Cómo restaurar

I once ran a fairly standard horror scenario where the plot revolved around a madman who summoned a demon to abduct a child. Although he lived quite close to the child’s family, nothing tied him to the crime – he used magic to call the demon, so there was no reason to suspect him of involvement.

However, the scenario also said to play him as a crazed, nasty, twisted old man. The characters met him when they were walking down the country lane to town. I roleplayed the madman as suggested. After about a minute of conversation, one of the Players said ‘I shoot him in the leg. He’s obviously the bad guy.’

I argued that they had no reason to suspect him. The Player agreed, but pointed out that this crazy old man seemed completely out of place – everyone else in the town was rather nice and bland, except for this one madman who was taking obvious glee at their efforts to find the missing child. He was the only person who was even faintly unusual and therefore had to be important.

I told the Player his character would not shoot an old man based solely on a hunch (bad Games Mastering on my part). The game continued, and they found a piece of minor circumstantial evidence (a button, I think) linking the old man to the kidnapping. Again, the Player asked if he could shoot the old man now. I refused, saying that a button was not enough for his character to justify shooting someone.

Later, they found damning evidence and went to the old man’s house. He called up the demon again, who attacked the Player Characters. As an aside, another problem with the scenario was that the allegedly fearsome and terrible demon had so few hit points, a single shot from any one of the characters’ guns could take it down – make your monsters tough enough to be threatening. The Player, with great satisfaction, shoots the old man, shouting ‘I said he was the bad guy! If you’d let me shoot him when we met him, he wouldn’t have been able to summon the demon again’.

In retrospect, this was poor roleplaying on the Player’s part and my Games Mastering was equally bad. The Player was thinking about the crazy old man from the perspective of a Player (‘he’s the only Non-Player Character who’s crazy, evil sorcerers tend to be crazy and he must be in the scenario for a reason’) which is bad, but asking Players to squash this kind of thinking and consider every plot purely in-character is not a good idea. Instead of coming up with scenarios that fall apart if the Players consider the metagame, the Games Master should use more robust scenarios. In the example above, if I had played the old man as a lot less crazy, or else let the Players find him instead of just randomly running into him on the road, or even just had a second viable suspect (‘you meet two entirely separate crazy old men. One summoned the demon, the other is just a senile old coot. Which one do you shoot?’), then the scenario would have worked much better.

in their own delusions and the horror follows them wherever they go).

In the stake variant, the characters have something precious to them (usually, a Tie such as a loved one) that will be lost if they do not defeat the horror. They can leave, but Aunt Petunia is stuck down there with the cockroaches.

A scenario can use both traps and stakes; for example, if the characters are police officers, the initial investigation essentially puts their reputations or even their jobs at stake (‘solve this case of the missing teenager’). If the stake is not big enough to keep the characters in the scenario (‘argh! Things! I’m getting out of here! I don’t care if it costs me that promotion!’) then the trap can be employed to keep them there (‘aargh! The door won’t open! The things are outside too!’)

In general, use stakes instead of traps. Traps basically deny the Players a lot of options. While being trapped and isolated is a major part of horror, it should not be the only reason the characters are involved. Drawing the characters deeper into the horror with stakes is a much better approach than hooking them and then immediately putting them in a trap.

Plotting

The first step in plotting is to come up with three or four really scary images or scenes related to the initial concept, and flesh them out a little. What would scare you in those situations? How can you manoeuvre the characters into being as vulnerable and terrified as possible? These horrific moments should then be loosely tied together with possible connections.

For example, the Games Master wakes up screaming from a nightmare about a hairy, many-legged spider-thing

195

TURNING THE SCRE

W

descending from above. Being a good little Games Master, he notes down the image and decides to use it in a game. He is already planning a game set in a small, isolated town, so he uses the spider there. He needs a tall structure for the spider-thing to descend from, and the obvious choice is a church-spire. The spider can lower itself on a strand of web from the bell-tower (and the rope to pull the bell could actually be a braided, sticky web). One of the characters pulls on the rope to ring the bell… his hand gets stuck to it, and the bell does not ring, it crushes a few eggs or sucked corpses or something in the tower above, and a shower of slime and young spider hatchlings fall onto the characters below. They look up to see where the slime came from – just in time to see the spider falling towards them, one leg reaching towards each of their upturned faces….

To have this charming image in the game, the Games Master needs to get the Players into the town, and then into the church. Perhaps the whole town is actually the spider’s (metaphorical) web – it hunts by getting strangers stuck in the town, then hunts them down by vibrations in the web. The townsfolk could sabotage the characters’ attempts to leave; the characters

stop for fuel, and the station attendant pours sand in their tank. Everyone in town tries to wrap the characters in sticky emotional bonds – and when they fight back, they attract the attention of the spider (perhaps the attention of the spider could be incarnated in the form of the town sheriff, who drives around watching the vibrations of the telephone wires, which shake when the town is disturbed by outsiders). If the characters could see the town as it really is, they would see the invisible strands of the psychic web linking all the townfolk together.

Once the Players realise something strange is going on, the characters might do research in the town library. Maybe back in the ‘50s, the town was torn about by prejudice and paranoia and a local priest tried to solve the problem with magic. He summoned the spider to bind people together, but it never left. Now everyone in town is peaceful and friendly, even cloying…and sticky. The characters head off to the church to find the priest, they push open the door, see the bell rope… and down comes the spider.

Remember, the ties between the various images and scenes should be fairly loose, to allow for the actions of the Players. In the above sketch, the Games Master might have a list of encounters like:

~ The characters’ car is sabotaged. They get stuck in town.

~ The townspeople try to keep them there. ~ They cause trouble, which brings the sheriff. ~ They investigate the town.

~ They do research. ~ They go to the church.

~ They fight the spider and are forced to run away. ~ They learn to distract the spider, and while half the

characters cause havoc in town, the others sneak into the church, find the mummified body of the priest and banish the spider. Ideally, they should finish the banishing spell just before the spider eats the other characters.

The Games Master can imagine links between these scenes, but should be prepared to adapt. It is possible that a group of especially belligerent Players could cause the sheriff to appear if they start a fight in the opening scene at the gas station. Alternatively, tactically minded Players might work out a way to defeat the spider in the first fight scene, or escape from the town to return with better supplies. Players who can roleplay very

196

TURNING THE SCRE

W