Circus Game

I'm running a short run game concerning members of a Romanian circus in the 1930s. The first session was last night, and it went really well. 7:30pm - 8pm = character creation. This had several stages: 1. What is your basic idea (people had been thinking about this during the week)? What are 3 things your character is good at? (kind of like Over the Edge skills) Debbie - tarot reader with conjoined twin. She's good at fortune telling, mechanics and something else. Scott - lizard man. He's good at climbing/acrobatics, larceny and something else. Luke - Androgenous boy/girl twins. Good at contortionism, intimidating people (freaking them out), and something else. Sam - The Monkey King (animal trainer of 4 clown monkeys). Good at Monkey Kinging, Getting What She Wants, and something else. Conan - the Albino Strongman. Good at Albino Strongman (feats of strength and creeping people out), psychically sensitive, and something else. For some reason I can remember exactly 2 skills out of 3 for each character. Oh, and we added a dwarf called The Professor, who has a lisp, and is a juggler/unicyclist. He will be Norman's character in 2 weeks' time when Norman joins us. 2. What is your character afraid of? What do they want? Debbie - afraid of her twin taking over her mind. Dreams of being normal (not having a conjoined twin) - but feels guilty about it. Scott - afraid of fire. Dreams of finding someone to love him. Luke - twins afraid of being different to each other. Dreams of being married to themselves. Sam - afraid of being lef alone. Dreams of having a good safe home for her monkeys. Conan - afraid of being made to feel like a freak. Dreams of making his circus family proud of him. Each player described their character's personality and appearance to the others. 3. How old are you? Given that the PCs act as a family, I wanted to be clear who had what role in the group. The ages lead into this nicely. Debbie - 16 Scott - 18 Luke - 17 Sam - 15 Conan - 19 This lead to a clear family structure, which we spent some time discussing. Sam is the baby, and can be quite annoying at times. She is the boss of her monkeys, but no one else takes her seriously. Debbie is the quiet second youngest girl. She gets on well with Sam, but when she's trying to hang out with the boys she rejects Sam as being 'childish'. Luke's twins are right in the middle, and are often out of place. They stick together, and while they do get on with the others they're in an awkward position. Scott is the second oldest, and is also the most socially adjusted and confident. He looks after the younger kids, and tries to be on the same level as his big brother. Conan is the oldest, and thus most responsible. He's also a little shy, so while he looks after the others, he sometimes relies on Scott to be the more forward one. We then took turns pointing at a player, and saying how our characters felt about that character (starting with the oldest one and working down). This was mostly a one-way process, but as people got excited about the relationships they fed back to each other. As people explained their views of each other's characters, little details were added or tweaked. By the end of the half hour we had some pretty cool characters, but what was really exciting was that the relationships between the characters were really clear, and were in a context (family) that we could all understand on a pretty deep level. It's probably worth noting that there were lots of little things that came up, like the fact that Luke's twins were fascinated by Debbie's character, because they thought she must have such a special bond with her conjoined twin. Debbie had a crush on the boy twin, but thought the girl twin was freaky and weird. Unfortunately she couldn't tell them apart, so often flirted with or rejected the wrong one. We then had a hot drink break, and started in on the game proper. It felt like a really productive bit of preparation, and I was pretty excited by the way the characters were set up. It felt very promising...