MONSTRUM

THE BEAST AND ITS SIGNS
The word "monster" comes from the latin monstrum where it means both a thing which is not of the natural order but also a sign, omen or portent of the same. It is both the thing in the dark, but also the claw marks it leaves on the door, the way animals walk backward when it is near, an eclipse heralding its birth. 

Also, we've got internal/safe spaces and external/potentially dangerous spaces. Horror has monsters lurking on the outside, trying to get into the safe spaces or it has a revelation that there is no internal/safe space, that the whole world is monstrous (or it has some combination of the two). In both cases, we're talking about ontological rupture of the first order, of the truest essence: something that makes being human as we understand "human" deeply problematic if not impossible (or at least, I feel like good horror should do that).

YOU CAST YOUR EYES BEYOND THE VEIL, ON THE HORIZON... SOMETHING
Where you put magic-users is up to you, but:

1. When you make a Magic-User, tell the GM what is out beyond the veil, chasing you, trying to get in. You might be wrong, you might have seen it incorrectly. It might have changed its form.

2. Whenever you cast a spell, roll a d20 and tell the GM the result. The GM keeps a record of the results. It's always getting closer.

THEY ARE EVERYWHERE, THEY ARE HIDING
D&D provides two approaches to this. On the one hand, you've got points of light in a howling wasteland populated by the monstrous (Greyhawk, the encounter tables in the first edition of D&D and the map it suggest you use for your game world all are of this order); on the other hand, you've got relatively civilized, late medieval peoples living their lives and then tucked away in a few dark corners is an alternate world of monsters (B/X and most of the Basic modules have this more Beowulf feel to them). The former seems to often be the end result of a campaign, the latter its starting point.

Both can work as a kind of horror game. Where D&D really falls down on the horror front is the monotony of dungeons and the way it deploys monsters.

EXCERPT
A part of the solution that I've found has to do with how you talk about things. Here's an excerpt from something on which I'm working:

"DENY CLOSURE
Give Players however much information they want; their characters still have to dig around for it, they'll still have to spend Turns and actions poking around into thing, but they get the information. They get information, but no explanations:

they are in a dark tunnel and they see eyes in the dark, reflecting like a dog's, and they hear oncoming steps, quick breathing, the sound of metal hitting stone.

one of the magic-users throws a torch forward and they see something human shaped, clothed in rags, moving towards them at a run.

two fighters move forward, jabbing into the dark with their spears.

in the aftermath, they find a body, mangled.

Players: What was it?

You: Do you want to look at it? How are you going to inspect it?

Players: We'll poke it. If it's lying face down, we roll it over.

You: (because rolling it over sounds good and because you want to be verbose) it's human-shaped but small, maybe like a teenager or a malnourished teenager. It's bony and its skin is sort of grey, but it's also very dirty so you'd need to wash it off to tell its skin color for sure. Maybe the proportions are a little off? Maybe it's legs are a little short? It's wearing rags that look like they might have been clothes once. It's not holding anything. It has stringy hair. It doesn't respond when you poke it, it's like poking a raw turkey or chicken. You roll it over with a pole, which one of you is doing that? How close are you getting?

Players: I'm rolling it over and I guess I'll put a torch down by it and get close, but I'll have a shield up, in case. I'll have my spear like, on it.

You: OK. You roll it over with a pole and its arm flops to the side. It's nose is bloody and its face looks mostly human, though its mouth looks too big, maybe? There's something weird about its mouth. Anyone want to put their hand in its mouth?

Players: Nope. So is it like a human?

You: It's like a human, sure. It looks a lot like a human."

What they've just fought, in terms of stats, is a goblin. When they find more goblins later, they all look like the first one. There are also children like this goblin, and they're just as dangerous. Some don't speak, others speak in a language no one recognizes.

It's possible that in another bolthole there are goblins that look like this first one. There are certainly other goblins that look the same but who work differently. One can only be harmed in the light. Another heals whenever it's in the dark. A third heals any injury, even fatal ones, if buried in the earth. Others make elaborate traps. Some worship something made of blood and fire and it is their king and it gives them great strength and sight beyond the veil.

That's part of the puzzle anyway. The other part has to do with mechanics.

attribution: Sam Wolfe Connelly (who is amazing)

INSIDE OUTSIDE, ABOUT SCARY GAMES

IN/OUT

There is an inside and an outside. Inside is always safe. Outside is maybe not safe. The imminence of danger outside and its desire or propensity to test the boundary or how leaky the boundary is describes your living circumstances or, if you're a character in a book or a game, your genre.

Adults have a much bigger inside space than kids. For kids, inside is your home and maybe some grassy area nearby. Maybe not your home all the time, just when it's well lit. And maybe not certain parts of the house, the places that are alcoves and behind a number of turns, where no one goes and being there feels like you're almost not in your house anymore. This is how you get to Narnia and this is why Pennywise peeks out of the sewers.

This isn't really rational, it's about feelings. It's about feelings and space and other living things and our senses interacting.

Senses and experience help make things inside. Sight is always better than sound and sound is better than smell and taste is pretty shit. I'm not sure where touch goes, touch seems to often betray me (why is it wet and slimy?). 

I SEE A DOG

-If experience says: a dog bites the dog is outside and being confronted with the dog I may find myself suddenly outside too; 

-If experience says: a dog is warm and friendly and maybe even a protector and an ally, dogs are inside and I am inside when I'm around a dog;

-If I hear a dog and experience says: that's a dog, then we fall back to the previous constellation of things one could feel about dogs upon seeing them;

-If I hear a dog and experience says nothing about dogs,  then I default to "animal"

-If I hear an animal, and animal reads "probably another rabbit or something" I'm still safe

-If I hear an animal, and animal reads "could be a coyote" and then I think about teeth and claws or just rabies, i'm teetering on the border between in and out. 

Think about this and then think about what it's like running or sneaking through a forest at night or a dungeon with the short radius of a light a torch casts.

I HEAR AN ANIMAL AND THERE ARE TEETH AND CLAWS AND COILED MUSCLES FOR LEAPING

There is something nearby, something potentially outside, testing the boundary. Confronting it may leave me immediately outside, leaving it be may mean it gets in.

Lacking sufficient experience or knowledge, imagination jumps in and supplies possible answers to, "what is it outside?" and imagination gets dragged along by lizard brain until you're imagining someone living the crawlspace, scratching at the floorboards.

The point is: what is reliably in and what is likely out is learned but there are ways you trick yourself or let yourself be tricked out of knowledge.

FEAR

For players to be frightened they (a) have to be willing to be frightened and (b) have have something to be frightened of. 

You can't do anything about (a), really. (b) requires a subtle series of traducements and something they care about that is being threatened.

Jaws and Alien and Phantasm and ghost stories and possession stories and slasher movies are usually about something implacable that emanates malevolent outside, something whose sheer presence gobbles up the safe inside and spits out outside and then navigating a small space with limited options to get away, to find your way back off this ice or out of the water and into safe territory. You don't see the monster all that much because being around it enough to really get a good look gets you dead.

Lovecraft and Ligotti and others are about the anxiety of outside getting in or that you've mistaken the outside for the inside and realize you are suddenly in deep, dark waters and something is brushing your feet. 

In the second mode, there is a hint of something wrong and then other hints and the players pull the thread and the whole thing comes apart. 

A boy stands inside his house looks out a window at night, and the light outside is dark blue, and the boy sees a shadowy man he does not know burying a sack at the base of the tree in his backyard. He is inside, watching the outside act like the outside. When the man is gone and things feel less outside, the boy digs up the sack:

He opened the bundle, to find a human heart inside. He recognized its shape and color from the picture he had seen in his encyclopedia. The heart was still fresh and alive and moving, like a newly abandoned infant. True, it was sending no blood out through its severed artery, but it continued to beat with a strong pulse. The boy heard a loud throbbing in his ears, but it was the sound of his own heart. The buried heart and the boy’s own heart went on pounding in perfect unison, as if communicating with each other.

-Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

That's the outside: dangerous, enigmatic, alien, unknown, communicating something almost understandable but not quite.

attribution: Osric90

Monsters, new ruleset sort of

Working on new rules. Endurance is like HP, HD (hazard die) is what's rolled for damage. Here are some monsters.

scrambling eaters

Dextrous Monstrous Halfling HD6, 4 Endurance

-small, like a cross between a child’s corpse and a big cat

-night vision: eyes reflect light like a dog

-heal injuries in a few minutes in the dark or when eating

-hunts in threes, nests in 6s; nest has d2 Treasures

-1XP

ghoul, ascended

Charismatic Monstrous Human HD8, 9 Endurance

-tall, humanoid form, translucent skin, bones and organs glowing as bright as daylight, speaks with two voices

-4 SP: Restore, Calm, Silence, Phase

-takes an extra pip of harm in star light

-attended by d3+1 pupal ghouls, in chapel: d3 Treasure, 1 Art

-3XP

ghoul, pupal

Strong, Charismatic Monstrous Human HD6+1, 8 Endurance

-Light Armor

-tall, translucent humanoid, a whisper echoes whatever it says, but awkwardly, like it’s not used to a mouth or tongue

-2XP

lonely hungerer

Strong Monstrous Human HD10, 12 Endurance

-Thick skin and bloodlust; as Heavy armor with helmet

-Tall, muscular, hulking, always male-looking, with wide mouth and baleful eyes (red in the half-light)

-lairs solitary, among the bones of humans, has d2 Treasure

-2XP

specter

Undead HD6+1, 6 Endurance

-luminous, ectoplasmic human shape, slit mouth, black eyes

-becomes something worse if it opens its mouth

-Cannot be injured or killed by normal means

-corpse may be treated as Fetish

-1XP

failed chimera

Hardy, Monster, Once Human HD8+1 10 Endurance

-random Trait (determined by components)

-claws, teeth or beak in a jagged mouth and long black tongue and long stringy hair, 3+d4 limbs

-somewhere between a child and a predator, hunts, sings

-3XP

infernal juror

Wise Enormous Masked Demon HD10+1, 16 Endurance

-increase damage die size for human or smaller creatures

-can only be injured by weapons of its own making

-can change sizes, and its mouth is a door and its throat a tunnel to hell

-d4+2 Treasure

-4XP

star mite

Fast, Intelligent, Dextrous Monster HD6+1, 8 Endurance

-glowing, burrowing tick-like and dog-sized, attacks from loose earth and retreats, hates being seen

-sleeps when immersed in water, immune to heat, cold and pressure (including blunt trauma)

-consumes darkness, dreams, fantasies, nightmares; falls apart when it dies

-d4-3 Artefacts

-2XP

cultist

Human HD6, 5 Endurance

-marked with a sign visible only in peripheral vision or mirrors

-knows a Secret about something dark and deep or far, inky and cold

-1 in 6 have a random Trait, HD6+1, 7 Endurance, +1XP, d2-1 Treasure

-1XP

villagers

Human HD4, 3 Endurance

-important villagers have a random Trait, HD4+1, 5 Endurance, 1XP

the horde

Wise, Intelligent Monstrous Human HD6, 5 Endurance

-once abandoned children in rags, emaciated, a sign in their forehead

-appear in d3 or d8+2 numbers

-linked consciousness, telepathy

-live in sewers, alleys, dark places, hate the Empire, the wealthy

-1 XP

attributions: Rec, Blame!, Berserk, Sankai Jutsu, the Grudge, Dorehedoro, Wikipedia, the Village of the Damned

Lost Kids part 1

All children grow up and the way Wendy knew this was that adults are inconsiderate of children and talk about mortality in front of toddlers. 

Some children avoid growing up by remaining forever children, though, perhaps not, technically speaking, human.

It is a well known fact that a small percentage of children walking down lonely footpaths in wild woods or unkempt fields of shoulder-high wild flowers, that little boys and girls hiding in wardrobes among the tall smooth and buttoned coats that hang like vines in a jungle, that those hiding behind curtains or under beds or in bushes so large they have a space by the root which is almost like an inverted nest, the bare and brittle limbs like a poky cradle, have hid so well that they have hid from the eye of reality, slipped beneath the skin of perception and fallen or perhaps climbed or else woken up in some place very different but in many strange ways quite the same. Search parties find nothing, or rarely anything. Occasionally a missing shoe or a torn pair of pants, none of which are very convincing to anyone but the police who, it should be noted, would very much like to be convinced and then out of the cold and back in the station around an electric heater.

STARS AND TREES
Birds, we learn on the radio, migrate from one place to another, very distant place because of something to do with their skulls and bones and magnets making them sensitive to occult energies.

Children of ages 8 to even as old as 16 are possessed of skeletons whose proportional characteristics render them susceptible to similar effects and fields as our migratory birds.

For example: a child now lost in a strange and difficult land may be able to navigate their way to a safe place by following the stars (second from the right, straight on til morning) or by testing the moss growing on trees for any clever, well-read child knows that moss and other wet, dark green things hide from the sun.

Children lost and wandering in this manner usually find themselves at one of several places: the Fort in the Woods; the Castle in the Caves; the Ship on the Island. On the way there or once they've arrived, they find themselves a bit changed. Perhaps a bit grey or scaly and possessed of eyes larger than normal and teeth which are certainly sharper than they used to be. The change isn't dramatic, just enough that they might appear like-themselves-but-not-themselves should an adult compare their photos to a registry of missing children.

GOONIES NEVER SAY DIE
These lost children have the same stats as goblins, though they have greater variety and many of them are missing a shoe or a pair of pants or are wearing a magical scarf and use kludged weapons and wooden swords to attack (doing damage as normal).

More on variations, each of the places the children live, and on Wendy, Peter and terrible elves in another post (or two).

attributions: Nintendo, Berserk

Childhood Staring for Too Long

Part of my front tooth flaked off and its all raw and sensitive.

Here are things I like:

PCs who are children or teenagers who rescue other children or teenagers or fail horribly trying to rescue them. For tactical reasons and emotional and spiritual ones. (Monsterhearts. Over the Garden Wall. Adventure Time. John Bellairs. Gorey. Shintaro Kago. Takato Yamamoto. Maruo)

Wizards are from some wizard academy and they are all hot, condescending rich kids that don't really give you the time of day. like this one.

Dopplegangers not so much in the D&D monster sense, but in the literal sense. Jealous alternates. And places that are dopplegangers. (If a PC dies when no one is around, ask the player in secret if they want to come back as the malignant, weird version of themselves. They weep after killing a monster. When they think no one is looking, their character stares into the distance and they detect as neither evil nor good, but they are terrified of _sanctuary_. And they gain a fetish for masks of any kind, always wear them.).

Animals that wear clothes and act like people but also eat one another and don't really understand language and just pretend at civilization and stare too long at the humans that talk to them. (there is a 1 in 3 chance that any village or town is animals instead of people. The shops take nuts (squirrels sell books and clothing and rations and tools) or worms (birds sell spells and secrets) or fresh meat (weapons, armor) instead of money, the courts determine things with fights to the death using only claws and teeth (you can probably convince the judge that a sword or something is like "your claws" if you do a good job of miming. otherwise charisma check or something))

People riding deer that seem to understand them like a person would.

Fairytales and Ovid and things where people are punished because the world is unfair and because they weren't clever and hadn't figured out the secrets. (dryads trapped in trees by thug  boyfriends. nice people turned into monsters because the mayor didn't like them. children raised as killers because their parents are awful. the emperor is the worst of all, like a monster pope.)

Gods that are monster.

gods

Orcs that are just racist regular people in white robes and pointed caps with lots of muscles that worship something horrible and all fuck eachother.

Goblins that are just the lost boys and their king is a scaly peter pan. They are at war for esoteric reasons with other goblins led by the serious and kind Wendy (who is an Alice). They have magical scarves made by mothers they've forgotten (cantrip 1/game and then the scarf is ruined, the scales fall off and the boy or girl starts growing into an adult).

Magical longjongs (always warm or jump high or better AC).

Landscapes that are  the maps of people's minds. Like Ghostland. Or the limbic crust in Limbo.

Things with eyes like flashlights. Like that frog in the fiend folio.

Ghouls that glow like ghosts in the night.

The Red Saint

This is from that hexcrawl thing on which I'm working.

There are are seven Saints in the garden, five of which are known and two of which have wrapped themselves in secrecy. One of the five is presented here.

ALL SAINTS
Are sought after for succor, magic items, etc.

Treat each as a Lich, but for:

a. give them resistance to magic;
b. none may cast spells, but my use teleport 3/session, geas 1/session, gate 1/session and true polymorph 1/session;
c. have advantage against turning; and
d. except for the Red Saint, they don't really look like they could be undead and none detect as such.

Each has a phylactery hidden like a splinter in the eye of a demon prince. The princes are tormented by the phylactery, but no demon may remove them.

THE RED SAINT/THE CRIMSON LADY/SAINT SUSPIRIA/MOTHER OF SIGHS
Red is a pretty, emaciated, young woman in a tattered dress. Wounds describe her body, some fresh, some necrotic, a few still sport darts or arrow shafts. Her legs are wrapped tightly in dirty bandages  so that the flesh of her thighs and calves bulges through the gaps, like purple marble. Her nails are broken and filthy and when she is thinking, she runs them through her endless, greasy black hair. She coughs despondently, frequently. She is bad at feigning piety and compassion and mostly moans to cover up her disgust with supplicants.

It's said she takes pity on doomed lovers, especially women, and those suffering from afflictions; it's also said that she is most fond of the gallant and chivalrous.

She hates the blue saint most, then doomed lovers, then the gallant and chivalrous, then everyone else

Hidden on her: behind her hair, along her back, are hundreds of faces of various size, many no larger than a wart, but some the size of a hand. She uses these faces to replace her own should it be damaged for she cannot stand disfigurement of her visage. All these faces and the one she now wears are identical in appearance; also
buried into her arm, the base just protruding from below the wrist is a needle-like wand of hemorrhaging with four charges (being buried in her flesh recharges it) (treat as a wand of fireball but damage is dealt by leaking blood out of various orifices for d3 turns).

When no one is watching she is popping one of the faces on her back like a pimple (listen for the tiny screams). With each pop, she shudders sensuously.

If near death: she'll gate to a demiplane that's a red flesh landscape pulled taught over numbing needles walking about likely causes paralysis.


services provided

no.	service/item	price
1-3	she unravels a bloody bandage from her leg luxuriously. Stuffing this in your mouth heals as if rested. A character can only enjoy this effect 1/session.	the blood, heart or liver of something magical or exotic
3/session	cure all diseases afflicting a person	as above
1/session	places the soul of one thing of 3 HD or less in a doll in a red dress. The dress and doll slowly fall to pieces, turning to a charred stake in 1-2 weeks (the Merchant will say three), at which time the soul returns to its original home	one’s soul (must obey the commands of the Merchant 3 times, after which the soul-let is relinquished)
1/session	can make a red knife, or long long red sword, magical, +damage against living things as it causes profuse bleeding and welts	the heart of a mighty creature; or the death, maiming or face of whomever is connected to the person making the request that would be most awful to choose*
1/game	return a character to life
*so like, if a woman is asking for her lover to be returned to life, the Red Saint will grant the request if the woman surrenders her face. That sort of thing.

attribution: me

something something something (what I've been working on)

I have been largely absent because of not-game things. I continue to work on a hexcrawl that's also kind of a pointcrawl. I dunno. One of the few times where I care less about the mechanics than I do about the thing itself.

*Humans made themselves out of tools and so they make weapons and armor but they also make gods that are just and kind.

*Elves are thin and beautiful and perfect and cruel. If humans were monkeys before they were humans, elves were wolves.

*There are a number different version of the world, each with its own dominant peoples. It's not clear why this has happened, but there was one world and now there are an untold many: a world of elves and its all dead leaves and long teeth and hunger and there is a wold of humans and its all making things making rubbish and leaving it behind and controlling others and organizing and being safe and looking out of windows at the dark, and there is a dwarf world where the trees feed machines and everything feeds machines because the dwarves are making another world and the dead are piled like mountains and there is poison everywhere and a shimmering gas, and there is a proto-world that eats the other worlds and its full of dopplegangers and ghosts, etc, etc.

*Elves use human souls for a lot of things. They command golems that look like clay hulks that have only mostly forgotten they were human.

*there is a lake of suicides that connects the human world and the elf world, there are also hiding places in bushes and cupboards and under beds that are small enough for children and that open into black and wild places in the elf land

*there are color merchants

*there are a few human/elf groups, the humans a little wild and cruel, the elves a little more willing to ask for a thing instead of just taking it

*there is a secret factory that makes kindness

*monsters that forgot they were monsters

*there is a wild hunt and the huntmaster's agents is handing out masks

*children that were always monsters, but some that are getting better and one that is trying very hard but can't stop and feels terrible and sad about it

*tall dark trees in endless forests

*knights in white armor fighting and hurting everyone else but not eachother because they have great armor and are actually monsters themselves

*snags in order so that things repeat but the memory stays around like a pencil you can't quite erase. Say there is a village and it is being attacked by goblins and the party stops the goblins. Great. Later, there is the same village being attacked by goblins and the goblins are sort of larger and more vicious and sometimes there are more of them because the last time this happened, the goblins died but aren't gone entirely. Someone is usually carrying something or went off and did something and you have to fix it or the loop continues until nothing can be there and it's just people and goblins dying and grey and black and goblins falling into people and houses burning and everyone melting and being born again like a ruined sheet of paper where the graphite has been erased too many times