Before we can talk about this game, we need to get a few things straight. There’s a lot of bullshit that gets said about children, and a lot of bullshit that gets said about this game, so we need to get passed all that first. First up, children are not innocent wonderful cradles of truth, who remember to see all the mysteries and marvels us adults have taught ourselves to forget. Nor is childhood a magical time of joy and puppy-dogs where everything is born anew every single day. Occasionally, this game thinks both these things are true, and this is disappointing. However, neither greatly hurts the game greatly, for reasons I will now elaborate.
In the main, these problems are solved by the game being what it is: a horror game. By adding horrifying situations, childhood ceases to be idyllic, and by having the children face off against the darkest parts of our real world, and then some, their innocence becomes far less of an issue. Children aren’t innocent when viewed objectively, and certainly not when they’re playing up at school or deceiving their parents. But as soon as you throw rape, kidnapping and murder into the situation, suddenly casting children as innocent seems a lot more plausible, not to mention palatable.
For this is not, in the main, a game about what children fear. A quick flick through the opening pages finds blurbs like the following:
“I just turned my back for a second…and when I turned back, he was gone”
and
“Little girl lost near Diango River….Parents plea, bring out daughter back”
In other words, this is a game about what parents fear. About children being snatched off the street, molested by strangers, beaten by their parents. The fears of the title are the fears of parents watching the nightly news. This alone makes Little Fears a game worthy of note, in that it’s ostensibly targeted at people with children, instead of adolescents. Very, very few games – if any – can say that.
Unfortunately, this causes some confusion because the game is also seemingly about the fears of children. Sometimes realistically created, more often what we think we remember being scared of. Part of the horror comes from tapping into our memories of the monster under the bed, or in the closet, and the logic of those times. The end result is the game is somewhat confused about exactly what it wants to be. Sometimes it’s about what parents fear, seen through the eyes of the victims (thus creating a strange disconnect as the horror is scarier to the players than to the characters), and sometimes it’s about what children fear, as seen through the eyes of an adult looking back at it (creating another disconnect). And all this happens in a roleplaying game, where different levels of reality are already in play.
If you’re feeling generous, this confusion can be seen as a clever mirroring of how a child might actually react to real world abuse, showing us (as players) what the parents can see, and us (as characters) how it might be changed into horror fantasy by the child. If you’re not feeling generous, it could just be seen as a mess.
So let’s take a closer look at it, and maybe you can make up your own mind.
Unfortunately, the game kicks off with a minor, but very annoying flaw. The opening mood setting paragraph discusses our childhood memories, and says “deep down, in the furthest corners of your minds are other memories. Memories that aren’t so happy. They’re buried deep, but if you try really hard you may just glimpse them.”
Alternatively, you could just not be a putz, and remember your childhood accurately.
Happily, the game stops being patronising there, and we launch into some rather good game fiction. It’s written as the diary entries of a young girl, who has a monster in her closet – and a father who drinks too much. She meets a friend who provides a weapon to keep her monster away, but without the weapon, the friend is helpless to protect herself. It’s a rather bleak and, indeed, intellectually horrifying story, which sets the tone for the whole game. This is Calvin and Hobbes except the aliens Calvin fights with Hobbes and his wagon are not just cross mothers or boring teachers – they’re drunken, abusive fathers, and serial paedophiles, and (somehow) at the same time, the kind of hard-core twisted, terrifying demons that Clive Barker writes about.
It’s a good story, and it sets the two levels of the game up perfectly: half the time you’re scared for the girl fighting the monster, the other half you want to call social services and get her away from her father.
After the story, we launch back into the voice of the game designer, who starts telling us about FBI statistics. What is this section, I wondered as I read. It’s sort of setting information, but without introduction and with a long time spent dwelling on our (the reader, more than the player) real-world reaction to real-world facts. The problem with this is that it seems to go out of its way to cast us, the reader, as being unable to play the game. The language splits us very much into us and them: “We try to figure out why…” “Our hearts go out to them…”, and finally “You have forgotten, haven’t you?”. To which the only response I could give was “well, if I have, this game’s kinda knackered, isn’t it?”
But again, there is a point to this ranting: we ARE out of the picture in this game. Turning over two pages, the first sentence of the chargen chapter begins with “Little Fears is not about the child as a hapless victim, but the child as its own salvation”. Although the game plays on our fears as adults wanting to protect children in danger, the game is about turning off that instinct and being children who are all alone in the world. There’s that crazy disconnection again.
Yet it has a point; part of getting into the mind of the child is understanding that children typically do see adults as very different to themselves. More importantly, this is how children in the Little Fears universe (as opposed to the real one) have to operate, because anyone over the age of 13 cannot see the monsters. Which is a key point into getting into this game – in order to scare you, the adult, you have to play a child in the Little Fears universe, not a real child, and not you as a child. Luckily, a lot of presentations of children in cinema and literature follow the same rules for children as does Little Fears (eg children are innocent and fantastical, children can see the spiritual world, adults never believe them, children mistrust grown-ups, etc) so this isn’t too hard to do.
Indeed, chargen kicks off with this as its main piece of advice for playing kids – watch movies with child protagonists. The Sixth Sense and The Exorcist are listed as examples – both films more about adults seeing children in danger than they are about children. Following this we kick into chargen proper with the player questionnaire, which does exactly what it should – make you think like a child, both directly and indirectly. Indirectly, it asks the kind of questions children are often asked – hair colour, eye colour, how old you are, what you want to be when you grow. Directly, it asks the kinds of things children think about it – who are their friends, who they like best, what is their favourite possession, and so on. The writer continues to show his skill with creating this child’s mindset by naming the Virtues and Flaws as “Things I like about myself” and “Things I don’t like about myself”. Kids don’t think like that, but adults think they do, so there is quite the ring of familiarity.
To recap: the character sheet reads like the kind of questions asked of children, so a player tapping into their past self will find the patronising familiar. I don’t know if you should answer the questions as an adult thinking children think like that, because that’s all that’s ultimately playable, or as a child giving the answers they think the adult wants, assuming that’s possible. Questions like that give me a big headache.
Said Virtues and Flaws are well done – not really how kids refer to themselves, but very descriptive and fairly exhaustive. They include things like Big For My Age, Horror Buff, Teacher’s Pet, Bed Wetter, Picked On and Scaredy Cat. They are very inspiring in creating cinematic children; I happened to see Goonies while reading the book and the traits of those kids are easily recognisable on the list.
These qualities modify statistic rolls – if a good quality comes into play, you add a dice and take the best. If it is a bad quality, add a dice and take the lowest. The dice roll comes in two flavours: the Test or the Quiz. For a Quiz – when a PC is unopposed - you want to roll low, under your stat. For a Test – an opposed roll - you want to roll high, over your opponent’s stat. Whoever wins and rolls the highest wins the conflict. If that conflict is combat, then the winner takes damage depending on how much they beat the target Stat by, increased for weapons. Hit points are points spread across five distinct pain levels, as per the Icon system. And that’s the entirety of the system. Rules light indeed.
Stats are Hands (hand-eye coordination), Feet (agility and speed), Muscle (strength and constituion), Smarts and Spirit. They are all rated from one to five, and all start at two. You get six points to spend on stats and good qualities; you get points by dropping stats or taking flaws. You can also spend or gain points through the three other stats – Fear, Innocence and Soul – which are the subject of the next chapter.
Soul, Innocence and Fear are all rated from one to ten, and all work like Sanity in Call of Cthulhu – they’re the real hitpoints of the game. They’re easy to lose (or gain, in the case of Fear), hard (or impossible) to regain(lose), inevitably get worse over a game and are very, very bad to have low(high). Soul is what the monsters in the closet like to steal and capture; PCs lose it only through magical attacks. With low levels, the child becomes physically ill and visibly tainted very quickly. Innocence drops one point per year until you become 13 (and thus become Blind to the monsters) – so younger characters are much better off, unless the GM makes sure to balance this with in-game consequences for being younger (knowing less, trusted less etc). Innocence also goes down as the result of trauma (having to do horrible things) and abuse (having horrible things done to you) and for every three points of Fear gained. Without Innocence, the monsters don’t want you, but you can’t see them to fight them so your character is unplayable.
Fear goes up when players fail a Fear test and roll a 6 on the result table. A little random, and it could be fairly rare but you really don’t want Fear going up. The more Fear points you have, the more insane you go: 4 is jittery, 6 is paranoid, 8 is both deeply psychotic and means they fail all Fear tests from then on. 10 is the unplayable mark. Fear tests, by the way, are simply handled with a Spirit Quiz. Fail, and roll on the Fear table to see if you run, scream, pass out, wet yourself, or gain a Fear point.
Speaking of wetting yourself, it’s a small point but in both this table and under the Bed Wetter description, things get very strange. This is a game which involves child abuse, rape and torture, yet on the topic of bed-wetting, the tone suddenly becomes juvenile and embarrassed. Pathetic, really.
Fear can be lost through the use of the Faithful virtue (a rather unbalanced quality – the munchkin’s choice). Soul can be regained by going into Closetland (the monster’s realm) and getting it back physically. Innocence cannot be regained at all. It does, however, power Belief magic, which is one of the children’s few weapons against the monsters.
Belief magic can be material (activated through or in a special item, like a toy) or incidental (a ritual or belief in something) but the rules are the same. Simply half your Innocence rating and roll a quiz on that. Cleverly, if you fail a Fear roll, you get a bonus die to a subsequent Belief roll. And in a nice twist, Belief has a cost too – fail a Belief roll and you lose one-tenth of an Innocence point. And Belief works both ways, too – step on a crack in spite and your mother might indeed break her back.
Belief magic, like the rest of the system, is simple and keeps the emphasis on player-added description. The very large problem with it is that it’s not all that powerful. Toys which (to quote the rule book) grow eight feet tall have physical stats only of their owner’s Innocence halved – a maximum of four – and share their owners mental stats. So a strong child is most likely to be better off hitting the monster than having his teddy do it, and the weaker kids gain a minor helping hand, as long as they’re not too old.
Not that Belief magic is supposed to be all-powerful; the text even states it can only do small things. But I can’t see anybody wanting to rely on it in a game, and thus the players will have no desire to devote description or scene time to it either. Disappointing.
From this point on, we leave rules behind, however, and launch into Chapter Three: Keeping the Kids in Line. This is a collection of GM tips, most of which are specifically tailored to running Little Fears. It’s a decent introduction and certainly makes you feel more confident about running the game, but nothing special. The only thing really worthy of note is the discussion on how parents and adults treat children, and particularly their children, something key to running the game and much appreciated. Also included are stats and rules for a few adults (they have the same five stats, but always roll two dice and take the best).
Chapter Four is Behind the Door: our first real look at the setting, apart from the strange introduction at the start. Basically, the world of the supernatural is ruled by the Demagogue, who has an underling called Branxis the Enslaver, and under him are seven Kings, one for each of the Seven Deadly Sins. There are also angels of some Divine Host, but they’re relatively powerless. The monsters live in a dark, shadowy world of Closetland, where every nightmare is made flesh. They live only to destroy all the innocence in the world, because goodness hurts them.
Thankfully, that’s the end of the rather insubstantial backstory and we move on to what the writer really excels at: describing the horrors the monsters can inflict. Little Fears is far more a game about scary images than scary ideas and the book provides a litany of gorgeously described visual terrors and powerful scenes. The monsters can travel in shadow and can live in any closet or dark, closed in space. They can cause urban myths and horror stories to become real and warp whole landscapes into horrific reflections thereof. Their most important power, though, is possessing adults to do their bidding.
And so once again, Little Fears is in two minds. Much of the following pages describe vampires and werewolves and clowns gone bad and things under the bed…whose damage, we presume, is rationalised away by adults as the work of Bad People. The rest of the time, the bestiary is about strangers with candy or playing the game in the closet with Uncle Bob or when Daddy gets mad and breaks things. When this happens, it’s not because people are sick, or bad, it’s because the Kings are possessing the adult in question. They are, at those times, monsters from Closetland, and can become completely the puppet of a King if this continues long enough. Strangely enough, a lot of people in the real world rationalise away the work of Bad People with stories just like this (if you believe the tabloid newspapers, anyway).
You could accuse the game of cowardice for blaming all of humanity’s sins against children on (literally, sometimes) the Bogeyman. Particularly a game which purports to have something interesting to say about child abuse in the first place. On the other hand, the demonic, enemy forces should be the most evil things in the game, and nobody complains when all the bad people in Call of Cthulhu worship the Old Ones.
But I can’t help but wishing the game was just about monsters, used as a metaphor for the evil that men do in the real world. Or that it was mostly about possessed people controlled by the shadowy force under the bed. Of course, by being both, you have the choice: telling Stephen King’s It (kids fight Satan), or Stephen King’s The Bogeyman (dark child abuse) are both possible with Little Fears. But the price is these occasional patches of schizophrenia, providing as much confusion as they do choice.
Still, the visuals ARE strong, particularly when it comes to the Kings. Each one has his own back story, and nasty personality, but what really stands out in each one is the description of their lair. Mad castles full of captured blackbirds, halls of mirrors each trapping one child’s soul, a wall of child’s faces still screaming from the agony of being torn off, and the cottage from Hansel and Gretel made into the charnel house it must have actually been – these lairs and the lords and servants who live there will give you chills as you read them, and may even invade your nightmares. It’s like The Nightmare Before Hellraiser in Closetland, and you’re all invited for gumdrop tea.
Equally high on the fucked-up-ness scale is Patchwork, the retarded boy who keeps sewing patchwork dolls of human parts, and the psychotic twins with the butcher’s knife, and the worm people who can make a complete copy of anyone, as long as they can rip out their eyes. Alas, at the end of all this we’re told that all of this stuff is mostly off-limits, for the characters are unlikely to encounter such beasties, and are pretty much powerless to stop them if they did. Forget all the cool toys just provided, your characters will mostly be dealing with bog-standard, ass-numbingly dull ghosts, vampires and werewolves, with only the closet monster and the thing in the walls really hitting the child’s fears milieu at all.
And even these lesser monsters have no stats. All rolls against them are Quizzes, resisting against your own abilities. I think this mechanic is actually very clever, in terms of game play and the implicit metaphor, but it does make it difficult for a GM to express that one monster is stronger than another if the player can beat them both with the same ease. Of course, what changes is how precisely to kill them, which is entirely up to the GM (and would likely be impossible for the bigger guns). And frankly, if you’re looking for mechanics to inform storytelling in this game, you should have realised you were in the wrong place long ago.
The last chapter is devoted to adventure outlines. The first is the most complete, with NPCs, a detailed backstory and even some events that might happen, but it’s still miles from being an actual adventure. It does, however, set the tone by being particularly gruesome and nasty. A few years in the past, four men broke into the junkyard keeper’s house and raped, tortured and killed his wife. During this, the child was shoved into the carcrusher to be kept quiet, and it got turned on. Years later, this has become both a horrific town secret that is protected by a conspiracy of silence and guilt, and a kiddie’s horror story about the junkyard owner lurking there at night and chucking children into his fire-breathing, demonic car crusher since he can’t have his own. The story has become so scary to one little boy that the demons of Closetland have made it come true. Solve the murder to put the spirit to rest and stop the car crusher before it eats everyone.
Once again, we see a combination of Little Fears two sides, and they actually seem to work quite well together. In reading it, you can see how to work the two angles together and tell stories which scare both the child we remember and the parent we are now. The other stories are less inspiring and far less fleshed out – just a hook and three possible explanations – but they are also full of inspiration. They fill your head with scary ideas and scary stories, and once again, those exquisitely creepy visuals that Blair is so good at (and that children are so perfect for).
The art work, although occasionally cartoony and occasionally too Dave McKean/Lunch Money-esque for its own good, also goes a long way to providing these same striking images and ideas. Likewise the writing suffers from way, way too many sentence fragments, but is also powerfully vivid and strikingly atmospheric. This is a book which almost literally drips atmosphere; almost every page is soaking in its own awful, fucked up universe. It probably won’t make you scared to turn out the light in your bedroom, but it may keep you up all night worrying about taking your kids to school tomorrow. Or indeed, just how twisted the author actually is.
It also may make you want to run it.
And that, in the end, is the strength of Little Fears. Despite my distaste for rules-light systems, despite the occasions of schizophrenia and confusion, despite the lapses into heavy-handedness or melodrama, despite presenting a game concept that many instantly recoil from, others find uncomfortable and still more have trouble seeing how to produce….despite all this, when you finish the book you are left with the key sensation an RPG needs to deliver: a desire to play it. It’s just such an interesting and powerful idea, with such creepy sensibilities and mind-consumingly horrible imagery, and those ideas and images are presented with such verve that it gets into your mind and starts ticking. Sparking ideas. Nagging away at you, asking to be looked at. Asking to be played.
And asking to be thought about, and talked about, and pondered upon. Little Fears is thus something of a virtuoso work. As an RPG to play, it is not unflawed, frequently confused, often far too flimsy and containing little significant craft in its mechanical design. However, as an RPG to think about it, as a setting to read and be inspired by, as a presentation of a whole new, untapped genre with some exciting new gaming ideas contained within that, and, indeed, as a question about what genres and ideas and characters RPGs can explore, discuss and involve - and whether we (individually, and as a hobby) are ready for all this – as these things, it’s a powerful piece, and a thoroughly engrossing one.
In short, it might not be everyone’s cup of tea and it may not make it to your gaming table, but it makes for a good read and inspires many interesting thoughts. And after you’ve read it and thought about it, you might even want to play it. It is not the gaming equivalent of Gaiman’s Mr Punch, but it comes close, and that, I think, is worthy of attention.
Substance 3
Style 4
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)