The Supernatural, Immortal and Invincible
Serial Killer in Fantasy
There’s
something to be said for an occasional game in which the horror ticks up to
thirteen and the blood starts flowing freely as the hedge trimmer gets a
thorough shakedown in Murder 101. What follows is some advice I can offer on
how to take a movie like Friday the Thirteens or Nightmare on elm Street and
turn it into a fantasy horror tale worth remembering…
Start with the Mechanics and Establish the
Genre Rules
D&D and
Pathfinder are quite fair in their expectation that adventurers tend to face
foes of like strength, though it is by no means required and in fact works
against the grain of some styles of campaign (sandbox, for ex.) All editions of
the game do support mechanical features that allow for some deadly foes if
presented against a party of sufficiently lower level with few or no magic
items. A ghost or vampire presented to a party of 1st to 3rd
level in any edition is a sure sign of a looming TPK. Any single demon in the
game vs. a party of low level adventurers with no magic is going to be terrifying.
That said….it’s rarely enough to just take a stock monster and stick it up
against some low level adventurers. For the supernatural killer genre you need
something more unique.
One way to
thoroughly shake up a party of erstwhile adventurers is to throw something
horrifyingly traumatic at them: in D&D and Pathfinder this usually means
something which won’t die, and which in turn is uncannily effective at
instigating TPKs and which is unrecognizable to anyone in the group. It might
look like something they all know….and that only makes it worse! If it looks
like a zombie but moves quickly and with intelligence….and gets up again and
again….and is immune to daze/stun effects….that’s a pretty terrifying creature.
There’s
honestly no easy way to introduce an invulnerable regenerating monster without
feeling a bit unfair, so when you plan on integrating a Jason Vorheese-like
serial killer zombie in your game you also need to establish a precedent. One
way to do it is to have everyone roll up some side characters; traditional
D&D these days is all about heroic adventurers who have a chance at life if
they play their cards right. An even better way to do this is to have a bunch
of disposable pregens ready for the evening’s horror gaming.
There are a
couple other styles of gaming in D&D that lend themselves to this mentality
as well: the archetypal mentality of the OSR manifesto allows for the
possibility of the unkillable and unstoppable monster as a de facto
expectation; you’re barely supposed to want to (or be able to) fight something
as simple as a swarm of kobolds, on average….so a supernatural monster that
suffers no harm from the adventurer’s weapons is actually baked into the rules,
really.
The other
way is the “implied setting” approach. In 1st and 2nd
edition we were introduced to Ravenloft, a land where the evil dark lords rule
and even set the norms of reality according to their twisted personalities. 3rd
edition introduced Midnight, arguably one of the best of the crapsack worlds
(look it up in TV Tropes) in which despair and misery were par for the course.
There are many other examples of such worlds out there. Pathfinder has specific
regions of Golarion where Bad Guys rule and horrible things are the norm, as
well.
Once you’ve
established location/expectation in a way that will at least avoid the sense on
the players’ parts that tonight’s game is not about heroes but victims, you can
move forward with your diabolical plan to murder them all with an unstoppable
zombie menace. So how to go about doing this without making it feel entirely
like a crude encounter built around the one-sided premise of “GM wins, everyone
dies?”
Just
throwing the players into the mix with a supernatural killer isn’t going to cut
it, trust me. You need to establish the following ideas for your murderous
Halloween plot to make it full of horrific genre fun:
Here are the
bullet points for Supernatural Killer Games:
Location – Victims – Personalities – Motive
- Direction - Secrets - Murder! –
Achilles’ Heel
Location
Jason and
his cronies tend to frequent certain locales. It might be Lake Pleasant, or
perhaps it’s the old school house, the abandoned refinery, or something more
abstract like dreams. The villain needs a location to which it’s attached
somehow, for some reason. The players will need a motive for going there, or
being stuck there. In a fantasy setting this is easy: the tomb, castle, haunted
mansion….all easy fodder for supernatural killers. If you’re playing Pathfinder
take a look at the haunting rules in the Gamemastery Guide; they can come in
handy for setting a location with some spooky properties.
Double
points if you pick a locale that’s also just plain old dangerous. Often in this
genre the area itself lends to the mayhem.
Victims
Victims are
what drive the story and get everyone into trouble. Jason doesn’t just kill
anyone; he kills teenagers who are overly egotistical and promiscuous. Freddy
hunts the children of the parents who burned him to death in their dreams.
These killers usually have revenge, or an unresolvable desire for punishment
driving them.
If you’re
making pregens this part is easy; you can structure the “why” of the murder
part into the PC backgrounds. If you let players roll up their own or use
pre-existing PCs (with foreknowledge that they are in “evil domain X” or at
least aware that the conventional D&D genre is being set aside) then you
can always craft some background hooks that relate to their established
personalities. “You remember your aunt Tabitha, who was burned as a witch in
your youth; she cursed the whole village, but looked you in the eyes and said
that the children would pay for what the fathers had done” type stuff.
Ideally, you
may want to have 1 or even 2 backups for players, so when their first character
dies they can wander in with backup #1. If you don’t do this, then treat the
game like a sort of elimination match….last man standing gets the prize!
Personalities
It’s far
from a requirement, but the genre of supernatural killer horror is usually
punctuated by exaggerated or deserving personalities. From the promiscuous
cheerleader to the quiet goth type who hides in her room all day and broods about death….the victims have lots of
personality, sometimes in sync with what the killer hates most.
One way to
handle this is to hand out (or randomly roll) on a list of excessive or
exaggerated personality traits; if your players are creative just tell them to
pick something a bit over the top. If you’re using pre-established characters
then maybe they already have some personality quirks that work; if not, suggest
that the players play it up a bit.
If you want
to make the whole process a bit more spontaneous and organic, just indicate
you’ll be passing out kudos or rewards (extra XP if they survive) for the
person who hams it up best or brings the
most to the table.
Motive
Motive is
two sided: you need the killer’s motive (see victims, above) as to why he does
what he does….his back story. Then you need the PC motive about why they are
creeping around the abandoned castle or the old sawmill looking for trouble and
stirring up the undead. Motives in this genre of fiction can often be very
basic: a gang of foppish nobles out for a little fun and hanky panky go to the
old sawmill where thirty years ago everyone was slain by the son of the old
witch said to have been possessed by a demon….and who of course still lurks
there! The possibilities flow easily with a bit of thought. If you choose
motives, pick ones that the players are both comfortable with and which are
easy for them to respond to without feeling rail-roaded.
Direction
Direction
refers to how you pace your plot. The supernatural killer theme lends itself
very well to single game sessions, which means you need to keep players on
focus, usually by starting them in the place you want them to be with their
ducks all in a row already. Alternatively an ambitious GM could run the game
open-world style and populate a region with several such supernatural killer
events and other horrors (a la Ravenloft).
You want to
avoid a railroad event when you set up this sort of game. Sometimes the easiest
way to avoid a railroad (or sense of such) is to just start the game where you
want it to be. Don’t put everyone in the proverbial tavern and then force them
to haul their butts out to the sawmill (unless you want to let them choose more
than one path, or have more than one option anyway)….if the destination is the
sawmill then start them at the front door with some backstory. Get right to the
action, and avoid confusing the issue. It’s not a railroad if they start at the
destination, only if you need them to go there and then pretend like they have
the option to do otherwise.
If you’ve
built a story with a more open scope, then this becomes less of an issue. If
(to use the Freddy Kreuger example) the villain strikes in dreams then the
scope of your locale is infinite, essentially. If the monster haunts the entire
city, then you need not worry about getting them to Lake Pleasant. This style
of story works better for multi-session events, especially if the planned scope
of the game can expand beyond just the specific horror theme you’ve decided to
go with. Here then you could create the sandbox horror setting, with multiple
supernatural killers and horror events lurking in the shadows.
Secrets
Every
supernatural killer story has some secrets, even if they are simple ones (i.e.
finding out Freddy was really a dream-demon back from the dead to gain revenge,
or the deadites being kandarian demons summoned by the tape of a scholar who
probed too deeply into the unknown…)
Secrets can
involve the PCs as well, such as the gang of adults who remember the hobo they
murdered a decade ago, the weird hobo with the pentagram on his chest. In
fantasy it’s easy enough: perhaps they all belonged to the same mob that
murdered the witch woman, or were all descended from families that seven
generations earlier had made a pact with Evil and then reneged on their part of
the bargain….or agreed to condemn the souls of future generations in exchange
for immediate power.
Secrets are
something you can find to lend clarity to the murdering going on, something
which can serve as a big reveal, an explanation, or an ironic twist…
Murder!
And then
there is the murder. In the supernatural killer genre of horror murder isn’t
just a thing that happens, it’s sort of The Thing that Happens….it’s the
driving force behind much of the tale. Murder in these stories is never clean
and simple….it’s bloody, eviscerating, involves unconventional weapons, and
even if the supernatural killer gets it, he’ll come back, moments later,
unphased by the holes in his body. Likewise, when the adventurers die, they die
grisly, sordid deaths that may or may not have an ironic, camp, and always gory
twist to them.
Think of a
dozen or two unusual murder instruments and grizzly deaths. Keep those in mind,
write them down, and look for ways to execute them during the course of the
game. Bonus points for putting the action in an environment that just leds
itself naturally to gory deaths. Butcheries, dwarven smelting chambers, a
trap-laden mansion of evil…you name it. Remember that if there’s a river it
should have zombified piranha in it. If there’s a forge it should be
uncomfortably easy to fall into when fully lit. If there’s ornamental weaponry
on the wall it should take no more than a shove to become impaled.
Achilles’ Heel
There’s one
great and final secret which should become evident over the course of the
session, perhaps in sprinkled clues, or as a side effect of dialoguing with
various NPCs in the know, or even from the ramblings of the murderer himself:
the way to kill the thing…or at least stop it for another year.
When you’ve
presented an unstoppable monster with DR 15, SR 33 and Regeneration 5 to a
party of level 2 adventurers, it’s hard to dispute that you’ve created an
impossible beast for them to overcome. What you need is the thing they must
do….be it a ritual, a sequence of events, a discourse, the location of an
artifact or the means of revealing the true horror of the creature to itself to
at last put the monster to rest.
Perhaps a
ritual to close the dark portal from which the creature trods is buried in the
tomes of the old witch who summoned the thing by accident. Maybe the elder of
the village remembers that restraining the beast and impaling it on the tree
where it was originally hung will force the demon back into the dead wood.
Perhaps the only thing that will sate its murderous lust is to find the elder
nobleman who escaped its wrath forty years earlier. Hell: maybe it just needs
12 victims for the night and then it’s happy.
The means of
defeating the beast should ultimately be part of the plot, and something
potentially attainable, even if it requires the adventurers to question their
own moral compass at some point.
Conclusion
Hopefully
this advice will help you, too, carry out some classic supernatural murder
tales at your Halloween game table…!
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