My First Heartbreaker Begins Now.

[TooManyGoddamnOrcs]

Technically, it's my second after the TFOS/50s Horror hybrid I created in middle school with a percentile color chart straight out of Marvel superheroes, but that's beside the point.  Here is what I have, and I leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide your reaction.

Suburbia is a fucked up place to raise a kid.  Not so much because of the isolation or the conformity or the fluoride in the drinking water but because now everything wants to get ahold of them.

OK, OK, let's back it up a bit.  Back in the early days, people lived in tribes and each tribe generated a series of spirits that, as spirits are wont, shaped the minds of the young and, in exchange, fed off their beliefs, but once the kids got too far past puberty the obligatory plot device happened and their beliefs didn't taste as good.  That was all good and fine when we were hunter gatherers, and wasn't even so bad when we generally lived in villages and feared the wolves and orcs.  

Unfortunately, once we started a free and open exchange of culture and threw in television, we started a turf war that made Crips vs. Bloods look like Women of Wrestling (fake and unwatchable).  Below I list the major factions and what they do to our kids(and, increasingly, young teenagers as America gets progressively infantalized...perhaps it's a plot by the Sidhe, but more on that soon).

The Faerie Folke: Yes, the little people of varying ethnicities from Sidhe to Abatwa do exist, and are making your children well-behaved.  Faeries are the primary source of yuppies and similar bastards, causing sweet, disneyfied banality wherever they roam.  The faerie are the subtlest of the forces: most of those under their sway have no idea they're being controlled and would shamelessly mock those who point out the control's source.  Think Tracey Flick in Election.

Guardian Angels: Like the red beret wearing vigiliantes that bear their name, Guardian Angels use force (mainly guilt these days) to increase safety.  Those afflicted by the Angels tend to be either terribly guilt wracked or self-righteous assholes, although there's variation.  At the moment, they're terribly sketchy and underdeveloped because I'm generally going by memory here.

The TV People(Thank you Haruki Murakami for the name): These little bastards want to make you edgy, but in a marketable way.  They're little people, maybe three feet tall and of perfect human proportions but noone sees them, they're too busy looking at the screen.  Cartoons are ghosts, remember the Twilight Zone movie and occasionally the TV People will eat someone plastering their face all over the local news.  Usually, though, they'll just make you "cool" in the UPN/MTV sense of the word: Ferris Bueller is OK, Tucker Max is not.  As long as, in the end, you end up buying the T-Shirt, these guys'll let you kill the time, all of the time.

Monsters, Mary (Bloody) and Nuclear Mutants: The monster under your bed, the ghost in the mirror, the dumpster of aborted fetuses that rolled into the old chemical plant and were given perverse life and live in the empty drainage pipe.  Whatever they are, these critters are out there.  Closetland's smaller, though, and really these guys are almost sympathetic, reaching out to the unwanted, the outcasts, the momma's boys.  Yeah, they'll teach you to stop the pain by cutting yourself and wearing black and what bands are cool, but they'll also tell you that cats aren't people and therefore it's cool to crucify 'em.  Or at least where to get a kickass trenchcoat and a TEC-9 to fit under it.   OK, that's not quite fair, that's only in extreme cases; in suburbia, Monsters are generally the balancing element.  They're the ones that let you whack off or beat the shit out of someone when you're not wearing uniforms and so what if they're trying to turn you evil, at least they won't turn you boring like the other guys.

In short, this game is about culture war at its basest, ugliest level.  

Now for my ideas of how to implement it:
I have none whatsoever or, more specifically I have a couple but I haven't followed through on any of them.  Back in high school, I originally conceived of this project as a computer game where you picked one of the forces and tried to manipulate a kid from childhood to adulthood into becoming someone who makes the world a place more in line with your ideals.  That ended when I gave up C++.  

I also had the idea that maybe you're playing kids (from 8 up until you can manage voluntarily get laid) who're trying to grow up with their souls, or rather their personalities intact, but that might be ripping off little fears too much.  

Maybe if I take the computer game idea and make it a card game, or at least more of a story/strategy-driven RPG.  The ball, dear forgers, is in your court.  

Or, alternately, you can ignore me.

[ethan_greer]

Sounds like all setting/color, and no system at this point.  Are you set on making your own system?  If not, there are a number of universal systems you could use.  Fudge, GURPS, The Pool, Spin System come readily to mind.

[Thomas Tamblyn]

What do the characters do (for that matter who are the player characters?  The humans or the monsters?)?

Or is that what you're asking for help on?

[Thomas Tamblyn]

What do the characters do (for that matter who are the player characters?  The humans or the monsters?)?

Or is that what you're asking for help on?

Like Ethan said, what you've got so far is a setting not a game 9A good setting, but stil...)

[TooManyGoddamnOrcs]

Basically, what this is is an amorphous idea that keeps coming back to me and I needed to get out somewhere besides my own head.  The problem is I have a background and no way to spin it, once I find the way to spin it I can figure out what behaviour I want to encourage from the players and design a system that rewards such behavior.  

If I go with the humans, it will be far easier for the players to relate to their characters but, at the same time, it will probably make the various factions less interesting (Pazazu rather than Screwtape) and I'd run the danger of making this game into a cynical remake of Little Fears.  If we went the humans-as-players route, play would probably end up taking a narrativist or simulationist turn.

If I go with the monsters, for lack of a better term, the clear advantage I see is that the players could focus on a single child and FIGHT FOR THEIR VERY SOUL!  On the upside, this could throw players right into the thick of the world, (it would also probably make it a shitload more Gamist, especially if the players are from competing factions... waitasec, what was that game where the players were all psychics controlling various parts of a mutant death-beast?)  Problems include figuring out what a character's "sphere of influence:" can the monster under the bed still talk to you when you're on a sleepover?  At school (from that drawing of a naked lady in the third stall, perhaps)? At summer camp?  Also powers, besides slowly and manipulating their feeble little attention spans away from the other sides' propaganda, what else would you be able to do?   I'm thinking low-scale environmental manipulation, but would that be more conducive to a card game or other more concrete gamist medium?  

On second thought, maybe because the spirits' forces are so amorphous we should go with players as humans.  Nah, that's just giving more hard work to the GM who might not run this game because of it.

So I suppose what I'm doing now is asking for questions and comments on the cosmology, it's still pretty sketchy now and as I want the setting to drive the game it needs to be lucid to the X-TREME!  Right now I'm leaning towards making the players the monsters: if I do that, I need to flesh out what the factions are, where they came from and what form their .  Perhaps you start out as a cherub, a closet monster or the assistant MTV V-J during spring break who only the kid can see and then move up the ranks and eventually kill the school's guidance counselor and animate his body with your soul inside (only he's been dead for twenty years and you just need to oust the current occupant).  This is getting too long, I shut up now.

Waitasec, just as I was about to hit send I had an idea that will probably render the game unplayable but it rocks.  Maybe for every three or so players playing factions/monsters/etc. one of them plays the kid they're fucking with.  Stupid idea, probably, but damn did it feel good to think of.

[Valamir]

At this point it sounds like much better grist to write a few short stories about than as a setting for gaming.  That might be a good place to start anyway to help you find a clear answer to the "what do you do" questions.

[Lance D. Allen]

An idea that you could consider would be the human as player AND monster as player approach. Each player plays a human, but they also play a monster which focuses on another player's human character.

Beyond this, I'm unsure exactly what to suggest. I'm still quite foggy about what the monsters are attempting to do. That they're obviously competing against each other is obvious, but how do they "win"? What is the goal that they are striving for?

[lumpley]

I'm a sucker for this game.

I'd have the PCs be fairies, guardian angels, monsters etc. who got bad job dissatisfaction, saw how rotten their sides' agendas are, and now have banded together to help this one kid grow up free from manipulation.  That way the PCs could be the cool critters, a., and their enemies could also be the cool critters, b., which is important if you want rising, balanced conflict, and also we still all get to sympathise with the poor meddled-with kid, c.!

Go for a short game with a distinct endgame, and absolutely have one player play the kid.  Mechanically, give the kid a bag full of stones representing her attention.  The villains can be trying to get the kid's attention and the PCs can be trying to help her keep it.  How many of her stones each of the factions has can determine what happens in the endgame.

TooGoddamnManyOrcs, I think this game is GOLD if you can get away from a standard fantasy game structure.

-Vincent

[Paul Czege]

I'd have the PCs be fairies, guardian angels, monsters etc. who got bad job dissatisfaction, saw how rotten their sides' agendas are, and now have banded together to help this one kid grow up free from manipulation.

Perfect! The PCs are the dissidents. So the players aren't competing against each other, but against the unrepentant creatures who occupy positions of significance relative to the child, and also their supervisors who create policy. Fighting and politicking, clandestine negotiations, influence peddling, and fantastic espionage.

Paul