Flesh for Frankenstein- Twisting what's Known

Some horror movies are scary, and some serve as some kind of a dark and twisted mirror for our lives, for our culture. Flesh for Frankenstein is one of those movies, yet it is so campy that I almost missed that; it is so gory that I almost threw the DVD out of the window (which is bad, 'cause it's a library copy). Yet, it does have certain merits to it, if (yet again) you look hard enough.

It is yet another strange spin on the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his unnamed creation, but it is taken to an almost Rocky Horror's extreme: The Baron creates the monster to join his earlier creation, "a female zombie", in order to create "a new human race". It adds to that a lot of very dark humor, much gore and sex. It also has the infamous line: " To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life... in the gall bladder!" Yeah, that's the movie we're talking about.

But still, there is something to learn from this movie, right? Rrrrrrright…

It's quite hard to find something in there, you know, social commentary, gore and sex aside. But we can learn from it something, though, or I wouldn't be writing this piece. And what I've learned is that one of the greatest ways to surprise the audience is to build a story on something that they know quite well, and then to twist and spin it until it is *almost* unrecognizable.

The almost is the most important part- if it is too similar, we won't be surprising anyone as we don't have enough playing space. Too different, though, and it will feel completely new and thus we won't be able to utilize the prior knowledge.

When one treats a story this way, the audience gets to feel a unique kind of experience: the surprise to see how different the events turned out to be change, with the anticipation to see those changes. That's the power of the Campaign Comics, for example, and utilizing it to our games can prove this much successful also.

Think about the possibilities of having an evil Snow White and a good Queen Regina, think about the character of the prince who climbed to wake the sleeping beauty- he's a necrophilia character, to a certain respect, and by utilizing it we get the whole relationship that our culture has with those characters.

And that's it for this movie, at least from me. How about you? What did you learn from this movie? Or did you use a twisted twist like this in one of your games? How did it go?

The Beginning of Your Doom

I've watched yesterday the original Frankenstein movie (yeah, the one with Boris Karloff...). It's a nice movie, but what really caught my eye was the opening of it. You know, this movie has 2 openings. The first one being done by the Dr. who warns us from the movie, the second is a funeral. This made my brain engines work: "What is there, in these 2 openings, which is so spectacular?"

The answer didn't wait long before coming: They create interest and curiosity. More than that, though, they conveyed the mood of the story, of the movie all the way to me. Add to these 2 things that these 2 openings were far from normal, and we get a thing that just waits for an exploration into the dark mind and world of the story. So, let's look at a few openings, won't we?

"This story may even horrify you", or starting with a warning.

The first opening of Frankenstein is a warning from the Dr. about the movie: How frightening the movie is, what lies in the middle of the story, what is the experiment and so on. 3 things are achieved by this: The first one is the building of the expectations. We now wait to see what this movie is gonna be about, and how frightening it really gonna be. Will we be frightened? Horrified? Not affected? The expectations are already there, waiting for the story to unfold and to unravel the things that we expect.

The second is that we know to what we enter. The easiest way to destroy our horror movie is by bringing an audience which doesn't know to what it enters. So it is with our games, where we must make sure that the players don't only look forward for a few things but also know what type of story they're going to participate within.

The third one is the conveying of the mood. The dark tone, the costumes, the veil, the close-ups and the manner of speech, all give us a sense of the mood. This story is going to be dark and grim and terrifying, so beware. It's a great easy and dirty way to get the atmosphere that we need.

"Midnight, a funeral, the priest is blessing", or starting with the funeral of one of the characters.

This one is far more interesting than it seems. Starting with the funeral of one of the characters gives us so many things to play with, from the sense of dread to the ability to use flashbacks and to the knowledge that no one is safe from death. 

The sense of dread comes naturally. We Begin with the death of one of the characters, and the macabre is there, dancing between the graves and tombs. There's almost no work that needs to be done here, as the prayers and the tombs does their work almost by themselves.

So is the knowledge that no one is safe from death. Starting with a funeral makes it justified to kill characters in the game, 'cause after all, it's gonna happen or there won't be any funeral. Starting with the funeral of a minor character, like the mentor of one of the characters can be proven useful too, as it can be considered a foreshadowing if we plan to do something with the dead mentor's body for example.

The ability to use flashback is important. Going for a nonlinear game can be proven quite hard and demanding, but it's far easier this way. It also gives an excuse to skip all the uninteresting stuff. "What, when telling legends, we never learn what the protagonists did between adventures or during their trips from one place to another..."

"Once upon a time, in a world not unlike our own", or starting with a storyteller that tells the story.

This is also very interesting. It is very similar to the funeral example, but creates a lesser sense of dread and a greater sense of innocence and epicness. It means, after all, that a legend is being told. If it's done by one of the PCs, who grew old since the adventures, it's even better. A few things to consider:

It means that (at least) one of the characters will survive the adventures, so it's preferred to not reveal the storyteller 'till the end of the story arch. Otherwise, there will be no sense of wonder about who is the storyteller. If it's being told by a storyteller that is not from the group, this problem is solved but it will be less powerful.

Another thing is that it gives an epic or a fairy tale feel, mainly due to its connotations, so it might not be always useful to horror gaming (although it can surely be useful to other types of games).

And, that's about it. How about you? How do you open your games? How does it affect the mood? The game itself?

"The Big Rulebook of Fables"- Plans For an Upcoming Changeling Campaign

My Changeling campaign is coming closer with each passing day. So, we'll begin the campaign and all my planning will be tested, but until then, I've got at least about 2 to 3 weeks, maybe even more. As such is the situation, I've decided to get into the fairy tales a little bit closer, so the first session will be a session that worth the wait. Anyway, I've came to a few observations about this genre of stories. My changeling game is supposed to resemble these tales in so many ways, that there's no other way so beneficial to prepare for the game. What follows are some of my observations, accompanied by how I plan to use them in games.

My first observation was about the world. It's pretty much clear that all fairy tales occur in a place that is  familiar and alien. In one hand, there's its normality, with normal human inhabitants, wars, kings and queens and much much more. On the other hand, though, there's the strangeness of the world. It's a strange, peculiar, alien, wonderful world, filled with all kinds of wonders (and some other things). A world that is both familiar and alien, fearful and wonderful, magical and mundane is hard to create in a moment, but it's not impossible, and that's something that I plan to do in my game.

The easiest way to make this happen is to make it some kind of an urban fantasy game, but it may be too familiar this way, so a twist has to be made. I'm still not sure what mine will be, but I'm sure thinking about it, and that's where the magic of the world will come from. Possibly an exile? Attack of the Gentry? Maybe a discovery by the humans?

Another thing is the infamous justice. What's bad shall be punished, what's good shall be greatly rewarded. How can we insert this into the game without making it feel strange or forced? Maybe it's more suited to be strange and forced, to come in terms with the strange world? I'm not sure, but I have to make the punishment something both peculiar and frightening, and the main inspiration for that will be the dancing in the burning shoes. When thinking about rewards, it's much easier to think about things, as rewards in fairy tales are pretty much normal: Marriages, nobility, gold.

The last thing I wanna go over today is the point of "Happily Ever After". How can we make that into a game? How will it be happy? How will it go in line with horror gaming? My take on this is quite simple; I think that I'll go for the tragic "Happily Ever After" end. Things will end badly, really badly, but the lesson will be learned and the mistakes and bad deeds won't come back to hunt others; people will to handle properly. I think that I start this game with the "Once Upon a Time" notion, told by the only living person from the story that s/he tells.

How will it go? Will it work? I don't know, but I'm eager to find out. Maybe, just maybe, this will help to make my game better, or even I'll be lucky enough to help another's game also...

A Fairy Tale Feel

In his commentary to the movie "Pan's Labyrinth", Del Toro expresses a key concept for making movies that feel fairy-tale like: the fairy tale is a simple story with simple characters. you can change one of the elements, but not both of them.

If we'll look at Pan's Labyrinth, the plot is complicated, with intervals of fantasy in the middle of reality, and with these 2 worlds colliding to each other. But the characters? They are really not that complicated. The Capitan an egocentric person whose love for control and order is unquestioned (as can be seen by his work on his clock). Ophelia's mother is a pregnant woman, who is in love with the Capitan, and who surrenders to whatever he says. The Dr. and the maid are double agents, who are not brave enough to join the rebels, but that's as far as they are complicated. The illusion of complexity is broken once one looks into the film.

At the other end of the spectrum, is the movie Spirited Away, a movie that although I didn't like it, I truly appreciate. The plot is pretty straight forward, with a girl trying to save her parents, but the characters are full of eternal conflicts, of metaphors, of allegories. All the characters in this movie are not as simple as seen at first sight, and even the evil ones are not as evil as they seemed.

In both movies, there is a strong feel of a fairy tale story. True, there are other elements there that make and/or help to enhance the theme, but this concept is one of the stronger and more important ones.

In RPGs like Changeling, this little thing can do magic. The stories in Changeling (or in Grimm, or the like) resemble and are closely related to fairy tales. While Changeling goes back to the original uncensored ones, and Grimm to the twists on them, keeping the idea and the feel of the fairy tale is a need in this kind of games.

Because usually, one gets to these games when they are more advanced as players and GMs, the characters will be much more rounded and much less flat usually. That means that the GM has to shift the focus from the plot to the characters, and that his/hers NPCs must be more developed and also, must resemble the concepts that the players want to explore in their characters.