HPL
has a tendency, in ending many of his stories, to enact a dreadful revelation
and then have his protagonist run screaming into the night. It happens at the
end of “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “The Outsider” and, to some extent, in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. In the
short story or novella format, this is entirely acceptable: once the climax has
been reached, very little more needs to be added to complete the tale: BAM! Aaargh! The End. Anyone who’s ever read
a book by Alan Garner knows the deal: every single one of his books – Elidor, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The
Owl Service, Red Shift – concludes in just this manner. That’s not to imply
that this is a problem; it isn’t... until someone tries to tell the story in a
different medium.
When
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS) turned “The Whisperer in Darkness” into a movie recently, they ran into a
serious issue in translating HPL’s ending to film. While it’s OK to just have
your narrator go crazy and head for the hills in print, it’s not very effective
on celluloid. In this instance, the HPLHS guys took a step back and came up
with an alternative ending that was very satisfying and fitted well with the
source material. In essence, they just wrote a short ‘what happens next’
sequence to tack on where Lovecraft left off.
However,
I don’t want to give the impression that Lovecraft’s ending is not useful, or
is somehow less valuable than other approaches. One of the reasons that HPL’s work
sticks with the reader long after they’ve put down the book, is that the mind
formulates extensions to the material, cogitates what would take place after
those final words: it’s this practice of seemingly leaving things hanging which
grabs the reader and brings them back for more.
In
a gaming format, this tantalising resolution is just as useful. Every now and
then, things go pear-shaped for the Investigators: every roll is crap; everyone
gets knocked out; everyone who isn’t unconscious goes temporarily insane. What
to do? BAM! Aaargh! To Be Continued. Just
wrap things up at this point (if you’re close to the end of your playing time
anyway), or jump to a new scene. Investigators who go temporarily loopy tend to
run – a lot. Have them regain their senses at some other locale some time
later, preferably one that will put them back on the trail once again. As a
bonus, you could have them come to holding the McGuffin that they were after in
the first place, allowing them to backtrack and find out what happened to their
buddies (with a view to rescuing them). Or, if the team were simply overcome
due to combat, have them regain awareness in a holding cell somewhere, close to
the action, with the possibility of escape and of continuing the narrative.
These things don’t have to spell total disaster for the party or your finely
crafted story.
And
if your players question how it is they were let go by the Servitor Beings who
seriously had them on the ropes, or why the creatures didn’t just kill them out
of hand once they had them dead to rights, remind them that these are alien beings we’re talking about: their actions don’t have to make sense to rational human minds. (If they do, then perhaps the players should
think about having their characters take a quiet rest cure somewhere, in order to
build up some Sanity Points...)
In
one of my own tales, I had my team investigate a run-down old building due for
demolition, which contained a serious cache of nitro-glycerine, precariously perched
on the edge of an unsteady workbench in the basement. Ideally, the party should
have found the gallon jar and carefully removed it to a less potentially
dangerous place, but their gamers’ instincts got the better of them and the
basement was the last place they wanted to check out. So, what with them
kicking-in stuck doors and randomly falling through rotten floorboards upstairs,
the glass jar hit the floor and – BAM! Aaargh!
To Be Continued. Since I had stuck enough explosive material in this ramshackle
building to wipe out everything in a 100-metre radius, I decided to simply draw
a veil over that night’s session and move on. At the beginning of the
subsequent session, we began with the team being dug out of the rubble, somewhat
chastened, a few hit points worse for wear, but still able to carry on fighting
the Good Fight.
How
did they survive? What confluence of physics and surrounding wood-panelling
kept them from harm? Who cares? The point, of course, was that everyone got to
live to fight another day, and months of my writing and preparation didn’t just
get flushed down the crapper because my players were too lily-livered to simply
walk downstairs and see what was going on. Personally, I blame the “Evil Dead” movies...
The
first duty that both the team of Investigators and the Keeper have is to the
story. Breaking things up into scenes, drawing a veil over something that didn’t
go as planned, editing the narrative around poor decisions and bad dice rolls,
gives everyone involved flexibility, creative input, and – best of all –
longevity. And it will keep them coming back for more!
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