Alright, here we go. Got a little (a lot) carried away with this one, but hey, it’s Monster Mash.
So, to be totally honest, I started out the creation process with the thought of “I want to make something that can use the phrase ‘monster mash’”, which most naturally lent itself to making something that mashed monsters. But, the topic was more about making monsters than mashing them, after all.
That brought up the idea of someone making a monster for the aims of killing it. In other words, the magecraft would be intimately tied to monsters both in their creation and in their destruction. When I thought about why someone would ever do that, the first thing that came to mind was ‘just don’t tell anyone you’re the one who made the monster, so you look super cool when you know all its weak points and murder it’, and moved forwards with that.
...in other words, you remember the whole plan Syndrome from The Incredibles had with his giant robot where he’d beat it with his remote control and everyone would love him? Yeah, it’s basically that. Realized that literally just now as I was writing that previous paragraph. Fucking hell.
Anyway, I decided from the outset that I wanted this to be more family-focused with the current head as another line item than the other way around, since for something like this where the magus is more ‘the inheritor of a legacy’ than ‘an oddity in their own right’, it just fits better. If there’s an oddity here, it’s the first family head, but I felt like he was the easy way out for a topic like this. At any rate, that was the purpose behind the Clock Tower Case File format, so it still felt like everything had a cohesive narrative and kept to the core idea behind ‘Make a Magus’, instead of straying outside of those bounds, so I’m pretty happy with that overall.
It was also fun to write it in this sort of style, too, as a sort of in-universe account instead of a meta top-down view like how sheets usually are. There are some gaps in knowledge and interjections of investigators’ personal biases and so on scattered throughout. The downside of that is that some stuff wound up getting scrapped from the final draft, like the precise heroic anecdotes each magecraft formula is based off, with the exception of the mention of Vortigern and Vishnu avatars. I have some notes on the precise stuff, but there’s no sense in dumping that in when it doesn’t add much overall, I felt. Some stuff is explained below, though.
This format did make it a bit hard to justify something like the interlude though, until I remembered Residual Thought Playable from Apo and Case Files, which made it super simple for obvious reasons. Thanks Sanda. I’m ultimately glad I included that interlude, even if it adds some length to the sheet as a whole, since I felt like it’s an important part of really showing the ‘monstrous’ nature of the family and how they slot into the topic, as a family whose magecraft is completely intertwined with monsters.
Originally, I was going to include a second interlude from the current head’s observation by investigators from his daily life (it would’ve been called Blue Blue Glass Moon, because I’m a bad person), but being busy, I decided not to in the end. Not wanting to make this submission end up being thirty-some pages long was also a motivating factor, obviously. I feel like his character description paints a good enough picture as it is, so I don’t feel particularly bad about leaving that interlude out. The only notable thing that would have been there that’s otherwise not in the sheet is a bit of ‘mask switching’ a la a certain Touko dialogue, between the happy Rance-ass motherfucker in the daily life to the rapey Rance-ass motherfucker in the monster-killing, but I felt that was pretty implicit in the sheet and the interlude I did write regardless, so hopefully it didn’t hurt the character too much.
Granted, this sheet’s still long as hell, but I think everything that’s there kinda needs to be, otherwise you’d have something a lot more two-dimensional.
Now for some of the magecraft info that didn’t make it into the sheet proper, since it wouldn’t be a proper magus sheet if I didn’t explain that somewhere. It was initially just a process of grabbing as many heroic cliches as I could, finding cross-cultural links and groundings for each, and translating them into magecraft. So you’ve got stuff like the concept of Uther designing Arturia, Parashurama acceding to Rama, and so on as the grounding, which was intentionally cross-cultural to take full advantage of the magic foundation. Rapid growth of child heroes, heroes fighting against the creations of their cursed ancestors, a weapon passed down to a worthy successor, and so on. That said, that was just a starting point. From there, I had to think on how to actually make it magecraft.
That’s where the fun stuff happens.
This isn’t gotten into in as much depth in the investigation (because how would Kron figure this out decisively), but the way it actually works “cross-culturally” is by leveraging past phenomena like colonization and Crusades as well as aspects of modern day phenomena like hordes of Westerners practicing yoga; in other words, using the westernization of non-western things so that the cultural meaning of those non-western things can be tapped into without using those incompatible foundations. This in turn is very intimately related to the Christianization of legends, which shouldn’t need any explanation. Despite being Barthomeloi faction, then, they’re actually dipping into a bit of modern magecraft, but it gets results so who’s gonna judge? Well, Lorelei will, but that’s beside the point.
The universalizing nature of Christianity was also a big part here; it’s mentioned in Case Files how you could use “God” instead of angels as a foundation stabilizer, but “God” has a particular color already which might not be what you want, so you use angels since you can probably find an angel suited to your needs given their sheer variety. The Corpalatium use “God” instead of angels though, because they want that color. Explaining that in depth goes a bit deeper down the rabbit hole. Sure there are the obvious ones like King Arthur and Charlie’s paladins (fun fact, the monster curse of the first family head borrows just a little bit from the concept of Karl’s assimilation virus, but that’s for another sheet) who don’t need any description, but it doesn’t stop there. For instance, in some sects of Hinduism, Jesus is seen as an avatar of Vishnu, which is how the Corpalatium get backdoor access to the legends of succession between Vishnu’s avatar, by leveraging “Jesus as a hero” and “Jesus as an incarnation of God” with the same aspects appended to other avatars of Vishnu. Add in an extra splash of connection via British colonization and the popularity of pseudo-Indian culture like shitty restaurants and meditation in western societies, and bam, you’ve tapped into that story without having to touch Indian magic foundations.
You also have similar aspects in the Celtic side, the Middle Eastern side, and so on; this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but Christianity’s pretty much everywhere, so I’m not going to start listing out everything since I’m sure you all get the idea by now. This also allows you to take how different cultures handle “monsters”, but that all operates similarly to the hero stuff so there’s no point in just repeating myself. With that all explained, you can probably think of what beast parts the Monster Mash was originally made out of, too. The name of the Corpalatium ties in as well, coming from “cor” (together) and “palatium” (palace), in other words a palace of unification, a place where things come together. The fact that palatium is also a component of the modern-day “paladin” also helps in the connection of the family magecraft to the color of “God”, and the result is a family that cleanly embodies the pervasive aspects of that cultural space.
So in the end, what you’ve got is basically a family that makes monsters and then juices themselves up so they can kill the monsters to level up. Everything about them is ultimately oriented around those monsters, since in the end they define their heroism through ‘being things that kill monsters’. It’s a pretty simple premise, but ultimately I’m satisfied with how the mechanics and all of that slotted together. It feels like there’s enough conceptual depth to everything that the family didn’t wind up just as ‘boring combat family’, which was one of my big concerns going in.
The founder is someone who I made a bunch of notes for to hash out his personal motivations, political affiliations, and abilities for my own sake, so everything wound up staying cohesive, but that’s obviously not going here since that’d be way too long to add to here, even if it would help the monster theme, since I wanted this to be more about the interaction with/ties to monsters and the meaning of a legacy that bases itself on killing monsters than the process of creating monsters themselves. Sure, that might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think ‘monster mash theme’, but it fits with the topic as worded in the doc and wound up being something I’m more satisfied with. I considered just making the sheet about him instead of the family or the current head on a couple of occasions during the design process, but it didn’t feel right. I might make a full sheet for him one day though since there’s some fun curse stuff there I cooked up that there are some hints of scattered throughout here.
The current head’s essentially ‘the inheritor of a legacy’, but he’s also an example of the instability of legacies. Thematically, he’s basically a perfect narrative example of the point of the family, a bombastic hero-man who has no issues with cutting down ‘monsters’, but as a result of that, he’s also a loudmouthed idiot who has pretty much singlehandedly revealed enough shit that the Clock Tower’s got a full case file (actually three files) on his family now.
If you wanted to try and draw a statement on magus culture out of the sheet, then this one would be that magi are inherently beings that aim for an idealized concept. The problem is that they’re people, beings that aren’t meant to embody ideals even as a terminus, and so even if a person reaches that ideal concept, it won’t be in the perfect way that the magus envisions.
In the case of the Corpalatium, they’ve gotten closer to that ‘idealized hero’ than ever before with the current head, but in the process they’ve also ruined themselves because he’s a goddamn meathead. At the same time, it’s an indication that similar difficulties will be faced the closer they move along that path to the Root, which is something shared across pretty much any magus family, and is part of the issue with finite beings trying to reach a supreme infinite to begin with.
But yeah, there you have it.
Originally Posted by PlatineDragon
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