Post event post!
Okay its like obligatory to write posts after events as far as I can tell, however this is mostly going to be egotistical ranting about methods of characterisation, so I'm interested in hearing from people about how they get into characters.
( Let me tell you a story about carving turkeys )
( Let me tell you a story about carving turkeys )
Some research helps a lot - for instance, for Sophie I did a fair bit of looking into what poetry was around at the time, mostly to gain a sense of what was current and modern, and who she might consider her peers. I also looked into birth control and abortions because those would be pretty relevant to someone who was having a lot of sex in a time period where such things weren't public.
Clothes and accessories are pretty important to me - I bought her two dresses from ebay, and although they weren't my first choices, combining them with the tights really helped me get a sense of her style. Most important was the Book Of Poetry, which I created in the week before the event once she was already speaking to me, going through old anthologies to pick out a few pieces that seemed right. Writing the IC poetry was also a big step, and I tried a few different styles and threw them out before finding her 'voice'. One of them was inspired directly by an Emily Dickinson poem I'd already decided to include.
Beyond that, though, most of what I did was on the day. I'd planned for her to have a French accent until about two weeks before the event when I realised that actually she places more value on her English heritage (from her mother) than she does her French, and so would only use an accent if it was to her advantage. Everything else - walking, tone, all that, I just step into her as we left the car and see what happens.
With longer term characters I do like to find a hook to get me into their headspace - Eve, my old VIP character, for instance was all about the hair. I'd let my hair fall over my face from behind my ears and voila, Eve-thoughts. Wearing the corset as Rashel does a similar thing, just as wearing a different corset for my succubus did.
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And the book of poetry was awesome :) Yeah I didn't even think about finding the characters writing style as a method of getting the character when I was writing this post because Scaithgrace's criminal background make him unwilling to write down too much incriminating evidence, but I've played writey characters before (ask the YS Refs, there are running gags about the amount of notes and papers I often show up with). My favourite one of that was me and Jonno exchanging letter correspondence between Eskmeals 2 and 3 (we got about 10 letters done I think, where I was also trying to infodump occult wisdom as I knew they'd show up in character and hence I wanted to drop something that may help the players out).
The only thing I did this time was to work out what his signature looked like as I had to sign a couple of letters and knowing how to effortlessly (well relatively) sign as a character is something I've found can be useful and tells you a lot about them.
I'm interested by the accent thing (I've only ever played one (recurring) character with an accent, and while I find my vocal style changes for each character I tend to stay with my accent because I'm shakey on doing others reliably) I think it could have made Sophie more obviously foreign and other, which could have been interesting in a way, now you've mentioned it I wonder if it would have been interesting to phase into French when drugged or threatened, or to learn some choice swearing for cussing people out :) On the subject of hooks for drawing into characters I've not really done that except for Enoch Satterthwaite (worst poet ever) who I had a reset phrase for his bad Yorkshire accent rather than the rest of him.
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