Hello hunters, I have a bit of a problem I have to do a game that involves using a succubus and have the players seduced to do evil. How would you implement a mechanic like that to be fair and balanced?
Hello hunters, I have a bit of a problem I have to do a game that involves using a succubus and have the players…
Hello hunters, I have a bit of a problem I have to do a game that involves using a succubus and have the players…
Red flag! Red flag! Don’t do it at all.
Write a custom move. On a miss, they find they’ve done something unfortunate.
Perfect excuse to pick on the spooky in my opinion…if you have one you might want to allow the succubus to express shock and horror as the monsterous or spookys inner demons get loose.
If you’re going for this sort of thing, I’d make the succubus moves give the hunters incentives to do what it wants – e.g. “if you do as it commands, mark experience” – rather than taking autonomy away from the players
Or look at Apocalypse World Brainer moves for inspiration.
Why do you have to do it?
Thanks guys great ideas so have, a new player really wants me to introduce a particular demon. It works for my story arc and we have two characters that will go mental for this chance. Short answer, happy players… happy GM 🙂
Hi all. I can understand why some commenters are urging caution on this. With a player who isn’t into it, this type of thing can seem like a horrible loss of agency. There are plenty of players who love this type of thing however, and as Eli Nelson has confirmed the player(s) are into it, great! It’s a massive trope in the fiction which inspired MotW, so one can see why it would fit.
Here’s a custom move I wrote for an AW game with a similar thing going on (based on a move from the AW book’s front examples I think). There was a Threat location which whispered suggestions into the brains of susceptible folks. If you weren’t listening to the whispers – no problem! If you were however, you gained the custom move “The Whispers” as a beginning of session move. Every session the players affected would roll:
The Whispers
When you are Listening To The Whispers, roll +weird. If you have no weird: you cannot hear the Whispers – this move cannot affect you.
On a 10+ your brain protects you – no effect.
On a 7–9, I tell you what to do: if you do it, mark experience; if you don’t, you’re acting under fire from brain-weirdness.
On a miss, you awake, some time later, having done something…
The miss result is interesting to me, as you can go two ways with it. You as GM basically describe some horrible scenario that the player awakes into: “You wake up with the taste of blood in your mouth and the smell of burnt feathers in the air… what do you do?”
Now, you haven’t actually established what has happened. You’re suggesting possible things, but the character doesn’t necessarily remember. You can deal with this several ways, which allow varying levels of player agency, and allow the player to regulate exactly how fucked up this is…
1) you can toss it back to the player “Do you remember what you’ve done? What did you do?” – this allows the player to keep on top of what happened, and make it as dark or not as they like.
2) You can keep it a mystery, never establishing what (if anything) has happened. This allows everyone’s imaginations (characters and players!) to fill in the details, but never be sure
3) You can start to reveal the horrible truth… by establishing exactly what has happened bit by bit. This can be powerful for the right player, but does remove some agency from them. I’d recommend starting with option 1) and progressing through, dependent on how enthusiastically the player embraces the chances to be fucked up 🙂
That might actually be perfect… thank you very much. 🙂
In addition to the player agency issue, which your group seems to be okay with , there is the fact that the succubus is a particularly demeaning, insulting trope. If it showed up in a game I played, I would have to explain to the GM how hurtful it is to women. And if the GM persisted, I would walk out.
That’s a fair point, and not the angle I was really looking at. I don’t think its too hard to de-couple the storyline from the traditional sexy succubus image however. You could side step this by presumably having the demon not be a traditional “succubus” type, not gendering it female (or not gendering it at all) and simply running the slide into evil with a different flavour. I’m assuming that the interesting thing here is the horror of the gradual corruption of the good, rather than sexy-times.
Supernatural did an episode like this ( Sex and Violence, S4E14) with a siren instead of a succubi/succubus. The siren was portrayed as male, and attacked Dean through the love of a brother instead of a lover. No sexy-times involved.
Aka queerbaiting
That escalated fast.
I get why some players might be put out by a succubus The reason the new player wants the demon to be a succubus is because she (the new player) wants her own succubus character to have a creator overlord sort of thing going on. I don’t think she intends her character to be insulting or demeaning to anyone nor do I intend for a succubus character to be hurtful. Overall the person I see having a problem with it is our professional who like monsters he can just flat out shoot with no darn trickery. My favorite part of being a keeper is sometimes giving the players what they want. 🙂
Mythological monsters need to be handled with care. Some represent explanations for feared and poorly understood natural phenomena such as rabid animals, insanity, weather and disease.
But there a substantial number which are intended to demonize certain behaviors or classes of people. Succubus is certainly a case of demonization. While it can be used in a way that isn’t exploitative it will certainly be a trigger point for some.
You’re likely to get a similar result from me for a Medusa-based villain. (Though 5e D&D mollified this by making the origin of a medusa be a result of someone making a Faustian deal rather than using the Greek myth). To me that myth is horrible. Medusa is raped, punished for it by being transformed, flees society to be consoled by her sisters and finally killed by the son of a god who was being blackmailed into the act as a way of protecting his mother. I’m more likely to sympathize with the gorgon than want to kill them. (I actually have a few gorgon characters. And elements of the Changeling Playbook were designed with a gorgon in mind).
I also hate the idea of anything being “inherently” evil. It doesn’t make sense to me and feels quite a bit like rationalizing racism. Possibly why I like Tolkien so much. He was one of the earliest people to start humanizing the villain races and in his letters and interviews had directly shut down people that suggested the orcs could never be good. For him the brutality of such people was a result of culture and upbringing rather than nature and he paralleled it with the growing corruption of the elves of the house of Feanor as well as the Black Numenoreans and other debased people.
So when someone tells me that X sentient creature is 100% evil I get a little irritated.
Thank you everyone for your advice, the game went very well and all had a blast 🙂 Our monster was vanquished when the dinosaurman monstrous landed a tractor on him after an ice ramp was created using elemental magic… A very strange game all and all.