This Halloween, my fellow gamers are expecting a creepy Little Fears game hosted by me, as they tend to think I'm the most disturbing person they know. I have two game ideas that I've been batting around, since I don't know which one I want to run.
After seeing "The Devil's Backbone" ("El Espinoza del Diablo"), I wanted to base a game on that. The movie takes place in Spain in 1939, at an orphanage that takes in children who were devastated by the civil war. The new kid, Carlos, is teased a bit, even more so after being assigned the bed that Santi, a boy whose death remains a mystery, slept in. Eventually, Carlos sees the ghost of Santi, and his frightened descriptions go unbelieved by the caretakers. I won't spoil the ending, but the death of Santi and the history of the orphanage become intertwined as the story unravels. The players would be the children in a similar orphanage during WWII, but I don't really want to run a game back then. It would make it more interesting, but I have a bad feeling about doing that. If I could run it modern day, it would take place in Texas during the mid 1990's, but I lack information on children's homes in these times (seeing as we have CPS and all).
The other idea takes place in a suburban neighborhood in September 2002. The players all know Mikey, a boy that lives not too far from them. His mother recently died during the summer in a car wreck, and since then Mikey's father has become a raging alcoholic, but it's only know to Mikey. Soon, it becomes apparent that not only booze is consuming his dad. Close to the beginning of October, all of the kids have a sleep-over at Mikey's house. Despite Mikey's protest to the idea, they spend the night anyways. In the middle of the night, the kids wake up due to a rhythmic sound in the kitchen. To their horrifying surprise, they see Mikey in a dress being graphically and sexually abused by what appears to be his father. In the creature's eyes, the players see a glimpse of something dark and wicked dwelling inside. If they survive that night, the next morning the kids propose to tell someone about what they saw. Mikey and his dad, as with any real-life abuse situation, deny anything and everything. Quickly, the children see that there is more than one beast out in the community as the teen across the street becomes dramatically violent to neighborhood kids and pets. Morbidly mutilated dogs show up in lawns and mailboxes, and Marie, a seven year old girl down the block, is found dead with her face removed and genitalia cut out. Sooner or later, the kids take it upon themselves to rescue Mikey from his haunted household and to silence the demon that resides in Mikey's dad and the teen across the street.

I don't see why you couldn't move the film's elements to modern Texas. Unless your players are familiar with child protective services, it's not necessary to be faithful about that aspect.

BTW, The Devil's Backbone is set in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, not WWII.

--JB

Pardon me for butting in again. I'm not really familiar with Little Fears, but if it doesn't have to be the shattering of suburban dreamland, you could get a good deal of mileage out of Mexican children with their families trying to get into the USA. For the kids, INS agents could be very monstrous, and the detention camps they might end up in would be no fun at all, either. That could give you the kind of refugee situation you see in the movie you're sourcing.

--JB

The problem with both these scenarios is that there is one protagonist. Whereas likely you will have multiple players. Which means that at best all you can hope for is "Scooby-doo" protagonism, that being where the PCs only help the charactr with the issue.

What I would do is go with the orphanage scenario, and make the kids all newly arrived orphans who are all assigned to the bay where "it happened" (and of course has been left unoccupied til now). You still get the particular horror of the one kid who has to sleep in the bed, but perhaps the apparition can appear to all of them.

Still, you get the same problem, however. They are just helping the dead boy.

A lot of LF adventures seem to get arranged around this idea of helping some third party kid. There never should be a third party. The kids should be the ones being threatened. As such, that means that in the orphanage scenario, that whatever happened to the dead kid should also threaten the new kids. So, if it was an agent of the boogeyman that did it, he will be an worker at the orphanage who has access to the kids. The ghost kid then becomes an asset in helping to figure out the danger before it's too late.

But the kids must be directly threatened. I going to go out on a limb here and say that this is crucial to how LF works.

I can really see this as an extended campaign, BTW. Once the orphans dispatch the boogyman, they can try to deal with the deaths of their parents, or their abandonment issues through fighting other minions that come in through the janitors closet. Everything in sepia tones. Very cool LF setting.

Mike