Touchstones

What is a Touchstone?

Your character maintains links with the human world through a small group of humans they care about and who vaguely know they are a supernatural creature. Mechanically, and also IC, these are called your Touchstones.

Player characters are often not very helpful to their Touchstones, whether or not they intend to be, because they are not particularly good at being a modern-day human. Most Downtime actions consist of messing up your Touchstones’ lives. Your Touchstones will turn up at the UCH on Friday nights and demand you or other people from CLS fix the problems you caused. They may also throw drama at you directly depending on what exactly it was that you did.

Cambridge Lunatic Society and its human “friends” is a small fishbowl, and many of your Touchstones are shared between two or even three supernaturals. Even worse than this, different kinds of supernatural creatures tend to care about humans differently, and you’re not very good at sharing. Even if you’re not intending to be bad people individually, your conflicting actions cause a lot of stress and problems for the humans you collectively care about.

If you're not sure what kind of relationships to create, here are some guidelines:

• Vampires are likely to have as their Touchstones the humans that they feed upon or use to source their food or wealth. They want to exploit these people to sustain their power, but have to care at least a little bit about their basic well-being - after all, you can’t feed on the dead.
• Shifters are likely to have as their Touchstones those humans they feel called by destiny to protect. They want to solve all these people’s problems though their primal methods of doing so are often ones that make complex human issues worse, and they may become very angry if they feel they are not given the kind of respect and awe they feel they deserve for all the tireless work they put in.
• Changelings are likely to have as their Touchstones those humans that remind them what it means to be human. They are interested in maintaining these people as a shining example of human-ness, in all its glory and faults, and are very opposed to change and especially supernatural ‘contamination’ of their Touchstones’ lives by other people, often going to extreme lengths to put things back where they think they should be.

Playing a Touchstone

Touchstones will be available as DPC (directed player character) roles. To recruit a Touchstone for your character, you can either pick one up in character as they come into the UCH, or you can post in the #touchstone-recruitment channel to see if anyone's interested in picking up a new one.

If you are playing the Friday game and are an experienced larper who is not new to Cambridge LARP Society, you are expected to play at least one Touchstone as your monstering duties. To start playing a Touchstone, look at #touchstone-recruitment on the Discord server and see if anything looks interesting - or just turn up as a human to the meeting in the UCH channels, thinking that Cambridge Lunatic Society sounds like great fun, and forge Touchstone relationships in-character.

Once you're attached, you will receive the Downtime actions of your attached player characters, and will have the chance to discuss briefly with them or the refs what problems this has caused for you and what other people from CLS could do to fix them. (You can also just talk directly to some or all of your player characters to arrange what has happened if you both prefer that option.)

You will then turn up as the Touchstone in the UCH channels, maybe cause drama, recruit two or three other player characters to come fix your issues, and there will be a short resolution played out in tabletop. We encourage you to GM this resolution yourself using our GM-friendly system, but other GMs will be available if you don’t want to, and you can just sit on the channel and provide plot details.

The player characters you befriend and pick out to solve your plot may decide (with your consent as a player) to acquire you as one of their Touchstones, allowing them to cause problems for you in Downtime as well, and the cycle of drama continues.

Touchstones are not intended to be long-term characters. The role is escalatory in nature, and we expect the average duration of a higher-drama Touchstone role to be two to five weeks. Possible retirement scenarios include:

• Dying as a result of your supernaturals’ actions.
• Realising that this relationship is not good for you, blocking them on everything, and moving away from Cambridge never to return.
• Your supernaturals suddenly losing interest in you in favour of more interesting and valuable humans.
• Being bitten by a vampire, spontaneously manifesting shifter powers, or being stolen by and rescued from the fae, and joining the system as a player character.

Touchstone plot is allowed to contain restricted topics, as long as it is kept to the appropriate restricted topics channels, which all start with the letters rt and are opt-in. Guidance on how to run plot containing restricted topics in ways that respect the emotional safety of your fellow players can be found in the rt-rules channel of the Discord server.