Campaign Toybox
The Story: The purpose of a toy is to be owned by a child. A toy without a child has no purpose. No reason to live and no place in toy society. Many such toys take their own lives or drift away to die in the landfills. But a few are unwilling or unable to seek death. They become the ronin of the toy world, living in the shadows, travelling by darkness, trying to find a quest, a goal, a reason to justify remaining alive. Some of them – if they are lucky – find this meaning in helping other lost or damaged toys escape the claws of the Horrors and find children of their own. Of course, the only children who want lost and damaged toys are those who have no toys of their own, and those children have lives filled with their own dangers – dangers only a lost toy can save them from.
Christmas is the worst time of all, of course. Yes, more toys find their ways to children, but so many more are made and so many more are dumped and abandoned, and knowing that many toys are finding children at the same time only makes it worse for those that are lost. And so many more children suffer and need more and more toys to help them survive. The Horrors are everywhere at Christmas, and at their most hungry, for when folks forget about the weariness of the world, Horrors starve, and look even more fiercely for those who cannot forget. As the hearths crackle and the windows shine with light from within, the darkness grows deeper, little match girls die and Horrors cackle. And the only ones that can make any of this better are those who walk unseen and unloved, by their own kind and the children they love so much. They are the Lost Toys.
Style and Structure: There’s something about the world of toys that calls to mind dark horror sliced with ritualistic promises and honour codes. One look at Changeling: The Lost proves that. Add in duty and you get the kind of stories that knights or samurai were born for. And rogue knights, or ronin, are perhaps the simplest protagonists to build a story around, as long as they care about something. You get all the passion of duty without having to follow orders. Plus you get the whole bad-boy thing, but thrown into context against the purity of the original. Nobody falls like a fallen knight, nobody is more lost than a ronin without a daimyo. And if you’re looking for a pure and noble spirit there is nothing better than a childhood toy, the most stalwart and pure force ever known.
You can run this with a big emphasis on the purity of what was lost, using something like Pendragon or Paladin, or on the katana-wielding rogue feel, using Vampire or Changeling, or anywhere in between. It can be action, horror, monster of the week or epic tragedy. Whichever you choose, these are the kind of stories many, many RPGs are already set up to tell. All you’re doing is adding teddies for that hint of cute that may indeed make the blackness all the more horrifying – and hopefully keep it from feeling like another rip-off of Angel.
PCs and NPCs: Toys are a superstitious and cowardly bunch, and tend to classify their ilk by appearances and substances. To wit: your character races will probably best be done on material lines: fuzzies, plastics (including dolls), metals and woodens (old school) and electronics for the ones that talk or light up. Class roles may come from what kind of role they were designed for in toy society, or, perhaps how they choose to go on since they became Lost. No doubt some fight the Horrors with weapons and others with magic, brains or just furious courage. Again, we’re on familiar ground here, pick your favourite RPG’s approach and use that. Don’t forget to give your toy some bad-ass taint or curse or mishap that led to them being lost. Maybe it’s as simple as a missing eye or a stuttering voice chip, or maybe they fell off the conveyor belt at the factory and never even saw the light of the mall.
NPCs can be other ronin toys, or toys within the system, and children with or without toys themselves. Note that the Lost Toys can’t have children of their own because if they dedicated themselves to saving one child, they wouldn’t be able to do their missions any more – no more leading lonely children to abandoned toys, or dealing with the other things in the dark.
Plots and Villains: Children are afraid of the dark, because they can see what lurks there. Part of growing up is learning how to keep these things at bay, but children don’t have these skills (and adults want them to wait as long as possible before learning the harsh skills that keep the monsters at bay). That’s why adults aren’t any fun, and why children need toys to protect them. There are at least five commonly spotted Horrors, all creatures which feed on human suffering, the kind that visits you in the middle of the night. Grindlings, the spirits of weariness, mostly bother adults but learning that you have to go to school every day attracts these spirits (and when they hear their parents worrying about money). Remorsels are also less interested in children, as adults have far more they regret, but children can still wish they hadn’t looked so stupid. The Unfairies prey on adults and children alike, whenever there’s an injustice, even if its in their favour. Children have most to fear from the Worrisons, who make them fear the future and their own inadequacies, and worst of all, the Looklikes. The Looklikes, as the name indicates, can look like whatever you fear. They prey on victims of the primal fear of the dark and the unknown, the monster and the predator, lurking and hungry. Looklikes also gain the strength and powers of whatever they look like and are a child’s worst enemy and a toy’s fiercest opponent, but all the Horrors are terrifying. And they have endless plans and schemes with one goal: to devour the souls of children, wringing every last drop of fear and terror from them until nothing is left but catatonic shells.
Between fighting the good fight, Lost Toys have to also keep themselves alive, find new recruits, seek out Lost Pets, fight off rats and garbage men and try to keep away from the Found Toys, who often see them as a threat to their positions. And at Christmas, the work is never finished. The gutters are choked with newly Lost Toys, and the children who feel alone and afraid seem to be innumerable. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
Sources: I saw the animated film of The Mouse And His Child as a young boy and it messed me the hell up, so I thoroughly recommend it if you can find it (or the book). Classical fairytales The Brave Tin Soldier and the Nutcracker are full of freaky toys too, and the latter also has a terrifying claymation film adaption. More recently we had the excellent Toy Story 1 and 2 (with #3 coming soon): they’re mostly light fare but take a look at the things under the bed in the first film and the threat of “outgrowing” in the second to understand the plight of the Lost Toys. Small Soldiers is another useful reference. If you want something more adult you tend to have to rely on horror films: Chucky from Child’s Play (and its many sequels) being the touchstone. More frequent than evil toys are evil puppets (Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes being a fantastic example, or for 80’s gore fans there’s the Puppetmaster) but they are still useful for ideas about what can be done when nobody is looking.
For outcasts protecting the night, vampires are a good place to start (Angel, Forever Knight, Blade, The Confessor, Anita Blake etc etc). For ronin, check out some Japanese classics like The Seven Samurai or Yojimbo or their Western remakes, The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars. For just generalised dark protectors of the night, start with Batman and work through pretty much 50% of everything on the popular culture shelves these days.
RPGs: Puppetland was, again, puppets, but it works fine with toys and is brilliant. Toying With Destruction was a minis game but it had a clever method of measuring stats based on real toys, allowing you to play this as (ahem) “live action”. The Germans made a cool game in the 80s called Plusch, Plunder and Power about living teddies, but good luck finding it. There is much here that overlaps with Little Fears, newly released in its Nightmare Edition. There it is the kids doing the fighting, but it’s a good look at kids in trouble. Along a similar line we can find Grimm (the new version or the original D20 one). Either version of Changeling is right up this particularly shadowy alley, with the fey often being toybuilders or made to resemble toys (the Manikins in the Lost, particularly), and since this borrows a lot of White Wolf’s high notes, any of its incarnations would be a useful resource, if not your base. It really isn’t that hard, however, to turn vampires into teddy bears, or vice versa. Try it, you’ll see. And Merry Christmas.
