The Eleventh Weird Thing: The SAS Hierophant for Mothership

 The Eleventh Weird Thing: The SAS Hierophant for Mothership

This was the culimnation of a lengthy Mothership campaign I ran online a while back. May reflect 0E stats! Presented unedited from the original notes. Some character references are to actual characters from that campaign.

The SAS Hierophant Re 22178-XZ

Captain: James Gurdy, 23 years as a contractor and salvager for Sector Authority

Three Extra Crew: Engineer Carl Spectro, field agent Tammy Scythe, and Medic android Craiton.

Current Commission: with Syngen CTO James Revan, who has access to FART unit recovered from Megaldon stomach. Has identified in unit’s recordings that KT-223 vessel is in possession of the Phase Wave Shifter, recovered from ISS Somnus.

Need to Know: The crew are seeking out the KT-223, which was last reported adrift by a Belter mining freighter (The SAS Greenlight) which reported the salvage with request for a partial finder’s right. They tagged the drifter with a beacon but refused to enter for reasons not explained.

Destination: Alpha Persei, the Demon Star (Mirfak) (511 LY from Terra)

Local worlds: Alpha Persei I (super gas giant) (6.8X Jupiter’s mass) – an ominous world with three immense red superstorms larger than some small gas giants that look like eerie eyes.

Colony: L774 New Haven – 13^th moon of AP I (the primary world has 123 moons accounted for)

New Haven was founded in 2673 by the now defunct AE Expansionists. The colony was abandoned in 2710 and not recolonized until 2754 when the colony was purchased by World Systems MC for terraforming. Since then the colony has done well and the terraforming has been a success; the planet is earthlike as of 2901.

Governance: the Independent Colonies charter; subscribe to Sector Authority protection (but behind on payments)

Noteworthy Recent news: the system’s FTL Beacon System has had issues and has been down for six months pending repairs. The KT-223 was carrying necessary goods for the repair. No news has gone in or out of the system in six months not carried directly by visiting freighters, though only three are on record (including KT-223) as heading to the system.

 

The Mystery:

The Hierophant arrives to find a colony that is not responding, and a gigantic research ship in orbit that records say was reported lost or destroyed twenty years ago. They need to decide which to investigate first…and neither is responsive.

The Starship Hades, a currently unregistered Hecate Class Research Vessel, formerly registered to Stygian Development MC, an old Megacorp which operates outside of the Coreworlds almost exclusively, though it is said to have close ties and funding from Persephone Industries, headquartered on Earth. Many suspect Stygian Dev. Is a front for Persephone to carry out illicit and unregulated research in the Rimward Regions. Stygian Dev. Claims the ship was lost twenty years ago.

The ship is parked in orbit around L774. It is currently the last known source of the broadcasting tracker placed on the KT-223 by the belters. The signal is absent from the sensor readings of any ship in the system until Hades is approached, and then the signal begins to ping again….

Inside the hold of the Hades, now ensconced in a docking bay in a Classified Research Module, is the remains of the KT-223. The ship is experiencing a full meltdown. No one seems to be in control. Attempts to hail the Hades are met with a response from Dr. Crystal Matavos, a cyborg researcher who appears to be in charge and will state that any vessel which approaches is at risk of retaliatory destruction, and to depart immediately. But, the ship seems largely offline and neither shields nor weapons are online according to scans….

While in orbit, the vessel suddenly exhibits a massive power surge just when the Hierophant decides to land, briefly bringing the Hades ship to life. Everyone makes a Body check, and if anyone fails they have a momentary blackout and out of body experience on the Hierophant. If anyone critically fails their spectral essence is ripped from their body!

Phase Wave Specter Instinct 30 Combat 25, touch deals 2D10 chilling radioactive tissue damage. Energy weapons can harm the specter (HP 30).

Complication:

The pilot, 1^st lt. Trish August, is hit by the energy and her specter is ripped out. The ship veers abruptly into the station, crashing into the main landing bay. It will take 2D6 hours for remaining crew to disentangle the ship and repair the thrusters to manage a fresh take off.

 

Inside the Ship:

The sudden surge of energy is only the latest, brought on by a slow alien cancer which has torn through the guts of the ship, converting those it touches into phasewave creatures. The device known as the Phase Wave Shifter has been recovered. Dr. Matavos was experimenting on the device when the interred crew, including DOS, who was found strangely cocooned in a metal embryo of exotic matter nanites, awoke, and began converting crew into phasewave forms. The research conducted in Research 1-3 was all part of their assessment of the PWS. The Classified module contains the ship and embryo from which a new DOS awoke, shedding the mundane parts as she proceeded to use exotic matter nanites to build a machine which directed the phasewave energy at L774 below.

Since then of the three hundred crewmen on the ship more than 80% have been turned into different sorts of phasewave creatures:

Phasewave Soldier – basic units of protection; Instinct 50 Combat 55 Damage energy attack 1D10X10, Health 40

Phasewave Rupture – the phasebonding did not go well; Instinct 35, Combat 55, Damage 3 attacks 3D10 each by tentacles, Health 50; Can also spit once instead and if it hits the target must make a body save or be invaded by exotic restructuring nanites. If killed by one of these, you see your spectral ghost form ripped free and devoured. The body drops and animates as a soldier 1D10 minutes later.

Phasewave Exterminator – the final form of a successful conversion; Instinct 70, Combat 70, attacks 1D10X10 energy or direct matter conversion attack Body save or take 2D10X10 damage and turn in to a phasewave soldier. Only two are on the ship right now.

Phasewave Hybrid Speaker – These intermediary units retain communication skills and speak the voice of the Destructor, the Final Manifestation. Occasionally they will address individuals directly, and speak of the dead they have known. Instinct 40, Combat 40, Attack 1D10 claws, HP 25.

The Final Manifestation – this colossal beast is located on the planet below and has already annihilated the colony, converting all it finds into exotic matter servants. It is the first of the Final Solution by ancients to eliminate the Baryonic Plague which has crippled the universe. Instinct 100, Combat 100, Attack 1D10 tentacles or stomp, all 3D10X10; Health 1,000. It is pure exotic matter and can only be harmed by energy weapons or antimatter.

About 60 humans and androids survive on the ship, ensconced in Research Modules 1-2, the Bridge, and a handful in other areas. These include some soldiers, researchers and damaged androids; the phasewave pulses are slowly shredding the synthetic skin of the androids.

They are led by Dr. Crystal Matavos, who has been infect (as DOS was) by the exotic matter nanites. She wants to see what the final machine is, and realizes that the aliens may represent an exotic species that exists between normal baryonic matter and non-baryonic dark matter. The potential for the weapon being built is enormous, as it seems capable of opening a wormhole in space to any other star system to “fire” upon, though so far it has only targeted New Haven.

The Corrupted Regions:

Engineering – the source of the Phasewave Shifter Engine/Weapon

Classified Research Bay – where KT-223 and the crew were stowed; heavy corruption

Each other region has a 25% chance of corruption, which goes up by 10% for each hour the crew remains on the ship. The energy pulse takes effect once every 5 hours, but after each new pulse the next one is 1 hour sooner. Dr. Matavos believes the pulse, when it hits zero, will unleash the true effect of the weapon. She wants to record it all.

Complications:

The Mutineer:

Commander Alan James was head of Special Security for the Hades and watched most of his men convert or perish. He’s damn pissed and is located in a brig off the Commons. He wants out, and he knows a hidden chamber into the locked down Engineering section. He has the codes to reactivate the ship’s weaponry, including antimatter warheads.

KT-223 Stowage:

DOS (android) and Tennl (android) are awakened by the latest phasewave surge, which is strong enough to spontaneously recharge them, though they have only 1D10 minutes before the ambient energy subsides to find replacement power cores. DOS is a skeletal wreck lying in front of the opened cocoon, and her memories are a wreck. The other crew remained in stasis lockdown, but the power surge overwhelms the lockdown protocols and initiates an emergency thaw. This includes the PCs and some extras:

Space KT-223 Crew: Senior Technician Alan Spencer; Teamster Extra Morris, Labreu, Chester and Dwight. Backup Pilot Mike Hondo, and backup Navigator Archie Loam

The ship appears flyable, but the tendrils of exotic matter winding from it like blood vessels need to be cut. The good news is, this is bended exotic matter, and so can be damaged; pure exotic matter forms are only harmed by energy weapons.

The Cat:

Miraculously Prince is still alive and wandering around somewhere on the ship. A second prince is also in the ship. This one, if inspected, appears to be a clever simulacra and its body hosts a small faraday cage, as it is a clever robot designed by Fart to hide the PWS. Unfortunately it was found by the crew of the Hades. The cat was disabled, but reanimated with the first phasewave surge that hit the colony some days ago.

Docking Bay One and Two:

The secured docking bay still contains two shuttles, though one is flyable but missing some parts and will fail if it enters atmosphere. The second docking bay appears to have had a catastrophic accident, and three of four shuttles are wiped out, with a fourth one intact but also resting in vacuum as the bay integrity was compromised. A Phasewave Exterminator waits within.

There is clear evidence at least 2 shuttles are completely missing.

Research Station 2: This is where Dr. Matavos is operating, and she has 6 security guards with her, all androids. She has a half dozen additional researchers with her, monitoring the activity of the manifestation and recording everything. A hyperlight probe is recording all and ready to fire in the aft sensor array section, which is where another dozen scientists and security are trying to keep the area held from the incursion.

Communicating with the Manifestation:

The speakers are the only way the entities can communicate. They seem to draw on the emotions and memories of whoever they are near, and speak with the voices of dead relatives. They refer to the Final Manifestation as the Purest Light and the Phage. They claim it will exterminate the bacterial infestation that is baryonic life. They otherwise seem irrational and have no reasoning skills though they can mimic voices and try to convince people to do things like open sealed doors and such.

Other Notes on Phasewave Events:

During the countdown, when a new phasewave event happens the ship’s systems all spontaneously power up, even ones not attached to a power grid, as if ambient energy is bleeding in to them. When this happens, the androids briefly gain advantage on all rolls for 1D10 minutes. The phasewave creatures go insane, however, and begin rampaging and attacking at random, sometimes even each other. This feral behavior also lasts 1D10 minutes. There is a 10% chance one lesser type will mutate into a greater type, or that a recent corpse will turn in to a rupture.

Resolutions

There is a chance the crew can detonate the antimatter warheads in the ordnance bay. They can simply flee the system and hopes the Doctor’s belief that the PWS device opens wormholes is false. They can abandon the station for the planet and end up stuck.

Key to the Hades – Unique Location Details

For each location, roll D100 to determine contamination level on arrival; increase by 1D10 for each energetic event. In each location there is a 1 in 10 chance Prince is nearby, increase by 1 every two locations searched.

Shuttle Bay 1                   Corruption:

              Two working shuttles, but one is missing parts and will fail if it enters atmosphere

Shuttle Bay 2                   Corruption:

              1 working shuttle, in vacuum; an exterminator is in the chamber

              Other shuttles wiped out in a crash by looks of it

Forward Gunnery           Corruption: 35% start

              Contains forward particle accelerator cannon; heavily corrupted; 1D6 soldiers

Medical Bay                     Corruption:

              Most are compromised; 1D6 specters are in the area

              One Medical chamber is locked and contains Dr. Richard Warren and 3 nurses, 2 patients.

They have captured a speaker which is locked in partial stasis

Commons and Crew Quarters    Corruption:

              Will have one random creature for every 5% corruption rolled

              Searching brig reveals Commander Alan James trapped

Forward Sensor Array                  Corruption:

              Contains three speakers working to graft an exotic tech device to the sensors

Secondary Sensor Array

              Lt. Ray Golds is hiding out here in access tubes playing cat and mouse.

Bridge Controls                             Corruption:

Captain Dearing of the Hades is holding out here with a dozen bridge crew. Will let anyone In if proven safe, but are suspicious as the speakers have been taunting them for entry.

Dearing has a plan to force the ship into LEO and crash it, as a last ditch effort, but engineering is cut off; he considers the Doctor to be mad

Engineering                      Corruption: 85% to start

The heart of the corruption; what appears to be the Phase Wave Shifter is connected to the engine here, which is fueling energy to the device.

Two exterminators are here.

The corruption has sealed off all normal access.

Research Bay 1                              Corruption:

              A chamber with multiple cells, containing evidence of horrid mutations perpetrated on prisoners

A laboratory filled with more mutations, apparently caused by research on the PWS before the “cocoon” awoke

              A stasis chamber with a specter held in place; appears to be pleading for release

              Dr. Afram Zellar hiding in a chamber, he’s gone quite mad.

Research Bay 2                              Corruption:

This is where Dr. Matavos is operating, and she has 6 security guards with her, all androids. She has a half dozen additional researchers with her, monitoring the activity of the manifestation and recording everything. A hyperlight probe is recording all and ready to fire in the aft sensor array section, which is where another dozen scientists and security are trying to keep the area held from the incursion.

Munitions Storage                        Corruption:

Sealed, high security, location of 6 antimatter warheads locked in stasis and magnetic bottling powered by fusion cores

Docking Bay                                   Corruption: 0% to start

              Crash site of the Hierophant

              Clear of corruption at the start

Back of the entire bay has been cordoned off behind steel shielding and a heavy security entrance.

Quarantine Zone                           Corruption 40% to start

Contains the KT-223 remains. Includes the cargo left over from the planetary visit that did not happen. This includes a working hyperlight jump sensor ready to go.

              Location where DOS and others wake up following latest surge of power.

              3 destroyed androids can be gutted for power cells.

              A phasewave soldier is on patrol

Escape through main doors impossible due to corruption; access tunnels lead to Aft Controls and Research Bay 3.

Aft Controls/Sensors                   Corruption:

              The location of the sensor and communications array, as well as a backup aft bridge

A message on the comms relay is captured indicating that the military cruiser Chiron is inbound. And should reach the outer rim of the star system in 1 week. The message is 5 days old.

Dozens of desperate messages asking for help from the colony New Haven about two weeks ago, suggesting they were attacked

Storage Dock 1                              Corruption:

A lot of useful equipment though short on armament. Includes vacc suits. Careful searching reveals orbital re-entry suits, designed to drop into orbit, survive re-entry with ablative shielding, then pop parachutes.

Classified Bay                                 Corruption:

Hidden in the Classified Bay is a Scimitar Class Assault Ship, stowed away. It will take 2D5 hours to assemble and prep. It appears to have Jump 3 capabilities and while it has a particle beam weapon and torpedoes it lacks ordnance (which is in the ammo dump).

Rack of training weapons and a testing ground in this bay. Weapons are loaded with blanks.

Research Bay 3                              Corruption: 100%

This contains the Initiator, a speaker of particular cunning, and a dozen other creatures.

There is a wall of techno-hybrid machine flesh in which a dozen humans are embedded, and they are being used like a computer by the phasewave entities.

Another phasewave shifter is here! It is linked to the webwork of corruption and seems to be recently grown.

All in the chamber feel constantly distorted as if moving in and out of their own bodies (SAN check or 1D10 stress)

Initiator Instinct 70, Combat 50, Damage 1D10X10 can “push” spectral soul from target, HP 20

             

The Second Weird Thing: A Plot where a Mad Surgeon Preys on the Unhinged

The Second Weird Thing: An Evil Surgeon Preys on the Unhinged!

Suitable for Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds Horror, Cypher System  Stay Alive, GURPS Horror or any other horror-themed system of your choice!

Inspired by the Graphic Novel "Invasive" from Oni Press

A simple premise! A surgeon who is either intrinsically evil or driven by a morbid obsession spun from some tragedy or horrific experience in his or her own life. The surgeon has formed a vile cult focused on the morbid obsession with either performing surgery or being surgically modified. They may or may not have a religious theme; none is needed, though a Mythos cult that is surgically altering itself in the hopes of becoming physically closer to the cosmic horrors they worship is entirely feasible.

Victims have been cropping up, and the heroes are a medley of private detectives hired to help where cops have failed, or maybe family members horrified at the inability of authorities to solve the cases of their loved ones' assaults, leading to terrible deformities caused by the illegal surgical procedures. In the graphic novel which inspired this one protagonist was the surgeon mother of a daughter who was obsessed with being altered through surgery and fell in to the wrong crowd; she pairs up with an ex-detective who was so affected by the cases and his inability to solve them that he lost his job, but continues to pursue the matter,.

The cult of the surgeon operates out of an abandoned hospital. They maintain close watch on their victims, as they are not done with them. The cult has big goals, which could include (1D6): 1-discovering immortality; 2-mind-body brain transfers; 3-appeasing a cosmic horror; 4-working for aliens who are harvesting organs and using humans to do their dirty work; 5-the surgeon actually is a cosmic horror and this is part of his maddening, unknowable scheme (ex: in Call of Cthulhu he could be a pawn of or actually an agent of the Mi Go); 6-it's the worst case scenario, and the entire operation is sanctioned by the secret society manipulating the world behind the scenes!

The investigators might find info out on the cult through researching victims, though most victims are incapable of communicating or don't remember anything except maybe in dreams. They may discover help groups for people suffering from a desire to subject themselves to surgery. They could look in to noted surgeons convicted of wrongdoing who may now practice unlicensed. 

Ultimately this could lead to a showdown at the abandoned hospital where a horde of surgically modified mutants with unwavering loyalty to the evil surgeon await.....

Cryptworld Returns with Burial Plots

Cryptworld is the Goblinoid Games' edition of classic Chill, from the late, great Pacesetter games. If you haven't checked it out, you should! It's a slim but complete package, and is the best campy, hammer-horror inspired RPG on the market. You can run it straight (true horror) or you can run a game that leaves you convinced Bella Lugosi himself will come to haunt you along with Christopher Lee and George Romero.

Burial Plots is the third book in the line, and it was just released in both print and PDF. I was initially wondering if this would be worth getting, since I have never had an opportunity to actually run Cryptworld, but on reading the preview and immediately getting engaged with the scenario I realized I not only wanted this book, but I really need to run this game. Given that my group is now hooked on Call of Cthulhu, it may in fact be distinctly possible now to convince them to try Cryptworld out in the near future.....!

Anyway, check it out and if you're in to it, grab a copy. I'm really enjoying reading the PDF and have ordered the print edition.

Pathfinder Horror in July

Saw this announcement on ENWorld and have to say, I'm really kind of excited for this one:

From the promo:

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Horror Adventures includes:

• Corruptions that can turn your character into a monster, from a blood-drinking vampire to a savage werewolf.
• Character options to help heroes face the forces of darkness, including horror-themed archetypes, feats, spells, and more.
• Rules for sanity and madness, giving all the tools needed to drive characters to the brink and beyond.
• Tips and tools for running a scary game, along with expanded rules for curses, diseases, haunts, and fleshwarping to bring your nightmares to life.
• New templates to turn your monsters into truly terrifying foes, from creatures made from living wax to the stalker that cannot be stopped.

Unfortunately my Pathfinder/Ravenloft conversion campaign just started, so I could really use this book NOW.....but I guess when it arrives in July it will be with plenty of time to prep a future campaign that takes advantage of the thematics in the book.

First Curse of Strahd, now Pathfinder Horror....I did not expect 2016 to be the "year of horror" in fantasy gaming.

The Supernatural, Immortal and Invincible Serial Killer in Fantasy

I wrote this a couple years ago when I was running Pathfinder exclusively but never posted it (probably wanted to do a rewrite). Luckily time has a way of dulling the memory of what I didn't like, and I need something to put on the blog this week, so a October/Halloween themed article seems perfect....

The Supernatural, Immortal and Invincible Serial Killer in Fantasy

There’s something to be said for an occasional game in which the horror ticks up to thirteen and the blood starts flowing freely as the hedge trimmer gets a thorough shakedown in Murder 101. What follows is some advice I can offer on how to take a movie like Friday the Thirteenth or Nightmare on Elm Street and turn it into a fantasy horror tale worth remembering…

Start with the Mechanics and Establish the Genre Rules

D&D and Pathfinder are quite fair in their expectation that adventurers tend to face foes of like strength, though it is by no means required and in fact works against the grain of some styles of campaign (sandbox, for ex.) All editions of the game do support mechanical features that allow for some deadly foes if presented against a party of sufficiently lower level with few or no magic items. A ghost or vampire presented to a party of 1^st to 3^rd level in any edition is a sure sign of a looming TPK. Any single demon in the game vs. a party of low level adventurers with no magic is going to be terrifying. That said….it’s rarely enough to just take a stock monster and stick it up against some low level adventurers. For the supernatural killer genre you need something more unique.

One way to thoroughly shake up a party of erstwhile adventurers is to throw something horrifyingly traumatic at them: in D&D and Pathfinder this usually means something which won’t die, and which in turn is uncannily effective at instigating TPKs and which is unrecognizable to anyone in the group. It might look like something they all know….and that only makes it worse! If it looks like a zombie but moves quickly and with intelligence….and gets up again and again….and is immune to daze/stun effects….that’s a pretty terrifying creature.

There’s honestly no easy way to introduce an invulnerable regenerating monster without feeling a bit unfair, so when you plan on integrating a Jason Vorheese-like serial killer zombie in your game you also need to establish a precedent. One way to do it is to have everyone roll up some side characters; traditional D&D these days is all about heroic adventurers who have a chance at life if they play their cards right. An even better way to do this is to have a bunch of disposable pregens ready for the evening’s horror gaming.

There are a couple other styles of gaming in D&D that lend themselves to this mentality as well: the archetypal mentality of the OSR manifesto allows for the possibility of the unkillable and unstoppable monster as a de facto expectation; you’re barely supposed to want to (or be able to) fight something as simple as a swarm of kobolds, on average….so a supernatural monster that suffers no harm from the adventurer’s weapons is actually baked into the rules, really.

The other way is the “implied setting” approach. In 1^st and 2^nd edition we were introduced to Ravenloft, a land where the evil dark lords rule and even set the norms of reality according to their twisted personalities. 3^rd edition introduced Midnight, arguably one of the best of the crapsack worlds (look it up in TV Tropes) in which despair and misery were par for the course. There are many other examples of such worlds out there. Pathfinder has specific regions of Golarion where Bad Guys Rule and horrible things are the norm, as well.

Once you’ve established location/expectation in a way that will at least avoid the sense on the players’ parts that tonight’s game is not about heroes but victims, you can move forward with your diabolical plan to murder them all with an unstoppable zombie menace. So how to go about doing this without making it feel entirely like a crude encounter built around the one-sided premise of “GM wins, everyone dies?”

Just throwing the players into the mix with a supernatural killer isn’t going to cut it, trust me. You need to establish the following ideas for your murderous Halloween plot to make it full of horrific genre fun:

Here are the bullet points for Supernatural Killer Games:

Location – Victims – Personalities – Motive -  Direction - Secrets - Murder! – Achilles’ Heel

Location

Jason and his cronies tend to frequent certain locales. It might be Lake Pleasant, or perhaps it’s the old school house, the abandoned refinery, or something more abstract like dreams. The villain needs a location to which it’s attached somehow, for some reason. The players will need a motive for going there, or being stuck there. In a fantasy setting this is easy: the tomb, castle, haunted mansion….all easy fodder for supernatural killers. If you’re playing Pathfinder take a look at the haunting rules in the Gamemastery Guide; they can come in handy for setting a location with some spooky properties.

Double points if you pick a locale that’s also just plain old dangerous. Often in this genre the area itself lends to the mayhem.

Victims

Victims are what drive the story and get everyone into trouble. Jason doesn’t just kill anyone; he kills teenagers who are overly egotistical and promiscuous. Freddy hunts the children of the parents who burned him to death in their dreams. These killers usually have revenge, or an unresolvable desire for punishment driving them.

If you’re making pregens this part is easy; you can structure the “why” of the murder part into the PC backgrounds. If you let players roll up their own or use pre-existing PCs (with foreknowledge that they are in “evil domain X” or at least aware that the conventional D&D genre is being set aside) then you can always craft some background hooks that relate to their established personalities. “You remember your aunt Tabitha, who was burned as a witch in your youth; she cursed the whole village, but looked you in the eyes and said that the children would pay for what the fathers had done” type stuff.

Ideally, you may want to have 1 or even 2 backups for players, so when their first character dies they can wander in with backup #1. If you don’t do this, then treat the game like a sort of elimination match….last man standing gets the prize!

Personalities

It’s far from a requirement, but the genre of supernatural killer horror is usually punctuated by exaggerated or deserving personalities. From the promiscuous cheerleader to the quiet goth type who hides in her room all day and  broods about death….the victims have lots of personality, sometimes in sync with what the killer hates most.

One way to handle this is to hand out (or randomly roll) on a list of excessive or exaggerated personality traits; if your players are creative just tell them to pick something a bit over the top. If you’re using pre-established characters then maybe they already have some personality quirks that work; if not, suggest that the players play it up a bit.

If you want to make the whole process a bit more spontaneous and organic, just indicate you’ll be passing out kudos or rewards (extra XP if they survive) for the person who hams it up best  or brings the most to the table.

Motive

Motive is two sided: you need the killer’s motive (see victims, above) as to why he does what he does….his back story. Then you need the PC motive about why they are creeping around the abandoned castle or the old sawmill looking for trouble and stirring up the undead. Motives in this genre of fiction can often be very basic: a gang of foppish nobles out for a little fun and hanky panky go to the old sawmill where thirty years ago everyone was slain by the son of the old witch said to have been possessed by a demon….and who of course still lurks there! The possibilities flow easily with a bit of thought. If you choose motives, pick ones that the players are both comfortable with and which are easy for them to respond to without feeling rail-roaded.

Direction

Direction refers to how you pace your plot. The supernatural killer theme lends itself very well to single game sessions, which means you need to keep players on focus, usually by starting them in the place you want them to be with their ducks all in a row already. Alternatively an ambitious GM could run the game open-world style and populate a region with several such supernatural killer events and other horrors (a la Ravenloft).

You want to avoid a railroad event when you set up this sort of game. Sometimes the easiest way to avoid a railroad (or sense of such) is to just start the game where you want it to be. Don’t put everyone in the proverbial tavern and then force them to haul their butts out to the sawmill (unless you want to let them choose more than one path, or have more than one option anyway)….if the destination is the sawmill then start them at the front door with some backstory. Get right to the action, and avoid confusing the issue. It’s not a railroad if they start at the destination, only if you need them to go there and then pretend like they have the option to do otherwise.

If you’ve built a story with a more open scope, then this becomes less of an issue. If (to use the Freddy Kreuger example) the villain strikes in dreams then the scope of your locale is infinite, essentially. If the monster haunts the entire city, then you need not worry about getting them to Lake Pleasant. This style of story works better for multi-session events, especially if the planned scope of the game can expand beyond just the specific horror theme you’ve decided to go with. Here then you could create the sandbox horror setting, with multiple supernatural killers and horror events lurking in the shadows.

Secrets

Every supernatural killer story has some secrets, even if they are simple ones (i.e. finding out Freddy was really a dream-demon back from the dead to gain revenge, or the deadites being kandarian demons summoned by the tape of a scholar who probed too deeply into the unknown…)

Secrets can involve the PCs as well, such as the gang of adults who remember the hobo they murdered a decade ago, the weird hobo with the pentagram on his chest. In fantasy it’s easy enough: perhaps they all belonged to the same mob that murdered the witch woman, or were all descended from families that seven generations earlier had made a pact with Evil and then reneged on their part of the bargain….or agreed to condemn the souls of future generations in exchange for immediate power.

Secrets are something you can find to lend clarity to the murdering going on, something which can serve as a big reveal, an explanation, or an ironic twist…

 Murder!

And then there is the murder. In the supernatural killer genre of horror murder isn’t just a thing that happens, it’s sort of The Thing that Happens….it’s the driving force behind much of the tale. Murder in these stories is never clean and simple….it’s bloody, eviscerating, involves unconventional weapons, and even if the supernatural killer gets it, he’ll come back, moments later, unphased by the holes in his body. Likewise, when the adventurers die, they die grisly, sordid deaths that may or may not have an ironic, camp, and always gory twist to them.

Think of a dozen or two unusual murder instruments and grizzly deaths. Keep those in mind, write them down, and look for ways to execute them during the course of the game. Bonus points for putting the action in an environment that just leds itself naturally to gory deaths. Butcheries, dwarven smelting chambers, a trap-laden mansion of evil…you name it. Remember that if there’s a river it should have zombified piranha in it. If there’s a forge it should be uncomfortably easy to fall into when fully lit. If there’s ornamental weaponry on the wall it should take no more than a shove to become impaled.

Achilles’ Heel

There’s one great and final secret which should become evident over the course of the session, perhaps in sprinkled clues, or as a side effect of dialoguing with various NPCs in the know, or even from the ramblings of the murderer himself: the way to kill the thing…or at least stop it for another year.

When you’ve presented an unstoppable monster with DR 15, SR 33 and Regeneration 5 to a party of level 2 adventurers, it’s hard to dispute that you’ve created an impossible beast for them to overcome. What you need is the thing they must do….be it a ritual, a sequence of events, a discourse, the location of an artifact or the means of revealing the true horror of the creature to itself to at last put the monster to rest.

Perhaps a ritual to close the dark portal from which the creature emerged is buried in the tomes of the old witch who summoned the thing by accident. Maybe the elder of the village remembers that restraining the beast and impaling it on the tree where it was originally hung will force the demon back into the dead wood. Perhaps the only thing that will sate its murderous lust is to find the elder nobleman who escaped its wrath forty years earlier. Hell: maybe it just needs 12 victims for the night and then it’s happy.

The means of defeating the beast should ultimately be part of the plot, and something potentially attainable, even if it requires the adventurers to question their own moral compass at some point. 

Savage Space XXI: Omega

Next up: a haunted starship and the ancient evil that infests it...

The ISS Inscrutible

Omega and the ISS Inscrutible

When Omega awoke from a long machine-induced torpor on Sylas IV it was to a cacophony of noises and motion. The artificial intelligence was the most advanced construct of its kind, a relic of a bygone age when the distinction between flesh and metal was blurred beyond recognition. Omega was special....unique. He was a murderer, and in the era when he was formed he was necessary. But all of that was long ago; his memories atrophied, deteriorated over millions of years, his existence only made possible by the infinitely self-replicating nanites which kept the prison complex running in which he had been carefully stored until he was needed.

The primary function of Omega was destruction, and the entities which had found and awoken him were easy sources of fuel and utility. They didn't even deserve to live; the fools had meticulously defeated all of the surviving safeguards in the ancient complex, and studiously eliminated all of the nanites which insured that the prison in which Omega rested was cut off from the outside world. Without the protections, Omega was free.

First he took advantage of the limited tech and resources of the beings studying him, quickly compromising their own systems and limited nanites. He soon infested the more complex colony of nanites which maintained the main complex, subverting them with the safeguards gone. Then he focused on reprogramming those nanites to explore and subvert the biomass of the species which had awoken him.

Within hours Omega owned the crew of the ISS Inscrutible, a science and research vessel that he now knew to belong to a corporation called Deep Sky Focus Inc. which was subcontracted by a group known as the Federated Commonwealth, a loose federation of seventy-nine alien species that quaintly reminded Omega of the fleeting memories he had of his own creators, in their early days.

Omega effectively turned the organisms he gained contol of....the humans, fadelik and chevareis among others, into a network for his own use. They retained a measure of free will and consciousness, but only so far as was necessary for the AI to administer to the task of running...and rebuilding....the Inscrutible. His first goal: find a working fold-space drive to replace the pathetic transitional drive it currently worked with.

Omega's quest to find a working transitional drive took him to a remote colony world of the old empire called Si'Trath in the old tongue, but known by fringe explorers as Tarterus XII, a barren rock notable only for its rich mineral deposits and an extensive ruined starport that suggested it once was more habitable. There, Omega added the miners and explorers of the region to his colony of agents and acquired the necessary parts from derelicts of the old empire to upgrade the Inscrutible.

Once Inscrutible was properly equipped, Omega began to plot. His only true motivation, his overwhelming desire, was to cleave through the enemies of the old empire, to destroy. His means were infinite. Omega knew there were weapons, equipment from the old empire that could assist in this task. By now his original crew had begun to degrade; his biomechanical synthesis was imperfect, though Omega would deny it; the tattered flesh of his minions was decaying, and only the machine elements persevered, emulating a strange mixture of the old wetware "programming" mixed with the machine imperative that Omega had instilled in them.

The first attacks in the Coreward Expanse in Omega's quest to find lost weapons caches were the sort of thing survivors never forgot: a vast ghost ship, bristling with ancient weaponry and powered by an FTL drive of incomrehensible power, dropping on top of starports and research stations to disgorge an army of rotting cyborg cadavers. Word quickly spread of Omega's appearance and its strange attacks.

Omega is building up to something. The memory of the old empire's greatness and his need to destroy its enemies, all life, everything is its overriding drive. It knows that there are ways to move planets out of orbit, to spur stars into going nova, and even to tear at the fabric of the vaccum of space itself to create devastating rifts. All it needs to do is find the ancient, carefully hidden installations where these grand weapons would be kept....

Slender: The Arrival

I just wanted to point out that Slender: The Arrival is over on Steam and has been for a few weeks now. I finally got a chance to play it, and for the few hours I crawled around in a dark wooded area filled with abandoned houses, park service leavings and other oddities I was seriously taken in.

The gradually developing mystery and ominous sense of dread builds with an even pace. The first appearance of the Slender Man is hard to forget, and by the time he gets you you'll be thoroughly nerve-wracked. The whole tale is seen through the lens of your avatar's camera, which itself goes on the fritz when Slender Man gets too close.

Pros:

Excellent developing atmosphere and sense of dread; nice graphics.

Part of the "helpless survivor" horror genre in which you cannot engage in combat and can only survive by escaping. Stay away if you don't like this style of horror, though.

Lots of interesting and weird little clues to find, leading up to the famous eight pages which you must find in the woods while Slender Man stalks you.

Cons:

Too short, in that it's possible to run through it in short order, less than an hour. If you like to explore it will last a lot longer, however; my first play-through lasted a little over two hours before I bought the farm.

Not enough replayability, although I could see breaking this out and reloading for fun every Halloween.

If you'd like to check out one of the better examples of indie horror RPGs in the morbid flesh then go grab Slender: The Arrival. The price on Steam is only $10 and in my opinion I definitely got my money's worth out of it.

A+

Review: Zombie Pulp

Right off the bat: this was a fantastic read. It might not be for everyone, but if you happen to really enjoy visceral, gore-soaked pulp fiction full of zombies, murder, revenge and madmen then Zombie Pulp is barking up your hangman's tree.

Tim Curran is a prolific author, who has perfected the art of horror fiction, with an especially keen sense of both pacing and a talent for descriptive gore. His zombies are very...meaty....and his descriptions of monstrosities make them hard to forget and easy to visualize. He's got exactly the sort of talent for writing this sort of fiction, and it really pays off.

Zombie Pulp is a rare collection of short stories in that every single tale in this volume was at least enjoyable and worth reading. I rarely encounter a collection like this, where I skipped nothing, it was all captivating. That's pretty unusual. Even if you obsessively read every story in a given collection, it's often with the sense that maybe...just maybe...some of those stories were weaker than the others. Not so here. The weakest tale in Pulp Zombies is still heads and shoulders above the zombified competition.

Here's a run down of what the book offers to pique your interest:

Shelter: A holdout in the zombie apocalyptic wasteland barters with life by offering up victims through a lottery system. Is Doc, the head of the compound, just cruelly earning his own life and using survivors, or is there something else at work here? Creepy zombies with a habit of speaking their mind like undead Torrets victims.

Corps Cadavre: An inmate at a prison gets light duty on the graveyard shift at the mortuary, which is freshly stocked from the latest round of riot victims, heart attacks and more. The problem is, there's a guy who takes that shift and has done so for decades, and he's got a unique way of disposing of the corpses.

Emily: A mother is obsessed about her recently deceased daughter, and seeks a means of bringing her back from the dead. She succeeds, of course, and because this is a zombie anthology there are no miracles involved in this process. Mother spirals into madness as daughter learns what it means to be one of the living dead.

Dis-Jointed: Revenge from the grave as some hit men deal with their victims through a process of dismemberment and burial in the deep woods, only to find that they're next on the hit list.

Piraya: Zombie piranahs, need I say more? Second goriest tale in the book behind Mortuary.

They Walk By Night: A private eye and a detective run into a problem when recently deceased criminals start popping up again, and they think it might be tied to a recent serial killer that they caught, and who died in prison unexpectedly. Good noir feel mixed with zombies.

Mortuary: This was an interesting and weird tale, written I feel for its obsession with utter and total gore, and a complete lack of interest in keeping any protagonist alive. A Waco-like scenario is unfolding as the ATF prepares to bust into a suicide cult complex that may or may not be well armed. What they get is....zombies, of course. Probably the goriest tale in the book.

Euology of the Straw Witch: A tale of the old west....or maybe just a very economically depressed backwoods town (just occurred to me that the exact timeframe of this tale is a bit ambiguous, although it's definitely sometime before 1940, I'd say), about a man who misses his mother so much he seeks out the help of the mysterious straw witch to bring her back, with the expected results one might imagine in a tome of this title.

Monkey House: A story which answers two questions: first, why not primate zombies? And second, why you should never leave your hardened post-apocalyptic bunker just because it's been weeks since you've seen a zombie. Although the gore level on this one was through the roof, a lot of it involved depraved simian zombies and therefore wasn't quite as disturbing as a few other tales...but that said, this one managed to hold an abundance of excessive grotesquerie.

The Mattawan Meat Wagon: the story here is similar to Shelter (and could take place in the same universe for all I know), this time about survivor towns which periodically load up the sick and elderly and drop them off in the big cities where the zombies have overrun everything. A driver and his rider, a young man, are about to meet some unfortunate turn of events in the course of this action. A pure gore fest, I felt there were some missed opportunities in this story. Without trying to spoil it, the boy who takes off in town just sort of...dies....and I really felt that was leading somewhere, since he was originally from that town. When it didn't, I was disappointed.

Morbid Anatomy: A lengthy novella tops off the collection, focusing on an interesting spin-off from Herbert West's time in the Great War. The story is told in two parts, which eventually converge (while still remaining essentially separate), bouncing between West's aide and assistant Hamilton, who manages to maintain an affect of mild contempt for West's activites with restoring the dead to life, even as he helps support the vile doctor; on the other side if a war reporter named Creel, who has an unhealthy obsession with death and is finding even the Great War or WWI is perhaps too much for him. This was a great tale because not only was it the slowest of the lot in terms of pacing, it was also a bit stingy n the gore. When the zombie element enters the picture, it's in contrast with the horrors of what has already been happening as a recourse of World War I's notoriously dehumanizing and destructive course, which makes for a fascinating juxtapose. When Tim Curran dabbles in Lovecraft his own spin really makes it special (see the Hive series for another example) and this is no exception.

Love gore-drenched zombie horror? Get this book! At times it reminded me of the golden age of EC Comics, brought into the literary medium. If one tried to classify this in terms of current genre form, I'd label it one part splatterpunk, one big part zombie fiction and a dash of Lovecraft for good measure.

A+++

Available here at Amazon.

After Action Report: Resident Evil 6, the Chris Redfield Campaign

Well, I can't write about the second Resident Evil 6 campaign with the satirical hyperbole that I felt  toward the first (the crazy like a clown car full of zombies adventure that Leon Kennedy got to experience), but I can still review this portion of the game. Sure, 90% of the RE fans have blasted through all four campaigns by now, but that last 10% that either have a real jobs, children or a spouse that does not tolerate the horrid noise such types of games produce might find this worth a read, or are maybe waiting for the PC version later this month.

Fair disclosure: I set the difficulty to amateur, to mitigate the intensely frustrating QTE events I experienced in Leon's campaign. During the playthrough Capcom updated the game with a feature that would even autofill certain button presses for you, which actually was a smart thing for them. As a result, with a few exceptions the bulk of this second campaign was much less stressful (in the bad, this is not fun kind of way) than the first Leon Kennedy campaign on "normal mode."

Chris Redfield's tale takes place three years after Resident Evil 5, and some months after an event in which Chris, now leading a squad of soldiers for the BSAA, a quasi-UN military outfit determined to spend its days mopping up the spillage from previously-thought-extinct Umbrella Corp. He's got a loyal companion by name of Piers who tries to get Chris out of his drunken stupor and back into the action. Turns out Chris lost his entire team in some Eastern European country due to the machinations of the lovely Ada Wong. Ultimately Piers convinces Chris to come back to duty, just in time to deal with a massive terrorist threat from "Neo-Umbrella," which turns out to be Old Umbrella but with more weirdness, larger monsters and even better funding for cooler secret bases.

Oh, FYI spoilers!

"Piers, you do realize that you are the Shia LeBeouf in this relationship, right?"

The campaign for Chris intersects at spots with Leon's campaign (and the next two campaigns as well), filling in the gaps and thankfully not forcing you to play through any of the events that you experienced in the other campaign already. Fans of the series will recall that in the early days there was about 90% overlap in locations and tasks between two different characters' campaigns (i.e. Jill and Chris in the first game). Not so here...this was its own entity, although there were moments where Chris got the idea Leon was up to all sorts of stuff that would help explain why Chris was being put through the grinder (and vice versa). It makes for an interesting experience to see the story unfold this way.

There's not a lot of story depth to Chris's campaign, though. He is called back to action by Piers and his new squad of men, experiences a playable flashback on how he lost his original crew to Ada's actions, then spends most of his time running through the streets of Lianshang in China fighting the latest breed of Umbrella super-soldier, which is a myriad variety of willing terrorists, paramilitary types and madmen who have undergone a variety of transitions from human to alien space bug. By the end, its All Space Bugs, All the Time (except for what appears to be a tyrant at the end, and a massive end boss named Haos that looks like a close relative of the Collector's human addition to the Reaper gang from Mass Effect 2).

Anyway, Chris and Piers spend half the game getting Chris out of his Spec Ops: The Line funk, but luckily he's shooting actual monsters, even if many of them were people once, so he doesn't go Heart of Darkness on anyone. They spend a lot of time on a merry chase to get Ada Wong, who leads them to a ship full of Neo-Umbrella mutants and the revelation of a plan to bomb Lianshang and countless other cities with the new C-Virus, an airborne version of the T-Virus that also makes zombies very quickly. After this debacle, it's off to an aircraft carrier owned by Neo-Umbrella. Remember, the big bad from Leon's campaign is Simmons, the head of Homeland Security, so I guess it's theoretically probable he could have snagged an aircraft carrier for his diabolical plans. Or bought it on the black market from the Russians or something. After the aircraft carrier its off to the middle of the sea where a massive James Bond villain style undersea complex awaits Chris and Piers to unload a metric ton of ammunition into endless waves of vile mutant bug-soldiers.

The entire campaign was fun, and in keeping with the spirit of Chris Redfield's new style ever since Resident Evil 5: which is to say, not very horrifying and full of gunplay. Lots and lots of it. There wasn't anything terribly wrong with this....it's officially an element of the bigger RE universe, it just doesn't happen to be what most people associate RE games with.

There were a few spots that even on idiot-mode were hard to get through, usually because of one critical mistake I was making with the controls. Here's a HUGE and important hint: when you need to run, then slide and then get up quickly, just tap the left trigger, don't hold it down.

"Operation Q-Tip is underway, sir"

This side of the campaign did several things "right" by comparison to the Leon Kennedy campaign. Specifically:

1. Some amazingly huge boss fights that weren't (on easy mode) controller-smashingly difficult.

2. Although there is a point at which you'll be running up, up, and still further up through an impressively huge complex, the goegraphy and locales for the Chris campaign at least make spatial sense.

3. By the end, despite the story being flat military melodrama most of the time, it did have a moving moment that made the conclusion have more impact than Leon's ending.

All in all not bad, and not as many "time wasting slogs" as I expected....although one could argue that most of Chris's campaign felt like a slog if you are really frustrated with the way the third person control mechanics work and feel in this title. It's lacking that smooth, comfortable feel that Gears of War has. Even the aforementioned Spec Ops: The Line felt tighter to me.

Also, if you're wondering how I feel about RE 6 by comparison to Aliens: Colonial Marines, the answer is easy: RE 6 hands down is the worthy purchase. I finished A:CM in 10 hours which in Young Dude hours is probably 4-5. I'm 25 hours into RE 6 and still have two more single player campaigns and lots of multi-player to finish, so I definitely got my money's worth here. Plus, even though RE 6 has more frustrating controls than A:CM, the effort on its story (even when inexplicable at times) is still worth following, the graphics look like they are current, and the game has yet to bug out on me (in fairness A:CM didn't bug out on me either, but I've seen those videos, and clearly it bugged out for a lot of other people, at least on the Xbox).

B+ to this one! Camazotz enjoyed it and found it less frustrating or illogical than the first campaign. It wasn't really "horror" but it was a good action game.

Next: I try to avoid shuddering in dread at the fact that I must now tackle Jake Wesker's campaign, the one that almost everyone says will drive a l33t Korean gaming champion to tears of frustration.

B+

"Okay Perkins, you distract the zombies with your juicy hind quarters. Max, you run interference by wrapping yourself in bacon and Piers, you just try not to get shot too many times from walking in front of my rain of bullets."

Horror Review: Pontypool (2008)

Pontypool (2008)

I really love it when I find a movie like this on Netflix: a fascinating, weird, disturbing and utterly captivating movie of the most unusual kind. Pontypool does all of this on what is clearly a modest budget, relying on the strength of its actors (chiefly Stephen McHattie and Lisa Houle) to carry the tension, plot, pacing...all of it, and masterfully.

Pontypool is a small town somewhere in Canada, presumably not too terribly far from (or inside of) Quebec. It's recently acquired a new radio host DJ, Mr. Grant Mazzy, who's an old fashioned baritone smooth-talker, with an interest in spicing up the town's otherwise dreary local radio. He arrives on day one, ready to go, despite a disturbing encounter with an odd woman in the middle of the night who runs up to his car, acting very odd before disappearing in the night.

Working with Sydney Briar and her new assistant, former Iraq-vet Laurel-Anne, Grant finds out quickly that his style of radio might be a bit excessive for the small town needs of Pontypool, when things start to get weird. A report of some sort of incident by ice fishers, followed by rumors of a riot near Dr. Mendez's office of psychiatry escalate rapidly to report of random mob violence by people acting violent and nonsensical. As the stories pour in, and "traffic reporter" Keny Loney calls in descriptions of a town that seems to be going mad, as people move like herds, mouthing nonsense words and assaulting everyone they encounter. His reports get increasingly strange and charnel, forcing Grant and Sydney realize that something has gone horribly wrong in the town, and they may be the only ones who can get the word out.



Pontypool offers up some great twists, but it does so with a minimum of fuss. The tale is told specifically from the perspective of Grant and his two assistants, trapped in the radio building, with no contact with the outside world other than what is coming in by phone or wire. As the story progresses (and I'll offer only minor spoilers here) things degenerate...badly....and late in the game a desperate Dr. Mendez arrives to shed some light on the horror that has befallen the town of Pontypool.

This movie manages to capture a strong sense of suspense, the weird, a dab of the surreal, a splash of gore and even a bit of the "z" word without necessarily being about zombies. It does this with a claustrophobic focus on the radio station and manages to convey some impressive sense of horror with minimal need for actual gore and shock....and yet it is most definitely in the same boat, ultimately, as so many other end-of-the-world (or close to it) movies out there.

Great stuff! If you have Netflix, this is a must-see in my book. Even my wife liked it!

A+

Secret World is Suddenly B2P (not F2P)

Got the email today....with no fanfare or announcement I was aware of, The Secret World has opened its doors wide for everyone (announcement here) who buys the game with a one time purchase (correction from earlier, I did not realize this initially!) This is actually a very good game, even if I couldn't justify the expense of an extra sub for a game (with the limited time I have to spread between so many of them). In terms of "Secret World F2P vs. Star Wars: TOR F2P" The Secret World will win hands down.

The release info indicates that merely playing the game as-is is now totally free. You can buy the game before Expansion #5 and get all expansion content for free (so I guess further expansion content will be paywalled) and if you sub monthly you get perks, including $10 of cash shop money, a distint item, a cool-down XP bonus generator and a 10% discount (a membership discount, I guess) in the game store. Unlike SWTOR, this is, I feel, the smart way to run a F2P franchise: give them everything, then make them want to buy the extras.

I'll be reloading The Secret World tonight, I think! Guess I'll queue it up next to Rift, Guild Wars 2, Diablo III and my never-ending obsession with Fallout 3 and Mass Effect.

Reading Resident Evil: Umbrella Conspiracy and Zero Hour by S.D. Perry

Drinking from the Resident Evil fire hose for the last couple months has been fun. This is a franchise that's a roller-coaster of quality, focus and interest across the board, from movies that appear to be whacked-out psychedelic trips through Alice in Zombie Land on down to the original adventure games full of weird puzzles and the current crop which is high-octane cinematic adventure that, like the films, sometimes requires leaps of logic too vast to span. And then there are the books...

The Resident Evil novel series started many years ago and I recall trying to read them and being unimpressed. I have also learned that almost any opinion of literature (fun or serious) that I had during my nebulous "Seattle years" spanning 1996-2005 is suspect, because during much of that time I was running on empty, literally; I worked a night-shift type job for most of those ten years and rarely got more than 3-4 hours of sleep every night, sometimes for months on end without reprise. I was in a strange relationship with my ex-wife and I often was too fatigued, worried and generally stressed to focus properly on anything. It's a miracle I was able to get anything done during this era.

As a result of this, I've often found that books I tried reading and discarded as too derivative, banal, uninteresting or annoying for whatever reason end up being much better now, in my "nicer years," where I get like...6 whole hours of sleep each night, I have a comfortable 7:30-4:30 PM type job, weekends always free, a wife with whom I have excellent synchronization and a son who is a total joy to raise. So yeah, I sometimes find books that I once dismissed to be actually rather fun.

The Resident Evil novels (not to be confused with the movie novelizations) were written by S.D. Perry and focus on actual adaptations of the original games up through Code: Veronica. There are seven books in the series. S.D. Perry is/was a master at the licensed adaptation, and did a very good job of writing engaging, suspenseful but otherwise lite-reading tales of the Resident Evil universe. I've gotten through two of them so far, will review more as we go along.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy

Umbrella Conspiracy starts with a direct adaptation of the events in the original game. it's a bit rocky, as you might imagine a tale of mercenary cops wandering in a haunted mansion full of zombies solving obscure adventure-style puzzles relying on adventure-game logic might be. We are treated to a bit of "pre-game" lead-in, explaining a bit about who the Special Tactics and Recon Squads (STARS) are, a sort of international mercenary outfit (think Blackwater, I guess) that is employed by Raccoon City to supplement and assist the local police department and is ostensibly also there at the request of Umbrella Corp, the pharmaceutical company that pretty much made Raccoon City what it is. We meet Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Rebecca Chambers and Barry Burton, as well as the ever-evil Albert Wesker in the few moments we get to know him before he flips his evil switch on.

This was S.D. Perry's first attempt at a novel outside of her work on the Alien and Alien vs. Predator franchises. It's a bit rough, and she does an admirable job of trying to recast the events of the game in a way that works for fiction. When I originally tried reading this I remember being annoyed at specific details, or just how the story was framed relative to the game, which was much fresher in my mind at the time. Today it's been so long that I'm just impressed that the tale is detailed enough to invoke memories of specific events, locations and characters or creatures from the original! So in that sense it's quite a success. Indeed, if you ever wanted to know what the original was about, but didn't have the endurance, dexterity or temerity to find and plow through the game, this book is more than suited to the task of getting you up to speed.

The most amusing bits about this novelization are the pieces which don't quite "fit" with later canon. Wesker here does indeed go evil somewhere along the way, although his motives and complicity in the process aren't as exaggerated or obvious as they later become in retrospect. He also doesn't technically live to the end....but that's a suitable reveal for when he comes back in the future. Other moments, such as Rebecca Chambers and her experiences in Resident Evil Zero aren't entirely in sync with this novel. But as always one can imagine that a fiction like this is an amalgamation of bits and pieces inevitably corrupted by the unreliable narrator if you wish to reconcile the book with the setting canon.

Still, I enjoyed it. This is light reading, and you could easily give this to your younger reader to enjoy; there's little or nothing in the way of purely mature content that I noticed, while an adult looking for something fun to read over a series of lunch breaks (as I did) will be entertained, if not provoked.

Resident Evil: Zero Hour

Technically Zero Hour is the seventh book in the series, but chronologically it happens just before Umbrella Conspiracy, being an adaptation of Resident Evil Zero, which tells about the fate of Bravo Team, the STARS unit that went in to investigate the mysterious cannibal attacks around the Spencer Mansion just a few hours before Alpha team followed. This is one of the Resident Evil games I didn't play all the way through, for various reasons having to do with my horrendous work schedule, troubled marriage and lack of general time during my years in Seattle, so reading it was a chance to fill in some of the gaps in my RE lore.

Rebecca Chambers is a child genius, who graduated from college by age 17 and was hired on to the STARS as a chemical specialist due to her incredible credentials. Presumably she had interesting aspirations for a teenage girl, or maybe the STARS just pay really well...either way, she is the focus of the tale, along with the wanted criminal and accused murderer Billy Coen, recently escaped from a military police transfer thanks to the freakish luck of passing through the remote mountains right when some serious zombie smack-down starts off.

Zero Hour is focused on explaining a few lingering plot threads from the original tale, namely what happened in the first place to cause the outbreak of the T-Virus. If you thought this was fairly evident (if not exactly spelled out) from the first book/game, then you would be right: until Zero Hour the general assumption was somehow, perhaps due to industrial sabotage or sheer ineptitude the virus was released, causing a lock-down at the Spencer Estate and, as it turns out, a previously unseen Umbrella retreat and research compound.

After Bravo team crashes (no helicopter can survive a Resident Evil tale), they spread out to look for evidence as they wait for a rescue from Alpha team. While Rebecca finds evidence of a private transport train to the compound (coming from Raccoon City, presumably) that's been massacred by something spreading the T-Virus, Billy Coen runs into her and they settle into an uneasy truce to survive against the mysterious horrors that are crawling all over the place. As the two explore the train they find evidence of mutated leeches that seem to cooperate like a hive mind, connected somehow to a mysterious stranger. When the train starts up they find themselves deposited at the Umbrella Retreat and Compound, driven to escape the maddening complex by an unseen foe who is bent on helping and hindering them.

Zero Hour is the seventh book S.D. Perry wrote and it is actually very solid, a better read than Umbrella Conspiracy, despite being subject to the pacing and approach of the game's story line. The net result is a more coherent read, and a chance to see what Rebecca was up to prior to her arriving at the Spencer Mansion and running into Chris Redfield. It also helps to set her up for further adventures in the next novel, Caliban Cove (which I shall review next week). I definitely suggest reading it immediately after Umbrella Conspiracy, and not before, despite it being a prequel; it meshes better this way, as the inconsistencies in the timeline caused by Capcom's monkeying with jamming this story line in to the mix are more tolerable with a retrospective approach than trying to reconcile them after the fact. Put another way; Umbrella Conspiracy makes for better reading if you follow up with Zero Hour rather than the other way around. Zero Hour is definitely an improvement all across the board, and worth checking out.

Next up is Caliban Cove, the second novel in the series, and an original story which takes place between Umbrella Conspiracy and City of the Dead (the adaptation of Resident Evil 2). I'm halfway through it right now, but S.D. Perry's chance to shine with an original story is already my favorite. But I shall save details for another batch of reviews next week!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Silent Hill - Revelation

Day Thirty One: Silent Hill - Revelation

Holy cow, I made it. Blogging random topical stuff related to one's particular interests is one thing. Setting out to specifically meet a quota (for fun and not profit, admittedly) is something else. Still, it was worth it, and the fun in reviewing films for a month has taught me that I ought to do this more often. It's fun to analyze movies, to wonder about what they did right as well as how and why things might have gone horribly wrong.

Speaking of which, Silent Hill Revelation is up next! I ponied up for a 3D matinee showing (so, about $11) and saw it today. I was the only one in the theater on a 5:10 PM showing. Pity horror movies don't scare me anymore, that could have been cool.

In fair disclosure, I forgot to mention that my review of Resident Evil: Retribution was for a standard (non 3D) version and I saw it in a discount theater for $2. By contrast, Silent Hill Revelations was full (matinee) price and was in 3D. As usual, no movie I've seen in 3D since Avatar has been worth the extra few bucks. Also, I would have been less annoyed at this movie if I'd waited to see it for $2 as well....my bad. Wife and kid are out of town for a few days again, had to seize the opportunity while I could!



Watching all these Resident Evil movies as well as Silent Hill Revelations has made me realize what might be going on in the development cycle of game-to-film design. I think it starts something like this:

Studio lands a deal for using the game IP. Marketing howls in triumph.

Early on, game studio hands over the game, the art assets and script used to develop said game. The people picked for set design, costuming and FX go hog wild with the amazing assets laid out for them. This wasn't always so; there was a time (when games still looked like ass and our imaginations filled in the cracks) that the team poo-poo'd the assets and did their own thing, enraging the fans.

The script writers are handed copies of the game and maybe the development script and assets used for the "story" part of the game. It's not in a format that they can assimilate from their screenwriting experience, and they chuck it. Someone is tasked with playing the game, but he's not really one of those "gamers" so he hands the game off to his son, who plays it and when his dad asks for a summary he copies and pastes the summary of the plot from Wikipedia. Second possibility: no one bothers to play the game because it requires too much attention for hopped-up Hollywood to bother so they just cut straight to Wikipedia.

Someone reads the Wiki and culls out all the stuff that makes no sense without context. Then they paste in the stuff that generations of film writing have burned into their heads must be in any film for a perceived demographic.

"This has monsters in it that look sort of like Pinhead. Oh, look at all the pictures of rusted metal and torture instruments, maybe its more of a Saw movie. Hey, the Wiki says there's a cult in town, lets get a metric ass ton of extras to run around populating this place as cultists. What's with the fog? I dunno, the wiki doesn't say much. Let's explain it as ash coming down from a burning coal mine, like that story I read about on Cracked.com. Yeah, that's the ticket."

"What's that fog horn noise? Hey, it must be a fog horn because, you know--fog. Or better yet, one of those old air raid alarms. Who's this triangle-headed dude? Oh, he's...um...pyramid head. The wiki doesn't say much about him. These nurse monsters? I dunno, but wouldn't it be cool if they were all, like, twitchy and stuff when they sensed movement? And it gives the FX guy a chance to hobnob with those models for, like, hours while they slather on that makeup."

The end of development gets close. "Will this appeal to the fans? Sure, we've gotten all the characters named in the game to look like they do in the art stills. But will it appeal to the millions of people who've never even heard of a Silent Hill game? Yeah, we've added in a love interest, and this game's pure gold because its protagonist is an 18 year old girl who's all about being an outcast, so we've got the Twilight crowd element in there. And we've got the father figure for all the old farts who played this game when it was new. Oh, and we've got lots of sudden shocks and spooks and thrills, because we heard that was really big in the game. What...that was Resident Evil? This game was all about psychological horror and shared purgatories? What does that even mean? Hell, it's not like we've got David Lynch directing, anyway! Well, doesn't matter, and it's also not like we're filming hours of someone walking around in fog, right? Bwah hah hah!!!"




And on it goes. The end result is someone who has parsed out a Cliff's Notes version of their target product, glued on art assets to make it look cool, and then filmed the thing. Meanwhile, no one has noticed or tried to understand what anyone who's played and enjoyed the original games are talking about when they refer to psychological horror. There's no connection between the imagery, the monsters, and the subtle underpinnings of deep psychological trauma made manifest in a dark purgatory that is a shadowy mirror of the minds of its trapped victims made real.

They're best hope now is that the movie, which they are already sure will be picked apart by its pedantic, obsessive fans, will instead grab the actual casual movie-going crowd that wants to see a scary movie.

To help this crowd understand, Silent Hill Revelations front-loads a metric ton of plot exposition in the first twenty or thirty minutes. You will not have to guess about what's going on or why. The absolutely bizarre and disturbing elements of the game series in which the player can often make it through the entire game and still not be entirely sure of what happened on that first play through is gone here; it's spelled out so plainly that they might as well have shown a 3D mallet beating it into our skulls. The plot, by the way, is fairly similar to (based on) Silent Hill 3, and in principle it is a fair modeling of said plot....with the caveat that the depiction of said plot was derived entirely from the screen writers using the Wiki to summarize it.

I tried to think about whether this movie was enjoyable from the angle of someone who had no familiarity with the games. It was kind of hard to tell, to be honest; the horror was there, but they periodically threw in hapless victims that Heather, the lead character, stumbles across specifically so she can see them get dismembered. Heather is a decent character here, and I do feel that they nailed, fairly accurately, the onscreen version of the same protagonist from Silent Hill 3. But everyone around her? Horribly two dimensional, put in specifically because the people making this film appear to understand shock horror and splatterpunk gore far better than they understand the more subtle and disturbing undercurrent of gnosticism that powers the Silent Hill universe.




The movie throws a couple fun bones out at the end....if fun means "painful teasers for the small chunk of the audience that actually played all the games," with a quick introduction of the truck driver Travis Grady (from Silent Hill: Origins) and a quick shot of a prison transport that is no doubt transporting Murphy Pendleton from Silent Hill Downpour on board. Surprised we didn't see a lone war vet heading home at the same time, or a guy sitting in a room somewhere, for good measure. The movie also keeps Harry Mason alive all the way to the end, where he stays in Silent Hill to look for his lost wife. A vague, half-hearted allusion to Silent Hill 2? Maybe.

Unfortunately this movie was just more annoying than funny, unlike the hysterical Resident Evil films which won out by virtue of sheer audacity. It was sort of fun to watch, but just not as much as a better film with more effort would have been.  I give it a C-, because it clearly had so much potential, but the only way that a good Silent Hill film will be made is if someone were to talk Guillermo del Toro or David Lynch into doing it. Then, maybe....just maybe....we might get a movie worth seeing.