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I really hate to say it, but I didn't enjoy Little Fears. Or, more specifically, my enjoyment very much wavered depending on what part of the book I was reading.
I enjoy horror gaming. My love for Call of Cthulhu is well known, I like Delta Green, I like horror movies, I like horror novels. And I like some of the stuff that's been published about kids - the good stuff, at least, since there's enough crap about the magic of childhood to fill the Atlantic. Little Fears probably should have been right up there on my list of favorite games.
"Won't someone think of the children?"
Unfortunately, it's bleak; moreso, I think, than Call of Cthulhu itself. The character are essentially young children who have been stripped of parental and societal protection and thrown into combat against the forces of Closetland. The supernatural forces behind Closetland are attempting to destroy the world's innocence, using possessed adults and various monsters to kill or abduct children. The only thing that children have to defend themselves with is their belief in something - a glitter baton, a teddy bear, an action figure - that can be used against the monsters of Closetland. The adults won't listen - or, worse, are possessed by a King or its minions - the authority figures are helpless. And every year, more and more children disappear or are killed at Closetland's behest. The adults can ask why, but thanks to their Blindness, they're unable to see why their children are being killed. Think of Stephen King's IT and you'll have a pretty good idea of how the game plays - but it's even worse, because the subtle madness that overtook Derry is spread over the entire world here.
The opening fiction sets the tone right off the bat; it's a diary written by a small girl whose mother has died and whose father has come under the influence of Closetland. Unfortunately, while it does gives a pretty good idea of what Closetland is like and how it affects children, it's also obviously written by an adult trying to write from a child's perspective; it's too coherent, peculiarly unemotional, and lacks the real sense of hurt and terror that the kid would actually be feeling. Mind you, if it was written in that style, it'd be too difficult to read, so it's kind of a Catch-22. It does get across the idea that kids do have a defense mechanism - Belief - against the monsters of Closetland, but ends on one hell of a down note. And, contrary to real life, there seems to be little parental involvement; I can't imagine the kid being allowed to return to a home where her drunken father slapped her the night befor. No foster homes, no social services, no cops...
Remember the McMartin trial?
Essentially what happened is that three people had their lives destroyed because of mass hysteria regarding allegations of abuse at a preschool. The prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence, the children were badgered into admitting that abuse had taken place, increasingly fantastic and flimsy evidence was used and the country convulsed in paranoia that children were regularly being kidnapped and abused on a mass scale. The entire thing was mass hysteria, and it wasn't laid to rest until much later because nobody wanted to be in the position of saying "Well, maybe the children weren't telling the truth when they testified about the staff shooting babies with rifles in outer space."
Little Fears, at points, writhes with that paranoia; with the idea that all children from six to twelve are essentially targets for every variety of abusive parent and/or sexual predator under the sun, who are in turn sponsored by the depredations of powerful evil beings - the Kings of Sloth, Greed, Pride and so forth. The book opens with a lengthy quote from an FBI report about the fact that there are 2,000 missing children reported every day, about how there are 600,000 missing children in 2000 alone; however, just because a report is filed doesn't mean that six hundred thousand children are being hoovered up by forces malign. Most of them, I'd be willing to wager, are solved within a week. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, is happy to pick up on the rest, having had a good ninety years of experience in clearing kidnapping cases. Notice on that last link that there are a grand total of twenty-six "Have you seen these people?" pictures. This is not exactly the six hundred thousand missing people that the book suggests. (There's also a section on kids who have been kidnapped by their parents, most likely the result of divorce proceedings gone bad. Again, not the epidemic that the book seems to suggest.)
So, basically, Little Fears takes place in an alternate universe in which children are being abducted and killed left and right, and in which parents react to this with a mild sense of consternation. Closetland is real, children do need belief and innocence in order to fight these monsters, and they can die. As long as you're careful to split between the portrayal of child abuse within Little Fears and the real world, you're cool, but it makes me a touch upset to see the hysteria that got put to rest a long while ago come back as a basic axiom in this game. There are children in this world being abused, raped, murdered - but there's also a great deal of effort put in by various agencies to prevent it.
"You're not supposed to do that with the character creation, Darren."
Anyways. Character creation takes a step away from the traditional "here's your character sheet, here's a fistful of dice, here's a bunch of charts, get cracking" method of making characters - you start off by describing your character's name, age, gender, what's his most important possession, his favorite person, what you do when you get scared, what you want to be when you grow up - a description of a kid. If you're feeling really masochistic, you could even go back into your old school records and find your answers in what you wrote when you were eight. I also like the stats line - rather than Dex, Strength and so forth, you get Hands, Feet, Muscle and Smarts. The Hands and Feet part strikes me as how kids would describe their physical stats, so that's a definite plus.
Along with those stats are Soul, Innocence and Fear. Your Innocence indicates how gullible you are, Soul indicates how much of your natural soul you have left, and your Fear acts as a sort of SAN mechanism - the higher it goes, the less stable you become. You get six points to distribute among the various attributes, called "Playaround points"; it looks so much like "Playground points" that I'd suggest just calling them that to avoid confusion. Besides being able to purchase extra points in attributes, you're also able to get qualities - either positive ("Things I Like About Me") or negative ("Things I Don't Like About Me". ) And there's some wonderful stuff in here - Artistic, Big For My Age, Bookworm, Charmer, Favorite Child, Teacher's Pet - or, on the negative end, Bad Name, Asthmatic, Class Clown, Slow Learner, Potty Mouth and Shy. It's nice to be able to tailor your character to come up with something like this:
Eric Cartman
Age: 10
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Brown
Muscle: 3
Feet: 1
Hands: 2
Smarts: 1
Spirit: 3
Fear: 0
Soul: 10
Innocence: 8 ("You're telling me that these pubes are worth nothing.")
Things I Like About Me:
Things I Don't Like About Me: Chubby (Fatass), Loud, Potty Mouth, Whiny
If you're interested in just playing Little Fears as a role-playing game for kids, this is a pretty good place to start. As a matter of fact, it may be the best place to start - I can't think of any other game that has this kind of detail for playing kids, especially when it comes to the effects that attributes have.
As for the mechanics of the game - they're pretty simple, and pretty sweet. Challenges split into two types - Quizes, where you have to roll under a particular attribute in order to succeed, and Tests, where you're rolling against somebody else. In a particularly neat bit of machinery, the qualities that you pick aid your attempts - so if you're trying to remember what the Creature of the Black Lagoon dislikes, and you have the Horror Buff quality, then you get to roll an extra dice and use the best result. Disadvantages, or negative qualities, force you to roll an extra dice and use the worse of the two results. Tests are resolved by trying to roll over your opponent's stat; in combat, the amount that you roll over the opponent's stat is your damage, with a flat amount of weapon damage added per weapon that you're using. It's a remarkably simple system, and probably the first skill / advantage combined system ever created.
"Krusty is coming. Krusty is coming. And he'll bring food, and water, and smite our enemies!"
The game's primary stat is Innocence, in the same way that's Call of Cthulhu's primary stat is SAN, or Rifts' primary stat is munchkin semen. The younger you are, the higher your innocence is; the higher your innocence is, the better your chances are of being able to pull off a belief-based attack - your teddy bear grows to eight feet tall and charges the monster, or your favorite toy rifle works. (Well, I imagine that it would - I'd just treat it as a creature that only has Muscles, derived from the kid's innocence.) It kind of reminds me of Agnes from Tribe 8, with her army of oversized children's toys. More interestingly, As Joshua Neff points out, failing a fear check results in your Belief temporarily becoming stronger - meaning that crisis situations will be easier to deal with, or will at least give PC children more to do.
More interesting is the ability to do incidental magic with your belief - for example, X-ray glasses that work, or itching powder that drives monsters into spasms of furious scratching. If it fails, though, you have to come up with a rational reason for why it doesn't work - the X-ray glasses don't work when it's raining, or the rifle doesn't work in the bathroom.
More iffily, though, are rules for Fear and for insanity. Your character's fear grows when he encounters the supernatural and fails a Spirit check; as you get more and more afraid, you start going insane. The thing is, I don't think that it's possible for kids to go insane. Stephen King said. in Danse Macabre, that if you gave an adult some potent LSD, set him in a movie theater and showed them The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the kid would have two weeks worth of nightmares and the adult would spend the rest of his life in a rubber room. I can't see a kid becoming schizophrenic, or manifesting multiple personalities - while I'm sure that there are cases, it doesn't seem exactly right for an eight-year old kid to be schizophrenic. Maybe an obsessive best friend, or age regression, but the mental illnesses presented here seem more appropriate to adults than to children. Maybe somebody who knows about this stuff can let me know. There's also Darkening, which is what happens when a kid's soul is damaged by an encounter with a supernatural creature; you start getting pale, your thoughts become distracted and you essentially become a slave of Closetland until you die. Losing your innocence before you reach thirteen means that you're Tainted, which doesn't seem to have any game effects, but keeps your character haunted by monsters whose presence he can't understand.
Lisa: Mom! Mom! You've gotta help: they're cooking kids in the school cafeteria!
Marge: Listen, kids: you're eight and ten years old now. I can't be fighting all your battles for you.
I'll get my big complaint with the game out of the way right off the bat: The way that adults and siblings are treated in this game is, for me, the most mishandled part of the entire game.
In one sense, it's completely understandable; it's tough to play in a game where you can look forward to a deus ex machina rescue every five minutes from your parents and/or older siblings and/or teacher and/or local cop. It reduces the amount of stuff that the players can do before their parents take over, tends to spoil the mood of the game, and eliminates the horror. It also gets across the rough feeling of IT, where the parents were either unable to help or were puppets of IT.
But it makes the game so much darker to have anybody over the age of thirteen be utterly oblivious to the forces of Closetland.
For one thing, the death of a kid - for any reason - is going to attract a hell of a lot of attention, and no matter how weird the circumstances of death, an investigation is going to take place. If a kid winds up in the hospital or the morgue drained of blood, or torn to pieces, and the kid's friends say that a werewolf or a vampire caused it, then the authorities are going to start looking for a werewolf or vampire - or somebody that fits that description. Blind or not, in real life, they're not going to discount the story of a kid as to why their playmate showed up butchered. The same thing with Darkening - if a kid suddenly starts showing signs of neurological distress, along with a sudden lack of pigmentation, then the parents are going to take it very seriously. (The book suggests that they'll take him to the hospital, which'll make the kid even worse.) In IT, the parents had an enforced sense of disbelief, and the authorities didn't care; that's because Pennywise was broadcasting "Please ignore me" vibes so strongly that it intefered with TV reception and the proper operation of pacemakers.
But one of the more satisfying parts of most movies involving kids and monsters is when the kids are finally believed; when the monster is brought to light, when the walls start bleeding in full view of the parents, when the giant ants cut the head off the smarmy general who's been deriding the kids mercilessly for the first hour of the film. It's when the monsters realize that they can't hide behind the kids anymore; when the calvary comes. It's not going to fit the tone of the game all the time - but it's an option that I wish had been included within the game.
Especially terrifying is the idea that child molesters are being controlled by Closetland; that anybody, in fact, who attacks children for whatever purpose is likely the servant of Closetland himself. This strikes me as the same idea that fueled Werewolf, where evil people were essentially Wyrm-puppets with no free will of their own; rather than increasing the horror, it reduces it; it removes the horror of free will. On the other hand, it also creates a situation in which nobody is safe, in which your parents can apparently override a hardwired prorection impulse in order to abuse their kids out of the blue - at least, if I'm reading the rules correctly.
There's no easy solution to this. One idea that I kind of like is to have kids be able to get ahold of direct parental or sibling aid if they can make the right kind of innocence roll - say, unleash a 240-pound line-tackle sibling onto a Closet Monster who picked the wrong kid to mess with. It reduces the horror of the setting, but that's not entirely a bad thing. I think that the people writing Little Fears should try to resolve the question within the game - explain why the parents don't believe the kid's explanations without falling back onto being Blind, and explain how parents are going to deal with what seem - at least to me - to be concentrated attacks on their children occurring nationwide. It breaks the suspension of disbelief for me; I'm not sure if that's going to be something that anybody else is going to have a problem with, however.
"Hail to thee, Kamp Krusty, on the shores of Big Snake Lake..."
The section on storytelling: It's here that Little Fears broadens itself out a bit, going from an atmosphere of pure horror to one that makes Little Fears more of a generic kids horror game; you can use the same elements presented within the book to play different games. The game itself offers dark fairy tales, Goosebumps-style "scary stories", and true horror, which is the style that the book's written in. The book's careful to point out that the horrific option isn't going to be for everyone, and I think that's definitely worth repeating. I think that Little Fears is the king of all "play only with the most mature gamers you can find" - it's going to demand the best out of any group, just like Wraith.
The funny thing about Little Fears is how much I keep thinking about how many stories there are to be told with kids vs. supernatural monsters. Calvin and Hobbes. South Park. Goonies. Little Monsters. There's a hundred different stories that you can tell with Little Fears, and they're all full of potential. I keep thinking about the kind of story that I'd play with Little Fears - not about horror, but about the mixture of the strange and the horrific. A hospital ward full of kids who are visited by a little girl who looks like a Gray, and who invites them to visit her in her ward - except that everybody on her floor of the hospital looks like her, and the kids from our world are the freaks. Kids who suddenly decide to build a wooden radio to communicate with kids on another planet. A visiting uncle from out of town turns out to be a friendly vampire, a la Ray Bradbury. That kind of thing. Little Fears feels a lot like Over the Edge does, at points - it's as much inspiration for your own stuff as it is a game in its own right.
On the other hand, the monsters and bogeymen presented within Little Fears are just about the nastiest creations I've seen within a role-playing game. Closetland is led by the Demagogue, an analogue of Satan; serving underneath him are the Kings, each King representing a different sin - Lust, Pride, Gluttony and so forth. Each King is nasty in the extreme; the King of Pride, Titania, has a bit of fiction that suggests that she might have something to do with anorexia and bulimia, while the King of Envy has a wall full of kid's faces, some of which are still inhabited by the spirits of the kids that they belong to. This is nasty, nasty stuff, and I'm pretty sure that it's going to take either a foolhardy or very brave GM to try to include this stuff in a game.
The child abuse isn't a major part of the game. It's mentioned explicitly in the opening fiction and in the fiction bits involving some of the Kings; and you can pretty be assured that it's going to be the most controversial part of the game. But I confess that it put me off, even though it's handled with a fair amount of respect. The game handles it almost by omission - they'll refer to it within the fiction bits, but not within the rules of the game itself (except for how it affects loss of Innocence.)
On the one hand, it's an exploration of something that a lot of people are going to be very touchy about; it informs, rather than exploits, and it takes a yard of guts to include something like this in the game. Not including it would have been undercutting the point of the game, which is that children are vulnerable, but that they can also act to save themselves.
On the other hand, it's sufficiently squicksome - as well as the material on the fates of the victims of the Kings - that it could easily knock a potential GM off it for a long time. I can't come to any conclusion. It's handled very, with respect for how horrible a situation it is. But it's not something that a lot of people are going to be interested in dealing with unless they're very, very brave.
The monsters are pretty grim, ranging from your standard vampires, mummies and zombies to the servants of the Kings; there's a Clown Gone Bad, a pair of knife-wielding twins, and a kid who wound up getting more surgery than he bargained for during a routine stay at a hospital. I think that the Clown Gone Bad is laying it on a little thick - I'd like to find a good clown in an RPG one of these days - but they'll provide inspiration if you're running short of ideas.
But, and I don't think that this has changed much since I picked up the game: As it's presented within the book, Closetland is astonishingly bleak. In Closetland, the broken shells of children work as slaves in Satanic work camps, if they're not promoted to being demonic enforcers. Or they're stuck behind mirrors, pleading for their freedom. Or they have their faces peeled off and stuck on a wall, with their souls still inside. Or they're depicted standing in chains around one of the Kings in one of the illustrations. And a few of the description of the Kings have prefaces that have adults screaming abuse at their kids - "I want this place absolutely spotless of I'll beat you so hard you won't be able to stand!" And that's what I was referring to when I asked about if I was misreading the game, burgeoning flamewar aside. One of the adventures deals with a kid being crushed to death in an automobile compactor while his mother's raped, and the children dealing with the spiritual aftermath; another involves a kid being sucked down through his toilet into a septic tank. Monsters, when they're killed, aren't truly dead; they just waft back to where they came from, to be recycled. The only way to destroy Closetland for good is to get rid of fear - and I seriously doubt that anybody, much less a pack of children, are going to be able to pull that off.
Which is why I keep wanting to strip Little Fears of those elements and just play it as a game that mixes startling moments of beauty with moments of utter horror.
Which is easy enough to do.
Is it worth buying? Absolutely. The system is wonderfully simple, and the game's flexibility makes it useful for any number of options. On the other hand, if you're not prepared to deal with some pretty horrific stuff, you're going to find Little Fears a punch in the gut.
But this game will probably be seen, in later years, as an attempt for role-playing games to deal with something larger than just popular entertainment. So it may have a larger impact than just how many copies it sells.
I'm curious to find out what impact that's going to be.
-Darren MacLennan
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