Campaign Toybox
The Story: Yesterday, you were pretty sure you were a vampire in a dark gothic metropolis. The day before, you were a barbarian warrior, slaying undead nightmares in their ancient tombs. But today, you seem to be just a normal twentieth century person and the vampire charging at you doesn’t seem to want to invite you into his clan...
Style and Structure: This is a gimmick, sure, and it’s only suited to a one-off, but when a gimmick works, it can be glorious. Most of our roleplaying games work on two basic assumptions: that the players (and their characters) have at least some idea of the world they are inhabiting and its rules, and that they can trust what the GM is telling them about that world. Taking that away leaves the players very much in the dark. And the dark is scary.
Many kinds of madness, particularly delusional schizophrenia, are manifested by an inability to tell the real from the imagined. Simulating this in an RPG is very easy: you simply present the players with two or three (or more) RPG sessions, operating simultaneously, and don’t tell them which one is the “real” one. Most importantly though, whatever they do in one reality does carry over into the other. If they kill the vampire running towards them in the fantasy tomb, then they also kill the vampire in the world of gothic intrigue, and they also kill the goth they just ran into on the streets of Indianapolis.
That said, while there is a fertile horror ground in fantasy bleeding into the real world, you’re going to want to avoid going down that path too much, because it’s cliché in general and it’s doubly cliché in the RPG hobby, thanks to the wonder of Mazes and Monsters. Don’t think that just because you’re shifting through entirely fictional worlds the horror and confusion cannot be manifold. After all, a vampire in D&D, Masquerade and Cthulhu are all very different things indeed, and figuring out which world you’re in is vastly important, before you get killed for getting it wrong...
PCs and NPCs: Pulling a stunt like this inevitably takes away some agency from the players but you don’t have to do all the work making up the characters for them. You can get them to make up their own characters in advance. You could tell each player they’re going into a different genre, which has the added bonus of making that player more sure that “his” reality is real. Alternatively, dig out their old characters from old campaigns: now they have no problem dropping into their new personas, and have even more reason to believe each world is real. It also ensures they know how to use each system you’re using, so they can make snap judgements with ease. It also provides you with NPCs from your notes (or from other PCs whose players aren’t at the table) which saves you even more work.
Using the same system across all the characters will also help keep some sanity to the thing, but it reduces the cognitive whiplash as you switch between them. Also, a popular generic system with several published worlds offers obvious explanations of how they might rotate in and out of reality, and you don’t want that. Of course, you do want them looking for an answer but you don’t want them finding comfort in the obvious ones. Of course, the campaign worlds/characters you choose to cycle through might also suggest solutions but your control over them makes it easier for you to pull those rugs away.
Plots and Villains: You’re going to want a solution to it. That doesn’t mean any one world has to be real, or more real than the others, but one world should probably matter more than the others – even if the players have to choose which one they think that is, or which one they think that should be. There may be no one right answer (or even a very clear or precise one), as long as there’s a dramatic or interesting answer.
So what is the answer? Why are things collating? Unless you’re as good as Chris Nolan, dreams are usually a cop-out, but then so is just “parallel universes colliding”. Being crazy is good, as long as it’s not the only thing at work. Generally, the only thing scarier than our reality being unravelled is someone doing that unravelling as a way to mess with us. Most campaigns will have a villain or macguffin capable of doing this kind of thing, in fact each campaign world may have several of them. The question then is figuring out which one...and how to stop it if it’s powerful enough to break through the walls of genre.
Sources: The most recent series of Doctor Who featured just this kind of episode – same characters but two realities in competition, with no way to tell the difference. The English tend to like competing realities, doing it brilliantly in the recent Life on Mars (ignore the American version) and its sequel Ashes to Ashes. Indeed, British fantasy in general tends to be co-located – Narnia, Wonderland and Never-Never Land are all just around the corner (as indeed is Diagon Alley) and the first two can be fallen into at any moment (as, indeed, can Stephen Donaldson’s The Land). That’s not quite the same as shifting back and forth but it is a good mine for ideas about how to deal with shifting realities. More appropriate models tend to come from science fiction: the aforementioned Inception, Dark City, Total Recall and The Matrix, plus oddball things like Donny Darko and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Moving more into the horror genre, the Nightmare on Elm Street films play around with reality and dreams bleeding into each other and all the terror that implies. In comics, try Sam Keith’s exquisitely collocated superhero The Maxx, and look at how the two worlds reflect each other through a glass darkly, and how BOTH of them are pyschescapes of the heroine’s subconscious.
RPGs: You can do this with any RPGs, of course. You want them to be different but not too different – things with extremely different goals or structures will have trouble working together. Switching from Dark Heresy to 3:16 is just mechanically annoying without being interesting. Ideally choose RPGs that your players are all very familiar with but with very different feels; that way each world feels familiar enough to be truly disconcerting when they arrive. As mentioned, it’s even better if they meet old friends and NPCs from campaigns past. When they were there, those worlds always seemed solid and real, because they came to believe in them through the games they played. Now at least one of them can’t be real, and if nothing else, that puts their fun memories in jeopardy. That’s the true horror, attacking their own gaming history, and it works on the players not the characters. But that’s what they want in a horror game, right?
