New horror scenario: The Cultists

Finally Arcon is over and I can publish my latest scenario. Luckily, it was one of the three winners (second place) and I bought Fiasco companion with my gift card. It had nine players, which we split into three groups that played simultaneously thanks to the help of two extra narrators.

The scenario is called “The Cultists” and it’s a Lovecraftian horror story about a group of Christians that know each other from church, and are captured by a group of cultists. They are put in what seems to be an abandoned jail, together with 20 or so more prisoners. The protagonists have no idea why they are kept there, or what the cultists want or intend to do. As days pass, more and more gruesome things happen to the prisoners. The main themes of the scenario are truth, and whether it’s useful to be right if you live with people who are wrong and cannot be convinced otherwise. It’s written for Call of Cthulhu but it almost doesn’t depend on any rules so you can play it with whatever system you like. As most of my material, it’s written for adult players.

This scenario completes what I jokingly refer to as the “SJW trilogy”, a collection of three horror scenarios related to social issues: “Gone Girls” (about racism and prejudices), “Suffragettes” (about class warfare, esp. in the context of feminism) and “The Cultists” (about having “crazy” people in power). As always, you have them available in the scenario section of my RPG resources page.

Edit: update links to point to HardcoreNarrativist.org.

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Book summary: Writing Monsters

This is my (partial) summary for the book “Writing Monsters” by Philip Athans. It’s a book with advice and tips for fiction authors on writing effective monsters for your stories. Instead of following the book structure, I’m going to try to summarise a selection of its ideas.

Predictability is the enemy of horror

This is by far the most important idea in the book, and many of the tips stem from this principle. I have marked in italics everything connected to this.

What is a monster?

Uniquely strange creature that we instinctively fear. A distortion in appearance, behaviour or thought. Characteristics:

• Monsters have a disturbing capacity for violence.

• They are amoral and beyond our control: cannot negotiate with them, don’t seek or respect our opinion.

• They turn us into prey, sometimes isolating us and/or taking our weapons.

Note that shape, appearance (hideous to beautiful) and size (giant to microscopic) don’t matter!

A strange, terrifying creature might not be a monster once its behaviour is understood.

Uses of monsters

• Villains: Monsters don’t have to be villains, and villains don’t have to be monsters. If a character is both, build the villain facet first.

• As transformation: We’re afraid of what we can’t control, including ourselves and other people (werewolves, Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, etc). Our psychological well-being is as important as the physical, maybe more, because otherwise we’re expelled from society and civilisation.

• As “natural disasters”: They bring the best and worst in people. Useful to explore honesty, loyalty, vanity, etc., not just good/bad.

• As obstacles: Simply what stands between the protagonists and some goal. Note that “defeating” a monster might mean understanding it, helping/rescuing it, or sending it home.

Defining Your Monster

When defining your monster, define its offence (why it’s dangerous), defence (why it’s hard to get rid of it) and utility (features that gives it “colour”, like Blair Witch Project making stick figures and putting victims in a corner). Make rules for it, even if they’re never fully explained to the reader. You can use a monster form as a reference.

Archetypes like vampires, zombies, dragons, etc., are useful, but you need to define your own twist to them, see eg. 30 days of night and 28 days later. Otherwise, they’re unoriginal and, worst of all, predictable.

Describing Your Monster

Show, don’t tell! Describe the visceral experiences of the protagonists/victims (eg. use of “shuddering” instead of “being afraid” in Lovecraft’s Dagon excerpt on p. 142), the monster’s effects on people, and its possible intentions. Not knowing what the monster is, or not seeing it, is effective.

Think of all the senses. Limiting one, or all but one, can be effective. We don’t have to be turned away by appearance, smell, etc: sometimes predators use good smell to attract prey.

Revealing Your Monster

Monsters should be revealed in three stages:

1. Initial contact: Announces there is something. It’s fast (uses few words) and dramatic.

2. Build-up: Reveals aspects of it, takes the most space: increasing the threat, leaves reader wondering where does it stop. Reveal no more than necessary (our imagination makes them scarier), use “red shirts” (side characters who die) to show the danger.

3. Final encounter: Play with expectations and wait as long as possible to show the monster. Don’t actually show the monster until the end.

Conclusion

There’s much more to the book than what I’ve written here: I just included the parts that were more interesting for me personally. I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with the book: it seemed messy, some of the ideas and examples I didn’t find enlightening or useful, and some ideas were repeated several times (didn’t feel like reinforcement, just messy writing/structuring). Maybe I had too high expectations.

That said, the book was interesting and useful, at least for a n00b like me. So I recommend it, just not wholeheartedly.

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New horror RPG scenario

I finally had time to take all my notes for the last scenario I wrote and format them properly in a nice PDF so people can read it and enjoy it.

It’s a horror scenario set in 1914 London, where the protagonists are suffragettes (the radical branch of the suffragist movement). The themes are oppression, feminism and class warfare, but you can play as a random horror/investigation scenario without caring about the underlying themes. In any case, this scenario is for adults, so please don’t play it with younger players without first reworking and adapting it.

I have added a list of resources at the end of the text. It’s obviously not everything I read or took ideas from when I wrote it, but it’s a pretty good starting point that will help narrators retell this story with more context and depth.

This is the first, and so far only, scenario I have run with Lyre, and I think it worked fairly well. Without further ado, enjoy Suffragettes.

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