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?

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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!?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

RobNJ wrote:

clehrich wrote: 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.

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

:)

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

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.

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.

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 :).

Have you read much detective fiction? Not mystery novels like Agathie Christie, but the hardboiled, gnarled stuff where the issue is less "who did it" than "why" and the moral tangles turn out to connect everybody's painful pasts? I've just gotten into this myself based on Ron Edwards' recommendations in Sorcerer's Soul and read Chandler's Big Sleep and Ellroy's Black Dahlia (same author as L.A. Confidential). These are very good models for taking multiple, apparently unrelated "kickers" (clues or killings or what have you) and ultimately revealing they all stem from the same underlying moral awfulness that's been going on for a long time.

Now with your specific characters, from reading the White Wolf Forums posts, you seem to have (1) one who is none too nice to prostitutes (2) one who likes teenage girls a bit too much (3) one who's a recent immigrant from a 3rd World country. Now, since prostitutes are often underage new immigrants, you have one very, very easy way to link their personal problems together at a shot.

Wow, Sydney, what the hell is wrong with me that I didn't see that? :) Thank you. Hmm.

As to the hard-boiled fiction: I've read Chandler's The Postman Always Rings Twice and a couple of others whose titles I can't remember. They didn't really pop for me as novels for some reason. I could get through them and find stuff to enjoy in them but they didn't make me want to read the next page NOW, know what I mean? But I'm always open to new experiences.

Anyway, I take your point. I understand the tone there and will see if it feels right to employ it.

Oh, I hadn't read any of this stuff until Ron (I genuflect thrice) Edwards put me onto it as a potential model for RPG scenarios.

And the thought that struck me just after I hit "post": Turning what other people have suggested on its head, maybe the Weird Stuff that the PCs have been researching all this time really is bullshit, and the true horror lies in their personal backstories, without them even realizing it? Maybe all the tabloid nightmares are just a smokescreen put out by the Powers That Be so we don't notice that the real monsters are out there, running 14-year-old girls across the Mexican border to be sold as sex slaves....

My initial gut reaction was that the magazine has been funded by The Publisher (my notes for him in my "ideas" document are: The Publisher is a kindly, doddering and old, he's got an old-money Mid-Atlantic accent (like FDR).), who is a vampire that uses the magazine's slightly comical tone and obvious lack of journalistic thoroughness to aid the Masquerade (if they're still calling it that; I have yet to read Requiem, though I own it).

I'm a little squicked by that, because it reeks of the oWoD "Vampires control everything."

That may be mitigated somewhat by this being something that the co-executive-editors, a couple of ordinary mortal college buddies, started the magazine and run it, and The Publisher only came in after the fact and helped to upgrade the quality of the publication.

My good buddy Judd (Paka, here) was bothered by the whole "Vampires are really in control" aspect to this, too, and suggested that The Publisher might be a freaky old guy who had a caged vampire whose blood he used to power himself. I rather like that, but then the "keeping the real supernatural world quiet" impetus is punctured.

RobNJ wrote: My good buddy Judd (Paka, here) was bothered by the whole "Vampires are really in control" aspect to this, too, and suggested that The Publisher might be a freaky old guy who had a caged vampire whose blood he used to power himself. I rather like that, but then the "keeping the real supernatural world quiet" impetus is punctured.

Lisa, I like #3 especially.

Maybe The Publisher's victim is one who Done Wrong. I'm thinking he's old money, and maybe the family's influence is such that it can even sway the supernatural world. Perhaps he's the former Thrall to a vampire that was killed by his victim, and the Prince gave him this vampire as a reward.

RobNJ wrote: ...it reeks of the oWoD "Vampires control everything."

RobNJ wrote: Lisa, I like #3 especially.

Sydney Freedberg wrote: Yeah, that always annoyed me to. But there are two types of creature who ride a horse: Humans and fleas. One controls the direction; one just hangs on for the ride and sucks blood. If you imagine vampires and other supernatural nasties as lurking in the shadows, embodying our worst selves and the things we deny about our society -- in other words if you take them seriously not in power-political terms (Simulationist) but as walking metaphors (Narrativist) -- then they don't have to control everything. They don't even have to want to. "Go ahead, worry about your global conspiracies and your black helicopter," they say. "Here's a nice tabloid to keep you busy. Meanwhile we're happily smuggling and selling illegal immigrants, right in your neighborhood, and taking 10 percent off the top to eat."

Rob,
Mostly this is a `what Chris and Sidney said', but there's one additional point I want to sneak in: The kickers you have posted so far are "safe". They keep a clear distance between the characters' cores and the supernatural. If what you're looking for is not blood-and-gore horror but gnaws-at-your-soul horror, then you must cross that distance (Chris' Lovecraft examples all do this).

Now, if you want to tie stuff together, you've got a beautiful 1-2 setup. The characters get involved on their "safe" kickers and then later (with the revelation of the tie-together) it turns out that things aren't safe at all, that they are in beyond any hope of getting out.

Let them play for a bit in the safe mode, getting to know the PCs and geting to care about some NPCs and then reveal the tie-in. This should directly impact both the PCs and the cared-about NPCs.

Actual Play example: a PC of mine recently got to kill one of her daughters as the daughter had turned into a vampire. That daughter had been on the stage for several sessions before this happened, so not only the PCs, but the players had gotten to know her and like her. That has an impact. (and not just on me: the player of the PC who helped my character hunt down the daughter is an experienced Vampire: the Masquerade player and he said afterwards that that was easily the most horrific vampire scene he'd ever been in.) That the PCs cared about the daughter was crucial for the story, but that the players cared about her was crucial for the horror of it.

SR
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Rob Carriere wrote: The kickers you have posted so far are "safe".

Rob,
By "safe" I mean that they involve the characters and force some action out of them, but they do not threaten the characters' sense of self. It doesn't really matter whether they are dangerous in an action-adventure sense, it matters that they will allow the character to resolve the kicker one way or the other and walk away the same person they were before. That's incompatible with the kind of horror I described. In that kind of horror there must be a threat to the indentity of the person. Lovecraft's heroes have the choice between walking out on the story (they hope) or going mad. That sort of thing.

And I think the kickers you have are just fine and dandy.

The reason is that unsafe kickers won't work until there's been time for the players to get attached to various characters, PC and NPC. So you need a bit a of breathing space at the start (again, read the Lovecraft stuff and look at his use of tempo). The kickers will give you that.

Then, when all is nicely in motion, you drop the safeties and show them how it all dreadfully fits together.

Technically, I suppose that would make those second-stage things Bangs, not Kickers. Whatever the name, you could ask the players to come up with the tie-in revelation(s) or you could spring them as suprise(s). Depends on the kind of game you (plural) prefer.

SR
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So the Kickers may be safe, but the "meaning" I impart to them can make them non-safe, yes?

To interject here for a moment about Kickers:

Kickers will only ever take on their meaning, which is to say their "grab" factor in the emotions/interest of everyone who's participating, during play.

How the Kicker is written should help this to happen, but the details of how it does that will vary greatly, from group to group.

The simplest cases are (a) interesting and provocative Kicker + illuminating and inspiring play; (b) boring and blah Kicker + standstill and blah play. However ...

In group #1, someone may write an astounding and fascinating Kicker and then ... nothing happens about it, or in an engaging way, during play itself. The player shot his wad in the writing and all is over.

In group #2, someone may write a boring and blah Kicker, and then during play, it takes off like a rocket with everyone all excited. Some kind of cue or input during play (sometimes I talk about "spiking" Kickers) turned it into what it was supposed be.

There is no way, just from looking at the text of Kickers, to know what will happen. I do recommend inspiring written Kickers, but there are no guarantees.

Best,
Ron

Ron, do you regard Kickers that involve the character's background as necessary to be inspiring? Or do ones which are "merely" interesting although not explicitly about the character or his history have the ability to be inspiring?

Hi Robin,

I have seen any concrete event or realization be an effective Kicker - the only requirement is that both the player and GM were honestly jazzed to see it become important in play (and therefore would play the character accordingly).

I often advise people to establish some certainty about this "honest jazzing" through communicating with one another about it.

Since many role-players are trained in way that I can only describe as "anti-Kicker," my advice often takes the form of writing a Kicker which is absolutely explicit and very clearly connected to the player-character's background and various ethical dilemmas.

That is not definitional. A Kicker can be as vague and seemingly disconnected to the character-as-written as an ordinary morning which ends, "and then my cat told me, in plain English, that my fly was unzipped!"

This is a suitable Kicker because there's really no way to react neutrally to such an event. However, whether this is a good Kicker depends entirely on whether the real people involved, i.e. player and GM, take the ball and run with it, in terms of Humanity and other features of the game (talking about Sorcerer).

You know your players, and I don't. You know, relative to a given piece of player-written text you're looking at, whether [insert name of player here] will take the ball (which is to say, whatever you as GM do with that text) and run with it or not. As long as the answer is "yes," then all is well.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: You know your players, and I don't. You know, relative to a given piece of player-written text you're looking at, whether [insert name of player here] will take the ball (which is to say, whatever you as GM do with that text) and run with it or not. As long as the answer is "yes," then all is well.

Perhaps the characters are having what appear to be different and unrelated supernatural experiences... but they're just hallucinating. Maybe there's a supernatural cause, or maybe they've been exposed to something that causes vivid delusions at unpredictable times.

The implication would be that whatever's causing the problem would be responsible for most claims of supernatural events.