Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986, The Final Girl and the Adventuring Party

Candy and Denise, in trouble again.

Jackson, IL is a place where 1980s horror rules apply.

I just finished watching "In Search of Darkness" on Tubi, and it was wonderful. It is about 4 and a half hours long and covers movies from every year of the 1980s. There are some fantastic movies, wonderful interviews (Barbara Crampton and Cassandra Peterson still look amazing!), and just a wonderful romp through some of my favorite VHS, and now Tubi, memories. 

They talked a lot about the "rules" of horror movies and how more recent movies still abide by them and/or try to send them up. They are useful and a lot of fun. 

I have no desire to go by the book on every one of those rules, though. Some of them are better left broken or put into question. Others ought to be hauled out behind the old school and put in the ground where the football field lights can’t find them.

Then there is the matter of the Final Girl. She still has her place.

She matters in that she is the one who spots the pattern. The locked door, the photograph that isn’t there, a name you keep hearing, a song in the wrong room, some sound the rest of them don’t pick up. She puts two and two together before the adults do and lives to see how the horror is done. When the game is well played, she will act on it.

Mina Murray Harker is still my favorite example of a Final Girl. It might seem an odd choice for a discussion of 80s horror, but she is the root of it for me. More than simply being the one to outlast Dracula, she makes sense of things. She organizes the evidence, types up the journals, and turns fear into something you can act on. I find that more to my liking than the "last girl alive" trope.

For the 1980s, we have Nancy Thompson. She is a prime case. She stops waiting for the grown-ups to come to her rescue and starts making ready for the fight herself, having learned Freddy’s rules. Or take Kirsty Cotton in Hellraiser; she doesn’t survive by overmatching the Cenobites but by knowing their rules well enough to make a better bargain than the one they offer. Or  Laurie Strode in Halloween, or Ellen Ripley in Alien (ok, 1979, but she still counts). 

That is what I want in my games. None of the lazy notion that survival is a form of moral superiority, no purity or punishment for its own sake. The Final Girl endures because she learns and adapts and won’t let the monster have all the upper hand. That is good horror design and good adventure design.

In Jackson, the title of Final Girl does not belong to the witches. My playtests have shown it is usually Denise and Candy who are best at it. And that is as it should be.

They are NPCs, certainly, but they stand in for the kind of characters Jackson should be able to support. They are not here to supplant the ones at the table but to demonstrate the sort of arc you can get from the game. YOUR characters should feel like the Final Girl. At least that is my desire. 

Denise and Candy are not the stars of every Jackson game, but they are the proof of concept: ordinary people can stand in the center of the horror and still matter. In fact they can sometimes have the best clarity.

Denise and Candy are always in some kind of trouble. Not from any weakness or foolishness on their part, but because they are right in the human center of the horror. They are tied to the town and its consequences. The witches may spot the occult angles first, but Denise and Candy will see the human side of it. Who is being lied to? Who is missing? Who is afraid? Plus they just have a knack of being exactly where they shouldn't be. More Horror Movie logic.

What am I getting at? Survival is not always about power. It should be about noticing what is going on. 

It is what makes them targets and what makes them valuable.

The horror in this part of Illinois is not just about who wields the magic. It is about who comes through an encounter and doesn’t leave the vulnerable behind, the one you can run to later. That is where Denise and Candy count for most. They don’t just get through a bad night and disappear. 

I would call that a Final Girl arc, and I want one at my table. In a ways it is like The Hero's Journey, just with more AquaNet.

With this logic then there can be more than one "Final Girl." You will not find that in a film. A Slasher is built to whittle things down to a single survivor; a role-playing game has no need for such assumptions. The Game Master ought not to view the rest of the cast as so many bodies laid out to flatter one character’s significance. This is not a screenplay. It is a room full of people making their choices and rolling the dice to see if they can get through the scenario.

In Jackson, the Final Girl might be Final Girls. Or a boy. Or a coven. Or a whole lot of furious, battered teenagers who put up with the haunted school and then have to be in class on Monday. That makes for better play. The archetype is there, but the table is what counts.

And this is where we look at Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

In Gothic Horror, the Final Girl is often the helpless last victim. Mina Harker broke this mold. She is last, but she was never helpless. She was the hero.

In AD&D the Final Girl is the adventuring hero. To make her only the Witch would be too self-serving, too narrow. The Witch has her part to play: she is the one who knows the monster’s true name or reads the omen the others missed. But let the Fighter hold the door. Let the Cleric be the one who won’t abandon the dead. The Thief can spot the way out, the Magic-User the spell that turns the tide, the Ranger can follow the horror to its lair, while the Paladin stands at the threshold. The Gallowglass, the Warlock, the Magus, they all get their due.

The adventuring party in AD&D are all potential Final Girls. Fantasy and horror mix well because the dungeon is a haunted house with rules you have to learn or die by. D&D is different in that it allows your characters to be more than mere survivors. They become the ones who go back in.

You have Nancy setting traps for Freddy, or Kirsty haggling with Hell and coming out the other side. Mina is the one who collects the evidence to put Dracula to the sword. Laurie and Ellen telling the monster, "No." Then the party comes to the crypt with lanterns and spells, and someone says to the monster: "We know what you are now. And we know how to fight you."

That's D&D for "Get away from her, you bitch!"

That is the moment I am after. Not because I want to make horror easy. If the creature is reduced to a bag of hit points, you have lost the tone. But if the characters have put in the work, survived the first pass, and figured out the pattern, then acting on that is no betrayal. It is their reward for paying attention.

The Final Girl isn’t the one the scenario lets off the hook. She is the one who has learned how it works. She knows the rules. And at the table, that can be anyone, or all of them.

Mirror Shard: The Survivor’s Rule

There are times in an adventure, be it in Jackson, IL, or with Advanced Witches & Warlocks, or with your own horror game, when the horror is thick, and the characters have come face to face with the main threat and put up with it. In those cases, put this rule into play.

Let a player who has just survived a run-in with the central horror put in one question to the Game Master about the creature’s weakness, its limits or how it operates. You must give a straight answer. It doesn’t need to be exhaustive, but it has to be true. The character has been there and seen what the rest of the party has not. This is their reward for paying attention. For surviving. 

Some good ones to ask might be:

• What does it invariably do before making an attack?
• Is there a name that will make it pause?
• What has it left in its wake?
• Who is it after, really?
• Where won’t it go?
• What old mistake has it made?
• What compels it to follow a certain rule?

In Jackson, you can think of it as genre knowledge born of fear. The survivor has picked up on the rhythm of things; she knows the hallway is quiet when it should not be, or what tune precedes the ghost. She can tell the adult is lying because she has heard the lie from him before. With the Advanced Witches and Warlocks, it is more of an old-school affair. They have put themselves in harm’s way to see how the monster behaves, to watch it choose or reveal itself.

But don’t let the rule be a way of handing them the answer. Make it the basis for their next dangerous decision.

It is horror movie logic, gamified. 

It is the desire to survive against terrible odds, certain death, or worse. 

The "or worse" is important. In AD&D, death is something that happens a lot, and there are ways to raise the dead. In Jackson, death is a much bigger deal. A death can shut down a community, and there are no Raise Dead spells here. Dead is dead.

But Player Characters are not Horror Movie Characters. So the fear may never be as real to them. I keep thinking about "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors". Those kids are still in terrible danger. Freddy is still Freddy. But once they understand that the dream gives them a kind of power, the game changes. They are not safe. They are not invincible. They are just no longer completely helpless.  That is what the Survivor’s Rule is meant to do. It gives the players a small edge, earned through fear and attention. The Big Bad can still be bigger and badder. In fact, it probably should be. In the end Freddy still gets most of them. 

That is why I keep coming back to the Final Girl. Not as a fixed role, and certainly not as a body count waiting to happen, but as a way to think about play. Horror gaming works best when the characters are frightened, outmatched, and still paying attention. Jackson, IL gives me Denise and Candy as my working examples of that. Advanced Witches & Warlocks gives me the adventuring party as the fantasy version of the same idea. Different clothes, different weapons, different rules, but the same moment at the table: the monster has shown itself, the players have survived long enough to understand it, and now someone gets to say, "We know what you are." That is when horror becomes adventure.