Rip It & Run! Kids' Stories...

I have just watched the latest re-working of Stephen King’s It and my brain has suddenly been teeming with possibilities: next time you’re thinking about establishing a new “Call of Cthulhu” campaign, why not seriously consider having all of your characters be children? If your usual crowd of ghostbusters and monster wranglers are starting to feel as though they’ve seen it all, let them raise the stakes by dropping the age range.

The thing that holds true of most children’s fiction is that the adults who impinge upon the kids’ worlds rarely take time to 1) listen to what the children are saying, and 2) give them any credence. When trying to explain that the thing at the bottom of the garden that’s taking the chickens is not a fox but a shoggoth, kids will most likely find themselves being sent to bed without any supper rather than being listened to.

Children have the added benefit of being willing to suspend disbelief more readily than adults. If one of the local children tells your band of young Investigators that there’s a troll beneath the bridge on the outskirts of town, then your party will just take this on board rather than trying to supplant the information with rational explanations. When faced with the inexplicable, kids tend to find an explanation that suits their worldview, rather than trying to jam an ill-fitting puzzle-piece into the background of a “normal” reality.

Of course, when it comes to kids, as Keeper, you need to prepare adventures that suit the capabilities of your team. Obviously, EDU scores are going to be lower and Credit Rating scores will suffer a detriment. The likelihood that your characters will have a facility with Urdu, or Latin, will be quite low and their Drive: Automobile skills will be slight at best. That being said, kids have advantages that adults don’t: they’re smaller and can wriggle into places a fully-grown person cannot; if they start acting peculiar – moving strangely and chanting odd doggerel – adults tend to ignore them, or tell them to take their silly "ritual game" elsewhere; if they start painting strange symbols with their watercolour paints, or take odd books out of the library, more often than not they’ll be encouraged in their attempts to explore their creativity or to push their linguistic boundaries. Kids are often simply overlooked, or ignored, by the grown-ups around them.

All this being a given, it probably doesn’t mean that, as Keeper, you can set your junior Investigators on the trail of a globe-trotting Shub-Niggurath cult; adventures will most likely be of the local variety and of the low-powered type. Holidays make great excursions for kid teams, giving them a defined area in which to Combat Evil. Cultists proliferate everywhere and often engage in criminal activity to finance, or facilitate, their peculiar lifestyles: kids might notice the predations of a smuggler’s racket that the adults are oblivious to, or they might spot a sharp decline in the number of village children which the grown-ups are writing off as “naughty behaviour”.

Dreamlands adventures are almost your go-to option here as the World Beyond the Veil of Sleep is pretty much tailor-made for kid’s adventures. If you’ve ever read The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, you’ll know the way to proceed: just swap out the Christian subtext for a Mythos rationale and you’re good to go. And, while you might not want to set your kid’s team up against Cthulhu, or Azathoth, a big gun like Nyarlathotep, oddly enough, is a perfect nemesis for a children’s gang.

As source material, there’s almost too much to take onboard. Kid’s books have the added benefit – for the most part – of having been turned into films at one point or another, but you’ll need to pick and choose amongst what’s on offer – some, especially more “modern” interpretations, can be quite bad. Here’s a quick literary list, in no particular order:

Ray Bradbury:

The king of the creepy kid’s tale, hands down. Try Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, or The Illustrated Man. Something Wicked was made into a movie in the 80s starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce – it’s a bit dated, but still worth the effort. Many of Bradbury’s best works are short stories and the last three titles here are compilations organised by a loose rationale. All good stuff.

Alan Garner

Elidor, The Moon of Gomrath, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service. Garner’s stuff tends to focus on young adults rather than true kids, but the first three titles listed here are definitely children’s territory, with Moon and Weirdstone forming a two-part adventure. He can really bring the creepy – I particularly remember being freaked out by the Brollachan in Weirdstone as a child. All his books tend to end dramatically at the climax, so don’t look for any denouements in his novels.

Susan Cooper

All you need to know about Susan Cooper is The Dark Is Rising sequence. It comprises five novels – Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; and Silver On The Tree – there’s enough drama and tension to keep anyone enthralled here, while demonstrating just how capable kids can be in the investigation of ancient magicks. There’s even a worldwide cult in the background; however, in this case, they’re the good guys! If you get nothing else out of these great books, you will at least come away knowing how to pronounce Welsh words.

Enid Blyton

The Secret Seven and, most of all, the Famous Five, are the mainstays of childhood adventure. In fact, they’ve become so entrenched in the English-speaking vernacular that they’re often parodied, not always to bad effect.

At the place where I work, we have an alternate name for Five Go Off In A Caravan:

In fact a friend of mine once wrote a convention module in which the players adopted the roles of the adult versions of the Famous Five and took on Nyarlathotep, who dangled the prospect of returning to their younger days before them, as an escape from their tawdry, disillusioning adult lives – powerful stuff! There are many titles in the series and you don’t even really have to read them in order to riff off their vibe. Imagine what you could do with this:

Stephen King

Kids are an obvious target for mayhem in horror novels, because most peoples’ natural tendency is to shelter them from harm. King understands this almost as much as Guillermo del Toro (who kills kids fairly casually in his movies). It and “Stand By Me” (the film based on his 1982 novella, “The Body”) are two obvious mentions here, although the kids in ‘Salem’s Lot and Pet Sematary also rate a mention. It must be said that the first two titles here are pretty much the same story – with supernatural horror and without – so take your pick. Of course, movie versions abound.

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There are many more authors who can be mined for inspiration – C.S. Lewis (as referenced above) and E. Nesbit, among others – and of course there are Mythos staples too: Arthur Machen, with his dreamlike and disturbing tales set in the golden pre-War days of Edwardian England, has much to offer the Keeper seeking to take this diversion.

Rolling-up child characters is somewhat problematic, and depends upon which rule system you’re using. SIZ and EDU are your main bugbears. Roll 2D6 alone for your Investigator’s SIZ and give them 1D6+3 for their EDU – this reflects the limited amount of received knowledge which they’ve accumulated in their few years of schooling, although a higher score could be argued for under certain circumstances. Remember that EDU reflects the number of years the character has attended formal education, however that is defined. You might wish to impose a -3 penalty to STR if you’re feeling particularly mean, but I would suggest that the rolled physical statistics should be read as a guide to relative power within the group, rather than universally – a kid with a STR of 18 is still going to be no match for an 18 STR adult. All you need to do now is decide what happens to kids when they go mad.

There are many ways to pursue this, and they will depend upon what options you think are the most credible. You might decide that children have more durable psyches and are able to weather a sanity-blasting storm better than adults (who always try to explain and rationalise everything they encounter). In this case you might give your child Investigators a one-time +15 SAN bonus, to kick things off. On the other hand, you might feel that human brains – adult or otherwise – all suffer the same way under duress and therefore provide no benefit or detriment. It’s really the Keeper’s call and trial-and-error will reveal which is the best method.

One thing that I think you will find with this approach is that, rather than “dumbing things down”, you will start to explore different ways of achieving successful resolutions. Without easy access to weapons, cash, or societal assistance, your players will be forced to adopt new strategies in order to win through. For a hidebound and jaded team, this could well be a way to inject new vitality into your gaming.