The Player Characters
The “characters” of the player characters will be pre-written and assigned by the game team, based on the responses the players have given to pre-game questionnaires. These character sheets will give you news on world and personal events, background information, clues, objectives and tasks to undertake – but your characters’ personalities and natures will be for you to decide, and portray.
Your characters will consist of five sections:
- Your occupation brief – why, officially (and perhaps unofficially) you are aboard the Sisyphus. This section will also include any required activities/functions you need to perform in-character.
- Your political alignment – where in the 1980s political spectrum you sit, or if you are a non-UK character, where you sit outside it.
- Your archetype – which of the ten Jungian character archetypes your character sits in, and hint and hooks about how to use that in play
- Your briefing – this is your character-specific information which will contain some objectives to achieve in play.
The purpose of these elements of briefing material are to give you positions to play your character’s attitudes from, and to give you fuel for some of the ethical and moral conundrums the game may present.
You as a player should review the information we have provided in your character briefing – this is a game where informational details may be important – but don’t get too hooked up on memorising everything or pinning down every detail. There will be plenty of time during play for you to review any documentation.
Political Alignments
Each character will have a political alignment specified – where they align with the British political left-right spectrum of the 1980s, or where their loyalties lie if they are from a non-British background.
Political Alignment is broadly grouped as Left, Right or Other.
Example political alignments:
- Left: Union Militant
- Right: Mainstream Tory
- Other: IRA Operative
More data will be available in the briefing material around the specific alignment you sit within.
Archetypes
The Sisyphus uses the twelve basic Jungian archetypes to define the character types each player can interact with. The Archetype brief provides a series of hints, tips and hooks for interacting based on a character’s rough behaviour profile. In summary they are:
- The Caregiver: Try To Protect Others
- The Sage: Try To Bring Understanding
- The Magician: Try To Make Dreams Come True
- The Lover: Try To Create Intimacy And Connection
- The Destroyer: Try To Break the Rules
- The Creator – Try To Create Something With Meaning
- The Warrior: Try To Save The World
- The Seeker: Try To Find New Experiences
- The Ruler: Try To Make Order From Chaos
- The Jester: Try To Bring Joy Into The World
- The Innocent: Try To Be Happy
- The Orphan: Try To Belong
Each character will align with one of these archetypes, and the brief will provide information on how to use that to support play.
The Deckhands – NPCs
The Deckhands are members of the crew who “appear in the background in other scenes” but play no part in the plot. They can be identified by their radio headsets, and will be played by the BD/CF team.
Their role is to act as referees and adjudicators and to allow them to move around the ship without breaking player character immersion. They have no personalities or associated plot, and you should avoid trying to interact with them other than for game mechanical purposes.