MONSTRUM 2

I started talking about this here. Zak then talked about Monsters here, which overlaps quite a bit with what I wanted to say, though I'm really talking about a method of doing this sort of thing, of using monsters to build a mythology and a sense of place and history into a game.

Solution One (already covered): change how you talk about monsters when you run a game.

Solution Two: change what "monster" means. Move it beyond or outside of D&D (or most other roleplaying games I've encountered).

A THING, A SIGN OF A THING

As discussed already, a monster is not just a rupture in the natural order, it is also a sign of the same. It is the beast and it is its call in the night, and it is the prophecy that foretold its coming and it is the calf born with two heads when it sidles by the barn to pluck a young farmhand from asleep in the hay.

Here is what hearing about monsters does to you: you are nervous, worried, the world feels unsafe, you jump at loud noises, avoid shadows, mistrust everyone, all of which takes its toll. In Monsterparts (and the thing on which I'm working) I called these Secrets, but the name is secondary. They deplete your health. If you have x HP, now you have x-1 HP just for the thing existing. Being around the monster, being in its lair is worse, more depletion.

Because the thing about a lot of monsters is that they're not actually, themselves, mechanically all that terrible. They're terrible because you never face them in full fetter, because getting to them means wading through unsettling things, sleepless nights, etc, so that you're already half-crazy when they show up, in the dark. If this were a book or movie or something, the monster, itself, should be the denouement.

ALONE, HUNGRY, IN THE DARK
Here is a monster description:

scrambling eaters

Dextrous Monstrous Halfling HD6, 4 Endurance

-small, between a child and a really big house cat

-night vision: eyes reflect light like a dog's

-heals injuries in a few minutes in the dark or when eating

-hunts in threes, nests in 6s; nest has d2 Treasures

-1XP

Here are signs of the scrambling eater (treat these like rumors and wandering encounters):

-missing children or children and animals with missing limbs, digits, eyes

-bright eyes under sewer grates, scrabbling or tapping under cobble stones

-little statues in home shrines to a wide mouthed little god, similar signs scratched newer sewer entrances, but no one says what god to which they prey

-general starvation, crop failure, horribly skinny people eye you from rags, slowly chewing or sucking on a bone or what must be a strip of leather

-lethargic governance, no one does anything to help, pretends there is no problem, men meant to watch in the night stay inside and hide, fearful

-scratching in the walls of your room, holes in the walls much too large for a rat

-people leave bowls of blood out on their stoop, in the morning, the bowls are empty

And here's something you might discover in the lair of a scrambling eater:

-crude maps of the insides of houses, with much more attention paid to where people sleep and to the spaces between walls

-its corpse is marked with a brand on its forehead, knife-shaped, though its children have no such mark

-the nest will invariably have a parody of a cozy home with rotten and raggedy beds, tea in chipped teakettles, probably a well-worn chap book with the prayers crossed out and re-written ("blessed are the meek for they shall devour the earth," etc)

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Here are excerpts from something on which I'm working (note: XP requirements for a level are much lower than in trad D&D than here [possible conversion: multiply the XP by 100]):

"Roll a d6 and add your level of renown. The Referee should move up the list if the result has been rolled previously, returning to the lowest value of the list is exhausted. Resolution of the Secret rewards XP equal to its number less your level of renown but is always worth at least 2 XP. Anyone that contributed gets the reward and regains all lost Endurance. There are usually at least a few weeks, if not months between Secrets.

When reading aloud the italicized text, contextualize it for each character. One of them heard scratching under the cobble stones, another saw eyes like saucers in the sewers, another heard chewing behind the walls or under a manhole cover."

"2. IN THE SEWERS

scratching under cobble stones and flashing eyes like saucers in the sewer grate, children are disappearing. If you put your ear to a manhole cover, there are whispers or chewing noises

3. IN THE TEMPLE IN THE VAST, DARK FOREST a burning white god in the temple heals the injuries of some, leaving them increasingly pale, bright and beautiful. These “new saints” are widely respected in the Village, but you've seen them beating beggars, pulling wings from a pigeon.

etc."

"2. IN THE SEWERS Faction the horde Monster scrambling eaters For Later a pit into the terrible underground, a maze of the spaces inside walls

3. IN THE TEMPLE IN THE VAST, DARK FOREST

Monster        ascended ghoul, pupal ghouls

For Later       a means into the land of the elves

etc."

attributions: Sankai Jutsu, Sam Wolfe Connelly

MONSTRUM

THE BEAST AND ITS SIGNS
The word "monster" comes from the latin monstrum where it means both a thing which is not of the natural order but also a sign, omen or portent of the same. It is both the thing in the dark, but also the claw marks it leaves on the door, the way animals walk backward when it is near, an eclipse heralding its birth. 

Also, we've got internal/safe spaces and external/potentially dangerous spaces. Horror has monsters lurking on the outside, trying to get into the safe spaces or it has a revelation that there is no internal/safe space, that the whole world is monstrous (or it has some combination of the two). In both cases, we're talking about ontological rupture of the first order, of the truest essence: something that makes being human as we understand "human" deeply problematic if not impossible (or at least, I feel like good horror should do that).

YOU CAST YOUR EYES BEYOND THE VEIL, ON THE HORIZON... SOMETHING
Where you put magic-users is up to you, but:

1. When you make a Magic-User, tell the GM what is out beyond the veil, chasing you, trying to get in. You might be wrong, you might have seen it incorrectly. It might have changed its form.

2. Whenever you cast a spell, roll a d20 and tell the GM the result. The GM keeps a record of the results. It's always getting closer.

THEY ARE EVERYWHERE, THEY ARE HIDING
D&D provides two approaches to this. On the one hand, you've got points of light in a howling wasteland populated by the monstrous (Greyhawk, the encounter tables in the first edition of D&D and the map it suggest you use for your game world all are of this order); on the other hand, you've got relatively civilized, late medieval peoples living their lives and then tucked away in a few dark corners is an alternate world of monsters (B/X and most of the Basic modules have this more Beowulf feel to them). The former seems to often be the end result of a campaign, the latter its starting point.

Both can work as a kind of horror game. Where D&D really falls down on the horror front is the monotony of dungeons and the way it deploys monsters.

EXCERPT
A part of the solution that I've found has to do with how you talk about things. Here's an excerpt from something on which I'm working:

"DENY CLOSURE
Give Players however much information they want; their characters still have to dig around for it, they'll still have to spend Turns and actions poking around into thing, but they get the information. They get information, but no explanations:

they are in a dark tunnel and they see eyes in the dark, reflecting like a dog's, and they hear oncoming steps, quick breathing, the sound of metal hitting stone.

one of the magic-users throws a torch forward and they see something human shaped, clothed in rags, moving towards them at a run.

two fighters move forward, jabbing into the dark with their spears.

in the aftermath, they find a body, mangled.

Players: What was it?

You: Do you want to look at it? How are you going to inspect it?

Players: We'll poke it. If it's lying face down, we roll it over.

You: (because rolling it over sounds good and because you want to be verbose) it's human-shaped but small, maybe like a teenager or a malnourished teenager. It's bony and its skin is sort of grey, but it's also very dirty so you'd need to wash it off to tell its skin color for sure. Maybe the proportions are a little off? Maybe it's legs are a little short? It's wearing rags that look like they might have been clothes once. It's not holding anything. It has stringy hair. It doesn't respond when you poke it, it's like poking a raw turkey or chicken. You roll it over with a pole, which one of you is doing that? How close are you getting?

Players: I'm rolling it over and I guess I'll put a torch down by it and get close, but I'll have a shield up, in case. I'll have my spear like, on it.

You: OK. You roll it over with a pole and its arm flops to the side. It's nose is bloody and its face looks mostly human, though its mouth looks too big, maybe? There's something weird about its mouth. Anyone want to put their hand in its mouth?

Players: Nope. So is it like a human?

You: It's like a human, sure. It looks a lot like a human."

What they've just fought, in terms of stats, is a goblin. When they find more goblins later, they all look like the first one. There are also children like this goblin, and they're just as dangerous. Some don't speak, others speak in a language no one recognizes.

It's possible that in another bolthole there are goblins that look like this first one. There are certainly other goblins that look the same but who work differently. One can only be harmed in the light. Another heals whenever it's in the dark. A third heals any injury, even fatal ones, if buried in the earth. Others make elaborate traps. Some worship something made of blood and fire and it is their king and it gives them great strength and sight beyond the veil.

That's part of the puzzle anyway. The other part has to do with mechanics.

attribution: Sam Wolfe Connelly (who is amazing)

INSIDE OUTSIDE, ABOUT SCARY GAMES

IN/OUT

There is an inside and an outside. Inside is always safe. Outside is maybe not safe. The imminence of danger outside and its desire or propensity to test the boundary or how leaky the boundary is describes your living circumstances or, if you're a character in a book or a game, your genre.

Adults have a much bigger inside space than kids. For kids, inside is your home and maybe some grassy area nearby. Maybe not your home all the time, just when it's well lit. And maybe not certain parts of the house, the places that are alcoves and behind a number of turns, where no one goes and being there feels like you're almost not in your house anymore. This is how you get to Narnia and this is why Pennywise peeks out of the sewers.

This isn't really rational, it's about feelings. It's about feelings and space and other living things and our senses interacting.

Senses and experience help make things inside. Sight is always better than sound and sound is better than smell and taste is pretty shit. I'm not sure where touch goes, touch seems to often betray me (why is it wet and slimy?). 

I SEE A DOG

-If experience says: a dog bites the dog is outside and being confronted with the dog I may find myself suddenly outside too; 

-If experience says: a dog is warm and friendly and maybe even a protector and an ally, dogs are inside and I am inside when I'm around a dog;

-If I hear a dog and experience says: that's a dog, then we fall back to the previous constellation of things one could feel about dogs upon seeing them;

-If I hear a dog and experience says nothing about dogs,  then I default to "animal"

-If I hear an animal, and animal reads "probably another rabbit or something" I'm still safe

-If I hear an animal, and animal reads "could be a coyote" and then I think about teeth and claws or just rabies, i'm teetering on the border between in and out. 

Think about this and then think about what it's like running or sneaking through a forest at night or a dungeon with the short radius of a light a torch casts.

I HEAR AN ANIMAL AND THERE ARE TEETH AND CLAWS AND COILED MUSCLES FOR LEAPING

There is something nearby, something potentially outside, testing the boundary. Confronting it may leave me immediately outside, leaving it be may mean it gets in.

Lacking sufficient experience or knowledge, imagination jumps in and supplies possible answers to, "what is it outside?" and imagination gets dragged along by lizard brain until you're imagining someone living the crawlspace, scratching at the floorboards.

The point is: what is reliably in and what is likely out is learned but there are ways you trick yourself or let yourself be tricked out of knowledge.

FEAR

For players to be frightened they (a) have to be willing to be frightened and (b) have have something to be frightened of. 

You can't do anything about (a), really. (b) requires a subtle series of traducements and something they care about that is being threatened.

Jaws and Alien and Phantasm and ghost stories and possession stories and slasher movies are usually about something implacable that emanates malevolent outside, something whose sheer presence gobbles up the safe inside and spits out outside and then navigating a small space with limited options to get away, to find your way back off this ice or out of the water and into safe territory. You don't see the monster all that much because being around it enough to really get a good look gets you dead.

Lovecraft and Ligotti and others are about the anxiety of outside getting in or that you've mistaken the outside for the inside and realize you are suddenly in deep, dark waters and something is brushing your feet. 

In the second mode, there is a hint of something wrong and then other hints and the players pull the thread and the whole thing comes apart. 

A boy stands inside his house looks out a window at night, and the light outside is dark blue, and the boy sees a shadowy man he does not know burying a sack at the base of the tree in his backyard. He is inside, watching the outside act like the outside. When the man is gone and things feel less outside, the boy digs up the sack:

He opened the bundle, to find a human heart inside. He recognized its shape and color from the picture he had seen in his encyclopedia. The heart was still fresh and alive and moving, like a newly abandoned infant. True, it was sending no blood out through its severed artery, but it continued to beat with a strong pulse. The boy heard a loud throbbing in his ears, but it was the sound of his own heart. The buried heart and the boy’s own heart went on pounding in perfect unison, as if communicating with each other.

-Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

That's the outside: dangerous, enigmatic, alien, unknown, communicating something almost understandable but not quite.

attribution: Osric90