[WoD 2.0] Why the Supernatural? Why Now?

[Robert Bohl]

So, the characters in my Freak Jersey series have been investigating the paranormal for several years.  I've decided to open the story by having them come up with Kickers, events of the players' own design that are uniquivocably supernatural, and which require their reaction.

I have a dilemma, though.

Why after seeking for so long is the supernatural now showing itself to the characters?  This is an important question.  It is tempting to say that some supernatural beings decided they've earned it, but this takes authorial control away from the PCs.  What, then?  The only thing I can think of is some past investigation exposed them to an altering resonance that allowed their eyes to be opened.  They have been altered and lost their ability to ignore the strangeness of the world.  This isn't perfect, because it still removes the transformation away from something they have done.  It's something that's been done to them, or happened to them.

Perhaps the PCs have lived a prior life that they have been made to forget by supernatural means.  Perhaps it's wearing off now.

Other ideas?

--

So far I only have one Kicker from my players.  Here's what I asked them:

Give me something that happens to your character that is potentially supernatural, to which he must react.

And this is what one of the players sent me:

Crap. It's after three. Getting a little old for these pub crawls. My eyes feel astringent. Wish smoking would get banned in bars here like in the City. At least I can sleep in. Gotta have some water, or I'll feel like royal hell tomorrow, er today. Funny. I always lock my door....Holy shit! Look at the mess! I've been robbed!...Wait, TV's here, DVD player, computer...what is my computer doing? it looks like it's downloading something...those characters look like cuneiform; what the fuck!?

--

Note that I am pretty well unsatisified with every idea I present for the why of this, above.

[Robert Bohl]

Some background is probably in order.  The characters are a reporter (Harris), a photographer/multimedia guy (Ricky) and a driver/repair/handyman/street kid (Manny) who work for a magazine that is me ripping off Weird NJ called Freak Jersey.  They know each other already.  Harris has been ardently searching for the supernatural for his entire life, Ricky could care less but likes the pay check and is a deep skeptic, and Manny is a religious and superstitious kid.

They've been hunting down bogus stories for a while now.  Why is something real showing itself all of them now?  I realize that if I figure out a way to tie together all their Kickers, that will probably help, but I am still worried about externalizing the locus of control.

[greedo1379]

Do you *NEED* a greater reason?  Why can't something strange just happen to them now?

I mean these guys have been searching for a while and haven't found anything.  This time they do.  So what?

[Trevis Martin]

Rob

I'm agreeing with greedo.  That's what makes this part of your players lives a story worth playing or a movie worth watching.  Instead of run of the mill the ante was upped.  Think of this, if  your players passion is the supernatural, either proving or debunking (which it seems is the case.)  Then the kicker will present opportunity or threat to that passion.  In the case of your first player it sounds like a mysterious opportunity.  Cool!

I suggest that the question 'why now' doesn't really matter.  Why now?  Because it didn't happen before, that's why.  The players may never know.  They got lucky, or they are related or connected to something or someone genuinely supernatural that they didn't know about.  They may never know.  The question for playing purposes isn't really why did it happen but what are they doing about it.  In the x-files, they never find out, for sure, why everything is happening the way it is.  Its all just shadowy suggestion.

I can't remember exactly where this is from but I've  heard a writers adage that says something like 'its perfectly acceptable to use coincidence to get characters into trouble, just not out of it.'

I'm not sure what you mean by external locus of control.  Weave the characters kickers into the backstory through relationships if possible.  Make the supernatural personal, I say.  Especially for the guy in it for the check.  The fellow with the passion for the supernatural won't need too much more reason to stick in, but the other two must care about something.  That's what their kickers should revolve around.

One more point.  Who said only the players with PC's have authorial control?  You're a player too, and you have just as much an investment in whats happening.  You should have some stuff you'd like to see happen.  Just because they get the PC's doesn't mean they get to decide it all.

best,

Trevis.

[contracycle]

Maybe something in a photograph taken 10 years ago is suddenly relevant.  Like it shows someone who has clearly not aged, or who should be in the shot (was visible to the naked eye) but isn't.  Seeing as any number of images could have been printed, and hence be in circulation, figuring out how some NPC stumbles upon it should not be that hard.

Chasing the characters for something they don't know they have or can't give can be quite effective.  Or, you could take it off them and leave them to figure out which obscure item was taken, thus confronting them with the mystery.

[Robert Bohl]

I want to thank everyone who's responding to this.  I've gone to a few other fora to try to get these answers but as expected the level of help to be found here is on average of higher quality than elsewhere.  It probably has something to do with an innate understanding of the toolbox I'm trying to start to use.

I suggest that the question 'why now' doesn't really matter.  Why now?  Because it didn't happen before, that's why.

If I can't come up with a good reason, or if a good reason doesn't emerge from the uniting of the Kickers (assuming I even get Kickers from 2 of the players by Saturday, which I am starting to regard as a vanishing proposition) I can of course just let it go and decide there is no reason.

However, I'm concerned about stretching beyond breaking the players' willful suspension of disbelief.  The major problem is that they've been going at this for years, and simultaneously, the supernatural is expressing itself in three different ways.  That's important, too.  The Kickers are not likely to all revolve around this burglary.

For example, if Manny's Kicker is, "I'm throwing the family's trash into the apartment complex's dumpster and I find it's packed full of warm corpses," and Ricky's is, "I am developing a photograph and see a figure there that I am sure wasn't there at the time I took it," then having all three things just coincidentally happen might strain credulity more than can be borne.

Although if I don't get anything juicier (or at all) from the other players, I am starting to think of a way to tie them together.  Harris eBays for "supernatural artifacts" frequently.  He could've found something real, and some being could be trying to get it back from him, and if the other players' Kickers allow for it, what they're witnessing could be attempts to see if they have any idea where it is, or perhaps to intimidate them out of frustration.

I was also thinking that perhaps theyve' been running into "real" things all along the way, and they've had themese memories suppressed by some outside force, but that suppression is starting to wear off.

In the x-files, they never find out, for sure, why everything is happening the way it is.  Its all just shadowy suggestion.

No offense to X-Files fans, but I don't want to use that as a model that much :).  Mostly because I always felt like they were just sort of making stuff up as they went along, and everytime they revealed something, they'd erease it within the next couple of episodes.  It felt unfair and cheating a lot of the time.

But that's a rant that doesn't have much to do with what you've said.  I am tempted to just let go and let it be whatever it will be.  But I am very concerned about them scoffing when they look at it all from a distance.

I'm not sure what you mean by external locus of control.

Basically, one of the big complaints about the Old World of Darkness was that mortals' choices didn't matter much because everything was secretly controlled by [pick your flavor of supernatural].  I also wanted the players' decisions (or the characters', because that's the stance they generally prefer) to drive the plot, rather than having it be driven by NPCs.  But maybe I can give up on the instigating incident being under their control?  I don't know.

Weave the characters kickers into the backstory through relationships if possible.  Make the supernatural personal, I say.  Especially for the guy in it for the check.  The fellow with the passion for the supernatural won't need too much more reason to stick in, but the other two must care about something.  That's what their kickers should revolve around.

You're right.  Unfortunately so far I have more meat for Harris than anyone else.  But I agree with you.  He almost takes care of himself in this milieu.  Both of the other two come from a superstitous background, and I planned on bringing in some traditional Chinese and Mexican ""monsters" or supernatural stories.

One more point.  Who said only the players with PC's have authorial control?  You're a player too, and you have just as much an investment in whats happening.  You should have some stuff you'd like to see happen.  Just because they get the PC's doesn't mean they get to decide it all.

Okay, thank you for that :).

[clehrich]

I do think there's a lot of value in the notion that the characters aren't encountering the supernatural entirely coincidentally.  But you don't necessarily need to know the answer now -- and nor do the players.

Consider Lovecraft on a good day -- not CoC, but Lovecraft's stories.

The main character becomes involved with the supernatural usually out of curiosity about old things: old churches, interesting old books, strange parts of town, etc.  The character is very often an "antiquarian," i.e. knows a lot of history and trivia and whatnot about the past.

The main character does not expect that this antiquarianism will lead him into the supernatural, which quite likely he doesn't believe in anyway.  He just finds it an interesting facet of the old times.

Ultimately, it turns out that the main character had the supernatural quite literally in his blood: he's really related to the families that turn into Deep Ones or whatever, and the curse is catching up to him.  Which, of course, is exactly why he's always been so attracted to antiquity.  And why that interest led him into the occult, which he didn't plan on.  And so the whole plot turns out to be the manifestation of a curse.

Obviously not every story fits this model, but a lot of the best ones do.

If you're looking for Kickers of the supernatural, my inclination is to go read a stack of Lovecraft:

"The Shadow Out Of Time": protagonist is displaced by ancient beings through thought-projection, for no reason except that he's very intelligent; he continues, after he gets better, by trying to find out what happened... and unfortunately finds out.

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth": protagonist wanders into Innsmouth because it's cheap and seems sort of vaguely interesting, stumbles on the whole Deep Ones cult of Dagon & Cthulhu thing, desperately flees... and discovers that he'll have to go back soon because he's actually one of the Marsh family.

"The Colour Out Of Space": alien meteorite falls in farmer's field, slowly destroying everything with its awful influence, until eventually monsters are in the well and the family has been killed and possibly eaten.

"The Case of Charles Dexter Ward": protagonist is an antiquarian who stumbles on an ancient portrait of his ancestor -- who looks just like him.  After too much research for antiquarian reasons, he is possessed by his ancestor.

"The Rats in the Walls": protagonist decides to restore the family manor in England, but discovers that its ancient curse is in his blood after all.

In short, Lovecraft has a wide range of ways to encounter the supernatural, often through an ancestral curse or taint, but sometimes through nobody's fault or for no reason at all.  Check it out: a great mine of ideas, not well-enough used in gaming because CoC has come to dominate the Lovecraftian field.

Note that all these stories, except "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," are in the big volume The Dunwich Horror and Others.  "Charles Dexter Ward" is in At The Mountains of Madness.  They've all be reprinted in small volumes as well, but you get a lot of second-rate stuff with the good in each of those little paperbacks.

[Jaik]

I kind of like the idea of the group having found actual supernatural stuff before, but not remembering it.  The obvious reason would be a supernatural force of some sort suppressing their memories, but I prefer a shadowy government group, ala Men in Black.  Assume standard WOD, with the government basically being in the pocket of vampires, mages, and the like.  Now assume a smart group of intelligence types figures this out and starts trying to fight it from the inside.  What if this group has been using the PCs to sniff out the supernatural, the erasing their memories and installing new ones, ones with ordinary explanations?  

An MIB handler desperately searching for a clue ransacks an apartment, ends up dead.  His bosses show up looking for the clue.  The bad guys show up looking for the clue.

What if the PCs are active and relatively well-known in the supernatural community, but only when their memories are unlocked, and they've been leading a double life for years?

Sure, it smacks of Total Recall, Who am I (love Jackie Chan!), Paycheck, and Enemy of the State, but I love all that stuff.

YMMV, naturally.

[Robert Bohl]

If you're looking for Kickers of the supernatural, my inclination is to go read a stack of Lovecraft:

However, the "problem" is that the players are coming up with the Kickers, right?  I mean if I was designing the Kickers I could make them all come together pretty easily.

[clehrich]

If you're looking for Kickers of the supernatural, my inclination is to go read a stack of Lovecraft:

However, the "problem" is that the players are coming up with the Kickers, right?  I mean if I was designing the Kickers I could make them all come together pretty easily.

Okay, so make them go read some Lovecraft.  Seriously, it seems to me that the reason people run out of creative ideas for characters and whatnot is that they don't read enough.  Why not steal your material more?  I find TV and movies as a rule quite uninventive; they do the same hack-work again and again.  But there's lots of good stuff to read out there.  If someone can't seem to come up with a Kicker, tell him to go read some Lovecraft -- or Stephen King, or whoever.  The opening of almost any such text is going to present and examine a Kicker -- how else would you get the supernatural active in the story, and justify it as plausible?

[Robert Bohl]

My Kicker is, "The man in black fled through the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

:)

[Eric Provost]

Hiya Rob,

I dig you're problem.  I've been there.

I'd like to take what the others have said here and build on it a little more.

In your shoes, I wouldn't even begin to sweat the Why of the coincidence... today.  See, I'd just let the players do their thing, create their kickers, and make for some strange coincidence.  Then, I'd start working towards discovering if those situations were really coincidence or not.  And I'd find a way to make the players (and their characters) tell me if was all coincidence or not.  I wouldn't force them down one path or the other, but I would seed them both, and wait to see what blooms.  

For instance:
I'd include the same 'clue' in the outcome of each kicker.  But I wouldn't have anything in mind for what this might be a clue to, if it's even a clue at all.  But it's going to jump out at the players.  What if the symbols on the computer screen are Bright Orange... and the corpses in the dumpster are all wearing Bright Orange ... and the developing photograph includes the figure of a man wearing a Bright Orange hat... Well, now, maybe it's all a coincidence, and maybe it's not.  But I'd make the players decide that.  And I know I'd be terribly excited to find out if it is or not.  

Good luck,

Eric

[Robert Bohl]

Thanks, Eric.  That's very helpful.  I think I am going to resign myself to figuring out why later and hoping it doesn't look stupid later.

And I think I might call the other players tonight if I don't get kickers from them. :)

Incidentally, for the Bright Orange thing, I had already planned to have each bear some Tarot symbolism.  I think that Harris might best be described by the Moon card, so the symbols may eventually resolve to a Moon of some kind.

[DannyK]

Well, if you're trying to keep this close to the UA tradition, the answer that leaps out at me is that somebody -- or something -- has a use for them.  They've been messing about in the shallow end of the pool long enough that they've been noticed.  As long as you use this as a Bang -- something that they can respond to however they like -- it won't take away from their control.  

I agree with others that you needn't pin down every detail of the who or what right now -- let it be shaped by their kickers and the development of play.

[Robert Bohl]

Ricky's Kicker is in:

Ricky is hanging out at an all ages club.  He is feeling a little tired so he goes to the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face.  He is alone in the bathroom.  He wets his face and looks in the mirror.  Behind him in the reflection he sees a teenage boy staring at him with a knife stuck in his stomach and stab wounds surrounding the blade.  Blood comes out of his mouth.  Ricky spins around to help the boy only no one is there.  Ricky looks back in the mirror and sees the boy is still there.

Yay :).