I don’t know if anyone has gone outside the typical Buffyesque/Harry Dresden/Being Human/World of Darkness setting, where there are monsters everywhere and tried to do something a little more, ah, focussed, but inspired by the recent TV series In The Flesh, and also last year’s French series The Returned, both of which explore how small communities deal with people who come back from the dead, I’m going to be giving it a go myself next week. I’m hoping it’ll go beyond a one-shot, but wanted to pick people’s brains (heh) to see if anyone had tried to tackle anything like it before…
I’m giving the players a degree of free reign in how we create the community, what Skins they pick and when the story picks up, either after some world-shattering events that exposes the Unnatural to humanity, (ala In The Flesh, where the community reacts to those who are trying to return to their own lives after medicine has granted them a semblance of life) or right back on that first night, when the PCs are newly awakened to their unnatural natures, and humanity first becomes aware of those who walk amongst them (more like The Returned, where the dead return more or less unaware that they were even dead), but once the setting has been established I’m hoping to concentrate on the few select Skins, having just one of them representing a race that ‘goes public’. I’m happy to have multiple players play the same Skin, to roll with idea, whilst those other Skins that come into play may well the the only known examples of such creatures. The session will thus focus on a world where the dead begin to rise, for example, or where people begin to succumb to a disease that awakens a feral rage in them in the light of the moon.
I use the term “unnatural” rather than “supernatural” here as I want to have people responding to the monsters in real terms, recognising them as victims of a disease, trying to understand things through the prism of science and logic rather than through superstition, reacting to them as if they were not nightmarish creatures but second class citizens, foreigners, or somehow unhealthy, untouchable (“you can catch it through shaking hands, you know…”). Similarly I’ll be having Gaze Into The Abyss a lot less mystical (unless a player has a particularly mystical Skin) – answers are uncovered through flashbacks, or memories of when a character was their Darkest Self.
In short I’ll be trying to emulate some of the cool things I’ve seen in the two shows I’ve mentioned, deviating from standard Monsterhearts individual alienation from each other by having the teenage protagonists be part of a subculture that seems perfectly normal, even reassuring, to them but which scares the older generations and more conservative residents of the town. You know, the way teenagers actually do.
Can anyone else (particularly people who’ve watched those two shows) think of other things I should be considering?
This is really cool setting premise. It will be great if you post your experience with it later.
Sorry that i’m can’t get you some advice.
Cheers. I’ve got a mix of Monsterhearts ‘veterans’ and guys who’ve not played before, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all turns out.
There was a British show I caught part of a few months back (can’t recall the name, sorry) that had everything normal except for a boy who came back from the dead, starting a chain reaction of people returning. They had problems like needing makeup to look ‘normal’, discrimination because dead bodies carry diseases, and a bunch of religious issues stemming from the ‘resurrection’ -especially because the first victim was a suicide, if I remember correctly. Just a couple ideas you could throw in there. Good luck!
That sounds a lot like the In The Flesh show I’m largely inspired by. 🙂
This article goes into a little more depth about the two shows – to give an example of how I’d like to tweak the usual monsters operating in secret aspect of Monsterhearts.
http://www.indiewire.com/article/television/reinvented-zombies
Still not sure whether we’ll start below the radar or whether it’ll be out in the open (it’ll be up to the players), but eventually we’ll see situations arising much as explored in those shows. Maybe it won’t be the dead – I’d be just as intrigued to see what happens to a community that finds itself under siege from werewolves, or is invaded by creatures from the faerie realms. Maybe an alien take-over via The Queen.
We’re due to play tomorrow, so I’ll report on where it all ends up.
I should probably update this entry, having played a couple of games in the same setting. Based in the small English village of Newberry (fictional), I had five players prepared to give my proposed idea a shot. Two of them were not really roleplayers, so the game did not quite go as planned (one, playing a male Witch, decided that her character’s defining quality was that he was awesome).
Still, we’ve got a nice little setting, mostly human protagonists (in the form of a male Queen, a female Infernalist and the aforementioned Witch), one recently human male ghoul (we started the first session with him awakening from his death experience), and a female Vampire (the second novice player).
Players opted for a game where we began with things slowly becoming apocalyptic. Our dead Ghoul’s origin was that he was Rejected, the Infernal’s master The Poisoner has been a vague unseen force, and the Queen suspects that he is watched over by some otherworldly force. I’ve been toying with the idea that the village is going to be the setting for some sort of battle between ancient forces, but with the focus on the players we’ll see how the town reacts.
The town is slowly becoming aware of bad things afoot. The Infernalist’s father died only last week, and the Ghoul’s parents died a month and a half ago. Both these characters have ben seen to have gone slightly off the rails somewhat (the Ghoul actually tried to kill himself by overdosing on drugs, only to come back completely under the influence, hungry for chaos, leading him to trash a party). The only overt display of the supernatural has been in a chemistry lesson where the Witch, finally pushed to the limit by the Ghoul, cast a withering hex on the Ghoul, who began to desicate and shrivel, leading to mass panic in the classroom – some kids running scared from the skeletal Ghoul, some backing into a corner from the guy who’d always said he was a witch, but no-one believed, some just thinking there was some nasty chemical accident before the Ghoul fled…
The stage is now set for the town to become aware of what things are going on. There will almost certainly be further incidents of the rising dead. Vampires have been scaled right back – the one we have as a PC was created thousands of years before Christ was around,, and the only other vamps that have been in the town are those she created (one of which she then destroyed), but I’m toying with the idea of her ‘sire’ returning at some stage. Still, I’m quite happy to have the main cast, and extras, be mostly human, with the inhuman quality seeming to be all tied into to death or undeath, as if the encrouching supernatural elements will be from beyond the veil of death. I think though, whilst I’ve been considering shadowy background figures to establish as Menaces and Threats, that in order to bring the town to the fore I’ll need to make Newberry a viable Menace, and its people a proper Threat. Now that they’re seeing some of the younger elements of town as irresponsible, dangerous even, there will likely be some sort of response.
Note – yes, it’s perhaps a little more Buffesque than I was hoping, but I’m starting to get those things reigned in. I’m hoping to push the idea of people recognising that some of the kids are ‘different’ and to see how they react to that… whether they accept them for who they are, or turn their backs on them. This is more like The Returned than In The Flesh, but that’s still good.
I’ve created a pseudo-Skin for my game, for any players I have that join future Sessions – an ‘Ordinary Human’ Skin that starts off with -1 for all statistics except one of their choosing (which starts at 0 and kind of defines the character as a popular person, an outsider, an athlete or a creative). They can be dropped straight into the story as it stands, as ‘the new kid’, get a feel for where the game is, and where it’s going, and get to opt for which stats they want to boost once they can see what will work best for the game so that, soon enough, they’ll have the two high and two low stats that an ordinary Skin has (and basically swap to a suitable Skin, under the premise that the teenager now drops its mortal disguise, or assumes the new identity as a result of spooky goings on… or dying).
To give the character a slight edge, as they initially get no Moves except the Basic ones (including no Sex Move), get no Darkest Self script and get no Experience (until they’ve selected their Skin), the first stat they bump up gives them a unique Move they get to use and keep even once they’ve selected a Skin.
They all tie into the stat raised –
• If Dark is the stat boosted, the character has a move that allows the character to remain Under The Radar, a sort of magical stealth move, which might go some way to explain why the character hasn’t come to anyone’s attention in town before now.
• Meanwhile the three Moves set aside for Hot, Cold and Volatile allow a unique ability that allows characters to discover secrets, not entirely unlike Gaze Into The Abyss, but using more mundane abilities (Contacts, Research or Prowling) that take longer and are more narrow in scope. Additionally each unique Move allows the character to use the boosted stat to roll one Basic Move not normally under their purview. In essence this means that, in a setting full of full-Skinned monster teenagers, the newbie has at least one stat that makes the playing field a little more level.
Ideally this Ordinary Human pseudo-Skin is traded for a proper Skin within the first session they’re introduced to the game (if nothing else the inability to gain Experience should push the player into picking one). Alternatively, keep playing as the Ordinary Human to simulate playing the game at ‘Difficult’ level. 🙂
New inspiration is the six part 1 series TV show from 2012: The Fades. Never watched this at the time, practically watched the whole thing in one sitting this weekend. Has some silly things (such as the main protagonist gaining wings), but well acted, and criminally never brought back for a second series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fades_(TV_series)
Simon Brake sounds interesting. might have to add this to my ‘must watch’ list
Had one person drop off the radar for last night’s game, and had another three newbies join the session. It was courting impracticality but we kind of coasted on a game with 7 players (admittedly one person, who said he was happy to just watch the game, played an Unseen, and just dipped in every so often). We pretty much hit the limits of what will work in a game, and it was grinding gears at time, but we did have a great big fight at the end.
I’m hoping we manage to get back down to the four most regular players, and the newbie who was most active in the last session, but with room for the others to drop in if and when they want. Five teenaged monsters is much more manageable.
I’ve now got three Menaces in place, one the Infernal’s Dark Power (“The Poisoner”), one the town itself (especially since the Witch has began Withering people who piss her off, during lessons), and one the mysterious glowing white figure that appeared to a student who failed his Gaze Into The Abyss roll and had a weird sort of lucid vision quest. But I’ll be concentrating on the town most of all… the fact that there seems to be some nasty wasting disease around the school has not gone un-noticed! Time for the authorities to get involved, and a potential quarantine to be enforced around the town.