Horror in Sorcerer: Does it happen, is it different?

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Ron Edwards:
The current absence of the older Forge threads is griping my ass. We discussed quite a bit about horror and role-playing in the early days, and I think we aired the issues so well as to make it unnecessary to go over it again. And here we are. I'll try to recall what I can.

HORROR AND TERROR

1. The essence of horror is a distinct realization of some kind. It can be about any number of things: back-story, revelation of an event or about a person, introspection (what one is capable of, or what one is, and similar), revelation of cosmic influence (or worse, lack thereof), and others. The core content is a sense of upset, overturning of previously-held beliefs, disorientation, alienation - a shock to the value system.

It's important to distinguish between character and (for purposes of this paragraph) the reader, because the realization is only horrific when it comes to the reader. Whether it is experienced by the character or not, should be considered a device which may or may not be employed. Also, when it occurs, relative to reading the story (seeing the movie, sitting in the play, blah blah, adapt as needed) doesn't matter either. If it strikes you years later, then it worked.

To clarify and stave off a potential misunderstanding: despite the phrasing I used in the above two paragraphs, horror is not necessarily intellectual or verbalized. It's effectiveness relies in fact more on empathy and identification, in that the events of the horrific story seem indubitably relevant to one's own life.

2. The essence of terror is emotional experience, "the chills" - to contrast with horror, terror is a shock to the nervous system. However, it's more profound than mere startlement (which we immediately dismissed as unimportant in the discussions, except as a useful minor device), because it taps into dread. For example, one might become quite willing to dredge up a childhood safety ritual when terrified.

With dread in mind, a core feature of terror is that it may operate both during the experience (reading, et cetera), and in a lingering way afterwards. As a personal example, the most terrifying part of the movie The Sixth Sense occurred, for me, about a month after seeing it when I was walking my dog in the pitch-black morning (3 AM) in an urban neighborhood. We were returning home through a dark alley, and I was suddenly and fully convinced, that right around the brick corner we were about to turn, was standing a dead man, who would be staring at me.

This lingering dread cannot be shaken, and - perhaps most affecting - once experienced, one realizes that it can happen again. I became a little scared to go out on nighttime walks for a while after that, because I knew that I might be hit by a similar sensation or what would seem, in the moment, to be a fantastic visitation.

3. One thing I implied in both of the above numbered points is the distinction between what one experiences right there while engaged with the book (movie, et cetera), as opposed to afterwards. Although I focused a bit more on the latter, clearly something has to be enjoyed or experienced during the engagement itself. I currently think that whatever that is can vary greatly. One might enjoy a story at what seems like a very comfortable level, only to react more profoundly later. As an example, the film Man Bites Dog seemed like a quirky, well-done, mildly gross curiosity when I saw it, but it stuck with me so badly and so upsettingly that I can't even look at the DVD on the shelf in a video store today, and I saw it in 1993. Whereas in other cases, the terror or the horror is quite profound during the engagement itself.

4. Clearly horror and terror can be present at the same time, or more broadly, may be produced in whatever degrees by the same artistic work. Perhaps this point deserves a second look.

5. "Fear" should be recognized as an unhelpful term. Either it's only one emotion, such that many sensations or reactions associated with the above two terms are left out; or it's too broad to be useful, including many distinct emotions.

6. Humor deserves a very deep discussion in terms of how it may be intertwined with either terror or horror. I don't think we got very far about that, except to say that humor is often a valid component of either one, and that these were deep waters and not subject to quick or off-hand comments. Oh yes, and to say that self-referential parody was both (i) utterly off-topic, regardless of any or all "horror" (et cetera) motifs, and not what we're talking about at all; and (ii) so identified with the term "horror" in cinema today that talking sensibly about genuine horror (or terror) means literally tearing whole chunks of habit out of our thinking and talking in order to make any sense.

ROLE-PLAYING

We quickly realized that most talk about horror or fear in role-playing, before 1999-2000, was wish-fulfillment or worse, rank ignorance. I'll repeat here my claim that although it may be that groups here and there, over the years, have experienced genuine horror or terror while playing Call of Cthulhu, there was no evidence at all that playing this game consistently generated such things, and the evidence pointed to more general tendencies toward Halloween-style scare-fun (often at conventions), genre emulation (and I specifically point to August Derleth as the primary influence on the game, not H. P. Lovecraft), and the opportunity to cut-up because you are not obliged to keep your character alive, much as in Paranoia. There was some kind of widespread belief among gamers, we found, that playing Call of Cthulhu was horror, such that the cart had become the horse. As a later-date note, Jesse's recent comments about how he, as a young person, thought of RPG texts as genre Cliff's Notes, are profoundly important here.

To be blunt: there wasn't any horror or terror that we could see in terms of RPG design out there. That's not to say that those things didn't happen, ever, but that whatever made them happen was going on in ways which either ignored or radically retooled the rules in question.

A couple of the issues of how horror or terror can be found in (or via) role-playing should jump out given my listed points above. First, it tied into a core point of early Forge discussions, which was that most post-game talk was wildly unreliable and often entailed people making up a fun experience that they came to believe actually happened. In the presence of this very common phenomenon, trying to discuss the immediate vs. delayed effects of either horror or terror was impossible. Second, genre emulation was something of a trap, when it became an end in itself rather than a device or means.

SPECIFIC GAMES

1. Regardless of what you may mean to think so far, I don't intend here to disrespect the game Call of Cthulhu. It has many virtues, and it certainly contributed astonishing details and content to role-playing design culture. There's a reason that people kept genuinely playing it for decades, with or without a recent revision to fan the flames, and keep doing so. However, again, here I'm talking about terror and horror, and I think that Call of Cthulhu is a great example - perhaps even a gorgeous example - of the genre emulation trap. I guess the only way I can put it is, there are too many layers. To summarize, playing the game is an emulation of the sourcebook/scenario content, the sourcebook/scenario content is an emulation of Derleth's Lovecraftiana, and Derleth's Lovecraftiana is an emulation of Lovecraft's fiction. These layers are themselves incredibly enjoyable (I'll play a CoC game with ya, no question), but they also serve as a buffer against both terror and horror. Pickman's Model is a horrifying story. Nothing relating to that story's content in the rulebooks and scenarios of the game Call of Cthulhu is horrific.

(Personal note, for purposes of clarification. Of Lovecraft's outright horror fiction, I call Pickman's Model, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Thing on the Doorstep, and The Picture in the House the best. The latter is raw terror, incidentally. The story The Call of Cthulhu, by contrast, blows chunks - utterly stupid, dull, and ineffective. You can agree or disagree or whatever; I'm saying this so you know where the person writing this post is coming from.)

2. Little Fears was probably the first RPG designed toward terror; Jason Blair insisted that it be called the game of childhood terror on this basis. I wrote about it extensively in my review and in some actual play threads you can find in the old Little Fears forum.

The following games had not yet been published during the older discussions.

3. Under the Bed strikes me as a very insightful horror design, not the least because inventing and playing childhood toys seems pleasant enough at first. But we were so grief-stricken at the breaking and loss of the little tinker-toy helicopter that we could hardly continue to play. Maybe that's not horror, merely sentiment, but I can say that I did in fact suppress any musings about my own real childhood toys for a long time afterwards. I didn't want to think about it.

4. Dead of Night deserves intensive discussion, which you can find on my part anyway via the Actual Play threads. I have at least four of them, I think. Briefly, it manages to utilize genre emulation rather than fall into it as a trap, and it also manages to stay solidly based on the Simulationist agenda. I wrote about about how its order/IIEE techniques actually promote terror physiologically, and although I don't think that technique would work in isolation, it's extremely strong in combination with other features of the game.

5. I haven't played Dread, or rather, the game by that name which uses the Jenga technique. Frank Tarcikowski wrote about it in Actual Play and if I remember correctly, he talked about the immediate terror and tension involved and how well it worked.

Well, that was a real data-dump and a lot of outright assertions. I'll hold off on how this might or might not be relevant to Sorcerer. Jaakko, my impression is that your inquiry wasn't very conceptually grounded. I'm not saying it's a bad question or topic, but it would help a lot if you could say, clearly, exactly what you mean by "horror," especially in terms of a role-playing experience.

Best, Ron

Marshall Burns:
Hey, somebody beat me to it. I gots fans!

But, yeah, if you want clarification on what I meant, Ron just gave it:
Quote

The core content is a sense of upset, overturning of previously-held beliefs, disorientation, alienation - a shock to the value system.

Thus, magic in Conan stories is horrifying, because it shouldn't exist. Dracula is horrifying because he can't exist. On a more mundane level, someone pointing a gun at you in the middle of your quiet, suburban gated community is horrifying because it isn't supposed to be possible.

Terror is an interesting thing, too. If I ever get American Wizards off the ground, it'll be an important part of it. See, horror involves a certain identification, or understanding. You know that people can't come back from the dead and live off human blood, but you understand that Dracula does anyway, so that's horrifying. Terror happens without understanding or identification.

-Marshall

Christopher Kubasik:
Jaakko,

Everyone beat me to what I might have said.

And I think Ron's points about the "genre-trap" can't be overstated enough. I have come to get a horrible tension up my arms whenever people use the word "genre" in an RPG conversation.

I want to add, building I think on what Marshall said, that in my view horror comes down to an awareness on the part of the character that something is wrong. The horror reaches critical mass when the character engages in the wrongness. This engagement can be full comprehension (the mother in THE RING realizing what happened in the family that generated the ghostly girl) or action (the mother's decision and method to save her son at the end of THE RING.)

It's the moment when the veneer of what is possible in human wrongness is made apparent and that even you or I can do the things that are wrong.

In this respect, I think Sorcerer is full of potential for horror. Vampire, as it was advertised, did the same, by the way.

But, as Ron points out, horror comes from engagement with... well, horror. Not the pushing of genre pieces around the board. The differences between the two goals are severe.

Christopher Kubasik:
And I want to add...

Ron pointed out that we need to make a distinction between the character and the audience/reader. Which is true. What matters is delivering to the audience/reader.

My own habits/craft/techniques use characters as a "delivery system" to the audience. Especially because I work in the form of dramatic narrative (plays/movie/tv) where the story is told specifically through the words and deeds of and between characters. That might just be a preference on my part. And different media (novels and more) allow many other options to transfer story and information to the audience/reader without using the character as the medium.

But Ron's point stands. That's my point. If the character in an RPG is saying, "Oh, I've been touched the horror of what I've just seen," but the players aren't moved at all, we're doing a great H.P. Lovecraft Halloween Pageant. But it ain't horror.

Paul Czege:
The RPG.net Game Index doesn't think My Life with Master is horror. As contrary evidence I offer the following two incidents of actual play from the very first multi-session playtest (excerpted from Google's cache of the Forge forums from 2002).

From the second session of the game:

Tom is playing a hunchbacked minion named Hiram, who has a connection to Catharine Dowkins: he enjoys listening to her singing while she draws water at the well. It was revealed by my scene framing, in the first scene of the first session of the game that Gideon, Matt Gwinn's playwright minion, had written a challenging role for the Master, that of a "sympathetic rapist who can sing." And in the first session the minions abducted a wanted rapist, a singing rapist named Jack Hervey, from the Constable and his honest men, just as they were about to hang him for his crimes.

A sequence of play in this second session begins with the Master giving Hiram a very distinctive knife stolen from Lucian Sterling, the son of the Constable, Masheck Sterling, and instructions to wait by the well at dawn, kill a woman who comes to draw water, and leave the knife behind. "Masheck Sterling will be distracted from his efforts to investigate the whereabouts of his rapist by our implicating his son in a grisly crime." Not surprisingly, Tom had Hiram resist. He suggested an alternative to the Master's plan, offering that it would be better to kill someone close to the son, and got the Desperation die for that. And he won the roll.

And then he called for a scene with his Connection, Catharine Dowkins. So I framed Hiram hiding in the bushes behind the home where Lucian Sterling's fiance Claudia lives, and hearing the singing of Catherine as she passes by on her way to the well. Tom has Hiram leave the knife behind and pursue Catherine. After a bit of group brainstorming, he decides Hiram's overture will be to give Catherine a skinned rabbit. We roll. He fails, so she recoils and he gets the Self-Loathing as well as the Love. I go to roleplay her reaction, and Danielle says, "Don't make her a vegetarian." I ask why. "There wasn't any such thing in 1805." So Catharine responds, "Meat, on a Friday?" and looks horrified. He is clearly no Christian. Hiram thrusts the rabbit into her hands and says, "Make it on Saturday." And bolts from the scene.

Next scene for Hiram, before I even frame anything, Tom launches into a painful roleplay of Hiram stabbing Claudia Repton, muttering, "gave her a rabbit..." and "stupid, stupid, stupid" as stabs her again and again.
From the fourth session of the game:

In an earlier session I'd framed Matt Gwinn's character Gideon into a scene with the Master, Attor Fusae, in the conservatory of the home of an outsider, Lord Barlow. His daughter Phoebe Barlow, 15, was playing the pianoforte as her friend Molly Irish, also 15, and chaperone Dame Claire Augusta, 63, looked on. "Isn't she beautiful, Gideon?" said the Master. "I have promised her and Miss Molly the box seats at our first performance of your brilliant play. Does that make you happy?...You must do something for me. The ladies will wish to see me after the performance. You must make sure they find their way to my dressing room...and that their unfortunate chaperone is otherwise detained separately." It was a command that Gideon wouldn't act on until last Monday, two game sessions later.

The intervening session featured the stage performance of the play, in which the Master, having consumed the wrong subject, delivered a grotesque and incoherent performance that culminated with him professing his love, sotto voce, to Danielle's character Ambrose, and commanding Ambrose to "take my love inside you," right there on stage. Of course, most of the audience had already departed. Ambrose's attempt to resist, "I will always be second to your love of the stage," was unsuccessful.

So last Monday: The session began with Matt's effort to satisfy the Master's command to make sure Miss Phoebe and Miss Molly find their way to his chambers. He tossed local actor Uriah VanSickle from the box where he'd spent most of the performance chatting the girls up, to the floor of the theatre, an act which resulted in the man's death. Motive? It was largely the presence of VanSickle in the box that had disoriented the Master to the point of ruining the performance of Gideon's play. Gideon botched an attempt to knife Dame Claire, snapping his blade against the boning of her corset, and took a ferocious and bloody bite to the nose from the old woman as a response, and had to suffer the consequence of her yelling for the young girls to flee for their lives. But he succeeded ultimately in murdering Dame Claire and Miss Phoebe.

Next scene I framed Ambrose out sitting on the porch of the theatre, and negotiated with Danielle what he might be doing there. She settled on the idea that he was engaged in nursing a bottle of gin in response to his recent molestation. I described Miss Molly bursting from the theatre, disheveled, and throwing herself at Ambrose's feet. She begged for help. Danielle decided that Ambrose was unmoved. But as Gideon, covered in blood, emerged to take Molly into custody, Danielle described how Ambrose stopped him for a second so he could take the girl's shoes, because "he likes them." Sheer Authorial power on Danielle's part, and I think it pretty much creeped the shit out of everyone in the room.
Two thoughts:

In both cases the horror was very much elective and creatively inspired on the part of the player. My sense is that horror in Sorcerer is the same. If so, if horror isn't driven by mechanics but is somehow inspired, then what is it about My Life with Master and Sorcerer that inspires it that's not there in Call of Cthulhu and other pre-1999 RPGs?

In the first case, Tom's roleplay of Hiram's butchery of Claudia, the other players all laughed. In the second case of Danielle's taking of Miss Molly's shoes, no one laughed. Everyone was just really quiet. There is definitely a connection between humor and horror, but for all I've seen in playing My Life with Master over the years I don't have a good sense of what makes certain horrific events also humorous.

Paul

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