I
have just waded through Season 13 of “Supernatural”
which has left me feeling somewhat – meh. Occasionally shows like this need to
do some house-cleaning and put things back in order and this is definitely the
season where they do all of that (I thought about posting a review, but the
whole thing can simply be summed up with the following: “this is prep.; stay
tuned for Season 14!”). The good bits are fourfold – Rowena; Bobby and Charlie
are back; Mark Pellegrino; and “Scooby-natural”;
the bad things were par for the course – the Winchesters emoting; Kevin Tran
getting killed (again!); soporific angel politics; and the egregious error of
failing to pick up a “Wayward Sisters”
spin-off show (I would have watched the Hell out of that!). Along the way, I
threw a DVD into the ‘player entitled “Frailty”,
starring Bill Paxton (who also directed), Powers Boothe and Matthew McConaughey;
the film isn’t really anything to write home about, but it – along with the ‘Whinge-chester’
farrago - got some cogwheels turning in my brain.
When
we embark upon a new campaign of “Call of
Cthulhu”, there’s an unspoken automatic expectation that the group of
players are going to be the ‘Good Guys’. The assumption is that our team will
be going up against the Dreamer in Rl’yeh, taking names and kicking butts, but
why should that be the case? Are they fighting a Good Fight? In Lovecraft’s
universe, things such as an ethical disposition are entirely superfluous – the Universe
doesn’t care whose side you’re on, or even if you score points for your ‘team’;
it’s entirely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The “Delta Green” source material for “‘Cthulhu” touches on this issue, but I
don’t see why it can’t be brought wholesale into a mainstream version of the
game.
Getting
back to “Frailty”, the synopsis for
this film is as follows: the American Midwest father of two young boys receives
a holy vision/has a brain snap (your choice), and suddenly perceives that many
people walking around the countryside are actually “demons” from “Hell”,
working against God and His angels. A set of coincidences leads him to his ‘holy
weapons’ – a length of steel pipe; an axe; and a pair of heavy-duty work-gloves
– and he convinces his children to go with him to remove these monsters from
God’s Creation. One child is fully on board with the plan; the other… not so
much. And thereby hangs the tale. It’s an okay set-up as far as these things
go, but it got me thinking: what if it was true?
Many
“Call of Cthulhu” teams are
established around the notion that the members of the group are seeking out
evil within their communities and expunging it. They tend to band into
organisations – ghost-hunters; private investigators; newspaper/TV reporting
teams – which give them a rationale to be together and a means to be drawn in
to their investigations. Alternatively, they become a loose confederacy of
fellow-travellers, striving towards their goal while keeping their activities
on the down-low. But what if their actions forced them out into the daylight
and made it difficult to keep their fight completely sub rosa?
Sam
and Dean are on an FBI hit-list; wherever they go, if they get noticed, they
will get pursued (although the threat of this ever happening has faded
absolutely into the background at this stage in their career!). The story
outlined in “Frailty” is, in essence,
the effort of one of the abused sons to throw off an active FBI pursuit that is
closing-in uncomfortably on the ‘family business’ of demon-slaying. In both
vehicles, the crusade against the Evil infecting the world requires that a whole
bunch of misdirection and avoidance of the Powers That Be has to be undertaken
in order for the Good Fight to keep going. Here is a way to lift your campaign
from a simple string of escalating “Monster Of The Week” (MOTW) killings and to
re-locate it into a narrative containing some Real World bite.
Let’s
assume that your team is based in New York. It transpires that a cultist
conspiracy has infiltrated City Hall and certain key figures within the
government – the Mayor; the Chief of Police – have been replaced by leading
cultists, or by shapeshifted/mind-controlling/body-swapping alien horrors and only your players’ characters know about
it! Suddenly, your team’s focus shifts sideways – how do we confront the
menace when the menace is an upright pillar of the community? You can’t just
bowl into the Mayor’s press conference, toss the Powder of ibn-Ghazi in his face while he’s on the podium, gun him
down with magic bullets while chanting in Senzar, decapitate his body with your
holy blade and then calmly re-assure the members of the Press watching all this
that he was “an evil entity who dripped down onto our planet as cosmic pus” and
that things will all be fine from now on. No – we all know exactly what happens next and it doesn’t involve a photo of the
party on the front page of the next day’s ‘paper receiving the keys to the city
beneath a banner headline screaming “HEROES!”;
it has more to do with white coats, electrodes and high-dosage injections of insulin.
An
investigation of a local haunted house becomes fraught with difficulty when the
‘ghosts’ are cultist enforcers using the ruined building as a base of
operations and the local cops are in on the scheme, as would be the case with a
spooky mansion in, say, Dunwich, or Innsmouth. In such an instance, the stakes
are raised: the investigators need to factor-in the idea that any sources of
information that they access might be guarded by those with a vested interest
in keeping nosey-parkers away and, if things go pear-shaped, the option of just
dialling 911 is no longer available.
Take
our ‘Invasion of City Hall’ concept above. Say that the invaders are the
Insects from Shaggai, bent upon summoning Azathoth into the middle of New York.
The Shan possess people by phasing into their heads and riding them around in
order to do their evil deeds. Suppose one of our investigators discovers a
certain type of lens, or photo-emulsion process that allows the viewer to see
when a human being is possessed (all those wings and legs and neural whips don’t
always fit neatly inside the victim’s cranium!). Now our players can target the
evildoers, identifying them easily much as Sam and Dean do with a splash of Holy
Water, or as Bill Paxton does in “Frailty”
with an angel-provided written list of names. Suddenly our heroes have a long line of individuals to break down into an efficient MOTW timetable.
But
identifying the enemy is just the first step and it’s arguably the easy part.
What comes next is difficult and leaves the party open to punishment under the
auspices of the Law, which doesn’t have ‘magic glasses’ to let them see the
Truth and, even if they did, would probably not just say, “well, that’s okay
then!”. When your team pits itself against an Enemy, they’ll suddenly discover
that they have a three-way fight involving a de facto third front – the pesky Rule of Law and its enforcers.
What
this all means is that your players will become outlaws. They will no longer
have free access to the things that make life cool and dandy. They will have to
curry favour with fixers, use connexions and employ cut-outs and dupes. They
will most likely – initially, anyway – not have access to a base of operations.
Some teams might enjoy this more desperate style of play; others might find it
too gruelling – it depends on your players.
Of
course, none of this is at all surprising really – most campaigns have a tinge
of this sort of thing going on at some stage or another, moments when the
characters skate a little too close to legal repercussions for comfort. However,
dialling it up to 11 could be the thing that catches your players’ imaginations
and brings them back for more!
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