Retail Dinosaurs: The Shopping Mall (Night's Black Agents, Esoterrorists, Fear Itself)

Once upon a time you could guarantee that, come the zombie apocalypse, folks would naturally head to shopping malls. About five minutes after that, the survivors get remarkably good at shooting things in the head, which always surprises me; it's not an easy trick to pull off. However there may be a problem with that plan, if the apocalypse arrives right about now, as shopping malls are dying off.

The photographs in that link come from Seph Lawless' collection of urban decay artwork. The mall culture as we've come to know it, with its big boxes, anchor stores and chain outlets, got its start just after the Second World War. The concept really started catching on in the 1950s, when developers began making fully enclosed shopping spaces, rather than the open-air design that had been popular before the War. These behemoths took shopping to the suburbs; you didn't have to go all the way into the smoky, polluted city to scratch your retail itch any more. The mall became the new community hub, a place you'd go to just to hang out, or see friends. If you were a kid living out in the suburbs it started as an entertainment center, with its arcades and food court, then became a source of employment later on, when you needed cash for the summer. It was a part of everyday life.

But the retail environment has changed. Part of it is changing economic circumstances, with many of the mall's former customers being too cash-strapped to afford its goods, and many of the chains that serviced them - RadioShack, Blockbuster, Virgin - now out of business or on their way out. Particularly in America, where entire cities and suburbs can be dead on their feet, the mall has become a symbol of this overarching collapse of community narrative. Part of it is a change in retail habits, now that the internet has brought goods to everyone's doorstep, eliminating the need to get out of the house.

It can be a slow death. First just one or two shops shut, but the mall can't find replacement tenants, so they stay vacant. Then footfall patterns change, as people stop going to that section of the mall that housed those shops. Soon nearby stores or food outlets move on, seeking to avoid the blank spot, but it just expands. Nobody's taking care of those areas, so if the floor gets dirty, or windows broken, nobody fixes or cleans. Pretty soon the mall has a ratty, desperate look to it, and it will only get worse if, say, a serial murderer decides your now-quiet mall is the perfect place to stash a body or two. The slightest whiff of crime, and you might as well shutter the place now and save money.

This isn't a pattern unique to America. A mall I knew very well when I was a student in Reading offers a zombie experience now, and I don't doubt there are malls all over Europe - particularly in Spain and Greece, I'd bet - in similar straits, either dead or dying. When I posted the Escapist article, one of the commentators was kind enough to post a link to a dead Bangkok mall that's become a home for coy and exotic fish. Pick your country; there's bound to be at least one or two of these retail dinosaurs, still standing but dead on their feet.

What does this mean for Night's Black Agents, The Esoterrorists, and Fear Itself?

Well, both Night's Black Agents and The Esoterrorists rely on spycraft tropes, and an abandoned mall is perfect for a chase scene as well as a fun setting for an enemy base. Malls don't have to be centrally located; part of their charm, when the retail model still held sway, was that a developer could plant it out in the middle of the countryside and still expect people to drive there. That means an abandoned mall can be isolated, with any hope of rescue far, far away. If it's in the middle of a decaying suburb, then the Keeper has the option of a Silent Hill vibe, with the mall the centerpiece of an expanding network of dead buildings, the few humans left scurrying for cover when night falls.

Fear Itself has a slightly different aesthetic. It takes essentially the same game world as the Esoterrorists, but plunges ordinary people into the mincing machine rather than highly trained special agents. In that kind of setting the abandoned mall can be a kind of Castle Ravenloft, and the characters the equivalent of villagers huddled nervously in its shadow. In a one-off they'd head straight to the mall, but in a mini-campaign it may be better to have the characters skirt around its edges first, perhaps take on a few minor challenges in some of the houses roundabout before trying to penetrate to the heart of the mystery.

As far as mall design is concerned, the Keeper only needs to know the basics. There's usually a Food Court, a central location where several different fast food outlets serve everyone at once. Emphasis here is on 'everyone at once,' which means it needs to be cleaned easily and quickly. There's going to be a lot of tile and glass here, and probably a very bright, cheerful color scheme. The Food Court is likely to be central, in a large, open area.

The mall probably relied on one or more key tenants to provide revenue. These are the big boys, the nationwide chains, and they may occupy more than one floor of the mall, with internal connections via stairs, escalator and elevator. If there's more than one key tenant, the stores will be positioned as far apart as possible. That way people going to the mall have to walk from one anchor store to the other, which means they walk past the smaller stores and Food Court. Footfall is everything in retail.

Finally, there may be satellites. Technically these stores may not be an official part of the mall, but they're close enough for that not to matter to the customers. These standalone stores may or may not have their own parking areas, and may provide completely different, but complimentary, functions. I've noticed that gas stations are quite common in the UK; I don't know if the same applies in North America. Food outlets and cinemas are also likely.

So let's talk about Spring Creek Shopping Center.

Located in the suburbs surrounding a major city center, Spring Creek got its start as Indian Spring, an open-air mall built in 1947. As the city's industrial sector took off and people started relocating to the suburbs, the developers who owned Indian Spring soon discovered that their development was just too small to satisfy their expanding customer base. They started quietly buying up adjoining land, unveiling their new scheme, Spring Creek, in 1954. By 1957 it was a reality: a massive complex capable of satisfying pretty much any retail need a suburbanite could think of.

Problems began in 1961, when a partial collapse due to shoddy design caused the deaths of two people. Subsequent lawsuits and bad press were a significant knock on Spring Creek's profitability, and the original developers sold out to a management firm, Westbrook, in 1968. Westbrook decided significant renovations were needed, which finally completed in 1971.

During 1970, when the renovations were still ongoing and the mall part-shuttered, fledgeling horror director Bill O'Bannon shot his low-budget vampire movie, Scream Nocturna Scream, at Spring Creek. Many of its most memorable scenes were shot in one of Spring Creek's anchors, the department store retailer Von Moore. O'Bannon later went on to become a schlock horror icon, but died of a drug overdose while attending a horror convention, Fright Night Dallas, in 1981. 

Spring Creek's heyday came in the 1980s. There was money and lots of it, rolling in day by day. The mall expanded in 1982, and again in 1987, with the promised addition of a new anchor store and a dozen smaller outlets in its Galleria Wing. However the expansion was too large, even for the projected profits, and it didn't help that, in 1989, it was revealed that Westbrook's CFO had embezzled millions over the years before committing suicide - or possibly met death by misadventure during a sex act - on Christmas Eve, an event that became enshrined in local memory as Black Christmas.

It was all downhill from there. Lack of development money meant that the promised Galleria Wing was left unfinished, and the big box retailer decided not to move in after all. Spring Creek struggled through the 1990s hoping for a break, and never got one. The internet, and economic collapse in the 2000s, sealed its fate. Its customers were broke - the city's industrial sector was on its knees - and the ones that had money didn't need Spring Creek any more.

The defining event of the 2000s was the discovery, in 2006, that the serial killer who came to be known as the Hammer Killer had been stashing bodies in the abandoned Galleria Wing, relying on lack of maintenance to conceal his dump site. It was three months, and eight victims, before he was caught.

In 2008 Spring Creek shuttered for good. One or two of the satellite stores still operate, on reduced hours, but the main building has been locked up for years. There has been talk of knocking it down, perhaps replacing it with an open-air mall or park, but there's neither the money nor the will to get it done.

Now, Keeper: if you can't do something with that, there's no hope for you! Enjoy!

Bookhounds Campaign Thoughts Part 3: the Arc

Okay, so you've put the players through their paces, they've become comfortable with the setting and the mechanics, and they've just become aware of the major plot arc. What next?

Let's take a step back and talk about antagonists again, with Sarah Montgomery and Stanley David Fentiman as examples. Why were they chosen?

Well, in part they were designed to match the setting.. Each setting has its own quirks. An early Gothic locale with crumbling castles out in the lonely countryside is very different from a bustling coastal city in the glory days of Haroun al-Rashid (may he live forever), and both are as different again from an antiseptic space station out on the periphery where the least breach of delicately balanced artificial systems could mean death for everyone on board. Each setting demands a particular kind of antagonist. Sauron only really makes sense in Middle Earth; he'd be out of place in the Wild West. He could be made to fit, but in the doing of it he'd stop being Sauron and become something comletely different. A mad AI determined to eradicate disease by eliminating potential carriers would be great in the space station, but wouldn't make nearly as much sense in Baghdad, and so on.

This is Bookhounds, and that means buying and selling, with the characters as middle men, taking their cut from each transaction. Buyers and sellers are the best antagonists in that situation.

Sarah Montgomery is the buyer. She has wealth, and that often translates to power and influence; she's used to getting what she wants. That means she can put pressure on the protagonists in ways most customers can't; she can cause them legal troubles, financial problems, pay for thugs to smash up their store. Equally she can reward them far beyond their wildest dreams, should she wish to. Both are powerful motivators, but some Keepers may wonder, why make her as rich as all that? Surely she didn't need to be so wealthy to be an effective antagonist? 

Yes and no. Yes she could be effective without wealth, so long as she had enough money to be interesting to the characters. However it's more useful to the Keeper if she's more powerful than the characters and their allies put together. Someone living in the hobo shack down by the railway tracks can be beaten up, or have their possessions ransacked, and not be able to retaliate. The players know this, and if they think the antagonist is weak they'll probably go on the offensive. Usually the Keeper doesn't want this to happen. There are times when attacking can be a lot of fun to play through (there's a reason why Dungeons and Dragons is still one of the most popular tabletop systems out there) but in horror games direct assault ought to be the last resort, since there are too many ways it can go wrong. Wealth is a clear indicator of power, and power doesn't get attacked very often, at least not directly. Making Sarah wealthy - which means she'd have all the trappings of wealth, including bodyguards, assistants, a large estate out in the countryside where everyone's her friend or ally as she's the Lady of the Manor - signals to the players that direct action isn't the way forward.  

It also means, in a game world focused on buying and selling, that she's an attractive target. After all, when someone can afford to pay three or four times the going rate, and not quibble about the price, the vendor starts paying attention. That's a pretty tasty reward for a day's work.  If the characters want it, they need to do what she wants them to do. Someone with less money would be less interesting. Why should a vendor go out of his or her way to satisfy a customer who always demands a discount and never pays list price if they can help it? There are other customers willing to pay for what they want. 

The fundamental principle is this: just as the antagonist needs to fit the game world, they also need to be powerful enough to be useful to the overall plot. The mad AI on the space station has no wealth at all. That doesn't matter: it controls all the station's systems, including life support and security. In other words, it has power that is appropriate to the setting, which in turn means it can directly affect the plot. The plot needs to be paramount, in a story-driven game; the plot is what drives the characters forward, what gives them their motivation and their goal. Without it, they're adrift, and the game suffers.

So back to Fentiman. If Sarah's such an effective protagonist, why is he here?

Well, in part he's here to provide Sarah with knowledge she doesn't have and can't get with money alone. He's the one with the occult skill, and she has the resources to make it happen. In theory he didn't have to be there: she could have had the occult skill herself. However that would raise more questions than it answers, chief among them being: how did she get that skill in the first place? It seems out of character for a wealthy widow to somehow have all the knowledge she needs as well as the money. Genuine polymaths do exist, but they're incredibly rare. To put it in modern context: Lord Sugar is a businessman with decades of experience behind him, but that doesn't mean he could design a computer system, or build an office tower, or win the Grand Prix. All those achievements take a particular skill set, and it isn't reasonable to suppose that he would have them all, any more than it's reasonable to suppose Sarah can do everything she wants to do. It also begs other questions, like 'if she had magic powers why didn't she protect her sons during the War' or 'doesn't she realize that what she's trying to do involves dealing with forces she can't control' or even 'so why does she need us Bookhounds, if she's already got the power she needs to make it happen?'

Whereas if Fentiman is involved things start to make more sense. Yes, he has the natural ability, but he's always lacked the funding necessary to get what he wants. He probably knows a great deal, but the real secrets have always been just out of his reach, so he needs the Bookhounds or someone like them to hunt up the grimoires he'll then use to further his schemes. He is her agent, but he has his own plans, and that means he can complicate the players' lives in ways Sarah's never dreamed of. She has lawyers and flunkies: he can summon up the powers of the Mythos. She can interfere in their day-to-day; he can infiltrate their dreams and plague them with nightmares. Again, his power is appropriate to the setting, but in a completely different way. He represents the true threat, in a horror game: the one who can plunge everything into chaos, and will, to get what he wants.

That's it for the moment: one more to follow.

Bookhounds Campaign Thoughts Part 2: the Early Chapters

So we have our antagonists, Susan Montgomery and Stanley David Fentiman. What to do with them? How shall the initial scenarios play out?

I'm assuming a mini campaign with at least three acts. In the first act, the players get used to the setting and are introduced to the antagonists. In the second, they deal with the first major arc, Susan Montgomery's plot, and are introduced to the second one, Fentiman's plot. In the third they deal with Fentiman, and conclude the overarching storyline. Each act consists of at least three seperate scenarios, so about nine sessions overall. Assume that an individual session can last an average of two play evenings (more or less, depending on the group's availability and the speed at which they tackle plot) and you ought to end up with eighteen evenings of play, or two to three months total.

That's a lot of time. It needs to be filled.

This Ephemera is going to tackle the first act, where the players are introduced to the setting and the antagonists.

The obvious first question is, why have a first act at all? It could end up being talkie talkie and not enough action. Why not leap straight into the plot?

The answer to that is you need the first act to establish the setting, the characters and the overall mood of the game. Whether the players are veterans, novices or a mixture of the two, they've never played in this game world before, because it's your game world, fashioned out of your ideas and imagination. They don't know what to look forward to, or what to be worried about. They may not know all of the rules, and they certainly won't know all of the locations or NPCs since you're going to be making many of those up yourself.

Bookhounds suggests three potential campaign styles: Arabesque, Sordid and Technicolour, and adds a fourth descriptor that could apply to all three, Tainted. It doesn't really matter which you pick for your campaign; what matters is the players get to understand what that means, both to the plot and to their characters. The whole point of the first act, in any campaign, is to establish mood and setting. You don't even have to introduce main plot at all if you don't want to. The important thing is, if the setting is Arabesque, then the first act has to drive that home to the players. Everything they see, do or encounter has to reinforce that atmosphere.

They don't even have to encounter the Mythos, or anything supernatural, in the opening act, so long as the opening act is true to the overall mood.

There's two important points to consider here. The first is that getting them used to the setting is paramount, and anything that distracts from that is to be avoided. By having them chase ghoulies in the very first scenes, you're distracting them. It may seem interesting at first, but it does mean that later on they may not fully understand what's going on or what they can do about it.

The second is that every reveal detracts from the ultimate horror. It's the first rule of good ghost stories: the less you see, the more you imagine. When M.R. James wrote his chillers, he didn't pitch the protagonist straight in and have them grappling with demons right from page one. In fact, you rarely ever see the creatures in his stories at all. In Canon Alberic's Scrap Book, for example, there's only one very brief scene with an actual spectre - no more. Yet there's plenty there to keep the reader occupied. If you as Keeper chuck in ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties right from the get-go, you're only doing yourself harm in the long run. The big reveal should be a Big Reveal, and that means you oughtn't to detract from it by revealing your hand too soon.

Horror on the Orient Express has an interesting way of going about this. The initial scenes are pure prologue, (with the exception of one haunted train moment that many Keepers skip anyway). There's plenty going on, but it's all aimed at establishing setting and mood. Those are the scenes in which wise Keepers will be playing the Orient Express for all its worth, emphasising its luxury, the wine list, the attendants at your beck and call, the incredible novelty of such a fantastic train. Later, when things start to go wrong, it's exactly that information that will be most useful to the players. 

What you as Keeper ought to be doing is getting the players to concentrate on the things that matter (at least in the short term): the setting and the starting location. In Bookhounds, that's the shop, and book auctions, which even for veteran players will be an unusual challenge.

Some may wonder how they're going to make a session out of encounters in a shop. Those people have never worked in retail.

All the world passes through your door, and most of them are time wasters. People looking for a free toilet, hoping for shelter from the rain, who want a book for Uncle Bob but don't know what the book is called or who the author is, drunks, lunatics, thieves, actual honest to God members of the public who don't know what they want but might (glory be!) spend some money, and on and on and on. And that's just the customers - what about the staff? Slackers, dopeheads, no-hopers and snarky drudges, almost to a man (or woman). It's enough to drive you to drink, and if you happen to own the store you've probably got a bottle stashed away for emergencies.

The key here is to establish the shop as an important location, and its regular customers and staff as its major players. Many of the staff roles will be taken by player characters, but that doesn't mean all of them will, and whether they are or aren't, the customers aren't PCs. The very first scenario ought to be all about the store, and its daily routine. That gives the players some foundation for their future adventures. The major event of that scenario could be something relatively mundane - say, chasing down a potential squizz for a very important customer, which has the unfortunate character wandering all over London looking for something suitable. Not only does that keep the player busy, it's also a handy reference for future scenarios, as it introduces several other important locations and NPCs. Rival bookstores, markets, forgers, possibly the police, and so on.

Later scenarios in the opening arc could introduce other important plot elements. Say the Keeper chooses to use Idiosyncratic Magic, as introduced in the main rulebook and later fleshed out in Rough Magicks. If that's on offer then the players need to get used to the idea, so now's the time for some simple magic tricks, perhaps taught to the character by an NPC or picked up as they go along. Let them try these incantations in relatively safe circumstances, and they'll be more willing to rely on them later on. Of course there has to be at least one big book auction too; after all, that's as integral to the Bookhounds setting as dungeons are to Dungeons and Dragons. It'd be a pity not to indulge the players in an auction scene, particularly one where they win out over some hated rival by the skin of their teeth.

By the time the opening arc reaches its conclusion the players should be comfortable with the setting, the mechanics and the mood of the campaign. They may have met one of Sarah Montgomery's agents by now; possibly she was the important customer who wanted that squizz mentioned earlier. They've certainly had a few triumphs by this point and they ought to know by this stage that there are Things Out There. Possibly one of those spells went wrong, or they found the ghastly remains of someone who wasn't as lucky as them. Or they may even have been studying the stock a little too closely for comfort . . .

But however it went, now is the time to introduce them to the overall plot, and bring the introduction to a close.