Mining: The Exorcist (FOX tv series)

It's October, that magical time of year when everything comes up horror.  Rather than digging around, trying to find scraps of horror in movies and television, we get a banquet of content.  Books, comics, even music all turn a darker shade of crimson as the leaves turn and the pumpkins dominate the entrances to stores and homes all over.  On this table of bounty, I have been enjoying a number of horror offerings.  One of which is the new Fox series The Exorcist (I know, it will probably be cancelled after its first season, but I can't help myself).  I went in extremely cautious, and after 3 episodes I can say without reservation that I have moved to cautiously optomistic.  

A quick review before I do a quick mining session.  The first episode sets the stage and as such, moves fairly slowly until the very end.  We are introduced to the young priest, the old priest, the victim's family, and the victim herself. This is not a rehash of the movie, though, and the show makes sure we know this.  It also ties to the movie very briefly with an article in an old paper mentioning the tragedy at the end of the first movie. But this show is definitely a new entry in the world of the Exorcist, despite the initial similarities. There are some segments that give you hope that we will have a true horror series and not just a family drama, but it is really the last 10 minutes or so that fills you with hope for what the series will become.  I am excited to see where they go with this show, and if the horror elements of the episodes so far are an indication, it should be a fun ride.  As long as Fox execs don't screw it up...

So what can we mine from this that we can't get from any other possession story?  The one nugget in the three episodes so far that could be used for gaming purposes is the way the possession occurs.  Most posession stories show the posession from the witnesses and not from the victim.  In this show, we see the descent from the victim's perspective.  The demon is given a face, it interacts with the victim, and most of all, we see that the possession is not entirely unwilling.  We see a broken girl with issues that give the demon a way to work its way into her willingly.  It is not a hostile takeover.  It is a seduction.  What we see is a girl, hungry for attention and tired of being second best in her family, despite her successes.  At first she resists, but the demon wears her down, acts as first friend, then loved one.  This is so far one of the strongest pieces of the show, and also the nugget of rpg usefulness that I am mining from the show.

So how do we use this seductive possession scenario in our games?  From an non-player character (NPC) perspective, they are not a victim.  The seduced NPC that the player character (PC)s are meant to save may actually resist their attempts to help.  They do not see the entity as an enemy, but a friend.  Perhaps the way to defeat the entity is not an epic boss fight or intricate ritual, but a social contest with the NPC victim themselves. They must convince the NPC that the entity is an enemy and that it is the NPC's fight to win and not the PC's.  Perhaps the "final fight" requires one or more PCs to continue to convince the NPC to fight while the rest of the party deals with manifestations caused by the entity to delay or eliminate the party.  In this, we have more than a two-dimensional possession scenario, and one that can create more depth for the story and for the NPC, as well as the entity itself.  The entity is not some boring bag of experience points, but something with motivations and character.  A three way social contest between PC, NPC, and entity would be a highly entertaining final battle.

The other way the seductive possession can be used is on an NPC.  Perhaps the entity comes from a particular item the PCs pick up.  Perhaps it latches onto a PC when they visited a particular area.  Or perhaps the game master (GM) sees a particular PC flaw on a sheet that would be a powerful invitation to an entity to start its seduction, something that happens completely unrelated to the current game story line.  During play, the GM could privately send messages to the PC, tempting them with help or with ideas that could get them out of sticky situations (at some sort of cost, of course).  These can be played as social contest requiring dice rolls, but it depending on the player, it could be pure choice.  Accepting the help gives the entity another tick in possession, however the GM decides to track this.  After a certain number of ticks, the PC begins manifestations, then potentially loses partial control of their character as the entity asserts itself.  This could even happen in the middle of an adventure, so suddenly the focus is on understanding what is happening to the PC and helping them.  This could even set up a choice for the party:  help their party member and fail the quest, or finish their job at the risk of the possessed PC sinking deeper into the entity's clutches.  

There are a number of ways to use the seductive possession in a game, both on PCs and NPCs alike.  It creates an interesting dynamic, an enemy that can't be chopped or shot, and one that is not a brute, but a cunning and manipulative entity that preys on the weaknesses of mind and spirit that exist in any individual.  It is a frightening concept, much more frightening than the faceless, angry spirit that most possession stories show.  It forces a confrontation of self and of flaws that we may not want to acknowledge.  That is a horror of a different sort...

Mining: The taking of Deborah Logan

Fezzypug has been recommending this movie to me for a while. The taking of Deborah Logan is yet another horror movie in the found footage/housecam style, with an exciting twist, that is it is actually good. At first it seems like another possession haunted house movie, with the schtick being that the person being possessed is an Alzheimer patient, but as the movie goes on it unwinds a cool backstory with plenty of spooky schlock to liven up a game. I'm not going to avoid spoilers, so if you are a horror movie fan I recommend skipping the blog for now and adding it to your netflix. So here we go in no particular order.

1. Putting the bad guy in the body of someone close to the PC's. One of the main characters in the taking is Deborah's daughter. The fact that she is fighting to save her own mother pushes into many extreme situations. In many rpgs players tend to get into kill it with fire mode quickly, this is a lot tougher when the monster is an innocent person that needs to be saved.

2. Using a hospital as a setting for session. Players are often hurt, bad guys get beat up, there are plenty of reasons for players in a modern game, or even a historical one to end up in a hospital. What if after the a big showdown with a major villain, where the players barely make it through and everyone took damage, you open with the players still wounded in the hospital. Perhaps another foe of the party decides to make a move against them while they are down, maybe the big bad wasn't really killed. The players might have to overcome the obstacle of doctors not believing them, the players being drugged or restrained, at the very lest the players will have no gear to speak of and have to improvise with all the dangerous implements a hospital setting provides.
3. Old ladies that can teleport, have snake venom and are graphically shedding bloody skin all the time.
4. A ghost from the past possessing someone to complete an unfinished ritual. The players get to research and find out what the ritual is. Use that information to figure out the final uncompleted step and race against time to stop it.
5. The bad guy working against herself to help the players. What if your bad guy is fully aware that what they are doing is evil, and actively brings the players into the situation to stop themselves. A conflicted bad guy ties into number one as well.
6. A strong visual theme to go with your evil occult thing. Instead of generic otherworldly scripts and pentagrams tie a strong theme to an occult ritual or plan. In case of the Taking that theme was snakes, but it could be anything. Nobody remembers a generic crazed cultist, but what if the cultists explode into snakes when you kill them? Or if they remove their own hearts and put them in clocks, and put clockwork hearts in their chests instead. Or if all the cultists have to drown themselves to join, and their lungs are perpetually filled with seawater and goo? Almost anything can work here. In a movie something like this could come off as cheesy, but rpgs are allowed to embrace cheesy in a way that serious movies can't.
7. There is no seven.

It is October the time for scary movies, so don't be surprised if you get more of these. I also just watched Blade 2, and that movie is ripe for mining!

Mining: The Purge

 

Fezzypug here with another installment Mining.  In this episode, we will be digging into the world set up in the trilogy of dystopian horror movies that include The Purge, The Purge: Anarchy, and most recently The Purge: Election Year.  What can we dig out of these movies that we can use for our roleplaying purposes?  Let's find out.

The movie trilogy begins with The Purge.  This movie introduces the concept of The Annual Purge, and shows one family's tragic experiences during one Purge.  The world introduced is a dystopian near-future, where the US economy was on the brink of collapse until a party called "The New Founding Fathers of America" (NFFA) overthrows the US government and institutes a totalitarian police state.  They institute a series of policies to stabilize the government and society, including enacting the 28th amendment to the Constitution.  That amendment enacts "The Purge", an annual 12-hour period of time where all crime is legal, including murder.  Government officials above a certain level are immune and failure to comply with the rules of The Purge are a hanging offense.  The next two movies in the series expand the world and the story, as we venture out into the streets and see how people deal with The Purge, and the groups that are involved in one way or another.  Though not the greatest films ever, they are nonetheless worth watching, if nothing more than setting up the "what-if" conversations with friends.  Oh, and all of the game potential. 

So where do we begin?  A game set directly in The Purge world has quite a bit going for it.  A dystopian police state that rewards the rich and oppresses the poor and middle class is a perfect game setting for a group of Player Characters (PCs) that get caught up in struggle to unseat the government and bring the power back to the people.  The Purge event is a catalyst to action, providing ample motivation for the PCs.  Maybe they lost loved ones to The Purge.  Perhaps they were devoted Purgers until something changed their minds and now they are working to make amends.  Perhaps the PC is a foreigner intent on helping change the system they see as a crime against humanity.  Whatever the reason, there is plenty to mine here for character motivation. 

The actual Purge night scenario is rife with possibilities in terms of adventures.  This could be a great one-shot, or series of one shots, as PCs attempt to survive the night, either hiding, trying to complete a particular job only possible on Purge Night, or trying to help others make it through the night, either as body guards, or as part of an underground group providing emergency services while the official emergency services are offline (watch The Purge: Election Night for a great example of this, including an awesome example of a Purge-proofed ambulance).  In the world of The Purge, you have a number of groups not hiding behind reinforced walls and windows.  PCs are not those people.  Their adventures would take them out into the streets to fight and survive. 

Many people are out to Purge on Purge Night, so enemy-wise as a gm the options are endless.  The best part is that you don't have to make them faceless mobs.  You can make them a part of the PCs lives if you are playing a campaign.  People that they deal with or know throughout the year may put on a mask and become something less than human on Purge Night.  How would players feel when they get cornered by a blood-drenched pack of insane Purgers only to find out that it is led by their friendly neighbor or favorite bartender?  That helps to make Purge Night adventures into more than two dimensional survival quests. 

System-wise, the sky is the limit.  This world and scenario plays well with any system, as well as pretty much any setting.  You can go traditional and make a modern scenario.  You could drop this into a post-apocalyptic setting and system, either as is, or even as something more akin to Escape from New York, where there is a whole area called the Purge Zone, where nothing is forbidden.  You could even drop this into a fantasy setting.  Imagine the PCs venturing into a perfectly normal city for some other quest, then suddenly finding themselves in the middle of the Purge Night insanity.  That could lead to a meaty adventure to discover the reason for the event and help end it (or in a twist help keep it alive if you can give some sort of reason that it plays a greater good). Sci-fi has a place for this, as well.  Imagine your PCs docking on a station just before lock down and having to survive while trying to figure out what is happening. 

As you can see, there is quite a bit of choice gaming ore to be mined from The Purge movie trilogy.  There are countless stories to be had in the Purge Night alone, not to mention how that one night can completely change and affect society and the world around it, as well as the people involved.  Whether it is a frantic and bloody one-shot or a world-changing campaign to end the bloodiest night on Earth, The Purge offers you a wealth of gaming material that has the potential to keep you and your group busy for a long time.  Can you survive? Or will you Purge?

Mining for Gaming Gold

 

This week I was in an interesting conversation with some friends regarding movies and television shows.  During the conversation, someone asked me why I watch terrible horror movies.  Now, for the record, I don't just watch bad horror.  Really, I watch (almost) any horror (excluding the subgenre of horror nicknamed "torture porn").  I personally love horror that leans towards the supernatural, whether that takes the form of haunted houses, strange monsters, mythical creatures, or demonic possessions.  In truth, though, as long as the movie doesn't focus on just random torture for the sake of extreme discomfort, I am in.  And yes, that includes horror that many may deem "dab" or "trash"  (note that I don't just say movies:  if it is horror, I will consume it with gusto).  The question stands:  why would I bother with something reviews might sum up as "...I wish I had that two hours of my life back"?  For me, the answer is simple:  I am always on the lookout for role-playing (RPG) game fodder.

I am an RPG enthusiast.  I collect systems like others collect baseball cards or comics.  I love new worlds and new possibilities for stories.  I love the big budget RPG releases, and I love the tiny indie RPGs that someone hacks together in their free time and releases free into the wilds of the internet for intrepid explorers to discover.  I love running and playing games and I love having a large toolkit for telling the stories that get created when you play.  To me, the world is filled with tools for that toolkit, and most of them are not found in official manuals or books only dedicated to RPGs.  The world is filled with these tools, and horror is just one of the many places that I go to root for something new and interesting to use to tell stories.

Ok, you say, but why bother with bad horror?  Because even in bad horror I can find something useful.  Maybe that terrible movie had an interesting location that would be a good start to an adventure.  Maybe the characters were terrible, but that one was just quirky enough to be an non-player character (NPC).  Perhaps the effects for the monster looked like they were put together by a band of intoxicated toddlers, but the idea, the lore behind it, well that might make for a potentially awesome monster, or even the Big Bad of a whole campaign (kudos to you if you get the Big Bad reference).  In every movie, there may be some RPG gold.  But you can't find riches if you are afraid of getting dirty every now and again.

I like horror, even bad horror, so I can put up with quite a lot of bad out of love for the genre.  But more than that, I go into each and every experience looking for some choice bits to add to my RPG toolbox.  I don't always find something, and then I am just left with a bad movie.  But more often than not I can salvage something, so the experience, to me, is very much worth the time.  So my short answer to why bad horror is " I am mining for ideas".  And you would be amazed at the gold a band of drunken toddlers can spin sometimes.

The best part is that this idea of mining sources for RPG ideas can be extended to pretty much any experience you may have.  Books, movies, television, comics, and really any experience in life are potential gold mines just waiting to be discovered.  Go into each experience not only for the experience itself, but also to discover something that will help you create an groovy story down the road.  That way, even in  experiences that may end in disappointment or disgust, you can still pull out something positive.

Look for posts in the near future where we dive into different experiences like movies, books, and games, and pull out the pieces we see as potential game ideas.  We will subject ourselves to the best and the worst in our quest to bring you the pearls that you can use in your games, and describe not only where they come from in the movie, but also how we might use them in a game.  That way, you can mine our potentially painful blog for ideas of your own.

Stay tuned.  In the meantime, dig into something on your own and see what you can find.  You might be surprised at how something that should be bad can be fun and entertaining.