Saturday 15 February 2014

Rip It & Run! The Lovecraft Denouement


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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