OOC

[Marullus]

Given the description of our malefactor, I thought I had to share this...

FB_IMG_1613952926468.jpg (39.49 KiB) Viewed 406 times

[tibbius]

I'm just happy that I found a venue for my ancestral mythos.

[tibbius]

I don't know how well this is working, bc I have never run a horror-focused game before, but I'm trying to go for a sense of pressure and dread ... ?

[shaidar]

I'm not sure we're quite there yet. But it's a learning experience for all of us and I'm sure we'll get there. I'll post IC shortly and hopefully that will help crank things up a bit.

[Marullus]

I'm having fun, and you're doing fine. I think your descriptions are intriguing and I'm curious to get to them, but it is not yet suspenseful.

One professional GM I follow did a blog post on this a week or so ago. It isn't online (it was email-delivered), so I included the bottom line below.

Now, many years later, I've come to see a lot of parallels between that situation and how horror movies and fiction create suspense.

Every movie, book, or story has characters (the PCs, in this case), but it also has an audience (the viewers, readers, or players). And the point of suspense isn't to scare the story's characters at all. It's purely to scare the audience!

Why, in so many horror movies, do we see the killer searching through the house with a knife held high while the characters hide under a bed? Why do we watch Buffalo Bill stalk Clarice through the dark basement as though we had on night vision goggles, too?

The characters don't know what's going on. But we, the audience, do. We're painfully, horribly aware that disaster is imminent.

That's suspense!

And it comes from the audience knowing something bad is on the way.

So next time you're running a game and you want to inject suspense, you now have a secret weapon. Use the metagame to your advantage — remember that the players are your audience. Let them know something horrible is out there; let them squirm trying to figure out what it is.

In another blog post, she recommends taking tips from screenwriting: use dramatic questions to create suspense.

Looking at this game, you have a great character looming ahead of us. If it is player emotion that generates suspense, we're missing the sense of immediacy and threat. The game pacing is "what are you doing in your normal day?" which is the opposite of suspenseful timing and generating variations on "I'm waiting for something to react to or act on." Turning the scene so we're in a tense position witha dramatic question facing us ratchets that up.

Also, our characters don't know about it (except for some weird dreams), and both are initially non-believers (so are ignoring the clues). When they get into a scene that dispels their disbelief, it will radically change the drama level. The main storyline here (Fair Ones in the real world) isn't something we're proactively searching for as characters, but something these specific characters need to be forced to react to. The main drama starts when we're put in that position. I see all we've done so far as character-building exposition. That's not a bad thing - we laid interesting groundwork for their normal lives before they're thrown into upheaval. It's like the first 20 minutes of a movie establishing the characters, and we're at minute 20, where the main storyline hits and the action starts. Many story-heavy games (like most Powered by the Apocolypse (PBTA) games) intentionally start this way, with the whole first session being "day in the life" stories before drama hits. I had a much shallower appreciation of Lucas previously and like our initial story.

[shaidar]

I agree completely with Marullus's post

I didn't explicitly say it earlier, but I am having fun.

Once the big reveal occurs then that'll be the opening of the flood gates.

[tibbius]

Hah. I'm very pleased to hear that you're both having fun. I had felt that the slow approach would be important to make the jump out of normalcy more of a jump ... glad to have the feeling validated. Hopefully the jump will be appropriately shocking. I've got two ideas for how it goes, depending how the two of you behave en scene. (Nice job shaidar roping Lucas into this).

[shaidar]

I really need to think what Edward is going to say, either humour them and tow-the-line or something else.

[tibbius]

I'm not entirely sure but I believe "toe the line" is prison talk bc one of the oddities of bin life is that the guards sometimes make the prisoners line up for inspection with their toes literally on a painted line.

Anyway ... do not despair of your Disastrous roll. This is Fair Ones, a game about spirits continuing further than one might think they should.

[shaidar]

I'm not entirely sure but I believe "toe the line" is prison talk bc one of the oddities of bin life is that the guards sometimes make the prisoners line up for inspection with their toes literally on a painted line.

I didn't know where the phrase came from. I just knew it meant to do what your told/what everyone else is doing. I assumed it was nautical (hence, tow when it should have been toe)

[Marullus]

I love etymology. Toe the Line. Apparent origins are 207 years ago from track and field.

I love that both "line up in prison" and "pull the rope in the direction you're told" make perfect sense.

[shaidar]

“To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream..."

Or more likely on seeing Magout "WTF?... "

[shaidar]

Can Edward speak and maybe gesture at this time?

[tibbius]

Sure.

Interested by how Cernunnos and Czernobog share two thirds of their syllables. Could probably do some sort of linguistics on Celtic and Slavic to track back a minimum age for the concept of the Horned Hunter.

[shaidar]

That is interesting. I didn't think about it at the time. Originally I was going to go with Herne, but then thought Cernunnos would be better.

[tibbius]

Herne is a Saxification of Cernu, like heart and coeur.

Anyway ... waiting eagerly to find out Edward's next move!

[shaidar]

Hope you're happy with how I'm handling Edward on his little journey.

[tibbius]

Quite

[Marullus]

Ok - this will take a while. Might as well make a new character.

[shaidar]

Um...