Have your ever read the comic ‘Strangehaven’? It goes a different way with the archetypes, and it’s set in small-town Britain, but it touches some of the same places in my brain as this does.

THE EIGHT BIG MEN

The Pastor, Walter Abernathy
The Police Chief, Virgil Cooper
The Banker, Edward Davis
The Editor, John Green
The Mayor, Milton McDonough
The Merchant, Robert Peeke
The Doctor, Carl Shaw, M.D.
The Innkeeper, Winthrop Tucker

You are the soul of the character you choose. You want to be good, and you want to be decent. Everyone else will be trying to destroy you, and your criminal, immoral, and antisocial weaknesses will help them do it.

(I’ll narrow this down to six people - it’s turning into a game of sixes)

It’s weird, but I like playing pre-gen characters. It forces me to break out of my bad habits and preferences. If you do decide to go the ‘You are so-and-so’ route, perhaps make it randomly drawn cards or a chart of some sort?

Exactly, time-framing-wise.

I intend it to be VERY constrained. I’m considering even naming the PCs - “you are John Crabtree, the town Doctor.”

The nomenclature is a little dodgy. “Child” and “Child” is an example of this. Easy to fix. I’ve started working on mechanics - PCs have two stats, MEMORY and REGRET.

I worry that it may be too constrained, but I had a similar worry about the Roach, and it was baseless. Would like to try it, though, and see how the stories overlap and intertwine.

It seems to me like you want to force the sort of wonderful concurrence that happened a few times in the MACE Roach game, where one scene would go off, and the next scene would be framed before that one temporally, thus changing the flavor of the intial scene completely (my drunk rabbi’s rant, and ‘earlier’ murder of his wife).