The Problem of Horror
Horror and urban fantasy are probably my favourite genres for roleplaying, I cut my teeth
on the hobby with Vampire the Masquerade back in 1994 and it was White Wolf’s
games and Call of Cthulhu, that got me hooked. With the exception of a long
running Warhammer Fantasy campaign I was involved in, my favourite games are
almost invariably modern, set in the real world, or something like it, and
fairly dark; with only a few diversions into history and different tones. I
like the fact that they feel familiar, that they use the modern world as a
template, which makes so many character options viable without punishing the
players. Admittedly in White Wolf/Onyx Path games this often means clinging to
some sort of outsider chic, but I don’t see that as a bug, so much as a feature.
This isn’t
to say that this type of game and the settings that are common to them don’t
have their own problems, though. Nothing’s perfect and the nature of gaming can
be restrictive in places; plots can boil down a few basic phases that lead, ultimately,
to a combat based denouement. Sometimes that isn’t desirable, especially in
horror where player characters may fall into ‘crunchy and taste good with
ketchup’ category even when they’ve been through a lot of adventures and should
be old hands. As with my article on Fantasy worlds, I’m not sure there’ll be
anything new here, so be warned: this may be a load of old hat.
Let’s begin
at the beginning with a biggie; population and the issue of keeping a secret.
The old riddle has it that three people may keep a secret, but only if two are
dead, and whilst it doesn’t scan directly into the realms of roleplaying, it
has some traction. If we look at the global picture for the World of Darkness,
or the various incarnations of Cthulhu based gaming, or even at worlds like
Kult or Conspiracy X, it does start to look as if there’s no way that the
monsters could remain hidden. Within the World of Darkness the populations
needed to reflect the overcrowding of vampires or the guerrilla warfare between
the Werewolves and the destructive forces they battle, suggests humanity would know
the monsters were out there and would have adapted to deal with them. That’s
before you add in mages, mummies, wraiths, changelings, the various other forms
of shape changers, Asian vampires and mortals who know about what’s going on. Add
the internet, smart phones, citizen journalism and all the other trends and paraphernalia
that allow us to communicate across the world with relative ease and the whole
thing starts to resemble a boiling pot with its lid perched precariously on the
top, ready to slide off as things bubble out of control. In Call of Cthulhu
there are so many different types of monster that if they’re all assumed to be
at work at the same time, again the question becomes not ‘how did the
investigators discover them’ and more ‘how were they not discovered earlier,
and why didn’t someone bring sticks of dynamite?’ I know that just seeing the
monsters in Cthulhu games is tantamount to signing into an asylum in a many
cases but the way humans work, that would be as much of a signal flare as lots
of eyewitness reports. What is it up at the old Cooper estate that’s meant the
last five people to go up there have either gone mad or died? The pattern would
lead anyone to assume something was amiss and that there was more to the world
than was normally advertised.
To their
credit most gaming companies have taken that into account and included the ‘net,
Youtube and so on, as problems the monsters and hunters, who often don’t want
to publicise their activities either, have to work around. Tellingly, the
current World of Darkness includes the basic idea that normal humans know that
there are things out there in the dark; responding by keeping their heads down
and hoping that some other huckleberry will be attract the attention of the
monsters. The only real solution though is to throttle back and let there be
gaps, cut down on the size of your conspiracies and have room for cock up, not
cover up.
This brings
us to the issue of conspiracy. Most games have some sort of hidden, sub rosa,
organisation buried within them, often behind fronts and sometimes with fronts
hidden in fronts. They may be things to fight, or they might be places that
offer the characters a sort of home in terms of ideology, identity or
employment. Again there are issues here, can we really believe that an
organisation like Aegis from Conspiracy X or the Delta Green conspiracy could
remain hidden? The US government can’t even keep the NSA’s spying on email
accounts hidden for long; whilst we might like to think that they’re staffed by
slick, assured men in black, whereas in fact you’re going to be hard pressed to
stop them playing video games or chatting on Facebook. To grab an example,
Charles Stross, the author of the Laundry Files novels, has said that the most unbelievable
part of his universe is how efficient the Laundry actually is, in the light of
how many bungles the intelligence community has made in the past few years.
Tempting as
it is to believe that hidden groups extend all the way through our society,
pulling our strings, Illuminati style, the fact is that they can’t stay below
the surface very effectively. We know about the Mafia, we know about,
ironically, the Illuminati; things like Bohemian Grove and Bilderberg are
documented, acknowledged and noted… It’s the nature of the business that goes
on there that makes us suspicious, not the fact these events happen.
Where this
can fall down, is when conspiracies are meant to have been entrenched in
history, ruling from the shadows over centuries. For one this doesn’t explain
why change happens, or why we have the society we do. I appreciate that these
are meant to be subtle monsters but if we assume a guiding hand then much of
what we take for granted ceases to make sense. Unless some sort of very delicate
hegemony is at hand would we have seen the development of our political or
social systems? It becomes tricky and a wise GM keeps the conspiracy from
having a totality of control; players need spaces to breathe and places of
refuge.
In other areas
the nature of these bodies seems right on the nose, Pentex in Werewolf the
Apocalypse seems pretty close to the likes of the conglomerates who are carving
up our world at the moment, only with a demon worshipping edge. If nothing
else, they feel relevant, covering a niche that seems to be missed by a lot of
RPGs, it seems odd that more focus isn’t swung onto corporate affairs in the
hobby but this might reflect the ‘government bad, public enterprise good’,
biases of American life (bearing in mind that the SF horror game SLA Industries
makes no bones about the culpability of the big corporation in pretty much
everything that’s wrong in the setting). Even then there’s a question over why
there isn’t more of an Erin Brockovitch vibe going with secrets leaked and
questions raised; something that applies equally to Cyberpunk, one of Horror’s
kissing cousins. So again, the question of exposure and secrecy are writ large
as things to work around. Why hasn’t the firm whose leaders are part of the
Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign suffered a fatal leak based on their dubious
practices, okay business might keep their cards closer to their chests than
government, partially because they’re less monolithic, but there are any number
of examples of whistle blowing and so on to choose from. The obvious answer, I
suppose is the huge dearth of belief in whatever it is that the game is centred
on.
I do get a
bit bothered by that, after all when you have stuff that demonstrably works,
even if it may send you mad, why cling to the unproven faiths of childhood. I suppose
it’s linked to our lack of acceptance of Global Warming; it’s too big, too
unwieldy for us to perceive, and besides there’s no Mythos televangelists
banging their signed copies of the Necronomicon on pulpits and telling us we’re
going to be eaten.
The conspiracy
can bring another challenge too, if the player characters are placed inside it
(cunningly tapping into players’ self-identification with subcultures in order
to shift copies), much of the horror diminishes. The scares and shock value of
discovering what’s out in the dark is diluted, of course you know what’s out there;
you’re a vampire/werewolf/part of the Delta Green and so on. The focus is meant
to shift to reflecting on what you have to do in order to keep the secrets, or
maintain the illusion of normalcy, and how you climb the ladder within your
tiny sliver of society. You may have to lie to your loved ones, brainwash your
friends; treachery is meant to become your watchword, as you lie and cheat your
way through the world, either for the greater good or for personal gain. Like
it or not, you’ve been drafted and there’s no room for civilians or nice guys
in the armies of the damned.
This is
where things often break down in play, it can be hard to maintain a balance
between the unseen world and the visible one. Human affairs are easy to neglect
in favour of more monsters and strife. The drain of coping with a failing
marriage because you’re out on stakeouts for aliens or whatever, isn’t much fun
for many people. They would prefer, perhaps understandably, that their
characters have no weaknesses, nothing for a GM to latch onto. The legend of
the GM taking innocents and using them as targets, in game I hasten to add, is
well enough established to make player shy of adding background. In a genre
that strives for realism in many respects, this undercuts that, diminishing the
fear factor because players end up with characters who don’t really have
anything to fight for. Again, and this might say something about the way
companies work, this seems to be something that horror and dark fantasy RPGs
are addressing. Whilst Fantasy gaming clings stubbornly to its old form, the
games we’re addressing today mutate happily to become more relevant, and escape
the shadows of the past.
Like a
downward spiral though, this brings me to another issue, that of maintaining
the fear factor. Horror is dependent on a number of things, shocks, scares and
a sense of things growing suddenly bigger as pieces fall into place; something
it shares with espionage fiction. Over an extended period of time, these
tactics begin to fail, and players become used to what’s going on. Fear can
plateau, lose its sting, or become just dull or sickening. Simply based on that
there might be an argument for using horror games for short term engagements
rather than something that lasts forever and a day.
This does
highlight one reason for the broad vista of monsters, factions and other things:
to keep things fresh, even if the knock on effect is an increasingly porous
Masquerade. Familiarity breeds contempt, things that were scary three weeks ago
cease to be so because after a few adventures they become ‘known knowns’ or ‘known
unknowns’ in the words of Donald Rumsfeld. You can’t scare people with
something they’ve seen and defeated, but if you rely on an ever broadening cast
of threats you’ll eventually tip over the apple cart. Depth not width is the
ally here. Give the PCs a mystery to dig for and you can touch on the impossibility
of the ancient conspiracy and temper it with the knowledge that it never got
beyond a group of families, who have done incredibly well and one of whom may
be running for President, or a society that has colonised Oxford University and
are bending it to their will at the behest of unseen masters (who may be, in
the style of David Icke’s lizards, in the reality next door).
Further
issues arise when you take into account that most games start the player characters
from a position of innocence, or failing that, ignorance at odds with the usual
player experience. Whilst some books take care to shield the player from the
nature of the game, often tucking away monster stats and meta-plots and vital
facts away in the GM’s section of the book. This can be a stretch, acting as a
way to further diminish the impact of horror. In Vampire, for example, you can
play ‘guess the clan’ from powers, looks and so on, robbing the game of a lot
of its mystery. It is one of the many challenges the genre offers players to
keep from allowing player knowledge from influencing the game too much;
arguably more than in Fantasy or Science Fiction gaming, where the maintenance of
mystery can be less important.
It seems to
be a reverse situation to the one you find in vampire or zombies films where
none of the protagonists has ever, ever seen a vampire or zombie film and
consequently, have no idea on how to deal with the threat they discover.
Weirdly, that’s a conceit that could hold water in the 1980s when horror was
still very much under the carpet, something ‘nice’ people didn’t talk about. Today
though, oh come on… are you telling me you haven’t seen Buffy or Dracula, or
Night of the Living Dead? Our mainstream culture has become so colonised by
tall, pretty and dead things that you can barely move for them. And again,
familiarity breeds contempt.
Horror
gaming offers different challenges to the player, essentially it isn’t so great
if you want to bury your head in the sand and beat up orcs, because the world
outside your window doesn’t cater to that sort of behaviour. Horror offers a
different sort of release valve, one that might be seen as more ‘feminine’ than
the macho flexing of muscles and punching of bad guys found in fantasy or
superheroes. Where it challenges players is that very often the urge to simply
smite things is only a short term means to an end, one that may offer
drawbacks, rather than advantages. Killing that vampire may only alert the rest
of them that they’ve been discovered; wiping out a nest of cultists only gets
the FBI involved. So finding ways to work around things, and having a knowledge
of how the world works can be advantageous, one thing that, quite apart from
the supposedly scary nature of the games, marks these games as probably being
better served for adults rather than teenagers (I’m sure there are people out there
who started out playing horror games, but the stereotype is that most horror
gamers are a bit older). That being said there’s no doubting that the nature of
investigation has changed over the years, a game set in the 1920s might allow
PCs access to newspaper’s morgue, assuming the back issues aren’t all online
now, would such a thing happen in today’s security conscious world?
Pagan
Publishing, as long ago as the 1990s, updated the idea of the Investigator in
Delta Green, working to eliminate the issues that most people would have in the
mundane investigation process; bureaucratic sleeping policemen that would
render the civilian unable to gain access to official records or allow them to
investigate witnesses. I think this is in part why the idea of PCs belonging
some sort of group has become so prominent in the past few decades, where you don’t
dwell in the shadows, using supernatural powers to get what you need, then some
sort of backing or access to extra, covertly obtained, resources actually
become sort of necessary. Of course modern media hasn’t hurt that either, Twin
Peaks and X-Files opened up a new vista for gaming in the popular imagination,
making aliens cool again; RPGs usually follow the trend rather than setting it.
This isn’t to say that there are no games which cast the characters as
independents, only that they may well find the deck stacked against them.
Where then
do we take horror gaming. Unlike the issues I have with Fantasy gaming I don’t
believe these are baked into the way games are put together, and many of them
are probably necessary to keep the games going. Variety is needed, as is
innovation and horror games provide both. Rather than seeking to reinvent the
games completely, possibly a set of guidelines regarding campaign creation
would work best, with a simple ‘don’t use everything in the toy chest’ as one
of the first principles, followed up with ‘and keep the arcs short, snappy and
frightening’. Beyond that we’re into familiar territory, with characters
dedicated to roles in the game rather than attempting to rounded individuals…
again something that can be talked out at session zero or at least in character
creation. The key, rather than starting again, is to fine tune and get the best
out of it for everyone.
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