|
|
The Phantasm net supplement to White Wolf's Storyteller series of games, especially the World Of Darkness, is designed to put a character into a position similar to that of the character of Mike in the Phantasm movies. I feel I must note that in order to fully understand the concepts and motivations within this supplement, it is probably wise for a storyteller incorporating these rules to have seen (if not all the Phantasm series, then at least) Phantasm, Phantasm III and IV. Players need not, however, as their characters need not know of their true nature at first.
The player characters generated with these rules are not alive, at least not in the traditional sense. They walk, talk, heal wounds, can eat and drink, and pretty much have free will, but they are not real, living humans. If they bleed, they do not bleed red. Instead, they leak a yellow fluid, similar to embalming fluid, but not quite. They have but one living componant: their brain. But, even that is not as it should be. It has been shrunken -- with apparantly no loss in function -- and placed inside a golden sphere, which was in turn placed inside the head of the character. This can give the character some superhuman qualities, but only if the character knows how to use them.
There are three basic character concepts. The first is that the character thinks he or she is a perfectly "normal" human until something in-game happens to change that. The second and third require that the character does know who and what he or she is, and that they have made a conscious decision either to fight against or ignore the Tall Man.
The Tall Man
The Tall Man is a figure of fear and
control for these characters, someone to fight against and to try to resist,
for if they give in to him, they will become like him. His
origins are mysterious and his motives enigmatic. For some reason, he harvests
people's corpses, turning their bodies into dwarven killers and their minds
into flying spheres of destruction. A few select people, however,
he has chosen to aid him in his mission, however unwillingly. He kidnapped
them sometime in their past, re-structured them in his own image and returned
them to their lives without any knowledge this has taken place. In
some cases, it seems he has taken fully-grown adults from the past, modified
their memories, and placed them in the present, as children to grow up
as a new sort of creature, all the while believing they are human.
When the chraracters encounter the
Tall Man, he could be either malicioulsy trying to remove the sphere inside
them, or behaving in a disturbing parody of fatherhood, attempting to convince
them to "return to him" of their own free will.
