Campaign Toybox
The Story: This is a little oblique, but stick with me. The year is 1908. Massive earthquakes rock Italy and San Francisco, and a gigantic meteorite flattens Tunguska. But in Europe it remains a beautiful time of peace, prosperity and new ideas – revolutionary new ideas. Einstein is proposing Specific Relativity and Minkowski suggests that there is a fourth dimension that works just like the others. But the centre of the world is Paris, where a whole new kind of art is being created. Impressionism gives way to wild Fauvism and nihilistic Dadaism, then Cubism questions the whole concept of vision, and finally Surrealism creates that which is “more real than reality”. Geniuses like Picasso, Duchamp. Miro, Braque and Dali are painting pictures which show multiple dimensions all at once, including time. They are bending and breaking all the rules of images, truth and reason.
And they are unmaking the world.
They didn’t start it, of course. The dragon was already there, although previously you could only see it by drinking a great deal of absinthe or smoking opium for two days straight. And the dragon was always trying to get through, and only held back by the faintest of barriers. But these new paintings have driven cracks into the barrier like spikes hammered into a ice-covered lake. Holes have exploded in Russia and Italy. Things have come through. Things are falling apart, and the centre cannot hold, as it were.
Horrified, the painters sought to undo what they had done, but found they could not. What they did realise, though, was they could control the cracks with their works. They could allow just enough unreality to bleed through to allow them to harness that power, and then use it to keep the dragon under control. To fight him back through the holes and hold the world together. Th fate of the world rests in salons and cafes, and the future of humanity lies in the hand that holds the paintbrush.
Style and Structure: Your typical RPG setting needs a reason for the PCs, a source for kewl powers or macguffin and an archetypal badguy. So this one is pretty standard vaguely historical monster hunting – not far from Call of Cthulhu – or, if you turn the power nobs up, historical supers. It’s just that the origin of and style for all these monsters and powers is Modern art. Note that Modern art is a movement, and shouldn’t be confused with contemporary art, ie art being made now. Which points to the issue here: most people don’t know much about art and care even less, and your players are likely to feel the same. But you don’t need much research to get this up and running. A couple of minutes with Wikipedia and the works of Picasso and Braque will do you fine. After that, you just use slip these ideas and images onto your standard rules-set.
Although system matters, a lot of system comes from the style and images we put on our games. So you’ll find that even with only a veneer of art theory (which you can pick up in a few minutes) your games will feel different. This is, after all, the whole essence of effects-based power design in supers RPGs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s blasting fire, or eldritch lightning or the power of Dada, if it does damage, it uses the same rules. Likewise, the right macguffin – and the gorgeous historic setting of La Belle Epoque – will give your standard monster-hunting adventures their own unique flavour.
PCs and NPCs: The poet and critic Appolionaire was perhaps the king of the salons of Paris. It is he who brought together the great minds of the art world into one studio in Montmartre, with the beautiful white pinnacle of the Sacre Coeur out one window, and the Tour Eiffel out the other. Who are these artists? Some are the PCs, the others – like Picasso and Braque – are legends the PCs have heard of, and in whose footsteps they will follow. Such legendaries also need help: Picasso is missing in his homeland Spain, where he was investigating strange fluctuations in Guernica, Duchamp was critically injured by a nude while descending a staircase – a nude which still remains at large - and Escher has been lost inside his own self-replicating paintings. Meanwhile Paris is full of young poets, writers and even military types, as the empire-building conflicts of England and Germany hovers constantly in the shadows. And of course, this being Paris, there are beautiful young waitresses, pavement artists and balloon sellers on every corner.
If your players are finding it hard to distinguish Parisian painters, their powers can certainly do that. Artistic movements are the source of these, with just a touch of fanciful interpretation. The Fauves were famous for their wild, uncontrollable use of colour, so they might blast prismatic sprays, or simply have controllable physical fury (super strength and speed) or perhaps you could take the name literally (this is hyperreality, after all) and let them turn into beasts. The deconstructionism of Dada is probably blaster powers or anything that destroys. Cubism messes with spatial representation, so that covers teleporting or telekinesis. Passage – the technique of portraying movement in time in a single picture - covers time travel or super speed and Surrealism can be the ability to shape matter and/or flesh itself – perhaps biokinesis, or element control. Impressionism can mess with people’s minds, and so on and so forth…
Plots and Villains: Whenever you’ve got your monsters and your power coming from the same source, villains are easy to come by. Crazed surrealists like Magritte are destroying whole patches of reality by denying pipes are pipes. Dali unintentionally goes too far and bends time, makes tigers fly and sets giraffes on fire. When Duchamp gets out of his coma, he starts delving into the dragon and Finding Objects. Then there’s the truly mad Abstractionists who just want to turn the world into chaotic lines and shapes. Meanwhile, since most of these artistic types were French or Latin (if we exclude Ernst and Bosch), it is fun to oppose them with the rectilinear Teutonic Germans. While the painters are trying to stop the world being destroyed, the scientists are encouraging it. Einstein’s probably too cuddly to make a good villain, but he makes an excellent ex-villain, who escaped when he saw what they were using his Relativity for. Godel is probably the mastermind, working on his terrible Incompleteness Device which will force the universe to no longer contain itself.
Of course, you’ve also got all the other supernatural enemies you can imagine, which have been empowered by the return of the dragon - ghosts, vampires, terrible beasts, magicians and more. Such mundane threats will help keep you grounded if the above options are screaming too far into pulpy territory. On the other hand, you could turn the cheese up to bleeding and have villains with names like Still Life and The Frame!
Sources: The absolutely mandatory starting point is the second volume of Grant Morrison’s run on the Doom Patrol The Cars that Ate Paris which features the Brotherhood of Dada. Paintings which can shape or predict reality are a staple of genre fiction, from classics like Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to the very recent Heroes TV show. For fun with hyper-reality, check out Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyper-reality. And for insights into the amazing world of innovation around the turn of the last century, plus heaps of hyper-reality fun, have a waltz through Godel, Escher, Bach. To get a sense of the setting, try any of a hundred European WW2 films, or modern works like Paris J’temme or Amelie.
RPGs: Call (or Trail) of Cthulhu is a primary first stop – not least because it’s so gloriously historical. Keeping in the right era points to pulp triumphs like Spirit of the Century, Hollow World Expedition, Adventure! or Pulp Zombies. Unknown Armies and Over the Edge are both weird enough to handle the War of Art without any trouble. The World of Darkness, new or old, has a perfect vibe and plenty of historical supplements as well. I’m almost certain there was a Paris sourcebook for the old World of Darkness, and a Parisian adventure for CoC, but someone will need to check me on that. For painting-powered supers, go for something effects based like Mutants and Masterminds, Wild Talents or Savage Worlds, or roll things forward into the heights of Expressionism and the coming of WW2 and use the wonderful Godlike. All of them will need some work, but it’s a small price to pay for great art – that can also kick your ass.
