Well, this is a bigger project than what I've posted. It... started off as one of those challenges I take now and then to retool another system better... well, I got an idea and suddenly I went "woah" and jumped at turning it into something I could be really proud of. My first stab at designing narrativist style, which I'm going to have to say is one that I'm the least familiar with in actual play. But, hell, this is a LARP system and I've never even played in a damn LARP. Whether or not that's really damaged my design is up to you, I guess. I have good second-hand experience, but that's all. My second-hand experience tells me the specific referee/player ratio I demand will be the biggest problem, but I can't even imagine a way around that with Narrativism. In the end, it's really just an elaborate attempt to create Narrativism in a LARP, and I just took the best stab I could.

There's a section about rape in there, and I'll be fair... it's the only solution that I could think of that fit. It think it's best that I cover such a subject alot better than not covering it though, or only giving it a few words. From my experience it's been the touchiest social contract bit, and I can only hope the way I touched on it will help things.

There might be a few loose references to now non-existant bits of rules and some words that are Capitalized some places but not elsewhere.

SHADOWS

life as a mere non-existent and how sex can slow the rot in your heart

A Live Action Roleplaying Game

What Shadows Is
Shadows is a live action roleplaying game. A roleplaying game is many things, in this case it’s a game where players represent characters in order to try and create emotional, intense stories. Referees will try to help shape the story, trying to heighten the intensity and act as the miscellaneous supporting roles to the player’s characters (these supporting roles are called NPCs, for Non Player Characters). A live action roleplaying game means, instead of the traditional setup (three to five players and a referee sitting around a table), instead there are many people, who are walking around, perhaps dressing up, pretending to be their characters.

This game is a little different than most LARPs because the emphasis of the game attempts to bring about a self contained community of individuals who will create story for each other. This requires a bit more support than most games, so for every three players or so, there should be one referee. In a LARP of thirty people, seven to eight should be referees. Also, while perhaps there should be a one or two referees that take care of important tasks like advertising and scheduling for the game (especially the important task of booking and preparing wherever the game takes place), the referees should not be generally unequal when it comes to running the game and empowering the player’s story.

If you want to dress up for Shadows, shop at Amvets. Wear old ill fitting clothing with holes and patches. Smell like a beggar. Don’t brush your teeth. Don’t shave. Don’t wear make up. Knit caps and old fingerless gloves are a must. Carry your things in a trash bag.

Welcome to the city streets, and waking up screaming every morning…

A Note on Sex
A tough bit, but anyone playing this game should know it’s just what it is; a game. There’s no real sex going on at any LARP and every activity that occurs in play is purely imaginative. It’s a LARP, so supposedly people walk around a bit more and wear sillier clothing than the regular tabletop games, but that’s the whole extant of such pampered nonsense. The real difference is just that there’s more players and referees than a tabletop game. Explore the wide wonders of sexual relationships, but remember you’re doing it in a make-believe manner.

That’s also a warning. If that previous paragraph made you nervous, stop reading now. Sex is going to happen a lot, no matter who your character is.

The Visions of Shadows
Shadows are unfortunates and fortunates, awoken to a new destiny and a new world. Their eyes have been opened, but in being opened, their eyes are blinded by madness and prophecy. They begin to exist on a level of dreaming and visions that makes their interaction with normal people hard and generally fruitless. Horrors, monsters who romp in the dark, seek to spread their blood across the alleyways. The Order, a mysterious conspiracy watches with hidden eyes. The shadows draw power from their past life, but also from the few tangible moments of humanity gained in a warm embrace of another shadow.

Shadows suffer from visions, which makes them act insane and hard to understand by normal mortals. They are able to reshape reality to their will, although at the cost of having a normal life. They are essentially stuck in cities, unable to leave because the visions keep taking right back to where they began. They were once normal people, maybe a little weird sometimes, and one day they woke up from a really bad dream… and they weren’t in their usual bed. Some wake up in someone else’s bed, someone else’s apartment, but that someone else never returns and so the shadow just goes on living there. Others, they wake up in an alleyway, or in a sewer. It’s always in a city. Who becomes a shadow? Anyone. High schoolers, businessmen, housewives, college professors, car thieves, and once it happens, it’s apparently permanent. Some say that they remember wishing for something happening, that they were stuck in a place in life that they could not be dislodged from. For such people it is bliss to become as free as a shadow, for others it is a hellish imprisonment.

Visions are what sets the shadows aside from everyone else, every shadow will agree. The ability to directly change reality is minor compared to this. The visions make it impossible for shadows to interact with normal mortals; shadows will automatically begin displaying a mental quirks and physical ticks, which just makes the normals back off immediately. I don’t care how kind and understanding a normal is; they’re going to take one look at you and walk quickly away. It’s best not to blame them, it’s not their fault. It’s the visions, those nasty dreams that you wake from every morning.

In your sleep, the dead and the forgotten talk to you in the voice of god, and when you awake (hopefully in the same place you went to sleep), you generally only have impression of what happened. In the visions, the world is exposed, and inconceivable demands are made on the human soul. Sometimes, you’ll get bad impressions about some other shadow you’ve met, sometimes you’ll wake up feeling like you want to go find them and tell them you’re deepest secrets. Visions will try to lead you into doing stuff, and they will get worse the more you lose control. If you become really reckless, the visions will start forcing strange unwanted actions on you.

The first vision is what turns you into a shadow. No on really knows why it happens, or what makes it happen. You get moved, somehow. How? It just happens. And then your old life is over, and your new life as a shadow begins.

The Order is a strange organization which attempts to control shadows behind the scenes. Their own members are shadows whose visions have been focused inwards in a not entirely understood way. They have convinced themselves that they are separate from mankind, a different breed, not actually more advanced, but with the ability to protect mankind from the horrors and from the rogue shadows. They maintain order among the largely faction less shadows, largely as single sleeper agents. You will never know whose really a member of the Order; although paranoid people tend to watch other shadows, trying to see if they still suffer from visions. Believe me, you can’t tell from watching, although now and then someone will start a witch hunt and a couple of innocent shadows get beaten up by a mob.

Sometimes, you’ll find places where conflicts of reality have been fought, leaving an impression of power and strangeness. Shadows gravitate to these areas, which tend to be in out of the way spots, hard to find for normal humans unless they’ve been there before. Horrors like to gather here, too, unfortunately.

Horrors? They are the monsters of our existence, unknowable entities with backwards mindsets and a general desire for violence. Some believe they might be some sort of twisted spirit, others wonder if they are instead figments of imagination turned to reality. A few horrors are “friendly” and claim to live among humans (more successfully than the shadows) while others are little more than beasts, dangerous predators who will kill unwary shadows. “Friendly” horrors, though, may be setting a trap or trying to make you agree to some nasty agreement. Overall, the best idea is to stay away unless you need something from them bad. More often than not, you’ll find yourself at the wrong end of a brutal attack by one of these beasts. If you have to face up against a horror, then I wish you all the luck you need. Sometimes, it might be best to figure out some way of dealing with them that doesn’t involve actual fighting, if you don’t think you’re likely to win in a straight battle.

Mortals are just another word for everyone who ain’t a shadow or a horror. Just that, normal people. They can’t see horrors, or if they can, they ignore all the warning signs. When they meet us, though, we get all weird and shaky and soon enough they’ve walked away and forgotten all about us. That’s the nice thing, really; no one sees us and no one ever bothers us if we don’t bother them.

Character Creation
The character can be both experienced shadows and shadows who just had their first vision, or any range within there. The only shadows in the game should player characters, and the only player characters should be shadows. A character’s capabilities do not increase in play, as some players may be used to in other games.

Character biographies are, in general, unneeded and unwanted. A character is developed and becomes a person from actual play.

Control
Control is a simple number, all characters have ten. This number goes down during a session, as players use it to resolve actions. The most you can use in a single action is three, the least is zero. Realize this isn’t a purely natural or supernatural trait; Control represents both physical endurance, mental willpower and (especially when three points get used) using your ability to alter reality to help you succeed.

If you have zero Control left at the end of a session, you will wake at the start of the next session with a vision that gives you an order you can’t refuse. Once you have had to deal with one conflict related to the order, you no longer have to follow it.

Possessions of the Shadow
You can have an apartment, a pet or a job. It doesn’t really matter; just remember that shadows never have wealth, never have bank accounts, never have cars and never have jobs where they have to interact with anyone. The apartments they might have they keep because of some weird contract loophole (most shadows are homeless, though) and the food they get comes from handouts or food kitchens.

Lost Relationships and Shadow Relationships
The first is a list of three people that were directly important to you before your first vision. They do not need to be dead or alive, just having had a profound influence on your life. In each, write a few words about them, especially a few physical details (hair color, eye color, age, etc). Next to that entry, write the single event when you most wanted that relationship to be over (when they stole money from you, when they had an affair, when they wrecked your car, when they hit you so hard you ended up in the hospital). These are your lost relationships. They represent what you have truly lost in becoming a Shadow.

You can create new relationships (with the other shadows, who else?), but friendships don’t count. The only relationship that counts is sexual in nature, and it requires that the two characters have to keep having sex as long as they keep using that relationship for power. The less people that other person sleeps with, the more power you’ll be able to draw from the bond.

Some rules on shadow relationships:
1) Once you’ve drawn energy from that relationship, you have to sleep with them to renew the relationship. Lose a point of control every time you sleep with them.
a. You don’t have to lose that point of Control, in fact you can get one back and make the person you’re sleeping with lose two. All you have to do is for the two of you to get in a Tongue conflict. The winner chooses whether she will gain one or lose two, and the loser gets the other result. In a tie, both lose two Control.
2) Anyone you have a relationship with, or anyone who has a relationship with them is protected. You need to spend two points of Control to act against them in a conflict.
3) Even though it’s advantageous for you to have a lot of relationships to draw from, it’s not advantageous for you if those people have lots of relationships.
4) Player characters who you sleep with get to know how many relationships you have, and with who. Players write down that number next to your character’s name on their sheet.
5) You can’t use energy drawn from a relationship, if that person is in the Conflict or someone they have a relationship with is in that Conflict.
6) If that person dies, you erase that relationship on your sheet immediately upon finding this out.

Conflicts and Reality
What is a conflict? A conflict is when an event arises that a player (not a referee) wants to have happen differently. A conflict is an entire event, not just a single piece of it. If two characters ended up in a brawl with each other, their fighting, how each got wounded and how one ended up surrendered finally is all detail, just bits of a single conflict. Conflicts should never happen multiple times repetitively. One conflict would cover an entire scene in a play or movie, and would only involve two conflicts when what was being fought over changed and the participants individual desires change.

When a conflict is initiated, the objective of each player in the conflict should be openly declared. The referee must also declare his objective, whether it’s from the perspective of an NPC or not. This objective is important, because if that participant wins the conflict, that objective will succeed, no matter what. Declaring objectives may sometimes escalate, with each participant trying to raise the bar higher than when they first declared it. Generally, there is an upper limit; you can say your objective is to kill someone, but only one person per conflict. You can casually hurt several people, but never more than three at once. You can’t call for something to happen to a shadow who isn’t there for that conflict. There is, after all, another control on this: if a player calls for too dangerous of an objective, the more likely the other players will outbid them.

Can you change your objective once someone declares their objective? No. Thus, an order should be maintained: the player that asked for a conflict to be resolved, then going onwards alphabetically, according to that player’s last name.

Objectives don’t have to be the motive of the player character; especially when the motives of the player and the imagined motives of the player character are precisely opposite. They also don’t have to be physically possible; both drawing on relationships and Control represent the ability to change reality to some degree, so wanting things to happen that would be impossible or unlikely isn’t unreasonable at all. There are no restrictions on what you can ask for your objective. You should keep in mind you can’t change your nature as a shadow. You can’t leave the city, you can’t become something not human, you can’t make normal mortals understand or believe you.

Using Control and Relationships
Control represents a mix of things, which includes very basic reality alternation. Relationships are bonds that you can drain each day for power. This “power” is the ability to change reality, to cause things to happen that are unlikely or impossible. The shadows can draw on it, for all the good and evil it brings, but only when they end up in a conflict. It is in a conflict, in the heart of opposition, that the ability to remake the world is unlocked, called forth from your relationships with other people.

How to Resolve a Conflict
Every conflict happens between two players or a player and a referee. Referees have Control themselves to draw on. A conflict can have more than two people involved.

A player has ten Control, a referee has thirty-five. A player can’t use more than five in one conflict, a referee can’t use more than seven.

When a conflict is decided, the participant puts their hands behind their backs. When called, the two players draw their hands out, showing the number of Control they’re using. If they’re using none, they make a fist. If they’re using a relationship with a shadow to draw power, they make a ring with their fingers and thumb. If they’re using one of their lost relationships, they stick out just their pinky finger and thumb.

(Diagram showing this)

If just Control is used, then it’s easy; figure out who used the most. Highest succeeds at their goal, read the Narration section below.

If a shadow relationship is used, the player is considered as having five Control, minus the number of relationships the other person is in (the number you wrote down when you last had sex with them; yes, your own relationship with them is still counting as one). Once used, make a check mark next to the Shadow relationship. You need to renew it, by having sex with that person.

A lost relationship, from before your time as a shadow, is a source of the most power. If you use it, you automatically win that conflict (you tie with anyone else who does this). You are considered as having won by one point for the purposes of narration. You will need to cross off this relationship with a check mark next to it. The only way to renew it is two ways:
1) Destroy a shadow relationship. Find the person you have a relationship with (it might be already used up for power, just needs to be on your sheet) and then tell them you never want to see them again. You’ve given up any hope of being with them for the memory of this other relationship. The other shadow erases his relationship with you, and makes a line through one of his lost relationships (up to him which one). That lost relationship is now in the same jeopardy yours was.
2) Find the shadow that has the vision concerning this relationship tomorrow (next session). You have to force them to take you to come with you and do whatever it was they saw in their vision. This is always highly dangerous (to the person who had the vision) and reckless, and the person concerned will hardly ever know it was a vision concerning your memories. You will have to, in all likeliness, force and a threaten a person to do this for you. This person will always be person you don’t have a relationship with, but who someone you have a relationship does. If such a person doesn’t exist, then this option is not open to you.
If neither one of these two conditions are met by the end of the session after you drew on the lost relationship, that lost relationship is erased and you can never regain it.

Narration
Once a conflict has been decided, figure out by how many points the winner won by, compared to the second highest participant. This number of points, subtracted from five (so 5 – points) is the number of statements that each of the losers can make, regarding the conflict. They can’t subvert your objective, but they can put limitations on it. For instance, if you said you wanted to convince one of them that a terrible Horror was going to come up from the sewers soon, they could limit you in that once you say this, they decide to wait and kill it as a trophy instead of fleeing.

Once all the limitations have been declared, then the person who succeeded must narrate a conclusion to the conflict, including how he succeeded at his objective, how others failed theirs and working within the formerly stated limitations.

Ties
A conflict won with a tie will have each participant succeeding in his own objective. Those who lose will get to make a number of statements as if the winners had been one player, compared to the highest scoring loser (the normal five minus the number of points is used).

Killing a Shadow
“To kill the shadow Jason.”
“To have him die in an accident.”
“To leave her to die in the den of the Horrors.”

These are examples of objectives where the outcome is going to include the death of a player character. It needs to be said like this, this straight forward. You can’t say “I want to beat him up” or “I want to beat him in Chess” and then when you win narrate you want him dead.

A statement from a non-victorious player can’t contradict objectives. However, there is a backdoor open for shadows who fail in a lethal conflict: they can immediately draw on a lost relationship or immediately erase a shadow relationship in order to save themselves from this certain death (they can never regain erased shadow relationships). They must do this at the stage in the process of the conflict when they would declare limitations. They will survive the conflict, just barely.

Realize that due to the nature of conflicts, that’s it. You can’t keep forcing him into conflicts to kill him, he’s already survived the entire ordeal of almost getting killed. What comes next is dealing with the consequences of that attempt. (In other words, once you try to kill someone, you can’t try to kill them again until both of you have participated in another conflict that didn’t involve you trying to kill him).

What Referees Do
Referees act as their name implies; they are expected to have a better grasp of the rules than the players, and thus solve any disputes that come up. Their foremost function however, is not rules interpretation but instead reinforcing the central concepts and questions of the game. They do this through in two ways, through the visions handed at out the start of the game, and through events that take place at the start of the game.

Unlike some games, the referees in Shadows have a limitation on their control of the game’s story. They are expected to create controversies that lead to a player demanding a conflict to be resolved, so they are given fifty Control, and can use seven at most. NPCs (such as Horrors) never have relationships to use, so the referee has to decide carefully how to relegate Control in order to make the best conflicts and to still have enough so as not to run out of points at the end of the session.

This game is centered around a central dichotomy, a question that is meant to force reactions from the players. What’s more important, relationships from your old life or your new life? This is called the premise. Lost relationships must constantly be juxtaposed against shadow relationships. There’s not supposed to be a right answer to this question, or at least not one that anyone can say before playing the game. Referees aren’t supposed to aim towards a right answer, but instead direct events as to constantly keep players questioning whatever conclusions they have come to. These events (which include visions) should force sudden, intense answers to that question. They show who the character really is, what he is made of.

Has a player let one of their lost relationships lapse? Does it seem like a player isn’t bothering to make shadow relationships? Does a player do anything he can not to use relationships in conflicts? These are signs that Shadows is not being intense enough. Make the game tougher, or else the game will never be working at full speed. A player that seems to be powergaming, managing and manipulating the relationship system for all it’s worth, is doing exactly what he’s supposed to be doing. Hit that guy even harder than all the rest, because his work at using the system should be rewarded. There is no such thing as a rest in Shadows, the game should never hand out a free lunch.

Visions
Visions will occur every session, at the start of the session. They should be written on little cards, just a few sentences (unless the player gets a command). They should be written in order to make emotion, whether that emotion be absolute confusion, sadness, anger or fear.

How to do this? Well, first off, don’t try to write the player’s back story for him. Instead, try to focus on the things happening in the community. They don’t have to be real things that happened, maybe they’re seeing one of their shadow lovers and a hated enemy having sex. Or maybe a lover is killing someone from a lost relationship. Maybe it’s a vision of one of them getting killed by horrors. Maybe it’s just a nightmare, where some terrible monster cooks them for dinner. The great thing? None of this stuff has to be true, or actually has to happen. Events in play (see below) however will become reflections of the visions, with the visions being the result if things go really bad.

Here’s an example. Sandra (a shadow) is fucking her boyfriend back in her bedroom, when suddenly she realizes she’s in some trashbag filled alleyway fucking one of her shadow lovers, and her boyfriend is standing there at the mouth of the alleyway, watching her. He turns and walks away, and Sandra finds herself chasing after him, only to find his dead body. She wakes up that day, only to find her hands are stained with blood. So, that’s a vision. Of course, it’s based on knowing a little about the character in question, and remembering to stress the shadow/lost relationship dichotomy.

Commands are a little more difficult. First off, a referee whose player has drawn on a lost relationship has to see if there actually is anyone who suitable to give a command to (someone whose in a shadow relationship with the player’s lovers but not the player himself). Then, the low point event of the lost relationship drawn has to be stressed. Is it about the time the player character realized her husband had sold nude pictures of her over the internet? The time the player character was told by his girlfriend she had had an abortion? Well, now. That event, that betrayal or whatever has to be transferred to the Command, the quest the shadow who gets the vision will have to complete for the other shadow to get his lost relationship back. Think the most horrible ways to “play out” that event in game. For the pornography one, maybe the shadow who gets the command has to sell one of his lovers (another player character!) as a sex slave to the Horrors. For the abortion one, maybe the shadow has to gouge out his own sex organs with a knife, or they need to try to kill the youngest shadow in the game.

Whatever it is, it has to be nasty, and it should be tied into that player’s vision for the session. It has to be something they’d have to be forced at gunpoint to do, and maybe even when that happens. It never requires the shadow to kill themselves, but it should require some incredible act of savagery against another shadow, something that mimics and reflects whatever the worst low point was in the lost relationship drawn.

Referee Events in Play
Referees should be divided up so that each one has three players they interact with on a regular basis. Maybe one or two have two or four. Yes, this means that referees should constitute a fourth of the people coming to the game, but their role is simply too critical to running an intense game to ignore, and with larger numbers of players, the required preparation before each session and repertoire gained with the individual players becomes hard to cover totally. A close and personal interaction should be maintained between the referee and the players they take care of. They should know each other, and they should be people actually willing to become friends.

Much of shadows play may be individual scenes. At no time should the idea that players should “stick to a group” ever be considered. When not dealing with a referee, a player should seek out other players to interact with, in order to best manage their relationships. When dealing with a referee, however, it should be quite normal for the scene and story event being revealed to entirely involve a single player, being built to their personal and specific needs. Such times are their story, no one else. Other players are included as secondary characters, assisting as elements for comparison and contrasting to the central player character. A good referee will allow other players to watch the story and how the central player reacts, and give ways for the other players to express their responses and have a part in heightening the intensity.

These events should be open-ended, as described above they should force the question to the player in a way he can’t refuse to answer. Sudden, intense events take place, but the player will always have the ability to call for a conflict and get the chance to change the nature of the story in all respects. The shadows, for all their inability to go back to who they were, have immense power and should be expected to take control of their own destinies.

A referee should sometimes slant questions, but in such a way as not to reinforce whatever answer a player has already found. This should be especially done when a player has drawn on a lost relationship; a focus should immediately develop around the player as he has to decide if he wants to pay the price required in order to restore the lost relationship. His resulting actions, and how they ripple outwards into the community of shadows should gain the same focus. For example, if a player finds that he has to force another shadow to kill another shadow, in order to not lose the memory of his wife, he will see specters of his wife begging him to rethink, whether remembering her is really worth the life of another. If he decided not to do this, however, he should instead see specters of his wife begging him to do anything to remember her.

Once a referee has forced one of these “terrible questions of morals” (called a bang in Ron Edward’s Sorceror) on a player, the referee rotates to another player and gives them an intense individual scene as described above. The referee keeps moving about the players below him in this manner, and should generally aim for going through at least two such events with each player over the course of every several hour session. Each one should take twenty or thirty minutes to play through, but if the session is (for example) five hours long, you’ve got a few extra hours in there for events that take a little longer or for taking care of other things in play.

Here’s an example. You take the player, and you flashback to one of those events next to their lost relationships. Or maybe it’s some other event, like when they got married, had their first kid or had sex for the first time. Only, it’s like a videotape getting played over and over again, and a bunch of other shadows are there, as observers the NPCs can’t see. Sort of like a vision, except it’s happening in play, see? Maybe the player and his NPC wife keep getting into the same argument, over and over, and in one instance she walks out, another they make up, another she admits she’s been having an affair but he just wasn’t pleasing her. The player, he can change what’s happening, either he can try to just talk to the NPC or change reality. He’s got the power, through conflicts. And the other players? Talk to them before you do this. They become your agents, trying to twist the central player up. They need to make him uncertain what’s up and down, whether he wants to go back to his old life or not. Whether he wants to be a shadow or not. Try to explore why this lost relationship meant and means so much to him. Don’t try to head for some previously decided conclusion, just play it out and see what happens. If you want to try some neat things, maybe play through it several times, but each time something different happens.

In Play Events should be highly personal and specific. Draw upon who the player character is, what relationships they have and what they’ve done previously in game. Use all that information as a springboard for ideas. There’s no rules about what can and can’t happen in the world of the shadows, and there’s no rules about what shadows can’t make a conflict about to change. That lack of restrictions is pretty damn important. Oh, and one last thing: draw on the visions. Visions are a clue about what happens later, about the worst possible conclusion of an In Play Event.

Playing the Game and Making Life Hard
The most important of the referee’s jobs, however, is to make life intense. If players are not forced by the events of normal play to use their relationships (especially their lost relationships) then a good deal of what might have happened will never happen. This system is an attempt to create system of relationships that will quake and shudder under pressure, possibly eventually gaining its own momentum. This rippling of the relationships will create nasty moral events that the players should be well encouraged to participate strongly in. Referee planned events should be quickly paused, put on hold or even trashed if one of these events occur. Why is this? This is because they represent an emergent story, a result of player actions and system intertwining. If such events come to be the standard, occurring constantly, then referees will become supporters of the story, instead of providers. Think of spinning a ball on the ground, and then standing back to watch it spin. As the spinning begins to slow, you step forward and lightly touch it, maintaining it’s fast spin. Occassionally it will lose all velocity altogether, and then you have to get back to getting it to spin again. Shadows play aims for the game to enter that spin: where the In Play Events described above don’t need to be given anymore, and visions augment the story that emerges from the intense nature of the game.

That intensity, however, will require dead characters. Relationships has to be essential to survival, so there has to be something you actually need to survive against. Generally, this threat will need to come from referee-created events, although if a witch hunt or some sort of mass lynching starts, where players attempt to kill other players, then this becomes highly I suggest greatly you try to kill characters at every point. Someone goes walking out alone? They get tagged teamed by Horrors. Someone has a gathering? The Order shows up and starts shooting randomly. If a player isn’t at one or zero Control and has drawn on most of their relationships at the end of every session then the referees are not being tough enough. That said, it’s almost always possible to stop yourself from getting killed in this game, it’s just whether or not you want to pay the price.

In that same vein, encourage it when players try to kill each other. Smart players will set up tough successive conflicts to drain their target of all his relationships (spread across a session), before finally declaring they want to go for the kill in a conflict. Let this happen. It’s using the system in a smart way, and any target will have to be smart not to fall for the trap. Plus, it’s getting players to do the dirty work for you.

If you’re trying to kill people, occasionally someone won’t like this. They’ll begin to become non responsive, sort of shell-shocked from all the intensity. Or maybe they’ll begin to complain the game is getting too nasty, too shocking, too melodramatic, too violent, too cool for them. Fuck them. This game doesn’t try to hide what it’s about. Play and enjoy it, or don’t play at all. If you’d rather have a game about playing with Barbie dolls where nothing bad happens and people never act nasty to each other, then go play that game. This game isn’t like that. If they get killed (almost impossible unless they wasted all their lost relationships, see Endgame below) and don’t want to make a new character, then they’re just an unfortunate necessity of having to prove the intensity of the game. Making new characters in this game shouldn’t take a long time. Fill out the sheet, ignore whatever sort of reflexive urge you have to create a bio, and get back into the groove.

Horrors and Their Use
Horrors as bringers of death are probably one of the ways referees will use Control the most. Horrors can also provide another use, acting as the sort of NPC the players will interact with the most (due to inability to truly interact with normal mortals). Horrors will always have bizarre nightmarish forms, although not too much should go into describing such creatures; leave them in the shadows with only a few features sticking out. They will try to be many things to the shadows, including confidantes and connivers. If some miscellaneous task, however amiable, needs to be committed by an NPC, a referee should choose a horror. The Order should be infrequently met and badly understood, the normals should be unable to comprehend the players, but horrors have few restrictions if any on them as plot devices. Shadows should always be weary of them and expect antagonism, but there’s no reason that the horrors have to be directly antagonist; they can instead do so subtly and vaguely, acting as the referee’s tool in bringing about terrible and difficult revelations.

If you as a referee have a few horrors attack some characters hanging out together, then give their character sheets a check first. If some of them have a lover in common whose there, attack that person. If that shadow dies, all of them lose that relationship, so all of them will try to protect him. Or, have the horrors all look just like their lost relationships (or maybe they are their lost relationships…). That said, there’s nothing wrong with making it just a battle. Deadly conflicts will make the game intense just by the nature of the system the players have to use to survive.

The Order and Its Members
The Order has its place in the game, acting as the antagonists whose motives and methods are largely unknown, and whose existence in the player population isn’t impossible, creating the possibilities for player witch hunts.

Referees should always be on the look out for players who seem too interested in the Order for their own good, or a player who constantly draws on lost relationships. Such individuals should be approached by an NPC member of the Order, and offered a deal: meeting a person from their old life in exchange for completing a mission.

The mission is handed out at the same times as visions at the start of the session, on a card marked Directive. This card is an instant +6 points in a conflict where the state objective is the declared objective. This objective should always be something particularly nasty that has to happen to another shadow who is their lover, and has to occur that session. Maybe trying to kill them, maybe using some magic talisman to suck away a lost relationship, whatever. Strain and pressure should be placed on the player; doing this task should not be easy physically or morally, and perhaps he will decide the price is too great and not do it at all. Doing it or not doing it should be the player’s imperative. The NPC Order member from before should meet him halfway through the session (if the player hasn’t already filled out the objective by that point), and declare that if the player decides not to do it, then the Order will have to fill out the objective themselves. What the player does now is up to him, he is the one who brought this trouble down on his own head.

Killing a member of the Order before they get their objective or can get into a situation where they can declare it is important. Thus, as soon as the new Order member is ordained, the session before he gets his objective, two shadows who aren’t lovers of that player must be approached by NPC Horrors and told that a member of the Order exists among the shadows, bidding his time. With any hope, a witch hunt will be organized, and something interesting will happen, especially if the player of the Order member is now working to stop NPC Order member from fulfilling the objective.

If the Order member should succeed, he will happen to come upon one of his lost relationships (ask him which one he wants to meet) on the street. They will be frightened and seem not to recognize them. If asked, they will say they never knew the player. What a player does next is up to him. When it is over, this meeting effectively will restore a drawn lost relationship or give you a second chance at drawing on it (this second draw is lost after its use).

If he should kill this person he used to know, then he will retain the lost relationship (and the extra charge, if he gets it), but lose it forever once all charges are gone. After this meeting, that player will be alienated from the rest of the shadow community most likely (if anyone knows about him having been the Order member). The Order will never approach him, and if somehow he should ask one of them why, they will respond that he’s a security risk now.

Dealing with Normal Mortals
They represent the second part of the important equation that fuels play, the normal everyday mortals who represent everything the shadows have lost. Ultimately, the fact of the matter is that these people can’t understand shit about the shadows. They’ll understand the words coming out of their mouth, but they won’t be very attentive (they’ll be paying more attention to how much your hands are shaking, or how bad you smell) and they certainly as hell won’t believe you.

This is the one part of the game that demands defeatism. There is nothing, no conflict, no power, that can help you in this. The players are a closed community, and ultimately can only turn to one another for companionship. And that gets to be the question doesn’t it? Who do you like better: the clean, nonviolent folk who don’t really listen or like you, or the violent dirty folk who will love and hate you with a passion?

Locations Within A Game and Hanging Out
Within a game, the referees should designate areas where the players can hang out. Alleyways, closed down subway stations, run down building, whatever. These won’t exist in reality, they’ll probably be just some room with “Subway Station” on cardboard. They’re the forgotten places, a little twisted by the power and conflicts fought there, and normals don’t find these places too easy.

Players should feel free to hang out here at any time, and such activities should only occasionally be punctuated by attacking horrors (find some other place to attack them referees, these places should be mostly safe). They’re places for players to meet up with each other, for them to discuss what’s happened to them and what they’re thinking. Dark questions about their existences should be asked. Players should remove themselves for a a minute or so as they go to fuck in a dark alleyway in order to renew a drawn shadow relationship.

End game
The game should end, at some point. No game of Shadows should go on forever. No character of Shadows should last forever. When you start a game, the referees should agree on a date, on a time when they’ll finish the game. New characters shouldn’t be accepted after several sessions before that time when end game comes around. When end game is reached, the shadows should each get narrated to some ending that is personally satisfying; being returned to their old lives if they’ve stayed faithful to their lost relationships, with everyone else perhaps finding themselves in some deserted land where they can exist as a community as they did in the city. If two players have been very faithful in their shadow relationship to each other, then perhaps they find themselves waking up in a house owned by both of them. A player that has lost and thrown away their shadow relationships and lost relationships wakes up from the worst of nightmares to find himself having become a horror.

Sometimes, a character will reach their own end game. This is similar to a character dying, except it occurs when a player has decided that the premise, for the character, has been answered. Perhaps they’ve run out of all relationships, run out of all lost relationships or perhaps managed to completely alienate themselves from the community of shadows. When this has happened, the player character isn’t really fit for play, and the player has answered his premise through his actions, more or less. The player decides the personal story for the character has ended. As described above, some sort of suitable ending must be found.

Keep the Sex and the Visions flowing!

For those who need to know my take on an important issue that may come up in the game, please read on.

A Note on Rape
I can’t get away from writing this bit. Thing is, I don’t see it as impossible some player character may very well do this in play. Is it a problem? Well, it’s not supposed to be a nice game, after all, it’s largely about how the sexual relationships that people have after leaving home change their view of the relationships they had before (yeah, that’s what it’s supposed to be about). Sometimes, a character gets frustrated, angry and desperate. And when the system makes sex a requirement to survive, well, the result is never going to be pretty. I’m not awarding it (without penalty) and I’m not condoning it. It isn’t nature, but instead humans falling to the things that make them animals, and not using the twenty pound mound of brain matter on their shoulders. Players whose characters are victimized, well, this isn’t a pretty game. This game is going to explore issues, and I’m not going to act surprised if issues some people don’t want explored come up. Don’t play this game if you aren’t willing to discuss it out in game terms. There’s no damn touching, there’s no damn describing. Everything that happens is just make-believe. Referees should merely do their best to differentiate between harassment of a player, and an event that occurs entirely within a make believe narrative. Sadly, it may not be easy to tell.

So, I’m going to give it rules, in order to ensure that play doesn’t come to screeching halt when it comes up and (surprise!) everyone isn’t entirely weirded out by it and unable to talk plainly. This will probably be a rare event.
1) The victim automatically wins conflicts against the rapist after this. You wanted them this bad, and you sprung a backdoor in your head wide open for them. Your life is no longer your own, and you’ll be draining relationships just to keep alive probably. If the two end up in a conflict together but with other players, then the victim will always have one more than whatever the rapist bids or whatever the victim bids themselves (whichever is higher).
2) The rapist does get a relationship, which counts for six points. That relationship gets erased after he draws on it. Even if the victim has sex with him a hundred more times, willingly or unwillingly, he’ll never have a relationship that matters with that person.

When rape comes up, just always remember to handle the consequences. Violation of body comes with a price, for both rapist and victim. Deal with the nastiness that arises, keep the focus on that. Try to work that in with the premise. Instead of letting it kill the game, use it to fuel the events in game. Juxtapose the betrayal the rape represents with the betrayals and treacheries of the lost relationships.