“And I think it is even more terrible when a modern man or woman, girded round with privilege and education and all the trappings of the so-called good life and all the freight of the clever, pragmatic, vision-hungry modern mind, is forced to confront utter, alien, and elemental evil and terror. What has the unspeakable and the unbelievable got to do with second homes and tax shelters and private schools for the kids and a pate in every terrine and a BMW in every garage?”

Anne River Siddons, in a letter about The House Next Door, from Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.

I was going to talk about weather magic. Fascinating subject; I believe that weather magic is probably the most underutilized type of magic in roleplaying games. But, I’m putting that off until next month, because of “breaking news.” In the campaign I’m running (and what subconsciously prompted the article idea), the whole hidden magic plot came to fruition. So, instead I subject the poor reader to a completely narcissist case study. If you’re the type to skip “making of” TV shows, hate blogs, and not bother with the DVD extras, you’re probably safe to skip this column.

Our group alternates games every week – one week, I run a game; the other week, the other GM runs a game. We have been playing GURPS for quite a while in my campaign, and I wanted to do something different. So, I picked up the Serenity rules, saw it wasn’t d20 (nothing against it, but it just doesn’t do it for me when I GM, and anyway the other person was running an AD&D 3.5 game already), saw it had a lot of the same qualities I like in GURPS, and decided to introduce this to the group. I had a one-shot session planned to get people introduced to the rules, and then there’s usually a session where people create characters. This gives me a few weeks to come up with an idea that revolves around the characters. The players aren’t shy on giving me enough hooks to use. I don’t have everything planned out, but I like to have some direction, if only to have a consistent theme.

Those weeks are usually quite busy. During that time, I was on a Lovecraft kick. Have you read Lovecraft (and I’m talking the real thing, not “in the universe of” or “inspired by”)? I know a lot of people can’t stand his flowery style and he’s almost as easy to parody as Faulkner or Hemmingway, but when he sets up a mood, it stays set up. Here are a few quotes:

“It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion. There were buildings and other architectural remains – in one terrified glance I saw a weird pattern of tumuli, a savage circle of monoliths, a low-domes Roman ruin…”

And

“I felt that the strange-voiced man who had so queerly affected the clerk must have a pivotal place in the ominous business, and hoped that Keene station employees and telegraph-office records might tell something about him and about how he happened to make his inquiry when and where he did.”

Furthermore, the Lovecraft mythos is nothing if not epic, and who can resist an epic scope? And check out the parallels between the Alliance and the Mythos. “But if the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ has any significance, it is as an ‘anti-mythology’: whereas most of the religions and mythologies in human history seek to reconcile human beings with the cosmos by depicting a close, benign relationship between man and god, Lovecraft’s pseudomythology brutally shows that man is not the center of the universe, that the ‘gods’ care nothing for him, and that the earth and all its inhabitants are but a momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the universe.” (introduction to the Penguin Classics version of H.P. Lovecraft, by S. T. Joshi). Likewise, Serenity’s Alliance is not actively evil, just bureaucratic and uncaring (and remember the quote: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”). The Cthulhu Mythos is just an extension of that point of view, a few evil people doing their thing while the Gods just watch in detachment, their hand in the popcorn bowl, munching quietly away.

So, I had a vision of the campaign as Arkham Horror in Space. One of the NPCs was agoraphobic, highly autistic, and an engineering genius – his disorders were partly because I didn’t want to handle his character outside of the ship, but I had a feeling they would end up part of the arc. I then put all thoughts of introducing weird stuff out of my mind. Horror only works if there’s something normal to compare it to. The big beast only surprises you if you’re in suburbia. I also was subtle because the players didn’t know what campaign they were getting. But, more of that later.

So, the characters got a ship and ran a few trade lines and dealt with the usual business problems that young entrepreneurs deal with. The weirdest thing they had to deal with was an overly friendly pirate king and his overly friendly stepdaughter. Then the characters chanced on a bounty mission where the payoff was high, and the mark was last reported in the area. The characters went to the planet of Shadow, to a dusty town of maybe a hundred people, and learned that the bounty headed into the mountains with some mining equipment, rations, and guard dogs.

The characters tracked the bounty to an abandoned mine. They went through, and ended up face-to-face with a castle hewn from the very stone itself. There was an altar with odd runes. There were odd bloodstains. The dogs were rabid, and the bounty was even crazier, chanting in a language no one understood. One of the characters actually glimpsed what was being summoned before the ceremony was interrupted and the castle started collapsing, a green glow with a vague hint of tentacles.

And here’s the joy. The characters (and players) rationalized it. They tried to figure it out, but thought like the characters would have thought, keeping it all on a rational level. The one character who saw the green glow chalked it to hallucinations or effects. The bounty was obviously crazy, and they discounted his ranting as, well, ranting. They kept the guy sedated most of the time, and turned him over. Later, one of the players said that he wanted to find out what all that was about, but the money was too much of a lure – some of the previous jobs went south and they were running behind on the monthly payments. In short, they acted real.

Fast forward a few months of real time and a month of game time. Again, the payoff was unbelievably high, this time to infiltrate an Alliance base on Londinium, get some information on how some rich person’s kid died “in the line of duty”, and get out alive. Experiments got out, and the characters ran into beasties that they knew should not exist, Hounds of Tindalos and Nightgaunts. At this point, the players realized this wasn’t your typical Serenity world. But, they escaped and went to the next job.

More normalcy. Is normalcy a word? It should be. The characters had to deal with the family from Hell as passengers. Kids are cute until they get into the heavy machinery.

Then, the planet Londinium was surrounded by poisonous mist. The Redcoats (oh yeah, them – a Browncoat terrorist movement that the characters ran into a few sessions before) claimed that they destroyed the planet. Official reports stated that the few survivors told stories of tentacles rising from the deep, of maws and insects and unspeakable horrors coming from the mist. The players were starting to grok the Arkham angle. The next few sessions had this going on in the background, of planets slowly getting eaten by mystical forces. Then, a mind scan of Tick-Tock (the autistic engineer NPC) showed that he had entered the Abyss, and he was altered. Amongst the descriptions in the mind scan were quotes from the Simon Necronomicon, including mention of Kutulu and Azag-Thoth (Ia! Shaduya Ia! Barra, Barra, Barra! Go Team Go!). That tipped the hat. As of this writing, the characters are heading to Londinium to seal the gate, save the world, and preferably, make some sort of profit out of it. At least, I think that’s the plan, but they’ve derailed my ideas many many times before to the point I’m not surprised when the campaign goes in a completely different way than I expected it to. But that’s the blissful burden of a Game Master.

Lessons learned:

1. Don’t get too excited too early. Vary the mystical mumbo jumbo with something more realistic. The word of the day is contrast.

2. It can get to self-parody very quickly. Players were joking about how they needed an Elder Sign before going on a mission, or complained that their Serenity character sheets lacked a sanity statistic. I think I dodged that bullet because even though there was the Arkham angle, the campaign was still designed around the characters. The players were involved and invested in the campaign. Plus, for all the Lovecraft references, it still is identifiably a Serenity campaign.

3. Halfway through, I realized I did the players a disservice – essentially, a roleplaying bait-and-switch. The players were game, which I was happy with, but it could have gone bad very easily. So, pay attention to the players and see how the deal with the magic. If it seems like they’re not dealing with it well, then switch the plot a bit, ditch the magic angle and make the game more in line with what they’re expecting. I guess this is a good rule of thumb for anything in a campaign, but this especially. I was also adding a psychic angle to the game, but the player I was subjecting it to did not like it at all. So, I stopped (the aforementioned player is my wife, so that’s added incentive to appease her).

So, next month will return you to your regularly scheduled column. Until then.