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?

Start At Your Best, And Then Slowly Raise It up.

It's not a comeback if I don't write about improvisation or lessons from improvisation, right? Well, I'm here to fix that…

A few years ago I went to a great improve seminar. We talked, and practiced stuff and the like. And then, during one of the Games, this instructor says: "Be blunt, whatever cool and interesting stuff you have, bring it on upfront." Needless to say, it created some very different stories.

But you see, there's a lot of logic to it when one really thinks about it. I mean, from a story's standpoint, if I'll keep the good stuff for too long, the audience will get bored. If I'll start with it, though, I'll probably find a way to build upon it with "yes, and-ing" and I've got a better story.

If I'll translate it to RPGs, it is pretty much the same. If I want to ensure that the players 9including the GM) have a good time, I want to present the cool stuff upfront and as soon as possible, and then we'll all build upon it, whether players and/or GM.

In Israel, there's a nice saying that goes something like this: "Start at your best, then slowly raise it up." And apart from being great all by itself, it is far easier to accomplish it when you start at your best.

How about you? Do you use something like that in your games? Why, or why not?

Conflict Is Not Mandatory

You don't need conflicts. You read that correctly, I really did say that you don't need conflicts. Conflicts are not mandatory, are not a must-have ingredient for a successful game or even for a successful story. Conflict is a nice and a very useful tool in order to create enjoyment, interest and to be one with the character, but it is not the only one, or the most important one, or a success guarantee.

Think for example about a nice in-character conversation between a PC and an NPC. Does it have to hold a conflict in order to be interesting? No, I'm serious, does it? I don't think so. I once GMed a game in which for three hours the characters were just gossiping about people not present. No conflict was there, just a conversation about what did this person and what did that one. When I wrote this game for my friends, I thought to myself: "If we have to have conflicts in order to create interest, why do our conversations seem so enjoyable, so interesting, so "worth-our-time?" It went a blast. I was asked to GM this game again.

But this is an extreme kind of game, not much similar, or even close, to what we refer to when we normally talk about RPGs. Things like Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire, PTA. But then I started to read the GENder theory, which is kinda interesting yet kinda flawed. Anyway, the E stands for exploration. It means that one plays in order to explore, in order to be, someone else. And that got me thinking: "In order to feel like [insert a name here], do I need to be in a conflict?" I don't think so, otherwise I wouldn't enjoy play SIMS.

And it all circulates back to what I've said in the beginning: Conflict is not mandatory. It is useful, but not mandatory.

Opinions?

The Players just roll the Dice…

One of the most common problems that I've seen in games is a lack of understanding about the distinction between what the players do and what their characters do. Let's explain this strange sentence with an example:

It is a D&D session, and a fight erupts. Fighter raises his axe and attacks Orc Number 1, while Wizard shoots Orc Number 2 with a magic missile.

Now, let's analyze this scene. What do the characters do? Wizard casts a spell, Fighter attacks with his spell. What do the players do? They roll the dice, and… that's about it. And that is the problem that I mentioned in the first sentence of this post. The fact that the characters are fighting, and have a certain chance to die, isn't relevant that much, because at the end all they do is to roll some dice.

Actually, if you look at it this way, looking for clues in Call of Cthulhu is not that much different: You enter a room, and you try to notice things. The character does that, I mean. You just roll the dice. Or in other words, if we want to differentiate between types of scenes, we should think in terms of what the players do and not in terms of what the characters do. Because if in both cases we just roll the dice, there is no difference. Or at the very least, not a real difference between the scenes.

And that's a distinction that I think one really has to make and hold to her heart. When one writes an adventure, or improvises one, you should always try to think in terms of what the players will do. Will the players just roll some dice? If so, maybe I should find another thing that they'll be able to do, like inventing the adversaries, or giving them as much roleplaying scenes as possible?

After all, we sit with the players, in the real world, and not with the characters in an imaginary one…

Success with a Cost

Another week, another session. We finished the first story arc. None of us really know if the problem was solved or not, but as it seems, we won't tackle laughing books anymore. They came back in time and defeated the villains before the problems really begun, winning the "fight" against them before most of the books left the library. So it is a win.

But you know, winning wasn't the goal in the first place. I mean, maybe some of them wanted to succeed, but I'm not even sure of that. Looking at their favorite scenes' list from the arc, most of them are major plot points, or catalysts for major plot points. No challenge that they've overcame found its way to the list.

So what did we look for? My money is on story possibilities. And because of that, it is no surprise that the "success with a twist" idea is so powerful. The idea is quite simple- when the players roll a failure, they can sometimes still succeed, but it will not be a complete success, because something bad is gonna happen alongside the success.

It's not a new invention by me, but I must say that again and again I'm surprised by the possibilities it presents for me. And most of the times, they are the ones who describe/create the bad happening. They are the ones who bring their doom to join hands with their successes. And I think that this is the reason that this idea is so powerful: because they bring to themselves the bad events that hurt they're the most. And this crates the drama that we're all looking for.

When a group isn't looking to win, but to enjoy creating together a nice little (or not so little) story, it is only fitting that they will look to increase the drama level in the game. And if they can do it through successes also, it is only better. Especially if it lets them escape complete failures when it doesn't fit dramatically, I suppose.

So yeah, this is one of the tools that I use to increase the drama. How about you? What do you use?