The City of Shadows [ EDIT ]

The darkness answers.

The fog parts, and a figure walks forwards. Swathed in the mist, holding it almost as if it was a cloak, the form is difficult to make out at first. Then, as it comes closer, the figure’s features suddenly became recognisable.

It is a young woman, a hood drawn up over her head. Her eyes look to you. She smiles, and as she does so there is a hint, a small hint, of sadness in her expression.



"You are lost. I can help you. Show you. It is not far...."

She swallows as she steps forwards. With a trembling, tentative hand, she reaches out, almost as if to take your hands in her own, but she stops short.

"There is a price though. I do not know when I can come again here to this place."

She shudders, bowing her head. Her arm shaking, she reaches out, she almost touches your arm. She stops just short, and her hands fall to her side. The girl looks up, and she smiles sadly.

"There," she points to the right. The fog suddenly begins to thin beyond the reach of her outstretched hand.

Her form begins to fade, becoming translucent and ghost-like. As it does, a tear rolls down her cheek.

"Help me….find me. He won't let me go."

And then her form fades into ethereal nothingness, almost as if she was never there to begin with. Yet she was there, she was not a figment of your imagination.

Lost in time between these moments,
Always on the outside looking in.

---

Welcome to the City of Shadows and Lost Souls. What will you find when you arrive here? What will you find when you tear away the mask and stare at what lies beneath you? Will you see the face of a monster staring back at you?

Will you realise that the monster is you.

Lost in the fog, you follow the voice and form of a beautiful woman as she guides you through the fog to an unfamiliar place.

Help me, find me, she implores you, and her words haunt you to the very core of your being, even without the ominous end of her sentence.

He won’t let me go.

And yet soon the fate of this beautiful yet enigmatic stranger will be the least of your problems. Trapped in a bizarre city, where you know nobody, and are not sure of who you can trust and who you can turn to, you can only trust each other to survive.

Or can you?

When reality is altered, and when you can never truly be sure whether the person you look at is nothing more than a mask hiding a terrible monster, you will soon learn that perhaps to survive, you will need to embrace the lesser of two evils. You must pierce the heart of this decadent city, to the terrors hiding inside the shadows of which people fear to speak. This hubris of social decay, and learn the terrible truth behind the curtain. Ultimately you will discover the truth of what lies underneath the serene surface of this terrible place.

For little do those who walk the mortal coil realise the dark truth hidden behind shadows that wisened eyes turn away from. That beyond the earthly realm in which they hold so familiar, and so true, lies another place.

It is a realm of darkness, of dread, of decay and of death. It is a place that sings.....it sings to those who hold malice and hatred in their hearts. It summons them here, to this place that they can call home. Home, amidst the creatures of the night and the forgotten souls that have become twisted and misshapen. Here, they are among their own kind. Here, they too can sing and be free in this place where they are wanted -- where they belong.

It is not until it is too late that they realise the terrible truth. That this place, as it beckons them in, as it invites them to take a seat, as it offers them their hearts desire…it hides something terrible. As the land around them shifts and takes shape, twisted by their own demons and their own desires, these beings realise that what they once saw as their salvation has become their prison.

And that now they have entered, they can never, ever leave.

---

First of all, massive massive thanks to Len’s Recruitment thread, it was really helpful when I was putting together some of this detail.

This game is, at its core, a gothic horror mystery set in a strange and bizarre city that is foreign to you. You will not start the game as residents of this city. As I have hinted above, at the onset of the game you are lost in thick fog which distorts both direction and sound. Wandering aimlessly, you encounter the visage of a beautiful stranger who leads you out the other side to find everything has changed. You are strangers to the city at large.

Unfortunately, you will soon find that you can trust nobody here -- everyone has an agenda and there is no telling who is friend, and who is enemy. Part of the game will involve unravelling the mystery of what is happening here and how you got here.

Can you trust anyone else? Can you even trust each other? These are the questions you should be asking.

I should be straight from the outset - this game is predominantly story and role-play focussed. As a mystery it will be heavily favoured in that way, although there is some combat, combat encounters as such will be few and far between. The combat will be theater of the mind only.

I am looking for players that are willing and able to tell a story with me, and ones that are capable of carrying that narrative.

I do have a tendency to apply the "rule of cool" when appropriate - hopefully that is acceptable to everyone here.

For that reason I anticipate that the posting rate won't be particularly high for this, but enough to keep the game going at a respectable rate -- I think about 2-3 posts a week would be more than sufficient for what I am looking for.

This won’t be a particularly long game, I hope that with a consistent post rate we can close this off within a year to two years.

This game is explicitly friendly to LGBT and any other minorities or marginalized groups.

I intend to leave this post open for a bit, at the very least until next week to allow anyone interested chance to either let me know or post a character concept. As I’m still finding my way around the site I’m not especially in a hurry to close this down.

What I’m looking for is a brief high level overview of your character as below:

Name:
Race:
Class:
Description: A short description of your character.
Character Overview: A high level overview of your character concept, who are they, what are their strengths & weaknesses. What are their hopes and fears?
Backstory: A short backstory for the character.