The CAST of Alternity

[alt_moderator]

Well, there we are, folks! Seven Years. What a long trip it's been.

As we said Monday night, the game may have reached its conclusion, we are not exactly done! We have some fun and exciting extras planned for you. In the coming weeks, we'll unveil some additional "bonus content," host some AMAs from player- and character-perspective, talk about the process, and of course, celebrate the achievement that this story represents for all of us, and we hope, all of you.

Before we get to that, though, allow me to introduce OUR CAST.

In the course of seven years, players come and go, some characters work or don't, and often characters have changed hands. Some have remained constant since the beginning (shown with an * below). Of course, we've also killed a lot of them (ahem), but that doesn't change who played them, only that those players retired the character in service to the plotline. Pretty soon, we'll be opening our wiki (because how ELSE do we keep all this information straight?), which has a complete list of who played which character, including past role assignments.

In the interest of privacy, we're not revealing details, but the players are encouraged to post below in the comments with bios, tales of how they joined Alternity, and any other creds they would like to provide.

And now, here is the list of our current players, and the characters they played as of the last time said characters were seen:

• Brook: Cedric Diggory*, Rabastan Lestrange, Augustus Rookwood*


• Deb: Regulus Black, Barty Crouch, Jr., Poppy Pomfrey*, Lana Sandoval-Pennifold*, Ron Weasley, Blaise Zabini*


• Denise: Antonin Dolohov*, Severus Snape, Charlie Weasley*


• Elise: Megan Jones, Linus Moon, Jeremy Stretton*


• Erin: Susan Bones*, Lavender Brown*, Pomona Sprout**


• Gwen: Ptolemy Baddock*, Sirius Black*, Michael Corner, Justin Finch-Fletchley*, Hermione Granger, Minerva McGonagall, Lucius Malfoy*, Narcissa Malfoy, Padma Patil*, Horace Slughorn, Zacharias Smith*


• Jenett: Albus Dumbledore, Lee Jordan, Aurora Sinistra, Pomona Sprout**, Dolores Umbridge*


• Linny: Penelope Clearwater, Colin Creevey*, Alice Longbottom, Evelyn Longbottom*, Frank Longbottom, Ernie Macmillan, Pansy Parkinson, Nymphadora Tonks (Ponds)


• Naomi: Savitha Desai*, Seamus Finnigan*, Rachel (Lamont) Brodie*, Remus Lupin, Harry Marvolo, Corax Mulciber*, Sally-Anne Perks*, Arista Selwyn*, Dominic Selwyn*, Ginny Weasley


• Peg: Hannah Abbott, Terry Boot*, Amycus Carrow, Neville Longbottom*, Luna Lovegood*, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Arthur Weasley, Bill Weasley*, Fred Weasley, George Weasley, Molly Weasley*, Percy Weasley*


• Rene: Millicent Bulstrode, Daphne Greengrass, Bellatrix Lestrange*, Hydra Lestrange*, Rodolphus Lestrange*, Walden Macnair*, Draco Malfoy, Eloise Midgen*, Jason Montague*

(**This character was shared by both players)

In Alternity, at the memorial services, people were encouraged to offer memories of their loved ones. Let's get the ball rolling here by inviting the players to offer up their favorite memories of their own characters and of others. We also want your feedback! What goes in your book of "Best Alternity Moments?"

In the next few days, we'll start holding AMA sessions with various players and their characters - understanding that some players may want some of their character information to remain nebulous or open to interpretation, of course!

Comments

[longstrider]

Brook here.

I've been reading since the beginning thanks to Peg. I finally worked up the courage to app and joined taking up Cedric.

[elisem]

I really liked Cedric's Hufflepuffian nature, the way you played him.

[longstrider]

Speaking of other bits for you all to enjoy, I had worked up two of my codas before we settled on a format, here are the originals:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/4710776

http://archiveofourown.org/works/4710710

[synecdochic]

I loved how Cedric showed the very best of Hufflepuff. And I loved playing out all the bits about Tosha adopting him after saving his life, and just how damn much that influenced Cedric in the end.

[jenett]

Also, I really really loved Rookwood's incoherent mad scientist evil. And the way he's still killing people years later. Oops.

(And thank you for letting me have the moment where Siz's Defence work paid off: for everyone else, that was something we decided about 20 minutes before it happened.)

[naomikritzer]

::waves::

Peg talked me into joining the game shortly after it first started.

In addition to writing in Alternity, I write novels, short stories, science articles, and I blog about Minneapolis politics.

(Here's a story of mine that was published in January, if you're curious.)

One of my favorite bits from a while back was when Luna wound up with the wizarding world's equivalent of 50 Shades of Grey instead of the dry classic text on Dark Arts Dolohov had intended for her to bring in. ("I hated to think what you were going to ask us to do for extra credit.")

[lucky_guess]

HAH! Yes! That entire exchange was utterly brilliant.

[gwendolyngrace]

Gwen reporting!

I was part of the original crew Flourish recruited for Alternity (back at Portus in Dallas, 2008), and I've been privileged, honored and delighted to see the project through to its conclusion.

I also served as your recapper (with the exception of the first couple of months, and the first 2 1/2 (?) years of "Previously on Alternity" posts, which were done by Flourish), and I succeeded Flourish as moderator when life commitments forced her to step back from the game. I could not have done it without the intense collaboration of all our players, but especially Naomi, who served as my second, as well as Denise, Deb, and Rene, whose twisted and beautiful minds were always ready to figure out how the HECK we were going to make this all work...and who frequently helped me calm my shit down so that it would all work.

[gwendolyngrace]

I am going to cheat because I have too many favorite moments to even begin to mention.

Particularly special to me is the relationship that Rene and I built for Justin and Hydra, and I'm so glad readers found it touching and tragic.

My respect and admiration goes out to Rene, as well, for everything she did with her Draco.

[synecdochic]

HELLO. I played Dolohov, Charlie, and Snape, and I have to thank all y'all for loving Dolohov so much, because your constant, gleeful love for him has helped me tailor how I wrote him for maximum effect.

See, back in mid-2012, LiveJournal released (the semi-infamous) Release 88, which removed subject lines from comments and which infuriated a large portion of LJ's huge collection of RP games. (Alternity had moved over to DW in 2009 when we first opened, but a lot of games stayed.) As the co-owner of Dreamwidth, I knew that in order to make sensible product decisions for the site in order to make RPers feel welcome, I should understand more about the subculture -- and what better way than to join a game myself? I'd already been reading Alternity, because I've known jenett for ages, and she kept trying to lure me in and I kept saying "I don't have time! DW keeps me too busy!" Turning it into something work-related, though, gave me just enough of the excuse I needed. :)

When I joined the cast mailing list, I asked, okay, what kind of character do you need? And the consensus was: we need somebody who's able to be seductive, charismatic evil, who can help bring out some of the moral conflicts that the next few years of the game will inevitably contain. Seductive, charismatic evil? "I can do that!" I cheerfully announced. And Tosha was born, and I've used your feedback to tweak him as time went on.

(Amusingly, I knew up front that I had to keep secret the fact that I was playing in Alternity, because if you know I'm playing, and you know my writing, who I was playing becomes BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS. I have a type -- or, shall we say, an archetype? -- and Tosha fits it to a T. I actually had two separate people guess I was playing Tosha just from me having recommended the game to them, without telling them that I was playing.)

I picked up Snape when Flourish had to pass him on due to lack of time, and I added Charlie because with Snape and Tosha, I needed one character who wouldn't know what a semicolon was if it bit him. I love all three of them to bits and pieces.

[pegkerr]

I admired Denise's playing SO MUCH OMG, and a big regret I have is that she didn't join the game earlier. It was quite an astonishment to me, especially (aside from the delights of Dolohov and Snape) how much she added to the game by playing Charlie. I played most of the Weasley family, but didn't see the need to include Charlie at all. In fact, when she joined and it was announced that she was taking Charlie, my chief reaction was, Why? Charlie? Off-stage during most of canon, mucks around with dragons, what could he possibly add to the plot? I was so wrong! It was a wild delight to me how quickly the sibling bond blossomed between Charlie and Bill--it seemed to spring from our collective imagination as an instantly fully developed relationship--and it really upped the fun I had playing Bill.

[elisem]

Elise here.

Jenett told me to read Alternity, and I gulped the whole thing down in, oh, January 2012 I think it was. Then Jenett and Peg and Naomi talked to me. I remember Peg cornering me at a party with that bright idea smile she gets, and, well, then I wound up here.

Writing Linus was waaaay too much fun, especially in exchanges with Erin (Lav). Writing Megan was full of unexpectedly overwhelming moments; there was a point where her conversations with Harry just dissolved me. (Shadow twins, wrestling with issues of family and authority and freedom and danger.) Writing Jeremy taught me a great deal about editing everything down to 1/4 of what I started with. :-)

One of my favorite Alternity moments was the whole grand pandemonium of what wound up being called The Platening. That night was a hoot. (Speaking of Umbridge, another of my favorite Alternity things was discussing Umbridge with Jenett and helping think up some of the awful punishments she used. She was just so wonderfully icky.) And reading everyone's codas has been the most amazing thing.

OK, someone's been cutting onions in here, pardon me.

[naomikritzer]

I really loved the backstory on the kitten plates. Did that ever get out of player-conversation and into the game?

And, I loved the avalanche of kittens when they all got de-plated, and all the people who wound up with pet kitties.

[reenie]

Hi all, this is Rene.

When the game launched I was invited to play Bellatrix Lestrange. I had sworn off doing yet ANOTHER Harry Potter RPG after just finishing as the mod of This is Now, where I also played Bellatrix and Draco, among others. And yet somehow the premise of this particular RPG, Alternity, pulled me in, and I was soon back in Bella's shoes.

Only a few weeks later, I picked up Draco when the original player left. For all but his two first posts he's been mine. I also developed Rod's character, and invented Hydra from out of the ether. I picked up other characters along the way, playing Daphne for all but a few of her early posts, and forcing Jason on everyone in the game's final months.

I'm a writer in the real world. I have a website here

I have more fond memories of this game and the last seven years than I can began to comment upon. But I'll do my best here in the coming days. :)

[elisem]

All your characters are great, but Jason Montague sure was impressive, going from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds, as it were. Talk about quick character building, and fitting in fast!

[pegkerr]

Hi, this is Peg, and like Gwen, I have been with the game since the conception stage. I had about a dozen short stories and two fantasy novels published before I discovered Harry Potter, but I fell into the fandom when my mother-in-law sent the first two books to me to read to our daughters.

I've often said that while I'm proud of my original published work, my work on Alternity was the most FUN I've ever had as a fiction writer. I also discovered that I really enjoy working collaboratively. I feel that I'm strong on writing dialogue and scenes, but I have trouble coming up with plots. As a team, we players had skills that overlapped, and I am so impressed with the collaborative result.

I was going to mention Luna's confusion over her assignment from Dolohov, too! The idea was just a little comment that Naomi threw away on our planning list, suggesting that Luna was the best character for the joke. The writing between me and Denise (as Dolohov) just unspooled like magic, and I was absolutely SCREAMING with laughter as we threaded back and forth. And then when Naomi came back later that night, she was astonished when everyone of the players yelled at her, "OMG, NAOMI, BEST IDEA EVAH!" and she was like, 'What? What did I miss?'

I'm very proud that I lured Naomi, Elise and Brook to the group.

Ideas that I personally came up with that I'm rather chuffed about: The I Solemnly Swear Lock (and how Fred and George tested it), Alt-Galleon, and the idea that we would plant Dumbledore at Hogwarts during year one and have him switch to the Transfiguration teacher role later on. And then when everyone would be looking at Barty Crouch, Jr arriving to teach Year 4, we would pull the rug out from everybody by having Dumbledore show up. It worked really well.

[pegkerr]

Oh, and also, Rene reminds me: I played in two other RPGs: I played Neville (taking over from another player) in both Nocturne Alley and Seen Unforeseen. Nocturne Alley was REALLY popular, but I always felt a bit lost because I came in late and felt that I wasn't oriented very well. And Seen Unforeseen sort of fell apart because there really wasn't very good central planning.

I've felt that the writing in Alternity just kept getting better and better (my big frustration was that I was always hoping for a bigger audience, because I felt that we deserved it), and I'm as proud of work that I've done here as anything I've sold professionally.

[lucky_guess]

I'm a Linny! Big Nocturne Alley fan, and small-time RPer, found out about Alternity through NrAged folks, and applied to take over Alice and Frank back in October of 2008 (so Year 1). I took over Pansy in Year 2, and played Harry for a while too.

I have some published work, but it's dry and Sciencey, so this has been a nice change of pace.

I'd say one favorite moment (of many!) was the Time-turning sequence in Y3 -- we had to work out the multiple timelines, and then had to time the posts properly, and it was just a lot of fun to pull off!

[synecdochic]

Every time I reread canon to check up on something, I was baffled to find that Alice and Frank weren't there.

I gushed up there ^^ about all the fun I've had with you, but in the not-our-characters department, I have to really admire what you did with Pansy. Her long, slow evolution over seven years was amazing.

[lapin_agile]

Hi, I'm Deb, and I play Alternity.

Er.

I came to Alternity as a reader and loved it madly for sixth months before I succumbed to the siren song of the Casting Call. I applied to create and play Madam Pomfrey and I ended up taking on Ron, as well, because he'd been languishing after his first player left the game. (True confession: Ron was a hard sell. I didn't particularly like Ron in canon, and I really had no burning desire to figure him out and play him. But I'm so very glad I did.)

I have lots of favourite conversations/moments of the game. Like the time Sirius and Poppy talked about music and about going surreptitiously to Muggle rock festivals before the war. Or the time in first year when the firsties had a Potions lesson disaster with Forgetfulness potion. (Or the other Potions fiasco that year when Padma ended up with a boil on her face in the shape of Poland.)

A favourite night of play, though, was the night when Regulus, whom I then played, stayed up very late, talking first with Pansy and then making peace with his much loved and entirely misunderstood brother, Sirius. Those two character relationships were lovely to play, and that night was a game highpoint for me. So long ago!

[naomikritzer]

Oh, the forgetfulness potion. Poor Lav. Draco forgetting that he disliked Ron: also hilarious.

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

Hi!

I'm Erin\queenbookwench; I've played Susan Bones and Lavender Brown since they showed up in the middle of year 1, and shared Pomona Sprout with Jennett.

I was a huge fan of an RPG on LJ called That Was Then\This is Now (you can still find my plot speculation posts in the fan comm!) that was active between 2004-2006ish; I was totally hooked by the plot, the banter, the quality of character development, and the immersiveness of following the story in real time. I looked, but never found another game that casptivated me in that way. So when someone (Rene I think) posted on the fan comm that some TWT\TIN alums were starting a new game with a cool AU premise, I gamely headed over to read. And actually, the moment that really hooked me as a reader was when Teddy and the Slytherin boys decide to test Hermione's blood.

The player application re-opened shortly thereafter, and I nervously submitted....

[reenie]

Yes, that was totally me!

So glad I made that post, Erin. :)

So was Draco. Lav was his first crush.

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

One early moment that I was proud of with my own characters was the climax of the first year Mean Girls arc.

I was so nervous about writing both sides of the confrontation between Lav and Sue!

[lapin_agile]

The Mean Girls storyline was so important to Y1. That and the AK game plot, which Megan won (or nearly won? I can't remember), and in winning lost so much. Those were great plots for developing characters and establishing the cliques that shaped the way the kids lived at school.

But the Mean Girls story was also true to life and age-appropriate (something we sometimes of struggled with in Y1, because writing 11 yr-olds is difficult!).

I loved both Sue and Lav in different ways, but especially Sue because she was someone I would like to know. :)

[reenie]

I love the HUGE ARRAY OF LEGIT FEMINIST ICONS represented in our game's female characters.

Seriously, I can't think of a single one who didn't present some positive feminist quality. And yes, I include Bella and Umbridge in that statement - though of course it's a very tiny positive in a whole mountain of "ew."

[jenett]

This, very much this.

I also really love the many different models of what to do with your life, and that there were so many variations on how to choose to do what you were doing.

[pegkerr]

One thing I'll mention is how much fun I had playing the bulk of the Weasley family.

Several of our other players mentioned how they didn't like 'playing both sides of a conversation.' I didn't mind it at all. (It certainly was convenient for me, when I was playing two characters squabbling, that I didn't have to wait on another player's schedule.

For some reason, I had an easy time channeling members of this family I love so much, and it would give me a great deal of delight to have four or five members going at it, capping each other, one after another. I loved Arthur and Molly's relationship: how they loved each other, how she would get wound up and he would settle her down. Writing about Molly after she was widowed was so interesting.

I loved the constant fencing between Percy and Bill. (Another fencing relationship in the family which was different but fictionally interesting and useful, but this time involved another player was Deb's Ron played against my Bill.)

I loved playing the twins. They were originally played by my daughter, Fiona, but I picked them up when she got too busy with school to continue. I loved their convoluted plans (setting up the ISS lock, assisting Terry, springing their surprise on Molly so they could force her to admit the existence of the Order).

I learned an awful lot about families and health--and unhealthy--family relationships by writing the Weasleys.

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

Percy's arc was pretty intense!

[jenett]

Hi, all! I'm Jenett. In my day job, I'm a librarian, and I've also been the Data Goddess for the game for years, and I am so looking forward to being able to release the wiki to you all. (And then talk endlessly about all the stuff in it, and the 'how the wiki works' and which choices I'd have done differently in hindsight. Also Alternity itself.)

On the other hand, I am sort of looking forward to a world in which my life is not driven by the wiki indexing I need to do.

A lot of my other writing is explanatory non-fiction: I have a 120+ essay site about religious witchcraft stuff, and do what friends call "librarian smash" posts explaining complicated topics in ways that apparently make sense to more people than not. (I do not do concise well. You may have noticed.)

Favourite moments
All of it? Seriously, there has not been a week where I have not gone "This is so amazing, and these people are so amazing, and I am so glad I am doing this."

I have most loved what different people brought to the plotting: I think Alternity worked as well as it did because we had some people who loved plots that spun out over months or years, and some people had the perfect last minute thing that brought a whole concept together, people who were amazing at the serious stuff and people who could bring the perfect quip at just the right moment, and how that all meshed to make for much more awesome.

We have the best fen. Watching you all theorise was so much fun, pretty much always.

Siz is very near and dear my heart. I didn't originate her, but I started playing her in late December Y1. She's taught me a lot about a number of things, including astronomy: I quite literally see the world differently now than I used to.

I particularly adored her relationship with Raz, and how Rene, who was his player for a lot of it, had this incredible knack for him saying exactly the right thing to stop one of her stress spirals dead in its tracks. And her interactions with Cedric and Harry, in particular.

I am so glad we had a Tosha in the game, not only for my own sake (oh, I adored her conversations with him, we had so much fun) but for all the complexity and ambiguity and the fact that he is *right* a bunch of the time, even when he's also very wrong, very broken, and very dangerous.

Playing Umbridge had me washing my brain out with bleach very very frequently, and I so appreciate the crowd-sourcing of evil that both Elise and Peg did with me at different times (and every other player in general, for letting me torment their characters.)

Albus was ghosted for a long time, and always complicated to write, but I picked him up when it became clear we needed someone to coordinate all the weird stuff he was doing and keep track of it. My favourite post of his is him asking Tonks and Charlie about effects after ritual sex.

(And I feel sorry I didn't manage to do more for Lee: I picked him up from Peg, and then my life got more complicated before he got to be a coherent voice in my head.)

Other things:
The pivot point of the Frost Faire. We hadn't, originally, intended it to be a big thing, just a set piece of yeah, yeah, more evil. And we got to the point where Lucius and Barty and Dominic are trying to decide to speak up, and everything just shifted.

A lot of the silly threads, the counterpoints to the very dark world. Intra Profundis. Sunrise Cordial. Pixies and kittens rampaging all over the castle.

The many different kinds of relationships, and how characters worked through incredibly difficult choices and situations.

The way books got interwoven - we have summaries of some of them. (And our discussion in chat of how Imperius-driven authorship brings out the worst in the YA genre is one of my favourite player chats: notes from some of that are in the wiki.)

I am deeply amused that I don't know if anyone ever actually guessed what the American Witches books are based on, which is the Sweet Valley High series that both D and I remember from our pre-teen years. (Again, much more in the wiki.)

So much more, but I could go on for days, and we've got time to discuss.

[longstrider]

For all its silliness Sunrise Cordial is freaking dark. Drugging children to spy on them and their families is very dark.

[flourish]

I figured I might post here. As most of you know, I started this thing, but sometime a few years ago things got too much for me and I had to hand over my characters. I'm super thrilled that the project survived all the way through to its natural end and was so happy to be part of it - even down to the last night, when the current players let me come along for the ride. :)

[flourish]

Oh, and I played a LOT of people along the way - most notably, however, Hermione and McGonagall – who were all much better handled by their later players!

[reenie]

I'm really glad that I got to play two characters - Draco and Hydra - with such dynamic arcs, who basically ended up very different from how they started (and yet not). Despite their similarities, and the fact that they essentially landed in the same place, I do feel that their arcs were pretty different.

Draco began as a snotty little shit, of course. Harry was actually quite clueless, as well. But with so many forces trying to pull Harry away, toward rebellion (Sirius, Hermione, then Snape), I knew that Draco would either follow, or totally turn away from Harry and all that he stood for. The fact that Harry always stuck by Draco meant that Draco followed...but he went dragging his feet, that's for sure! And then he had to encounter his own prejudices, and the self-loathing that followed. I can honestly say that if Draco had NOT become a fugitive, he may not have been able to complete his journey into a full-fledged, 100% committed member of the Order.

Hydra debuted as a sweet, gentle character - for all appearances. But it really was just that, appearances. Hydra was never so calculated as her mother accused her of being, but she definitely adopted an incredibly passive demeanour out of habit, and out of a need to protect herself. She didn't have Draco's prejudices, but she was incredibly sheltered about some things, and too knowledgeable about others. She also did inherit certain personality traits from her parents, despite being a person who was most definitely Good (she is a darker character than Draco, for example - or is if you ask me, at least). It was difficult to write about a victim of abuse and not have it turn into exploitation, but I hope I walked the line there in a way that wasn't offensive.

[pegkerr]

Copying my response to the later alt-fen post here and deleting it there, since we seem to be continuing game discussion here.

Oh, yeah, fen/player influence. That was interesting. Sometimes we'd be doing something and you'd guess, and we'd be squeeful: 'They have no idea what's coming!' Sometimes you'd catch on quickly and we'd be a little crestfallen: 'Were we that obvious?' Sometimes you'd guess and I'd feel dismay, because your idea was actually better than the idea we'd be working toward!

One of the most fun times I had watching the fen's reaction was the slow, slow buildup to the revelation of the I Solemnly Swear lock on April 1 in Year One, and how it would allow the fen to hear Terry in his own voice for the first time. That was one of my favorite reveals in the game.

One of my biggest regrets is the way I worked with Terry's icons so that the 'mudblood' icon was initially set up as his default icon instead of as a named icon. That made sense, because it was the icon I was using the most frequently, but it meant that when I changed the default icon, ALL of the icons originally set to default also changed to that new icon. I could have gone back and changed all of the posts to the mudblood icon manually, but it wouldn't have fixed the way all the comment icons changed too. People who discovered the game later on don't realize the stylistic change that was there: until Terry can speak freely under the lock, you never see his face. boot is faceless. That was SO important to me, but it isn't true now. Including on the .pdfs, which weren't even a twinkle in our eye when we set up icons and started the story.

(Jenett, that's maybe a note that we should put in the wiki under Terry's entry.)

I loved the absolute explosion of fen commentary that occurred when we introduced two of our most Eeeeevil characters: Amycus and Dolohov. I played Terry alone at first for several months and then a new player created Amycus. She did such an amazing job of channeling an inner psychopath and it was so exhilarating to play Terry in opposition to her, because it was so much like Terry's actual dilemma: I would have no idea what she would do next. But to my great regret, she had to leave the game, and I ended up taking over Amycus. I've never written such a depraved character before, and it was an interesting (and chilling) experience as a writer. But unlike my pleasure playing both sides of a Weasley confab, I didn't enjoy playing both sides of Terry/Amycus quite as much. I never felt I was as good at Amycus as Nancy was (you'll note that all the references to opera went away). And I missed all the frisson of dangerous surprise underlying when it had been Nancy and me.

[synecdochic]

I actually have plans for fixing the Terry icon thing when I redo the pdfs, we just couldn't do it while the game was running because it would involve making current posts look weird for a bit!

[naomikritzer]

One of the things I loved about canon was that JKR gives you such a broad and vital sense of the varieties of Good and Evil. The spectrum of evil includes Peter Pettigrew, Dolores Umbridge, Bellatrix Lestrange, and Lucius Malfoy, all of whom are evil in radically different ways. The spectrum of good includes the Trio but also Dumbledore, Snape, Molly Weasley...

I think we did a good job with that in the game, especially with our Death Eaters, who were an incredibly varied bunch. I played four Death Eaters, in the end: Dominic Selwyn, Corax Mulciber, Savitha Desai, and Seamus Finnigan.

Dominic was intended to be someone who could at least on the surface seem reasonable. He was a pretty good boss -- generally polite, genuinely appreciative when employees would show up offering help in a crisis (see: the portkey mishap that one December), his Christmas gifts to Arthur and Bill always indicated that he paid fairly close attention to the sorts of things his employees needed and liked. He was a loving father to his occasionally exasperating daughter.

He was also vicious, manipulative, entirely willing to feed drugs to teenagers to see what sorts of things spilled out in conversation, and committed to the cause of the bad guys (I mean, he wanted Voldemort gone, but he was figuring the Council would continue to run things and could do a much better job without V.)

After he died, I immediately wanted a new DE -- hence Corax. Who was the pointy-haired boss, but with the power to cruciate anyone who annoyed him. Where Dominic was well-controlled, thoughtful evil, Corax was id personified in some ways. Impulsive, gleeful, sadistic, energetic in all the wrong ways. He was not only a terrible person, he was the worst possible boss in every way I could think of -- he would give you conflicting instructions, complain no matter what you did, focus on the wrong details, etc., etc., etc.

Corax eventually got killed (as was inevitable given that his allies found him as annoying as his enemies -- IIRC he was actually offed by a fellow Death Eater), at which point I brought in Savitha Desai. She had previously been described as charismatic. She was never going to rate up there with Dolohov in the Personable Evil department but I tried to show her own variety of magnetism, especially in her relationship with Ron, whom she mentored.

And finally, Seamus, who was a Death Eater eventually, but never the sort of Death Eater who had much actual power. I tried to make sure that Seamus was awful, but at the same time, you couldn't really avoid seeing why he was so awful.

[kiya]

I suspect that's one of the reasons that I found Seamus so very compelling, and so wanted to know what was going on in there - that I could see enough of why he felt he had to do what he was doing that I couldn't help but wonder how much of it was genuine belief and how much of it was lacking any other meaningful option.

I am so, so glad that he found Jason and got a space, in some of his life, to start actually making his own choices for a while. Even if in the end the things he had tried to leave behind were the ones that finally caught up with him.

[pegkerr]

Another thing I'll mention about our playing method that we really only started doing when Denise entered the picture. She suggested that when one of our characters were in a battle, we should roll the dice to determine their fate. We used (at Denise's suggestion) random.org.

We had certain characters that we knew were going to kill and when--Arthur was an example. We had certain characters that weren't sure whether they were going to survive or not--Frank is an example. I believe, Linny, you assumed he was going to die before the end of the game?

Terry was one character I had that I just didn't know. I thought it was very likely he would die, but I couldn't quite see his future. Certainly he had a knack for having EVERYONE AROUND him die!

We rolled for a good number of characters at the Battle of Hogwarts. I had assumed through most of the game that Kingsley, as in canon, would be instrumental in the aftermath of the war--except that when I rolled for him, he hit a 100! Sorry, Kingsley, you iz ded. And in honor of his rolling such an emphatic score, we decided he should take out another player character when he died, which is why he killed Savitha.

As I said, I just couldn't quite figure out Terry's future. I had a hard time seeing how he would be happy, because he was so damaged, and dammit, I wanted him to be happy. Very early in the game, I thought he might end up with Hermione, but it quickly became clear they would go in different directions. I thought he might die, but for all the time I rolled for him, he never hit a fatal score.

But his fate only became clear in the last 24 hours in the game, when Linny rolled for Colin and hit another 100. Suddenly, Colin was gone, and Luna, who I had always assumed would end up with him, was alone. And suddenly, all the interaction that Luna and Terry had had made perfect sense as a set up for a long-term relationship arc which turned out to be very good for both of them. It hit upon all the notes of Terry's having to deal with his massive survivor's guilt, it hit upon the fact that they were both physically scarred, it hit upon both their canine natures (Luna due to lycanthropy and Terry because of his animagus form). It hit upon Luna's awesome ability to accept and love people exactly how they are.

Luna and Colin would have had a very happy life together, I've no doubt. And yet Terry and Luna are perfect together. And, as I said, it only crystallized in the last 24 hours of the game, due to a totally random roll.

[naomikritzer]

I am glad we started encouraging some randomized death, because it's really hard to let go of a character, but at the same time, there's something a little dishonest about big battles where only NPCs and bad guys die.

True fact: when you fight a war, you lose people you love.

[gwendolyngrace]

I've started a new post for fen to ask us questions.

Also we're going to be putting up some other posts for people to talk to players about character who go together - like the DE thread or the Hogwarts folks...