# My Life with Master tags: #game/rpg/my-life-with-master ![[My Life with Master (cover).jpg|600]] Every master needs minions; **My Life with Master** asks what those minions are thinking while they do the monstrous work. Written by **Paul Czege** and published by **Half Meme Press** in 2003 (debuting at Gen Con that year), it's a compact Forge-era indie game about the horrific, dysfunctional ties that bind a monstrous Master and the broken people who serve them. Its subtitle — *a roleplaying game of villainy, self-loathing, and unrequited love* — is not marketing. It's a mechanical promise. Rather than empowering players to be heroes, the game makes them the help, and it takes a perverse glee in watching how far the fiction will bend before somebody finally kills the boss. The horror, as Czege puts it in the book's disarmingly plainspoken warning, isn't mostly inflicted by the GM on the players. It's *produced by them* — the chilling events come from the table itself, to the shock of everyone present. That inversion of who's causing the trouble is the whole point of the thing. ## Setting The default setting is a deliberately vague stand-in for early-nineteenth-century Europe — an unspecified central European country, somewhere around **1805**, in and around an unnamed town. The world is split between two forces: **Fear**, the palpable presence of the Master threatening from his **Demesne** (a crumbling castle, a dank crypt, a moldering theatre out in the rough wilderness), and **Reason**, the steady, staid influence of the Townspeople. It's a stage designed for a war between romanticism and common sense, with the Master as the champion of glorious, dangerous emotion and the townsfolk as the voice that says "no." It's not a world you build in detail. It's a vibe you set and then let the dysfunction fill in. ## Core Mechanics Character generation is where the tragedy is seeded. Each player's **minion** divides three points between **Self-loathing** (how much they've come to believe they really are a monster) and **Weariness** (a subtler exhaustion), then writes two human truths about themselves: a **More than Human** statement and a **Less than Human** statement, each wrapped in a painfully narrow "except/unless." A minion might be *mute, except when singing hymns*, or *turn to stone each evening unless fed by a child that day*. When a Less than Human limitation applies, the resolution system isn't even consulted — it's automatic, cinematic failure. When a More than Human ability applies, it's automatic, impressive success. Out of their scope, they are simply ordinary. Players also spin up two **Connections** — NPCs from town to whom the minion is emotionally tethered in love, protective concern, or curiosity, all unrequited at the start. Minions begin with no **Love**, and Love is the currency of this particular economy: the thing that lets them resist the Master, help each other, and ultimately kill him. Resolution is the famously blunt **opposed d4 pools**. Both sides roll a pool of d4s, all rolled 4s are discarded, and the highest remaining total wins. A tie means the conflict was interrupted — a scream from the parlor, an unexpected arrival, a collapsing wall. The various conflicts are distinguished purely by how each pool is calculated: - **Resist the Master:** *Master (FEAR + minion's SELF-LOATHING) vs. minion (LOVE − WEARINESS).* If the Master wins, the minion is obligated to carry out the command. - **Make an overture to a Connection:** *minion (REASON − SELF-LOATHING) vs. connection (FEAR − REASON).* Fail or succeed, the minion still gains a Love point — they've demonstrated their humanity, which is worth more than the outcome. Failure just also adds a point of Self-loathing and a blow to the self-esteem. The **Endgame** arrives when a minion successfully resists the Master *and* holds Love greater than Fear plus Weariness. Then the climactic sequence unreels — scenes that culminate in the death of the Master, with **epilogues** describing what each minion does with a free and suddenly ordinary life. It's a game with a guaranteed, built-in conclusion: the arc is dictated by the mechanics so thoroughly that railroading isn't a risk, it's beside the point. You aren't playing to find out *whether* the Master dies. You're playing to find out *who* he dies at the hands of, and what it costs them. The setup session matters almost as much as the play. The table collectively builds the Master — choosing an **Aspect** (Brain, driven by thought and language, or Beast, driven by physical and primal sensation), a **Type** (Feeder, Breeder, Collector, or Teacher), the **Needs** they exact from the Townspeople and the **Wants** they pursue from the **Outsiders** whose judgment ultimately drives them, and starting values for Fear and Reason. Czege is emphatic that this isn't a classification system — it's a scaffold for a conversation. The monstrous creations you end up with will defy tidy labels, just like the characters in the fiction they're modeled on. ## Editions - **My Life with Master** (Half Meme Press, 2003) — the original, and the one *in the library.* A staple of the Forge era's indie wave, it remains most notable for proving that a game could make the tragic end the point of the machinery rather than an accident of it. ## References - [My Life with Master — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_with_Master)