The Artemis Club

 My wife and I have been paying for PBS Passport. It's been fantastic, really. We have been watching a lot of Masterpiece Mystery, which I have always loved (back when it was just "Mystery!"). We watched all the seasons of "Miss Scarlet and The Duke," now just "Miss Scarlet." It was great, about a woman detective (whose father was played by Tim Downie, who also played Gale Dekarios in Baldur's Gate 3) set in 1882 and the issues she faced. 

The fun thing about Masterpiece Mystery is that it has all these shows about mysteries and murders in England. I speculated that there are more murders on PBS than in real England.

We also watched the very good "The Law According to Lidia Poët" and the enjoyable "Enola Holmes." Both on Netflix. Though I will admit the caliber of the shows on PBS is much higher in terms of writing, even if the Netflix shows have bigger budgets.

All three have strong women leads as primary investigators. They all take place at roughly the same time as well: 1882 for Miss Scarlet, 1883 for Lidia Poët, and 1884 for Enola Holmes. Given my love of the Victorian era, I could not help but enjoy these shows and wonder if there was something I could use here.

The idea was one I mulled over and sat on for a while.  

I spent some time with SCP and thinking about how I could adapt my ideas for A.R.T.E.M.I.S. as well as an occult investigative organization.  I mean, I really like it. The ideas are not really ready for publication here yet. I am still cooking them...and then I got a little sidetracked. 

While writing, I was wondering about the origin of A.R.T.E.M.I.S. When and where it began. Who started it and why. They are some good ideas. But they don't really fit with what I really wanted A.R.T.E.M.I.S. to be. They do work great for The Artemis Club.

These new ideas began while I was recently re-reading some of my old Ghosts of Albion material. I began thinking, what if A.R.T.E.M.I.S. began as a criminal investigation club in the Victorian era? Certainly has some value to it. This gives me a chance to work it from both ends. I had some ideas I like, but they don't really fit well with the modern A.R.T.E.M.I.S.  

The Artemis Club

The Artemis Club began not as an investigation club, but as a "reading club" for young women associated with Oxford University. 

They began meeting informally in the Oriel College Library, often at hours when their presence would attract the least attention. They discussed history, philosophy, literature, science, antiquities, folklore, and current events. Mysteries of all sorts, however, grabbed their attention the most.

Because they were often seen moving quietly through the library stacks and galleries, the women were jokingly called "The Ghosts of the Oriel." The name began as a mockery but was quickly adopted by the women themselves. Though, feeling pressure from the University, the women moved out. 

Aurora Evelyn Ashcombe, better known as Lady Ashcombe, was young, rich, intelligent, and married to a considerably older husband. Lord Ashcombe had little interest in how his wife spent her time or his money, provided her interests remained respectable and she stayed away from younger men. She obliged him by giving him his heir and only keeping the company of other women.

Aurora pays for the new meeting place and suggests the new name as an homage to the Huntress and Protector of Women.  The club members, with renewed dedication, refocused on solving all sorts of mysteries. First, as an academic exercise, then as time went on, the club began hosting what became known as consulting detectives, but for female detectives. Many focused on completely mundane sorts of crimes: missing people, affairs, dishonest staff. A few cover the more complex crimes, like murder. And very few consult on crimes of a paranormal and supernatural nature. These are the sorts that Aurora herself is most interested in, and ones she secretly funds more than the others.

From the 1840s onward, the Artemis Club investigated all sorts of crimes.

The Club eventually developed a simple investigative philosophy:

Observe first. Explain afterward.

A second maxim, usually attributed to one of the original Ghosts of the Oriel, became equally important:

Dismiss nothing merely because it is impossible.

This did not mean the Club believed every tale of ghosts or monsters. Quite the opposite. Artemis investigators became notorious for exposing fraudulent mediums, false hauntings, forged antiquities, staged séances, and criminals who used superstition to frighten their victims.

For this reason, the Club's supernatural case files were not labeled "Ghosts," "Demons," or "Magic."

They were simply marked: UNRESOLVED

Members of the Artemis Club never wore uniforms or carried official credentials, but many wore a small silver brooch showing a crescent moon crossed by an arrow. It was not meant to identify them publicly. Rather, it was a quiet sign between members that help, discretion, and perhaps a warm cup of tea were close at hand.

Throughout the Victorian era, the Artemis Club quietly solved cases that baffled the preeminent and male minds of the time. By the 1880s, they had members throughout England and had begun a chapter in St. Andrews, Scotland.

 But it was not to last.

The 20th Century

The end of the Victorian era and the dawn of the 20th century initially looked like a new age for the Artemis Club. Women were entering universities in greater numbers, taking professional positions, publishing under their own names, and gaining access to institutions that had once excluded them. In some ways, the world was finally beginning to resemble the one the Club's founders had imagined.

Ironically, that success weakened the Club.

The Artemis Club had been born because intelligent women had nowhere else to go. By the early 20th Century, some of those women now had universities, laboratories, newspapers, hospitals, political organizations, and professional societies of their own. The Club remained respected, but it was no longer as necessary as it had once been.

Even in her 90s, Aurora Ashcombe remained an active participant and an imposing presence in Club affairs. She represented a direct link to the earliest days of the Ghosts of the Oriel, but after her death the Club lost more than one of its founders. It lost its greatest patron.

The Ashcombe fortune had supported the Club for decades, but no fortune is endless, particularly once divided between heirs who did not share Aurora's interests. The Club continued, but with less money, fewer staff, and increasing difficulty maintaining its London house and enormous archive.

Membership numbers start to fall. The First World War was a further setback. A good many of the members put in their time as nurses, physicians, clerks, and intelligence workers, some as volunteers or translators. Some did not come back at all; others were killed. And for those who remained, the war put a different complexion on the kind of mystery one would trouble to solve. After the trenches and poison gas, after the mass graves and the millions of dead, stories of strange disappearances and ghosts had a way of seeming quaint.

There was a period when spiritualism made an appeal. Bereaved families were only too eager to think they could speak with the departed, and Club members found themselves looking into mediums and séances, even claims of messages from soldiers who had fallen. Most of it was a sham. In some instances, it was not.

The Artemis Club of the interwar years was a more closed and older organization than its Victorian predecessor. They still took on cases, but they were less of an academic exercise and more likely to involve fraud, blackmail, and political extremism than the cases that defied easy categorization. In other words, they had grown out of the "ghost hunting" business.

By the 1930s, the Club had on its books nearly a century’s worth of unexplained phenomena, which was of some interest to certain governments. They were still consulted, but more often than not, even their extraordinary-sounding cases became ordinary in the end.

Then the Second World War arrived.

The Blitz left little of London standing, and the motherhouse of the Artemis Club was no exception. The building went up in flames, and with it, their grand library. Generations of investigators had amassed casebooks, journals, maps, photographs, and artifacts; all of it was lost.

One might find a file here and there that had been copied or put in safekeeping, and the St. Andrews chapter held on to some Scottish records, as did a few families with their own papers. But the archive proper was gone.

The Club did not formally die that night, but it never really recovered. When the war was done, the rest of the members were scattered and worn out. Britain had to be put back together, as did families and careers. The world that had given rise to the Artemis Club was another matter entirely.

Former members would get together now and then in the 1950s, old friends rather than working investigators. But that too came to an end.

A couple of scholars and investigators attempted in the 1970s to put the old organization back together, riding a wave of public fascination with the occult, UFOs, and the like. They could not make it work. Too much was gone, too many of the old traditions, and the references that remained often told different stories from one another.

So by the close of the 20th century, the Artemis Club was nothing if not a historical oddity.

For most people, anyway.

The Rise of A.R.T.E.M.I.S.

Modern A.R.T.E.M.I.S. did not descend directly from The Artemis Club.

There is no charter passed down from one to the other, no secret chain of command, nor any hidden society that has been in operation since Victorian times.

The link is there, but it is a symbolic one and was put in place on purpose.

When the modern agency was being put together in the early 1990s, researchers came across odd fragments of the old Club’s history. What they found was far from complete: some case reports here, a reference in a police file or a university archive there, the odd newspaper clipping or private journal. The founders were not so much interested in the Club’s putative dealings with monsters or ghosts as they were in its approach.

Observe first. Explain afterward.

The Artemis Club had a way of doing things. It would take up claims that the establishment chose to overlook, gather evidence, cross-reference the files, and note what witnesses had to say, even if others were inclined to dismiss them. Above all, it did not turn its back on an event just because the prevailing wisdom held it to be impossible.

That kind of thinking appealed to the new organization, and the name was taken as an homage. The acronym followed in due course: A.R.T.E.M.I.S., standing for the Agency for Research into Transdimensional Events, Magic, and Inexplicable Sightings. The founders were fully aware it was put together in reverse to keep the original moniker, but that was fine with them.

Artemis stood for something of value: the hunt for truth and the protection of those who might otherwise be left out, and a readiness to go where a conventional investigator would not.

In terms of actual legacy, the new body inherited little from the Club. There was no headquarters, no continuity of institution, no command structure, or full set of archives. Just an idea, a few cases, and a name. Which is perhaps for the best.

From time to time, A.R.T.E.M.I.S. reacquaints itself with the past. An investigator may open a file from 1872 and find that the thing he is after has been encountered before. Or a sealed box is turned up in the cellar of an old Scottish property, or a journal comes to light at auction. 

There have always been rumors that some of the more unusual records were removed from the motherhouse before the Blitz. No one knows by whom or where they went. Modern A.R.T.E.M.I.S. officially considers these stories unsupported. Unofficially, more than one investigator has spent considerable time looking for the missing files.

Artemis and A.R.T.E.M.I.S. 

I know I am not done with either organization. Tales of the exploits of the Artemis Club are likely to surface from time to time. Of course, A.R.T.E.M.I.S. is in a solid growth stage and likely to expand and change as I write more. In fact, sitting here now, I remember I have a bunch of notes I wrote about the SCP Foundation that I plan to move over to NIGHT SHIFT, notes I could have used here today but didn't. 

Well, that is another post. 

Thinking About October

October is a big deal around here, and I am gearing up for some posts.

As always, I will be hosting the Horror Movie Marathon here at the Other Side. 31 Nights, 31+ movies, at least 20 first-time views.

Since I have two "1986" centric projects, I am focusing on movies from 1985 to 1986, with various exceptions from 1983 to 1987. I am focusing mostly on hometown horror, high school horror, and generally 80s-focused horror. I might hit a few slasher flicks, but there aren't really any I haven't already seen.

Yes, those are my tapes, Trapper Keeper, and my 1986 high school yearbook.

If you want to join me, just post on social media! 

I am also bringing back Urban Fantasy Fridays for October to look at some urban fantasy/horror RPGs. Likely to use with one of my three urban fantasy/horror settings: Jackson, Carbon Vale, and/or Sunny Valley. I like the idea that each setting uses a different rule system. 

The purpose is to see what these games have to offer me, what ideas I can adapt for my own play, and mostly just to have some fun with some other games.

So as always October is a busy time here.

In other news, I am working on finishing Codex Qliphothica. I had to buy some new PDF tools. This also means Advanced Witches & Warlocks will be delayed until next year, and no idea when Jackson, IL will be ready for public consumption.

Mirror Mondays: The Seven Books That Made Me Want Witches in D&D

 I have spent a lot of time during these Mirror Mondays talking about where my ideas about witches came from.

Some came from D&D, obviously. Some came from movies and television. Some came from folklore, mythology, and religion. And more than a few came from simply being a kid in the 1970s and 1980s when the occult seemed to be everywhere. From the Occult revival to the Satanic Panic.

But most of it came from books.

And more specifically, most of it came from the public library.

I talked about the library as a dungeon back in June, and with good reason. My local branch had what struck me as an enormous amount of material on the supernatural: witches, vampires, ghosts, monsters, the whole lot. I made short work of them. I later discovered that we did indeed have more than our fair share. I went on to visit other libraries, and they had only a fraction of what my local one had. 

In those days, before the Internet, if one wanted to know about witches, one had to put in the effort and find a book on the subject. And that also often meant me getting on my bike and riding to the library. 

I was not being completely allegorical when I described the library as a place of quests. Should a book make mention of Jung or some obscure piece of mythology or psychic phenomena, you can bet I was off in search of more. One shelf would lead to another. In terms of shaping my Witch class, that process was likely of greater import than any rulebook from D&D. I did the legwork; I was on the quest.

Below are seven books that put the desire for witches in D&D in me. Don’t mistake them for the seven best on witchcraft; some are scholarly, and some are not, and one doesn’t really concern witches in any way. But they all added to the mix. Or as I often say, the alchemy that allowed the witch to grow in my mind. 

Daniel Cohen, Witchcraft, Superstition & Ghostly Magic (1974)

I went through everything Cohen had to offer at the library in my pre-teen years. He wrote the kind of thing I was after: unexplained happenings, monsters, the like. It was a last stand for a world of magic I wanted to believe in, even though I knew on some level it wasn’t true. Before I turned ten, I could still savor the notion of a secret world beneath the ordinary. That romantic notion has never left me, even if I know that the world is not hiding anything supernatural. 

Take Jackson, IL. The adults are at work, the kids are at school, everyone is shopping or complaining about the weather or worried about grades. But there are witches and ghosts and monsters in that town. Most are none the wiser. 

Cohen didn’t put that idea in my head, but he did a fine job of convincing a younger me that the world is more interesting if you allow for such possibilities.

C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (1983 edition)

I have been a huge fan of Carl Jung. His psychoanalytic theories, especially regarding the collective unconscious and archetypes, have always appealed to me more than Freud’s. The witch is just one figure to come out of that, but the fact that certain stories and symbols have a way of reappearing has meant a great deal to my approach to fantasy.

There is an accident of library history here. In 1984, I set out to read Synchronicity. Yes, because I was a fan of the Police album of the same name. The library didn’t have it, so I made do with Man and His Symbols. In the end, perhaps that was the more fitting book for me to be reading at the time. Jung provided a vocabulary of sorts for what I was already putting my characters through. He made me ask why some of them have a way of coming back in my mind, or why I can spot an element of one witch in another. Why is it that a character can cross from one game to another, from one world or genre to the next, and still be unmistakably who she is? Those ideas had their genesis here. The witch not as a character but as a universal archetype. 

At the time, I was only aware of the patterns. I have reread the book many times and each time I walk away with different ideas and insights. It is not a great work of psychology, but it does provide a great lens in how we view the stories (or my case, games) we create.

Brendan Lehane, The Enchanted World: Wizards and Witches (1984)

One would not be surprised to see this on the list. I have put pen to paper about the Enchanted World series and this volume in particular, but the first had a profound impact on me. Lehane takes you from the wizards of old myth to the forbidden arts of the medieval magician and on to the witches. You will find Circe, Merlin, Roger Bacon, Baba Yaga, and the like all occupying the same broad magical space. Yet they are not all engaged in the same sort of thing. That is a distinction which matters.

It is an idea I am still mulling over in Advanced Witches & Warlocks; a Witch, a Wizard, and a Warlock ought to be more than three labels for a spell-caster. Their approach to magic is different. In looking back at Lehane, I can trace the origins of that notion. There are small things I have taken from the book into my games as well. The bit on witches’ flight, for instance, speaks of distaffs as well as broomsticks, and I have since made room for them in my own work. One reads something at the age of fourteen and finds it has been sitting in your game for forty years.

Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959)

Here is one of the major ones. I picked up my copy in a second-hand shop and it has proved indispensable when it comes to witchcraft and demonology. But with Robbins, the subject matter gets less comfortable. Witchcraft is entertaining when you are discussing familiars and old legends. The record of witch persecution is no fun at all. It is the story of men and children, but mostly women, being put to the sword or tortured on the say-so of someone who called them a witch. The witch stops being the wise old woman, the alluring temptress, or even the oh-so-clever teen in homeroom. She becomes the innocent woman tortured to confess something impossible and only has death to look forward to. 

You have the fantasy witch, the one from folklore, and then the individual who is accused. They are not one and the same. Robbins gave some historical heft to what might have been nothing more than a character class in a game. I have gone back to it more times than I can count; of everything here, it is the one I have used most as a reference for my writing.

I am not so vain as to say I write to avenge those wronged. But I keep them in mind with everything I do write. Maybe I read this stuff at too young an age (the ongoing joke that Gen X is the way we are because we read the wrong book way too young), and it imprinted on me. 

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts (Reader’s Digest, 1978)

My parents were/are voracious readers. Books filled every corner of my home growing up, and every room had at least one bookshelf; some, like the living room, had three. 

They, like many people of their generation, had a lot of Reader's Digest books. One, in particular, was Strange Stories, Amazing Facts.

There was a copy of this in my parents’ house, and for years I could not put it down. At first it was my book of choice when I wanted to read about vampires, though over time I began to make use of it for witches too. 

This book should not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered good literature or even good research. It is, however, good fun and a fun read.

In a way, it was an education in the weird, a sort of giant compendium of everything. You have ghosts next to odd bits of history, monsters beside the unexplained, and folklore rubbing up against what is put forward as fact. 

One might open the volume with a particular aim in mind and turn twenty pages to find one’s thoughts on something else entirely. This is where I came up with the idea that *I* could figure out what REALLY happened to Grand Duchess Anastasia. (She died.)

It was much like wandering the library stacks. I suspect that kind of discovery has had more of an effect on my games than I gave it credit for at the time. I am fond of connections: the local ghost story tied to an old family, which in turn is tied to a witch and some strange occurrence out of town. The supernatural does not exist in a vacuum.

The History of Witchcraft by Montague Summers (1956 edition)

Like Robbins, Summers was indispensable to me as a starting point, but he is a very different source, and I found that to my advantage. Put in the hours reading on witchcraft, and you will see the books do not always agree. There are shifts in scholarship or the authors’ own assumptions at play. Where one man writes of literal truth, another may call it superstition or fraud or psychology. 

A researcher has his work cut out for him. As a game designer, however, I welcome it. There is no need for every source to concur, nor for every witch in my games to be of one mind. A demonologist with an old grimoire, a folklorist, a frightened priest, and a witch who took her lessons from her grandmother could all tell you of the same event in four distinct ways. They could be right, or they could be wrong. That notion is central to what I do now, and I can put it down to having read widely divergent takes on the same subject.

In my academic work I typically dislike contradiction. I like looking for the one true answer. My game design work though has taught me to embrace contradictions.

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

An odd entry, perhaps, but then again maybe not. 

This is not a witchcraft tome in the same vein as the rest; it is children’s literature and theology and science fantasy and cosmic adventure all at once. 

But consider Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit. For a child with an obsession for witches there was no way I would not be drawn in. I can still recall the chills I first felt when I read Mrs. Whatsit’s thundering “WWEEE ARRE HHERRE!” 

I know a witch when I see her on the page.

L’Engle’s book put some things into perspective for me regarding distance. The world is stranger and vaster than it seems; two points can be worlds apart yet still touch. Will, memory, and love can get where ordinary travel cannot. Meg is not a witch, but she has power, and she is central to solving the problems of this tale. 

I did not have the vocabulary for it on my first reading. I do these days. And so I am led back to Jackson. That comes later in this essay.

Honorable Mention: The Witch’s Catalog (1976) by Norman Bridwell

This one has to be included. An odd volume, but it planted the seeds for much of my imagination when it comes to witches. Most of all, it did away with the notion of the child-eater; in its pages, the witch is a protector, a protector of children from scary things. There is an image of a witch night light that I can still picture as clearly as day 50 years later. It is witch, well a Bridwell witch, glowing with her hand out. She is keeping a trio of frightened-looking monsters away. The caption reads "scary things don’t go where the witch tells them not to go." That stuck with me. Compare that to the "mission statement" of NIGHT SHIFT. All the classes talk about how they deal with the "weird things," and the witch says, "I am the weird thing."

And it was published in 1976, the year I was six. Six is also the age at which Larina first realizes she is a witch in my games. You see where this is going? A coincidence, I am sure. But where is the fun in that?

Shelf by Shelf, Book by Book

You won’t find "my Witch" in any single tome. I cannot direct you to a chapter and claim that it is the origin of the class or of Larina. It was a more gradual process.

Daniel Cohen provided the secret world. From Jung, I took the archetypes. Lehane taught me that magic should vary in kind and gave me the mythic type. Robbins offered history and its consequences; Strange Stories, Amazing Facts made the connections. Summers was all contradiction. L’Engle supplied the sense of distance and the idea that an impossible chasm between two people is not so impossible after all. And Bridwell was there to make the case that a witch does not have to be a monster.

All of that ended up on the same mental shelf. Then, when D&D arrived, I had somewhere to put them. 

Perhaps that is why I return to the library in my writing. A wizard makes do with a spellbook, a cleric with his holy text.

As for the Witch, give her a library card and let her sort it out on her own.

The Mirror Shard: A Wrinkle Between Worlds

I put this concept out there for #RPGaDAY earlier in the year, though I have a bit more to go before it is finished.

Take Jackson Larina, "Nix," and his counterpart in Carbon Vale, "Creepy." They have found ways to talk to one another. Don’t imagine some grand magical rite or a crystal ball; no spell is required. They are just two teenagers after all, and they know a grand total of maybe five spells combined. 

All they need are two well-worn copies of A Wrinkle in Time. Put a message in one, and it will be in the other when you open it. The books are 220 miles apart and in two completely different universes.

That is the kind of magic that appeals to me.

Things get more complicated when Nix uses the book to warn Creepy about something that is going to happen. In Jackson, Larina's mother, Siân, died. Nix warned Creepy in Carbon Vale.

And in Carbon Vale, Siân lived. 

I have already said there will be a price for that. I don't know what it is yet. But there will be one.

For now, it is the book itself that matters. In choosing the object to bridge the divide between the two Larina Nicholses, I went with something I read as a kid. That doesn't feel accidental.

It feels Jungian, and maybe even a little bit of Bridwell too. 

The idea came to me while developing these two similar but distinct worlds. I knew they had commonalities and I knew they had a shared history. But there was divergence somewhere along the way. Game-wise, they allow me to play in similar worlds with different rules. But they kept informing each other on changes. It was like Jackson was talking to Carbon Vale. Or, as it turns out, Nix was talking to Creepy. In game it was innocent enough. Larina "Nix" was at the library. She saw a copy of "A Wrinkle in Time" sitting in the book return area and had the idea to write a note on  bit of paper "I love this book!" and slip it in. She thought that was a little silly, and went back to take it out. She did but now her note read "I do too!" And the handwriting was the same. The responder even used the same purple ink Larina was fond of. 

I am planning an adventure, "The Best of Both Worlds," that will be dual-stated that brings these two together in one world. But so far, that is planned for the first adventure of a "Season 2" after they defeat the Hollow King, so maybe Summer 1986. No idea what Season 2 is even about yet. 

The Best of Both Worlds, when Creepy met Nix

It should be rather ridiculous, and I am really looking forward to it!

Fantasy Fridays: The Gate is Open! Yog vs Dark Sun

 "THE GATE IS OPEN! THE GATE IS DEFENDED!"

- Dying Edict of the Ash Witch

These were the final words of the Ash Witch and the first words of the Wasted Lands of Yog campaign.

Last week, I was discussing the makeup of Yog: Dying Earth, Zothique, Hyperborea, Gor, and an assortment of other sword-and-sorcery, weird fantasy, and cheap paperback fare that I have put together over the years. I brought up this idea. The Dying Earth is clear on the fact that we are all going to die; Yog asks what we plan to do about it beforehand.

I mean to start putting some answers to that this week. An oddly fitting catalyst has presented itself in the form of another world in its death throes.

Dark Sun is making a comeback.

Wizards of the Coast announced at Gen Con that Athas will be back in 2027 as D&D’s first mature-rated setting. I am looking forward to it. I have always been fond of Dark Sun for the sorcerer-kings, the city-states, the perilous magic, and the feeling that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket and those remaining must make do.

But the news has stirred up an old conversation. What does one do with the hard parts? Slavery, tyranny, genocide, brutality, and ecological ruin. These are what make Athas, yet they are at odds with much of today’s heroic fantasy.

I don’t know how Wizards will handle it. I haven’t read the new material, so I am not going to judge it now. I wouldn’t want to try and make Yog into some version of "Dark Sun done right." That would be silly and a bit juvenile. 

Athas is one thing, Yog is another.

The real question is how to put genuinely disturbing matters in a roleplaying context without either sanitizing them or making a spectacle of the whole affair.

How does one handle the hard topics?

This Is a Warning

Let me be extremely plain about this.

Yog is a brutal place. Here, one will find slavery, torture, exploitation, religious oppression, sadism, and sexual violence implied.

For centuries, the Priest-Kings have held sway over their city-states through fear, tradition, and violence. Their economies run on slaves born into bondage. There are professional torturers and priests whose duty is to sanctify the social order. Some make a living from it; others simply like it.

It is an important distinction. Sometimes cruelty is the work of an evil system, sometimes the system allows an evil person to be what he wants to be.

But there is another side to it.

I have made Yog brutal, not so the players can bask in it, but to give them something to fight for.

I have no use for pages of description detailing the degradations of the enslaved or graphic accounts of every atrocity under the Priest-Kings. At some point, "mature" content is just spectacle and says nothing of value. I am after consequences.

Take Constance, for instance. She is from Yog, and she has had terrible things done to her.

I won’t go into exactly what they were. There is no need. One can tell from the world she inhabited and the sort of men who held the reins of her life. The implication is enough.

I am not in denial that the worst happened, but I see no reason to make of her suffering some kind of entertainment for the reader's edification.

What matters is Constance. And the people who later step up for her. Deirdre helps her. The Ash Witch sees to her escape. Once free, Constance starts to help others. In a sense, that is the true beginning of her story. I want to know that the players meet Constance and see that she creates a new life. And then I want their characters to do the same for all the other Constances still left on Yog.

I have a particular affinity for Constance because she is, in an odd way, a mirror to one of my other characters, Candy Mercer from the Jackson, IL game. 

Candy is a sweet girl in a world where awful things happen. Yet Candy has her protections. She has a family and friends who care for her; there is a trio of witches and a host of teenagers who have made it their business to stand between any trouble and one of their own. With all that, Candy is able to put down roots. She gets to grow up. Later, she makes a life for herself as a nurse, becomes a mother, and I she becomes someone who helps others.

Constance is what you get when you take away those safeguards from Candy. Not out of weakness or any notion that she is due for a different fate. It is simply that nobody was there in time. That is, until they were. Deirdre says no. The Ash Witch will not have it. And Constance is free to be the one who can say no on behalf of the next person in line. That is the kind of game I want Yog to be. Constance is only one, after all. There are thousands more who are still waiting for someone to make an appearance.

Look at it this way. I see a distinction between acknowledging something and putting it on display. A game can let someone know that sexual violence is part of the setting without making the players part of it. It can have slavery in its world without dwelling on the lot of the enslaved. One can have sadists in the mix without the game itself turning sadistic. Implication is not always a form of cowardice; it can be restraint.

But I am not going to solve matters by feigning these things do not exist. 

You cannot solve a problem until you are willing to look it in the face.

Slavery is evil, as is religious tyranny, and the treatment of another human as property or as disposible. I don’t believe fantasy is made better by shying away from such truths, nor does a setting become mature just for the sake of having them. Maturity isn’t a matter of how much blood is spilled on the page but the understanding of what that blood signifies.

Which is why we come to the player characters.

The slavery in Yog is not for the players to have a go at living in a slave-holding world. It is there to be broken. The Priest-Kings are not meant to be admired for their decadence, but to be overthrown.

That is not to say every outing in Yog will be an insurrection against a city-state. Characters will still be robbing tombs and sifting through ancient ruins in the sand. They will encounter necromancers who have no qualms about using the most plentiful resource in the world, the dead. There are assassins, witches, strange monsters, and dying gods, and things so old one can’t tell if they were ever alive. It is a swords and sorcery game, plain and simple.

But the Priest-Kings are part of the scenery. Perhaps the merchant outfitting an expedition the PCs are guarding is quietly passing fugitives from one city to the next. Or the caravan they are hired to protect is carrying something other than wares. Maybe that old magical weapon just uncovered is enough to put a Priest-King in the ground. 

The characters will have to decide.

And to be clear on one point: the witches did not put resistance on the map. The people of Yog have been at it for centuries. They have hidden children and fugitives in villages, poisoned their masters. Priests have turned a blind eye to orders; soldiers have done the same. People have escaped.

People fled into deserts, where they might die, rather than remain somewhere they would certainly suffer.

Rebellions broke out. Most of them were put down. There were heroes, though their names have been lost to time for the most part.

I have no desire to present the Thorn Witch, the Red Sorceress, or the Ash Witch as some kind of powerful outsiders who had to show helpless folk what freedom was worth wanting. The people already had that in them. What the witches did was of a different order.

For centuries, the oppressed have been putting up a fight. The witches’ contribution was to show that the Priest-Kings can bleed.

That is a matter of some consequence. 

A slave market goes up in flames. A slaver is gone, and then another. The Red Sorceress has a mind for some trouble, and the soldiers the Priest-King sends after her never return. Word gets around that the Thorn Witch made short work of the soldiers after an escaped girl; someone else will tell you the tale another way. Then the Ash Witch makes her mark.

The stories take on a life of their own. They are sung, prayed over, and scratched into walls. Some are threats. Whether only half of them are true is beside the point.

The Priest-Kings can bleed. And if they can bleed, they can be beaten. In a society that holds its rulers to be beyond reproach, that notion is more perilous than any act of the witches.

But the Ash Witch does something worse still. She provides a destination.

The Witch Gate

I have mentioned the Gate before. For the witches who created it, it was simply The Gate, but the oppressed people of Yog have named it something else. The Witch Gate.

I will leave the details of the Gate, and where it might lead, to the imagination of the players and the characters. Those in Yog who are downtrodden call what lies beyond it *Haven*. The Priest-Kings have a word for it too: *Hell*.

Spoiler: The Gate leads to West Haven, where the Witch Queen waits on the other side.

Their priests are quick to denounce the witches as demons, preaching that the Ash Witch has opened a road to damnation and is stealing souls from the natural order. But those making a desperate bid for the Gate are not much moved by such theology. More to the point, in their minds, nothing on the other side can be worse than life here.

Prior to the Witch Gate, any escape was fleeting. One could put distance between themself and a master or a city, or hide with strangers in the desert. Yet they were still on Yog, subject to the next slaver or law that would see them in chains. The Witch Gate offers an actual way out, not just a chance to run a little farther and hope the slavers give up.

Opinions differ on what the Gate is. Some say the Ash Witch found a road that was always there; others say that she has made a new world. Some think Haven is a kingdom, some a city, some nothing but freedom. The Priest-Kings insist on Hell. Perhaps they are all wrong. 

With this Gate, the Ash Witch alters Yog more deeply than she ever could with a blade to a Priest-King’s throat. She leaves behind something that will outlast her. The witches are a legend, but the Witch Gate is a permanent fact of the world. And a dangerous one at that.

First, they learn the Priest-Kings can bleed.

Then they can lose.

Now they understand the Priest-Kings do not have the final say on whether you remain.

That last bit is likely to unnerve them.

And it is the most important part of the campaign.

The Ash Witch Falls

And then she is dead.

This is the point at which I want the game to start. Not in the middle of the great witches’ exploits, but in their wake. The Ash Witch, The Thorn Witch, and The Red Sorceress. They have had their day and left their mark on Yog in ways the Priest-Kings cannot undo. Now they are gone.

There is no standing behind the Ash Witch and letting her sort things out. She dies.

As she falls, her voice is heard across the land.  Maybe they hear it with their ears. Maybe they hear it in dreams. Maybe a Priest-King wakes, breathing heavily, because the words are suddenly inside his head, louder than any scream he has caused.

Maybe an enslaved woman working in a field stops what she is doing and somehow knows that, somewhere beyond the horizon, a dying witch has just spoken.

It doesn't really matter how the message travels.

Everyone hears the final Edict of the Ash Witch:

THE GATE IS OPEN! THE GATE IS DEFENDED!

These are the campaign’s opening lines as much as they are the last of the Ash Witch. And the second carries as much weight as the first.

The Gate is open; you can escape.

The Gate is defended; they won’t be able to just take you back.

As for who is doing the defending? I will not say in the game. The Priest-Kings would have you believe it is demons. Some maintain that the dead Ash Witch herself is on the other side. A few witches will only smile if you put the question to them, while others claim the Gate is its own protection. What is beyond dispute is that the Ash Witch is gone and the Gate is still there.

A slave owner may wake to an empty room and find no sign of where his property has gone. A Priest-King will have his sermon ready on the soul-stealing ways of witches, though someone in the pews will be hearing something quite at odds with his intentions. There is an exit. And once that is known, the cage loses its permanence.

This Is Where the Heroes Come In

One can get used to almost anything, but that does not make it right. For as long as anyone in Yog can remember, the Priest-Kings have been saying this is the way of things. Their forebears lived so. The temples call it sacred, the merchants necessary, the soldiers call it law. Given time, the monstrous becomes normal when one has no memory of an alternative.

The world has made a habit of suffering. The heroes have not.

I could make no more telling statement about Yog. 

Perfection is not required of the heroes any more than of the witches. Some are vengeful or prone to killing where another witch would show mercy. After a lifetime of battling monsters, one has to wonder if the line has been crossed. Resistance is not a blanket justification for every deed.

But heroism can be as straightforward as looking at what has been accepted and saying:

No. This is wrong.

And then acting on it.

That is the distinction between Yog and a fantasy world done up in dark colors for the sake of it. I have no desire to see how much misery I can cram onto a map; I want to see the response to it. Which brings me to the talk around Dark Sun. Not because Yog is superior, or that Athas ought to be handled my way. Athas is what it is. But it is worth asking why we put such material in a game.

With Yog, I know why. To be opposed.

Let the sun go dark in time. Let the kingdoms and towers and Priest-Kings become yet another stratum under the sand. Everything dies. But there are chains to be broken in the present. There are people like Constance who require someone to come to them now.

The Ash Witch, the Thorn Witch, and the Red Sorceress had their say. They are dead and cannot see it through. That is as it should be in a role-playing game.

The Ash Witch’s last words are the campaign’s first.

From here on in, it is up to the player characters.

Star Trek at 60: Fine, I’ll Do My Own Crossover

I love Star Trek.

I say that without any irony at all, I love all Star Trek. 

This week marks the 60th Anniversary of Star Trek. The show premiered on September 8, 1966, and television, science fiction, and honestly, my own imagination have never really been the same since.

I have talked about Star Trek a lot here over the years. My various USS Protector, Mercy, and Challenger projects, my affection for old FASA Trek, my recent dive into Star Trek Adventures, and, of course, my love for the mythology and storytelling Star Trek has always given me. 

But. And let's be honest. Paramount has kind of dropped the ball on Trek over the last couple of years. There are no new Trek series in production right now, and the current series are wrapping up, ending prematurely. Not to mention, there is almost nothing on TV to celebrate 60 years of the show.

Sound familiar? 

Yeah, the exact same thing that was going on with Doctor Who. For two shows that have defined what science fiction television can be, both anniversaries felt like they should have been bigger. 

Now, maybe that is unfair. Maybe no celebration could have matched what these shows mean to me.

Or maybe, just maybe, the answer is obvious.

So, if I can't rely on the creators of my two favorite sci-fi shows to do things right, I'll do my own 60th Anniversary celebration and have that Star Trek and Doctor Who crossover I have been promised.

Crossovers

One of the very, very first zines I ever bought was a Doctor Who zine that was being sold as local sci-fi convention. It featured a Star Trek (TOS) and Doctor Who (Tom Baker) crossover. I honestly could not tell you what the story was about, except that it required Spock to mind-meld with the Doctor. But it stuck with me.  It must have stuck with others too, but later on in the Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who: Assimilation² comic featuring the 11th Doctor and the TNG crew, a previous encounter featuring Kirk, Spock, and the 4th Doctor was alluded to. Granted, that is a very obvious choice.  I also recall reading an actually rather good fan-fic on one of the Star Trek Usenet groups featuring the TNG crew and the 7th Doctor. Wesley and Ace even went on a date. I also recall the 8th Doctor tapping the replicator with his question-mark umbrella to order a sandwich. 

Crossovers are baked into the wider fandom of both shows, and the possibilities are nearly endless. So many Trek shows and stories. So many incarnations of the Doctor. 

The real question becomes, what mix do I want? AND what system to play it in.

If I were going to do Star Trek TOS with the Fourth Doctor then answer, to me, is obvious. I have to use FASA rules. Likely some brain-numbing combination of both the FASA Trek and FASA Doctor Who. Part of me wants to do that just for nostalgia's sake. And maybe one day I will. A one-shot would be great. Have the Doctor with Sarah Jane Smith. I loved Sarah Jane.

But if I am going to do this one properly, I want something longer. Something more episodic.

The Blue Box Directive

If I am going to do this, I want Trek and Who at its newest. I considered Strange New Worlds for about a minute or two. But it is still running, and they have come close on their own many times. A real crossover is not likely to happen now, but I suppose I have not given up hope. 

So, I am setting it after Season 5 of Star Trek: Discovery, in 3192-93 CE. The Doctor is the Fifteenth Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa, with Ruby Sunday, played by Millie Gibson. A temporal anomaly appears, Discovery investigates, and the TARDIS arrives.

I like this idea because both runs were cut short, and both pissed off some of the worst fans of the shows on the internet. So if I am doing a crossover to spite people, I am going all the way.  BUT, that is not 100% the reason either.

The Doctor and Ruby would LOVE Discovery. It is exactly the sort of humanity the Doctor loves. A Federation that survived disaster. A ship thrown impossibly far from home and still doing the right thing. Scientists, explorers, found family, and people who keep choosing hope even when hope is wildly inconvenient. I mean, that is the heart of both shows, really. 

Not all the details have been worked out. I know there is an anomaly (there always is), and after the Flux (Doctor Who) and the Burn (Discovery), there have to be weak points in the multiverse for things to go through. The Doctor and Ruby show up, materialize in the cargo bay. I would say that some crewman tells the bridge that a "Blue box just appeared out of nowhere" which would trigger an alert to Starfleet HQ, still several hours away on subspace.

Also, I DO want Tilly to be there, maybe with a group of cadets on a training exercise. Hell. If I plan it right, they could be Cadets from Starfleet Academy, and they could be the PCs. Have not worked it all out just yet. Why? Tilly would be the ultimate Doctor fan-girl. And I adore Tilly.

The adventure begins when another temporal signal is discovered. The Doctor comes to the bridge with Ruby, yes, he convinces Burnham that a civilian should be there. They track the signal and get there via conventional warp drive. There is a lot of <insert really cool technobabble here> interference. Burnham tells Bryce to clean it up and put it on audio. Burnham is about give her "we are here to help" speech when the audio breaks in.

"EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"

The Doctor pulls out his sonic screwdriver and activates the spore drive, sending the entire ship into panic.

Before Burnham can question the Doctor or Stamets can ask who is messing with his spore drive, Admiral Vance breaks in via hologram, ordering Burnham to invoke "the Blue Box directive."

Because, of course, Starfleet has protocols for dealing with the Doctor.  

The idea is to follow the Discovery premise of a chase across space. The bad guys are the Daleks since the 15th Doctor never got a chance to encounter them. AND I was thinking of using the New Paradigm Daleks, since we haven't seen them in a bit. The Daleks would be a natural enemy of the Federation. The Federation brings all these different species together to work together, celebrating their differences. This is an abomination to the central Dalek creed. These Daleks are here to destroy the Federation in a universe without their greatest enemy. And now they have set their sights on Discovery's spore drive.

I have an idea for Discovery's crew to capture a Dalek and interrogate it to discover what their plan is. The Doctor thinks this is a terrible idea, and it is, because this isn't a repeat of the Ninth Doctor episode "Dalek"; it is more "Silence of the Lambs" with the Dalek in the Lecter role. The Dalek wants Discovery's crew not to trust the Doctor by talking about all the deaths that can be laid at the feet of "The Oncoming Storm."

Ultimately, the crew (aka the PCs) defeat the Daleks, and the Doctor and Ruby get back to their own universe. I just have not figured out how that all happens yet! But isn't that also part of the fun? 

The System

This is important because is tells me the tone of the game. If I use Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition, that means I am expecting Star Trek logic. If I choose Doctor Who 2nd Edition, that means I am expecting less fighting and more talking. 

I have considered going back and forth between the two. My players would not mind, but it would mean a lot of extra work for me. 

Given Mōdiphiüs' support for Trek, and the 32nd Century Trek in particular, I am likely to go with this game. Though, as an exercise, I might have everyone generate their characters in both systems. 

I am nothing if not a glutton for punishment.

If I am going to make my players do it, then I should as well. And there is an obvious choice for a test run. The person who likely wrote the Blue Box Directive in the first place. The immortal Valerie Beaumont.

Valerie would come aboard the Discovery as a Specialist because she knows the most about the Doctor. I have already set her up for Doctor Who Second Edition, so let's see how she fares as a Star Trek Character.

Agent Valerie Regina Beaumont

Species: Human (Immortal) 
Career Path: Starfleet (Intelligence)
Role: Intelligence Agent
Department: Security
Intelligence Grade: Commodore-equivalent
Assignment: Starfleet Intelligence, Special Operations
Era: 32nd Century

CONTROL 11
DARING 9
FITNESS 8
INSIGHT 9
PRESENCE 9
REASON 10

COMMAND 4
CONN 2
ENGINEERING 1
SECURITY 5
MEDICINE 1
SCIENCE 3

Stress 10
Reputation 5

Focuses: Blade Weapons, Espionage, Infiltration, Earth History, Survival, Anomalous Phenomena

Talents: Cautious (Security), Close Protection, Tough, Veteran

Species Ability: Faith of the Heart

Role Benefit: Intelligence Agent

Grade: Commodore-equivalent

Values

"I am immortal. Everyone else is not."
"History is memory, and memory carries obligations."
"Sometimes a secret saves more lives than the truth."
"The mission matters. People matter more."

Attacks

Unarmed Strike (Melee), Stun 2, Size 1H
Shadow-Steel Sword (Melee), Deadly 3, Size 1H
Phaser Type-2 (Ranged), Stun/Deadly 4, Size 1H, Charge

Gotta admit, she looks pretty good at 1,623 years old.

And because I can.

Specialist Larina Stephanie Nichols

Species: Human (Psychic)
Career Path: Civilian (Official)
Professional Trait: Civilian Specialist, Xenolinguistics & Behavioral Sciences
Role: Xenotranslator
Starfleet Status: Civilian specialist attached to Starfleet
Administrative Rate: Crewman First Class
Division: Sciences
Actual Function: Psychic intelligence, reconnaissance, and subterfuge
Era: 32nd Century

CONTROL 10
DARING 9
FITNESS 8
INSIGHT 11
PRESENCE 9
REASON 9

COMMAND 3
CONN 2
ENGINEERING 1
SECURITY 5
MEDICINE 1
SCIENCE 4

Stress 8
Reputation 4

Focuses: Linguistics, Psychology, Espionage, Infiltration, Survival, Martial Arts

Talents: Extrasensory Perception, Telepathy, Psychokinesis, Martial Artist

Species Ability: Faith of the Heart

Role Benefit: Translator

Grade: Crewman First Class

Values

"Every mind has a language."
"Never ignore the feeling that something is wrong."
"People matter more than procedure."
"Underestimating me makes my job easier."

Attacks

Unarmed Strike (Melee), Stun/Deadly 2, Size 1H
Psychokinetic Strike (Ranged), Stun/Deadly 3
Phaser Type-1(Ranged), Stun/Deadly 3, Size 1H, Charge, Hidden 1 (a gift from Valerie)

To be clear, this is not Larina from Jackson, IL. That girl had a nice long life and likely passed away sometime in the late-21st century. That is, if this is the same universe at all. This Larina could be a reincarnation of that Larina. 

This Larina grew up on Earth, and Valerie found her and noticed Larina's talents for both language and her psychic powers. She serves as an aide to Agent Beaumont, where her cover is that of a xenolinguist, but in truth she is an expert in psychic espionage. 

There is a Jackson connection here. Jackson Larina once saw this Larina in her mirror. She didn't know what she saw, and I described it as a "psychic storm wearing her face." 

I also opted to teach her martial arts, thinking she had something like a psychic punch. 

Maybe Valerie and Larina served aboard the USS Jackson. Exactly the sort of strangeness I expect to see in the multiverse. 

One thing is certain. I want to do a lot more with this game. I barely left the character generation chapter, and I REALLY wanted to build some starships.

Well. I have the Protector, the Mercy, the Challenger, and more to still build.

Happy Birthday, Star Trek! Here is to many, many more.

Can I Use NIGHT SHIFT for an SCP Tabletop RPG?

Crossposted to the Elf Lair Games blog.

My kids got me into SCP.

Or, more accurately, they told me all about it, pointed me toward the Wiki, and then left me standing there staring at what appears to be several lifetimes’ worth of lore.

I am very new to SCP. The sheer amount of material is honestly a little overwhelming, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But I am a horror RPG designer.

So once I started reading, one thought kept coming back to me: Can I run this with NIGHT SHIFT?

That answer is absolutely yes.

Running this with NIGHT SHIFT: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars?

I would say yes. In fact, the more I look it over, the more I am convinced NIGHT SHIFT is already a near-perfect fit for an SCP-style campaign.

Now, I do not mean in the sense of replicating every scrap of SCP lore or re-creating each Foundation department and classification. The old hands at SCP know that side of things far better than I do. What I have in mind is the game's fundamental structure.

You have your secret organizations and the impossible creatures they house. Haunted objects. Beings from other dimensions. Government installations where some entity has been walled off behind six feet of reinforced concrete simply because no one has yet come up with a way to put it down.

NIGHT SHIFT can handle all of that without much alteration.

An SCP game is not about playing the SCPs; it is about the ones who must deal with them. And that is where NIGHT SHIFT excels. Your characters are the researchers, the security detail, the occult experts, the field agents, and the medics. Or the poor saps you send into the basement when something starts to make noise. In the parlance of NIGHT SHIFT, they are Veterans. People who have run up against the supernatural and lived to tell of it. But they are also the Sages and Survivors, and maybe even the odd Psychic. 

It could be their first day with the organization or their twentieth. Then again, perhaps they were recruited precisely because they survived something that ought to have finished them off. There is something very NIGHT SHIFT about that.

The Foundation as the Night World

There is a basic tenet to NIGHT SHIFT: the supernatural is there, coexisting with the normal world but kept out of sight. From what I have read, SCP operates on much the same premise.

The distinction is in the organization. In a typical NIGHT SHIFT affair, your characters might come across the paranormal of their own accord. Not in an SCP vein. Here, someone is already aware of the monsters. They have the files, the labs, the protocols, and likely a number for the beast in question.

This does not have to be the SCP Foundation proper. For my own table, I would probably make up something else. A federal agency, an international body, or a private concern dating back to the Second World War or longer. It does not matter so long as someone is quietly putting the Night World in order. They have learned the hard way that some things are not to be destroyed, only put away.

Secure

Consider the investigation.

A case comes in. People have vanished. An antique mirror is showing people the future. There is an extra room in a house where there was none before. Every soul in town has had the same dream. Or a children’s program shows up on tape for no reason anyone can recall.

The characters are on the scene to find out why. You will have them talking to witnesses, poring over records and folklore, and the odd door-kicking exercise. Classic stuff. But they are not after a permanent fix right now. They need to understand what they are up against in order to get through it.

Contain

Here is where the SCP element puts its stamp on the adventure.

In a conventional monster hunt, the objective is plain: find it, kill it, head home. Containment is another matter. You try to put the creature down, and it comes back, or makes matters worse, or defies being killed altogether. That is very often the case.

So you have to think of something else. Bind it. Relocate it. Seal off the entrance. Put the artifact in saltwater. See to it that two copies of the photograph are never in the same place. Do whatever is necessary.

It turns the session into as much a puzzle as an action piece. The players stop asking how to defeat it and start wondering what the rules are. To me, that is the appeal of SCP as an RPG. The horror lies not just in the monster but in the way reality has fallen apart around it.

Protect

Then there is this part. I think I have the most fun with it. Who is being protected? I think about this one a lot.

The public, of course. The organization would have you believe the common man is not equipped to know what is really out there. But then the characters are likely to find that "Protect" is a word with many definitions.

It could mean shielding civilians from the supernatural or the other way around. It might be about keeping the organization itself from being found out, or even the preservation of reality. And on some days it means protecting an anomalous creature from the very people whose job it is to look after everyone else. That last scenario in particular makes for fine NIGHT SHIFT material.

Think of it: you go in and find the thing in containment is intelligent. Or innocent. A child. The last of its kind. What do you do? In that moment, the game is no longer a matter of monster hunting; it is something far more compelling.

From Classes to Roles

There is no need for an "SCP Agent" class in NIGHT SHIFT. I would make use of the ones on hand and view them as the sort of personnel the organization puts on its rolls.

A Survivor is your field operative or security. A Veteran is the containment agent who has seen enough. You keep a Chosen One on staff because anomalies have a way of behaving differently in their presence. A Psychic is your specialist for research and investigation. As for a Witch, put her in the Occult Research Division and let the rest of the department avoid her. No end to where an Inventor can go.

The organization is not concerned with what is written on your character sheet. They want to know if you can go into Room 17, have a word with the occupant, and return. With the same headcount you had when you left, ideally.

Anomalies, Not Monsters

I like this part best. Call it an anomaly and give it a designation rather than a monster label. Put together a containment protocol and a file on what the organization thinks it knows.

Take a vampire, for example.

Designation: NS-017

Containment: Sealed chamber with remote UV lighting. No personnel with exposed blood allowed inside.

Known Properties: Photosensitivity, rapid healing, nocturnal.

Very clinical. Until someone realizes that the ultraviolet is having no effect at all. The vampire has been putting on a show. Suddenly, you have an adventure on your hands.

Let Them Be in the Dark

One does not want to turn the supernatural into a textbook. The organization can catalog, experiment, and write reams of documentation, but understanding is another matter entirely. The best SCP-style game will highlight the chasm between the two.

The file says the entity will not cross running water. Why? Nobody can say. It goes dormant if you sing to it. Again, why? The file says there are seven of them. There are eight. That discrepancy will prove to be of some consequence. The Night World has no duty to conform to the order the organization is trying to impose.

Making Containment Procedures Work for You

This provides the Game Master with a ready-made structure. Begin with a procedure, then ensure it is broken.

CONTAINMENT BREACH

The players will be aware that something has gone wrong, though they may not have the full picture. Was the creature let out on purpose? Did it escape? Or was the procedure never doing any containing at all, and whatever was actually holding it back has just made off?

That is an adventure in the making.

On the Matter of Sanity

I would not insist on it. You can bring in mechanics for fear or trauma if the campaign calls for it, but an SCP game does not automatically require them. These are Veterans of the Supernatural Wars, not some ordinary folk having their first run-in with the impossible. They are the ones called in after the impossible has already made a meal of three guards.

The horror is in the realization that your training and your fine three-inch binder of CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES may not cut it. Because things have changed. And the thing on the other side of the door has taken note.

NIGHT SHIFT: Secure, Contain, Protect

One can certainly make NIGHT SHIFT work for an SCP-style game if one puts the mind to it.

Retain the classes and the monsters. Let the supernatural Night World remain as a presence under the surface of normal reality. Then put in place an organization whose job is to investigate anomalies and see that they do not come to light.

Assign the monsters some clinical nomenclature. Have containment procedures for odd phenomena. Leave the players with files that lack detail.

After that, simply go against one assumption.

That is all that is required. Or so I would have it after my initial foray into the SCP rabbit hole.

I am sure any veteran of SCP will be able to point out the complications and aspects of the setting I have yet to encounter. I would be interested in hearing about them. But as a game designer, what has caught my attention is this: the monsters have always been there; someone has just begun to record them.

Links

• SCP Foundation Wiki
• About The SCP Foundation
• Guide For Newcomers
• Essay and Resource Hub
• FAQ

Mirror Mondays: Jackson as a Mirror

 I just got back from a long trip to visit my in-laws, and I got to go to Jackson. Not Jackson, IL, but Jackson, OH. The real town. 

We were driving south to see my in-laws, and this was along the way. Of course, I had to stop. The town was just like I thought it would be...just not for Jackson, IL 

For Sunny Valley, OH.

It is the right size, in the right location, and certainly has the right feel. It is set near enough to the Appalachian Mountains to get the right feel.

Driving through the Appalachians also gave me many ideas for both of my fictional towns for NIGHT SHIFT.

Jackson, OH, and Jacksonville, IL

These two towns are about 760 miles apart and don't have a lot in common.  

My fictional Jackson, IL, owes a debt to the real Jacksonville, Illinois. It is not a copy of it. Yet it provides the sense of place that I need. From Jacksonville, I get a Midwestern town of the proper proportions and the right kind of civic life: the streets, the neighborhoods, the schools, the churches, and businesses that serve as my point of reference. Jackson, IL and Jacksonville, IL are not exactly the same, but but walking around either during the daylight hours should feel the same.

With a population of 20,000 or so, Jackson is a small but substantial town. There are enough people for characters to lose themselves in the crowd now and then, and one does not know everyone. You have your different social circles, your hospital, your clubs and rivalries, and local institutions. Still, it is small enough to be recognized.

Sunny Valley is another matter. With only about 5,000 residents, the difference is considerable. Here, people will tell you where you were last night.

There may be a single high school and a grocery store that everyone patronizes. A modest downtown with a diner where certain families have been coming for generations, a few churches, a funeral home, a clinic, a library, and perhaps a hardware store older than anyone’s memory. And then the town just stops. The streetlights run out, and the houses give way to trees.

That is how Jackson, Ohio, began to make an impression on me. It had less to do with the town and more with the drive through the Appalachian hills of southeastern Ohio. Mile upon mile of ridges and valleys, of roads that wind into the woods where visibility is poor.

I found myself thinking that something could be out there. Not in the flippant sense of "the monster lives here," but because the landscape made it seem entirely plausible. The forest can put things out of sight; the hills have their secrets. In that moment, it occurred to me what Sunny Valley had been lacking.

Sunny Valley 1.0

Sunny Valley came before Jackson.

In the beginning, Sunny Valley was an exercise in putting together a supernatural teen milieu of the early 80s. I put it most simply by asking: what would Buffy be like if she were in Ohio in 1983-4?

It was a sound approach, and I had a blast with it. You had your share of kids and monsters, oddities in the woods, the kind of supernatural conundrums that make for a good teenage horror game. There was even a Hellmouth-ish sort of thing in Sunny Valley.

But when I put my mind to Jackson, things changed.

Jackson took on a life of its own. It put down roots in the form of history and old families, adults with more to say than they let on, and teachers looking out for their students. Witches, ghosts, conspiracies, and long-held grudges all came to the fore, building a whole community of the supernatural on top of the ordinary one.

Jackson was no longer just a venue for an adventure; it was a place.

I was of the mind for some time that Sunny Valley had run its course. It had provided the 80s campaign I needed to figure out what Jackson should be.

Until I made the trip to Jackson, Ohio, and drove through the Appalachian Mountains. 

Sunny Valley 2.0

I used to say Sunny Valley had a Hellmouth and Jackson had history. But I have come to see that as not entirely true.

Jackson has the history, certainly. Sunny Valley is defined by its geology.

It is a minor distinction, yet one that means everything to me. There is no need for a magical hole in the ground to account for the awful things that go on in Sunny Valley; the mountains will do just fine.

Take the Appalachians. Their story reaches back hundreds of millions of years, through mountain-building events older than anything in human experience. The Rockies were still in their infancy when these ranges were already ancient. They have been eroded and reformed over eons that put our recorded history to shame. 

The people of Sunny Valley like to think of themselves as an old town. The mountains have other ideas.

Sure, you can find a house or two in the valley that is close on two hundred years, or a family name from the first settlers, an abandoned mine, some pre-Civil War churches and old cemeteries. But to the mountains, all of that is from this morning, geologically speaking.

And with that, the nature of the horror is altered.

In Jackson, the supernatural is steeped in history. In Sunny Valley, it is prehistory.

Jackson asks: What if the weird kids were right?

Sunny Valley asks: What if your grandparents were right when they told you not to go up there?

That is the difference in a nutshell. Or perhaps there is an even more straightforward way to tell them apart: look at which way the characters are running. In Jackson, they tend to run to the trouble. In Sunny Valley, those with any sense put distance between themselves and it.

When you drive for a few hours in the mountains, you get a lot of ideas.

Sunny Valley 2.0 is not scarier because the monsters have more hit points. It is scarier because some things were never meant to be fought in the first place.

Two Different Kinds of Horror

Jackson is dangerous, but Jackson allows heroism.

That is the town where Rowan can ride Tempest into the final battle against the Hollow King while Andy announces her arrival by playing an 80s hair-metal song on his trumpet.

It is ridiculous. It is glorious. And it belongs in Jackson.

Jackson is a place where the kids eventually discover that they are not alone. Teachers protect them. Older witches know things. Friends show up. People choose sides. The supernatural can be terrible, but it can also be opposed.

Sunny Valley should not work that way.

If someone tried that sort of heroic entrance against one of the older things in the mountains, it might not even understand what the child was trying to accomplish.

At best, it might say, "Hush, child."

That is the kind of horror I have in mind for Sunny Valley. I am not after stronger monsters, but older ones. The sort who do not hate us because, to them, we are not worth hating. They predate the town and its first settlers, and likely predate any name we have given these mountains. Most should predate the concept of names.

You will find the folk stories here are less by way of explanation than survival instructions: don’t whistle in the dark; don’t answer a call from the woods if you can’t put a face to it; avoid the old road over the ridge once the snow comes; if there is knocking under the floor, you leave. Nobody can tell you why. They will only point out which families were the ones who didn’t heed the rules.

Sunny Valley is no longer "Buffy in Ohio." It is edging toward an Appalachian cosmic horror.

The numbers make a difference. Jackson is a place of 20,000 people with its layers; it has the critical mass for a supernatural community. Sunny Valley has 5,000 souls and an expanse of empty land around it.

There is a distinction here. Jackson is home to its share of old monsters, some of which predate the human race. Yet for all that they are comprehensible to humans in some measure, they have a history and motives, hungers and grudges, names and bargains. Even demons are tied to us in some way. They can hate us. Tempt us. Love us. Hunt us. Make deals with us. We matter to them.

Sunny Valley is not like that.

What one finds in the Appalachians is something else entirely. Those are things that were old in the time of the dinosaurs. To call them demons, gods, or ghosts is to apply a word humans have invented. They are of an older order.

Where Jackson’s monsters have a past, Sunny Valley’s have geology. And that makes for a different kind of coexistence. The town’s founders did not so much subdue the wilderness as come to terms with what was already there, learning the rules necessary to put down roots. Or it could be said the humans were merely put up with.

Jackson's oldest monsters remember humanity.

Sunny Valley's oldest monsters remember a world without us.

The Mirrors

Then there is the matter of the real towns in the mirror. I have no desire for my fictional Jackson or Sunny Valley to be stand-ins for Jacksonville, Illinois, or Jackson, Ohio. They are mirrors.

Jacksonville provides the texture and scale for my Midwestern setting. But Jackson, Ohio offered something else entirely to my Sunny Valley. Not in population, but geologically. One can walk those small-town streets and then drive out to the wooded hills and get a sense of the other half of the picture.

In a way I didn’t foresee, the process has come full circle. 

Sunny Valley was instrumental in making Jackson, and Jackson has shown me that a town must be more than scenery. Now a real Jackson has sent me back to Sunny Valley. Not to make it more like Jackson, but less so.

Take the places outside Sunny Valley that are well known, yet not in the manner of a tourist spot or a famous haunts. The old mine road, the logging trail abandoned for thirty years, the hollow where no house has been built, the fire tower visible from town but unclimbed by memory. A grandfather won’t bother with explanations about bad roads or bears, as an adult might to a teenager. He will be direct: "Don’t go up there." In Jackson, that is an open door to adventure. In Sunny Valley, it is sound counsel.

I think this covers the four comparisons without the need for separate essays.

Jacksonville to Jackson, IL is inspiration made into a community. Jackson, OH to Sunny Valley is inspiration turned to atmosphere. The evolution from Sunny Valley 1.0 to 2.0 is the shift from fighting the supernatural to surviving something very, very old. And between Jackson and Sunny Valley lies the question of what each can sustain as a horror story.

There is a line I want to keep: "Jacksonville helped me imagine where people live. Jackson, Ohio made me wonder what lives beyond them."