COVID Character: Stephen Clark

Special NPC Edition!

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Stephen Clark

Aliases: None
Pronouns: He/him
Character Concept: Last minute sibling for another NPC
Character Stats: Dreamer and Painter of Spooky Things
Campaign: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth
System: Call of Cthulhu, 7th Ed.
Campaign Status: Complete!

 

I decided to take a break from posting characters that I've played to non-player characters I've created for games I've run. Don't worry, there's only two of them. This character is the first.

 

The first campaign I ran during COVID (chronicled on this very blog) was Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. In the first part of the campaign, the players tangle with, and ultimately bring down, the local chapter of the Silver Twilight Lodge.

 

One of the plot threads players can follow up on is the disappearance of James Clark, a young lawyer and new member of the Silver Twilight Lodge who goes missing shortly before the game starts. For unclear reasons (i.e. the module doesn't actually say why), he's been imprisoned in the lodge's creepy, secret basement, listening to the screams of poorly-resurrected undead and slowly going insane.

 

James became a much more integral character to the campaign's story--in part because I made him a friend of one of the investigators and in part because the players liked him and wanted to help him. He's supposed to be quietly shuffled off to an asylum at the end of chapter one and never thought about again, but instead he (and his girlfriend) got dragged along on various missions and pumped for information about the Silver Twilight Lodge.

However, James' sanity was very, very fragile, and it was easy to get him to have a breakdown. The players were also interested in getting James' family to help him out with his condition, so that they didn't feel like they were abandoning him to the world. I quickly made up his younger brother Stephen, a reclusive artist who lived in New Hampshire. I also decided to make Stephen a latent psychic, who was suffering horrifying nightmares now that Cthulhu was stirring in his slumber. In order to make sense of his nightmares, Stephen drank a lot of absinthe and painted very disturbing works of art. 

 

I decided to make Stephen transmasculine, because why not? I based some of his backstory on the real life artist Gluck (who seems have been non-binary, if I'm reading the history correctly). I also used a picture of Gluck as the character art for Stephen.

Stephen was just a bit better put together than his brother, and was happy to be his occasional minder. Over the course of the campaign, he created a bunch of artwork loaded with hints and foreshadowing. The players made good use of these in planning their actions over the course of the campaign.