Rip It & Run: Scübidüberisms!

“...And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those pesky kids!”

-The oft-heard complaint of Ne’er-Do-Wells

One of the mainstays of life is the fact that we have to take the rough with the smooth. There’s that old chestnut that we don’t know the heights of our joy unless we taste the depths of our despair. We are enjoined, it seems, to compare and contrast experiences weighing each against the other to gain a full comprehension of our existences.

What does this have to do with playing Call of Cthulhu? I’m glad you asked.

A well-run campaign of CoC leads its protagonists through a winding maze of clues and discoveries, taking them on a journey into the most hidden recesses of black and disturbing realities. Ideally, this trail towards madness should be gradual and slow to build up, piling pebble upon pebble until the barge of our heroes’ worldview sinks irrevocably beneath the waters of insanity. In planning a rich tale of slow-building suspense however, sometimes we rush too quickly from adventure to adventure and leap headlong into an inevitable – and irreversible – conclusion.

A wise Keeper will create tales which can be slipped in among the chapters of an ongoing campaign to act as buffers or brakes in the investigating party’s exposure to mind-searing revelations. Many of these adventures will contain little or no supernatural or Mythos-related elements at all; nevertheless, in the hands of a skilled storyteller, they may well still scare the pants off the players.

Part of the effort that goes into presenting such scenarios – which I call “Scübidüberisms” - is the ability to mask the goings-on behind a facade of distinct supernatural possibility. That is, the lead-up to the exposing of the mundane reality behind the strange events has to be masked behind a convincing layer of special effects. What I’m talking about, most simply stated, is mood.

In most of these kinds of tales, there is a large sector of humanity which has a fervent belief in, or a vested interest in, there being an acceptance of the strange events that are taking place. To this end, they will construct rumour, or stage happenings, to reinforce that belief wherever possible. Reputations and income-generation are often at stake here, so Investigators should step carefully in exposing the lies. Sometimes opposition to the players’ investigation is not malicious; tradition is simply, very often, a difficult thing to let go of.

In short, the NPCs are the best ammo that the Keeper has against the Investigators. Their determination and motivations in maintaining the status quo should be clearly kept in mind during the running of these adventures. Local witchdoctors often rely on a superstitious community to keep themselves fed and clothed; smugglers often depend upon the rumours surrounding local seaside ruins to keep sightseers away. With ulterior motives like these at work, Investigators may find themselves hip-deep in the sort of hot water that, while not of supernatural origin, is no less deadly for it.

The apparent supernatural elements contained within such stories all turn out to be carefully constructed theatrics designed to dupe the uninitiated as to the presence of bogeys and other fell creatures. Sometimes these are one-off events to cover a particular nefarious act; at other times the special effects are designed to maintain an ongoing result. Either way, the Keeper needs to be even-handed in dealing with these scenarios.

For starters, this type of tale is not an ‘us against them’ arrangement between the Keeper and their players. The Keeper must remember to let clues as to what is actually going on percolate through the narrative so that the Investigators will be able to figure things out by themselves. Without these breadcrumbs along the trail, the revelation at the conclusion will be hollow and appear to be an instance of ‘Keeper grandstanding’ which may stroke the referee’s ego, but will not have players coming back for more.

True, the Keeper needs to keep the mystery going for as long as possible; however, when the clues come together and the answer is plain for all to see, the wrap-up needs to cut in and the cards need to be revealed. It’s best in these circumstances for the Keeper to let the Investigators explain how it was all done, possibly to a gob-smacked and appreciative audience of NPCs, and jumping in with details - where appropriate - to plug any holes in their rationales.

Life is not always champagne and chocolates; occasionally we need a good solid dose of meat-and-potatoes to keep things in balance. A wise Keeper knows this is sound advice for their ongoing campaign as well.

Review: "The Babadook"

KENT, Jennifer, (Writer/Dir.), “The Babadook”, 2013, Babadook Films Pty. Ltd., Causeway Films Pty. Ltd., South Australian Film Corporation, & Screen Australia

Unfortunately, this is not going to be a film for everyone. I liked it a lot – even despite the fact that bratty, ill-mannered kids make my teeth buckle outwards. For many people out there it’s going to strike a definite chord, although whether it’s the right one, or the one that the director intends, is going to be permanently up for debate.

The premise is this: Amelia lives alone with her son Samuel, a very bright and overly-imaginative child. Seven years ago, while en route to the hospital to deliver herself of Samuel, Amelia and her husband were involved in a car accident, from which, we learn, said husband did not survive. Amelia has given up her creative life as a children’s book writer to focus on bringing up Samuel, working as a drudge in an aged persons’ care facility. Samuel, as the movie opens, is having difficulties going to sleep at night due to the fact that he believes there is a monster in his cupboard or under the bed. His sleeplessness affects Amelia, causing her sleep debt to pile up to dangerous levels. When a strange book entitled “Mister Babadook” appears in the house – a terrifying kid’s pop-up book resembling the combined nightmare leftovers of Shaun Tan and Jan Svankmajer – Samuel becomes convinced that “the Babadook” is entirely real, and soon Amelia starts to think that his impossibility is no longer an option as well.

From here, the narrative tracks Amelia and Samuel’s individual responses to the threat. Amelia digs her heels in and sets course for denial; Samuel begins preparations in earnest, building all kinds of weapons to take the Babadook out, weapons which get him taken out of school. Samuel’s anxious ranting about the monster grates on Amelia’s nerves as she desperately tries to hold things together, getting less and less sleep. As Samuel’s screeching ratchets up to nerve-shredding levels, her coping strategies collapse, her lies and dodges become exposed, and she loses it completely. Then Mr. Babadook comes to call.

I’m guessing that the director was striving for some metaphorical look at what happens in the lives of single-parents with demanding children when the pressures of daily life become too much. Using the device of the Babadook as a symbol for the weight of modern existence under which the toughest nerves can fray, this notion is convincingly conveyed; however, it loses some of its bite in the film’s effort to convince us that the monster under the bed is in fact a reality. I admit I kept waiting for moments where Amelia’s sleepless state would be used as an excuse for her seeing something unusual but it doesn’t really happen. She’s more focussed on keeping Samuel from talking to other people about it than trying to sort out if the threat is an actual one. Even when she finally goes to the police – assuming that the Babadook is the persona du guerre of some crazy stalker – she is warned off from lodging her complaint by the monster himself.

Of course, this is the choice of the director and there’s little to be done about it. I would have liked a film where the reality of the creature was in dispute for as long as possible, not just an assumed feature of the narrative from the get-go, but that’s just me. After watching the movie through, I turned to the special features on the disc to watch “Monster”, the short film that was the seed for the later movie. The DNA is very clear here, and the short length of the piece made the concept much tighter and snappier, although any forays into the realm of metaphor were brief at best. Seeing both works brought the concept into sharp focus, although I’m torn between which one I would consider the better exposition.

The larger stage of the main film allows other chilling elements to creep in too. Amelia’s sister and niece, the school principals, the welfare workers, the policemen, are all coldly oblivious to the fact that Amelia’s world is exploding and that they are helping not at all. Her co-worker at the aged care facility is the only helpful individual in the background and he comes off as slightly creepy too (even though the lack of physical and emotional intimacy is one of Amelia’s biggest issues); sadly, just when he looks like he might be a surprise ‘Mr. Right’, he too cops the wrong end of Amelia’s ad hoc coping strategies and Samuel’s inability to stop blurting out the truth and he leaves in a huff.

Essie Davis (known in TV-land as Miss Phryne Fisher from the “Miss Fisher Investigates” series based on Kerry Greenwood’s crime novel oeuvre) is fantastic in “The Babadook” and gives a bravura performance; grudgingly, I have to acknowledge that the young actor playing Samuel belted it out of the park too, despite the caveat I presented above about my response to ill-mannered kids. The film looks amazing and the monster – the eponymous Babadook – is enough to give anyone the willies.

One downside – and again, it’s highly personal – is that there’s violence against animals as a feature of this flick. And no, I didn’t need to stick in a ‘Spoiler Alert!’ there, as it’s flagged very early on in the proceedings. I don’t care what people do to each other, people are idiots; hurting animals is bad, even if it’s “just part of a movie”. People are barbaric to animals all day every day and no-one should be out there encouraging them. This element of the film was not particularly shocking – because, foreshadowed – but waiting for it to happen was almost unendurable. And the fact that there is no real punishment for this despicable act of cruelty at the movie’s end left a bad taste in my mouth too. Again, other people won’t have my qualms about this.

All-in-all, I’m giving this four Tentacled Horrors, despite the animal cruelty and the shrill child. It’s tightly written (although the intent of the director/writer is a little vaguely stated), beautifully put together and excellently acted. And it passed the acid test: I had nightmares about dark figures in top hats afterwards. Yummy, yummy, nightmares...

Shanghai Cosmopolites...

During the Nineteenth Century, ties of friendship and association within the treaty ports of China’s eastern coast became tangled and infinitely complex. From the late years of the 1800s, the foreign communities were united in their mistrust of the Chinese peoples upon which they had imposed themselves and they watched warily for any sign that the Celestials would try to force the foreign powers from Chinese soil and take over the lucrative businesses which the treaty powers had spawned and nurtured.

In Shanghai, this mistrust manifested itself as a general affinity amongst the younger men with the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC) which had been brought about by the Taiping Rebellion during the 1860s and which continued into the Twentieth Century. The sports-mad foreign community saw the SVC as another means by which the male elements of the concessions could exercise and maintain some degree of fitness, alongside such activities as cricket, jai-alai, horseracing, and paper hunts. As time progressed, the various national communities generated their own versions of the SVC under its umbrella heading, leading to the presence of a German Volunteer Corps, as well as one for the French and an International Corps, comprised mainly of Anglo-American members.

Shanghai abounded with nationalistic feeling, but it was a sentiment not devoted to exclusivity. Every national holiday was celebrated and manifested itself through open invitations to embassies and other nation-based organisations which would alternately host celebrations for other countries during their holidays. Given the tangled connexions between the “Shanghailanders”, it was not uncommon for British embassy venues to host open-air picnics for American celebrations, for which German bands would provide the music. This meant that almost every day in Shanghai, there was a party of some kind going on, given the days of national significance for all the various communities, as well as Catholic and Protestant church high days - not to mention the myriad Chinese celebrations, which the foreign communities held in fear and dread.

One particularly shining example of this foreign unity was the memorial to the German gunboat Iltis (above) which was erected in the Public Gardens at the northern end of the Bund, upon land owned by the “princely hong” Jardine & Matheson’s. In return for this privileged location, the German Concordia Club hosted the members of the British Shanghai Club for over a year, while that facility underwent renovations. In later years, as divisive tensions manifested, this monument became a sore point amongst the International Community: it was pulled over by French troops in 1918 then quietly re-located to the German School in 1929.

In short, trust and fellow-feeling abounded in the foreign communities but only amongst the foreigners. Business and social fraternity flourished and intertwined like invasive weeds, like a huge hedge of thorns designed to bar and obfuscate the Chinese. In the new century, all of this was about to change.

The first spoke in the wheel of Shanghai’s smooth-running cosmopolitanism was not the announcement of hostilities after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, as one might expect. Despite declarations of war, the Shanghai community decided to ignore the fact that Europe was in conflict and let life continue as it had for decades. Below the surface, however, a slow-building anxiety started to manifest as newspapers from Britain and other western countries began to ask what Shanghai was doing exactly to support the war effort? The Brits in China were intermixed with Americans – who were not involved directly in the Great War – and working hand-in-glove with all of the other European representatives, so there was a great deal of inertia in regard to doing anything about it at all. Shanghai reporters observed instances of British businessmen pointedly failing to recognise their German counterparts in the streets – the “cut direct” – and wondered just what exactly was going on behind boardroom doors, where these different national representatives were almost invariably thrown together? And what about the home lives of these taipans, whose German daughters had married English sons and vice versa? Much of the inconvenience of the overarching state of war between countries was expressed in matters of etiquette, such as who would be seated next to whom at festive gatherings, or whether one should avert one’s gaze from the German Concordia Club whilst en route along the Bund to the Shanghai Club. At no point however, did any notion of global politics interfere with the smooth running of business.

And then, on the 7^th of May in 1915, the Germans sank the RMS Lusitania off the southwest coast of Ireland. On board were 1260 passengers and 700 crew, crossing the Atlantic from New York. After the German submarine had made its fatal move on the Cunard liner, 1201 – mostly civilian - people on board were killed, including the majority of the 150 American passengers. To be fair, the ship was secretly loaded with contraband weaponry and other military munitions which were destined for the British war effort; as well, the Germans had taken out advertisements in all of the New York newspapers days before the ship left port, warning everyone of their intention to sink her. Nevertheless, world opinion turned against Germany and in Shanghai the local news organs loudly proclaimed Germany as a warlike state with no moral compass when it came to battle. With the headlines professing anti-German sentiments, the mood in Shanghai changed.

Notices were posted asking for men who could shoot and ride to sign up for active war duty in “the war to end all wars”. In response, many Shanghailander men active in the SVC answered the call. Among the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) force, there were ructions as men indentured to the SMP, tried to cancel the terms of their contracts and join the Army. In later years, many officers who just walked away from their police duties to fight for Britain, were dragged before courts military and otherwise to account for their desertion. Meanwhile, many taipans and the gryphons beneath them, turned in their resignations, put away their polo helmets and stood up to be counted. A Japanese ocean liner, the Suwa Maru, was commissioned to transport all of these enlistees to Britain. A band played as they left port and the International Community (minus its German contingent) gathered proudly to see them off, accompanying them along the Whangpoo in a small flotilla of motley craft, from which fireworks erupted.

A dismal time awaited them. After more than a month of travel (they were held up in Hong Kong and again in Penang) the majority were dispatched to a training camp in the Chiltern Hills of England, where they were informed that, apart from the four commissioned officers, no uniforms were available for them. As well, no guns were able to be issued to the recruits and they were forced to train with wooden, dummy weaponry. Having endured and enjoyed lectures on (outdated) military strategy, semaphore-signalling, body-building regimens and daily calisthenics onboard the Suwa Maru, running around the soggy cold hills of the Midlands in the clothes in which they had arrived did little to inspire military fervour. At one point, a society of women in Shanghai was formed to knit socks for these soldiers – mostly banded together in the 10^th Yorkshire Regiment – and the swift delivery of this much-needed apparel went a long way towards preventing wholesale desertion.

It goes without saying that the Shanghailanders of the 10^th Yorkshire were unprepared for the hardships which awaited them. Many of these men were first generation, Shanghai born and bred, unused to getting through their daily lives without the benefits provided by a Chinese “boy”, or servant, to do all the boring chores which enabled them to go about their business, things like shining boots, cleaning and pressing clothes, or even shaving. For many it was a confronting wake-up call.

Eventually, many months later after uniforms and guns were found for them, the regiment were sent out to the Western Front to finally engage the enemy. Here too, the fact that they were ill-suited for the battle and ill-trained on top of it, was driven home. Having been selected for their equestrian and shooting abilities, it became instantly apparent that what was needed were skills of a less glamorous nature, such as a forceful manner with a shovel, a deft way with a knife and the ability to accurately toss a grenade. At the Battle of Loos, the 10^th Yorkshire’s inexperience came together in tandem with some of the worst tactical planning ever devised by old and ill-informed British generals who had no clue about this new type of warfare that they were engaged upon. For many years, the Battle of Loos has been an exemplar of British military inefficiency and the 10^th Yorkshire Regiment the cause for much of the lacklustre action; recent reviews however, have shown that, in fact, the 10^th Yorkshire, in spite of being inexperienced, under-trained, poorly-supplied and grossly misled by their superiors, did surprisingly well.

Shanghai – specifically, the International Communities – being as parochial as they were, many of the letters sent home to anxious wives and parents from the field of battle, were published in the daily newspapers. As the horrors of the Western Front and Gallipoli were paraded in print to an avid and eager audience, sentiment hardened against the German community. For the first time, serious thought was given to the possibility of extricating businesses from their hopelessly-tangled cosmopolitan situations.

One particularly famous example is a case in point. In the early Settlement days, British taipans saw a need for a source of good-quality cheap beer in Shanghai. Supplies were erratic and the need for shipping them from overseas into the city forced the price upwards prohibitively. Funds were raised and a company created; the problem of where to build a factory for the enterprise was resolved by a German consortium in Shantung (the province, known for its iron ore supplies, was rented from the Chinese by the Germans) and the metal for the brewing facilities quickly provided. The British company owners engaged a master-brewer from Germany who, in turn, built a staff of well-trained German beer technicians around him. Beer and money soon flowed in copious quantities. In 1919, however, the rising anti-German sentiment and the aftershocks of the First and Second Sino-Japanese Wars, saw Shantung wrested from its German tenants: the Japanese ousted the Germans from the factory, with the exception of the meisterbrauer who stayed on due to British insistence. Eventually, the Japanese took full-control of the factory as the world fell into its second war and after 1949, the Chinese took over after them, a fate that the foreign communities had dreaded from the outset. The Tsingtao Beer factory is still running today; many other businesses were not so fortunate.

In 1919, the Germans were forcibly evicted from Shanghai and the other treaty ports. As part of the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, all extraterritoriality benefits accorded them were severed. By about 1926, there was once more a German community in the city, but it was a much more subdued group, subject to the laws of the Chinese citizenry where once almost total diplomatic immunity was theirs to enjoy.

In the final analysis, the feelings of the ex-pat communities within Shanghai from 1914 onwards, was a deep and bitter sense of betrayal. Where once nations had co-existed harmoniously, united by greed and their distrust and loathing of the Chinese, now great divisions had cut them apart. The letters detailing the experiences of the Shanghailanders on the Western Front ensured that there would be no going back to the ‘good old days’. Thomas Wade, who survived the Battle of Loos debacle, painted a telling picture in his journal of the new sentiments which the Shanghai men would bring back to the newly-Republican China with them:

“One young chap,” having captured a German prisoner on the battlefield, he reported, “took out a photograph of his brother who was killed a little while back, showed it to the German, then killed him.”

For Shanghai, it was the dawn of a new world order.

Rip It & Run! Character Images...

Character generation is a complex process which, if done properly, will serve the story well in the long term. Characters spring from many different sources: from history, from film and television, from books. Some just emerge from the particular genre of the game. In my experience, characters can come from images as well.

At the bookshop where I work, I discovered the following photographic illustrations and copied them to share here at the Debating Club. They all date from the late 20s into the 3os, so they’re just right for use as character shots. What’s not to like about this daring fellow:

Or this mysterious maid?

I managed to collar the following shots together as well. If you like them and they suit your character, or perhaps one of the NPCs in your game, feel free to use them.

And for those who are interested, these images come from period knitting patterns and originally looked like this:

It just proves that gaming inspiration is all around us!