Campaign Toybox
The Story: When Lieutenant Fiona Cortez finally caught up with the serial killer Devan McCall he’d tortured and killed more than forty women. When she ordered him to surrender, he simply laughed and told her he was going to a better place – then committed suicide by cop. To the cops, and the victims, it seemed like he’d gotten off easy. She didn’t believe in hell, so she wondered – out loud one day in a bar – if there was a way that the system could make sure his soul suffered appropriate justice. And one day, a scientist heard her and introduced her to his boss, Dr Verbrak. He called it a Dimensional Untangler but what it really was was a door into the Land of the Dead. Or at least, the City of the Dead; the giant ghostly imprint of her own beat, repeated in the necroscape beyond. It wasn’t exactly a nice place to be, but it wasn’t hell, and it contained the innocent, and the guilty.
Eventually, maybe, the government might work out some kind of extradition treaty or change the laws to accommodate arresting the dead. In the meantime, Cortez discovered she could step through the gate and find Devan McCall. When she did, he was drinking beer with his buddies, so she hauled his dead ass back across the line. Then she had jurisdiction again and could put him in an electric cage for a few hundred years.
The next step was getting a squad of bad-asses together to keep the good work going.
Style and Structure: You can, of course, run this anywhere from deadpan episodic police procedural to four-colour super asskicking. And yeah, I said super because that’s the fun part: in the land of the dead, the living have super powers. Exactly what those powers might be depend on how you want to write your land of the dead, but think expansively. Ghost inversions make sense – maybe the dead can’t walk through the walls of their necropolis, but the living can – but there’s no need to assume that all the living can do that, or that you need to stop at ghost-themed powers. Maybe how you die imparts an impression on your ghostly form; maybe that can be simulated by entering the Untangler in different ways - or maybe it depends on how you’ll eventually die, which would be spooky as hell: “Well, I’m basically Johnny Storm in the land of the dead, so that probably means I’m going to be killed in a horrific fire.”
The point is, this is an excuse to run a supers game, and with a really interesting twist, because the heroes aren’t freaks on a familiar earth, but they have the full Kal-El experience going: they seem normal to themselves, but have superpowers when they cross over into their strange new land. Which has its downside too: no doubt the ghosts won’t take kindly to the live-a-lots trying to enforce their laws on dead man’s turf. Some of them may be angry enough to cross over to make their point. Which gives you the chance to run two games in one: super-powered bounty-hunter ass-kicking in the gothic-as-all-hell city of the dead, and low-powered supernatural horror back home. Two for the price of one is always a good deal.
PCs and NPCs: The range of PCs depends on how widely known the gate is. If people start finding out there’s a way into the world of the dead, then some government types are probably going to move quickly to limit the traffic to certain people. That means playing those people – cops, army types, scientists – or people savvy enough to get past the restrictions. But if it’s just: being done by Dr Verbrak in his basement, then Cortez can round up anyone she likes relatives of victims, professional bounty hunters, crazed old occultists, city historians, mad mediums, child psychics, conspiracy-fearing gun-nuts, people who just happened to be walking past, corpses keen to earn time back in the land of the living…anyone at all.
Your players can even be the mad scientist and vengeful hunter who start the whole thing, so they don’t have to take orders. Having other people around can help with plots though, and let the GM deal with the issues of the technology and such. Every crazy science macguffin needs a room of white-coats to deal with the boring stuff, or say “I don’t understand! These readings make no sense” seconds before it malfunctions and blows them through a wall.
Don’t forget allies on the other side, too. It’s risky business helping a copper, it’s risky business helping an alien; combine the two and anyone who might help the PCs will be thin on the ground, and that’s a feature, not a bug. It makes those few who do as valuable as oxygen to the PCs, and likely to be messed-up types with lots of skeletons in their closet, if you’ll forgive the pun. They’re also likely to be the kind of self-interested cowards who will turn on the PCs when they need to. Perfect story fodder.
Plots and Villains: The thing cops and superheroes (and monster hunters) have in common is they’re pretty easy to keep writing for. Just pick a bad guy/super villain, have him hide somewhere. That’s why Law and Order ran for twenty years, and Batman for about eighty or something. The trick is making sure the bad guys aren’t just the same guy in different hats and that the chase is always interesting. That’s less easy but at least if you have the veneer of a cop show, your players will be expecting familiar patterns – a name to catch, a list of clues of where a spook might be hiding, the trail lengthens, the twist, the catch-up, and the final showdown. And that’s good: establishing a pattern helps people get into the smaller details; again, look at Law and Order. It’s not dull because its narrative structure is always constant, that means you can ignore structure and focus on other things. And it also means when you do mess with structure, it feels a lot more interesting.
And for bigger arcs, look again to Law and Order, in terms of how politics is all in the background. A power shift like this, with the living hunting the dead, would cause huge shockwaves through the power structures of the necropolis, and that could lead to supernatural repercussions in our world. Maybe, so far, most spirits have been content to play nice at séances, in a spirit of healthy cultural exchange – an attitude that might be about change rather violently. Or maybe word gets out that the afterlife isn’t so bad at all, and suicides and murders start to sky-rocket. A few tiny words in the wrong place could tear the whole world to pieces. That’s a knife edge you want your players teetering on.
Sources: For the most part, crossing over is generally considered to happen in the other direction but you can always watch Medium, Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me or The Ghost Whisperer, and steal ideas. The much-fun show Reaper is also set on our world (and features slacker heroes instead of bad-asses) but has the bounty-hunting escaped souls element down perfectly. Travelling to the world of the dead is rare – people are more likely to go to heaven and hell in films – but there are a few wonderful necroscapes out there. The gorgeous noir computer adventure game Grim Fandango depicts a wonderfully surreal and Mexican-themed land of the dead, and looking into the Mexican myths that inspired it is a good idea. Other tales typically have it like our world, only much more drab and boring (deserts or snowscapes are popular), sometimes to the point of insanity (which is why the dead want to leave).Certainly the mythical Hades was not a place you would want to have a picnic, but the tale of Orpheus is a good one for an example of how the dead might view a mortal interloper (although there the motive for the journey is love, not revenge). Finally, check out any story where people jump in and out of dimensions, even if they’re not deadworlds. The Matrix, eXistenZ and Tron spring to mind but dream-visiting is just as good; check out Chris Nolan’s new Inception and its predecessors.
RPGs: RPGs, far more than other media, have visited the lands of the dead. D&D has the Shadowfell, for starters, and other planes of interest. Your first major stop is White Wolf, however - but don’t just look at Wraith (best necroscapes ever) and Orpheus (great cross-over macguffin and power lists), be sure to check out Werewolf and Changeling as well, because the Umbra and the Dreaming are equally good models for a land of the dead that sits on top of our world, and the adventures you can have crossing in and out of realities. For a mind-bending city that runs on narrative rules, not ours, try and find Nexus: The Infinite City; or the weird island of Al Amarja in Over the Edge might also be a good model for a city where all the rules are different (and is the best city supplement ever for any game). If you’ve been expansive in your power choices, you may want your favourite supers game; choose one that lets you build normal folk equally well so your PCs can have both “real world” and “necroscape” forms. Of course, if you’re mixing supers with hunting criminals then you’re right up Mutant City Blues’ (crime) alley – but then again, if your cops are more 1950’s style, you might want to try Edge of Midnight’s noir-shaded alleyway instead.
