Lesley May in Rivers of London RPG (spoilers)

[buckyball]

In my game the player characters have been warned about Lesley May; about how she murdered Martin Chorley in very cold blood and right in front of Peter Grant and everything. But that has made her somewhat of a hero and potential ally to them. They totally are on her side when it comes to wanting to end Mr. Punch. And they see the pragmatism of shooting the faceless dude to protect Peter and the Folly. So with that in mind I had a couple of ideas for working Lesley into the game as an NPC plot device.

The first is that she could be trying to track down an evil cabal of revenant spirits based on the 'True Knot' from the Stephen King novel Dr. Sleep. In that story the cabal members hunt for psychic children, whom they torture to death in order to feed on the psychic steam (or shining) the children have. Their leader is a lady person called Rose the Hat, and she has zero remorse for what she does. Lesley still carries the emotional scars of seeing the baby Mr. Punch killed, and she in no way will let the true knot feed on innocent children. The other idea I had was that Lesley gets it into her head that Nightingale is a revenant spirit and Peter needs to get away from him. Her basis for this idea is that he died at Ettersberg. David Mellenby took his seat on the Charlie company flight home because they saw him die. Lesley is worried that Nightingale is prolonging his life and reverse aging because he can feed off of the lives of the people around him in much the same way that the 'jazz vampires' could in the second book. The implication would also be that Varvara is also a revenant. She also died in a rear guard action in WW2 to protect her fellow soldiers. An alternate explanation would be that both Nightingale and Varvara used magic to kill other people in the war, and that somehow created a tactus vitae which they subconsciously access to reverse age. I am not sure how far to push the Lesley May story line. I feel it could take over the game if we let it. But I think she is like the most intriguing character. Oh and in the game she doesn't go by the name Lesley May. She calls herself Anne Anybody; I stole that from a different urban fantasy story

 

    buciyball

[Greville]

I like both of those ideas. I do think killing Chorley like that does show how far over the moral event horizon Lesley has traveled, and how she is no longer anything like the person she was before. Your players may end up with some broken pedestals by the end of the campaign.

Lesley is a fantastic antagonist, you could do almost anything with her. I think there's also a lot about Lesley we don't know. Why did Punch choose her? Is her current rage a byproduct of being possessed by Punch, or did Punch posses her because it was already there? We always see Lesley through Peter's eyes first as an amazing Police Officer destined for greatness, then as someone who was forced to join the bad guys to get her face back. The revelation that it was revenge that Lesley was after, rather than just a new face, shows there is more under the surface than Peter realised.

[buckyball]

On 12/29/2023 at 1:14 AM, Greville said:

Lesley is a fantastic antagonist, you could do almost anything with her. I think there's also a lot about Lesley we don't know. Why did Punch choose her? Is her current rage a byproduct of being possessed by Punch, or did Punch posses her because it was already there?

Lesley is indeed a fantastic antagonist. In my game one of the players is already starting to sympathize with her. I think her key motivator isn't the damage done to her face. It was the toddler that was thrown from the window and subsequently died. In the first book she had been the one who had tried to resuscitate the infant. In a later story she pretty much tells Peter this. She accusingly asks him if he remembers the child's name, and she says she is haunted by her memories of the murder every day

So one idea I was thinking of exploring, was to have Lesley try to steal a book on how to make a demon trap. She isn't interested in making one herself, she wants to know how they are made, because the manufacture of such a device traditionally involves torturing someone to death. Since the True Knot also torture their victims to death she believes there is a connection between powering a magical booby trap and feeding on steam. Because the True Knot choose children as their victims she can't let it go on. And she is willing to go to pretty extreme lengths to stop them. She is also willing to take some big risks, to get what she needs to stop them. Grant and Nightingale will see this as a potential avenue to capture her. They might even bait a trap with a cryptic reference to German books in the Black Library. We will have to see if the party members are willing to go along with that since they will most likely want to help her take down the True Knot

[buckyball]

I thought of a way to introduce Lesley May into my campaign game. The party are supposed to be infiltrating the Paternoster Society to get information about the past activities of Martin Chorley and John Chapman. While talking to Paternosters Paul Jenkins and Clifford Chance they learn about a woman who calls herself Anne Anybody. Anne is of course Lesley May. There is a connection between Anne and the cat people from the 'stip club of Doctor Moreau'. She brought Chimera cat people to a Paternoster Bacchanalia to help the English solicitors get over their inhibitions. Peter and Nightingale become concerned about having cat people unaccounted for, so they ask the PCs if they could go with Dani to re-check the club for vestigia and or any clues that might lead them to the remaining Chimera. Lesley is well ahead of them an shows up at the club/crime scene ahead of them disguising as a Metropolitan police officer. Her goal is to learn more about demon traps. She knows that Nightingale found and disarmed one here (Moon over Soho) and she wants to trick the party into helping her find out more about them