Paint The Town Red is played over an extremely long period of time. At its purest, the game is played in a few short arcs in a given city. You players arrive in a city, Paint The Town Red, then render it uninhabitable due to struggles with factions and when one city is finished you pass on a few hundred years to the next.
This means we can zoom out over a long period of time to see how our characters change. As they journey through time, they can fit into new roles in society, develop new Passions, become new types of undead, change their name or even completely reinvent themselves. It’s fascinating to see them move through time and have their characteristics shift over hundreds or even thousands of years. The core book contains a whole set of procedures for mapping what happens to your characters over the centuries between cities, which we call The Full Weight of Time.
Thankfully, the characters around them are going to change too! Each Paint The Town Red adventure contains about 50 NPC, 12 sets of 2 Contacts plus 4 characters in each of the 6 Factions. While a lot of these change, it is absolutely fascinating to see how returning characters can repeat and change between adventures, kind of like recurring characters in a television show. What might this mean in our game? Let’s take a look at Pasco.
Pasco first shows up in Ancient Rome. They’re a charming yet revolting creatures who enjoys scaring people via delightful costume and tall tales. Their shit is inventing monsters and scaring people with them. They boast they invented half of the world’s mythology. They’re essentially a modern drag queen/king/thing, transported through thousands of years of history.
They begin their story in Greece, but then they move onto Rome. Here is their entry in Party of the Century:
5A: Pasco (Devious, Shrivelled, Unsettling)
A little freak who boasts of scaring the daylights out of generations of Greeks. Through delightful costuming they originated the myths of monsters across the Aegean: cyclops, medusae, harpies, satyrs. They are in Rome for a PARTY and are firmly back on their bullshit.
Jobs
Spook the everloving daylights of some poor mortal
Help them make a costume for a new monster
Deal with Phros a Greek Hunter chasing them
Rewards
Scare someone to death for you
Help you invent a new and fanciful tale
Tailor you a costume, preferably a monster one but they can do normal stuff
A sacrifice at the Ludi Saecularum, the Festival of the Dead.
We see him then, roughly 800 years later in Hair of the Dog. He’s not really changed that much. He’s moved on to stock Germanic myths, dragons and valkyries, and a different hunter is chasing him around, but he’s really not changed that much. He even has the same descriptors! He has chosen a new set of pronouns though.
6B: Pasco (Devious, Shrivelled, Unsettling)
A little freak who boasts of scaring the daylights out of generations of mortals. Through delightful costuming he originated the myths of monsters across the Mediterranean. He’s having more trouble with Germanic myths; his dragon outfit is hard to move around in, and valkyries are awkward. He can’t really fly.
Jobs
Spook the everloving daylights of some poor mortal
Help him make a costume for a new monster
A mortal pastor, Albus, is convincing locals to go “monster hunting”. Deal with him!
Rewards
Scare someone to death for you
Help you invent a new and fanciful tale
Tailor you a costume, preferably a monster one but he can do normal stuff
I wrote both of these, but the most fun is seeing different writers taking a crack at it. We’ve been working hard on collaborating with all the different monsters and creators, and cross pollinating them between the adventures. 1100 years later, our fellow Pasco has made it to Germany and then New York in IT NEVER SLEEPS. They’re a professional costumer and aspiring actor now. They did Nosferatu!
3a. Pasco (Smarmy, Unsettling, Decaying)
A little freak who is positively feasting on the combined mythologies of a new nation. For more than three-thousand years, they have developed a costuming skill beyond any mortal which they use to inspire society’s fears and imagination. Pasco has been getting consistent work in the new world of film and will talk your ear off about the Nosferatu costume they created while in Germany.
Jobs:
Share a legend or myth from one of the immigrant communities of NYC
Scare the pants off of a newly arrived mortal
Seed a story about one of their monsters to the mortal press
Rewards:
A truly scary fucking costume
The head of F. Scott Fitzgerald, known vampire hunter
Help you invent a new American legend
Look at him go! A completely different character, into the same things thousands of years later, but with a fun twist by his new location.
This seems liek the kind of creature Pasco would create!
There’s dozens and dozens of characters spread across the vampiric adventures and there’s more to come. PTTR is going to have an expansive community license, and I want to know what you all think Pasco would have been up in the interim… Perhaps the first PTTR third party adventure will reveal some secrets of his origins? Maybe we’ll even tell you how Dracula fits into our story!
My favourite bit of the Full Weight of Time are the Memories. There are slots on your characters sheets for six core Memories of the city you were just in. They form a set of requests for the GM about what characters you PCs want to see again. If Pasco appears ass someone’s “Joy: What moment was your emotional high?” and another character’s “Hatred: What was the character you hated the most?”, then the GM knows to bring them back later in the campaign. Each city, you can keep your Memories or replace them with new ones, keeping it clear for your GM what you want to see in future games.
Well that’s enough about that… Let’s chat soon, share the project, and if y’all like this I can share more fun NPC stories.
