How do you go about maintaining “quarantine” in your game – ie, most people think monsters aren’t real, but why not? In a world where everybody has a high definition video camera in their pocket and the ability to self-publish to the world, something has to be stopping people finding out.
How do you go about maintaining “quarantine” in your game – ie, most people think monsters aren’t real, but why not?
How do you go about maintaining “quarantine” in your game – ie, most people think monsters aren’t real, but why not?
Sometimes the something stopping “regular” people from finding out there are monsters living among them is the simply the fact that these types of stories wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Or to put it another way, sometimes the reason why normal people don’t figure it out isn’t a big deal. You simply accept the face that the “muggles” aren’t clued in and move on.
But if it’s important in your game Jason Williams, there’s any number of explanations. 🙂
Sure. I’m just interested in what interesting ideas people have used, or thought of.
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Ask yourself some questions.
Do you believe all Bill Murray facts are true?
Do you believe all you read?
Are you sure all ufo videos on YouTube are fakes?
Would your family, friends, or co-workers believe you if you’d tell them an unbelievable encounter?
…
Who would have interest in keeping those facts secret. Friend or foe?
A practical advice.
Destroy or hide evidence as much as you want them to be.
Being Human had an entire government department handling the cover up.
Good stuff 🙂
One idea I’d considered is a “men in black” setup that even those in the know don’t know anything about – the hunters know that publicity of the supernatural mysteriously goes away, but they don’t know who’s behind it or what their motives are
From technology perspective, you could use the tried and true trope that the supernatural warps any video or audio to the point that it would be suspect.
As to eye witnesses, there are plenty of people who claim real supernatural situations that the vast majority of the population writes off or believes there is a more mundane reasoning for.
There is also the fact that for monster hunters, life exists with the supernatural. But the fictional reality is that most muggles never experience the supernatural. For those few that do, it may be once in a lifetime. The human mind has exceptional abilities when it comes to self delusion.
What if the human art of self delusion in regards to supernatural is actually a supernatural phenomenon in itself? I’m thinking of something akin to The Silence from Doctor Who; a supernatural entity or race that exists in the shadows and warps memories of supernatural experiences to protect the beings of the other-realm.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_(Doctor_Who)
To be clear I am proposing a deviation from the DWHO Silence.
Video? Well, the picture is shaky and it was shot at night. Can’t really see any details.
People would think I was nuts if I told anyone that monsters ate mrs. Chabowski.
Butbutbut TERRORISM!!!!
I’m sorry, the reporter who wrote this article is currently in rehab. Yes, he had a bad LSD habit.
Come on, I saw better special effects in the original Godzilla…
Clearly just a big man in a costume. We’ll apprehend him soon.
This never happened. Trust me, I’m from the government.
Mass hysteria.
Sometimes even the best medical examiner comes up short.
Maybe this is the REAL purpose of SLENDERMAN..
Slenderman!
Born from fiction, a nightmare made real by collective fear.
I’m so gonna use that!
I’ve been working on and off on a setting where using magic makes you “drift” back into the land of dreams and gradually grow less “real” (and thus less memorable) to the people around you. Getting here to the real world is hard enough as it is, so that is a major deterrent to overt monster shenanigans.
Jason Tocci If I did that, the characters in my game would be long gone. They use magic like it was bullets 🙂
Tore Vange Hah! Well, in this setting, it’s less of a “don’t do this” mechanic than a “don’t overdo this” thing that helps answer why we don’t just see everybody doing magic and looking like monsters and whatnot. There’s also some strategy to it, drifting out of reality just enough that people will completely ignore you when you do something weird.
Yeah, I was gonna bring up Marble Hornets. Great example of what it might look like in a world with actual supernatural stuff.
Sure, maybe you could prove the supernatural if you got it under a microscope. How are you going to get it under a microscope?
One possibility is the supernatural cannot be recorded by technology. Tech gets fritzy around them, or simply records nothing, or the videos always come out grainy and fake looking. These “fake” videos and reports of sightings and encounters are higher than in the real world, but it’s attributed to a global hysteria or people scaremongering.
Look at actual phenomena like climate change, despite clear evidence there are a lot of everyday people who dismiss it since it doesn’t affect them. They will seek out ‘evidence’ that proves they are safe and nothing needs to change and they will cling to it. If you give room for doubt, people will do mental gymnastics to maintain their worldview.
I like the approach that a normally functioning human mind will balk at the supernatural and find a way to edit it out. You have to be a bit neurodivergent, a bit odd, a bit “wrong in the head” to be able to view evidence of the supernatural without the mind’s immune system working to exclude the information.
This is perhaps a result of selective breeding of humans by Something Else.
Sometimes it’s as easy as just issuing a correction: https://twitter.com/CaptGreybeard/status/515023238087606272
🙂
I just let the world know. My players gad a man embedded with them after the cats tried to get one of them to kill the president. Now people distrust cats in my world. Soon things will get weird but then there will be an apocalypse happening.