”No!” Dr. Nesbit’s voiced crackled over the radio as he placed himself between my pulse rifle and the hostile coiled around the Lieutenant.
The lights flickered again, and my breath turned to frost against the visor of my hardsuit. Another airlock must have been forced open.
“Out of the way, Doc. The LT doesn’t need you now,” Sarge barked.
The Doc turned his back to us as he approached the Lieutenant, “There is so much to learn from it.
We must communicate with it—“
“I plan to communicate plenty with this here rifle. Now move it, Doc,” Bergensen chimed in.
I sidestepped for a clear shot. That was when the hostile wrenched the Lieutenant’s head all the way around, so that his glazed eyes were staring at me. His mouth worked up and down like a mari-onette’s, but I couldn’t hear anything.
Then, softly, over the radio as the Doc got so close, his helmet was practically touching the Lieuten-ant’s face, I heard it: “Come closer, child. Closer now.”
Morality and the
Story
60
Chapter 9: Moralityyou in bed? On what bill are you several months delinquent? Who did you see at the supermarket last week, despite having the story revolves around a single test of a tragic
flaw. Usually the character is driven to achieve something: fame, wealth, women, immortality, power, or other classic goals. This makes the char-acter toy with something one should never toy with: mad science, pacts with the devil, séances to contact the dead, and the like.
The plots of these allegories should be fairly straightforward. You can spend your first two acts piecing together what is done to pursue the sinister goal, and have it all go wrong at the beginning of the third.
Conversely, you can wrap a story around a moral dilemma. Instead of a black and white answer, the characters have to muddle through the messy grays. For this sort of game, you can dig through the questionnaire for ideas about how to place two moral imperatives at odds with each other. Do the characters save the child of one of their own, or the lives of thousands of strangers’ children? If they let the man who killed their father live, he may discover a cure for cancer. Can they kill the knife-wielding maniac now that they have captured her and she begins to act like a child again?
In these games, you may wish to make a note or two about pulls you will demand. If you know that the characters will face a difficult decision, and one solution would never sit well with certain charac-ters, then make sure you make a note of when and why you think they might have to pull to overcome the power of their own conscience.
Look to the players to find which morals to exploit in your tale. Use the questionnaire to ask about the morality of their characters: “Who is your hero?” “What is the one thing you regret doing for love?” “With all the lives your projects have ruined, how do you justify what you do for a living?”
Find where the characters learned their mor-als: “What is the most important lesson you ever learned, and who taught it to you?” “Why have you rejected the faith of your parents?” “Where do you find the strength to save you from your self-destructive tendencies?”
Explore just how moral the characters really are.
Many people hold morals in high esteem, but rare-ly practice what they preach. Confessing sins is as good for the questionnaire as it is for the soul.
If you are hosting a game of moral allegory, you will also want to focus closely on the characters’
vices and tragic flaws. Each character should have one well-defined vice or flaw that would either put them in a position to be slain, or cause them to pur-sue it to dire ends.
Why must you dis-cover the secret to immortality? Why Relativism
Not all the characters will have the same ideals about right and wrong. This can make for an interesting story; espe-cially if something horrifies one character while another is not bothered by it. Keep these issues in mind while host-ing the game and accentuate them with pulls. If a charac-ter is repulsed by an act they have to perform, make their player pull to overcome the revulsion. Let the players of characters not repulsed by it get by without a pull and watch how the dynamic of the game changes.
Morality and the
Questionnaire
61
won’t you keep it in your pants? When did you knowingly put a loved one in danger so you could turn a profit?
While hosting the moral game, you need to pay attention to the choices the characters make. Are they following their own moral code? Does this help or hinder them? Is it better to be right and dead or alive and wrong?
Are the characters following the moral of the story, if it has one? If they aren’t, should they be pun-ished for it? In many cases you won’t need to be clear about why they are being
pun-ished, but you don’t need to be deceptive about it either.
Just be consistent. Most of the work for hosting a moral game is done in the creation of the story’s framework.
Still, you will be mak-ing morality a theme as important as isolation and deception, so you will want to take steps to reinforce that theme.
attended their funeral several years ago? When did you first get the feeling that there was something slightly strange about the Relativism • Moral Questions • Moral Host • Moral Tower
The tower is a great way to nail down a character’s own moral-ity or the moralmoral-ity of the story.
When sensibilities are offended, people can have visible, even physical reactions to it. A hungry child offered a meal might be initially grateful while eat-ing it, but may lose control once they find out the meat was from a stray dog. In this situation, the player may have to pull just to keep the character from vomiting, screaming or sinking into a depres-sion. Those with a high moral backbone are often susceptible to such pulls.
On the flip side, stories with a moral can force those characters with looser morals to pull. In those stories, gluttony, greed, lust, and the other deadly sins can often be liter-ally deadly. If the character contradicts the moral of the story, you can have the next threat focus on them, which in turn causes them to pull more.
Morality and the Host
Morality and the
Tower
62
Chapter 10: MysteryH
osting mysteries can be tremendous fun, but they are also some of the most com-plex plots to manage. An element of mys-tery should exist in any Dread game. It is the power behind the suspense and the product of the decep-tion. However, stories in which the plot strongly focuses on the question of who committed which foul deed are a slightly different breed altogether.Especially when the players’ characters are them-selves suspects.
You may have to pay extra attention to how you plan to isolate the characters when you create a mystery. Why haven’t the police been called or why haven’t they arrived yet? What keeps the characters from fleeing once they realize a killer is in their midst? And why hasn’t the killer fled yet?
Isolation also helps to narrow the field of suspects.
If no one can enter or leave the mansion, then it is a safe bet that the murderer is still among them.
Of course, if the players’ characters are the police, that carries with it its own built-in isolation. Whom do the authorities turn to for help?
During a mystery, the players will spend quite a bit of time and energy examining the scene of the
world that no one else noticed? What do you have over 2000 of? How are you working to undermine the young king, despite
Mystery and the Story
crime. Likewise, the host should spend a little more time preparing for this. To run a mystery well, you should be intimately aware of the details of the crime. However, it is more important that you know how the crime was committed and what ex-actly occurred at the time than to know every detail of the scene itself. This is because once you know the nature of the crime, the details will make them-selves evident in play.
When compiling your notes for the game, take the time to write up what happened during the crime, even if there will be no witnesses left to tell the tale.
Then, you can jot down a few of the more obvious details the characters will see when they first hap-pen upon the scene. Do not worry about creating clues.
This is because the play-ers should create the clues for you. During play, they will undoubtedly examine every inch of the scene looking for any hint to what hap-pened. As they do this, think about the crime and the criminal. When the characters look to see if any of the furniture in the room has been moved, ask yourself if there would have been and why.
Was a desk knocked over in the struggle and then set back up? Was a wardrobe moved to cover the blood splatter on the wall?