One of the great things about travelling round the world with your life in a backpack is the wonderful people you get to meet, people you might never have encountered, or known only as a name on an email or internet forum. A plus point to this is that sometimes these people also enjoy games and you can play stuff with those who have different experiences, outlooks and so on. The first game I have managed to play during my time in Japan was a short, two session game of My Life With Master in Iwamizawa, Hokkaido, with Simon and Emma, who very kindly offered to put me up for a few nights.

We were all keen to play a game of some kind, but Simon commented that he didn't want anything too horrific or heavy, something amusing would go down well. We talked about this a bit and eventually settled on a game of MLwM, but with the caveat that it would be more romantic and tragi-comic than horrible. We chatted about where the game would take place and what the master would be like and almost instantly settled on a parody of 1950's SF B-movies, set in the town of Clarksburg, North Dakota. Films used as a touchstone were The Thing From Outer Space, This Island Earth, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and (perhaps most importantly) Invaders From Mars. A comical parody of what were already fairly unintentionally comedic films (apart from Body Snatchers, to be honest) was what were were all happy with playing.

As for actually playing the game, this was the first time I would be taking the role of the Master. I had played MLwM a couple of times before, but always in the role of a Minion. My fears were assuaged by the fact that SF B-movies are a particular passion of mine and I felt confident that I could portray such a Master and their needs and wants. Emma had never encountered MLwM before and Simon had encountered it only in on-line discussion. So, we did a quick overview of how the game worked, but then swiftly moved on, both Emma and Simon happy to learn the system through play.

The Master ended up as follows:

A hideous green, swollen brained alien demagogue, floating on a anti-gravitronic disc and waving his spindly arms in impotent fury. There was a pretty big take on the Mekon from Dan Dare here, as well as the controlling intelligence seen in the final sequences of Invaders From Mars.

Aspect: Brain
Type: Breeder (e was kidnapping townspeople to use to create his army of human mutants with which he could take over the world!)

Needs: Continued supply of 'volunteers'

Wants: To control the town of Clarksburg, then the world!

Fear: 3
Reason: 5

Fear was set low and Reason was set high as this was likely to be quite a short game. The minions also had some initial love for their connections.

And the two Minions worked out thusly:

Mrs Lauren Thorn

A lady who is not hat she seems. She and her family were killed in a car crash, but Mrs Thorn was resurrected by the Master as an android under his control. The town looks upon her with sympathy. She is also something of the femme fatale and the ultimate 1950's housewife!

More than human: Can move with inhuman speed, except when she is acting for herself.

Less than human: Has to recharge at night unless she engages in sexual contact in the previous 24 hours.

Connections

Mr Palliser, slightly eccentric local writer

Norma Jean, 25 year old single mother of 2

Dr 'Doc' Alpert

The kindly town physician, he has fallen into bad company in the form of the Master. He believe that the master will eventually win, so has decided to pitch for the winning side for once in his life. Everyone in the town thinks he is wonderful, so how could he possibly be some sort of hideous minion for an alien overlord?

More than human: Can detect lies, unless the liar is healthy

Less than human: Uncontrollable stutter, unless he is talking about medical matters

Connections

Mrs Dallaway, widow who the Doc has been treating for 40 years

Robert Dallaway, offspring of Mrs Dallaway and the son the Doc has never had

Play started with the Master contacting Mrs Thorn through the Interossiter built in to the freezer compartment of her fridge. The Interossiter would become a recurring prop throughout the game, the Doc having his built in to the Westinghouse Medical Machine 5000 in his surgery (“The Machine That Goes 'Ping!'”). The first appearance of the Master on the 8 inch wide (this will become important later on) circular screen of the Interossiter caused much hilarity, with his screeching, arm waving and megalomaniacal threats (“First Clarksburg, then the world!”).

The tasks set out by the Master were many and varied. Notable events include Mrs Thorn being commanded to bring the entire high school football team (“The Clarksburg Coyotes”) to the Master for his deranged breeding experiments or the disturbing command to bring him the daughter of one of her connections, the single mother Norma Jean. The Docs commands involved such varied and heart rending tasks as killing off the entire population of over-60's in the town and assassinating and overly curious federal agent.

Both Simon and Emma came up with great ways for their characters to fulfil the tasks set out by the Master. Mrs Thorn tried to use drugs and her sexual wiles to kill Colonel Haffenbacker, the Commander of Clarksburg Air Force Base, but when the dice tied, she fell back on using her alternative plan of planting evidence that he was a Communist sympathiser and Red agent! Dastardly! The Doc, when the entire town is in a seething state of suspicion regarding Soviet parachutists and Commie spies, has to assassinate the Mayor and the Sheriff. Given a Disintegratron by the Master, he is driven to extremes by this command, simply bursting in to the Mayors office and going wild with the ray gun. The Mayor survived and the Doc ran off to Mrs Dallaway, begging her to hide him and listen to his tale of woe. However, the townspeople were now convinced that Commie had let a doppelgänger of their beloved Doc loose on the streets! Chaos!

It's worth noting that when ties came up in scenes of villainy or violence against the townspeople, both Emma and Simon were very quick to come up with alternative ways to complete the commands, despite the interruption necessitated by the tie. All of these were both funny and imaginative and really added to the on-going story of the Masters attempts to take over Clarksburg.

But, the majority of the most satisfying portions of the game revolved around the developing relationships between the Minions and one of their relationships. For Mrs Thorn, this was the eccentric local novelist (and avowed F Scott Fitzgerald fan boy), Mr Palliser. For the Doc, this was Mrs Dallaway, the lonely widow he had been treating for 40 years and whose son, Robert, he thought of as the son of his own that he never had (Robert was the Docs other relationship).

The up and down nature of the evolving love between Mrs Thorn and Mr Palliser and the Doc and Mrs Dallaway provided some great moments of play. There was the Overture where, in his surgery, the Doc attempted to declaim his love for Mrs Dallaway. Sadly, due to his less than human affliction of only being able to speak without a stutter when discussing medical or health matters, he had to continually refer to things in physiological and clinical terms. Mrs Dallaway eventually got the entirely wrong end of the stick, slapping the poor Doc in the face and storming out! All this was happening while the Docs attempts to wipe out the over-60 population was going on, via the media of a bingo night and poisoned fruit punch (it failed when old Mrs Scruggins got the first 'house' she had ever had in bingo and danced excitedly into the punch bowl, knocking at all over the place. She then died of a heart attack).

The overture scenes between Mrs Thorn and Mr Palliser charted their chaste, but growing affection for each other. We found out in play that Mr Palliser had a pronounced limp, which local rumour had it that he got when Humphrey Bogart shot him in the leg because of his torrid (but brief) affair with Lauren Bacall. Who would have guessed? Palliser frequently looked at his signed and framed photograph of F Scott Fitzgerald for inspiration, while Mrs Thorn (played most excellently by Emma) used her More Than Human to bake him muffin at unreasonable speed, clean his rather grand but untidy house for him and generally make him feel that someone, finally, cared about his well-being. In the end, he abandoned his attempt to write the Great American Novel and ended up penning the Great American Romance Novel due to the influence of Mrs Thorn on his life.

Sadly, little did Mr Palliser know that Mrs Thorn was a minion of an evil Master, responsible for such heinous acts as blowing up the nearby Clarksburg Air Force Base with a Neutronic Pulse Wave Detonation Bomb or, previously, planting false evidence on the base commander to have him removed from his post (he was investigated for being a suspected Soviet spy). This actually led to the townspeople assuming that all the deaths and bizarre events were the work of Red infiltrators and fifth columnists, nicely bringing in the Cold War paranoia inherent in many B-movies of the era.

One of the most amusing revelations of the game came when Mrs Thorn actually met the Master in his flying saucer, concealed underground, just outside of Clarksburg. It had been assumed that the Master was human sized, but when the meeting took place, it was suggested (either by Simon or Emma, I can't quite recall) that he was actually the size that he appeared on the 8 inch wide screen of the Interossiter! So, we have the sight of this tiny green man with a huge bulbous brain, floating on his disc and issuing his increasingly desperate commands to minions who are seeing their ties with this repulsive alien slowly dissolve. This was a great revelation which really added to the comedy of the game.

In the end, both minions managed to garner enough love to potentially through off the evil shackles of the Master and have some sort of happy life. However, this didn't come immediately! They had to struggle through more trauma, horrible tasks and maybe an overture or two before the Doc, being berated by the Master in the flying saucer, finally resisted his commands (his stutter disappearing for this moment as he became a man of action)! He was aided by the presence of Robert, son of Mrs Dallaway, whom he had regretfully delivered to the Master for experimentation. The Doc, in a previous overture scene, had released Robert from the Masters hideous machine and told him to escape. But Robert returned to assist the Doc by sliding a Disintegratron pistol across the floor to him, whereby the Doc reduced the master and his floating disc to an orange outline and finally, a pile of dust!

In the end, both minions had enough love to continue living their lives, becoming integrated with the townspeople. Emma decided that despite her being an android (presumably a biological one), she would marry Mr Palliser and they would end up having twins. Mr Palliser would become the famous author he so wanted to be, becoming featured on the cover of Time Magazine with his beautiful wife standing with him (she was always regarded as the great woman behind a great man).

As for the Doc, he eventually set up home with Mrs Dallaway and they got married in the local church. So, he finally gets to be with the woman he has always loved and Robert does become the son he has always wanted!

To conclude, MLwM really did fit our gaming needs perfectly in this situation. We got exactly the game we were looking for and the system allowed us to create and engaging funny, romantic, slightly horrific story from whole cloth. Playing the Master was immense fun for me and got me over the 'hump' of taking that role for the first time. I'm sure Simon and/or Emma will be along at some point to offer their comments on the game.

Cheers
Malcolm