Character Creation: The Deepest Dark

And for my last character of the month, I was gonna do The World of Necroscope, but then I wound up spending most of today coming up with games to pitch for the group that just finished Pugmire so I needed something shorter. Hence:

The Game: The Deepest Dark
The Publisher: Ella Watts
Degree of Familiarity: None, though I've played similar games
Books Required: Just the one

This game reminds me a bit of Ten Candles, and also shares some DNA just in presentation with Harvest. You're playing a group of cavers that died in a rockfall, don't realize they're dead, and figure that out over the course of the game, descending through Strata and explore new chambers. 

I find caving fascinating and terrifying. Few things get as visceral reaction from me as the idea of being trapped in a rock tunnel (which is one reason Descent is such an effective movie for me). I think this would be an interesting game, with the right group (actually I think the group that just started Harvest might get into it, but we need to do human sacrifice first). 

So we pick a character class. These are all twinned with another class; that is, there's a Mycologist and an Entomologist, and it's intended for a given group to only have one of those two, which for my purposes doesn't matter. The classes are really themed around motivation more than ability; both of the ones I mention struggle to be alone, f'rex. 

You know, Volcanologist appeals today, for some reason. Let's say that my character is Izuki Nagai, born in Kagoshima, Japan, near the Aira Caldera. Someone told him when he was small that the volcano was going to erupt and kill everyone, and he had nightmares about it for years, which gradually morphed into a strange fascination with the idea of volcanic destruction and what, if anything, could be don't to avoid it. 

The Volcanologist is fixated on averting disaster, and the book asks me to consider what disaster I failed to avert. Let's move it miles away from volcanoes and say that Izuki made friends with a girl when he was at university. Said girl (Samaar) was very wealthy, and she took Izuki and a bunch of their friends out on a boat one summer. There was a storm, the boat capsized, and Izuki said to her before they left port that there was weather approaching that looked dangerous, but Samaar was always more devil-may-care and Izuki didn't press the issue. Now she's dead. (So is he, but that's unrelated.)

So why am I here? The broad answer is "to find something," and specifically I think it's to find evidence of an impending volcanic event. 

My Fear is: "Why can't you let your guard down?" I think the answer I like best for Izuki is "because no one else will save us."

Gender: This is one of those games that treats gender as a defining, descriptive trait rather than just a reflection of sex. In Izuki's case, one of the options (for Volcanologist) is "impossible to see," and I kinda like that.

Izuki is a Japanese man of about 45. He's trim (he's an avid runner, climber, and swimmer), and has no tolerance for spice in his food (it's not that he has a sensitive stomach, it's that he has a sensitive palate). It's easy for him to fade into the background, and more than once in his life, he's watched people run face-first into dangers he's told them about. 

And that'll do it!