Conradin
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Character Name: Conradin Crane
Character Alias: Opener of Doors
Player Name: Matt Mitchell
Game: Threshold Victoria: Invasion
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[edit] Character Description
Victorian; mystic; newspaperman. Member of a conservative secret society called the Order of the Opened Eye, which ultimately found itself arrayed against both Morpheus and the Black Lake; Crane himself, more inclined to be pally with Morpheus, concentrated on fighting the Lake for the whole game. Spent horrific amounts of CP on Influence: Vision.
[edit] Character History
A young man of the middle class, prone to fantastical visions, Conradin Crane fell in with a crowd of mystics and rakehells while in the process of dropping out from the University of Victoria. Ultimately he wound up under the gaze of Solomon Grest, then the leader of the Order of the Opened Eye.
The Order encouraged Crane to pursue his trance-journeying; this eventually led to a session with some opium that left the young man catatonic in somebody's basement. But he wasn't dead, or simply unconscious: his mind was wandering far, faaaaar from Victoria--in fact in Iralith and its surrounding fiefdoms and fancies. There, over the course of seven years' journey, he saw and experienced much; when he awoke he discovered that (a) only a year had passed in the realm of his body and (b) he'd spent most of that year in a hellish insane asylum, having been dumped there by the Order when it seemed like he was beyond help.
Rescued and "rehabilitated" by Dame Synovea Ashburn and employed as a [[1]] by his new friend Reginald Durving VI, Crane rejoined the Order, immediately became tainted by the evil of the Black Lake, and set about wiping the latter from the face of the earth as he knew it. Beatdowns, and ultimate victory, ensued.
[edit] Notes
The name "Conradin" was lifted from "Sredni Vashtar," by Saki/H.H. Munro. In that story, Conradin is a boy constrained by terrible gray soul-crushing-cruelty-masquerading-as-filial-kindness in the form of his aunt; fantasy is his means of escape, of evading and ultimately defeating "reality." The violent anger in Saki's Conradin was at best sublimated in Conradin Crane: it never really came into play. At any rate, Victoria was the prison against which Conradin raged but also the body he never considered abandoning altogether.
Conradin Crane's one creative contribution to the Victoria Times was a short poem that appeared in the February 1877 edition:
The hours pace and snarl. What's found is lost.
Giants trip on lesser men. Regret's
The order of the day. Nightmare besets
The Daydream-seeker: such is the ticket's cost.
Black symbols on the map of life embossed
Reveal the frailty of our epithets--
Titles and stations! Reading, a man forgets
The tithe he owes, what borders he has crossed.
Despair, Victoria: in this hour you drown.
Your hands know half of what their partners do;
Your eyes are caught in mirrors, glazed in mist.
Only from your chained heart may light break through.
Despair, and gird yourself, misfortune-kissed:
The foe of joy is waiting. Face him down.
Almost everything in that poem was a specific reference to current events in game--"Giants trip on lesser men," for example, cited Trenton Merze's defeat at the hands of Garris Sarraj.
[edit] Session Summaries
Session four: November 14, 2003 (this character's first session)
