Horror in Sci-fi

One of the players at the larp I was at last weekend has said that if you're going to introduce horror elements into a non-horror game it needs to be signposted and possibly have content warnings.  And she's right.  You should do this in any larp, regardless of genre.  Even horror games.  Especially horror games.  (This incident doesn't seem to have been anything more than a case of inadequate signposting, but does demonstrate how easily things can go wrong, even with well-intentioned refs who care about their players.)

But I'm going to disagree with the person who described introducing horror elements into this game - a sci-fi larp that cites Star Trek, Mass Effect and Firefly as major influences - as a genre switcheroo.

Sci-fi horror is obviously a thing.  As far as I'm concerned, three of the greatest haunted house horror movies ever made are Alien, Event Horizon and The Thing.  The body horror genre is full of sci-fi, with films like The Fly and Slither immediately coming to mind, where either weird science or aliens provide the impetus for the horror.

Then there's things that aren't explicitly billed as horror, but are nonetheless scary and full of horror elements.  Films like Super 8 and Cloverfield, or the biggest sci-fi influence on my childhood, The X-Files, have no shortage of scares.

And then there's sci-fi that's not intended to be scary, yet still brings the scares from time to time.  Star Trek has the Borg.  Even Red Dwarf has the polymorph.  (Anyone who's encountered mimics in D&D probably has the same reaction as me to a monster that can look like anything, even before we get to the emotion-sucking aspect.)

Sci-fi and horror simply go together.  Themes of weird science going wrong, hostile aliens and technological breakdown in the harshness of space are genre staples.  Sci-fi doesn't have to include horror - I can't think of anything horror-related in Star Wars, for example - but they are close enough that horror themes showing up in a sci-fi shouldn't be a complete surprise.

Which brings me to Firefly.

Firefly isn't a horror setting.  Space western is the normal description, and when I run a Firefly game, I aim for that vibe because if I signed up for a Firefly game I'd be hoping for something that would fit in on the show.

That said...

    "If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And, if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
    ―Zoë

My convention scenario starts with the PCs going to investigate an abandoned ship, and I'd like to think that people who sign up for a Firefly game are going to be genre savvy enough to realise ships don't get abandoned for no reason.  What happens after that depends quite heavily on the players, but horror themes, particularly those that come up in the show, are always a possibility.  (With the exception of reavers doing the thing Zoe describes, for obvious reasons.)

It's not surprising to me that a larp that cites Firefly as one of its primary influences might include elements of horror.  The same goes for tabletop RPGs like Coriolis, which claims both Firefly and Alien as influences.

I've never really thought of myself as a horror fan, but I love sci-fi horror.  I hope to see more of it in both larp and tabletop.

Pirates! First time playing Rapscallion

With literally none of the players for my Scum and Villainy game available on Tuesday, I asked what else was going on and got invited to join a game of Rapscallion, since they were also down a player.  I knew it was a pirate game, using Powered By The Apocalypse.  I thought this was enough to have some idea what it would be like.  I was very very wrong.

The other players enthusiastically filled me in on the current situation.  We were sailing in the transparent shell of a dead titan whose soul was currently possessing the hat of the captain, who was currently a jellyfish in a barrel.  Other crew members included some kind of wizard with transparent skin, a ghost skeleton, and a cyclops.

They were in search of an island in the sea of blood where there was a lake of gold guarded by a giant chicken, which they'd been informed about by a pirate called Villacres, who was the seventh son of a seventh son and had a map growing out of his chest.

There were two missing players in the end, so I was invited to play either Captain Bighat, a man with a very small hat who didn't like people mentioning it, or Ravi the demon worshipper.  I chose the latter.

We jumped straight into the action.  We were sailing towards the island, but were being pursued through the red mist by a Royal Navy ship, propelled by two porpoises and captained by the evil(?) Captain Darling.  Observing through a telescope, Marianne the ghost skeleton told us that the captain had giant frog legs and all the crew had squid heads.

The cyclops was furious.  He hated squid and wanted all squid to die.

Wit the transparent wizard brought the ship around to fire a broadside at the pursuing ship.  Marianne jumped overboard to go and phase through the ship's hull and infiltrate the hold, a job made easier when Wit used his magic to set fire to the giant wicker figure of Captain Darling that for some reason was aboard his ship.

I decided to try to conjure some demonic magic, hoping for fireballs.  And I failed.  Resulting in my immediately turning into an elephant.

Between my efforts not to capsize the ship and the cyclops raging, both of us rapidly ended up in the water.  The cyclops picked me up and threw me back onto the ship, where I landed on top of Wit, crushing him to death.  Oops.

Fortunately Death decided to let Wit off this time - for a price.

My demon, Pazuzu, then offered to turn me into something else.  Given that the fight was still ongoing, and wanting to be able to swim, and also somewhat inspired by the other ship's method of propulsion, I said 'porpoise'.  I had neglected to take into account that I was still on the deck of the ship, and porpoises are not known for their land based mobility.  Or ability to talk.

The cyclops was going to put me in the water, but at about this point Marianne's plan to blow up the other ship's powder store came to fruition, and squid and ship bits went flying in all directions.  I communicated via vigorous tale flaps that I didn't want to go in the water just now, and we turned once more to make for the island.

The island was surrounded by storms, but by a strange twist of fate they calmed as we approached, just enough for us to beach the ship.  With most people a little beaten up from the previous encounter (especially Marianne) we decided to take a nap.  I took watch, due to the ability of porpoises to sleep with only half their brain at a time.

After a while I heard the sound of two people having some kind of argument.  Quite a way off, but the sound travelled well over the water.  Somewhat concerned, I woke the rest of the crew with more vigorous tail flapping.  We decided we needed to investigate, despite Marianne's insistence that she'd had a prophecy and didn't need to.

I attempted to stop being a porpoise, but failed.  Uma the witch (an NPC) offered to turn me into something more useful.  Once we'd got clarification on what exactly she meant by 'useful' she got to work.

(Out came the percentile dice.  I rolled 97.  "Roll twice."  Oh dear.  I rolled.  I rolled again.  100.  "Roll twice."  Oh dear.)

By the time she was finished I had the head of a shark, a body covered in fish scales with tiny legs, and arms made of water.  But I could walk and talk so we decided to go with it.

Along the shore we found the source of the voices.  Two ships with animated figureheads were having an argument.  One of them (called Aphrodite) was complaining because she wanted to go out to see, while the other insisted that she was too damaged and would be wrecked in the storm.  We chatted briefly, and Wit offered to repair Aphrodite by dismantling the other ship, who didn't seem entirely happy about that idea.

Then we went on our way in search of the golden pool, unhindered by local wildlife and vegetation as Marianne had foretold, with Villacres still going on about the Gallus - the giant chicken that guarded the pool.

And there it was.  Not, as I'd been hoping, a lagoon filled with gold coins, but a lagoon of liquid gold.  Poking some things in it revealed that it turned things into gold.  Marianne jumped in, but managed to resist turning into gold, which was lucky.

And then the terrible guardian of the lake, the legendary Gallus appeared.  Except it was in fact a Mollusc.  The mighty scallop.

We learned how Villacres (grandfather, not grandson, once we'd cleared up a bit of confusion about how many fathers our Villacres actually had) had been turned into a giant scallop with spit that turned things to gold by some storm mages, but really by the point I just wanted to steal some gold things, so when the scallop sprayed at Villacres and turned him into a gold statue, I started trying to steal the statue.

At this point Death came knocking on Wit's door, and compelled him to attempt to sacrifice me by throwing me into the lake.  Fortunately I managed to cling onto some nearby vegetation and avoided becoming a statue myself.

Marianne went through her pockets (I don't know how a ghost skeleton has pockets) and found bottles of the component acids to make aqua regia, the only thing that can dissolve gold.  I suggested oranges or lemons as an alternative, since it was a scallop and I really fancied a ceviche, but she threw them into the scallop anyway where the acid started eating away at it.

With the scallop well distracted by everything going on in front of it, the cyclops had crept round the back, and now jumped onto the scallop, smashing it to pieces.

We were discussing the best way to get the maximum possible amount of gold off the island, given that we couldn't remove the liquid gold without it solidifying, when we heard cannon fire.  It was Aphrodite, who had opened fire on her fellow ship at the behest of Captain Darling, the evil frog legged fiend!

Apparently he had helped her escape from her toxic relationship with the other ship who was holding her back, and he was going to rebuild her and they were in love.  Wit pointed out that the man had frog legs.

"I mean, I know I'm in no position to comment right now but..."

Alas, neither I nor Wit could persuade her it was a bad idea, and Wit set Darling on fire while the cyclops ran in to attack.  Darling drew a pair of pistols.  Moments later the fire reached Aphrodite's powder store, and the entire ship exploded, showering bits of ship, Wit and frog legs in all directions, while the cyclops jumped neatly down and walked away without looking back because he was that cool.

Which really just left two questions: had our ship become sentient, and how did the jellyfish feel about it?

Figuring out what to do with Don't Rest Your Head

Remembering that the last game I ran at Concrete Cow that wasn't Firefly-related was Don't Rest Your Head got me wondering why I've never run that game again. I've only run it once before that, as a one-off Halloween game for the home group.

I really love this game. I love the character creation, and the stories it inspires. I love the unique dice rolling mechanics and the hope and despair currencies. I love how it rivals Call of Cthulhu when it comes to sanity spirals. So why don't I run it more?

It's because I don't get on with the setting.

DRYH's setting is the Mad City, a twisted realm accessible only by the Awake when the clocks strike thirteen. Which is a pretty good setup, but the Mad City itself is just too wacky for my tastes, full of punny named entities that I struggle to turn into anything resembling horror. Pretty much everything I could come up with went into those two one-off games.  If I'm ever going to run this game again, I need something else.

So since Marc and me had a long drive recently, we spent the time hashing out a whole new setting for DRYH. One that plays to my strengths, and will allow me to run the kind of game I want to run, while still staying true to the game's fundamental concept of superpowered insomniacs.

We also came up with the basis of a convention scenario for it, which needs some fleshing out but is conceptually there. By next year I should be able to offer this one in addition to Firefly based games.

Consent

This post is going to include references to sexual assault.

Consent in gaming. I've a fair number of discussions about it recently, a lot of which have been people, mostly men, discussing hypothetical situations which largely seem to predict the doom of tabletop gaming through censorship and the death of creativity.

There will be no hypotheticals here.

One question I've seen more than one person bring up is why rape is not OK in a game but murder and theft are. Which I feel is being a bit disingenuous, given that 'kill monsters and steal their stuff' is literally the whole point of original D&D. But let's go with it for a moment. While I've never been murdered, I have been the victim of both theft and sexual assault, so I feel I have some kind of perspective on this.

Being burgled was horrible. It wasn't so much what was stolen (I have insurance) as the knowledge that a stranger had been in my house, touching my stuff.

Being assaulted was horrible. It was the fact that someone that I knew and thought I could trust had ignored every 'no', verbal or non-verbal and had been in my space, touching...yeah.

Not comparable. Not to me.

For a while, coming into contact with media that brought back memories of that and similar incidents was extremely distressing. I had to temporarily stop reading a book by one of my favourite authors because the content was upsetting me too much.

I don't want to do that to anyone I'm at the gaming table with. Games are supposed to be fun! Which isn't to say they have to be fun for the characters, if you're playing a horror game where terrible things are going to happen to them, but the players and GM should be having a good time.

Content warnings are a great idea. Whenever someone's run Kult Divinity at Concrete Cow it's come with an age rating and a mention of specific things that might be a problem for people. I'm working on a convention game scenario that includes children being endangered or harmed, so that will be mentioned in the blurb. I'm not going to suddenly spring that kind of thing on people who might be upset by it. I want a group of players who are going to enjoy my game.

I've seen arguments that content warnings spoil the plot in advance, but if your plot hinges on shocking your players with potentially distressing content, maybe you shouldn't be running that plot at a convention with a bunch of strangers? Save it for home games where you already know everyone and what their limits are.

Ultimately the game is not more important than the people playing it. This shouldn't even be a debate.

(And if anyone's concerned about me given what I said above, don't worry. I'm fine. I can talk about it because it's so far from where I am now, it has no power to hurt me.)

Character portrait: Sayah

My art skills are not good.  While my more artistically talented friends are drawing away for Inktober, I feel a little sad that I can't draw my characters the way they can.  Occasionally I'll pay someone for art (my profile picture, for example) but if I want to create a character portrait myself, I have to do it with words.

This is Sayah, my Coriolis character.

The room is richly decorated. Brightly coloured tapestries adorn the walls, and intricately woven rugs cover the floor, with only traces of the utilitarian grey beneath showing between them. The lighting is muted, with the harsh white filtered through coloured lanterns that throw patterns of light and shade across the low table and embroidered cushions. A faint haze of incense hangs in the air, filling the room with the scent of sandalwood.

A woman sits here. At first glance one might take her for middle-aged, but a closer look reveals a younger face, perhaps no more than twenty-five, with an unhealthy pallor to her light brown skin that seems to have stolen some of her youth. Her thick black hair has been dragged into a messy plait, the end fastened with a worn elastic and draped carelessly over her shoulder.

The galabeya she wears was once a deep, vivid red, luxuriously embroidered in golden yellow thread. Time and wear have muted the colours, and broken threads mar the pattern of the embroidery. She wears it carelessly; an old garment thrown on without thought for appearances. No bracelets, no ankle chains, no adornment save for a pair of rings set with agates and a tiny glittering nose stud.

Her posture is awkward; knees pulled up and head tilted back as she leans against the cushions. There is a deliberacy about the pose she has adopted, suggesting that relaxation does not come easily to her. Nevertheless, the tension is beginning to fall from her muscles. One bare foot has slid out a little further than the other, and the computer she carries has slipped from her hand.

The ornately carved pipe she holds dangles from languid fingers, while curls of sweet white smoke emerge from its mouthpiece and from her slightly parted lips. Her large brown eyes are unfocussed and the pupils still dilated in the dim light. The drug has not yet taken effect, but the ritual of preparing to indulge has served its own purpose. She is calm; her mind is still.

Diversity

It's improving, but it's still not great.

My first Dragonmeet was in 2005 and to say it was male dominated would be an understatement. I don't think I was the only woman there, but it was pretty close. The next two years I did see other women there, but we were still very much the minority.

Fourteen years later, and while I haven't been to Dragonmeet for a while, when I do go to a convention, things haven't moved as much as I would have hoped. There are more women, but I can't help comparing these events with larp events, where the gender balance is still weighted on the male side but is a lot closer to equality.

It's possible this is just due to limited sample size - but I've been looking at other conventions recently with a view to attending more of them, and specifically at the offered games and the names of the GMs. The only one where I've actually spotted female names among the GMs is Concrete Cow, where both me and Amy from the MK club run games.

I wonder if there's a more eclectic crowd at really big events like UKGE? There's certainly a reasonable gender mix in the trade hall, but then board gaming doesn't seem to be male dominated in the same way as RPGs. I'd be interested to know if this is the case.

(Facebook comments tell me that UKGE does have a lot more female players.)

I've only talked about gender, because it's the one area of diversity of which I'm acutely aware. I absolutely notice when I walk into a convention and there's not another woman in sight. You're going to get a much better assessment of racial diversity from someone who's not white (although my impression is that RPG conventions are even whiter than they are male.)

What can we do about it? On a personal level, I can keep doing what I'm doing. My presence tells any other woman who walks in that she's not alone. Running a game means there's someone with an unambiguously female name on the GM roster. On an organisational level, harassment policies are great, and enforcing them is even better. The way UKGE handled the incident this year means I'm confident that I'd be taken seriously if I had a problem there.

But what can you, hypothetical reader who is an RPG player and probably a man, do personally to improve the gender balance?

Inviting women to play RPGs seems like a good start. More women in gaming means more women to potentially show up at conventions. There are RPGs for pretty much anything - fantasy, sci-fi, steampunk, superheroes - so there's bound to be something that will appeal. It might take some initial scheduling, since women tend to get stuck with childcare more often than men, but it's not like it's hard to get people hooked on RPGs.

One thing that matters to me in convention games is that I'm not limited in what I can play based on gender. I like to play female characters, and was somewhat annoyed in one game set in Victorian Britain when I drew the army captain character, and was told that because of the setting that they had to be a man. (Accordingly I named him Captain James Tiptree. That particular detail never came up in the game, but it made me feel better.)

Much better, in my opinion, to take the Alien approach and create an interesting set of pre-gens without assigning any of them a gender, and let the player decide what they want to do with it. Perhaps a character you initially imagined as male gets played as a woman. Perhaps that means you end up with someone as awesome as Ellen Ripley.

And if you must have full pre-gens (like if you're using the characters from an existing IP) make sure there's some female options.

If I feel welcome, I'll come back. And maybe I'll bring friends.

Two games, one genre: Supervillains

My experience of playing superhero games has been limited to two one-shots, and by coincidence, both of them involved playing supervillains called in to save the world, Suicide Squad style.

Necessary Evil (Savage Worlds)

when the GM described the setting to me, I was instantly smitten.  Due to an enormous miscalculation, every superhero in the world has been killed by an alien invasion, and the only people left with the superpowers needed to take on the aliens are supervillains.

And it makes complete sense.  Supervillains aren't exactly the kind of people to quietly sit down and behave themselves when a powerful authority tells them to.  The PCs are one of a number of independent cells recruited by Doctor Destruction, the world's greatest villain, who resents the aliens taking over the world because that's his job, dammit.

The GM helped me with my character, since I'd never done a superhero game before.  With his help, I came up with Ice Queen.  She was a beauty pageant contestant, aiming to become the next Miss World.  To raise her public profile she went hiking in the Himalayas, where she fell down a crevasse and was presumed dead.  However, she survived, and was nursed back to health by Buddhist monks.  When she left and returned to America she discovered that they'd held the contest without her, at which point she tracked down the winner at a show, froze everyone solid with her new ice powers, and stole the beauty queen's crown, which she has worn ever since.

(I would like to clarify that this was all years before Frozen came out.)

Teamed up with a particularly disgusting rubbish-themed villain who once buried the whole of Los Angeles in trash, a walking liability called Captain Collateral and another villain who's name sadly escapes me, we set out to start the fight against the alien menace.

It should be obvious that I adore this setting.  It's a fun variation on superheroes, and the character options have been well thought out to cater to villains rather than just reproducing standard superhero stuff (for example, one of the disadvantages you can take is 'gloating'.)

Adventures are more along the espionage/sabotage line than conventional superheroics, which works well for a team of dodgy types with their own agendas all wanting to cause trouble.

Where I felt it fell down slightly was with the Savage Worlds system.  It took a lot of my character creation points to get the ranged ice powers I wanted, and then I rarely actually managed to do anything with them as I kept failing the attack rolls necessary to actually use them.

I would absolutely play in this setting again, but unless you're already a Savage Worlds enthusiast, I don't think there's enough in the book itself to justify buying ite.  I had fun in the game, but never quite felt properly supervillainous.

Excision (Groundhoggoth)

Once again going to the other end of the scale, Excision is the most rules-light system I've ever played, involving no dice and no character sheet - just a set of index cards with your powers on.

In simple terms, you play a card and succeed.  To get a card back, you have to fail.  (There's more to it, but not that much more.)  It's incredibly simple, but results in pretty cinematic stuff where the players are powerful when they need to be but are looking for opportunities for an entertaining failure to get some cards back.

As far as I can tell, this system was created for doing secret agents type games, but as Necessary Evil demonstrates, espionage type missions work well with the 'supervillains save the world' concept.

My contribution to our little suicide squad was Acid, whose superpower was the ability to secrete large amounts of acid through her skin.  Her drawback was constant heartburn from the small amounts of acid she couldn't stop secreting.  She was one of those characters who reveals themselves as you play.  She was terrible, I realised as she prepared to torture our antagonist, but she hadn't always been that way.  It was the inhumane conditions required to imprison her for her relatively minor crimes that had turned her into what she was.

I enjoyed this game so much that I wrote up the session afterwards.  Read it here.

This game was firmly at the grimdark end of the scale (with Necessary Evil sitting more at the four colour heroes end) but I suppose there's no reason it couldn't have been colourful if we'd wanted to play it that way.

While some guidance on powers might be useful, the absolutely flexibility resulted in everyone being able to play the villain they wanted, and no dice meant no feeling like a rubbish villain.  We succeeded when we needed to.  When we failed, we failed spectacularly.

Conclusion

While Necessary Evil benefited from a more guided approach to character creation, actually playing the game was more enjoyable in Excision.

I don't know what else you could play this style of game in.  Excision works if everyone's down with a storytelling approach but some groups want more crunch.  I'm not sure a conventional superheroes game would be an ideal choice, as while supervillains are superficially similar, they really don't work the same way.  I wonder what else is out there?