Campaign Toybox
The Story: Robert Frost said “good fences make good neighbours”. Certainly many believe that good enemies make strong nations, and it seemed true for America in the 21st century. As a lasting – if grudging - peace and unificiation spread right across Asia left America without purpose and without ready trading partners, the United States turned on themselves, tearing its streets apart over issues of religion, freedom and the growing poverty. And then it happened. A silver circle dropped like a stone into the Pacific Ocean. When the West Coast recovered from the resulting earthquakes and tsunamis, the news was very clear: the aliens were finally here, and they weren’t friendly.
They weren’t from anywhere that could yet be identified: probes had simply picked up a stream of information on a beam of light. When it hit the dense gasses of Jupiter, it executed its commands, coalescing plasma into high density crystals, building tiny machines that then build bigger machines that then built massive warmachines. They were vulnerable enough to earth weapons, however, and the Air Force had brought down the first salvo with relative ease. Or so they thought. Soon, reports came in of strange life-forms washing up on the beaches. The crystalline machines were mimicking human evolution at an astounding rate. And then one day, a shimmering, hairless man walked out of the sea and onto Venice Beach.
He killed twelve people before he was shot by a private citizen. As he died, he exploded into crystal fragments that melted into the sand. And we knew they could take human form, and they wanted to kill us.
But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that until this morning, you thought you were you. But this morning you woke up and you “remembered” you were one of them. In harsh light, your skin glitters. Under a few layers of synthetic flesh, your bones and muscles are nothing but pinkish crystals, hard but brittle. Your blood runs clear after a few minutes. But you don’t remember any mission. You don’t think you want to harm anyone at all. But you know for sure that the humans want to harm you. You need to evade, and survive, and get back to the mothership. Luckily you have some training and experience in espionage and security. In fact, somewhere in the back of your mind you seem to remember something about learning that, and something about an experiment, an experiment that would make America great again…
Style and Structure: For all their talk about you playing the monster, very few of the World of Darkness games and their ilk really made the players feel hunted. And being hunted is an incredibly visceral feeling. It may be the purest and most instinctual form of horror, and it never lets up or slows down, yet is so rare in RPGs. Mainly because keeping up that pressure is hard work on the group and hard to keep writing for. If you make every story about running away, it gets dull fast, but if there are chances to release the pressure, then why are they running? But a balance can be found, as some of the examples in the sources show.
One key idea to keep the pressure on is that the players’ crystalline structure makes it impossible for them to heal. They can take a pretty hefty amount of impact damage but if it goes over a threshold, they shatter. A bullet to the hand won’t slowly heal, it will blow your fingers off. One of the bugbears of GMs everywhere is systems that allow characters to almost totally reset themselves the moment they get downtime; taking that away from players will scare the hell out of them. So all injuries are now permanent. Run out of hit points and you shatter like a pane of glass. No rolls to stabilise. And no hospitals or doctors, ever, because a few minutes examination will mean the jig is up and the men in black will be strapping you to an autopsy table in five seconds flat.
The other good way to drive hunted games is with mystery and exploration. There may in fact be safe havens, allies and answers out there but finding them is going to be damn hard when anyone you ask could try to kill you. Of course, as always, you don’t want the players to give up in despair but mystery and obfuscation allows you to portion out hope and answers at the teeny tiniest rate – and, if you get backed in the corner, switch things around on everyone. After all, if the government really did make you into an alien, maybe you really want to end up on the autopsy table. Maybe they’ll give you the cure and say “well done”.
PCs and NPCs: Resist the temptation to give the players too many powers and too many different powers. If being an alien is a curse, it shouldn’t also provide magical gifts and nor should it make you a special snowflake. Use variety only to drive mystery; use the similarity of the condition to drive unity of the PCs and fear of everyone not like this. If players get to choose different aspects of being an alien, they get more points of data about what they are. And the key to this horror is not just that people hate you for what you are but that you don’t even know what that is. This means your players aren’t going to get to play in the powers toybox. But they can still have fun making up their own backgrounds, choosing from any manner of agents or operatives or military personnel – in fact, it can be anything at all. If they’ve ever wanted to play a Midwestern house wife, then this is the game that will let them, because there will be no problem hooking them into the story once they have their inhuman nature as a target on their heads.
Resist the temptation also to do a bait and switch on them. Players really like to own their backgrounds and don’t want to question them constantly…unless they know that from the beginning. So tell them they’re designing what they think they were, and now don’t know anymore. Let them do the same with NPCs – once they get that they can’t trust their memories, they will hand you betrayal situations on a platter. They believe they’ve been married for twenty years. They believe the captain at the precinct has always done right by them. They believe their buddy from Iraq wouldn’t turn them in. Players will soon realise that the more NPCs they make the more rope they are giving to hang themselves, and if they like the game’s concept, they’ll enjoy handing you more and more rope.
Plots and Villains: Avoid the trap of Lost and Heroes: work out some of your solutions in advance. Or better, work out several of them and feed hints towards each possibility, so you’ve got multiple options to fall back on. Only when you need to do a really big reveal do you need to pick the “truth” – or at least the truth until they get to the next layer, which can now be one of your other options. But don’t string your players along too long. They’re writers as well as the audience and won’t tolerate five series of reinventions. Villains we’ve already discussed: the players will find them for you. That’s the beauty of the hunted situation: everyone but the PCs is a potential villain, and a sympathetic one. Because you really are a monster, and you can understand the fear of your enemies…even though a moment ago they were your friends.
Sources: In a sense, this a zombie movie played in reverse. You turned into an undead freak and your buddies picked up the shotguns and are trying to not let past loyalties stop them from killing you. So start by watching any of the plethora of zombie films out there (and vampire films often too have test loyalties). A greater extension of that idea are films about people being possessed, ala the Body Snatchers, a film reinvented three times, with the aliens being metaphors for the fear of communism, militarism and commercialism, respectively. Speaking of metaphors, for a study of a society gripped by fear of hidden aliens, read or watch anything on McCarthyism – James Ellroy’s crime books look at it, particularly The Big Nowhere, and Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible was a savage critique of such fear gone mad.
The TV show the Fugitive is the archetypal hunted show, and is full of really excellent examples of how to keep a character on the run yet tell new stories each week. It was inspired by Les Miserables, which is also worth stealing from when you can (particularly the villain) as is the excellent movie remake with Tommy Lee Jones (again, a sympathetic, awesome hunter). Teen tv show Roswell was full of angst and romance but also did the hunted angle really well – look especially at how they rebooted the hunters each series, to keep the fear changing. The X Files is always a good resource for anything with mysteries and aliens, and there are a couple of good episodes where the agents for once are being sought out and compromised. The Will Smith film Enemy of the State has its flaws but it is also a text book example of how easy it is for a large government agency to track anyone, anywhere, in this digital, all-recorded age. Put it in your tool box, and make your players squirm at the thought of just making a phone call.
RPGs: Conspiracy X is right up this alley, and when the aliens sourcebook comes out next year should allow you to pitch a game from the other side, although its aliens are pretty powerful. Cthulhu has the right sense of desperation, and swapping out the Mythos for a force which finally very much cares if the PCs live or die will bring a fresh breath to old stories. Any monster hunting game will be a good source, and will heighten the irony if the players suddenly find themselves hunted by the kinds of characters they used to play. You can even use the monsters as models for the normal humans: after all, a massive bureaucracy of dangerous, infighting, all-seeing agencies with open jurisdictions and the ability to scare the hell out civilians is not far remove from a gigantic conspiracy of vampires or aliens. And if they can make you think you’re an alien, who knows what others powers their agents might possess? That’s why it’s scary – if this is real, what else could be? If they’re trying to kill little old me, what else have they already done?
