I spent three hours with him in his bright cell, and he whispered things that were not to be believed.
As I left he bellowed his hoarse screams at lights-out.
That night, I couldn’t help but dream of them—formless in the light and donning gruesome shapes in the darkness. My restless sleep disturbed my wife. When she asked, I told her what I dreamt of; what he had told me.
As I sat in traffic, the morning sun dancing off of the cars in the opposite lane, I struggled to see be-neath them. Between asphalt and engine, in the shadows, something moved.
At the office, leaping from the patch of sunlight on my desk, it took form in the shade beneath. I could not bring myself to approach it.
What had the madman’s whispers done to me? And my god, what terrible knowledge have I passed on to my wife?
57
college, and why didn’t you get your degree in it? What musical instrument do you regret never learning to play? What do you It is always a good idea
to ask about the fears characters might have, but in a game with insanity as a theme these fears will tend to be more irrational. “What do you fear that most people don’t?” “What happens during your commute to work that terrifies you daily?”
“What are most people afraid of that you are obliv-ious towards?”
If the story holds opportunities for people to be driven insane, you should also ask about what predilections and defenses these characters have.
“Is there a history of madness in the characters’
family?” “Why did you spend those two months committed to an asylum when you were in high school?” “How has what you witnessed in the war hardened you?”
The two easiest ways to incorporate insanity into your stories is to base events on the triggers for the quirks written into the questionnaires and to center the story on a horror which is incomprehensible to the human mind.
In the first case, take some time to explore the ques-tionnaires thoroughly before you put the finishing touches on your story notes. Did the players cre-ate any fears or compulsions for their characters?
What about addictions? Was the character mentally stable, or would a bit of nudging in just the right direction tip them away from sanity?
Perform the cheapest sort of pop psychology on the characters. Narcissists, self-loathers, sadists, and masochists abound—it just takes a little reading between the lines. Once you think you’ve found a crack in the character’s psyche, pry it open. Plan events that will exploit and magnify these parts of their personalities. Layer this over the normal
Madness and the Questionnaire
Mad Game • Mad Host • Mad Questions • Mad Story • Belief levels of stress in a Dread tale, and there should be no trouble pushing these characters to the brink of sanity.
The second type of story follows in the footsteps of authors like H.P. Lovecraft and Algernon Black-wood. In these stories, the threat posed to the char-acter’s mental health is as potent, if not more so, than the threat to their physical self. You will want to use things such as alien gods that defy logic in their physical form and psychologically are to hu-mans as we are to gnats. Even beholding such crea-tures tears at the fabric of the human mind, making them the perfect nemeses in stories of madness.
Take a look at the supernatural horror chapter again. Many of those tips will surely apply to these stories as well. Be sure to come up with a few il-logical and contradictory descriptions before the game, so you are not at a loss in the heat of the moment. Emphasize the insignificance of humans before these entities—that is where the horror lies.
You will also find that isolation will not be much of a problem. Who would believe the characters?
Even if anyone did, what could they possibly do to help?
The Power of Belief Strong, powerful faith in a religion or philosophy can help characters deal with witnessing things that would other-wise drive them mad. Alternately, it could drive them fur-ther and furfur-ther into the insulated world of their belief.
When you have a character whose questionnaire indicates they have a strong belief, you may have to deal with their pulls differently. Instead of pulling to avoid going insane, they might be pulling to avoid slipping further into this belief. For the most part, it is safer for players to reject these pulls—at least in the beginning. They may fall to their knees and recite the Lord’s Prayer in an attempt to drive off the unspeakable. While this may be useless, at least it isn’t as counter-productive as tearing your own hair out.
Eventually, however, it should catch up to them. Any be-lief held strongly enough can begin to feel like madness.
Madness and the
Story
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Chapter 8: Madnessfeel people notice first about you and how do you de-emphasize it? How often do you make something up rather than respond The trouble with
mad-ness is that it can be-come boring. It can have a crippling effect on how the characters view the reality of the story. If you narrate the game as if the players see and experience the world just as their insane characters would, the players can no longer trust the reality they are offered. When players can’t trust the story’s reality, they can lose interest in it.
Allowing the player to see what is going on with-out the taint of their character’s madness and then making them pull if they want their character to act on such information can prevent this. In essence, the pull represents a moment of clarity for the char-acter. This way, the character is still insane, but the player can enjoy the game as the others do.
Likewise, many characters will have unusual or obsessive com-pulsions, or even everyday addic-tions. Whenever the players want their characters to resist these compulsions and addictions, ask for a pull. Some only need to pull when in the presence of a trigger, such as needing to lock a door three times, while others will need to pull at a set frequency.
Recovering addicts take things one day at a time, and often an hour at a time. Play it by ear—if it seems like the character would be tempted or compelled, ask for a pull or make them play it out.
For the stories that contain crea-tures and secrets humans were
not meant to know, you can ask for a pull simply to gaze upon such ineffable horrors. These pulls work much like similar pulls described in the gore and supernatural chapters. Characters of the play-ers who refuse to pull can be frozen in horror or awe, reduced to a temporary catatonic state, or sent fleeing in gibbering terror until they are far enough away to regain their senses. It is typical of this par-ticular genre to have characters suffer from more permanent mental stress, usually in the form of mild paranoia, phobias, or neuroses accompanied by premature aging, shaky nerves, and the like.
Of course, madness—uncontrollable, raving mad-ness—is a wonderful way to remove a character once the tower has fallen.
Madness and the
Tower
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“I don’t know” to a question? What are you planning on doing for income if your business fails? What does your fiancé call
M
orality and horror are bosom buddies from the very beginning. No part of the horror we enjoy today is untouched by our common concepts of morality. When the Pu-ritans landed in the colonies, they saw within the dark woods demons and devils waiting to tempt and torture those weak of faith and moral struc-ture. Over 350 years later, promiscuous camp coun-selors are regularly and graphically torn apart in dark woods on the silver screen. The social mores of a culture are often blatantly reflected in the hor-ror they tell, and this makes them excellent tools for the host.Moral themes in stories can take several differ-ent forms. They could be presented as a clear-cut allegory. In this case, the story literally has a moral to it and any character who defies this moral will suffer for it. Designing
Mad Tower • Moral Game • Moral Story
these stories involves creating tests for the charac-ters with the moral in mind. The tests are usually in the form of temptation, with those who succumb to it perishing in gruesome ways.
Many slasher flicks are classic examples of these.
People are seemingly slain at random, but usually in the order of who the audience disapproves of most. So you’ll find the self-centered, cowardly, or mean-spirited perish early in the film, followed by the promiscuous and weak willed. The “tests”
that occur in these stories take the form of how selfless the character is during times of stress and what the characters choose to do when they are unaware of any danger. Rarely do the tests seem predetermined nor do they appear to directly cause the characters’ deaths. As far as the plot is concern, they appear to only be coincidence.
Many stories from classic TV shows and comic books like The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt are moral allegories by nature. In these, the plot of