears little resemblance to my Faustulus. (There are some comparisons to be made, but I will not bother here.) Faustulus in my scenario is a "Little Faust," a bit more ambiguous than Marlowe's Faustus, but not by much.

Much can be said about the adaptation of Faustus into Faustulus, but I will keep it to two points. First, although Faustulus also takes power from a sort of devil figure, just like Faustus, he does not quite die Faustus's death. On the contrary, the words he utters upon dying are Mercutio's: a plague on both your houses. This should be quite jarring -- which should lead to the questions, who is Faustulus, really? Is he Faustus? Or is he more complicated than that? (The tension between the positions into which people are put and the deaths that they die is part of the complexity of this scenario: only at the end of the Lucretia story do the roles finally solidify back into their proper places, with Lucretia as Desdemona and Collatinus as Othello. Prior to that, everything is muddled.)

Second, Faustulus's speech after you lie to him is adapted loosely from Marlowe, particularly V.ii. An interesting difference is that when Marlowe's Faustus has only one hour left to live, he cries for day to last forever, so that midnight (when he will die) will never come. When Faustulus finds out he has (supposedly) until next dusk left to live, he cries for night to last forever. Faustulus is less flamboyant about his power, less showy, more fearful about being seen and discovered, than Faustus is.

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OTHER FUN FACTS

This scenario went through a number of titles. A list of those that I brainstormed:
The Darkness (the original working title)
The Rape of Lucrece (just to drive the point home)
The Roman Ideal (can we be more blunt?)
Pietas (suffers from Kalloskagathos/Bahssikava syndrome: no one will spell it right)
Nethergate II (because EVERYONE asked if it was a Nethergate sequel, WHICH IT'S NOT)
Ateria (but another place name as a title?)
The Black Land (boring)
Comes Putidus ("Count Rotten" -- I tried very hard to justify this, but no)
Valor/The Valor/The Valor of Scaevola (too much)
De Virtute (same problem as Pietas)
Putidus and Lucretia (in imitation of Troilus and Cressida)
Putidus Rex