Generally speaking people know what they're getting into when they play a particular system. A James Bond game is all about being Bond and therefore can be expected to fulfil Bond tropes - the quips, the car chases, exotic locations and world-shattering evil masterminds. A Trail game is about Cthulhoid horror and can be expected to be moist and squamous, with a heavy dose of American gothic, possibly a hint of film noir. A Cyberpunk game is about dystopia, people lost in a futuristic landscape looking for meaning in all the wrong places.
You rarely see mixed genres in RPG settings, but it can be very interesting. The old Cyberpunk had a quasi-horror setting, the Night's Edge books, that worked remarkably well. In that setting you might encounter vampires, ghosts, Voodoo acolytes and terrifying dreamscapes. It had its faults; it leaned a little too heavily on serial killer tropes. But when it worked, it sang.
Body horror is a storytelling method where the narrative attempts to invoke intense feelings of physical and psychological disgust, or squick, and plays upon anxieties of physical vulnerability. One of the most effective versions of this I've ever seen on screen is the 1999 Takashi Miike movie Audition, in which a lovelorn businessman attempts to spark romance by auditioning women to 'be in his movie' - but things go badly wrong when he meets Asami, a fascinating woman with a past. And a few extra feet. There is a moment with a sack ... but I've said too much, and the trailers I can find online are a bit too spoilery, so I'll stop there.
The essence of body horror is making the human form do things we consider unnatural, though what we consider unnatural can be very revealing about our own prejudices. Stephen King once pointed out that, in the 1950s, you could freak American kids out just by having characters with a relatively mild physical issue. Even a bad case of the zits and shaggy hair was a major taboo, at a time when good hygiene, medical advances and three square meals a day had sorted out most of a generation's physical issues. Cleft palates, goiters, and many other ailments once relatively common, vanished almost entirely from the landscape. Bones lengthened, teeth straightened, complexions cleared. People forgot the old normal and replaced it with the new.
Clive Barker treads similar ground in Hellraiser, in which physical punishment - nails through the head, being skinned alive - masquerades as spiritual punishment. The spirit and the body are, apparently, one - mutilate the body, torture the soul.
Or Cronenberg, in films like Rabid, implying that a once-normal, healthy body can be tainted by, in this instance, a medical procedure, becoming a necrotic, corruptive influence.
There's no suggestion that a person's spirit and corpus is somehow separate; no immortal essence hidden behind a mortal façade. In body horror the two are one, and you can tell corruption at a glance because they don't look or behave like us. Often this is a buckets-of-blood genre, where guts and slick essences are spilt all over the screen and, by implication, your own home, since the whole point is to make the audience think this might happen anywhere at all, but especially where you feel safest. There's a reason why Hellraiser takes place in an ordinary house, why Rabid is set in semi-rural suburbia. 'This looks like where I live,' you're meant to think. 'This could happen here.' Of course, the logical tagline is 'it could happen to me,' which as you'll recall was Edwardian ghost story master M.R. James' famous bit of horror writing advice.
It doesn't have to be awash with gore. Invasion of the Body Snatchers achieves a very similar goal without the slightest drop of blood, by creating invaders that look like us but aren't quite like us. All flesh, no soul. Whatever immortal shred resides within that flesh is annihilated when the Body Snatchers take over.
In my practice, I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind... All of us — a little bit — we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear ...
If body horror is the subversion of the natural - exploding guts and all - then cyberpunk is the conversion of the natural. We think we know what normal is, and then our expectations are upended. The only difference is, in conversion we willingly accept the change, where in subversion change is forced upon us.
Manga and movies like Ghost in the Shell explicitly play with this concept, going on and on about the Ghost without ever really exploring the concept beyond muttering 'The Ghost!' as if they were all ravens programmed to say Nevermore every few minutes. Paying lip service to the spirit without really confronting the concept, yet taking every possible opportunity to show off fantastic new body conversions. At times you wonder whether there are any downsides to becoming a cyborg, beyond a compulsion to mutter 'The Ghost!' every other episode. Nobody changes; the Major is always the Major, Batou always Batou. Even when changes seemingly occur, the series reverts back to the status quo ASAP in the next episode. For all the characters talk about the Ghost, it rarely impacts the narrative.
Cyberpunk the RPG setting does something similar with Empathy/Humanity.
Empathy: Your ability to relate to and care for others, and take others into consideration. Particularly important as it offsets the effects of cyberpsychosis, a dangerous mental illness common in the Dark Future ... For every point of Empathy the Character has, they gain 10 points of Humanity (HUM) ... Cyberpsychosis Humanity Loss is defined (for this purpose) as a loss of empathy for others and a corresponding loss of self-regard or sense of self preservation. Subjects with low Humanity have trouble emphasizing with themselves or others as "real."
All of this should sound very familiar to CoC and Trail players since this is basically the SAN/Stability mechanic, except where in CoC or Trail SAN is permanently lost by exposure to Mythos sources and temporarily lost by exposure to any number of frightening circumstances, Empathy and by extension Humanity is lost by grafting on technical adjuncts to the flesh. There's a side mechanic where Humanity can also be lost by exposure to terrifying circumstances, but it's encapsulated in a small chart on p. 231 and I wonder how many GMs run with the idea. Sanity is a major concept in CoC and Trail; Humanity doesn't seem as important in Cyberpunk.
It's difficult to make those numbers mean something without engaging the players' imaginations, and it's difficult to engage imagination though numbers alone. Particularly when those numbers have a mechanical consequence - in this instance, loss of the character. To cyberpsychosis, but really loss of the character to anything, whether it's cyberpsychosis or the Spaghetti Monster, is just as frustrating to the player.
Exactly the same conversation's been going on in CoC for decades. At first SAN and loss of same meant a roll on the Temporary (or Permanent) Insanity table, which meant that in some or all future scenes the player had to behave as though their character suffered from, say, a fear of insects, or a fear of crossing bridges. From that relatively simple (at times cruel, unintentionally or otherwise) beginning, systems became more complicated, until now we have setups like Delta Green's relationships, bonds and disorders system, actively engaging the players in their own spiritual demise. Because if they don't tend to those Bonds, in-game, the characters lose out big time.
I'm going to suggest to you now that body horror is indispensable to Cyberpunk because body horror gets the players to engage in what it means to be Cyber, in ways other than crunching HUM numbers. Those implants and modifications they desire come at a cost, and it's not just in Eurobucks. Further, that body horror doesn't have to be guts and gore; it has to be a subversion of the norm.
White Zombie isn't a particularly interesting film. It's historic, as it's the first zombie movie ever, based in part on William Seabrook's book The Magic Island. However everyone who's ever seen that film remembers this early scene if they remember nothing else, because it's the most chilling moment in the movie. Nature can be cruel, but only man can be so pointlessly cruel as to set up a system like this. The dead toil to grind cane into sugar, and it doesn't matter if one falls into the mix and is ground up with the cane.
It has a lot in common with the Moloch scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis:
Both scenes are dehumanizing people in service of a mechanized, semi-supernatural overseer, for a goal that might be pointless. Both turn people into things. Both destroy people to achieve their objective. The workers of Metropolis march to their doom just as unthinkingly as White Zombie's dead men tend the sugar mill. Both are made in an age when socialism and worker's rights were hot topics, vigorously debated in the halls of power and on the factory floor.
Body horror - the subversion of body and soul.
Going back to Cyberpunk's player guidance:
1: Style over Substance: It doesn't matter how well you do something, as long as you look good doing it. Why should it matter if you look good? Because everything else doesn't. Imagine what decades of poor hygiene, lack of medical care and poor diet is going to do to people. Then add in radiation poisoning. Sure, if you're a corporate beaver, that's not a problem. Most people aren't corporates. Why do people cyber up if they can afford it? For the same reason people get plastic surgery. Not everyone needs a gun arm, but everyone needs to fit in.
2: Attitude is Everything. It's truth. Think dangerous; be dangerous. Think weak; be weak. Remember the sugar mill, and Moloch. The average primitive screwhead is going to end up sacrificed on that altar because they have no other choice. The average booster is going to die for some corporate's big power play because they don't know any better. That's what grunts are for. Are you a grunt?
3: Live on the Edge. The Edge is that nebulous zone where risk-takers and high rollers go. On the Edge, you'll risk your cash, your rep, even your life on something as vague as a principle or a big score. Why? Because the alternative is worse. Your principles are your soul, and you're trying to keep that as pure as possible in a world where people trade their souls in every day for a better butt or a new pair of eyes.
As GM you need to be banging away at body horror as often as possible, and you need to be making much greater use of that handy-dandy Humanity chart on p. 231. You should also encourage your players to go to Therapy (p 230) as often as possible, and maybe consider small Humanity rewards for interesting roleplay moments, much as CoC or Trail rewards heroic moments with a little SAN or Stability boost. After all, Humanity is ultimately about being human; there should be a reward for engaging with your Humanity.
As a final what-if, consider these potential body horror moments:
You enter the ripperdoc's dimly-lit den and notice, among the jars and storage tanks lining the walls, a new-harvested face floating in preservatives. You know that face. It belongs to the bartender at the Mad Hatter; you recognize that cute little mole on his cheek. He's been talking about selling his face for months, but until now you've always persuaded him otherwise. Guess he needed the money more than you thought. Wonder what he looks like these days ...
Womb rental - it's the latest thing. Some prefer vat-grown, but a healthy female with no significant black marks in her genetic history can command a substantial fee. They just put you into the factory for nine months, fill you full of sedatives to keep you compliant, and pop goes the baby. Of course, there are rumors that some of these women aren't exactly what you'd call volunteers, but hey - corp beavers need kids ...
You hear about the new factory they're building out by Jesus Street and Memory Lane? Remember about five years ago when they were going to renovate the old St. Simon Building, but the job stalled out? How they lost a cleanup crew? Well, turns out they didn't precisely lose that cleanup crew. I guess someone forgot to unlock a door when shift ended, and they've been down there ever since. Pretty airtight in those vaults, so they didn't decay so much as, well, became liquid. Anyway, there's good cheddar on offer for anyone who, you know, wants to scoop up the slurry and dump it somewhere legal. Or at least somewhere out of sight and mind ...
You see that group over there? Garbage pickers. They work the mounds out by Hooker Loop. How can I tell? Well, look at the fingers, choomb. See, on the one hand you get those who've been able to buy new hands, or at least good second-hand digits. See how the metal gets pitted and cruddy-looking? On the other, well, there's this kind of ulcer you get from that work, it eats fingers ...
You want to sign up for the Hustle Truck? Comes by every morning, picks up folks who want to earn a little extra by doing odd jobs. It's not a lot of money, and the work ain't much, but it's legal; it'll cover your coffin costs, choomb. One thing, tho; you got to get the Hustle Truck chip if you want in. It's nothing serious. The people who run it, they want to keep tabs on you - how you spend your time. Just when you're working. The chip doesn't monitor you when you're not on the job ...
Remember how Nixon used to tell those tall tales about Japanese ghosts? The what-was-it, the nupper-something, that was the one that really stuck with me. How it could just wipe its face away, leaving nothing behind but a blank. Well, they say that the braindance viewers over in the Night Market that sometimes pops up in Bitters has this problem. You go into the dance, and everything's slick. You come out, and sometimes you see faceless people. Now, are these real faceless people? Or is this some hot-shit rewired brain bull you get from the Dance? This one chica, she swears that after she did the Dance she went to, you know, freshen up, and there was this woman in the same stall, red hair, and the woman turns around ... nothing there, man. Nothing. Blank, from forehead to chin ...
Rats have been a horror staple for I couldn't even tell you how long. Some of our most effective horror writers have used them with great success. James Herbert turned feral human-devouring rats into a trilogy which ended with them munching on a thinly disguised Maggie Thatcher. Herbert turned those rats into a career, and became one of the grand masters of horror as a consequence.
Bram Stoker wrote one of his most effective horror shorts, The Judge, about a rat-infested house, and of course our dear friend Dracula has a close relationship with rodents - so close that Stephen King borrowed the idea for Salem's Lot. He created a moment so hideous that his agent insisted he cut it from the narrative; I had them swarming all over him like a writhing, furry carpet, biting and chewing, and when he tries to scream a warning to his companions upstairs, one of them scurries into his open mouth and squirms as it gnaws out his tongue said King.
M.R. James once pulled a very sneaky blinder by titling a short story Rats, leading with a quote from Charles Dickens about bedclothes a-heaving with the rats under them, only to immediately forswear rats entirely and write the story about something else. Deceitful old soul that he was.
New York is obsessed with rodents in a way I can't recall encountering anywhere else. Whenever someone posts a video about rats dragging away slices of pizza, people dressed in rat costumes wandering about in subway stations, giant inflatable rats posted at Union protests, I don't even bother asking which city. It's always New York. One of my favorite zombie movies is a rat zombie film, set in New York's Mulberry Street, made on a shoestring and remarkably well put together.
I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
Rats, and vermin in general, are easy gross-outs. Just having them appear in the scene is enough to get a lot of people shaking in their khakis. One rat's bad enough - so let's have two, three, a dozen. They make us feel vulnerable, and where a kaiju or some larger creature terrifies though size and ferocity, rats do the same and worse by making us feel small.
One of James Herbert's most effective moments, which appeared in the film adaptation, comes when the rats swarm a baby. In the film you never see the body but that's definitely not the case in the novel. Herbert looks that moment square on, as if there was a camera put right over the cradle. The family dog does its best but is quickly overwhelmed, and soon after that the child's torn apart. Which is how rats make us feel - tiny, defenseless, vulnerable.
Bear in mind, that's all aroundabout page 20. Start as you mean to go on, I suppose.
See, you can fight a wolf. You can hunt a bear, catch a shark. Rats, on the other hand, are like zombies - the weight of numbers is on their side. Kill one, there are ten more. Kill ten, there are a hundred. You can never kill them all. As for running ...
When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls. H.P. Lovecraft
It doesn't help that rats are pretty much contemptuous of us humans. They'll invade our spaces, wander though our kitchens, our bedrooms as they please, when they please. They'll attack us, bite us, where another animal might run. A cornered rat will bite a cat, it's said. To fight like a cornered rat is to fight with utmost ferocity, no holds barred.
The Quartermaster's Store, that cheerful ditty, may pre-date the Great War but it certainly became popular then, and no surprise. The War had more than its fair share of rat stories.
Entropy (n) lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. As symbolism goes, you can't get better than rats. Look at what happened at the Chipotle: wires destroyed, stock eaten, staff injured, a decline into disorder that leads inevitably to destruction - or in this case, closure.
So any scenario involving rats ought to be reinforcing that theme: disorder, decline, unpredictability.
With all that in mind:
The Nest
The characters are asked to go to X and recover Y. For purposes of this outline it doesn't matter what X or Y actually are. Y is valuable enough to send some poor shmucks to go get it, and X is a place that once was quite nice and now is not. It could be a subway station. an airport, a fine mansion on the hill. Or none of these things.
The previous occupant(s) were less than cleanly. Maybe it was an aged packrat (eh? ehhh?) who piled everything up until trash overwhelmed them. Maybe it was squatters, or some eccentric billionaire who forgot how to take showers and clip their toenails. Whoever it was, they left a lot of stuff behind, some of which is valuable. That's apart from whatever Y is worth; extra loot, which the characters might carry away for themselves.
Then they find the bones. At first it's animals; cats, dogs, relatively ordinary creatures whose corpses were dragged inside and flung into a midden. It's unusual behavior for unintelligent animals; people create middens all the time, octopi also, but it's rarer for other creatures.
Then they start finding human remains, picked clean. Some were transients, people who probably came here for shelter. Others may have been ambushed and brought here; kids, city workers, people who got too close. Somehow they were dragged here after death, their bodies carefully hidden away.
Then they find the holes, the tunnels that lead downward, ever downward.
Options:
The rats are being channeled or powered by a minor supernatural or Outer Dark entity; a ghost, say, or some kind of dybbuk. This spirit has inhabited the decaying flesh of one of the corpses and so long as that corpse isn't buried or otherwise dealt with, the rats will keep coming back.
The rats are being controlled by a different kind of rat, perhaps one with multiple heads (credit to James Herbert for that one.) This super-rat has psychic control over their lesser brethren, a kind of Queen status. It can't move very quickly so if the characters find this rat they should be able to kill it - provided they can get past all the other rats.
The problem is X. Wherever or whatever X is, it's not a place as we understand the term. It's entropy manifest. It started small, perhaps one room in a much larger structure, but over time entropy infested everything, took over the complete building, with unfortunate consequences for the people who lived/worked there. There may not be a way to defeat it, but there ought to be a way to contain it for now. Later, someone with more smarts or resources can actually destroy it. You hope ...
Recently I was asked how I would make (S)entries, the Harker Intrusion, the Van Helsing Letter and the Zalozhniy Quartet into a campaign that in turn led into the Dracula Dossier. That would involve delving into the guts of several scenarios any one of which could spoil things for the players out there, so I shan't be doing precisely that. However I did think it would be useful to discuss each of those elements individually and talk about how I'd stage them. I'm going to start with the Zalozhniy Quartet, and discuss vampire design. If you don't want even the least hint of a spoiler for that campaign, stop reading now. As a Director when you purchase gaming supplements you know you will have to make some adjustments. They might be small or large. You might be looking for something strictly off-the-shelf, with as few user tweaks as possible. You might be the sort who enjoys playing with someone else's toys and bending them to your desired configuration, like a miniatures enthusiast who can't bear to put the paints away until it looks exactly as you imagined. Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum some adjustment is inevitable to make the game fit on your table. No published supplement ever written is so perfect as to work for every possible group configuration every time. That means you need to understand vampire design. Or, in a different setting like Dungeons and Dragons or Mutant City Blues, adversary design.
Vampire design is absolutely key to any discussion about Night's Black Agents, and not for the obvious reason. Design is critical because it affects the overall aesthetic of the game, and that aesthetic has to bleed through into every scenario you play. Tone has to be consistent. That means you have to decide pretty much from the outset what your vampires are, because that will determine how they affect tone and therefore plot.
What's at ZQ's core? What are these vampires about?
In ZQ, without going into major spoilers, time is the core concept. Therefore as Director time is what you're going to be playing with. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about Satanic, Mutant, Alien or Supernatural entities. The key factor is time. These creatures play with time; they exist in between the ticking of the clock.
So every scenario, every moment within the game ought to be reinforcing this core concept. Think of it like a murder mystery. If Poirot is investigating a killing at the vicarage, he is always investigating that murder. There is never a point in the story when he is not investigating that murder. The narrative behaves as though he is obsessed with murder from the discovery of the body to the denouement. Eating breakfast? Going to the shops? Watching a film, reading a book? Never; it's all murder, all the time.
For you in ZQ, it's time all the time. As Director you need to emphasize this. It doesn't need to be some massive time-blorp. It can be something as simple as 'you're running late. 'She's always early, this isn't like her.' 'Gosh, is that the time? It's later than you think.' 'That clock's running slow.' You could begin every session by saying something like 'it's 8.36 am on Monday the 3rd,' and end each session with 'it's 11.58 pm on Weds the 5th.' That steady drip of time reinforces the tone, and puts the players in the mood for those moments when you really fork them with the naughty spoon.
I reference the Doctor Who episode Blink above because it's funny, but also because it reinforces the dilemma. Here's a brilliant example of a writer playing with the idea of time, using the simplest technology available: someone's video recording in 1969, played back in the present day. If your vampire plays with time then every chance you get you go wibbley-wobbley, just as freaky as you can.
Stephen King's The Langoliers does this very well - the miniseries not so much, but you can't have everything.
King doesn't start screaming from page 1 'time! Time, you bastards! Tiiiiiimmmmeee!' However much he may have been tempted. No, he starts with a dilemma: most of the people on board the plane have vanished, leaving only a few random artifacts behind. King progresses: why does the air feel different? The food stale? The matches somehow less inflammable? Why is the world so used-up? Then, and only then, when the situation has been established and the stakes clear, do the Langoliers appear on-stage in all their glory.
So in ZQ, what does this mean?
It means you can play with the scenery, that's what. It means 2014, 1970, 1940 and 1893 all occupy the same space at the same moment. It means Robespierre is giving a speech to the Commune, being executed, being born and is long dead all at once. It means it is always teatime.
'What a funny watch!' Alice remarked. 'It tells the month and not the time of day!'
Look around you. Right now. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Chances are the room you currently occupy - the physical building - predates you. Perhaps by decades, perhaps by centuries. Even if it was built in your lifetime unless it is very, very new it has had an existence in space and time that is independent of your own. There was a point when the wall wasn't there, it was over there. Or perhaps that door didn't exist before. The paint changed, the wallpaper was stripped away or applied.
Moreover it will probably outlast you. For years. Perhaps centuries.
Imagine if you could see all those moments at once. How permanent would the world feel to you then, when even the chair you sit in doesdoesnotdoesdoesnot like a cat in a box?
Now you've had that existential crisis, let's discuss the other issue you're likely to have with a published campaign. You need to be able to identify the parts that will not work for you, and to cut them. Don't be tempted to make it work. You'll only hurt yourself and your game. Just be able to see the problem for what it is, and get rid of it. If your heart isn't in it, the players will sense that. They're tricksy beggars. This can only damage the atmosphere, and thus the game.
Remember, the whole point is to provide an experience at the table which everyone enjoys. It's not to play the scenario exactly as written. Nobody ever does that. The Director might skip a scene, the players might not engage with the plot in exactly the way the writer intends. That's perfectly fine. The idea is to have fun. So long as you're doing that, everything else is optional.
Since this bit does involve spoilers, in ZQ:
Each
zalozhniy has a mortal wound that would have killed them if it were not for
supernatural intervention. If they suffer this wound a second time, they are
killed outright. For example, a zalozhniy who is “supposed” to die from a stab
wound is destroyed if stabbed in the right place; a zalozhniy who was
originally destined to die in a burning house can only be destroyed by
incineration. Discovering a zalozhniy’s true death requires investigation, but
if the agents can deliver the right type of attack (often with a Called Shot),
the creature is instantly destroyed When I first read that, I thought it was brilliant. Creepy. Totally in keeping with the aesthetic. Then I gave it some thought, and asked myself how I was going to communicate that bit of lore to the players. Then I asked myself how the players were supposed to use this information. GUMSHOE is ultimately about piecing together clues to unravel plot and resolve story. Say this is a murder mystery: in the room with the cooling corpse there is always something that indicates the identity of the killer. It might be blood spatter and forensics, or a written note clutched in the corpse's hand. There's always something. That means as Director you need to be able to look at any given situation and, without effort, think of a couple of clues that lead to information. The players then use this information to resolve the scenario's dilemma. You never want to hide information, or present information that the players cannot use. Note I say cannot. If the players do not use information, that's their own problem. Problem: What about someone whose chosen death no longer exists in the modern world? If someone was supposed to be trampled to death by European bison, will cows do? If so, how do you manage that without playing the Benny Hill soundtrack in the background?
Problem: What about a heart condition? Drowning? Electric shock? Extreme allergic reaction? There's a lot of ways to die. What counts as dying before your time? Hell, what's 'your time'? Is it just old age or is there something more to it?
Problem: How do you investigate someone's true death? It's not as if you can pull an autopsy report off the official file. There can be no autopsy; there was never a body to cut up. If you know that Mack the spec ops veteran was last seen when an IED took out his vehicle, fine. Except that doesn't tell you whether he died of explosive damage or heart failure or something else altogether. You'd have to get close enough to the target for Medicine or Notice to work, and if you're that close then the vampire probably has its fangs in you already.
So I began to wonder whether or not this mechanic was worth keeping. It's cool and I like the idea, but I'm already finding ways to bork it. If I can do that then the players will definitely do the same. Or, worse, they'll never find out about this mechanic and so never use it.
I'm not saying the idea's unworkable. I'm saying I can't make it work for me. So I can either tinker with it until it does work - which, as I mention above, is a really bad idea - or I can cut it. If I cut it I have to replace it with something that does the same job, but which I can make better use of.
So what does this mechanic do? Is it vital? Is there another way to get the same result?
It provides an instakill mechanic. Vampires can be killed by other means, so it's not vital. I can think of other ways to get the same result.
My fix: every vampire has a time they're supposed to die, but didn't. If Mack the spec ops veteran was supposed to bleed out at 1.45 pm and 43 seconds, then that's when he's most vulnerable. If someone delivers a killing blow at that split second (called shot), the vampire dies outright. The vampires know the moment of their own death and are incredibly paranoid about it, making sure they're in a safe place at the appropriate time. At that very split second each day the distortion field expands in the same way it does when a zalozhniy feeds. So if the players pay attention to those moments when the vampire seeks a safe place and their distortion field blorps, they can work out the best moment to attack.
Enjoy! Next week, something different.
When I was living in the UK, the first time around - so, late 80s early 90s - I loved the tattered horror paperbacks that seemed to spawn, unasked and unannounced, in second hand shops. This was roundabout the era of the British Horror Writer, folks like James Herbert, Clive Barker, Graham Masterson (The Mirror enthralled me, and I cannot for the life of me tell you why), and, of course, Shaun Hutson. I'm not sure what it was about the 80s that brought their particular style to prominence, but there were a couple things you could absolutely guarantee would be part of any novel any of these people wrote: gore, in large quantities, and sex, in not quite so large quantities. So basically squirting bodily fluids, and squirting bodily fluids.
Assassins is very much in that category. There's a moment in it when a zombie gets a blowjob, and I think I can safely say this scene sums up the story - maggots and all.
Hutson's an author after my own heart. "I have to get money … basically, that's how it works. Someone says 'here's an obscene amount of money, Shaun, would you like to go and write a book,' and then the Muse descends with incredible speed .. I do get writer's block every morning, at ten o'clock when I get into the office. I'd love to sit here now and say 'I go into the office at ten, then I drive my Ferrari for an hour, go write another chapter, then go off to Bermuda and do the first draft. But one doesn't. One clears off into the office, sits there - and I stare at a blank screen sometimes for two hours at a time - until something clicks into place. That's how you have to do it."
I don't know how much I'd like his stuff now. It's been a while since the 80s. I loved different things. Re-reading Assassins was a guilty pleasure, but it's a bit like re-reading Rats or The Mirror, both of which I enjoyed at the time, but would probably feel a bit meh about now. Which doesn't entirely make sense. Sure, they're trashy, but then so are most horror films - particularly if they're about zombies - and I still watch those.
Must admit, what I don't understand is how they made a film out of Slugs, but not this.
Still, if you were wondering what Hutson's style is like - now you know.
Gore isn't something you see a lot of in tabletop. Gunshots, yes, messy deaths, o Lord yes, explosions, Why Yes I Would Like Another. But I suspect if you tried something like this you'd get banned from the table:
Where there should have been a mouth there was just a gaping hole which seemed to stretch from the remains of his nose to the point of his chin. It was surrounded by wisps of grey hair and strands of rotten flesh which hung down like obscene raffia curtains over the gaping maw. The lips were little more than pieces of shriveled flesh which slid back to expel a blast of air so foul that Adam almost passed out. And, from the center of that reeking hole, a tongue emerged. Blackened and covered with thick yellow sputum which dripped like mouldering pus, it writhed like a bloated worm with a life of its own, twisting and turning in that putrescent gap, flicking in and out …
For starters, too many things are Like Something Else. For another, words are jammed together that make no sense together - mouldering pus, for instance.
But I have to admit, there's something there which grabs my attention. There's a quote about James Herbert which fits: Herbert doesn't just Go There, he Goes There, sets it on fire, and sells hotdogs.
I've been Keeper, Director, and what-have-you for more horror games than I care to count, but I can only think of one time I really got under the players' skin, in the same way writers like Hutson and Herbert do. That was the time I had a victim cut to bits and flushed down the toilet, except it didn't quite work, so the bathroom flooded. Happy days of youth, I suppose.
As with all gaming advice, I preface this with a 'check with your players before you do it' mantra. That said, if everyone's on board, (remember Consent, folks), then my advice for creating horror at the table has nothing to do with vampires, things that go bump in the night, or even atmosphere.
No, my advice is this: be prepared to Go There, set it on fire, and sell hotdogs.
Do I recommend this book? Christ Almighty, no. It's bloody awful, not least because the zombie assassins - the whole reason the book exists - vanish about halfway through and don't turn up again till the climax. Instead Hutson tells the story of the Sharon Tate murders, again. And again. The characters are two dimensional and utterly pointless, and the whole thing's about as engaging as Hammer Horror at its worst. Hutson basically takes Get Carter (complete with 'avenge dead brother' plot), Charlie Manson and Graham Ingels, jams it all together, and adds some softcore porn. There's nothing remotely complex about it.
But.
There's something worth learning from the bad as well as the good.
I see Assassins has been reprinted again and again, and can be had right now, in paperback, for less than the price of a pint in London. Even Foyles has it in stock. So there must be something to it, mustn't there? Hutson's published an average of one novel a year since 1982. That's a success story a lot of us would kill for.
Here's my takeaway. First, that the author only ever writes for an audience of one.
You can try to please everyone, and sometimes succeed. After all, Robert W. Chambers made an entire career out of pleasing a particular audience, and deliberately changed both style and subject matter when he felt the audience wanted something else. He wrote The King In Yellow.
Now, without visiting Wikipedia, name six other novels he wrote. The man churned out well over a hundred, and at least a score of them were turned into movies. It shouldn't be that difficult.
(If you managed it, well done, Ken Hite.)
Therein lies the problem. Most writers who try to please an audience churn out bland mush. Popular mush, sometimes. Dan Brown's rolling in lucre, after all. But mush is still mush, and unless you like the same damn thing every damn day, you're going to get bored writing it. Perhaps not bored spending the money, if you're making Dan Brown paychecks. But that would only carry me so far, and I suspect the same can be said of many of you.
Write to please yourself, and to hell with anyone else.
The second is, stop worrying about art, or the muse. I very much doubt Huston cares one bit about what I think of Assassins, or anything else he writes. He cares about the blank page, and he knows the only way to fill that blank page is to sit in front of the keyboard and make something happen.
Stephen King has, in the course of a long and successful career, said many things, but his writing advice is solid. I want to draw your attention to two from King.
First:
You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.
Second:
I recognize terror as the finest emotion, and so I will try to terrify the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify, I will horrify, and if I find I cannot horrify, I will go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
Hutson ticks both boxes. Faithful to the subject, and gross-out almost every time, because he cannot terrify and only occasionally horrifies. Not that he cares. He's still writing. He's been sitting behind that keyboard for a very long time; he's not going to quit now.
So next time you're behind the GM screen, and you've the complete attention of a group of wide-eyed horror groupies, remember:
I've been re-reading Salem's Lot, Stephen King's take on Dracula in a small New England town. It starts with two survivors on the run, who read about the ghost town that Salem's Lot has become. It is not the first town in American history to just dry up and blow away, and will probably not be the last, but it is the strangest ... The article goes on to reference the fictional town of Momson, Vermont, which also dried up and blew away back in 1923. I suspect King was drawing on the Bennington Triangle when he wrote that, particularly Glastenbury.
It got me thinking about ghost towns, and how useful they can be in fiction, and RPGs.
Ghost towns exist in every nation, in all parts of the world. More often than not they're unknown outside a relatively small area. To give you an example, I have on my shelf a coffee-table book about Abandoned New England - Its Hidden Ruins and Where To Find Them. I doubt anyone's gone looking for any of these places in years. The book was published in 1978 but more than thirty years have passed since then; what was a ruin in the 1970s is most likely a nondescript pile of rocks now. Point being that unless you own a book like this, or live in New England not far from one of these locations, you wouldn't have the slightest idea these places existed at all.
What is a ghost town, really? There are legal terms, of course; a town only exists as a town because it's been incorporated, and as such it can be unincorporated. In that sense the legalities aren't much different from the days when the Crown would issue a charter, or the Church establish a Cathedral. The forms have changed, but the basic principle remains the same: you can't call yourself anything unless you have the documents to prove it, and those documents can be nullified at any time by the powers that be.
However a ghost town is more than just a few forms. I think of it in these terms: first a town loses its ability, then its vitality, and shortly after that it becomes a ghost.
Its ability can be defined as the power, financial or legal, by which the incorporated entity serves its citizens. Once it loses that power, the town no longer serves its people. This can mean many things, some of which may not be immediately obvious. If a town can no longer provide or maintain drainage, the problem may not really be a problem until the first serious storm, at which point the town floods. That might not happen for years. On the other hand, if the town stops being able to collect and dispose of garbage, everyone knows all about it pretty quickly.
Its vitality is more nebulous, and refers to the interest its citizens take in the town's continued survival. Do they sit passively to one side, refusing to participate in town meetings, not bothering to support local initiatives? Do they volunteer when the town needs help? If there's a fire, do people show up to put it out? If someone goes missing, do they help search? If the answer to all these questions is negative, then the town lacks vitality and will most likely collapse at the first sign of trouble - say, when the garbage trucks stop showing up.
Without ability and vitality a town is dead - even if there are still some people living there. Many ghost towns have a scattering of people hanging on, like bats clinging to the exposed rafters of a burnt-out house. From a gaming perspective, having a few shell-shocked survivors dropping clues and adding atmosphere can be a very good thing.
Sometimes the event that causes a ghost town is immediate and devastating. Centralia, Pennsylvania is all but destroyed thanks to a coal fire that's been burning under the town since 1962. There are any number of small townships that went under thanks to fire or flood. Varosha in Cyprus was a functioning, thriving place until the Turks invaded, and since then it's lain derelict. Chernobyl in the Ukraine is probably the most famous example of a ghost town caused by a nuclear disaster. France's Red Zone is one of the most recent examples in the West of a populated area reduced to nothingness by war, though there are plenty of examples of this outside the West. We tend to think of war damage in terms of explosions and shrapnel, or of massacres like Oradour-sur-Glane that kill people but leave the town intact, but recent tests in the Red Zone showed dangerously high levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, zinc - the soil is basically poisoned, as is the water and the animals who live there. The same will apply to modern battlefields, if not more so; they didn't have depleted uranium in 1914, after all.
However a town can also die slowly, often due to economic failure. We tend to think of the gold, copper and silver rush towns of the Old West and British Columbia when we think of economic failure, but really as a phenomenon it's all around us. Dying industries, the increasing use of automation, the transfer of factories from one state to another - as an economy shrinks, so do the townships that service that economy, until one day there's nothing left. Monotowns are particularly vulnerable to economic fluctuation, even in planned economies where the state has every incentive to keep the town afloat.
Sometimes a ghost town revives as a semblance of its former self. This most often happens when the town is revived as a tourist site or nature reserve, but it's difficult to really call a town a town if it no longer has an independent function. As a tourist site or reserve the former town loses all its impetus, becoming a parasite without any reason to develop further or to change in any way. In fact, change - and with it, growth - is the last thing these places can afford to indulge in.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Alexandria, in Egypt, was all but dead in the 1800s, boasting a mere 5,000 people when Napoleon took over. Yet under Muhammed Ali Egypt reinvented itself, and Alexandria grew; today it has over 4 million inhabitants.
Alexandria's example is particularly relevant to Keepers running a sword-and-sorcery or fantasy RPG. In fantasy campaigns cities are often portrayed either as fully functioning, or completely abandoned, but historically there is usually a long intermediary period when most of the city is abandoned, and yet it is still alive. There isn't a major city in Europe that hasn't endured shrinkage at some point in its career; London famously lost a third of its population during the Black Death, for example, and many cities lost closer to 60%. Imagine what that would have looked like: empty dwelling after empty dwelling, roads meant for heavy traffic now almost deserted, wild animals roaming the streets. And yet people still eke out a living there. The city still has ability, but has lost vitality. Dunwall in the Dishonored series is one of the few videogame examples of this kind of city: basically functional, but with the guts ripped out of it.
With all that in mind, let's talk gamification.
I think of ghost towns in small sandbox terms. There may or may not be a convenient central hub - a general store, an inn, a church - but the town's story is scattered roundabout, which means there will be different kinds of experiences to be had. Go one way, and find out what happened to the silver miners when the mine collapsed. Go another way, and find out what lurks in the old coach house. Go a third way, and see what's left of the miller's granaries. A fourth way to find out where the children who attended the schoolhouse ended up - and so on, and on.
It's a small sandbox because ultimately this is a small scale tragedy, in a game which can span continents or even dimensions. If your secret agents need to be in Istanbul next week, they can't spend a lot of time digging into the life story of a bar worker in Germany.
From a Keeper's perspective, I would take a series of notes either on index cards or on one of the many apps that mimic the index card format. None of this has to be very complex. A few lines per location is all that's needed. The key thing to bear in mind is all the minor stories that took place here need to be linked in some way to the major story.
So as an example, let's consider a ghost town in modern Eastern Europe, or a fictional non-Earth equivalent, abandoned after a massacre during a civil war or military incursion from a neighboring state.
The massacre is the major story. That's what robbed the town of its ability and vitality. All the town's leadership was rounded up and shot, and the few survivors of the massacre fled to neighboring towns and never returned.
All the minor stories reflect this and link back to it. The event was sudden, catastrophic and irreversible. There will be some battle damage wherever the characters look, but if it's an overwhelming event then there may not be a truly significant amount of property damage. This isn't like Guernica, where waves of bombers strike a sitting target again and again; this is more along the lines of the SS lining up villagers against a wall and executing them.
Let's further assume that the game mechanic includes something like Ars Magica's Regio system, or Ravenloft's Sinkholes of Terror, where reality can bend or change altogether depending on which level of reality you happen to be standing on at the time. So at its worst it can be a hellscape, and at its best a blasted and lonely place.
Therefore at its worst point - probably the town hall where the people were herded inside the building and murdered, or the mass grave where many of them ended up - the Keeper needs to do the most preparation. Two or three cards worth of notes at least, one of which is devoted exclusively to the supernatural entities certain to be found there. There will be several layers to the main hub, each more awful than the last.
However there are going to be other stories scattered about the town which are related to, but not part of, the main event. The farmhouse where a young mother was raped, her baby's brains beaten against a tree. The garage where frightened survivors hid. The fire station that was set aflame with the stationhouse dog still inside, soldiers standing around taking bets on how long it would survive. Each of these stories needs a brief description, one card's worth at least, which should include the location story, any debilitating effects - SAN or Stability loss - and perhaps a color point or two, like the red flowers that constantly bloom around the tree where the baby died, no matter what the weather. There may only be one or two layers to each of these minor points, just enough to hint at what happened here without going full Night on Bald Mountain.
If you, as Keeper, do that, then I'm willing to guarantee the players will remember this ghost town long after other, perhaps more action-packed, scenes. Horror isn't in the eye, but in the mind, Play with their minds, and who knows what you'll accomplish?
