Posted January 04, 2024 by GRÆMAMËTH
This is a question I have, over the years, become very talented at redirecting, dodging, hand-waving, or otherwise disregarding - this is not done out of contempt, disinterest, or any actual disregard. It's just a very, very complicated thing to answer; to give a definitive answer is to imply a single canon, to imply that there is a single over-arching story; instead, this unconventional universe is littered with dozens of unique, character-driven experiences that criss-cross, dot, and tangle within each other until you have a deranged mess of explosive personalities at each other's throats.
All that aside, I'll do my best to present the narrative of Goethe in a self-contained and digestible manner:
The mod is named “Goethe’s Last Laugh” after the German poet Wolfgang Goethe, who wrote ‘Faust,’ an epic poem about an eponymous scholar, who sells his soul to the devil for worldly pleasures and material knowledge - at first, he’s enamored by his own wealth, but the loss of his soul becomes too much to bear, and plagues him to his death
You play my own Faust - a vampire who made a similar deal with the devil some 500 years back; those centuries of seeing human civilizations rise and fall has made him extremely cynical, jaded, desperate, and depraved;
He’s a corrupt cop officially employed as the sheriff for Gondolas city (the story’s fictionalized setting, a mega-corrupt city, so polluted that it’s sinking into the sea, a kind of gothic cross-section between Baltimore and Venice), but he’s also a narcotics trafficking, heroin-addicted, roughneck bounty hunter whose fidelity to the virtue of ‘justice’ is dubious at best.
There’s a working-class revenge power fantasy at the heart of the project - the idea that this dude Faust is charged with certain powers - both legal (as the city sheriff) and supernatural (being a vampire), but that, once abandoning his cynical apathy towards the plight of the living - he can learn how to turn these powers on the government bureaucrats and private interests pulling the strings of society, making a stand for those without the ability to make one for themselves, instead of continuing to function - as he did previously - as the jack-booted and fascistic strong-arm of an oppressive political regime.
The arc of his story is influenced deeply by the people he meets while trudging from one vice to another - he strikes up a partnership with a paranormal investigator who makes - ostensible - claims of federal agency, trades war-stories with a cartel hitman possessed by surprisingly deep, brooding, moral conscience, and humanizes himself through experiences with other soulful personalities meant to cast light on the vacuous black hole and heartbroken agony at the core of his character.
These characters are intended to spurn his growth as a person from this self-destructive nihilist into someone who affords room in his (un)life for hope, idealism, and virtue - from a dope-slamming jerk who can’t be assed to believe in anything, to someone who finds a way to use his unique and unholy talents to become an agent for meaningful positive change in the lives of the people of his city.