Introducing Horror Elements into Shadowrun Options

[Kanada Ten]

The horror of Soylent Green wasn't that they were turning people into food, though that's what struck the chord for the main character. The horror was that the world was dead. The last tree was wilting. The oceans could no longer support life, not even algae. Technology had failed, science had failed. Humanity would just dwindle into extinction through entropy. The elite were simply hiding the facts to prevent panic. They wanted an orderly extinction.

That's a pretty easy conspiracy to import to SR. The runners find a Corporate Court report that the Earth is dying and there's simply nothing anyone can do about it. Not dragons nor elves, nor anyone it seems. The report eludes to a plan, which, if uncovered, involves mass genocide, abandoning the planet (for space or the metaplanes), converting the population into 'survivables' via a nanite plague, etc. As usual, the plans don't seem finished, it appears the corps are prepared to bicker and posture while humanity is on the brink.

[Chrysalis]

You have real talent at writing, Chrysalis. A creative mind like yours is a rare and precious thing.

Now if only I could make money off of it.

[Tyro]

Now if only I could make money off of it.

You have the raw talent. Unfortunately, an independent author also has to have a head for business. And lots and lots of luck.

[AllTheNothing]

I do. Surgical pictures following dissection. I do have nightmares, heart pounding, shocking, but mostly my dreams are strange. As they progress I am no longer the tormentee but the tormentor, nightmare turns into a strange dream.

One strange dream which I remember badly is that of being in Verdun. I am wearing an embroided white shift, my feet cold on the snow speckled ground. The smell of cordite mingling with the spice of rot. An artillery barrage from 88mm shells landing all around me kicking up a gray dust that partially clouds the landscape. I stand in the middle. Sometimes I hear the muted staccato of a Vickers machinegun. Everywhere I look I see dead bodies covered in the gray dust, their weapons clutched in dead hands. Broken gas masks litter with memoirs in the trenches. The trenches stink of mustard and brown paper bags. I do not linger there for I fear the gas that does.

It is a familiar place almost home. It is a pastiche separated from time and space. Nothing lives here but the sounds of battle and the hauntings of rats in the shifting of bodies. Sometimes I stare at a tin button for hours, other times I puzzle over a dead German soldier his belt buckle carefully scraped so the words "Gott mit Uns" are near rubbed out. Sometimes I think the soldier thinks too loudly, yelling in words of German I do not understand. Sometimes I see someone warning me to not be there, but there is the sniper strike that silences them, the artillery barrage to make them disappear.

I am there alone, but someone had come before and arranged the scene from being a battlefield to a dead historical monument. The dead, dead, but their souls play acting their positions, nailed into their positions in that moment of death.

I don't know what to say..... I realy hope that you are just making fun of me.
If not, DRECK you don't deserve this kind of torment.
In any case I wish the peace may grace your heart, my lady.

Now if only I could make money off of it.

Well try to start something on-line, a website in which you put some material and take donations (just to let people know you), than if enough people are interested in your work you could start to make serious projects.
Or maybe write some novels and send them to some of our contacts in CGL, it's good to have them here on DP.
Anyway don't give up before having given it a shot, it would be a real shame.

[Wounded Ronin]

converting the population into 'survivables' via a nanite plague, etc.

RETSU GO DEUSU ECKSU!

[Wounded Ronin]

I do. Surgical pictures following dissection. I do have nightmares, heart pounding, shocking, but mostly my dreams are strange. As they progress I am no longer the tormentee but the tormentor, nightmare turns into a strange dream.

One strange dream which I remember badly is that of being in Verdun. I am wearing an embroided white shift, my feet cold on the snow speckled ground. The smell of cordite mingling with the spice of rot. An artillery barrage from 88mm shells landing all around me kicking up a gray dust that partially clouds the landscape. I stand in the middle. Sometimes I hear the muted staccato of a Vickers machinegun. Everywhere I look I see dead bodies covered in the gray dust, their weapons clutched in dead hands. Broken gas masks litter with memoirs in the trenches. The trenches stink of mustard and brown paper bags. I do not linger there for I fear the gas that does.

It is a familiar place almost home. It is a pastiche separated from time and space. Nothing lives here but the sounds of battle and the hauntings of rats in the shifting of bodies. Sometimes I stare at a tin button for hours, other times I puzzle over a dead German soldier his belt buckle carefully scraped so the words "Gott mit Uns" are near rubbed out. Sometimes I think the soldier thinks too loudly, yelling in words of German I do not understand. Sometimes I see someone warning me to not be there, but there is the sniper strike that silences them, the artillery barrage to make them disappear.

I am there alone, but someone had come before and arranged the scene from being a battlefield to a dead historical monument. The dead, dead, but their souls play acting their positions, nailed into their positions in that moment of death.

That's so awesome I had to fight the urge to stand up from the computer and start air riffing.

That's almost Clive Barker-esque. You should go and pwn him.

[Wounded Ronin]

A long time ago, I ran a horror game using the old WoD system. Everyone got pre-generated characters who were mostly non-combat focused archaeologists, each with their own goals and traits. It was a Lovecraftian style adventure set in the Jungles of South America, investigating ancient Mayan ruins. It blended some real world politics (the Shining Path organization were part of the adventure) and native myths (Jaguar men and fragments of Aztec mythology). The PCs had been warned by the old shaman that no mortal weapons could harm the Jaguar Men and given three blessed spears that could harm them.

Unfortunately one of the players had a habit of reading rule books and thought he knew a bit about "Jaguar Men", particularly as I was using Werewolf: The Apocalypse for basic rules. When the players stumbled into a weapons cache, they thought it was Christmas. For ages they'd been playing low-power games where the most powerful weaponry they'd get access to were automatic pistols or maybe an SMG. They asked what was in it and I off-handedly replied "oh, machine guns, grenades, RPGs." Then one of the Jaguar men entered. Did they do what any sensible archaeologist would do? Nope - the rulebook reading player explained that even if the Jaguar men regenerated from "non-blessed" weapons, they'd certainly go down under full machine gun fire and that damage would probably become "aggravated" (non-regeneratable) once it hit overflow.

So the one combat-capable member of the party hefts a machine gun up and unleashes a hail of bullets at this supernatural creature. The player excitedly asks for the results and I say: "The bullets pass through the Jaguar man's body as if he were a ghost, blowing chips of stone and dust from the chamber wall behind him." The player's jaw actually dropped. Well duh - the shaman had told them they couldn't be harmed by mortal weapons.

Anyway, the entire party was eventually sacrificed to an ancient monstrosity atop a forgotten Mayan pyramid. It was a bit of a downer.

What went wrong? Well mismatched expectations was probably one, though it was fairly clear that I was running a more mystery-horror sort of game than anything else. At some point though, everybody suddenly lost their immersion and snapped into metagame mode. It was undoubtedly the weapons that did it. Things had been quite good up until that point.

There's probably a point in there somewhere, though I don't know what it is. The only conclusion I can honestly draw is that my game would have gone much better if the players hadn't shown up.

Thank you for the entertaining anecdote.

I don't think that attempting to pwn the jaguar man with a machine gun is necessarily out of character for a "real" person. I imagine that if I were in that situation in real life, if we assume that I took action instead of being overwhelmed with horror, that I might attempt to use the firearms before using the spear.

I see it like this. If you got into a fight with a bison and you had a spear, it could be possible that you stab at the bison as many times as you could, but the bison would just keep coming and still kill you. Onlookers could tell all their friends later that only a magic spear could kill the bison and a regular spear would be useless.

So in a sense it would be accurate that a mortal weapon couldn't kill the bison, if by that what we really mean is a spear or something wielded by a man on foot versus an enraged bison.

But none of that necessarily impacts whether or not you would be able to pwn the bison if instead of the spear you had a submachinegun and did your best to dump 30 rounds into the bison while he's charging you.

See what I mean? So that's why if I were in the same situation as that player character in real life I might try to shoot the jaguar man, the warnings of elderly magicians nonwithstanding. Seeing as I don't believe in magic in real life anyway.

[Tyro]

I don't know what to say..... I realy hope that you are just making fun of me.
If not, DRECK you don't deserve this kind of torment.
In any case I wish the peace may grace your heart, my lady.




Well try to start something on-line, a website in which you put some material and take donations (just to let people know you), than if enough people are interested in your work you could start to make serious projects.
Or maybe write some novels and send them to some of our contacts in CGL, it's good to have them here on DP.
Anyway don't give up before having given it a shot, it would be a real shame.

Seconded, on both counts. It doesn't sound to me like you're making this up.

[knasser]

Thank you for the entertaining anecdote.

I don't think that attempting to pwn the jaguar man with a machine gun is necessarily out of character for a "real" person. I imagine that if I were in that situation in real life, if we assume that I took action instead of being overwhelmed with horror, that I might attempt to use the firearms before using the spear.

I see it like this. If you got into a fight with a bison and you had a spear, it could be possible that you stab at the bison as many times as you could, but the bison would just keep coming and still kill you. Onlookers could tell all their friends later that only a magic spear could kill the bison and a regular spear would be useless.

So in a sense it would be accurate that a mortal weapon couldn't kill the bison, if by that what we really mean is a spear or something wielded by a man on foot versus an enraged bison.

But none of that necessarily impacts whether or not you would be able to pwn the bison if instead of the spear you had a submachinegun and did your best to dump 30 rounds into the bison while he's charging you.

See what I mean? So that's why if I were in the same situation as that player character in real life I might try to shoot the jaguar man, the warnings of elderly magicians nonwithstanding. Seeing as I don't believe in magic in real life anyway.

Yes - I thought of that as I wrote the post. But the decision wasn't based on in-character thinking. It was based on a ten-minute explanation by the player of garou regeneration rules and a quick calculation of how much aggravated damage a Strength 3 character would do with a spear vs. how much more, but non-aggravated, damage the character would do with a machine gun on full auto.

Plus, I was 14-15 when I was running this game. Live and learn. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Cheers,

K.

[knasser]

The horror of Soylent Green wasn't that they were turning people into food, though that's what struck the chord for the main character. The horror was that the world was dead. The last tree was wilting. The oceans could no longer support life, not even algae. Technology had failed, science had failed. Humanity would just dwindle into extinction through entropy. The elite were simply hiding the facts to prevent panic. They wanted an orderly extinction.

That's a pretty easy conspiracy to import to SR. The runners find a Corporate Court report that the Earth is dying and there's simply nothing anyone can do about it. Not dragons nor elves, nor anyone it seems. The report eludes to a plan, which, if uncovered, involves mass genocide, abandoning the planet (for space or the metaplanes), converting the population into 'survivables' via a nanite plague, etc. As usual, the plans don't seem finished, it appears the corps are prepared to bicker and posture while humanity is on the brink.

If anyone wants a very strange horror that would be pretty inspiring for Shadowrun, try to get hold of an old out of print book called "Too, too solid flesh" by Nick O'Donohoe. Unfortunately I can't say much about why without terrific spoilers, but the book is very intelligent and especially enjoyable if you're familiar with Hamlet. What really got me was how much the back-cover synopsis sounds like a light, slightly silly comedy and how jaw-droppingly none of those it turned out to be. And considering how long ago it was written, almost prescient in some ways.

[Wounded Ronin]

Yes - I thought of that as I wrote the post. But the decision wasn't based on in-character thinking. It was based on a ten-minute explanation by the player of garou regeneration rules and a quick calculation of how much aggravated damage a Strength 3 character would do with a spear vs. how much more, but non-aggravated, damage the character would do with a machine gun on full auto.

Plus, I was 14-15 when I was running this game. Live and learn. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Cheers,

K.

Well, I guess that's what published RPG rules-writers mean when they write that with the Awakened or Undead you can always bend the rules to keep the players guessing. Maybe it's all about the reaction you get when things don't act as expected and the player characters start getting savaged. It kind of mimics the reactions of the Colonial Marines in Alien 2 when they realize the Xenomorphs aren't really playing by their rules.

[AllTheNothing]

Now if only I could make money off of it.

Lady, I could be missing completely the mark but there's this "Writer Wanted" thread that could be a beginning.
You write some Missions to see if you have a potential consumer base, than if the thing works out ok you can make plans about the future.

Well ... I think giving it a shot costs nothing.

[Chrysalis]

You have the raw talent. Unfortunately, an independent author also has to have a head for business. And lots and lots of luck.

I doubt there is much need for the talent of a person who can write Clive Barker-like horror that is not horror. I also do not know enough of the Shadowrun world to be one of its contributors. If I was it would be the kind where there would be much agonizing, for I would take an amoral stance. Where every step the ideals have to be shed for the sake of survival, where each individual choice is a step closer to becoming the thing men fear to be. It is about being the abyss, being the cure that is worse than the disease.

I really do not think that many would wish to play a game where the fun can be found in damnation. But then again us Europeans do play games that are less black and white than Americans do. The loss of childish idealism was the price of the 20th century.

[jesusofthemonkey...]

Well, I guess that's what published RPG rules-writers mean when they write that with the Awakened or Undead you can always bend the rules to keep the players guessing. Maybe it's all about the reaction you get when things don't act as expected and the player characters start getting savaged. It kind of mimics the reactions of the Colonial Marines in Alien 2 when they realize the Xenomorphs aren't really playing by their rules.

One of the things I really liked about the Deadlands series of RP games is that there was a section that flat out said, dont go back here unless you're running a game: its got monster stats and SECRETS! Of course everyone did anyways, but it was cool that the designers were angry about metagaming and tried to do something about it.

Back to horror: Does anyone use music? I'm a different game I play in the DM uses music to great effect to set a mood for a scene. The game isn't horror based at all, but the music is a nice back drop. I was thinking of importing this idea to Shadowrun and thought that it might work especially well for a horror themed run. Any thoughts?

[Wounded Ronin]

I really do not think that many would wish to play a game where the fun can be found in damnation. But then again us Europeans do play games that are less black and white than Americans do. The loss of childish idealism was the price of the 20th century.

Yeah, like that German F1 racing game.

[Caine Hazen]

If you use music, you will definitely need to do a good program before hand. The downside to this is that in a movie, music can be timed to build suspense up, and it would be harder to time this sort of thing for a game. However, having the music mix cut in something from Weird Al while trying to build suspense will ruin the mood, and it'll be hard to get back to. So plan carefully.

[Draco18s]

When I first started running, this statement held true. 2050, pre UB, pre Chicago, pre D for Pres. IE's and as mentioned above Aztlan. Shadowrun is a pretty great game, you can run whatever strikes your fancy and somewhere its already there.

Just don't tell Dumpshock (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

My current GM used the SR rules to run a space opera game (because no other rules set worked nearly as well). Needed almost no modifications at all. Gouls became the result of genetic experiments to create life that could survive the vacuum of space, robots and AIs are common (one of the players was a brain-in-a-jar cyborg and the Big Bad of the game was that once a planet develops FTL communication a virus-like AI takes over and tries to concert everything Borg-like), and "Pilot Aerospace" was as common as "Pilot Groundcraft" is in core.

PCs were the survivors on a colony ship headed to a jungle Jurassic-like planet (dinosaurs were not confirmed by the GM as they never landed) along with about 1500 to 2000 other people (still in statis pods) and a group that had woken up (this idiot farmer decided he was highest rank, along with one of the players, so they dived into two groups: Team Alpha and Team Prime--I'm still not sure which was which).

Was a fun game to watch.

[Wesley Street]

If you use music, you will definitely need to do a good program before hand. The downside to this is that in a movie, music can be timed to build suspense up, and it would be harder to time this sort of thing for a game. However, having the music mix cut in something from Weird Al while trying to build suspense will ruin the mood, and it'll be hard to get back to. So plan carefully.

One of the best scenes in the remake of Dawn of the Dead was the montage of the survivors in the mall killing time as Richard Cheese's take on Disturbed's "Down With the Sickness" played in the background. It was hilariously creepy, if such a concept could exist.

Any music can work so long as it compliments or appropriately contrasts the tone. Imagine an organlegger cheerfully singing Weird Al's "Like a Surgeon" over the sounds of bones splintering and flesh ripping as limbs are removed from a still-living victim. Brr.

[AllTheNothing]

I doubt there is much need for the talent of a person who can write Clive Barker-like horror that is not horror. I also do not know enough of the Shadowrun world to be one of its contributors. If I was it would be the kind where there would be much agonizing, for I would take an amoral stance. Where every step the ideals have to be shed for the sake of survival, where each individual choice is a step closer to becoming the thing men fear to be. It is about being the abyss, being the cure that is worse than the disease.

I really do not think that many would wish to play a game where the fun can be found in damnation. But then again us Europeans do play games that are less black and white than Americans do. The loss of childish idealism was the price of the 20th century.

We can't force you to do anything but we can tell you what we think: you are understimating yourself.

[hyzmarca]

Yeah, like that German F1 racing game.

Someone should make a deep philosophical and ideological comparison of Formula 1 and NASCAR.

[Tyro]

We can't force you to do anything but we can tell you what we think: you are understimating yourself.

QFT

[Rad]

I doubt there is much need for the talent of a person who can write Clive Barker-like horror that is not horror. I also do not know enough of the Shadowrun world to be one of its contributors. If I was it would be the kind where there would be much agonizing, for I would take an amoral stance. Where every step the ideals have to be shed for the sake of survival, where each individual choice is a step closer to becoming the thing men fear to be. It is about being the abyss, being the cure that is worse than the disease.

I really do not think that many would wish to play a game where the fun can be found in damnation. But then again us Europeans do play games that are less black and white than Americans do. The loss of childish idealism was the price of the 20th century.

Please don't generalize, there are far too many (often diametrically opposed) types of people in this country to take us all as a group like that. Personally, I've found that most gamers here in the states revel in damnation, though there is a difference between slaughtering people because it's awesome and making the kind of hard moral choice you're referring to. Look to the popularity of graphic novels (and their movie counterparts) such as Sin City, The Crow, and Watchmen to see how that type of amorality goes over in the states.

"The world will look up and shout 'save us', and I'll whisper 'No.'"

[Chrysalis]

I was not seeking to generalize, but create a gulf. My own perceptions are based on the media, which often myopic in its interpretation of society.

Well, one thing I was doing that week was reading Two Fisted Tales and Punisher.

[Chrysalis]

So if I was to run a play-by-post game of Conspiracy X / Shadowrun crossover with a sprinkling of Delta Green would anyone be interested?

[AllTheNothing]

So if I was to run a play-by-post game of Conspiracy X / Shadowrun crossover with a sprinkling of Delta Green would anyone be interested?

How would the thing be organized?