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Season of Worms has a great title, a few interesting ideas, and a fundamental misunderstanding of how to create a horror scenario. You can find it at http://jagsgame.dyndns.org/jags/index.jsp, as a free download for the JAGS system.
On its surface, it’s a simulation of a teenage horror flick. This is problem number one with the adventure; teenage horror flicks aren’t good in the slightest because they’re based around a very specific formula, usually one that pays more attention to gory deaths than to characterization or rational action, or any number of things that role-playing games cleave to. Jared A. Sorenson managed to pull off yet another utterly brilliant bit of work with his SQUEAM games, where the mechanics directly relate to the horror movie genre; with JAGS, the engine lies uneasily atop the adventure, like two people who want to have sex but aren’t sure how.
The adventure itself: Uniquely enough, it’s run entirely with premade characters, in two groups – one group is composed of people from high school that you love to hate, while the other is a collection of lovable nerds. The trick is that the players will get a chance to run both, with one group getting slaughtered before the next group goes in.
Quick quiz: Which group do you think gets slaughtered like cattle first?
It’s not exactly a trick question, and it’s not as if anybody doesn’t know that the obnoxious are the first to die in any horror adventure – but the game itself suggests that the first wave of characters must die in order to make the second part of the adventure work. The adventure itself takes pains to point that all of the PCs will be dead at the end of the first act.
It’s a different style than I’m used to have my players constantly shifting from role to role – one act as the nerds, one act as the cruel, the last act as the nerds again. I imagine that it can be done as long as you have decent players, but more worrying is the tendency towards railroading – the characters must all die by the end of the second act, and only during a particular part of the adventure, and the major monster will be killed in one particular way as dictated by the plot.
To be sure, there’s plenty of room for extrapolation in how these events go down, but the adventure seems more linear than a proper horror adventure should be. Call of Cthulhu’s adventures were deliberately structured around a general framework – here’s an event, here’s an event, here’s the cultist’s church, here’s the details of the monster, here’s how these NPCs might act, go to work. There’s no predetermined PC death – if the PCs decide to go charging into that slaughterhouse without taking precautions, then they’re going to die. If they don't, though, the GM doesn't have to railroad things to get them in there. Knowing that the deaths of your characters are scripted is likely to knock some of the enjoyment out of the game. Not telling them, of course, will make it more of a surprise, but it'll also generate more resentment, and most players are going to guess it anyways.
Anyways. The focus of the scenario is an old, haunted house which was the home of a cult dedicated to the worship of various Sumerian demons, who apparently have been making it big in the “Not the Great Old Ones, but we do” business – ever since Ghostbusters, I think. After one of their rituals goes wrong, a big ol’ demon winds up getting trapped in the basement, needing only a few more victims to chow down on before he can go on and do whatever Sumerian demons do; probably going bowling. Of course, since this is a teenie-horror film, the local teenage community decides to have a party in the same place where eighteen people were gorily hacked to death by forces unknown.
The game starts off with a rather unique introduction: a whole bunch of scenes involving the nerds/bastards, each of them detailing the personality of the people involved. The stoner wakes up late and has to get to school on time; the nerd has to get to class, but is shaken down by the jock and the preppie for cash. (Amusingly enough, the nerd has a psychological compulsion to get to class on time, encouraging role-playing his desperation.) There is a lot of potential down time – for example, while it’s interesting to show the characters in school, it’s somewhat railroaded, and encourages stereotypical play. The Glamour Queen’s player, for example, is encouraged to shred the Hacker’s love poem – but what if her players decides that she goes for it? Or if the Preppy is secretly in love with the Nerd? Or if the Wiccan Girl is actually an undercover Christian from a fanatical church? The text is written so that it follows a script, rather than progressing naturally from play.
The second act is where some of the good stuff goes down – blood starts coming out of the walls, people are possessed, players familiar with Call of Cthulhu have their characters get out so quick that they leave PC-shaped silhouette-holes in the walls. This part of the game is very freeform – the players each get a set of motivation cards, one before the madness starts and one after, and the house’s various horrors are detailed, including a lengthy, if somewhat unscary poem that’s scrawled throughout every room in the house. Along with the spirits of the family who used to live in the house, there’s packages of human meat, an oven for cooking people, bodies prepped for eating and so forth. However, the copy editing fell through a touch – we’re informed that there’s a “corps” on the table, and one sentence runs approximately like this:
“There’s a broken down, disgusting (multiple bodies were pulled off of it – the cops think that they took it, but it was actually left.” Whatever the broken-down and disgusting item is apparently got lost in editing.
I have to confess that I wasn’t much scared, or even unnerved by this section. The idea of the ghosts of a family hunting a bunch of people doesn’t give me too much of a scare, unfortunately – even for spirits, there’s nothing particularly unnerving about them besides a preoccupance with knives and the occasional set of missing eyeballs. The rest of it tends towards rather simple gore – a package of human meat, a closet full of dead bodies, a black-water sink that drags its victims down in to be drowned – with the occasional zinger, like this:
“The characters will hear faint moans, or soft screams. When things get bad [?] they will look up and see bodies, sewn together with thick surgical cord, writhing in a mass of arms and legs! A woman with an axe looks up (down) into the character’s eyes. She will come for them.”
Okay. Except that as it’s written, this is almost incoherent. How tall is the ceiling? Is the woman standing on the ceiling as if it’s a floor? Is the room tall enough to give the woman room, or is she simply going to have her head about the same level as the character’s waist? What’s does the room look like? Is it well-lit, or dark? How big is the mass of bodies? Does she fall from the ceiling, or does she run along the walls? It reminds me of some of the scenes from Alone on Halloween, from Pagan Publishing; however, Alone on Halloween had wonderful descriptions – cars with pulsating, gelatinous engines, vampires of every description, a visit to Carcosa – which is what made it so wonderful. The Laston House, by contrast, isn’t much to look at – just chunks of people and four ghosts with knives. Even more annoying is a note that informs that it’s out of character for the players to look inside a bunch of bloody packages.
At which point, it stops being a role-playing game and starts to be mildly interactive theater. There's nothing wrong with this per se, but it does lend to the impression that the authors of the game weren't really sure what they were doing when they wrote this. It doesn't have the postmodernist humor of SQUEAM, or the startling mixture of horror and beauty - I really need to think of a single word that can describe this quality - that Call of Cthulhu has at its best. Corpses are scary, but they're scarier when they're people you know. Bits of people packaged for delivery is scarier when you know that it's addressed to somebody, rather than just being out for a cheap scare.
Of course, the counter-argument is that it's designed to simulate a cheesy horror film. But this is sort of like being the world's best dung-stacker; no matter how good you are at it, it's not going to be much fun unless you've got a deep appreciation, one that goes past the "wow, this film is kinda stupid, but fun to watch" attitude. SQUEAM did this perfectly; it's postmodern, commenting on the tropes of the horror movie at the same time as it uses them. Season of Worms doesn't. It's a pale copy of the elements of a horror film without much else.
The third and final act is where the game does some mildly interesting work, but again breaks down. After a series of unsettling dreams and portents related to Nergal's arising, including a pair of garbage men who are mightily interested in making sure that their garbage truck remains full and a recurring series of incidents that involve maggots. There's lots of good, if scripted role-playing - I.E "You shoud try to calm the Wiccan down, since she's obviously hysterical. Believe her if she makes a convincing argument."
However, the scenario takes a rahter unfortunate turn when it introduces Harold, a Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair who happened to have an encounter with the scenario's main bad guy while still in Vietnam. It does not have the crucial feel of authenticity that a flashback should have; while Vietnam veterans are hard to get ahold of, their oral histories aren't. A request for those who write adventures: If you're going to include narration by a war veteran, study some material that relates to their lives - read Strange Ground, or any book that contains the veterans speaking in their own voices. Harold also happens to have a small arsenal just lying around, and the book suggests that it's acceptable for the players to learn a single level of the skill in a cinematic training scene. But one of the things that makes Call of Cthulhu so unique is that bigger guns are more likely to get you into trouble than they are to save you. I'm tempted to stay away from using the guidelines and tropes of Call of Cthulhu adventures for every horror adventure out there, but it's the only point of comparison - Chaosium makes the best horror scenarios out there.
But there's a brief scene before the final showdown that's genuinely horrific - it's a sequence in a gas station which manages to set the tone exactly, while playing on a specific rivalry / crush between the Hacker and the now-undead Prom Queen. But the bulk of the third part of the adventure basically replays the first part - which isn't a bad thing, but it might get somewhat tiresome for players who have been through this, and it may be difficult for a lot of players to forget about what they saw earlier on in the adventure.
The climax of the adventure is, unfortunately, quite railroaded - there's only a single way to kill Negral, and it involves the direct application of heavy explosives, as well as a potential noble sacrifice from one of the NPCs.
The system used throughout is called JAGS; for my taste, it's much too rules-heavy, to the point where I had a look through it, then thought "Yeah, I'll convert it to Cthulhu and run it like that." To be sure, JAGS has a lot of potential; I'm just not the one who's going to be exploring it. They did ask me to write this review, incidentally.
Ultimaely, the adventure that they've presented here just doesn't work. It's not self-recognizant to be ironic; it's not scary enough to properly chill characters; it's not well-described enough to linger in the memory; and it's too railroady to be worth adapting for your own scenarios. This is an okay start for the JAGS system, but unfortunately, not much more.
-Darren MacLennan
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