The Modern Witch Conspiracy

The surface has been brushed for period piece settings and stories with evil satanic witches. What though of the modern day? Has the ghastly horror witch gone the way of the dodo? The answer is a resounding no. They are certainly about and still practicing their nefarious ways. They do have their work cut out for them in some fashion though. Their brand of wickedness pales in comparison to the likes of serial killers, mass genocide in foreign lands--though honestly those kinds of atrocities have always gone on, if not as efficiently bloody as now--and the general moral slide of society with a total disregard for the value of courtesy, freedom, humanity and life not seen in centuries. Where then is the place for witch when the Adversary seems to be doing fine without lifting an apparent finger?

As with everything that slides into the present and looks to the future the ways and the wants of the witch have become more complex. Things are subtler now than ever. Part of it has as much to do with the witch hunters as it does the witches and their master. Staying covert went from a matter of privacy to one of downright survival. As would prove later to be beyond prescient the greatest lie the Devil ever told was that he did not exist. Thus too was it for his witches. The witch scare died down, past some unknown point, but likely earlier than now expected, the bulk of the victims of the stake were left to the innocent and the witches' own chosen scapegoats. Beyond that need for discretion was the need to find ever new, ingenious, and complicated ways to waylay and corrupt a populace that was continually growing savvier and more educated by the decade.

That formerly mentioned moral slide may have occurred all on its own, but the levels that it reaches and the ways that people are led, or driven, to act on the worst impulses that it represent can, and is, tweaked by the slyest of witches. There is a new, more ambitious, agenda at work. It is hard to nail down what it is precisely, but it is insidious, widespread, and broken down into a vast array of cogs that work as a monumental mechanism of evil the likes of which hasn't been seen before. Trying to chip away at those cogs is hard work and there are multiple redundancies. There are whispers and innuendo in certain circles about the nature of the witches' endeavours. The most frightening hypothesis put forward about this Machiavellian project is that even the attempts to derail it at every turn are pushing it toward its nefarious goal.

Mood: sly.

Music: Everything Louder Than Everything Else by Meat Loaf and Pure Evil by Iced Earth.

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A False Sense of Growth

Sometimes a role-playing game will use a set of mechanics, a.k.a. rules, to simulate a facet of the real world in a less than realistic manner. There are a number of reasons for doing this, the primary one being simplicity. The most prominent of these convenience simplifications is the level system. For those that don't know, the level system involves earning points that represent the growth of a character in the game. The points are experience points and many games refer to them as XP with the X standing for experience. XP rules can exist without a level system, but I'm not aware of any level systems without XP or a similar concept because the level system is co-dependent. A character reaches a new level after every so many XP earned. This is where the level system fails.

When characters reach a new level of experience--these are usually characters run by the players--they improve their skills and abilities. This is a vital part of the gaming process. The problem, the artificial quality, is that everything improves all at once. All of the character's skills are raised by a level, even if they haven't been used recently or at all. New powers or spells or psychic abilities, etc. suddenly appear to the character from out of the blue. Bonuses are applied to different combat rolls that didn't have such high bonuses before or maybe no bonuses at all. The changes all occur without training, instruction, or time spent mastering them. The new abilities and bonuses do not even have to have any tie to existing ones or reflect a previous desire for growth in the character.

Players and Game Masters take it upon themselves to fix this falseness to some degree by saying that characters practice their craft, self-teach themselves things, and plan ahead for the future that will be represented when that character gains a new level. Occasionally a game will suggest this as well. Spell casters are known to research books and at times, according to the setting's mood and details, settle down and meditate upon the world and their place in it, and from this they gain insight, which informs their new spells, or the idea to research specific spells. Most of the time though this is a stretch and as something glossed over it lacks a certain depth and feel. It does not deal with the improvement flood all at once either. Next time we'll look at a better way.

Mood: forward-thinking.

Music: The Iron Road by Widomaker and Fake by Motley Crue.

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Onward in the Corners

Here it is 2010. Can you believe that? Even a month into the year it's still hard to wrap my head around it. Is there another year yet to come that has received a lot of fictional press? I don't know any--I'm ignoring supposedly real apocalypse dates. Not only is 2010 a new year, but also more than that it's a new decade. Somewhere along the line I'm sure that I will post something about the future of books or writing and multimedia together or similar. It won't be the first time and as long as things keep changing and evolving in the world it likely won't be the last. Some of the articles I intend to write this year are not very dark or horror oriented but don't let that get you down. Some of them I will take special care to make dark and horror-filled.

One of the first topics I want to tackle will be in a sort of pseudo-series. I do not know how many weeks it will take or if I'll do them all at once or not. They are focused on role-playing game writing and use. The main thrust of these will be about the artificial quality of some rules that games have, and ways of avoiding that, hiding it, or otherwise minimising it. I also want to take a look at the ubiquitous and attention hogging vampire. This was a number of ideas, spawned by recent movies and a novel I have knocking around in the back of my head, to really make vampires something to fear again. Before I get to that though we need to look at how they are portrayed now. I also have to cover a bit about some of the myths that have fallen by the wayside and some that are only partially explained.

Back to that idea about the future of writing and the possible changes, I would like to write an article or two further getting into this whole idea of deleted and alternate scenes as well as side stories. The thing about this idea is it is only new in that--especially in the case of side stories--they existed separately before and now they can co-exist. The important part of this topic that I want to get to is about using the bits that exist in the story to set the mood, or to contrast it. How do you set that up? How does the full version change things? Are those changes present elsewhere and just quietly inserted? Of course any of these kinds of ideas could be full-blown articles all on their own. I hope you'll stick around to see.

Mood: optimistic.

Music: Music: Big Guns by Skid Row and Snakebite by Alice Cooper.

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Anatomy of a Horror Setting #17: Like an Open Book

People put on airs, hide behind facades and are a mix of layers that have varying amounts of transparency, even when "viewed" from the inside. What happens when all of the obfuscation is ripped away? What happens when a complete stranger knows more about a person than the person knows about themselves? There's a quintessential quote that says roughly if we knew what everyone around us was thinking would we go crazy or would we be driven to kill each other. Sort of sounds like go crazy or go crazy. Of course such a simplification doesn't indicate when this obviously involuntary sharing of thoughts occurs and seems to be predicated on this situation's sudden appearance. Even then it's hard to justify the results suggested.

There is fertile horror fodder here to be sure though. Looking back to the previous two articles about breaking the horror with too great a body of evidence and too much information there is something of an inverse situation that is possible without harming the mood and theme of the "story" being told. This inversion does though hinge on its own kind of limitation despite that it is breaking out of the mould of the previous limitations. Not just any character can be allowed the wealth of details. This free reign of facts is best left to a singular antagonist in the setting, a sole villain. Horror beyond the obvious frightening images and the moods of unease, gloom, and darkness is about being overwhelmed, outpaced, desperate, and being on the losing side of the odds.

Enter the villain that knows more about the hero than what the hero will ever know about the villain. The element of surprise is the best weapon in any encounter, but is even more pivotal for turning the tide of an uneven encounter. Beyond knowing the hero's past, what kind of person they are, whom they associate with, and other details of the present, what happens when the villain knows the hero's future, what they will do, when they will do it, and even a hint of the result? This must have a limit too, but it can be pretty open ended. The future is always fluid and no sense of it could ever be infallible. Subtlety is an absolute requirement here, but such a scenario could be plenty horrific. It's another possible important if limited proposition in a psychic versus psychic tale.

Mood: level.
Music: The Reckoning by Iced Earth and Archetype by Fear Factory.

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Time Period and Horror

Since it has become one of the driving forces in all of my writing from the RPG material, to the horror short stories and novels, I thought that today I would talk about the affect of changing the time period in which the story takes place. For my first novel I started with a certain amount of work already done. The work was short and it was rough, but it was highly detailed. It was set in the modern day—at the time that was the early 90’s. When I sat down to turn this into a novel I asked myself a very important question. What can I do to really punch this story up and make it sing? Really crystallize the horror and heighten it.

The answer was to change the time period portion of the setting. I started with the idea that there was a man who, much like most monsters, was more than a match for the people who would try to stop him. Someone who can do great bodily harm, and has the will to do it in the most horribly imagined ways, is scary only up to a point. Then it becomes, yawn, yeah the guy can tear people limb from limb literally. So what! Similarly, there is only so much terror to be had from seeing innocent Joe Blow off the street get smeared. This lead to the decision that the big bad man had to go after people who were less than helpless, even people who were just as vicious.

Okay, that’s two factors changed. However I made the best of both of them, merging them together. I still have to believe that the time shift is the stronger change of the two. Now, we have a monster of a man versus trained, high-tech, warrior-types. This to me just screamed much nastier. Think of it in terms of the Aliens movie franchise. The first one has people with not much to defend themselves with and they are way over their heads. The second has soldiers with heavy-duty gear and they are still way over their heads. Ask yourself, what if in the second film there was still only one alien and things went just as badly?

Right there I made a large difference. Other factors may be involved but that is where my second novel, the one I’m working on currently, comes in as an example. It is set back in time around twenty years. Why? In this case I was first looking to remove certain elements from play, and second I needed a more gentle and innocent time. Imagine it, all of the terrible nasty news stories of the last how many years never happened yet. No Columbine Massacre, no 9/11, much less coverage of every crime in painstaking detail with hours of coverage. The setting also poses limitations like no cell phones and no Internet. The advantages are many and tailored to the kind of story I’m telling. That’s the key. It can’t just be for the sake of doing it. It has to affect the exact story you intend to tell.

Mood: tired.
Music: Gunslinger by Demons & Wizards and Time Will Tell by Royal Hunt.

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