Making Race Important to the Game

Over at Roleplaying Tips they're hosting a nice little blog carnival, centered on the concept of races. And… I must say that I don't normally play with race too much, or at the very least- not today. But it doesn't mean that I don't have anything to bring to the table. I did run a year or two of campaigns centered on races and our prejudices surrounding them, back in the day.

John asks for tips and ideas about making race an important factor in the game. For me, the number one trick, the first tip that I offer for GMs who come to me with the same question, is to lead by example.

Think about the GM-player relationship in most traditional games- the GM sets the stage, decides what is important and what not, and the players (at least to a certain extent) internalize those themes and ideas, and then bring their own versions of it. That's how we explore themes in RPGs.

But it also means that the GM has to set the stage. If the GM will make race an important factor in her games, like having some racist NPCs or handing a prejudices index (just like we can find in every WOD race book), sooner or later it will become a major factor in the game.

If, for the sake of example, I bring to the table a Dwarf NPC who hates Elves and think that they just stink, suddenly it is important to know if Lucy plays an Elf or if she plays a Halfling. If I'll continue this stage-setting and the next NPC will think that Halflings are not real men, Mr. Halfling will have to find a way to show his manliness.

In other words- making the concept of races important to you, as GM, and playing to this concept, will make it important for the whole group. Before you'll know it you'll have Dwarfs who don't like Gnomes and Orcs who want to be Elves.

And that's the whole truth, actually. Make it important to you, stress it through your portrayal of NPCs, through your descriptions ("you see an Elf. She…"), through handouts... If it is important enough for you to stress it, it will become important enough for them as well.

Or you can just go and play Vampire. I "heard" that they've done it right.

How about you? What tips and tricks do you have for making race an important factor in your games?

NPCs are just Tools

NPCs are just tools. They're not there to steal the limelight, they're not there to give some amazing monologues. NPCs are just tools for the GM to use, to nudge the game a little bit to one direction or the other, to help make an enjoyable evening or something along those lines. As such is the case NPCs don't need complex personalities but a way to affect the PCs and through them to affect the players. When they've filled their roles, they're not needed anymore, they can be discarded, or move to the reserve pile for later scenes and/or sessions.

Drosselmeyer, in Princess Tutu understood this well. When talking to Edel in episode 12 of the first season, he says to her: "Your role is to add glow to the story in my place". Unlike the players, the GM doesn't have an avatar in the game. All the GM has is everything that is not controlled by the players. But, as we know, those things are there to serve the PCs and/or the players. The Gm should forget herself, of course, but for now please stay with me.

 Most problems of using NPCs come from not acknowledging this simple idea. If the NPCs are just tools used by the GM to serve the game and players, then one wouldn’t give them amazing and way too long monologues.  One wouldn't let them steal the limelight either.

But it grows deeper than that, unsurprisingly. It means that trying to give them life and complex personality is a futile intention. A gm should think in terms of how the NPC affects the PCs and through them affect the players. This calls for a simple motive, for example, so it will be easy to grasp. It also calls for something that will challenge the players' perceptions, like am NPC that divides the players and the characters to a few sides.

It also means that one shouldn't get to attached to the NPCs. Once they fulfill their role, they should finish they're part in the game. If the players don't connect to them, they should be left out. And if the players like them enough, make their part greater, make them more colorful.

So how one should use this kind of tool? There's no one true way, of course, but for me it always was about giving the illusion that they're far more complex and alive than they truly are. They should sometimes be busy, or they'll use some fancy words to describe some simple ideals. They will be distinctive, different from one another. And most importantly, they should be made such that I will always be able to bring them to the present scene, if I'll ever need them. Usually, this combination does the trick for me.

What do you think? Feel free to write in the comments.

Phantasm- Meeting the NPCs in Normal Situations

Some movies leave you with a lasting impression, others just don't. Phantasm belongs to the second group. It's not that it is a bad movie, or that I didn't enjoy it, but it just wasn't that good either. For me, it didn't have anything memorable within its 90 minutes, and even The Tall Man himself wasn't anything inspiring. I mean- after knowing The Slender Man, all I can say in benefit of this movie is that it was a nice inspiration for some great artistry. Too bad it's all I can say for this film.

Anyway, this movie's plot is pretty complicated, and not because of its presentation. You see, the movie twists itself quite a lot, combining gypsies with ice-cream men with heroic sensibilities, aliens and dwarfs, brotherly love and much-much grief over death in the family. Anything beyond that might be a spoiler, and I don't want that to happen.

Our protagonist, Mike, begins as a certain kind of stalker- he follows his brother anywhere, because his afraid of his brother leaving him behind, to leave his life alone. In a scene near the beginning, Mike follows his brother and witnesses his brother doing it, or at least beginning to do it.

And that's a great idea to use in our games. No, not this particular idea, but… one of the greatest GMing tips that can be given about portraying NPCs is that they should be given a sense of life. They should feel alive beyond the scope of their encounters with the PCs. A great way to do that is to have the PCs meet them in normal situations.

Imagine this scene- the PCs are doing their businesses in the city as usual, when suddenly they see the villain in a flower shop. "A-ah, this time we'll get ya!" they'll say to him, for which he'll respond "Can't I just but some flowers for milady?" or something along those lines. Or maybe he collects flowers because this is one of his hobbies? Or maybe because he is lonely and this is his way of escapism?

As an added bonus, try to think about ways to utilize these instances to make the players feel bad. "Look, if I'll try to kill this woman you'll be the first to know about it, and then you'll come and take revenge on me, and then you'll destroy my base (again) and then I'll have to start all over again (again)." Two benefits for the price of one, I'm taking it…

And that's it for today. How about you? Have you watched this movie? What have you thought about it? And what have you learned from it?

Tomorrow I'll cover the last five movies of this project, so I hope you'll enjoy it too.

The Orphanage- Use Sceptics to your Advantage

And here comes the big fix. A film that is so emotional, so intense, and so true to its roots. And it is far more than just a horror film- it is a film about motherhood, a film about childhood, about innocence, about the powers of our imaginations. This film is a masterpiece without a doubt.

It is the story of a mother, called Laura, who returns with her husband and son to her childhood home- an orphanage. As time goes by, her son starts to talk about some imagined friends, friends that Laura and her husband ignore as nonsense. But after her son, Simon, disappears, the real horror begins. Or is it just her imagination?

Short summaries like this one don't do the movie any justice. It is one of those movies that one just has to see for himself/herself. But I wanna talk about one of the things that make this movie so powerful, so full of horror and terror and suspense and dread. The movie has the sceptic character(s).

In this movie, we begin with all of the characters except for Simon as sceptics, but as the movie advances Laura also starts to believe. Yet, the others are sceptics. And those sceptics are important, as they give this movie to edges on movies without sceptics.

Firstly, sceptics leave our protagonist with no choice but to try and figure the truth by herself. She has no one else to ask for help, as after all nobody really believes her. The cops say that it is bullshit; her husband says that she starts to get mad, and the only ones who believe her are the paranormal experts, which doesn't make the situation any better.

But secondly, and far more importantly, is that this sceptic helps us to keep our suspension of disbelief. And why is that? Because through the sceptic(s) the director tells us that "yeah, it is quite strange, it does seem really farfetched". And when the director acknowledges that, it is far easier for us to believe in what we see, or at the very least to stop saying to ourselves- "Oh, this is just too strange to be real".

And when we're dealing with the supernatural, the combination of these two things is a huge edge that we can give to our games. Have in your Cthulhu game a cop who thinks that what the PCs are saying is crap. Have a friend of the PCs, in your World of Darkness games, dispute their theories. And suddenly, they will be inclined to work harder, because there's no one else to do the job, because if it is strange to the world inhabitants it is really strange and thus easier to believe, because of the disputer is close to the PCs the players will want to prove it to say to this friend of them: "A-ah, see? That is real!"

And that's it for today. How about you? What have you thought about this movie? And what did you learn from it?

Day of the Dead- Have Yourself a Little Bub

I don't think that it will come with any surprise, that I found Day of the Dead amazing.  Truth be told, it is not on the same level of his earlier two zombie flicks, but it is not surprising. The first two films were (and still are) groundbreaking, satirical, amazing, among the best the horror genre ever came to be. Those films weren't just great in their own genre, but among the entire world of cinema. Day of the Dead doesn't have a chance against this, but truth is- it doesn't make it any less good. It is still a treasure trove of the genre, and it still has a lot to teach us.

In short, in this iteration of the series, we follow a group of humans, some of them civilians and some of them soldiers, and we see how humanity collapses due to a lack of real communication. Like with most of Romero's films, though, the zombies are there in the background and not much more, and this sets them apart, shows why they received such high remarks, why they are still being imitated throughout the entire world.

But we're not here for a lesson about the movie industry, and as such is the case I wanna move towards the GMing side of the things. Because, like I said a few days ago, most older horror movies which still hold their charm have something to teach us, positively, or otherwise they wouldn't be as scary as they are. And with this film, we have a great lesson to take.

Somewhat towards the middle of the film, we are first presented with Bub. Those who have watched the film know by now to where I'm going with this, but still… Bub is a thinking zombie. It has a brain, some feelings, a sense of an earlier life; it even enjoys listening to music. And Bub raises the level of the film by so many ranks.

And Bub is an amazing takeaway, because we don't expect to see, to meet, to encounter a thinking zombie. We don't expect to feel something for one of the monsters. And yet, we do. So many blogs and GMing books will talk about giving the goons and mooks a face, maybe even many faces. Most of them don't ask you to give the mindless monsters a face. They're just cannon fodder. But when you will give those mindless monsters a face, and a brain, you get so much more. Because when Bub salutes the "evil" soldier, after shooting him to death, one can't stay calm, uncaring, unfeeling. One only has the ability to look in amazement, to feel. And that's the power of Bub. So have yourself a Bub also.

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What did you take from it? And what have you thought about it?

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer- Give Principles for your Killers

Emm… No, I just don't know what to say. I'm just speechless, wordless, amazed, shocked, and horrified, perhaps not in this order. Henry is a strange film, a little gem and at the same time a little piece of trash. I think that in the end, it is only a matter of how one looks at the film. For me, it's mainly in the gem section, but it doesn't mean that I'll watch it again, or that I'm happy for this film to ever been made.

To put it shortly, Henry is a film that tells the story of a serial killer, portraying him in a documentary-style fashion, showing his brutality without flinching, protecting us, glorifying it or anything of this fashion. It is a Slasher, but not the typical teenagers-on-the-run kind of Slasher; it is a psychological horror film but not that close to the exemplary ones like The Shining or The Silence of the Lambs. It is a movie that one has to see in order to understand. Telling about it is not enough.

Now, this movie puts a serial killer on the center. True, we have Otis and Becky, but it is Henry who we are after. And Henry is an interesting character. We know that he is bad, and one can't listen to him teaches his modus operandi without suffering from so many chills that it hurts. Yet, we hate Otis more. We hate the drug dealer, we hate the amateur serial killer, we hate all of Otis's character far more than we hate Henry. And that's interesting, and that enables us to survive this movie.

So one has to wonder- how could they achieve that? How could they make us hate Otis far more than we hate Henry? The reason that I've found is located in a very simple scene near the beginning- Otis tries to grab his sister and kiss her, Henry says "no!" and stops him. That's the scene, that's the reason. And why is this so powerful, so important? Because it helps us to identify with this Henry-monster, because it shows that even Henry has principles, or at the very least some feelings regarding other human beings. Things that Otis has far less of, if he has anything of this type at all.

And when we come to present our monsters and villains in our games, it might be better to use something like this. Why? Because it will make the players question the definitions of good and bad, the definitions of what moral and what isn't, it will make them be far more afraid, because a killer that is prone to feelings can be understood, and this means that one can become such a killer. But it has an almost as dark in addition for the earlier one stated- if the killer has feelings, and the killer is prone to those feelings, he can do things that will be totally unexpected, because it will attack the understanding of the killer's psyche and not just the normal expectations. And that's far scarier than anything one could achieve on its own.

How 'bout you? What did you think about this movie? And have you taken something interesting from it?

16 movies up until now, all of them new.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death- The Powers of Clothing

Some movies hold to their title, others do not. Too bad that this movie belongs to the latter group. Let's Scare Jessica to Death is an interesting movie, its soundtrack is creepy like hell, and it knows how to play on the audiences fears. Each and every element works perfectly when looked at separately. But when combined? They overshadow each other. And that's the main problem in this movie for me.

In a nutshell, it is the story of a woman who just got released from a mental asylum and who now tries to readjust to her new life, in a house far from town, nice and cozy and quite morbid. She hears things in her head, many-many things, and she tries to deal with it.

What struck me the most about this movie is its use of clothing to tell us about the characters. Especially when looking at our two leading ladies in this film. Emily is dressed in red, which puts her in the sensual realm, as an adult woman. She knows what powers her sexuality possesses.

Jessica, on the other hand, starts the film dressed in violet, and her clothing grows darker in tone with each passing day. I mean, she "chooses" darker clothes with each passing day. And that's interesting, because we can see through her clothing the naivety being broken, we can see how what she hears makes her older, forces her to grow.

And this can be used in our games too. Clothing is such a powerful tool to convey feelings, to convey characteristics, to shed a light on the inner feelings and workings of the characters, it is useful to show social differences. In other words, we can say that "show me what you wear, and I'll know who you are".

All I can say is that maybe, just maybe, one should try to use it. I know that I do, and it works magic for me, why shouldn't it be the same for you?

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What did you think about it? And what have you taken from it?

Daughters of Darkness- Playing with the PCs

Some movies match to their masterpiece title. Others, like Daughters of Darkness do not. I can't say that I was impressed with this movie, or even close to that. It is so over the top that it comes close to the campy group of horror films, it is so trying to reinvent the eroticism of the vampire that it becomes too non-erotic. The dialogue is bad; the acting is mostly mediocre (except for the one playing Bathory who is perfect); the composition of the shots is pure genius at times and complete rubbish at others.

If I had to describe this film, I would say that it is a film about a couple, a newly-wed couple with not much love for each other, and the meeting with the vampire Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Bathory plays with them, enjoys their suffering. Throughout the whole movie, it seems like whenever the director was stuck he threw in some boobs. This idea works as bad as it sounds.

But there are some good things in this movie, specifically the acting on the part of Seyrig, the composition of some of the shots (you'll recognize them when you'll see them) and… the way Bathory plays with the couple. Okay, not all of the playing is good, but the concept is interesting and sometimes even a little bit surprising.

And that's a great takeaway from this movie, this playing thingy. Let your villains and monsters play with the PCs and much hours of enjoyment on your part and frighten looks on the players' parts will be achieved. They will enjoy afterwards, and when they'll win (as sure they will), they'll be far happier than every other defeat they bestowed upon a villain(ness). Make your villains play with the PCs, use the PCs for their own benefits, sometimes even treating the PCs like stolen cars (if I might paraphrase Avery McDonaldo's GMing section in Monsterhearts).

But don't drive it too far, right? You'll might just as well finish like (spoiler alert in 2 seconds or so) Bathory in this movie- dead and copied. Pull it as much as it seems needed and not a single second more than that. Or at least, I think that it's better this way, but I might be wrong…

Anyway, that's it for today. And now it's time to hear you? Have you watched this movie? What did you think about it? And what have you learned from it? 

Inferno- Treating the Discoveries like Art

I never was one of Argento's greatest fans. True, only last Saturday I recommended Suspiria to someone, but only due to those amazing 15 minutes. Inferno, on the other hand, doesn't have this amazing quality to it which enables me to recommend it even though I don't really like the movie. Inferno is not a bad movie per se, it is just not exactly my style of horror it seems.

If I had to describe its plot in a few sentences, I would describe it as a religious kinda-slasher, with three goddesses as the slashers. I mean, there's more to that, but it will be too much of a spoiler. Let's just say that if you know what an Argento's movie looks like, you'll probably know what Inferno looks like.

And still, there are things to learn from this movie. After all, he may not be my cup of tea, but he is still one of the masters and this movie shows that. For me, the greatest takeaway from Argento's movies was always the horrifying discoveries of the bodies. Argento made them into a sick tour-de-force, showing us the monstrosity of his monsters through the way they let others see their work.

It can be said, and it won't even be too farfetched to say that, that Argento's monsters take their victims as canvases for a new painting, for a work of art. Maybe this is the reason that in some of his best movies the victims are also of artistic upbringing, as maybe they will be the ones who will best appreciate it. Anyway, though, the discoveries of the bodies are usually more sick and frightening than the killings themselves, and that's hard as they are usually presented to us almost exactly one after the other.

And this gives us a glimpse to the monsters' psyches, and adds a little bit of morbid horror, taking Shakespeare's comment that life is but a show to the extreme, up to eleven. And we can use that in our games also. We can make those discoveries like sick jokes, or like the climax of a movie or of a theater show.

Treat those discovery scenes like the pinnacle of your movie, Argento says to us, and actually it might work. It might work really-really well, if we'll give it a chance. True, most of his death scenes (and as such the bodies discovered) are pretty gory, but if we'll limit the gore to these scenes like he does… it may prove far more frightening than one would think. After all, he does know what he's doing.

And that's it for today. How about you? What did you think of this movie? And what did you learn from it?

Threads- Giving the Victims a Face

I don't really know how to start this post. I'm pretty shocked and horrified, you see. I've just finished Threads, a TV-movie made in 1984, about how a single nuclear bomb hit may affect the UK. It's suffice to say that the movie is way too realistic to go unnoticed, unremarked, to let you leave it without the urge to cry. I don't know what else to tell about it, before delving into one of the far too many lessons to learn from it. Should I say that it is not your typical horror movie? That the movie chronicles a little more than 13 years in the characters' lives? That when it was made and first broadcasted this nuclear bombing incident was a possibility, that this movie had a chance to become a reality? That society just crumbles and one starts to somewhat envy the dead?

No, I wanna go to the lesson as quickly as possible, I want to just let it off of my mind. You see, the main reason for the movie's power is that we have feelings and empathy for the victims. We identify with them, we know their normal ways of lives, and they feel real. We also see how the bombing affects them. Them and not some random people, them and not some red-shirts. We get to know the people only to see them become the victims of the bombings.

The bombing itself occurs about 35-40 minutes into the movie. Up until that moment we got to know about 10 characters pretty-pretty well. We watched the Kemps banter, we watched the Suttons say their last goodbyes, and we watched the love story of Ruth and Jimmy who are going to have a baby and so decide to marry. And after we got to know them, the pain is so much stronger, so much more close to home.

But it is more than that. Because we know of people who feel for each other, we feel their fears for their loved ones. We feel for Mr. and Mrs. When they cry for not being able to save their children, but also we cry for them when they only fear it. We cry for Ruth who fears of her baby being deformed, and we hope for Ruth to find Jimmy when she goes out to try and find him.

We also see how they change, how they become quite monstrous themselves when they have to commit crimes in order to survive, how they change to the "dog-eat-dog" mentality. It's the feelings than we have for them that enable the movie to touch us on so many levels, on so many emotions (from the d'aaw in the beginning to the "oh-my-god" of the ending and all those feelings in the middle).

And we can also use it in our games. When we want the players to fear for a city, or to feel for a kingdom, we have to get the players and their characters to know the people there. To know and feel they human-ness in them. Bring those faces out and show them to the characters and to the players who play them, and when the city will be under threat, or when the country will be under a nuclear threat, the players and the characters will do their best.

How about you? What did you learn from this movie? And even more important, how did you feel afterwards?

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?

Braindead- When Death Becomes Boring

Another day- another movie. Or something like that, at the very least. Braindead is a bad movie. It should have stayed dead, never becoming alive or even close to that. It is a campy movie drawn to the extreme, and today it's a cult movie, because its director is Peter Jackson. Yeah, that Peter Jackson. It doesn't make it any better as a film, or as a horror film. It's just bad.

It's a movie about a 25 years old virgin, who lives with his mother, and tries to start a relationship with a woman named Paquita. The mother is bitten by a rat, and becomes a zombie, thus starting to infect the entire city. If I made a mistake somewhere about the movie's plot, it doesn't matter, and it doesn't survive any kind of scrutiny. Actually, I'm not even sure that it survives a brain shut-down.

But I promised a lesson for each movie, and this one is no exception. Because, if you'll look pretty hard, and try with all of your heart, you might accidently find something positively to learn from it, like what I've found: That death is kinda boring.

Think about it this way: it is true that if the mom would have just died, I wouldn't have spent these 100 minutes almost cursing this idea of mine, to take this challenge. But you know what? Death is boring. If the mom would have just died, we wouldn't have this movie. And bad as it is, without it we wouldn't have the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and that's a shame.

So, what can I say? Death is boring, death is not scary that much. Try instead to make the characters suffer, try instead to ensure that the NPCs suffer, and then let them blame it on the PCs. And that's actually, a pretty good lesson. After all, it is far more interesting to have an NPC say to a PC "I lost everything because of you, and now I want you to repay for my loses" than to have this same NPC just die.

And maybe, just maybe, you can get the PC to kill this NPC and go the personal horror route. Or maybe I'm just exaggerating at this point. I don't know anymore, this movie messed with my head way too much.

And that's it for me with this movie. I do hope that at the very least you've enjoyed this post.

How about you? Did you find something else in the movie? Did you use something like along the lines of this lesson in one of your games? How did it go?

Come and See- Presenting Monstrosity

I've decided to try and take the October Horror Movie Challenge. In short, it is a challenge to watch 31 horror movies in the month of October. As part of this challenge (although not required), I decided to post something after each one of the movies. Being an RPG blog, I'll probably post lessons from these movies about what to do or what not to do as the horror GM or player. I'll try to keep it as one lesson for movie, and I hope that at least some of them will be applicable outside of the horror-gaming scene. For my list, though, I've decided to pick a bunch of movies that are considered good, yet not that well known, so I went to the 31 last places in the Time Out London. I hope that you'll find it interesting…

And we start with Come and See. And what can I say? It is not your typical horror movie. Actually, it is pretty far from it. It is a great movie, though, even if it is not a great horror movie. If I'll have to describe it, it is somewhere along the lines of Apocalypse Now, but done right, just like with Platoon.

It is a movie about the horrors of war, and specifically about the horrors of the Second World War, while also tackling the way that they influence a young lad who wants to be- and becomes- a partisan. The story takes place in Byelorussia, during the year of 1943

But apart from being a great movie, it is still a pretty good horror movie (even if it is more a horror movie by accident than by purpose). And like most good movies, it has quite a lot to teach us. But I wanna concentrate on a single lesson from it, derived from a single scene. It is the scene in which the Germans burn the church with all the people in it.

In this scene, director Klimov tries to show us the monstrosity of the Germans during those times. Klimov was wise enough to understand that one needs more in order to show someone as monstrous, than to just show this one committing mass murder. To make someone into a monster or to show someone's monstrosity you need far more than that.

The solution that he has found was to make the Germans behave, when committing those atrocities, like its normal and nothing worth thinking about. More than that, he showed them like they're enjoying it, a sick enjoyment. Our knowledge that it's all true makes it even more monstrous. But for our purposes we don't need this knowledge. For our purposes, the fact that he did show this is enough to make us hate those Germans, to make us terrified of what they can do. They listen to music while they murder, eat shrimps while watching the church burns, taking pictures afterwards like it is a tourist attraction. It's monstrous, it's disgusting, and it shows their monstrosity to the extreme.

And we can use that in RPGs too. When we want to show the monstrosity of the monster(s) in our games, we can use this trick. In one of my Changeling campaigns, for example, the villain made a lamp from the head of one of the major ally NPCs of the characters. But it didn't end with that, as he was so happy and smiling all over the place due to the beauty of his new lamp. Needless to say, nobody loved him afterwards. He's monstrosity showed for miles.

It is pretty much a morbid lesson from a very dark and depressing movie, but I think that it is a very useful tool in the horror GM's arsenal. How about you? Did you use a tool like this? If so, how did it go? And what other lessons did you learn from the movie?

Not Describing the NPCs

Some of my NPCs don't get a description. It's not that they get less love from me, as I do love them very much. I portray them to the best of my ability, some of them are even really important- the main villain, the main ally. They just never really received a description, not from me and not from my players.

It is an experiment that I've conducted (ok, I conducted retroactively at first), and I really like its results. It is no secret that people care more for the things that they create, and I wanted to take that to the extreme.

You see, a great lesson that I've learned from horror GMing was that one should describe as less as s/he can the monster, so the players will feel the balks with the things that frighten them most. So I thought to myself- "why should I keep this trick only for the frightening stuff?"

My rational was quite simple- if each player will create for himself/herself the image of the NPC, each and every one of them will care for the NPC more. After all, it is (at least to a certain degree) their creation. And I must say that it worked.

So I still give all of my NPCs distinct voices, and I adopt certain postures for each NPC, and some of them I still describe. But some of them I just don't describe. Sometimes it is just because I forgot or because there was no real opportunity for it, but most times I do it with a purpose. I just really enjoy this bond.

Besides, it gives me more time for other things, like portraying them and stuff…

How about you? Have you once tried not to describe your NPCs? How did it go?

5 Quick Tips for Roleplaying Nobles Better

Every now and then, we wanna introduce to the game a noble or 2. Maybe we want this noble to be the PCs' patron or maybe even their political or military or whatever nemesis. Then, as we start to think about it, we begin to understand that roleplaying a noble is not that easy. Especially since we're probably not nobles ourselves. So, instead of throwing this idea to the garbage truck, here are a few tips to roleplay those nobles better:

1. Imagine to yourself how this noble looks and smell. If you can bring a description, a colourful one, of how the noble looks and dresses, you can bring the noble look. Smell is important too, as it enables you to convey richness through perfumes or simplicity through wilder smell. Think about a noble after a good hunting trip or another after 2 days at bed. The smell is an easy way to differentiate between them.
2. Think about the noble's gender. There are some expectations, especially from nobles, about what each one's gender role is. A lady will have to behave differently from a baron. Crossing these restrictions can bring the picture of the rebellious noble with a lot of ease...
3. Talk with your head barely moving. It's a powerful technique to raise the speaker's statues. Don't think about it, just do it and many other characteristics of high statues will come with it.
4. Be polite. The politer you are, the better it will be (but try not to cross into the comical realm of politeness). It doesn't have to get to the highest ranks, but adding please and thanks and shaking hands in a certain way will take you far.
5. Take comfort in silence. Nobles made, over the years, the act of conveying things through silence into an art. Take comfort in silences, speak shortly and a little bit slowly, and take your time before you answer...

So, these are my 5 tips for playing noble characters. How about you? How do you roleplay them?

3 Techniques for NPC Names

A quick thought for today: Your players aren't gonna remember your NPCs' names. So, instead of trying to come up with clever names, try to find other names to make them remembered. Using names of famous people is one way. "Have you met my friend, Mozart?" Or maybe even "my other friend Buffy?" A famous name can be used to both create the picture, the voice and so on, and it will also be remembered better. "Remember that 2 years ago we met Mary Poppins?"

Another technique can be to call most of them with names like Jima, Jimb, Jimc... And then bring a name like Robert. It will make this name to stand up with ease. It will also help them to remember those not unique characters.

My last technique for today is by using descriptive names. "Do you remember Bluerobe?"

Although all of these techniques aren't natural, all of them have worked for me in the past. How about you? How do you make sure that your players remember the important names?

3 Ways to Make One-Scene Characters Unique

When we think about some occupations, we immediately get an image: The uncompromising cop, the fainting lady... These stereotypes can be used to a great extent to create a sense of deepness, of a hidden layer, even in NPCs that the characters meet for a scene.

Let's look at this example scene and see how stereotypes can be used in different ways to enhance it.

The scene is quite simple: The characters arrive to the great market, and a preacher gives a speech about the power of belief, and about how to save one's soul:

And then, the lion will utter its name, and reveal its true nature, and the king and queen will have no choice but to surrender to the great true king, the creator of our land. And then! Then will the sheer power of our lion's very existence unravel all of the criminals and all of the murderers and all of the bad people, and the good and pure will prosper in the earth..."

'Till here, it's a normal speech. The preacher warns the commoners from bad things, and suggests that if they will do badly, he lion will reveal their true nature. The preacher here is probably a great person, very charismatic and stands probably above and beyond to the commoners' reach.

Let's think about something else: Let's give the preacher a trait that is against what we would accept from him: Our preacher is alcoholic. BAM! Immediately we've got a different picture, there's something stinky in this preacher, is not this good, he works against the people he's "trying" to save... It's still almost the same preacher, but now there's something deeper within him, something that makes him both more real and more humane. At the same time, this preacher just screams to be questioned by the PCs to get a greater understanding of him.

Let's think of another thing: We'll take one of the preacher's traits from the original stereotype, and we'll take it to the extreme. Our preacher is not only very charismatic and beyond the commoners' reach, but the commoners look at him like he's some kind of a holy person, a once in a lifetime person, one that... Maybe we'll change another thing: This preacher screams of daemonic powers. BAM! We've just got another preacher. The commoners don't listen to him because he's right, but because he's controlling them. It's like Sauron in the land of the Numenors.

The last way for today is by adding a random affection for something. Our preacher is obsessed with something, like flowers. He gives his speech, and he takes a break whenever a bucket or a basket with flowers moves in front of his eyes. Again, we're getting a different preach, one that has weaknesses, and that can be distracted by ordinary things and maybe even stumble in his words because of that.

What I was trying to show here, was that in all of the preachers we've begun with the stereotype and stayed quite close to it. It's still, after all, in a nutshell the same old preacher. But it's also a different one. The preacher became a different person when we changed a different thing in the stereotype. That's the whole truth. Changing a little thing in the stereotype can invoke magic in the way the character is being viewed.

And, that's it for today. How about you? How do you use stereotypes in your games?

Sitting like My Favourite Character...

A little thing for today: A quick and dirty way to connect with a character is by sitting (or walking, or talking, etc...) like the character. If, for example, I'm playing a character that is shy and quiet, sitting with my shoulders hunched will help it. It will make me look always up when talking to other players or the GM, It will make talking harder and much more tiring, and I'll talk less.

It's a simple thing, that just changes everything in the way that you talk or sit or walk or whatever when you game. It helps you, especially when improvising, to switch between characters quickly and effectively. It can help you to switch standings in society, genders, and fantasy races and so on...

I, personally, use this technique whenever I get to play an NPC, and for every scene when playing as a player (like lying down when my character does it, or putting my hands aside without moving them when I'm tied).

How about you? If you had to choose such a technique, what would have been yours?

The Story of Mellisa Lermondon

In Arcane Game Lore, they're running a blog carnival about our favourite NPCs. I must say, it was hard for me to come with an NPC, because I don't have that many (although I really like the one that I do bring to the table). So, 18 days of thinking brought me to this NPC. Is it my favourite? I'm not sure, but she sure is on my top list...

Mellisa Lermondon wasn't supposed to be a major NPC, at the beginning. She was supposed to add a little bit of colour, maybe even be a part of a romance between one of the PCs and her. As it turned out, she couldn't end farer from that.

It was a D&D campaign that I've started a year ago and ran for 3 months, and the story was set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. The players wanted, as every normal player will want, to start a new village in the frontier. They have "forgotten" that it was the "Ezripold Daemon Forest". They have collected a group of peasants and adventurers to help them start this village, and among them she was.

Time has passed, and the village grew bigger and bigger, and her statues in the village rose as well. The characters, though, started to abuse her (and to treat her like an animal or property). That was the point when I said enough to myself, and started to think how to make her a little bit more important. 

As the real Mellisa started to unravel, I've started to like the character more and more. It was a long time since I had a major villain, and Mellisa looked like the right one. I've made her a conspirator that came from a noble family that no one remembers anymore. I've made her a bitter wizard who served to defend the city of her grandfather, only to be shunned because she was a woman. Then I've made a little bit of background (it was before the time of the recipe), making her and the king of the goblins work together, and so it went on.

Then, to the next session, she came back. I started the session with describing the clothing of the NPCs that they've started to like. None of the players got the clue, and the session continued. They went to gather some resources for the village, the characters and her, only to find when they returned that the village was conquered. She, who was the strongest wizard there, used her magic to incriminate one of the other NPCs for opening the doors. They didn't wait to kill him.

After a "civil war" in the village, order was back in place, and they went off again. There she made her mark. Everything that they tried to do, she made them fail, using her illusion abilities to incriminate others. She was kept clean. 

When they finally reached their spot, she made her move, and disappeared, leaving the characters far from home, going back to fill their subjects with poisonous thoughts while they were on their way back. They only received letters from her ever since and sometimes a riddle or 2 to tease them off.

One of the reasons that I so like her, I think, is that she didn't made any open move at all, 'till she left. Even then it was them who fought the village people, not her, and it was them who saw the collapse of the village that they worked so hard to raise because of their actions. She was a string puller, but most of the time they didn't know she was even her. I think that if they read this post, this is the first time that they get to know why the village collapsed.

5 Reasons to Describe Clothing in Your Games

Each one of us has spent at least sometimes a lot of time trying to figure what to wear for the day. It can be for work, or for a date or even for a coronation. What is important, though, is that we spent this time, to pick the right clothes. This can also be used in gaming.

1. Fashion can help to establish cultures. A culture in which women are covered from head to toe will be looked upon differently than a culture in which women can wear whatever they like. Cultures in which every Sunday all are wearing green; cultures in which everyone goes to work wearing everyday clothes (and not ties and tuxedos, for example) will be looked as much more strict and formal. This is a cheap way to establish a culture.
2. In addition to the first thing, if the characters went to a mission and returned to find the people of the place wearing entirely different clothes, the time that has passed will be felt, and a smell of change will be smelled.
3. Clothes can help to differentiate between characters (PCs and NPCs alike). Will they meet the knight who wears green, or the one that always goes with pink armor today? Isn't it more colourful than the knight who wears silvery armor?
4. Clothes can help to show feelings or hidden truths. A character that wears black will be seen as a vile or depressed character, while the one that goes with white clothes will be seen as formal or naive. Think about the character that goes with the ripped off clothes in contrast to the one that goes with the colours of the enemy state...
5. Clothes can help to create and express the character's personality: "Remember that wizard fellow who used to wear brown shoes every day? Today I've understood why: An oracle told him that he'll meet the love of his life wearing brown shoes..."

So, how about you? Do you pay attention to what your NPCs or PCs are wearing? How do you use it? What purpose does it fill in your game?