The Overlander's Guide to Sous-Paris
Apr 22, 2008 19:20:10 GMT -5
Post by Bonnie-Marie on Apr 22, 2008 19:20:10 GMT -5
Sous-Paris is essentially a French version of London Below in Neverwhere. Here's some information from a Neverwhere site to help get you started (though these were written for a more traditional RPG and certain things won't apply):
Another reality - another dimension; under, over, and astride our own. This is Neverwhere, the place where things and people forgotten and lost go. If you travel there, beware! It is a journey of no return, for you cannot be of both worlds, and it is easier to get lost than to be found again.
Imagine the world we live in (not too difficult a feat, huh?) We are all living nice, comfortable, well-ordered lives - well, at least a lot of people do, and if you have the time to scavenge the Internet for roleplaying backgrounds, I suppose I can count you in. Take a moment now and turn around, looking at what is right behind you. Then turn back here and describe to yourself what you were seeing. Is that all there was? Maybe there is a bookshelf - do you describe it as such, hoping the word is sufficient? What about the colour? The material? The books in it? There are things you edit out when you take in the world with your senses. Not every speck on that wall over there is important, just the wall itself is. You don't need to describe the title of each book in the shelf, much less the number of pages or the chemical formula of the glue which holds the books together. The important info is that there's a wall, there's a bookshelf, and there are books.
Now look again and try to notice all those things you did not include in your description, things you did not see at first glance. You will find that there is a wealth of detail, useless to the description, but there nevertheless, which you have disregarded.
Neverwhere is part of our reality, but so far removed from our happy lives that we edit it out completely. It is the home of the homeless, beneath our feet and up on the roofs, in subway tunnels, forgotten alleys and everywhere (neverwhere) you are not ready to turn and look. Even if you meet it face to face you do not notice it; you may be puzzled for a moment, but then you turn away and it is gone, vanished, out of sight, out of mind. Do you actually see the derelicts in the streets of your city, the run-down houses and the mountains of garbage? Or do you conveniently look the other way?
That is what Neverwhere is about: the things we do not see.
Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is set in London. In an interview he said that as a child he used to wonder about the names of underground stations - was there a real Earl at Earl's Court? Was there an Angel in Islington? In Neverwhere, there is. They may be the reason behind the place names or the places may become personified. In Neverwhere, urban legends become true, magic works, and nothing is what you would think it is. There is no need to believe that Neverwhere is restricted to the London area, neatly separating London Above and London Below. Instead, every place or at least every city has its counterpart Neverwhere. While details of London Below will be disclosed here, I do encourage you to find your own place, maybe even your own city, and find out the nature of its Neverwhere regions. Take London Below as a example and work from there.
In Neil Gaiman's novel, a man called Richard Mayhew, who is leading a secure and uneventful life in London, finds out the hard way that there is another London, a London Below, which he would never have dreamed possible. When he enters it, he is lost to London Above, the place he came from. He has to adapt, adopt and improve or die in the process. London Below is, for the most part, below street level, hence the name. It consists of the sewers, maintenance walkways, and, above all, the subway tunnels and stations, most importantly those which were forgotten. There are about fifty subway stations in London which are no longer used today.
In every city you will find locked, rusted metal doors leading who knows where. They may be built into tunnels, houses no-one lives in anymore, and lots of other places. They look like no-one has used them for years. You don't even notice them most of the time. They lead Neverwhere.
Whole societies live in London Below: the Ratspeakers, the Sewer Folk, the Velvets, to name but a few. All of these are outcasts; their way of life runs contrary to the accepted ways of life of London Above, so they became lost and forgotten, ending up in London Below. People, things and even, occasionally, places lost and forgotten turn up eventually in Neverwhere. The Sewer Folk make a living pulling such things and the occasional corpse out of the sewers and offering it for sale on the Floating Market, a kind of bazaar for the people of London Below. Here, these broken and discarded things may find new value; the people living on the underside do not see value in money but in those things they can put to practical use.
Time and space
Time and space in Neverwhere are by far less straight and normal than in our reality. Space especially may be distorted. Ground level alleys may end at doors leading to the lowest levels of the catacombs underneath the city while a set of rungs in a wall in the sewers may lead to the highest roofs. Places adjacent in normal reality may be far apart in Neverwhere or vice versa. Some people may know shortcuts others cannot find or use without them. A place may only be reached by first visiting a series of other places or it may be reached only at certain times.
Speaking of time, this commodity is not as reliable in Neverwhere either. While it still passes in a mostly linear fashion, it may stretch and bend and make unexpected turns. It may pass more quickly or slower than in the real world, so that it can occasionally be night in Neverwhere and day outside of it. Somehow, though, people who meet in Neverwhere always agree as to what time it is, although they may have experienced the timeflow differently when they were apart.
People passing fully into Neverwhere age differently - usually slower. Some may have lived through centuries, some may even be immortal, if not invulnerable. A select few may even learn to traverse time like they can space; Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar may serve as examples for that. Nevertheless, even they have to follow rules. While they may turn up in different periods (they say they had tortured to death the inhabitants of a 16th century monastery just before they took the current nowadays assignment), they still have to enter the time stream of their current assignment, do whatever they have to do in consecutive order, and afterwards may not return to change things or even just observe themselves doing it all so perfectly. While they may live through every second of the time stream they may only do so once for each second.
To reflect the ability of navigating the special time-space continuum of Neverwhere this setting uses a skill called Dysorientation. This skill is governed by Intuition. It enables its possessor to find routes from one place to another, possibly figure out relations between places, get used to the time stream and its eddies and keep track of the general passing of time. On a successful roll it also allows the user to know when and where the next Floating Market or May Fair will be. There may only be one roll per instance, you cannot roll twice to learn about the location of the upcoming market. Also, the roll is only possible shortly before the market begins; the vendors are usually the first to know and they begin to set up shop immediately.
Time travel such as Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar are wont to do will only be possible by using some kind of magic.
To see or not to see
People living in the real world do not notice things belonging to Neverwhere. Even if these things (or people) stare right in their faces, they will react to them only for as long as needed to get away and then forget about the experience promptly. As a result, if something or someone from Neverwhere doesn't force an outsider to take notice, there will be no interaction.
People from Neverwhere may see the outsiders perfectly well. They can hear them, manipulate their surroundings etc. Communication, however, is an arduous process, usually one way, and only good for the shortest of exchanges. If you write a letter or record a message, it will still bear the taint of Neverwhere and go unnoticed. If you take something away, it will pass into Neverwhere and be utterly forgotten.
Money, being one of the most important facets of our reality, is utterly useless in Neverwhere. As a consequence, any action requiring direct use of money (purchasing a ticket from a machine, using public phones, getting cash or paying with a credit card) will automatically fail. While you may still use private phones (for which of course the owner will get billed), the other side, if an outsider, will either not hear anything or react adversely ("wrong number!" - click).
In Neverwhere, exchange of goods functions by trading goods or favours. Dwellers of Neverwhere have a very different understanding of value than an outsider. So different, in fact, that they can hold a Floating Market in the midst of the huge London store 'Harrod's' without touching the items offered by the store at all.
Things forgotten and lost pass into Neverwhere. Once someone from Neverwhere takes them for keeps, they pass over for good. Sometimes this may even happen to people. While some of them (called Borderliners or Halflings) may live in both worlds, such people usually fade from reality into Neverwhere. These are either those who drop through the cracks of society, having no family and friends, living on the streets etc., so that they eventually pass over with or without noticing it, or those who somehow are touched by Neverwhere and ripped from reality by the experience. The latter is what happens to Richard Mayhew in the novel/series. This only happens to people who are somehow apart from outside reality. They do not really understand the trappings of everyday life, dream a lot, do unexpected things or play roleplaying games. Some part of their soul may already be in Neverwhere. Once they have crossed over, something which can be provoked by the slightest contact with Neverwhere, they may never (never?) return. And even if they find a way, such as Richard does, they will see that their bleak everyday lives hold no value whatsoever and soon return to Neverwhere for good.
Lost ideas
One of the strangest commodities on the Underside consists of lost ideas, or rather the realization of such. Great minds may have developed amazing things, yet even more amazing are the machines and gadgets they could only dream of building. These contraptions survive in Neverwhere. For instance, Door's father had a machine which looked like a blend of TV and video recorder as it would have been if Sir Isaac Newton had dreamed it up - that's exactly what it was. Some of Galileo's most outrageous inventions may have survived in Neverwhere side by side with the ideas of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. But such items should be rare indeed - after all, no single item will have been dreamed of more than once by its wouldn't-be creator.
Rat-Speakers
"He had long hair, a patchy brown beard, and his ragged clothes were trimmed with fur - orange-and-white-and-black fur, like the coat of a calico cat. [...] He walked with a pronounced stoop, his hands held up at his chest, fingers pressed together."
This description of Lord Rat-Speaker is typical for one od his people: the Rat-Speakers live in the Underground, using old and forgotten cellars and walkways where they eke out their meagre existence. They are closely allied with the rats and have taken on several of their typical traits and habits. They move and chitter like rats and scavenge just like they do. Their clothes do not only look as if they were made of cats' fur - they even eat the felines.
The Rat-Speakers accept the sovereignty of the rats and especially the Golden. They can talk to rats and understand them; and they take orders from the rodents. They know their way around the Underside very well - and if they don't, they can always ask a rat. On the other hand the Rat-Speakers are also allied with the Borderliners. This is probably due to the fact that many borderliners eventually end up within their ranks.
Rules: Rat-Speakers prefer the physical traits and Cunning. Knowledge is never very high and skills connected to it are rare. Most of these people speak Rat rather fluently, which may even be a native language if the character is born into this group and in this case does not have to be taken as a skill. Looks levels are usually low to average.
Sewer Folk
"They wore clothes - brown and green clothes, covered in a thick layer of something that might have been mold and might have been a petrochemical ooze, and might, conceivably, have been something much worse. They wore their hair long and matted. They smelled more or less as one would imagine."
The Sewer Folk live in or rather: near the deepest sewers and spend their waking periods (you don't know day from night down here) watching the sewage and fishing out anything found afloat in it. This flotsam they offer on the Floating Market - when it's under open air and they are permitted to attend. The Sewer Folk do not speak or hear; or at least they don't seem to understand what is said to them. All communication must be done by impromptu sign language.
Rules: Sewer Folk may not have positive Looks or Charisma. While their values may be high, their Looks and Charisma are strictly repulsive. Positive skills connected to Looks or Charisma such as Seduction may not be taken. Perception is not impaired for Sewer Folk. They choose not to hear and speak, but they could if they wanted to. However, any Sewer dweller would rather die than give any sign of listening comprehension to an outsider. Nobody knows why that might be.
Velvets
"Five almost identically dressed, pale young women walked past him. They wore long dresses made of velvet, each dress as dark as night, one each of dark green, dark chocolate, royal blue, dark blood, and pure black. Each woman had black hair and wore silver jewellery; each was perfectly coiffed, perfectly made up. They moved silently."
The Velvets are a kind of vampire. They do not live on blood, however; rather they kiss their victims and draw their warmth out of them. The Velvets are cold to the touch if they have not fed recently. They may be able to go to London Above and find victims (who actually perceive them as beautiful goth ladies) in the night clubs there.
Rules: Velvets always have high Looks and Charisma and high levels of Seduction or comparable skills. They should also have high Agility and a Stealth skill for pursuing and sneaking up.
The warmth drinking works like this: each Velvet has a variable value called Warmth (based on Stability, as it is the Health of Soul) which is her maximum capacity for stolen warmth. Each day of her life or unlife a Velvet loses one point of that variable. Should she reach 0, she freezes to utter motionlessness and can be saved from that perpetual state only by a generous infusion of living warmth. When kissing a victim, a Velvet may draw warmth from him - with this warmth, the life force of the victim is reduced. Small icicles and frost begin to develop on the victim. For each point of warmth taken from the victim, the Physical Condition of the victim drops by one. Should it reach 0, the victim dies. Moreover, the victim -if he survives- will always feel cold from that moment on and will lose a year per point taken from his total lifespan.
The Velvets may be forced to transfer their warmth back to a victim. Of course they don't usually do so. If they do, all detrimental effects to the victim are cancelled, with the exception of death.
If the Velvets choose to make a new Velvet, they drain the warmth completely from a young woman fitting their template; then they immediately giver her back enough warmth to keep going (one point). The newly-born Velvet then has to take her first victim.
The Black Friars
"A figure, dressed in black, waited at the foot of the bridge. He wore the black robes of a Dominican monk. His skin was the dark brown of old mahogany. He was a tall man, and he held a wooden staff as tall as he was."
The Black Friars were the guardians of the key to Islington's door until Richard Mayhew passed their ordeal of self-confrontation and won it from them. This part of their duty may have ended, but they see dark times coming upon London, now that the Angel Islington is gone.
The Abbot is a blind, old man, while his younger brothers are nimble, fleet-footed and really good with a fighting staff. He cherishes a nice cup of tea.
Rules: The Black Friars have either high combat skill levels or high knowledge skill levels. They hoard and guard a lot of information which may be accessible to them but not to outsiders. They should also have high Stability.
The painters
This group of children, all pre-pubescent, paint images on the walls of the subterranean vaults and tunnels they freqent. Little beyond that is known. What happens to those who reach the age of maturity is anyone's guess.
Rules: As these are children, consider their average physical trait to be 7, not 10. Knowledge is also low. Creativity, on the other hand, tends to be high. Artistry may be expressed by other means than painting, but this is foremost.
Pigeons
The pigeons are proliferate everywhere in London but especially on and around Lord Nelson's statue on Trafalgar Square. While they are not, by definition, homing pigeons, they can take a letter anywhere and to anybody- if you ask them nicely and with some words in their own tongue.
Rules: If you must play a pigeon, remember that in GeneSys, the average pigeon will also have trait levels of 10; however, that is average for pigeons and usually not comparable to human levels. Perception may be an exception to this, as may Intuition, Stability and other traits at the GMs discretion. Physical traits other than Perception and all Mental skills will probably be negligible in comparison.
Rats
The rats are just that: rats. They are organized in clans and they have names like Master Longtail or Lady Whiskers. These names sound better in Rat. The rats are intelligent, and due to their numbers seem to know everything that is going on on the Underside. The are revered by the Rat-Speakers, whom they taught how to survive on the Underside. Some of them may act as messengers for people who speak Rat and ask nicely enough, but they are easily angered.
The rats owe fealty to a special kind of rats, the Golden.
Rules: See the rules on Pigeons. Rats may have good Cunning and Agility.
The Golden
"The Golden had made their lair in a pile of bones. This pile of bones had once belonged to a woolly mammoth, back in the cold times when the great hairy beasts walked across the snowy tundra of the south of England as if, in the opinion of the Golden, they owned the place. This particular mammoth, at least, had been disabused of that idea rather thorouhly and quite terminally by the Golden."
The Golden are rats with a fur the colour of which explains their name. They are the size of a large cat. If rats have royalty, the Golden are it. The normal, run-of-the-mill rats give them all due respect and report everything to them. Unlikely as it seems, the Golden are among the movers and shakers of the Underside.
Rules: The Golden may even have Physical and Mental stats comparable to humans. After all, they could kill a mammoth. Probably they have a kind of racial memory which may be a skill dependent on Memory which may be used to remember information which an ancestor of the Golden in question might have had.
The Leftovers
*These people seem to be survivors of a lost age. They wear impeccable clothes, very period - Victorian, Renaissance, Medieval and so on. There is nothing out of style with these persons.
Actually, each one of them has been trapped in mobile pockets of old time. Through their eyes, the world, even the world of Neverwhere, is exactly what they have always perceived it to be. The Victorians still live under their queen (a shadowy figure living on the far end of Queen's Way), the Renaissance people still discuss ancient philosophy, and the Roman legionnaires are still making their camp somewhere, guarding the city against the barbarians from the north.
When you go with such people, your flashlight will not work. Those older than the Victorians will not use the Underground (in fact, there is none where they go). All things not fitting in the time they live in cannot affect them in any way.
Rules: Stability is usually very high with these people. Whenever they encounter something they don't know, they make a roll against their Stability. If they succeed, the offending object disappears, malfunctions or suffers any other fitting detrimental effect. If the roll does not succeed, a Leftover looks the other way and stops noticing the object (which remains unaffected) and goes to great lengths to deny its existence.
The Flower Children
*These are a special brand of Leftovers, and they look like hippies, which in fact they are. They are sufficiently modern to be non-detrimental to the function of most contemporaneous contraptions, but in their company everything begins to be so clear! So peaceful! So colourful! If only I could concentrate on something...
Rules: Due to constant drug abuse Concentration is a virtually non-existent trait among the Flower Children (5 maximum). Intuition may be high, as may be Cunning, but their use may lead to very convoluted insights.
The Albino People
*They seem to be a certain distinct group of people wearing gray suits and dark glasses. They are very susceptible to strong lights and will avoid them whenever possible. Apart from that, they don't seem much different from the Men in Black. What they do is unknown to others. The two groups might even be antagonists.
Rules: Stamina values among these people are quite low. Bright light and heat call for rolls against Stamina which, if the rolls fail, may result in slight to heavy wounds. Perception is high but sight may easily be impaired even by little light.
The Men in Black
*Yes, they are down here as well with their smart suits and their black gloves. They may even have some hidden agenda, but what it is is not known to anybody else. They might appear to do something arcane and then are gone the next moment.
Rules: Perception and Cunning are high with these guys. Looks and Charisma will always have a threatening aspect.
The Giantesses
*These are huge, almost identical women always seen in small groups. They move in unison and seem to share one mind. They are never observed eating, but they purchase huge amounts of food - mostly side dishes. They also purchase a generous number of slaves which no-one ever sees again...
Rules: While Looks may be formidable, they have a sinister air to them. If one should be caught in a combat situation, she might prove herself to be a fierce warrior with appropriate skills. The layers of fat will also soak 2 points of damage at 90% on the whole body.
The Crouch Enders
*The Crouch Enders live in those parts of the Underground usually not accessible to other people. They have adapted to an environment which forces them to contort their bodies into unnatural positions; if there is an opening, however small, a Crouch Ender may pass through. On the other hand, the Crouch Enders suffer from a severe agoraphobia when they are not in close contact with something hard and assuring with at least three different body parts. If a Crouch Ender happens to be trapped in, say, a vault, they often end their lives crouching in the corner until they starve.
Rules: Agility is high with these people. A skill based on it called Squirming allows them to pass through any opening which might remotely allow such a feat, even if it includes dislocating limbs. With those few who have a magical aptitude for Squirming, no inhibitors exist anymore - they may fit through keyholes. Stability may be high, but any contact with rather open places calls for a roll against Stability. Derangements gained will negatively modify each roll they make subsequently until they have reached the safety of confinement again.
The Borderliners (or Halflings, Borderlanders)
These are the derelicts, the homeless, the people living on the streets of London Above. Iliaster who lead Richard Mayhew to the Rat-Speakers is one, Lear, the saxophone player, is another. These people still stick to London Above like a chewing gum to the sole of a shoe. Eventually, most of them pass over into Neverwhere, but until then they can more or less easily get into contact with London Above and its denizens, while at the same time being aware (and scared) of London Below.
Only a small number of outcasts actually belong to the borderliners, for you have to be quite far gone to connect with Neverwhere for the first time, and it's just a small step from there to go the whole way. Only a small number of borderliners may keep this fragile equilibrium on the narrow ledge between above and below for any longer period of time.
Rules: Due to their fragile status quo Leftovers will usually have low Stability ratings. They will appear mad to many on both sides of London. They may not have the skill of Dysorientation at high levels.
Certain things to keep in mind:
-If a character spends too much time here, he or she risks belonging fully to Sous-Paris. (Plotwise, anyway. Of course it won't happen without Suethor permission.)
-This is not a place for basic domestic drama.
-Characters who belong fully to Sous-Paris are invited to be created.
The basic concept here is that most of the landmarks we know in "regular" Paris have Sous-Paris equivalents, which tend to be quite literal- for example, Notre Dame might actually be a protective mother figure, etc. Also, rather than the Métro, it takes place (largely) in the catacombs.
Have fun and be careful!