Hollyhock God's Notes for Session 3

This session was with my most experienced role-player, and I think it shows: this was a wonderful adventure to run, and the player had a great time. However, it's not entirely my experienced player's abilities; it also helped that some serious effort had been put into coming up with a solid adventure beforehand. Vashti's player watched this adventure, but she also had a part in creating it.

She got a kick out of watching her adventure ideas unfold over the course of the session, and hopefully she'll take up the pizza-flavored scepter of the game master one day.

Of course, it didn't all go according to plan: Feng Po's player is the Man Who Destroys Plots, and no sequential adventure survives for long around him. Still, the structure of the adventure that I had used in the other Commencements--a move toward gradually increasing weirdness and tension--remained intact with this adventure, and I think that the dramatic build-up was even stronger than in the other two.

Now, it should be obvious that I know nothing about China, but I also know nothing about Russia and that adventure turned out okay. It's amazing how far a name list will go to making your settings believable. A map also helps, though I found it difficult to find a good tourist guide to Guangzhou. Oh well.

The actual adventure ran very, very well. The creepy cultists with powers over probability were a lot of fun. I suppose that according to the Nobilis rulebook they were Elementalists, but terminology aside, I was very pleased with their powers--very Unknown Armiesish.

While the cultists were fun, I really got a kick from the whole Sea World thing, though. I apologize to anyone with a weak stomach, and for the life of me I can't figure out where that idea came from. It definitely wasn't in the original adventure. Vashti's player and I wrote the original adventure while watching a really nifty show about pyramids, so we were aiming for a Call of Cthulhu-ish final showdown in the twisting labyrinths beneath some ancient temple.

I'm very glad that I was struck with inspiration and decided to have Feng Po take his revenge on Paul, rather than the cult--it's just so much more wonderfully twisted. Of course, there is danger in such an approach. I know Po's player very well, so I know that I can take his character's actions out of his hands so long as he likes the result. Other players don't like having their characters man-handled, and some, in fact, throw hilarious and amusing hissy fits if you influence their characters in any way.

Despite the risk, I've found it important to take some control over a character, especially in online games. In an online game, it's often tough to finish an entire adventure even in a fairly long span of time, so it becomes very important to cut out the unnecessary stuff. In the adventure, Feng Po's player asked me if he needed a cab to get somewhere or if he could walk. Who the hell cares? Without any dramatic or situational concerns introducing mitigating circumstances, it doesn't really matter how the character gets there. He gets there; hop to the next scene.

While it may annoy a few players, scene-hopping becomes all-important in online games where you just can't waste time if you want to get anything done. That was, now that I reflect on it, a weakness in Dessa's first adventure: there was too much scene bleed, where the player would find herself making plans or performing actions in some sort of weird temporal limbo, like some sort of weird wargame. Even during planning sessions, it's good to know where the characters are, so that you don't ooze from planning to acting while still remaining in limbo.

I should probably also say something about scaring players, since I scared 'em silly with this game. I don't in any way consider myself a horror fan. I'm not impressed by horror in books, in movies, or in games: the closest I get to being "scared" in a game is being buzzed with adrenaline, and that's the desired reaction of the thriller genre, not horror. Regardless, I seem to be pretty good at freaking people out, so I'll offer some advice from my personal experience.

First, there's a very thin line between wonder and horror. Lovecraft understood that: that's why his stories of degenerate man-eaters and monsters from beyond the stars are mixed with stories of dreaming cat-princes and the jungles of Venus. I've found that it works well to introduce really wondrous, weird stuff, and let the players scare themselves if they so choose. I call this the "marching teddy bear" strategy. Marching teddy bears are weird and wondrous, but...c'mon...it's an army of marching teddy bears, and that's just plain creepy, especially as the first instance of something blatantly supernatural. Teddy bears are comfortable and safe; when they get a mind of their own, the whole natural order's overthrown, and that'll scare susceptible players.

"AHHHHHHHHH!!! They're dogs, and they're playing poker!!!

-Homer Simpson

The problem with the marching teddy bear strategy, as shown by Homer Simpson's wise words, is that not everyone's scared by things that are simply odd. Now, the way I figure it, I'm not a horror author. I'm not one of those great geniuses of terror, capable of latching onto your deepest terrors and putting them before you. There is, however, a solution: if you can't scare them with dogs playing poker, scare them with wire-skewered skinless corpses twisted into ungodly contortions.

This is the "Sea World of the damned" approach. It's creepy because it doesn't make any sense. I mean, I still don't know why I decided to have a nautical theme to Feng Po's atrocity. It really, really makes no sense. Now, I've worked at a psychiatric hospital, and though it may seem obvious, what makes crazy people crazy is that they don't make any sense. By extension, what makes the criminally insane that way is because they do stuff that doesn't make any sense. I mean, yeah, in a fit of rage you kill your friend; fine, that's pretty stupid, but rage is understandable. But mutilating children and masturbating into their entrails? That's just plain eccentric.

The very fact that it doesn't make any rational sense is what makes this sort of horror so effective. If done well, it locks the players into a "but why would he do that?" loop from which it's very difficult to escape. The trick, though, is to have some veneer of meaning to these actions. Nobilis is a wonderful example of stuff that almost makes sense, especially the properties of the Imperators. Ashkel is the Imperator of Words, Doorways, and Bronze. Words, Doorways, and Bronze? Eh, it makes sense in a way--kinda ancient Greek, I think. They made bronze weapons, their philosophy focused on the word, and they were focused on hospitality, so it makes...sense...sort of. Doesn't it?

The cool thing about the Imperator of Words, Doorways, and Bronze--or Murder, the Infinite, and the Age to Come, or whatever--is that they almost make sense, if you decide that they must make sense and try to wrap your brain around their internal logic. The human brain is a pattern-building machine, even when patterns don't exist. If you state or imply that certain things make sense together, the brain starts to whirr, trying to fit them together.

The same property works great for scaring players. Give them a bunch of horrific actions that really, really don't make any sense, behave as if they do, and watch them try to piece together a pile of shattered glass that they think's a broken mirror, cutting their fingers all the way. Have it makes some sort of sense--maybe there's a relation between the actions in a language that only you speak in your game group, for example. Then sit back and watch the players start thinking like a psycho. It's a blast.

Your lucky number no longer exists. Your lucky color is the nothing between the stars. Your true name is dead."

-Fortune cookie