Werewolves, Butoh, D&D

WEREWOLF CIRCA D&D

Somewhere between 1941's The Wolf Man and when seven, eight or nine year-old me got his hands on D&D, werewolves had ceased to be something that were, in essence, frightening.

I'm picking on werewolves here but this is true of a ton of our monsters, right? Like I think some monsters enter our common consciousness long after 1941, sometimes enter it precisely because of D&D, and still they're already old hat. The problems are many.

Like, ontological: I think the werewolf enters the modern psyche as an archetype for ersatz cannibals and violent madmen, maybe with a little fear of nature in all senses of that word thrown into the mix. It's not a very potent or moving or upsetting archetype as it describes fears I doubt many of us have in a present way. Maybe worse, it wraps those fears in an animal form that I think might read more furry than anything else these days. Do any other D&D monsters fare much better? I'm not sure they do, personal squeamishness about things with lots of legs aside.

And then in the context of a game where people have magic, things get worse. Changing into a wolf is scary only if wolves and/or people changing shape are scary, right? In a game where wolves and people changing shape are standard tropes, where the response to a metamorphoses into a wolf leads the wizard to go, "Oh, I have that spell too," the were-creature is already old hat prima facie. I mean, it's fun in a creature-feature reference way, but it isn't essentially frightening and as  Referee I feel like I'm wasting everyone's time talking about it transforming, but have to anyway because there's that whole ritual necessity to stories where, "it turns into a werewolf" falls flat because everyone wants the same boring thing about changing faces and tearing clothes and oh, how terrible is the widening mouth. 

Like, fantasy games create these spongy boundaries, so you can't just go: whoop, it's arms are too too long and everyone is like, oh god what is it? They're like, oh, do we know about people with long arms?

And then there are rules. We've got both cultural and mechanical rules getting in the way. Werewolves have culturally established rules involving ways to kill them and those rules work in favor of the player every time. Like, if its a werewolf and silver doesn't work because it's a special werewolf, there are players I've had, there are always and always have been and always will be players who will just see that as Referee bullshit. And everyone else that plays along will only play along so many times.

And every monsters in D&D has rules to kill them and while it's perfectly OK, in my mind, to include a nigh-unkillable monster in a game, it's shitty to provide an entirely unkillable monster, and no one wants to play in a game of D&D where all the monsters are unkillable or even nigh-unkillable, so if they just run into a furry half-man, half-wolf in some cave, it's totally reasonable of my players to expect to be able to kill it somehow.

Which is to say werewolves still work, but they work only or mostly when they are nigh-unkillable and mechanically frightening.

And so much of the baggage (resistances, powers, ecology, etc.) that our monsters bring with them is boring or mostly boring or is mostly only interesting when it's in the context of something else interesting, like, "what kind of monster is this?" or "this whole town is werewolves and a full moon is rising" or "turns out that silver we bought was just spray-painted on." Which is fine, but kind of dull for me, as a Referee.

WERWULF CIRCA BEOWULF

Then there is Grendel's mother, the aglæcwif (monster-wife), who, though, idese onlicnæs (appearing as a woman) is also mother of monsters, and a brimwylf (briny shewolf, lit. sea she-wolf). Never called a werwulf (man-wolf), she yet remains a wolf creeping up from a hell of black water and serpents, arrayed in the form of a woman. She holds court in those depths, her vassals are serpents and monsters, her reign twinning that of noble Hrothgar on the surface, her treasure halls similarly stocked. It appears she can breathe under water.

Grendel's mother scares the shit out of me. She is human and not, monster and not, maybe almost a bit of a god. There are no clear rules.

NOT WOLVES, NOT MEN
What seems frightening to me is not the mythologized, animalized, damaged, violent person, which werwulf probably signified in the Nordic context (some poor dude with PTSD and/or diminished intelligence and shit luck), but the actual damaged, violent person who is, at times, possibly an actual monster, because we don't really know the rules with them.

True Detective worked so well because we never were quite sure if the villain's gnostic pretensions were true or not, right?

So what does a werewolf look like? Something like Hisako Horikawa here:

Imagine that transition between human and some stranger, tighter, more urgent form, as it buries its face and hands in the soft belly of your friend, working its way through the organs and up into the ribcage to find the lungs and heart. And then the transition ceases. Maybe you see it ripple along the body of some kid you encounter outside of town on the edge of woods, maybe you see your linkboy undergo a similar change out of the corner of your eye.

*I wanted to talk about manitou and Louise Erdrich's Antelope Wife too but I can't find my old notes; I mention both only to indicate they're influential here too.

attribution: Wolf Man

MONSTRUM 2

I started talking about this here. Zak then talked about Monsters here, which overlaps quite a bit with what I wanted to say, though I'm really talking about a method of doing this sort of thing, of using monsters to build a mythology and a sense of place and history into a game.

Solution One (already covered): change how you talk about monsters when you run a game.

Solution Two: change what "monster" means. Move it beyond or outside of D&D (or most other roleplaying games I've encountered).

A THING, A SIGN OF A THING

As discussed already, a monster is not just a rupture in the natural order, it is also a sign of the same. It is the beast and it is its call in the night, and it is the prophecy that foretold its coming and it is the calf born with two heads when it sidles by the barn to pluck a young farmhand from asleep in the hay.

Here is what hearing about monsters does to you: you are nervous, worried, the world feels unsafe, you jump at loud noises, avoid shadows, mistrust everyone, all of which takes its toll. In Monsterparts (and the thing on which I'm working) I called these Secrets, but the name is secondary. They deplete your health. If you have x HP, now you have x-1 HP just for the thing existing. Being around the monster, being in its lair is worse, more depletion.

Because the thing about a lot of monsters is that they're not actually, themselves, mechanically all that terrible. They're terrible because you never face them in full fetter, because getting to them means wading through unsettling things, sleepless nights, etc, so that you're already half-crazy when they show up, in the dark. If this were a book or movie or something, the monster, itself, should be the denouement.

ALONE, HUNGRY, IN THE DARK
Here is a monster description:

scrambling eaters

Dextrous Monstrous Halfling HD6, 4 Endurance

-small, between a child and a really big house cat

-night vision: eyes reflect light like a dog's

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

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

-1XP

Here are signs of the scrambling eater (treat these like rumors and wandering encounters):

-missing children or children and animals with missing limbs, digits, eyes

-bright eyes under sewer grates, scrabbling or tapping under cobble stones

-little statues in home shrines to a wide mouthed little god, similar signs scratched newer sewer entrances, but no one says what god to which they prey

-general starvation, crop failure, horribly skinny people eye you from rags, slowly chewing or sucking on a bone or what must be a strip of leather

-lethargic governance, no one does anything to help, pretends there is no problem, men meant to watch in the night stay inside and hide, fearful

-scratching in the walls of your room, holes in the walls much too large for a rat

-people leave bowls of blood out on their stoop, in the morning, the bowls are empty

And here's something you might discover in the lair of a scrambling eater:

-crude maps of the insides of houses, with much more attention paid to where people sleep and to the spaces between walls

-its corpse is marked with a brand on its forehead, knife-shaped, though its children have no such mark

-the nest will invariably have a parody of a cozy home with rotten and raggedy beds, tea in chipped teakettles, probably a well-worn chap book with the prayers crossed out and re-written ("blessed are the meek for they shall devour the earth," etc)

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Here are excerpts from something on which I'm working (note: XP requirements for a level are much lower than in trad D&D than here [possible conversion: multiply the XP by 100]):

"Roll a d6 and add your level of renown. The Referee should move up the list if the result has been rolled previously, returning to the lowest value of the list is exhausted. Resolution of the Secret rewards XP equal to its number less your level of renown but is always worth at least 2 XP. Anyone that contributed gets the reward and regains all lost Endurance. There are usually at least a few weeks, if not months between Secrets.

When reading aloud the italicized text, contextualize it for each character. One of them heard scratching under the cobble stones, another saw eyes like saucers in the sewers, another heard chewing behind the walls or under a manhole cover."

"2. IN THE SEWERS

scratching under cobble stones and flashing eyes like saucers in the sewer grate, children are disappearing. If you put your ear to a manhole cover, there are whispers or chewing noises

3. IN THE TEMPLE IN THE VAST, DARK FOREST a burning white god in the temple heals the injuries of some, leaving them increasingly pale, bright and beautiful. These “new saints” are widely respected in the Village, but you've seen them beating beggars, pulling wings from a pigeon.

etc."

"2. IN THE SEWERS Faction the horde Monster scrambling eaters For Later a pit into the terrible underground, a maze of the spaces inside walls

3. IN THE TEMPLE IN THE VAST, DARK FOREST

Monster        ascended ghoul, pupal ghouls

For Later       a means into the land of the elves

etc."

attributions: Sankai Jutsu, Sam Wolfe Connelly

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.