We're All Going to Die Terribly

One of the important parts of planning and running a role-playing game is the same as plotting a novel or writing a script. It is about managing threat levels. Doing this has a cascade effect that impacts pacing, tension, horror--if that is your angle--and mood. Take the ever-popular zombie apocalypse. The threat level is high any time that the characters are out in the world rather than sitting in their safety zones. Even in the safety of their sanctuaries all of the dangers of the old world loom around every corner. A pall hangs over everything because the walking dead dominate the mental landscape as much as the external one. This makes for constant inescapable tension. The dark mood is always an instant away only to be forgotten briefly.

This general look at the threat level of the setting is just that, only an overview. Scaling down to the level of specific encounters the danger presented to the protagonists can only reach a certain pitch. The protagonists must be able to survive--at least until the end, since they can only be killed once. There must be some way out of every situation. Something natural or organic and not forced or contrived. By the same token it should not be a cakewalk either. A balance must be struck. In a game luck can be a factor that brings disastrous results with even the most balance encounter. An author or scriptwriter can bend luck to their will on the other hand, again only in a way that seems genuine. Either way there needs to be room for adjustment.

A threat level system became a part of AD&D recently--in terms of the game's long history--to the joy of some and derision of others. It is a quick and easy way to say this many player characters of this level of power should fight these, these or those. It can be rigid and by the nature of its existence can drain away some of the tension, especially if the players know the Game Master is sticking by it. The player will likely even be familiar enough that they can tell an encounter is safely balanced. This tension draining phenomena can happen even with fiction, and especially scripts for television. Certain characters just aren't going to die. There will be an out to almost any situation that seems hopeless. Some things just are not going to change or come to an end.

Mood: open.

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Bad Blurring of the Lines

On Twitter there is a sprawling community that is rancid, rank, and utterly decadent. This community prides itself on these virtues in mock-physical sense. They are zombie fans. Some of them purposefully obliterate the line between fiction and reality in their communications. They are in essence role-playing on Twitter as zombies. Their antics are as funny sometimes as they must inevitably be disturbing to non-fans of zombie movies and fiction. It is easy to image the horror and indignation of the horror uninitiated in response to the outlandish and gruesome posts. A fan of horror and of zombies can really get into most of what they do. They are awfully witty and comedic for the walking, ravenous dead. They have the most interesting and not for safe work outlook as well.

There is one trend that has developed recently that bears consideration. It also seems to be ill conceived and for once in bad taste regardless of the popularity of it, and the popularity of zombies and horror. Not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and there is no apparent backlash against it. The trend is to equate the H1N1 virus, otherwise known as human communicable swine flu, with a new and real zombie outbreak and ultimately a start to a zombie apocalypse. Now, it's not the disease factor that is the problem, nor the idea of a zombie apocalypse. There is a great Facebook group called The Hardest Part of a Zombie Apocalypse Will be Pretending I'm Not Excited which expresses the normal sentiment of zombie fans.

It is not even either of these ideas, but at the same time they do lend to the unease of this blurring of the line of reality. The first fear is that some people who are not aware of the fact that this is fictional masquerading as real will get the wrong idea and spread panic like wild-fire. The second is that such a pairing of a real disease, which has resulted in the real deaths of people, with a fictional milieu is insulting to those who have died. A virus that causes the dead to rise is nothing new. Neither is fiction revolving around death by contagion. Something about it just doesn't sit right though and the sooner the trend is over the better. This speaks to what is acceptable, where the line is between the shock and the horror desired, and just being distasteful.

Mood: smooth.

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Anatomy of a Horror Setting #4-3: Scalar Planar Collisions

Scale is the means by which things are measured whether it is a mile, or a millimetre, or a setting or plot. The scale of story elements in a horror story tend toward the small with a few notable exceptions. One of those exceptions is the zombie apocalypse story. The apocalypse portion of the requirement does not rule out the small scale though. The focus always narrows down to the key characters and their involvement with the crisis, and the antagonists, the zombies. This focus shift is true for all stories. If the intention of coming up with the setting is not for a single story then the scale needs to be examined even more thoroughly. Though they come in different flavours a predominant number of role-playing games fit in the fantasy mould.

Whether the intention is a horror fantasy role-playing game or a storyline with that cross-genre mix scale is an important factor. Zombies are no strangers to fantasy settings, nor are mummies and animated skeletons. They are common on a small scale. Armies of them appear occasionally, covering the middle ground, but usually not as a global level threat. Given the day-to-day level of horror inherent in most fantasy settings, even to some extent in medieval life, zombies don’t rate very high. Where swordsmen wander ceaselessly crushing evil, zombies are not a real threat without an edge greater than being similarly armed to the swordsmen. Something more powerful is usually pulling the strings and presents a greater level of menace bringing the scale, the focus, down again.

Another option is replacing the harbingers of the apocalypse with something more frightening. Defying demonic invasions from the outer planes are the fodder of prophecies to be fulfilled in many a fantasy. Certainly a horror fantasy could reverse things. The prophecy predicts the invasion, or better yet and somewhat its own horror to the protagonist(s) the prophecy fails to be fulfilled. Hell on Earth has a certain appeal for a storyline, or a state of the setting, a backdrop upon which to paint the rest of the story. This is about setting, not plot. This level is the foundation and some of the story structure. Like a house, with only a basement and some outer wall joists any number of frames is possible. Where the construction goes from here quickly becomes a matter of perspective.

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Anatomy of a Horror Setting #4-2: Arcanis Visicius Domini

Most of the questions, suggestions, and considerations that were a part of devising the setting for a modern magical horror still apply in the horror fantasy setting. The fantasy setting conventions and norms provide extra help as well as disadvantages to crafting the horror of the setting. Even some magic that was discounted is back on the proverbial table. The disconnect that the fantasy genre has with the modern, rational world immediately opens up avenues of horror that would be unwieldy or impractical in the modern magical horror setting. That disconnect also negates the impact of breaking the rational, which is often a major factor in supernatural horrors. In its place is the horror of the inevitable, the persistent threat looming overhead, lurking in every corner.

Magic of any great power or import should be kept out of the hands of the protagonists. This can be achieved by the requirements of magic or by maintaining strict moral lines. Material components and magical knowledge availability is limited not only by the environment but also by the greed for power of the magical caste, the wizards. Magic is nothing more than power in the setting and power is always jealously guarded. Corrupting power and the mad grab for it will direct much of the morality of the spell casters or the magic most commonly used. Beyond that magic can divided into direct black and white moral lines because the fantasy setting is more accepting of such mythos rules. Black magic will have evil requirements as well as evil results.

At the level of specifics fireballs and lightning bolts called down from the sky are fair horror fantasy game. Curses and geasa of terrifying kinds and results can be wonderful plot underliners giving the story a real mythological feel. Geasa is the plural of geas--a kind of magical obligation or prohibition like a taboo. In some cases the person is incapable of breaking the geas because they’re magically compelled. In other cases there are dire consequences to breaking the geas. As a facet of the setting curse bringing and geas infliction lead to other considerations and implications from the level of daily life all the way up to politics. The ever-popular zombie has its fantasy counterpart but requires a different touch. A matter of scale comes into play for this and other magic.

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Anatomy of a Horror Setting #2-20: The Final Conjurations

Let’s continue with our specific spells of horror. The first comes from a self-proclaimed Demon Lord of Pestilence. The spell was always unleashed upon one victim who was initially unaware of the dark magic worked upon them. A lone nomad with no home or tribe was the first victim. The nomad travelled far and wide. All that came in contact with the nomad would fall to the pestilence laid upon him by the spell. Three days after contact, with no warning signs, the disease would strike. It was a deadly wasting. The virulent contagion spread via contact as well as contaminating the water. Animals were not immune to it either. Wherever the nomad went, even taking to a life of hermitage, he killed off all the local game, forcing him to move on and spread it even further.

Spells to raise the dead as a zombie are easy to find. A nasty twist already lighted upon is to tie someone’s consciousness to his or her corpse. A searcher of ancient lore can find something more sinister in dusty forgotten tomes with pages that barely resist crumbling. There is a spell said to come from Mictlantecutli himself. The last to use the spell was a Death cultist. The victim was a traitor to the cult. The traitor was fed to a starving jaguar. The spell brought the traitor to the brink of death and then the traitor was healed within an instant, and given a short reprieve before he began to be eaten again, without the presence of the jaguar. The spell causes its victim’s murder to repeat over and over again in every excruciating detail for seven days and nights.

Blood feuds are as old as people. There is a spell that tries to bring them to an end. This spell curses anyone who kills or murders. The spell attracts non-corporeal entities to the murderer. The entities appear as the slain and are visible only to their killer. Much like a poltergeists these entities throw things, break things, violently--but not deadly--assault the killer, assault those who associate with the murderer, and create a terrible noise and ruckus. The entities cannot affect the physical world constantly and often have to build up to a good tantrum. The true power of this spell is that going forward the killer’s descendents who kill anyone accidentally, on purpose, or even in self-defence will suffer the wrath of a new entity as well as all of his or ancestor’s spectres.

Mood: exhausted.
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Anatomy of a Horror Setting #2-11: *Dun-dun* Zombie Love

The last article merely touched upon the zombies of horror’s voodoo lore. As stated those zombies tend more toward the living that are ensorcelled, or conversely, those held just away from the fringe of death. That said, there is nothing stopping any particular zombie from being in rough shape, with unhealed wounds, if not actual rotting flesh. Certainly if they are disconnected from select senses and awareness of being, then they may be grievously wounded and still carry on as long as their limbs remain intact enough. The biggest problem with these kinds of zombies as slaves though is that eventually they will collapse. They are still subject to most of the rules of physiology such as the need for rest and for food. That is why necromancers like to make real zombies, living dead zombies.

The living dead have no need to rest. They have no need to eat. This means that they can work ceaselessly. They do not feel pain. A lot of the time they do not retain any kind of survival instinct; though as with Romeroan ghouls, in some instances they do inexplicable retain a fear of fire. At the other end of the scale, the living dead and their kin, such as walking skeletons, may not need even flesh on their bones, and may not need their sensory organs (eyes and ears) to still be able to sense the world around them and operate within it. This means that the intelligence of the necromancer’s dead creations can have varying levels of intelligence despite their physical makeup. This leads to the two different routes that the necromancer can take in making and using zombies.

Necromancers can animate the dead with simple spells and control them like puppets to do their bidding. These zombies have no intelligence whatsoever, fear nothing, and do not need anything more the limbs necessary to do their tasks--and could even be just zombie limbs. In the alternative, necromancers can raise the dead to a semblance of life via rituals. These are the zombies that can be actually almost smart, depending upon the freshness of corpse involved in the creation of the zombie, or the strength of the ritual. That is of course unless the necromancer is binding spirits, life echoes, or incorporeal supernatural creatures to his corpses for the purposes of making a kind of greater zombie. This of course involves the other aspect for which necromancers are known.

Mood: harried.
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Anatomy of a Horror Setting #2-10: Who Do? You Do.

Any discussion of magic in a horror setting must eventually set upon the one kind of magic that is intrinsically horrific. This particular type of magic isn’t its own school, but more of a subset. It is a small discipline within the framework of invocation magic. This kind of magic is commonly known as Voodoo, which shouldn’t be confused with the religion commonly known as Santeria or other real voodoo beliefs in the real world. Horror voodoo works within a few different veins. Four examples include spirit mounting, curses, voodoo dolls, and zombies. With the exception of spirit mounting voodoo is particularly physical component oriented as far as the casting of spells go. Parts of it also slip into the school of necromancy and others the realm of psychic ability

Spirit mounting is essentially a person allows a spirit to possess them. The spirits range from the possessive’s ancestors, to their gods. This is not very horror oriented, due to the willingness of the possessed, and the goodness of the spirits that are called. Spirit mounting is in line with the Mediumship psychic ability. Alternatively it may be linked to necromancy when they are human spirits. Curses can similarly be more akin to psychic-styled attacks depending on the focus. Symptoms of a plague or disease based curse may be psychosomatic, as can curses of bad luck. They can also be frighteningly real and defy logic and modern medicine. A psychological curse may be beaten by force of will, magic cannot. You don’t need to believe in magic/the supernatural, it believes in you.

Voodoo dolls, referred to as poppets rather than puppets, are common to magic in horror. They require bits and pieces of the person to be affected to be a part of the doll or otherwise attached to it somehow. They were a part of some mystical traditions prior to the creation of voodoo--some tribal, others European. A voodoo doll is always a focus upon which spells are cast, even if such further rituals besides its creation only require concentration and puncturing of the doll with sharp objects or burning it with hot irons. Then there are the zombies of voodoo, which generally are not actually walking corpses, but instead, people held in a state between life and death. Or they may just be the living dominated by magic. Voodoo zombies are always created with the use of mystical powders.

Mood: exhausted.
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