Nine years ago a single sentance entered my mind and stayed there:
"Harry Protagonist rules, okay?"
For months this sentance just sat there and did its thing propogating all over my brain and resulting in me writing it on any available surface. Notebooks, tabletops, bar napkins, girlfriends. . . nothing was safe!
But who the hell was Harry Protagonist? And why did he rule?
I would spend the next year wrestling with those questions. The turning point came when my (at the time) usual gaming crew asked me to begin a new Mage game. I proposed at first another gritty game run in the New York City area. Through most of high school all my modern games took place in NYC. It was the place I was most familiar with, having family there.
But Jon Lemich said no. “You always make us play in New York. Can't you do something a little different this time?"
So I set about creating a new setting with a totally new feel; one rooted in the more sunshine and discovery vibe of going out west. At some point I infused it with my own sense of personal discovery as the girl I was in love with at the time moved out to the opposite coast.
The new place for my RPG stories would be San Francisco, where my lady love now lived. It would be something wholly new and full of life.
In New York I had hidden behind the largeness of the setting itself. I could let New York do all the RPing and setting establishment for me. Everyone I played with knew what the city was like. We had all been there. We had all walked its streets. How in the devil would I make San Francisco work? Would I just research, visit, walk through, and inhabit the whole damn city? Draw as much possible from scratch and from deep immersion so that people could actually feel what the place was like?
It turned out that I would.
Population came easier than I thought. Being exclusively an ST I had literally dozens of characters I wanted to play but never could. With some effort and retooling they all become rooted in the new west.
And somewhere along the line, a young gentleman named Harrison Krystoffic began to take shape. The game world toned down to a slightly closer plane and he stepped into his role as main character and star of the show. Harrison Krystoffic was born and in both the non World of Darknes and full on World of Darkness versions of the San Francisco setting, he joined his friends and became Harry Protagonist.
And if the response to his stories over the years is to be believed, he totally fucking rules.