#TheNameOfGod #ActualPlay #Salambina
During *Salambina 2013*, a game con held in Salobreña (Spain) I got to play a full game of _The Name of God_ .
Editing out the frequent interruptions and the mid-game pause to go get booze for the night, a full game with four players and a considerable language barrier (we played in spanish) lasted a bit more than three hours.
A few highlights from the fiction...
Pablo played *The Winter* ... a woman of middle age, ex teacher in an elementary school of Toronto, left alone by her husband when things got tough.
We saw her stalk him, obsess over him and his new family (younger wife, newborn child), up until a thief happened to get break into his house.
We all expected her to do something to help her former husband, but instead she let the thief beat him and flee, and then took advantage of the confusion to sneaked into the child's bedchamber and (as a Ritual Act) smother the life out of him.
She then simply walked away, offering the small corpse to the man that was still lieing on the floor, recovering from the beating.
It left us all shocked and breathless (but in a good way, I mean, it was like watching a disquieting horror movie).
+Claudia Sirim played *The Shadow* ... a 30-something guy living in the streets of Berlin.
His story was surreal and dark.
He was a violent guy acting as a sort of vigilante: he badly beat up a couple of guys to "save" a drunk girl they were groping; he almost killed a little kid in a barren city-park because he was having delusions of being threatened by god-killing demon-children; finally he "saved" a prostitute by forcing her into brutalizing and killing her own pimp.
His death was as surreal as his life; he went to confront the demon-children, rising such a big ruckus that the neighbours called the police (obviously no demons appeared) and when sirens and blue and red lights came, he saw it as a sign of his victory and walked "the iron road" towards transcendence ... ending up killed by a train.
Alejandro played *The Stars* ... a young man with a drug addiction problem, trying to get clean, in the city of Baltimore.
He managed to play and incredibly positive (yet dramatic) character.
He performed a few tough and honest actions, trying to "shine" despite all the darkness and filth that surrounded him.
He lost friends, he lost his freedom, he almost lost his life ... but in the end won the girl, and even got her father (basically his recurring enemy up to the very end) to reconsider his positions and accept him into the family.
Then used the rules of the game in a totally unexpected way: the text says that after you accomplish three Ritual Actions, you have to describe a scene where you kill your mortal body in order to free your divine spirit ... but it doesn't say WHEN this scene has to occur!
So The Stars chose to live a long and happy life among loved mortals, and only in its old age, after his wife peacefully passed away, he took pills to leave this world and "transcend".
A moving ending.
+Alessandro Piroddi (me) played The Worm and ended up tangled in a brief but violent story.
By accident my character crossed paths with a small-time russian criminal, in the docks of Barcelona.
Mad as a hatter, my character screwed the Russian plans for the night, stealing a medallion from him and earning his enmity.
The Russian tracked my homeless character to kill him, but got murdered instead, one eye scooped out with a spoon and eaten in front of his horrified and shocked men.
The end of the Worm then came when two crooked cops cornered him in its own lair (a dark alley where he had fashioned a sort of armchair/throne out of junk).
He confronted them, and obviously they killed him with, not before he managed to "take" something from one of them, ruining the man for life.
It was epic, and brutal, and batshit crazy.
In the end the game worked very well.
The fact that the players SAID some actions had special meaning, and then recited the ritual words and chanted the mantra, actually GAVE apparently random and common actions an incredibly esoteric aura and feeling.
The mantra itself often made the narration into a palpitant crescendo, with every player's voice adding energy and details to the occurring action.
The game lasts much longer that expected (it is _NOT_ a 1h game), but it was fun and engaging and left me with the desire to play again.
