I wouldn’t have believed it either, but it’s true. The worst horror movies are actually interesting scenarios. Generally speaking, bad horror movies are often criticized for their lack of character development. In a campaign arc, that problem is already solved. The horror movies tend to be tightly focused on say, one kind of monster (see any movie on the Sci-Fi Channel), which makes for boring, one-dimensional characters fighting an interesting monster. And let’s face it, most action horror movies focus on the monster. For a RPG scenario, this is precisely what’s needed. The characters never take long breaks. You don’t see, “months pass while our heroes research musty tomes on how to defeat the monster.” And yet this is what happens in too many Call of Cthulhu RPGs. I get it. Those RPGs were inspired by Lovecraftian fiction, with slower pacing and longer attention spans. But it’s not going to work for action horror.
The other problem I have with a great deal of the scenarios is their wide open toolkit nature. Sometimes, this just feels lazy. In essence, an area is developed (say a town), the monsters’ motivations are generally discussed, and a possible conclusion is alluded to. However, the scenarios seem to be built for allowing the PCs to head off the cultist before he summons the giant monster, thus ruining any opportunity for a climactic showdown. This doesn’t even work in horror fiction – certainly, Lovecraft was fond of explaining IN ALL ITALICS the horror as it arrived, even if it was just a glimpse. Framing a cultist before he even gets to do the ritual might be the eminently smart thing to do, but it doesn’t make for a good story.
I crave more. Specifically, I want the action to flow. If there are town members, I want to know two things: how they will interact with the PCs and how they will react to the Horror. I’m not interested in what their day to day schedules are. I AM interested in how they will go insane and any tips on role-playing them.
Movie plots give you all this and more. Since so many scenarios are inspired from movies anyway, it’s simply a matter of finding the original inspiration, taking a look at the script (or watching the movie and taking careful notes) and merging the two together. It then provides the best of both worlds; volumes of background come with the original scenario, and an actual plot that moves the game along emerges.
On the surface, this may sound like railroading. And in some ways it certainly can be. But I find railroading to be a useful device if, say, the players are stuck, the players aren’t that interested in pursuing a clue, or they missed the clue entirely. Stuff should HAPPEN. In the modern world, life can move pretty fast. It could be a cell phone call, it could be an accident happening across the street, it could be a news broadcast on a nearby television. There are plenty of ways to reach out and shake the PCs so the plot starts moving again.
The other advantage of using a movie as a template is that, with the right software, it comes complete with special effects and even actors. I used the surveillance footage from the beginning of the Hidden with Puppets Shows and Shadow Plays to great effect.
I took the following scenarios and merged them with the following movies. Here’s how it worked out:
- Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays (PSSP) with The Hidden: PSSP is about an alien that hops in and out of bodies, with the PCs on its trail. I wasn’t fond of PSSP because it provided a shapeshifting villain and then plopped it in the desert, with no opportunity for said villain to take advantage of its body-hopping powers. The Hidden solved all this. It kept the action going, it several dramatic conflicts, and it still retained that investigative feel of a Call of Cthulhu scenario. I considered it a success.
- Thin Jack with Shadow of the Vampire (SOV): Thin Jack is about a movie producer making a deal with what he believes to be a vampire. This was much tougher to pull off, as SOV takes places in the early 30s and thus has more options to reinforce the isolation of the characters, even characters filming a movie. I had the monster (a psurlon lifted from Monster Manual 3) use mind fog, dominate, and suggestion as a means of railroading the plot – if you failed your save, you weren’t able to interrupt until the dramatic speeches were over. I didn’t feel as good about it. In fact, the one major scene that worked best was a battle between the PCs and the proxy of the main bad guy, a human who was juiced up with stoneskin and wearing vampire makeup. That fight was more exciting than the movie plot. The scenario was still a success, but the plot was incidental.
- Skinwalker with Jeepers Creepers: Bad guy runs around stealing peoples’ skin and wearing it. I liked this plot but loathed the movie. This is one of the few horror plots where the monster goes on the offensive, attacking a police station. This tactic kept the PCs on the defensive and made things interesting, so I was happy with how it worked out. Certainly, the movie plot enhanced Skinwalker, which was a subpar scenario – in the original, the bad guy can swap skins but not voices, so he hides…in a woman. Riiight.
- Nemo Solus Sapit with Gothika/Session 9: A cult of Azathoth lurks in an insane asylum, as a power struggle between patient and doctor erupts into the apocalypse. I had to seriously tweak this scenario to even use it, but I’ve been itching to have a character committed to insane asylum for awhile and this was my chance. This was a complicated scenario to pull off, with PCs in the asylum and outside of it. I’ve always found the Session 9 tapes to be creepy, so I thought taping them would be a good idea. Turns out the players got sick of straining to listen to the tapes and just wanted to read a transcript. So much for special effects. I wouldn’t call this one a success, but then I crammed a lot into the scenario. Tell me if you’ve heard this one: a shan, an incarnation of Azathoth, a shapeshifting psychiatrist, and a lobotomized cultist walk into an insane asylum…
- The House on McKinely Boulevard (THOMB) with The Gate: Having learned from my first haunted house experience with The End of Paradise, I was determined to not make the same mistake with THOMB. The PCs investigate a house looking for important documents, only to find there are vagrants (read: victims) living there. I used all the victims to reinforce the terror of the place, dangling poor Kristian, the twelve-year-old kid, as bait. This worked beautifully, and the arrival of Tsathoggua at the end really clinched it. It also helped that there were only two agents, reinforcing the horror that if one of them went down, they both went down.
- The Gates of Delirium with Cube 2: Hypercube: This didn’t go so great, if only because I didn’t look as closely at the plot as my players did. In essence, the protagonists begin encountering copies of the bad guys as they discover endless parallel dimensions. The conclusion ends with a hostage sequence, but as one of my players (Jeremy, of course) pointed out ... why does anyone care if anyone dies when we’re all just one copy out of an infinite number? He had a point, and it tripped up the bad guy as well as the scenario.
- Closed Casket with The Hills Have Eyes: This scenario worked fabulously. The relentless attacks by the mutants (in my game they were ghouls) kept the agents on the defensive. The only problem was that they refused to enter the creepy town where the ghouls lived. So instead I had a climactic showdown at the gas station. The conclusion was still very rewarding all around.
- Last Rites with Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood: When you have a Jason stand-in as a protagonist, the scenario is pretty much over. And yet I was able to scare the crap out of players by having my chainsaw-wielding zombie inflict massive damage with his chainsaw. Guppy (Joe T.’s character) actually thought of disabling his chainsaw by shooting at it, which made a lot of sense and led to a comical moment where the zombie is confused by his now useless weapon. Fortunately, he had a machete as a backup. Still, the conflict between the supertelekinetic girl and the unstoppable zombie left the agents by the sidelines, which was a bit boring for them.
I have many more scenarios planned, all of them taken from movies of varying quality.
- A Love in Need with Identity
- Silicon Dreams (GURPS Black Ops) with Hangar 18 (more sci-fi conspiracy than horror)
- Operation Ravenheart (GURPS Black Ops) with Cube
- Blessed Be with The Wicker Man
- Cross My Heart and Hope to Die with Children of the Corn
- Of Dreams and Dark Waters with Freddy vs. Jason
- Silent Scream with Evil Dead II
- The Watcher Out of Time with Hellraiser
- Third Time’s the Charm with the China Syndrome (not technically a horror movie, but horrifying)
- Unpleasant Dreams with The Cell
With the advent of YouTube and sites like http://www.watch-movies.net, most horror movies are available online. You can also check the Internet Movie Script Database, Drew’s Script-o-Rama, and HorrorLair.com.
Doing research like this takes a lot of time. It also will either make you appreciate a horror movie much more, or make you hate it so much that you never want to see it again. My love for 80’s style horror films (The Gate and The Hidden being two) has only increased. On the other hand, Hangar 18 just looks goofy now and Gothika is still a terrible movie. I also learned to use headphones when listening over and over to different elements of a movie; my wife got really sick of hearing movie victims screaming.
Lesson Learned: Movies can provide structure to action horror that scenarios often lack.
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