Casting Shadows

Our prompt for Day 28 is scariest. The question that you might prefer to work with instead asks us to talk about the scariest game that we have played. That might refer to the events of a particular session, to the setting of a particular RPG, or to the system of one – or some menacing mélange of monstrous moodiness that matches your message more.

Long-term readers of this blog know that we hold that it’s the imagination of the players which leads to an emotional response, such as fear, so I think a good response for today will focus on the events of a session where the players felt some of the fear of their terrified characters.

Day 28: What is one of the scariest games that you have played?

Ten years ago, my answer to this question was the famous molasses incident. I am not going to retell it here, but you can hear it and a discussion of playing horror games for a serious intention (rather than comedic), on the episode of the Cerebrevore Podcast below.

In 2023, my response to this question is from a short Mage: The Ascension Chronicle I ran in Seoul with players new to it and relatively new to the World of Darkness. They had run Vampire characters just long enough to get a hint of what awful things lurked in the setting, and just how fragile mortal characters could be.

As they got into playing Mage, the set up for the Chronicle was a halfway house where orphaned Orphans were being protected by a motley assortment of caretakers, including the PCs. The source of fear in the Chronicle appeared at first to be of failure, as failure would mean failing to protect the children in their care.

I facilitated fear by emphasizing the vulnerability of their charges, but also presenting them as empathetic. My focus was on building relationships, and only being suggestive about the threats. The imagination of the players did the rest. They filled in the shadowy blanks with things from their own experiences in the real world and dialed them up to whatever number they thought suited the World of Darkness. It was a curiously explicit and brutal expression of the WoD without a lot of explicit talk about what made it so. As the PCs were adults drawn from a history of life alone on the street, and the NPCs were largely innocents not yet beaten numb by the horrors around them, it was natural to talk ambiguously and around things in the way that adults do around children. This made their fears all the more ripe for internal embellishment and the resulting revulsion and horror.

The hook for the Chronicle was a Mage NPC from the Vampire Chronicle that the players knew was into rescuing lost and homeless folks from the streets and the insidious industries they were seeing a new side of as undead caught in the power games of a dying city. We made characters who had made it to adulthood thanks to his interventions and were asked to come back to the city to help him defend the halfway house against various interests the players could guess at from their time playing Vampires.

In the end, the Chronicle did not go for the cheap thrill of bringing those threats into reality versus the children. Instead, it set the NPC up strongly as a father figure and the threats began to mount against him. The fear shifted from the broad and faceless daily threat to the orphans they were protecting, to a more directed and powerful attack on the person they relied on as their own savior.

It’s a terrible thing to lose a parent. This game took that experience head on. It was unafraid to draw on the personal experiences of its players, and it was a precarious balance of power and powerlessness in the darkest heart of the World of Darkness.