Entry tags:
Drink Me and Debrief
In the past month or so, I played in two different one-hour Paracelsus Games LARPs. One of them was insane and hilarious. The other was brutal and intense (in a good way) and brought us both to tears by the end (in a good way, genuinely). These two games were Drink Me and Debrief.
Drink Me was played with my partner![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gogollescent and two friends in one friend's home, with the aid of a darkened room, several cups, some paper inscriptions, and a bunch of food coloring. And a lot of water. A bunch of water. We will talk about the quantity of water.
Debrief was played with just my partner, over a video call between two different rooms, as instructed.
You can check out her own writeup of our experience with Debrief too (along with her side of the game ECH0 from early 2022). Both games involve picking up pre-written character profiles--especially Debrief, where the backstories are lengthy and immersive. It's a fun challenge akin to learning a role for the theater: especially for Debrief, I found myself a tad nervous that I would remember it all, and ended up with a handwritten note on the desk in front of me while I played that contained the name of my character's kids. (He had three kids. I'm not all that confident in the names and birth order of my more distant extended family, never mind the offscreen children of an imaginary person I just became. But I managed.)
Drink Me involves 4 people and is kind of a Victoriana gothic monster mash like the TV Show Penny Dreadful or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but less shooting, more squabbling. Debrief involves 2 and is an angsty Cold War interpersonal drama--think George Smiley or The Americans, but with a ghost.
If it sounds like I'm really into comp titles, I'm not, actually, but these games are: very much by design, I should think. They're games that expect the players to step into an unfamiliar milieu, historical or pseudohistorical, and learn a backstory and a set of motivations right off--it makes plenty of sense to draw on trope at least as a starting point, give players something to work with. They definitely encourage you to go beyond that, but when I was studying up on my Debrief role, I found myself going "oh I'm Bill Haydon, basically! Great, I can do a Bill Haydon" and then getting to examine how my character differed from John le Carré's actual Bill Haydon, or Kim Philby for that matter, and think about what I wanted to extemporize on. I'm pretty ambivalent on the popularity of trope as a widely known fandom thing, but I think this kind of activity is a great use of it.
Because they both rely on secrets and ask that the players read only their own role in full and not the others before playing, I'm going to put my descriptions behind two spoiler cuts. Just in case anyone's interested in setting up a game of either of these: they're both really fun, and I'm not sure they're replayable.
DRINK ME
In Drink Me, I ended up a well-hydrated god-empress. This happened because the game involves a group of magic potions, only one of which is bad for you, and I started drinking them all. If you want to replicate this outcome, you must determine which of them is the bad one and then your friends have to let you chug the rest of the potions. Which they did. --Well, kind of. Come to think of it, another player did steal one of the good potions--but amazingly, there's a potion of 'bring back literally any other potion if you want to,' so I did. I caught 'em all. I New Game +ed Drink Me.
I'm making this sound like a board game that I won, or kickball. It's not a board game. I do think it has some things in common with kickball, in the sense that it encourages a group of people to scrabble over a MacGuffin while the gym teacher looks on in amazement. If this description appeals to you--surely it must--then you'd probably have a good time with Drink Me. I wager anyone who has even a molecule of inner theater kid would have a good time with Drink Me.
I guess it's possible there's a less insane and madcap way to play Drink Me, but honestly, I mostly doubt it. The premise is so out-there and so OTT that you're basically in a steampunk Bond movie immediately. It's the kind of game that you could show up to in a false mustache.
--Uh, what is the game about? Well, you're 3 gaslamp fantasy Victorian adventurers who arrive at the "Cave of Wonders"--a room of your choosing with cups set up with food coloring, ideally--which is going to collapse in an hour and change. You all have something you want out of the cave: immortality, death, resurrection, it comes with your bio.
You have connected backstories--there's Edgar Eakins, sort of a Victor Frankenstein by way of Flowers in the Attic or The Fall of the House of Usher. Again with the comps, but it's really hard to overemphasize what a shameless monster mash Drink Me is! He's a mad scientist who wants to resurrect his dead sister for sketchy reasons. Then there's Alexander Clay, basically a Dorian Gray with a past involvement with the dead sister... then there's Vesper von Eternity, an adventuress who is the dead sister in disguise. That was me. If you can introduce yourself as Vesper von Eternity with a straight face, and/or pretend with dead committed melodrama that you don't know that Vesper von Eternity is your dead sister despite there being only one woman in all of your shared backstories, then you are Drink Me.
The game has a role for an orchestrator/GM because there are a bunch of interlocking and competing rules--magic powers, magic potions, what happens when you use them on each other. This was really good in our case, because we used them on each other. The rulebook has definitely planned for contingencies. We were the contingencies.
My two player comrades were amazing--just totally committed melodrama and comedy in both cases, absolutely Committing to the Bit including when the bit included hair-rending angst or bathetic obsession. I think the real challenge wasn't corpsing and losing it completely. Our orchestrator was also great, thorough, and thoughtful, assembling a delightful space for us. He also did a great job not losing it, or at least minimally. This is a scenario that benefits from deadpanning.
We also definitely benefited from the three of us (Edgar, Alexander, and Vesper) being RPers who regularly play together in a weekly tabletop campaign (s/o to Blades in the Dark, still going strong in 2022!) so we're comfortable riffing on each other and know one another's boundaries and tonal interests. Also, a willingness to just make shit up and go with it. This is necessary for anything like this, but I think it was especially necessary for Drink Me. Anyway, I got like four superpowers out of it, so win-win-win-win?
DEBRIEF
Debrief has you play out a final conversation between two old friends: a British spy who's been a Soviet mole for decades, and a British spy who hasn't. That's kind of the heart of it, the major conflict that powers the whole thing--one of you has been lying to the other one for a really long time. The other one has just found out. So there's this inescapable element of discomfort and embarrassment in it, like having to play out a confrontation with a cheating partner.
It's true there's also a repressed romantic element to the backstories--which you can work with to greater or lesser degree--but that's not really the reason it made me squirm and made me think of a reckoning over an affair. It's just a really brutal situation to set up. If you get into character at all in earnest, it's bound to hurt, whether you're liar or lied-to. We randomized it; I was the liar.
The background is pretty in-depth, although a lot of that is dedicated to laying out the historical and cultural context, just in case the people playing aren't really into this shit normally. I am really into this shit normally, so I'm all like "yes, yes, I went to Eton and fucking loathed it..." -- but it's a compelling setup, carefully laid out.
One of you, Alderidge, is an idealistic Communist who's been living a double life for a really long time--somebody disillusioned with the system early on. The other is a sincere patriot, Russell, who believed that his friend Alderidge was the same. One thing that struck me about the setup was how alike the two characters' backgrounds and life experiences were, making it even more of a story of character and what exactly makes people different and turn in different directions--Alderidge and Russell are both white British men in the 20th century, old school friends from the same shitty Eton clone of a school, both Oxbridge grads, both WWII vets. John le Carré had a lot of cynicism about the posh homogeneity and fanciful culture of MI6, and the two characters in Debrief are a pretty good example.
They would be: they're clearly modeled after real ones. The game is pretty interested in how such similar backgrounds have the potential to turn out loyal conservative Englishmen and Communist agents, although it leaves it to you to explore a lot of the 'why'--because Alderidge starts out dead. It's a final interrogation, but not in a cell: Alderidge is a ghost. There's a sort of plugged-in urban fantasy supernatural element (partly cribbed from the novel Ghost Talkers) which sets Russell up as something like a spy necromancer, a spirit medium for the government, and means that even death isn't really an escape from war.
Which is a major recurring element. Alderidge is obsessed with the dead; he was haunted before he ever got the chance to haunt anybody. His obsession is with laying the other unquiet dead to rest and freeing them from the cycle, in different words, but he's afraid of getting out of it himself. So there's a lot going on there. And Russell wants to know why. One possibility that is never on the table is doing anything about Alderidge's death, so 'why' becomes really the biggest preoccupation of Russell's time here. Of Alderidge's too, inevitably.
So this is a game about coming clean and saying goodbye, in the form of a one-hour video call. The game instructed me to turn the lights off in the room I was playing in so I looked more ghostly on camera, so I did, a task I was born for TBH and often do without any instruction, such as at the DMV. My partner, Russell the living, played in a lit room. The abruptness of the call and the hangup was really immersive--we came online and offline like we really were communicating across a veil.
The conversation we had was hard. I was surprised by how readily I got into character: I shouldn't be, I've been playing this kind of game for decades and I do it every Sunday for Blades, including with said partner as one of my players, but I rarely have to study up on a role and then assume it rather than making it up myself. But Alderidge is a character that really suits me, for various reasons, and she really knocked it out of the park immediately as Russell. The way I became aware that we'd sunk in, and this was going to fuck me up, was that I immediately started feeling defensive. Call goes up, I look at "Russell's" face, and it's extremely easy to put my sarcastic, flippant, evasive Alderidge shields up, because it's very easy to summon the feeling of oh fuck you stop making me feel bad, well if I'm the bad guy I'll be the bad guy about it.
In a lot of ways the randomization put this on easy mode for me. I don't know if I would've been so instantly Russell. --Actually, I'm pretty sure I would've been. I think that's one ingenious thing about the game--any adult reflective person unfortunately can summon up the all-consuming emotional persona of 'lied to' or 'found out.' But Alderidge was an easy character for me to play; the defense mechanisms that came out of him are ones I know really well. Also, he was the worst! Just the worst. Sorry, I know that's a very Alderidge conclusion to come to (in my version), including the like "now Russell is also the worst in his own way objectively but Alderidge feels too defensive and angry to be able to be a good judge of that, instead of feeling entirely in the wrong and super defensive and mean about it."
And that was really characteristic, I found, of early conversation Alderidge. He felt guilty as hell. He was defiant and true in his beliefs--although as weary and self-admittedly disillusioned as anyone about the distance his beliefs and his regime turned out to have beetween them--but that had approximately zero emotional currency for him. And feeling guilty made him an asshole. I didn't premeditate any of that, but I found myself snapping at Russell about something like "you know you think it's your stiff upper lip that gets you by with people, but it's really that damned sodden biscuit expression. You have such a gift for looking tearfully done-wrong-by." --so as you can see, Alderidge's zingers were also a bit backed into a corner. (But that's okay, as he had an infinite supply of them.)
Or nearly infinite, anyway. One thing I did decide ahead of time, about ten minutes before the game, was that Alderidge was really concerned with his kids' future and it would be the first thing he'd bring up in dead earnest. And it was. So I'm glad I wrote their damn names down. It interested me too because I imagined he had a bright, sharp eldest kid, a young teen named Alice, and he wanted all the best opportunities for Alice within their societies--which meant a good school. Which meant not a disgraced traitor of a father. This was also interesting because Robert Alderidge is centrally characterized in the material as having been formatively traumatized by the shittiness of British boarding school: it's the embodiment of hell to him, the hell that makes people devils, the system that should be replaced. And yet in his last minutes of consciousness, here he is obsessing over his kid having the opportunity to ascend through it, just like he did. That felt really real to me.
I'm mostly not speaking for Russell here partly because I'm hoping to sit hopefully until my partner also does her own Russell-POV writeup, but also because I'm discovering there was something very first-person about the whole situation. It was fucked up, anyway; the conversation went from antagonistic and sarcastic to meandering to weary and, frankly, Russell wore Alderidge down, or the ticking clock and the reality of never speaking to Russell again wore Alderidge down, but really both. As far as stated character goals, Russell 'won'; Alderidge wanted Alice's future, and he also wanted Russell's future. His biggest demand wasn't just that Russell lied about Alderidge's identity and protected his legacy--it was that Russell lied about his identity and promised to quit the service. So our run of this game was really about getting out, or not getting out.
The power shift back and forth was interesting. Alderidge and Russell's first big conversational turning point was when Alderidge demanded Russell admit, in his own words, that he also admired the dream future promised by the Communist ideal, and that he would move himself and his family there if it really existed; "except for the getting there, of course." This had nothing to do with Russell's actual present-day loyalties, but we easily developed a sense that this wasn't something Russell would have ever said before--something they both knew, but he wouldn't say.
One unstated or understated element Russell brought to it was this hurt, bewildered, raw you never fucking tried me about Alderidge defecting all that time ago and not bringing him along with. Again with the getting out! Or in. So there was this interesting element of, was Alderidge inherently something and Russell wasn't, or did Alderidge pack a bag on one particular night and just not stop by Russell's door? Something else I was surprised by that came out for me in play as Alderidge was that Alderidge felt really protective of Russell for Russell's gift and curse as a spirit medium in a brutal and wartorn world, and thought of it as a particular sensitivity and duty that Russell was cursed with; it wasn't the only or main reason he wanted Russell to resign, but it was a shaping element of how he saw each of them and why they were the ways they were.
The ending was hard. One interesting thing was that I knew Alderidge started realizing he wanted peace and resolution about 10 or 15 minutes before time was up, and to pass on, but had no idea how; and the way this actually transpired with Russell was in a conversation that hearkened to a remembered obsession they both had as boys. I honestly don't know how to summarize this without a transcript--it was brutal and gorgeous and also Russell's verbatim words were beautiful and I don't want to paraphrase them. Honestly, I might write a verbatim transcript of that part of it, from memory today or tomorrow, but I'd have to consult "Russell" about wording. But part of it went like this, I think the VERY last lines before I hung up the call as Alderidge passing on--
ALDERIDGE: [long silence] ... Do you remember Arthur and Lancelot?
RUSSELL: Yes.
ALDERIDGE: What do you think Lancelot would ask Arthur to do?
RUSSELL: [silence] ... [quietly, with a carefully steady voice] He would ask Arthur if he could bear him up. ... If he could carry him. To the highest point. So he could see every part of the isle. From his green bier.
[...]
ALDERIDGE: -- [thin smile] Then I release you from your duty, sir. You've served well. Put your weapons back on the wall.
RUSSELL: [silence]
ALDERIDGE: And George, by the way, I lied earlier. [laughs] --You look great.
Afterward we were really wrung out by it. At least we had something to laugh about together--my finding out that Russell's backstory as written had him as happily heterosexual and entirely clueless. That was not how we played it.
Anyway, it was great. Also I recommend (even just) the last season of The Americans to anyone who wants to resurrect that skin-crawling coming-clean feeling again, this time vicariously for people on the television.
Drink Me was played with my partner
gogollescent and two friends in one friend's home, with the aid of a darkened room, several cups, some paper inscriptions, and a bunch of food coloring. And a lot of water. A bunch of water. We will talk about the quantity of water.Debrief was played with just my partner, over a video call between two different rooms, as instructed.
You can check out her own writeup of our experience with Debrief too (along with her side of the game ECH0 from early 2022). Both games involve picking up pre-written character profiles--especially Debrief, where the backstories are lengthy and immersive. It's a fun challenge akin to learning a role for the theater: especially for Debrief, I found myself a tad nervous that I would remember it all, and ended up with a handwritten note on the desk in front of me while I played that contained the name of my character's kids. (He had three kids. I'm not all that confident in the names and birth order of my more distant extended family, never mind the offscreen children of an imaginary person I just became. But I managed.)
Drink Me involves 4 people and is kind of a Victoriana gothic monster mash like the TV Show Penny Dreadful or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but less shooting, more squabbling. Debrief involves 2 and is an angsty Cold War interpersonal drama--think George Smiley or The Americans, but with a ghost.
If it sounds like I'm really into comp titles, I'm not, actually, but these games are: very much by design, I should think. They're games that expect the players to step into an unfamiliar milieu, historical or pseudohistorical, and learn a backstory and a set of motivations right off--it makes plenty of sense to draw on trope at least as a starting point, give players something to work with. They definitely encourage you to go beyond that, but when I was studying up on my Debrief role, I found myself going "oh I'm Bill Haydon, basically! Great, I can do a Bill Haydon" and then getting to examine how my character differed from John le Carré's actual Bill Haydon, or Kim Philby for that matter, and think about what I wanted to extemporize on. I'm pretty ambivalent on the popularity of trope as a widely known fandom thing, but I think this kind of activity is a great use of it.
Because they both rely on secrets and ask that the players read only their own role in full and not the others before playing, I'm going to put my descriptions behind two spoiler cuts. Just in case anyone's interested in setting up a game of either of these: they're both really fun, and I'm not sure they're replayable.
DRINK ME
In Drink Me, I ended up a well-hydrated god-empress. This happened because the game involves a group of magic potions, only one of which is bad for you, and I started drinking them all. If you want to replicate this outcome, you must determine which of them is the bad one and then your friends have to let you chug the rest of the potions. Which they did. --Well, kind of. Come to think of it, another player did steal one of the good potions--but amazingly, there's a potion of 'bring back literally any other potion if you want to,' so I did. I caught 'em all. I New Game +ed Drink Me.
I'm making this sound like a board game that I won, or kickball. It's not a board game. I do think it has some things in common with kickball, in the sense that it encourages a group of people to scrabble over a MacGuffin while the gym teacher looks on in amazement. If this description appeals to you--surely it must--then you'd probably have a good time with Drink Me. I wager anyone who has even a molecule of inner theater kid would have a good time with Drink Me.
I guess it's possible there's a less insane and madcap way to play Drink Me, but honestly, I mostly doubt it. The premise is so out-there and so OTT that you're basically in a steampunk Bond movie immediately. It's the kind of game that you could show up to in a false mustache.
--Uh, what is the game about? Well, you're 3 gaslamp fantasy Victorian adventurers who arrive at the "Cave of Wonders"--a room of your choosing with cups set up with food coloring, ideally--which is going to collapse in an hour and change. You all have something you want out of the cave: immortality, death, resurrection, it comes with your bio.
You have connected backstories--there's Edgar Eakins, sort of a Victor Frankenstein by way of Flowers in the Attic or The Fall of the House of Usher. Again with the comps, but it's really hard to overemphasize what a shameless monster mash Drink Me is! He's a mad scientist who wants to resurrect his dead sister for sketchy reasons. Then there's Alexander Clay, basically a Dorian Gray with a past involvement with the dead sister... then there's Vesper von Eternity, an adventuress who is the dead sister in disguise. That was me. If you can introduce yourself as Vesper von Eternity with a straight face, and/or pretend with dead committed melodrama that you don't know that Vesper von Eternity is your dead sister despite there being only one woman in all of your shared backstories, then you are Drink Me.
The game has a role for an orchestrator/GM because there are a bunch of interlocking and competing rules--magic powers, magic potions, what happens when you use them on each other. This was really good in our case, because we used them on each other. The rulebook has definitely planned for contingencies. We were the contingencies.
My two player comrades were amazing--just totally committed melodrama and comedy in both cases, absolutely Committing to the Bit including when the bit included hair-rending angst or bathetic obsession. I think the real challenge wasn't corpsing and losing it completely. Our orchestrator was also great, thorough, and thoughtful, assembling a delightful space for us. He also did a great job not losing it, or at least minimally. This is a scenario that benefits from deadpanning.
We also definitely benefited from the three of us (Edgar, Alexander, and Vesper) being RPers who regularly play together in a weekly tabletop campaign (s/o to Blades in the Dark, still going strong in 2022!) so we're comfortable riffing on each other and know one another's boundaries and tonal interests. Also, a willingness to just make shit up and go with it. This is necessary for anything like this, but I think it was especially necessary for Drink Me. Anyway, I got like four superpowers out of it, so win-win-win-win?
DEBRIEF
Debrief has you play out a final conversation between two old friends: a British spy who's been a Soviet mole for decades, and a British spy who hasn't. That's kind of the heart of it, the major conflict that powers the whole thing--one of you has been lying to the other one for a really long time. The other one has just found out. So there's this inescapable element of discomfort and embarrassment in it, like having to play out a confrontation with a cheating partner.
It's true there's also a repressed romantic element to the backstories--which you can work with to greater or lesser degree--but that's not really the reason it made me squirm and made me think of a reckoning over an affair. It's just a really brutal situation to set up. If you get into character at all in earnest, it's bound to hurt, whether you're liar or lied-to. We randomized it; I was the liar.
The background is pretty in-depth, although a lot of that is dedicated to laying out the historical and cultural context, just in case the people playing aren't really into this shit normally. I am really into this shit normally, so I'm all like "yes, yes, I went to Eton and fucking loathed it..." -- but it's a compelling setup, carefully laid out.
One of you, Alderidge, is an idealistic Communist who's been living a double life for a really long time--somebody disillusioned with the system early on. The other is a sincere patriot, Russell, who believed that his friend Alderidge was the same. One thing that struck me about the setup was how alike the two characters' backgrounds and life experiences were, making it even more of a story of character and what exactly makes people different and turn in different directions--Alderidge and Russell are both white British men in the 20th century, old school friends from the same shitty Eton clone of a school, both Oxbridge grads, both WWII vets. John le Carré had a lot of cynicism about the posh homogeneity and fanciful culture of MI6, and the two characters in Debrief are a pretty good example.
They would be: they're clearly modeled after real ones. The game is pretty interested in how such similar backgrounds have the potential to turn out loyal conservative Englishmen and Communist agents, although it leaves it to you to explore a lot of the 'why'--because Alderidge starts out dead. It's a final interrogation, but not in a cell: Alderidge is a ghost. There's a sort of plugged-in urban fantasy supernatural element (partly cribbed from the novel Ghost Talkers) which sets Russell up as something like a spy necromancer, a spirit medium for the government, and means that even death isn't really an escape from war.
Which is a major recurring element. Alderidge is obsessed with the dead; he was haunted before he ever got the chance to haunt anybody. His obsession is with laying the other unquiet dead to rest and freeing them from the cycle, in different words, but he's afraid of getting out of it himself. So there's a lot going on there. And Russell wants to know why. One possibility that is never on the table is doing anything about Alderidge's death, so 'why' becomes really the biggest preoccupation of Russell's time here. Of Alderidge's too, inevitably.
So this is a game about coming clean and saying goodbye, in the form of a one-hour video call. The game instructed me to turn the lights off in the room I was playing in so I looked more ghostly on camera, so I did, a task I was born for TBH and often do without any instruction, such as at the DMV. My partner, Russell the living, played in a lit room. The abruptness of the call and the hangup was really immersive--we came online and offline like we really were communicating across a veil.
The conversation we had was hard. I was surprised by how readily I got into character: I shouldn't be, I've been playing this kind of game for decades and I do it every Sunday for Blades, including with said partner as one of my players, but I rarely have to study up on a role and then assume it rather than making it up myself. But Alderidge is a character that really suits me, for various reasons, and she really knocked it out of the park immediately as Russell. The way I became aware that we'd sunk in, and this was going to fuck me up, was that I immediately started feeling defensive. Call goes up, I look at "Russell's" face, and it's extremely easy to put my sarcastic, flippant, evasive Alderidge shields up, because it's very easy to summon the feeling of oh fuck you stop making me feel bad, well if I'm the bad guy I'll be the bad guy about it.
In a lot of ways the randomization put this on easy mode for me. I don't know if I would've been so instantly Russell. --Actually, I'm pretty sure I would've been. I think that's one ingenious thing about the game--any adult reflective person unfortunately can summon up the all-consuming emotional persona of 'lied to' or 'found out.' But Alderidge was an easy character for me to play; the defense mechanisms that came out of him are ones I know really well. Also, he was the worst! Just the worst. Sorry, I know that's a very Alderidge conclusion to come to (in my version), including the like "now Russell is also the worst in his own way objectively but Alderidge feels too defensive and angry to be able to be a good judge of that, instead of feeling entirely in the wrong and super defensive and mean about it."
And that was really characteristic, I found, of early conversation Alderidge. He felt guilty as hell. He was defiant and true in his beliefs--although as weary and self-admittedly disillusioned as anyone about the distance his beliefs and his regime turned out to have beetween them--but that had approximately zero emotional currency for him. And feeling guilty made him an asshole. I didn't premeditate any of that, but I found myself snapping at Russell about something like "you know you think it's your stiff upper lip that gets you by with people, but it's really that damned sodden biscuit expression. You have such a gift for looking tearfully done-wrong-by." --so as you can see, Alderidge's zingers were also a bit backed into a corner. (But that's okay, as he had an infinite supply of them.)
Or nearly infinite, anyway. One thing I did decide ahead of time, about ten minutes before the game, was that Alderidge was really concerned with his kids' future and it would be the first thing he'd bring up in dead earnest. And it was. So I'm glad I wrote their damn names down. It interested me too because I imagined he had a bright, sharp eldest kid, a young teen named Alice, and he wanted all the best opportunities for Alice within their societies--which meant a good school. Which meant not a disgraced traitor of a father. This was also interesting because Robert Alderidge is centrally characterized in the material as having been formatively traumatized by the shittiness of British boarding school: it's the embodiment of hell to him, the hell that makes people devils, the system that should be replaced. And yet in his last minutes of consciousness, here he is obsessing over his kid having the opportunity to ascend through it, just like he did. That felt really real to me.
I'm mostly not speaking for Russell here partly because I'm hoping to sit hopefully until my partner also does her own Russell-POV writeup, but also because I'm discovering there was something very first-person about the whole situation. It was fucked up, anyway; the conversation went from antagonistic and sarcastic to meandering to weary and, frankly, Russell wore Alderidge down, or the ticking clock and the reality of never speaking to Russell again wore Alderidge down, but really both. As far as stated character goals, Russell 'won'; Alderidge wanted Alice's future, and he also wanted Russell's future. His biggest demand wasn't just that Russell lied about Alderidge's identity and protected his legacy--it was that Russell lied about his identity and promised to quit the service. So our run of this game was really about getting out, or not getting out.
The power shift back and forth was interesting. Alderidge and Russell's first big conversational turning point was when Alderidge demanded Russell admit, in his own words, that he also admired the dream future promised by the Communist ideal, and that he would move himself and his family there if it really existed; "except for the getting there, of course." This had nothing to do with Russell's actual present-day loyalties, but we easily developed a sense that this wasn't something Russell would have ever said before--something they both knew, but he wouldn't say.
One unstated or understated element Russell brought to it was this hurt, bewildered, raw you never fucking tried me about Alderidge defecting all that time ago and not bringing him along with. Again with the getting out! Or in. So there was this interesting element of, was Alderidge inherently something and Russell wasn't, or did Alderidge pack a bag on one particular night and just not stop by Russell's door? Something else I was surprised by that came out for me in play as Alderidge was that Alderidge felt really protective of Russell for Russell's gift and curse as a spirit medium in a brutal and wartorn world, and thought of it as a particular sensitivity and duty that Russell was cursed with; it wasn't the only or main reason he wanted Russell to resign, but it was a shaping element of how he saw each of them and why they were the ways they were.
The ending was hard. One interesting thing was that I knew Alderidge started realizing he wanted peace and resolution about 10 or 15 minutes before time was up, and to pass on, but had no idea how; and the way this actually transpired with Russell was in a conversation that hearkened to a remembered obsession they both had as boys. I honestly don't know how to summarize this without a transcript--it was brutal and gorgeous and also Russell's verbatim words were beautiful and I don't want to paraphrase them. Honestly, I might write a verbatim transcript of that part of it, from memory today or tomorrow, but I'd have to consult "Russell" about wording. But part of it went like this, I think the VERY last lines before I hung up the call as Alderidge passing on--
ALDERIDGE: [long silence] ... Do you remember Arthur and Lancelot?
RUSSELL: Yes.
ALDERIDGE: What do you think Lancelot would ask Arthur to do?
RUSSELL: [silence] ... [quietly, with a carefully steady voice] He would ask Arthur if he could bear him up. ... If he could carry him. To the highest point. So he could see every part of the isle. From his green bier.
[...]
ALDERIDGE: -- [thin smile] Then I release you from your duty, sir. You've served well. Put your weapons back on the wall.
RUSSELL: [silence]
ALDERIDGE: And George, by the way, I lied earlier. [laughs] --You look great.
Afterward we were really wrung out by it. At least we had something to laugh about together--my finding out that Russell's backstory as written had him as happily heterosexual and entirely clueless. That was not how we played it.
Anyway, it was great. Also I recommend (even just) the last season of The Americans to anyone who wants to resurrect that skin-crawling coming-clean feeling again, this time vicariously for people on the television.