Tag: horror

Stranger Things is Honest in its Love of the 80s and D&D

Finished watching Stranger Things. Loved it, but I’m pretty much the ideal audience. It’s not for everyone, but like True Detective Season 1, it rises above and entertains better than most.

But hey, some people are sticklers and parse everything out, looking for every possible fault before deciding from on high whether something is good or bad. Some people need to make their opinion bigger and more important than the art they are commenting on. Here, cruising along in the 21st century, everybody thinks they know better than artists who pour everything they have into a project.

Me? I want to be entertained. But more importantly I want to be entertained honestly. I want to see clarity of vision, risk taking, and art with boundaries. I want to see love and passion for a project, brought to life with care and creativity. And while I loath both laziness and complacency, I mostly hate those who compromise a vision because they refuse to be honest. With themselves. With their characters. With their audience.

You may find fault in Stranger Things because it’s not perfect. You may not like it because you can’t relate to the characters. You may think its horror-SF trappings cliche and dated. And that’s fine. Good for you.

But I liked Stranger Things. A lot. Because it was written for me, and not just 12-years-old and playing D&D in the early 80s me, who is basically a composite of many of the main characters. But also the me who is a father who loves his child and would do anything for her. And also the fanboy me who likes to be entertained.

And finally for the writer-me, who wants people with my upbringing and interests to be successful and create more cool stuff. The show is honest with its characters, its setting, and, most importantly, its audience. It gives us everything it’s got and asks for little in return. So yeah, I liked Stranger Things. A lot.

I hope you do too.

New Kickstarter “Sun Spots” is coming in September

Things are finally underway! Again! Less than two months until I kick off the Kickstarter for my Cthulhu Dark scenario “Sun Spots” and momentum is gathering as we speak.

Here are components of the project that are already complete:

  • The core text, playtested multiple times (~27k words)
  • The cover art by Chris Huth
  • Multiple interior illustrations by Jason Eckhardt
  • Interior art by Caleb Cleveland

Furthermore, I am already assembling the following items to be ready for the Kickstarter launch:

  • Interior art by Reuben Dodd
  • Blind playtesting
  • Layout and design by Gregory Geiger
  • Maps, including one hand-drawn, by Jake Coolidge
  • Interviews and press
  • Budget, pledge levels and possible stretch goals
  • Tentative “Director’s Cut” version of the book

So everything is coming together for the actual book. The video for the launch is nearly done, as is much of the art for the project page. I’ve got plans under way, and deadlines on the calendar. And over the coming weeks I will post here regularly, sharing planning and providing visibility into the project itself.

I can’t wait to share more with you. In the meantime, read some previews here.

The Companion is Finally Live!

The Masks of Nyarlathotep, if you didn’t know, is often hailed as the greatest Call of Cthulhu campaign of all time, and even gets logged as one of the all time great RPG campaigns of any genre. But one of its problems is that there is a lot of room left in the story — there are so many details undocumented, questions unanswered. It’s a great campaign but could really be so much greater.

More than five years ago, Bret Kramer came up with the idea of building a companion for the campaign, and the Kickstarter for that companion is finally live. Back in 2009 I wrote a number of pieces for the book, one of which was about how to run and organize the massive game. Apparently I had some good stuff to say, because it’s one of the first pieces in the book, and my name ended up on the cover.

There is a lot of vaporware in the tabletop RPG world — material that people write that never sees the light of day. The Companion was definitely heading toward that and I am so excited and proud that it is finally going to be published. I distinctly remember writing my Companion pieces on my deck in Oregon, with my work laptop in front of me and a beer next to me and trying very hard to stay focused on completing what I had agreed to. I was so desperate to complete something, to be a part of a project, and I had no idea it would take so long for it to see print.

More importantly, I really wanted to write something that other people would read and understand and be thankful for. My key contribution for the Companion is the keeper introduction, wherein I try to help keepers wrap their heads around the enormous task of running Masks. I really enjoyed writing the piece because I felt like I had something to say and the writing came easily and naturally. You mean people want to hear what I have to say about how to run a better game? I was glad to step up and write all I could on the matter.

And with the Kickstarter now up to 20k pounds (~$30k), it’s clear my contribution is part of the greater whole that people are excited to support. The project is finally a success, and though my part in the overall book (which is bigger than Masks itself) is relatively small, it’s huge for me.

For me, 2015 is a year of “out with the old” as I not only take care of some health issues that have been dogging me for a while, but also try to clear my backlog of personal and writing projects. That the Masks Companion is finally done and going to print is very cathartic to me as it validates some efforts that have been sitting around for at least five years, and allows me to move onto other pastures.

The timing couldn’t be better.

Delta Green Conversion Notes for He Who Laughs Last

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR HE WHO LAUGHS LAST FOLLOW

REALLY, YOU SHOULDN’T

 

 

The following are notes on converting HWLL to the Delta Green RPG setting…

As a contemporary horror story, He Who Laughs Last can easily be integrated into Delta Green, Pagan Publishing’s modern day RPG setting of conspiracy and terror. The scenario needs very little to be inserted into any DG game, but there are two key components that require discussion: the scenario introduction and the use of a green box to distribute clues.

For the scenario introduction, there are a few different ways to bring a group of Delta Green investigators into the story:

  • The most straightforward option is to transform Becca’s father, Dale Kingsley, into a DG friendly who reaches out to the party for help, knowing they are capable in these sorts of investigations. Dale can be a doctor/surgeon who has helped DG in the past but now has nowhere else to turn. A simple phone call from Dale outlines the problem – his daughter has died mysteriously and he is desperate for their help. Or this call could come through “proper channels” to have the PCs reach out to Dale, again, as a DG friendly who is in trouble.
  • Perhaps Dale is a friend of one of the agents. Dale contacts his PC friend (they were college roommates or served together in the same branch of military), distraught and overcome with despair. This is just a slight change from the above suggestion – Dale still reaches out to the PCs, panicked and desperate for help.
  • Another option is to have one or more of the PCs be friends with Becca (through family or work) who are directly impacted by her “suicide.” Becca is in her mid-20s, and if any of the party is generally her age, they could have been friends with her either during or after college. Pulling the party together for this might seem like a challenge (to find a justification for all the agents to travel to LA for a funeral of someone they don’t know), but given the size and scale of the larger LA area, it shouldn’t be too hard to justify a handful of agents taking a vacation for a week to help their friend.
  • One last option would is to have Cell A (or whatever infrastructure your campaign uses) assign the DG agents directly to investigate the mystery.  Just Becca’s suicide alone could be enough to get the party involved, or the investigation could be bootstrapped by having a DG friendly point out some of the irregularities coming out of the coroner’s office.

With the introduction covered, there are still a couple of considerations to make this scenario work smoothly in the DG universe. First is that the PCs probably won’t be from the LA area and so won’t have the Hollywood connections that make it a bit easier to navigate the story (as mentioned in The Industry, pg. 12). They can, of course, play up their law enforcement credentials, or just play it straight as they try to uncover the mystery. The PCs will just have to be a bit more thoughtful and creative as they work to make connections with the various NPCs.

Finally, one easy way to get the PCs the information from David Lee (Package from the Coroner, pg. 29) is to provide it in a green box. While there is no specific need to deviate from the narrative, if the PCs ask about a green box or the party doesn’t end up meeting with Lee, send the PCs a key from a small green box located in a Burbank industrial park. You are free to put any additional information there for the PCs, but otherwise you can just substitute the green box for the the package from Lee as the mechanism to deliver the clues. Instead of receiving the package at the front desk, inside the green box they find a number of boxes, smelly and old from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, stacked in the corner, ready to divulge their secrets.

Those are all the elements that should be necessary to convert HWLL to a Delta Green scenario. Please let me know if you have any further questions on this, and I would love to hear if you successfully convert it to DG.

You can buy the scenario at DTRPG.com here.

It Lives!!!

The PDF for He Who Laughs Last is now available on DriveThruRPG.com, for the amazing low price of $8!

You can purchase it here. Over the next few months, the same product page will be updated with the ability to purchase not only soft AND hardcovers, but a whole host of digital clues and supplements for the scenario.

I’ll also be updating the project page here with the list of Kickstarter backers. It’s been an amazing journey and I would not trade the experience for the world. Many thanks to all involved.

No Signal – Limitations in Modern Horror Gaming

One of the most compelling and scary components about Lovecraft’s horror is its remoteness. There’s a reason why he set Whisperer in the Darkness in the remote White Mountains – removing yourself from civilization and all its protections is not easy for most people, and certainly must have been unnerving 100 years ago, when still so much of the United States was unexplored.

But finding that level of isolation to use in a modern horror game is a bit challenging. Sure, you can set your game in some actual remote location (mountains or jungle far away from civilization), but not all horror stories take place far removed from people and power lines. And not every critical moment can be born from the device that your character can’t reach someone else, that they don’t have a signal (one of the worst parts of the entire Mission Impossible movie franchise is in MI:III when Tom Cruise is driving around Shanghai trying to get a signal on his phone to make a call – this does not make for good drama).

In fact, I think the more a GM can give PCs access to their everyday technology, the more normal the scenario will feel, at least at the outset. Verisimilitude is a great place to start for modern horror. So what else, besides isolation, can we use to make things scary in modern horror?

Well, a lot of it comes back to all the crazy stuff Philip K Dick wrote about in some of his later works, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly. Well, and pretty much anything he wrote (which is a lot) about identity. One of Dick’s favorite themes is that our reality is not as it seems, that we are not who we think we are. The idea that (SPOILERS HA!) that Deckard and Rachael don’t know that they’re androids, or that Bob’s drug use creates two separate personalities unaware of each other strike at the heart of what identity means. And with identity theft continually rising, and online privacy becoming a larger concern for everyone, we seek more and more to verify that no one is watching, that we are who we think we are, and that our fundamental understanding of who we are has not been compromised. As that gets harder and harder to do identity “theft” (in whatever broad terms) becomes scarier and scarier.

Good art needs limitations, but a good modern horror scenario needs different limitations than our traditional 1920s-30s Lovecraftian story. In today’s world, it’s very difficult to remove all communications and information from people and how they use technology. So one of the things we can do is play with player characters’ identities, and twist their understanding of their world. If you aren’t sure who you are, then suddenly all of your perceptions and perspectives have limitations. This is good gaming material.

One of the main components in He Who Laughs Last is that a PC is not who he seems to be, which is slowly revealed over the course of the scenario. From my playtesting, this sort of twist of identity really freaks people out, which is pretty much the point. But identity can’t be the only component for good horror gaming. What else is there?

Announcing ‘He Who Laughs Last’

For the past year, I have been focusing on writing and developing ‘He Who Laughs Last,’ a Cthulhu Dark scenario that I plan to release via Kickstarter in early 2014.

I have created a page for the whole project and updates will be forthcoming. I am planning for a Kickstarter in early 2014 and am in the process of recruiting a top-notch list of contributors. I cannot wait to show you what we have in store.

 

Modern Horror versus Weirdness

I don’t quite get contemporary horror. Some of it is really good (The Orphanage, The Ring) and some of it okay for one trick (Paranormal Activity) and some of it just plain gross (Saw). But growing up in the late 70s/early 80s exposed me to many all-time great horror movies: The Exorcist, The Thing, Carrie, Hellraiser, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween. Lots of Stephen King in there too.

A key appeal of Lovecraft’s world is his imagination – the man was a once-in-a-lifetime individual and his work will live on for quite a while. But his take on existentialism was both nihilistic and weird. The story about the fish people breeding with humans in the failed fishing town in remote New England? Kinda different than what F Scott Fitzgerald was writing during the same period.

It’s the same elements that fuel Stephen King. Buoyed by an unstoppable work ethic (and, in the 80s, lots of cocaine and Miller tallboys), King’s work showed that the world still had room for stories about normal people having horrible experiences. King acknowledges his own Lovecraft influences, as does Clive Barker, Neil Gaimen, John Carpenter and Guillermo del Toro, because Lovecraft sets the bar so damn high – not for scary but for Weird.

His landscape is full of distant Dreamlands full of monstrous shadows, dark libraries haunted by broods of alien cats, crumbling towns on the edge of civilization. Lovecraft pushed the boundaries of imagination so far we are still trying to find the edges. But it’s not about shocks. It’s about going to different worlds, meeting strange creatures and understanding that our cosmos is limitless. It’s about stretching our imaginations into unseen territories, dreamscapes, visions.

I love playing Cthulhu Mythos RPGs because they are weird and different. I love writing Cthulhu Mythos RPGs because I get to be as weird as possible. With He Who Laughs Last, which is set in modern Los Angeles, I continually stretched myself to make things weirder, to catch the players off guard and give their imaginations something to sink their teeth into. The greatest pleasure for me comes when, after a PC awakes to find a large hyena statue has moved in the night to now stand next to his bed, the player says, “oh, man, that’s really freaky…” Caught, unexpected, by a stretch of the imagination.

So my modern horror games aren’t about shocks or surprises. Instead, they’re weird, unusual, gross and hopefully totally unexpected. So call it horror, call it weirdness, call it whatever. I don’t need sudden shocks to make my point.

I can just be weird…