Captain Mors "The Dragon"

We'll likely never know how well the character of Captain Mors actually played, because the character seems to be mentioned only in the first run - whether it was dropped or reworked is up in the air. About seventeen of the Clarence Characters are mentioned in reviews, but a few are never mentioned though we believe they were played. In some of the later runs, Mors may have been cast as the game was under-reg. It is not unusual that if a character is played poorly in the original run of a game, and subsequently the game is rewritten, the character may be "written out." to some extent, because the GMs simply don't know what to do with the character, since the game got along fine without them.

Captian Mors is a very interesting and unique character, an early SF hero brought to the game by Bucher from a German pulp which was popular through both wars.

However, Curtis Beck, who was elected to play Captain Mors did something....very different.

"Of course there are many things in Eura Mae Coker's review that I object to most strenuously. I want to say again that there was no dragon in the first run, thus there was no dragon to "be left out!" That is to say we wrote no part of a dragon, nor did we wish one to be played. The player who was cast in the role of Captain Mors "turned into" a dragon without any ruling on my part, and I have gotten the consensus of all of the GMs that none of them had any part in his draconization.

Mr. Walker remembers telling him that he could not breathe fire, in as lucid and constant a manner as he ever musters. I certainly did not tell him he could breathe fire. He should not have gotten your items, and should have had to fight normal combat like everyone else.

He was not of course the only person who did not seem to understand that it was the GMs not themselves who "made up" the characters. Several other players got very irregular rulings by means of going to first one GM and then the other until they came to an answer that they liked.

Mr. King assures me that you would have had any better or worse chance against the War Machine with or without the "Dragon Breath" of that character, and assures me that the "Dragon Breath" did nothing in the first run, as it was not a real thing, in that it was not something contrived by the GMs.

"Curtis Beck played 'the Dragon' in every game in which he was allowed, and some in which he was not. He called himself "Draco Draguignan" or some such horrible rot. I do not know whatever became of him after the Great War. I have heard that he enlisted with the Army Air Corps and flew an aircraft into someone's domicile, but I have also heard that he was a salesman of patent leather shoes after the war, and came around one of Mikhail Jung's games with a big cardboard suitcase, trying to sell quality footwear.

I suppose he was a harmless enough sort....I had him in "Wu Wu Wu!" back in ought-nine. I was a ninja master, and he was my ninja. He shouldn't really have been an ninja of course, as we were in China, which would make him a...Chinese Monk. But that didn't sound very scary...people yelling "look out...MONKS!," so our warrior types were called Ninjas. The game stole about as much from "The Mikado" as anything else, so I suppose it was a good enough term.

Anyway, after the game, I was talking to Abe Marsden, who had been cast as the other, Evil, Ninja master. He had quite a bit to say about the incompetence of his Ninjas. He'd "killed" a character in his hotel room, and sent them to put on their costumes and come back and pick up the body, to take it and drop it in front of Game Central because he rightly thought this would be good camp after the fashion of the Tong in Chinatown.

Alas they forgot his room number and so traipsed about the place in full ninja garb, with their masks off, until they managed to raise him on a house phone. By that time a long line of people had come into the room, including a room-mate who wanted to use the toilet, which was of course where he'd "hidden" the body, and it had required all his skill at prevarication to keep them from discovering the "murder."

I was able to go one better though. Curtis Beck was my assistant. He had this Oriental Sword, of the sort that you see in secondhand stores as were brought back in such numbers from the Orient during the Philippines campaign. At any rate, he managed to get the strap twisted around his neck and came up to me, red-faced and gesturing frantically.

So there was my ninja-warrior, who I had to save from suffocation by his own sword strap. I don't know how he contrived to get it around his neck like that.

At any rate, he had his dragon mask with him, and he later was wearing it though I don't know if the GMs broke down and let him play a dragon, or if he just decided he ought to be one.