Antarctic Horror

I've recently started to GM a Pulp Cthulhu campaign set in Antarctica. It unabashedly draws heavily from John Carpenter's The Thing (and by extension the John Campbell story "Who Goes There?", and to a lesser extent "At the Mountains of Madness" by H.P. Lovecraft). I've done a good deal of research about Antarctic exploration up front, and I figured I might as well post the results on my blog. The following is a mix of general information that could be useful to anyone running a game (or even writing fiction) set in Antarctica, and mechanics for representing that information in Call of Cthulhu/Pulp Cthulhu.

 

Section 1: Antarctic Exploration Primer

This is all non-mechanistic information which I supplied to players whose character had either a rating of at least 40% in Natural World or Library Use, or 25% in Survival (Antarctic). It was intended as a general overview of what to expect so they could better roleplay their character's knowledge. 

 If anyone had at least 90% in Natural World/Library Use or 75% in Survival (Antarctic), I would also have given the player free reign to google relevant subject matter anytime, including mid-session, since their character would be experts on the subject at that skill level.

 

Seasons

• Antarctic summer is November through February.

• Antarctic winter is March through October.

• There is very little daylight in winter and almost constant daylight in summer.

Temperature

• The average temperature in February is between -45 and -36 degrees Fahrenheit.

• Coastal areas tend to be warmer.

• Temperatures are colder in the winter, rarely rising above 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

• Wind chill can effectively reduce temperature significantly.

Snow

• Visibility can get very poor, even down to nothing in a whiteout.

• It sometimes snows so much overnight you need a shovel to dig yourself out of your tent.

Wind

• Windstorms are common. In the winter they are severe enough to prevent plane flights.

Storms

• Weather can change completely in the span of twenty minutes.

• Whiteouts and blizzards can cause very poor to no visibility.

• Blizzards are also very cold and involve high amounts of snowfall and wind.

• Magnetic storms can interfere with radio communication, compasses, and more.

• The aurora australis (southern lights) have a similar effect to magnetic storms and are present all the time.

Other Phenomena

• Mirages are common, like in any other desert.

• Glowing lights like St. Elmo’s fire can happen due to reflections of light, electricity being affected by the extreme cold, and so on.

High Altitudes

• Higher altitudes are colder and have thinner air.

• Altitude sickness can be a risk and must be gradually adjusted to.

• Breathing apparatuses are needed to get enough oxygen at high altitudes.

• Failing to get enough oxygen causes hypoxia, which can be fatal.

Crevasses

• There are fields of crevasses across Antarctica, often hidden by snow.

• If you fall in one, especially if no one is around to help, you are likely to die.

Wildlife

• Penguins, seals, and orcas (killer whales) are among the only native animals that might be encountered in Antarctica; even penguins are migratory, not actually native. 

• These animals are found mostly in coastal areas.

• Seals and orcas can be dangerous.

• There are no polar bears in Antarctica.

Dehydration

• The air in Antarctica is very dry; people need to drink 2 liters of water a day.

Frostbite

• Frostbite is a risk below 23 degrees Fahrenheit (including windchill). 

• You can heal from the lesser degrees if you get the exposed parts of your body warmed up in time.

• The worse degrees eat to the bone and cause gangrene.

Hypothermia

• Hypothermia (core body temperature dropping to dangerous extents) is a risk from exposure to especially low temperatures. 

• It should be treated with a slow and steady warming.

• A mild case is known in explorers’ circles as “the Umbles”

Sunburn and Snow Blindness

• In daylight, the glare of the sun on the snow and ice causes sunburn; sunglasses and sunscreen is required.

• Your eyes can get sunburned. This is called snow blindness.

Diet

• Because of the cold and strenuous activity, you will need about 5,000 calories of food per day. Very high amounts of fat and protein are required as well.

• Vitamin B and C deficiency can be a risk, leading to beriberi and scurvy respectively.

Clothing 

• You should wear 3+ layers of clothing, with an outer layer that will help reduce wind chill.

• Inner layers need to be changed regularly because sweating can lead to conditions like trench foot if left alone too long.

Other Equipment

• GPS - proprietary technology of the U.S. military, still in an experimental state in 1982. Helps with navigation using a satellite.
• Earplugs - helpful for sleeping through the wind.
• Altimeter - a device that tells you the altitude of your current location.
• “Bivy sacks” - bivouac sacks; used for sheltering when you sleep in a sleeping bag.
• Avalanche probes - long poles used to find things after an avalanche, or to check for crevasses.
• Crampons - spiked pads attached to the soles of boots, for gripping on ice.
• Balaclava - face mask with holes for eyes and mouth.
• Sewing kits, machine repair kits, first aid kits, and so on are important to have handy.
• Snowmobiles are used for shorter distance travel, while ATVs like the Bv 206 are for longer journeys. 

Here's what the Bv 206, the ATV the characters in my campaign have, looks like:

You can gather from all this that Antarctica is a truly miserable place to be. 

 

Section 2: Dangers of Antarctica

This section includes all the Call of Cthulhu mechanics I have compiled that pertain to the hazards listed above. I pulled from three existing game resources: "Beyond the Mountains of Madness", an official Call of Cthulhu full-length campaign, was the most useful, but I also drew from "Cinematic Environs: Arctic Lands" and the Golden Goblin Press scenario "Cold Warning". 

Cold Warning was really only relevant when I was figuring out what frostbite rules I wanted to use; frostbite can be done very granularly, but I wanted something that wouldn't be horrendously cumbersome in the midst of a session.

Both Cold Warning and Cinematic Environs have some iffy/appropriative elements concerning wendigo (for all I know BtMoM does too, but that campaign separates all the mechanics I used to their own chapter, so I don't know what the campaign is actually about, aside from elder things, presumably). 

I can't really recommend the Cinematic Environs product for that reason, combined with the fact that they clearly wrote a D&D 5e version of the product first and left large chunks of those mechanics in unedited in a way that makes no sense with Call of Cthulhu.

I will say the BtMoM chapter was extensive and seemed quite well-researched. There were places where they describe certain things (like frostbite) in great detail without actually giving clear guidance on how to run such circumstances in your game. Useful for sure, but it left work for the GM, which isn't ideal.

As a result, like I said, I drew heavily from BtMoM's material, not just lifting chunks of mechanics but using it as a research source in itself. I don't fully remember which of the following mechanics were taken directly from the campaign, which were influenced or modified, and which I came up with more or less on my own. Regardless, here's what I have (in my own shorthand; I expect it could still be useful):

Altitude Sickness
    • Easily adjusted to given enough time
    • Becomes a factor at about 12,000 ft
    • Manifests as headaches, nausea, etc.
    • CON roll if exposed suddenly
        ○ Success: penalty die on all rolls until acclimated or below 12,000 ft
        ○ Failure: incapacitated in 1d10 rounds

Hypoxia
CON roll every 15 minutes resting without oxygen or 1 minute of exertion without oxygen while at high elevations.
    • While suffering any of the below symptoms, an Idea roll is needed to think of even basic concepts like getting oxygen
    • Cumulative effects of failed CON rolls:
        ○ Increased respiration & pulse rate (-5 INT)
        ○ Headache (-10 INT)
        ○ Nausea (-15 CON)
        ○ Slight dizziness, reduced reaction time, impaired coordination (-15 DEX)
        ○ Tingling in arms and legs
        ○ Purple or bluish tinge to fingers, toes, ears, and lips
        ○ Fatigue, sleepiness, intermittent fainting (-15 STR and CON)
        ○ Dimming of vision (-20% Spot Hidden)
        ○ Confused thinking, impaired judgment, feelings of giddiness resembling intoxication or apathy and depression (-15 INT, -30% Spot Hidden and Listen)
        ○ Unconsciousness or convulsions and death

Crevasses
Roll per ice field. Penalty die if the PCs lack skis/snowshoes, bonus die if they have poles to probe the ground. Fall damage is d10 per 10 ft.
D100    Result
01-50    Field crossed; no difficulty encountered
51-80    Crevasse discovered; the party must backtrack or go around.
81-95    Crevasse discovered by accident; someone falls 1d10' and gets  stuck or falls on a ledge. A Climb roll is needed to get out (-20% if not helped from above). Falling damage may apply.
96-99    Crevasse catches a PC or roped-together group of PCs. They all fall 1d20 feet before the fall is stopped. A Climb roll is required for the PCs to get out (-20% if not helped from above). Sleds and other equipment are not retrievable without help from the surface. Falling damage may apply.
00    Large, deep crevasse catches a sled and team. PCs fall 3d20 feet and must be rescued from above. Falling damage applies.

Chinstrap Penguins
STR 15 (1d6 x 5)
CON 50 (3d6 x 5)
SIZ 35 (2d6 x 5)
DEX 85 (5d6 x 5)
POW 35 (2d6 x 5)
HP 8
Damage bonus -2
Attacks/round 1
Fighting 35% (17/7), damage 1d4
Dodge 47% (23/9)
Armor -
Skills: Spot Hidden 85%, Listen 70%

Seals
STR 80 (4d6 x 5)
CON 50 (3d6 x 5)
SIZ 95 (5d6 x 5)
DEX 35 (2d6 x 5)
POW 50 (3d6 x 5)
HP 14
Damage bonus +1d6
Attacks/round 1
Fighting 40% (20/8) 1d6 + DB
Dodge 22% (11/4)
Armor 5 pts (blubber)

Orcas
STR 115 ((5d6 + 6) x 5)
CON 115 ((5d6 + 6) x 5)
SIZ 255 ((6d6 + 30) x 5)
DEX 80 (4d6 x 5)
POW 50 (3d6 x 5)
HP 37
Damage bonus +4d6
Attacks/round 2 (can only bite & hold one victim)
Bite & Hold (maneuver): inflicts damage automatically on subsequent rounds until broken by opposed STR roll
Fighting 85% (42/17) damage 2d4 + half DB
Bite & Hold (maneuver) damage 2d8 + DB per round held
Dodge 40%
Armor 5 pts (tough skin)
Skills: sense life 95%

Dehydration
2 liters of water needed per person per day. 1 liter of water moves you back 1 stage.
    • Stage 1 (1 hour without water): sluggishness, increased heart rate
    • Stage 2 (3 hours without water): prone to fainting (CON roll during exertion)
    • Stage 3 (8 hours without water): organ damage - 1d8 HP
    • Stage 4 (11 hours without water): death (likely by kidney failure)

Frostbite
Frequency of CON roll depends on the temperature after factoring in wind chill (table below assumes part or all of a character is unprotected):

Temp (F)    Roll every…
-120 to -90    1 minute
-80 to -50    10 minutes
-40 to -10    1 hour
0 to 30    10 hours

Each failed CON roll increases the degree of the frostbite suffered:
Degree    Effects    Time to heal
1    1d3 damage, -5 CON, -5 DEX    1d4 days
2    1d3 damage,    1d4 weeks
3    1d4 damage,    4d4 weeks
4    1d4 damage, loss of body part    -

Body part loss table (for 4th degree):
D8    Body part lost
1    1d4 toes (right foot)
2    1d4 toes (left foot)
3    1d4 fingers (right hand)
4    1d4 fingers (left hand)
5    Part of right ear
6    Part of left ear
7    Tip of nose
8    Part of chin

Healing from the non-damage aspects of frostbite requires a First Aid roll ASAP after it happens.

Hypothermia
When internal body temperatures between 90-95 degrees F, a character suffers -25 to DEX, CON, and INT. Below 90 degrees, they lose another 10 from each of those stats at regular intervals (dependent on their circumstances; eg. every 30 min out in regular Antarctic weather) until they die.

Snow Blindness
Every day a character spends out and about with no snow goggles, a character must make a CON roll or be blinded for 1d4 days.

Starvation
CON roll every week without food, losing 5 CON on a success and 10 CON on a failure.

Beriberi
Caused by lack of vitamin B1. Per week of deprivation, characters suffer -5 DEX and STR. At 0 STR, they must make a CON roll every day to survive.

Scurvy
Caused by lack of vitamin C. Scar tissue deteriorates, causing old wounds to reopen. After 3 months without vitamin C (which is when bodily reserves are depleted) characters take -15 to CON and DEX and their natural healing rate is reduced by 1 HP per day.

Making/Breaking Camp
While away from the Refuge, one character must make a survival (Antarctic) roll to make camp. On a failure, characters must make a CON roll to regain any HP during their rest, as everyone is pitching in fixing the botched camp.

Climbing
See hypoxia.

If characters fail a Climb roll while using proper climbing equipment, they must make a Jump roll to belay. If successful, they take only 1d6 for falling damage regardless of distance.

Tech Malfunctions from Cold
    • Luck roll for ATV to start when temperature below -55 degrees Fahrenheit
Penalty die on above Luck roll when temperature below -70 degrees F

Section 3: Weather

This section covers the weather tables, which I spent a fair amount of time tweaking (although it was hard to find accurate weather data from the 80s).

Temperature (Fahrenheit) - February/March
2d6    Coastal    Inland
2    0    -90
3    5    -70
4    10    -50
5    15    -30
6    20    -20
7    25    -10
8    30    -10
9    35    0
10    40    5
11    45    10
12    50    10

Weather
2d6    Weather
2    ICME (and roll again)
3    Magnetic storm (and roll again)
4    No snowfall, 10mph winds
5    Light snowfall, 10mph winds
6    Light snowfall, 30mph winds
7    Moderate snowfall, 30mph winds
8    Light snowfall, 50mph winds
9    Moderate snowfall, 50mph winds
10    Fog and 1d6 x 10mph wind
11    Whiteout and 1d6 x 10mph wind
12    Blizzard (whiteout and 90-120mph winds), and reduce temperature by 1d6 x 5 F

For calculating wind chill, which is quite important in establishing actual conditions, I'm using this site.

 "ICME" on the weather table refers to an interplanetary coronal mass ejection; that is, a discharge from the sun that can disrupt radio transmissions severely. The sun figures significantly into my campaign in a supernatural context (I will avoid explaining that too much in case any of my players read this), and that's one potential manifestation.

 

Section 4: Equipment & Emergency Landing

This last part is less likely to be useful to others, but I might as well tack it on at the end here. My players flight to Antarctica was disrupted by sudden and severe windstorms, which is natural for a pulp campaign, and also not unreasonable for the area, especially at the time of year where the campaign is taking place (late February).

I created a simple system for determining how well the pilot (which I made sure would be one of the PCs, so they wouldn't feel cheated by an NPC botching rolls) managed a  harrowing landing. Here's the gist:

Flight to Antarctica
    • Pre-flight checks - automatic for Pilot/Mech Repair 25%+
    • Storm comes on suddenly when the plane is at 20,000 ft and 350 miles off the shore of Elephant Island; no time to avoid it
    • 5 Pilot rolls required
        ○ Lost supplies: 1 roll on below table per failure
        ○ Damage to PCs
            § On 1-2 failures, PCs take 1d10 damage each upon landing
            § On 3-4 failures, PCs take 2d10 damage each upon landing
            § On 5 failures, PCs take 3d10 damage each upon landing
        ○ Landing site is improved based on # of Hard/Extreme successes:
            § 0: site A
            § 1: site B
            § 2: site C
            § 3: site D
            § 4: site E
            § 5: original, intended site (marked in green)

Crash landing lost supplies table:
D100    Equipment Lost
01-11    Clothing
12-22    Medical supplies
23-33    Climbing equipment
34-44    Weapons and ammunition
45-55    Tents and/or sleeping bags, bivy sacs, etc.
56-67    Provisions
68-75    Fuel for stove, snowmobiles, ATV, etc.
76-80    GPS
81-87    Skis
88-95    1d3 of the 3 snowmobiles
96-99    The ATV
00    The plane itself (major repairs needed to get it airborne again, if it's even possible)

The pre-flight checks weren't especially important; I mainly had them there to establish the pilot's expertise (this is a Pulp campaign, and it's one of the character's primary skills, so she has a 91% rating in the skill). Obviously, there could have been casualties if she'd failed 3 or 4 checks, and a fifth failure could have been a TPK. But with that skill level plus the ability to fix rolls with Luck spending, I figured it was a very remote possibility, and I was right. 

 We ended up with 3 regular successes and 2 hard or extreme successes. This meant the PCs and all their equipment was unharmed, but the winds forced the pilot to land most of the way across Elephant Island (which, to be clear, was their actual destination). 

This map marks the PCs' planned landing area (Refuge Aziz Ab'Saber, a fictitious Brazilian research station) and where they actually came down, about 12 miles away if I remember correctly. I have a version of the map which shows all the possible landing sites, but it also has spoilery information which I don't want to post, as I said above. The sites were all pretty much in a line, with the furthest one being just south of The Comet mountain and the closest being less than 2 miles from the Refuge.

Closing

Anyway, that's what I wanted to post. I figured it could be helpful for someone else running a campaign in Antarctica, especially if they use Call of Cthulhu or Pulp Cthulhu for it. Also, when I put a lot of time into game prep like I did with all this, it feels good to show it to people, not so much to brag but as a kind of validation, maybe? I dunno. I also felt it had been too long since I last posted here, and this is the main RPG project I've been working on for the last couple weeks.

In other news, I've been applying to some actual play shows, so we'll see where that leads. Maybe I'll update the blog about this campaign again, too. We shall see.

The Smile Room

The following is a Room of Renunciation that appeared in my current Unknown Armies campaign.

 

 

 

Agenda

The world is full of upsetting things. Every day, far too many upsetting, awful, unfair things go on for a sane mind to handle. Most people adapt to this through ignorance. They rationalize what they can and ignore the rest. Who has the energy to worry about climate change and sweat shops and sickness and war? We're all too busy with work, family obligations, and eking out what little pleasure we can.

 

Well, not all of us. There are those who keep as clear an eye on the big picture as possible. People who keep score, even though it's unpleasant, because someone has to hold the wrongdoers accountable. These vigilant types are the target of the Smile Room.

 

The people who care, who really care about all the world's injustices, are most often miserable. They sacrifice their blissful ignorance and ability to fit in with their peers, and what does it really get them? A higher blood pressure and a cynical worldview? The Smile Room exists to take that load off.

 

But what's just as important (as far as the Smile Room is concerned) as the bleeding heart is the standoffish loneliness that comes with it. The angst is intertwined with the compassion. To calm people down, you need to bring them in among the flock. To sand down the rough edges, you need to douse the fire in their hearts.

 

Among the Smile Room's targets are a range of individuals, from radicalized conspiracy theorists who scream at the sheeple to wake up, to religious fanatics who see nonbelievers as irredeemable heathens, to activists who are sick to death of their anticapitalist warnings falling on deaf ears. Through the workings of the Smile Room, all these and more can be rendered happy and docile.

 

 

Appearance

The Smile Room can manifest behind any door, so long as a potential victim opens it. It most often does so while they are alone, especially if they are fatigued or have a lot on their mind. Its interior resembles a dingy basement crossed with a dentist's office, with a weird clown motif thrown in for good measure.

 

Grime and dust coat the walls and all the surfaces between them. Beneath that coating are decorations - paintings of grinning clowns and brightly colored phrases such as "BIG SMILES EVERYONE!" and "TURN THAT FROWN UPSIDE DOWN!"

 

The room is fairly small, about fifteen by twenty feet. The floor has a slight, uneven slant, but  it's impossible to pinpoint exactly which way that slant is angled, which is quite disorienting. At the center of the room is a grotty dentist's chair. The chair has ten mechanical arms folded up on its back, and a variety of dentist's tools and equipment built into its armrests and laden on the shelves of a large, steel cabinet against the back wall.

 

There is a round, 10-inch tall mirror hanging from the ceiling by an angled metal pole, facing the chair. Its surface is so filthy that it doesn't reflect anything. The mirror's frame resembles a clown's face; the mirror itself is set between the clown's gnashing teeth.

 

From some unseen speaker, upbeat, juvenile music fills the room. It's off-key, echoey, and incessant. It sounds like someone mixed the soundtrack of a TV show aimed at toddlers with some truly awful EDM. There are about a dozen different tracks that play on a loop.

 

Each corner of the room has a putrid-smelling drain in the floor. Those who've been subjected to the Smile Room's renunciation have used them as latrines in the past. They seem to be bottomless. Each one is about three inches in diameter.

 

 

Abilities

The Smile Room has the following tools to aid it in its mission of turning burnt-out loners who care too much for their own good into placid, smiling sycophants. Note that the Smile Room makes no accommodation for its victims' biological needs; hunger and thirst will pose a problem for the stubborn ones.

 

Earworm. Every time the Smile Room cycles through its bouncy little playlist, it gets a little less noticeable and a little less insipid. Each run through takes about 45 minutes. After somewhere between eight and twelve listens (depending on the taste of the victim), it fades into the background completely, though the victim may find themselves involuntarily nodding or tapping their feet to the beat. Realizing you've come to like this absolute dreck might be cause for a Self (1-3) check. Additionally, once a victim becomes comfortable with the music, they get a 10% penalty on any rolls relating to resisting or escaping the Smile Room.

 

Numbing Agent. If a victim sits in the chair, they're immediately injected with a magickal anesthetic by two of its mechanical arms. This concoction (which the chair has an unlimited supply of) works very gradually. After a minute, a victim will feel tingly at the extremities. After half an hour, it will have the same effects as a dose of anesthetic that one might receive before oral surgery. This keeps building up, however, both physically and psychologically. After three hours, a victim will feel nothing, physically or emotionally.

 

Dental Torture. Once a victim has been injected with the anesthetic, four more of the chair's arms pin them in place: one by the throat, two by the wrists, and one by the waist. Then the last four arms get to work. They pick up dentist's instruments seemingly at random and go to town on the inside of the victim's mouth. The victim can struggle against this, but that's ultimately just going to get their face torn to shreds. This initial stage of torture calls for a Violence (4-5) check.

 

The torture is calibrated to maximize pain while minimizing lasting harm. Teeth might be pried out only to be agonizingly reattached, perhaps even switching sides of the mouth in the process. Nothing the arms do will leave permanent, visible damage. That said, when all is said and done, the character will have suffered 1d10 wounds, and their gums will be a mess for weeks. An odd side effect of the process is that the victim will end up with a perfectly healthy and clean set of teeth, regardless of what their dental hygiene and tooth count was like beforehand.

 

The anesthetic and hostile dentistry work together to create a desensitizing effect. At first, the pain will be unbearable, but by the time the arms stop flying in and out of the victim's mouth, they won't feel a thing, despite the blood dripping down their chin.

 

Mirror, Mirror. Once the dentistry is complete and the victim has a sparkling smile and the emotional capacity of a toaster, the anesthetic wears off and the chair's arms wipe the mirror clean. However, it doesn't reflect the victim's image as normal. It shows them a sequence of every time in their life they've been ostracized, dismissed, mocked, and so on. This prompts an Isolation (6-8) check. After that, they see another, longer slideshow of every time they've been socially accepted and included, padded for hours with images of possible futures if they comply with the vision of the Smile Room.

 

Goodie Bag. Once the second slideshow finishes, the chair releases the victim and gives them a plastic baggie containing floss picks, mini toothpaste tubes, a cheap, clown-themed plastic toy, twelve syringes, and a bottle of the special anesthetic the chair administers. The syringes are magickal, and will only inject the designated victim, and the anesthetic evaporates if removed from the bottle by any other means.

 

The anesthetic can negate an Isolation or Self check if a dose is administered within 30 seconds of the check's occurrence. However, it also drains the user of all emotions and cares for 1d10 hours.

 

 

Agents

The Smile Room's Agent is its persona in the real world, its beaming face to the general public. There is only one, who serves for as long as they can. Once an Agent gets too notorious to be effective, or gets too infirm or addled to carry on, they quietly retire and the room finds a replacement.

 

The Agent of the Smile Room gets the following powers:

Welcoming Entrance. The Smile Room's Ritual of Renunciation works on any door to a public or communal place, so long as the Agent is holding it open to usher someone else through first. They could use it on the front door or elevator of an apartment building, but not a specific person's apartment.

Net Empathy. By rolling their Agent identity, the Smile Room's servant can magickally sense the average mood of any group of five or more people, as well as detect any extreme outliers. This allows them to easily locate spiteful misanthropes at parties before they start breaking things, or single out the attendees at corporate meetings who are still riding the high from the really good sex they had the night before. 

 

Adaptive Irritation. The Agent can alter themself to draw the ire of a prospective victim. This lets them change physically, including age, clothing, posture, odor, and ethnicity. It also temporarily gives them an identity rated equally to the identity they had renounced by the Smile Room. With this identity comes appropriate beliefs, knowledge, and capabilities. The Agent's loyalty to the Smile Room remains, and they can remove the temporary identity at will. Otherwise, it lasts for a number of hours equal to the roll of their Agent identity when they activate it.

 

Patrick Branham, Agent of the Smile Room

Lots of people hate kids. Many grow out of it as they age, even having children of their own in a lot of cases. The others just learn to avoid them and roll their eyes at all the "precious" baby photos. Patrick was different. When he was a child himself, he was always told he was "mature for his age", an "old soul" who kept the company of his elders rather than his peers whenever he could.  He was bullied a lot at school.

 

As a young adult, he was often enraged by people his own age throwing the best part of their lives away to raise families. When his own brother, Nathan, had his first daughter at age 22, Patrick wanted to disown him. However, the family bond won out, and Patrick found himself spending an uncomfortable amount of time with the newborn Emily.

 

This had a toxic effect on his development. Patrick switched specializations in medical school to pediatric dentistry, and before he was thirty he had his own practice. At the same time, he was tormenting little Emily behind her parents' backs whenever he could, gradually shaping her to hate adults as much as he hated children.

 

This wasn't enough for Patrick, however. He took his decidedly unhealthy anger out on his patients as well. He became obsessed with inflicting maximal suffering on kids without being found out. He learned a lot about the enemy, decorating his practice with the superheroes and princesses in vogue at the time, luring them in with a surprisingly deep understanding of Minecraft and Tiktok. He became obsessed with youth culture as a weapon against those very same youths.

 

Eventually, some of his handiwork was traced back to him, and the allegations flew like fireworks on the fourth of July. Patrick wound up in prison, narrowly dodging some false accusations of sexual assault that had been thrown in for good measure. While there, a dopey man named Charlie who was in for kidnapping (though he claimed he was innocent) offered Patrick a way out. The rest is history.

 

As an Agent of Renunciation, Patrick is pleasantly neutral on kids. He doesn't want to have any of his own, but long car rides with Emily are uneventful (he's on thin ice with his family, but they're serious about that familial bond! Besides, he's proven really easy to rehabilitate since his "release" from prison). 

 

Patrick has really upped the dental torture aspect of the Smile Room, making modifications to the chair in much of his free time. His targets tend to be adults most of the time, if only to avoid suspicion from the law. 

 

Outside of his weird hatred of kids, Patrick was able to fit into society pretty well before he was put through the Smile Room. He didn't have any other outstanding quirks or bad habits to reform. There is an odd void where all his anger used to be, but so far his role as Agent has helped fill that for the most part. He currently works as a waiter at an upscale Italian restaurant, where his Agent powers help him find new victims.

 

Stats:

Personality: Generically affable and perpetually agreeable. Maybe a little awkward around kids, but in that way lonely bachelors sometimes are. 

Obsession: Smoothing out antipathy. So many people are needlessly upset at others; can't we all just get along?

Wound Threshold: 50.

Rage Stimulus: When people lash out for no good reason.

Noble Stimulus: World peace. Let's make it happen, people!

Fear Stimulus: People who hate him for what "the Old Patrick" did.

Smiling Agent 65%: Casts rituals, casts gutter magick, allows the use of Net Empathy and Adaptive Irritation (see above).

Bland 50%: Substitutes for Connect, Protects Self, Protects Isolation.

Reformed Dentist 55%: Substitutes for Knowledge, Coerces Helplessness, Medical.

 

Possessions:

A black waiter's uniform, a supply of lidocaine recovered from his old practice, a couple hundred dollars in accumulated tips, and a mix of dentist's and mechanic's equipment for working on the chair in the Smile Room.

PREVIEW: Rhetoratism (Unknown Armies)

UPDATE 4/7/23: Rhetoratism is live on DrivethruRPG! You can snag it here!

 

I'm making good progress on designing my second adept school for Unknown Armies 3e: rhetoratism! Here's the rundown:

    "The miracle of language is not to be understated. We are essentially ambulatory heaps of meat that can, against all odds, convey wonderful and complex ideas to each other by flapping that meat in just the right ways. Without this miracle, civilization would not exist. And yet, how often does it come back to bite us? Sometimes we accidentally say something out loud that we meant to keep in our thoughts. Sometimes, in the heat of an argument, we let loose an insult that we wish we could rescind to our dying day. And sometimes, Jeff just won’t wrap up his quarterly budget report, even after running 20 minutes into lunchtime.

     Well, rhetoratists recognize all these nuances, and they choose to be like Jeff. They embrace the power of speech in all its forms; it can be just as useful to bore someone to tears with a droning monologue as it can to scream them into submission. It’s not just about what you say, but how you say it. And more importantly still, how long you say it for. Speech is a tool of domination, of subdual. It can be used to exert one’s force of personality over those who respect convention and good taste. If you never let someone get a word in edgewise, you have power over them. And if that fails, you can just dance around their argument with a bunch of florid epithets that don’t actually mean anything.

     The central paradox of rhetoratism is that we evolved to use speech as a way to communicate nuance and meaning, but it’s just as often used as a blunt instrument whose actual contents are unimportant. For every intricate discussion, there’s a lecture devoid of substance. For every persuasive and heartfelt argument, a relentless tirade that only ends when the speaker gets what they want. Our words have meaning, but that meaning is often drowned out by the tambor of our voices."

 

 

 

Hopefully that's caught your interest, but to sweeten the pot, I'll leave you with the names of some of the school's formula spells. Who wouldn't want to cast:

 

• Balderdash!

• Dramatic Monologue

• Drown Out the Screams

• Mommy? Sorry. Mommy?

• Shahrazad Style

• Words Can Hurt Me

• You'll See! You'll All See!
  

I'll be posting here when it's finished and up on DTRPG. The writing is pretty much good to go, so I'll be moving on to layout soon. 

Modeling Stress, Trauma, and Mental Illness in RPGs

 

In college, I studied English and psychology, a hybrid degree. My capstone project focused on analyzing the portrayal of mental illness (or, more often and regrettably, “madness” or “insanity”) in roleplaying games. It wound up more of a survey than a statement, beyond pointing out some obviously flawed approaches that I will bring up again here. It’s been less than two years since I finished that project, but I feel my understanding of the medium of RPGs and the world of mental health both grow every day.

First, I should differentiate some terms. I use “stress” to mean tension brought on by circumstances. For example, knowing a killer alien is hunting you is likely to put you on edge. “Trauma” begins to get into a space where one ought to tread carefully, so I’m going to outsource my definition. SAMHSA says: “Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”

More contentious yet is finding a definition for mental illness, or mental health. Even establishing how those two concepts are related can be tricky. To that end, the CDC says “poor mental health and mental illness are not the same. A person can experience poor mental health and not be diagnosed with a mental illness. Likewise, a person diagnosed with a mental illness can experience periods of physical, mental, and social well-being.”

Personally, I don’t believe in arbitrarily saying certain people’s minds are fundamentally “ill” just because they deviate from societal norms and expectations. That is a judgment which is inconsistent from person to person and cultural group to cultural group, and which has been used in countless harmful ways throughout history. This is what trips up even the RPGs that otherwise do a pretty good job, I think. More on this later.

In the interest of having a working definition, I will say that mental health refers to how well one’s mental and emotional paradigms match the expectations of the society they inhabit. Therefore, mental illness can be seen as paradigms that deviate from those expectations to the point that existence in that society becomes challenging.

Let me bring this back to RPGs with an example of where I’m headed with this essay. The first time I played The End of the World, a game in which you play as yourself in the context of an apocalyptic scenario, it was with university classmates. This was for a class assignment, as a matter of fact; I didn’t really know any of my fellow players outside of class.

The game began as is typical for EOTW: we (our in-game selves, much as their real counterparts) were sitting in an on-campus dining hall when concerning, sporadic news reports began to filter in. Pretty soon, zombies attacked us. We escaped narrowly to someone’s dorm room and began to plan our next steps. It was at this point that I (the player) began to consider what I’d really do in this circumstance, having just dodged a grisly death by a hair’s breadth. I decided I’d call my dad. I had to know if he was safe, and if so, seek his advice on what to do next.

As soon as I relayed this to the GM, I realized the awkwardness of my choices. This guy barely knew me, and I was asking him to roleplay as my father (who he knew nothing about) in a fairly intimate conversation. It was a non-starter, and also took pretty much everyone out of the game until I decided to just resolve the outcome of the call myself and move back to the action.

I bring this anecdote up not just for its cringeworthy humor, but because it represents an aspect of roleplay that has always mattered to me: I want my characters, be they copies of myself or something much more fanciful, to react in believable, human ways. One way that manifests is a desire for trauma to have meaning in the game.

 

 End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse (2014, Fantasy Flight Games)

Let’s move on to another game example. Imagine a first-time D&D player showing up with their debut character: a high elf wizard with the noble background. Level 1, fresh from her mansion, with only a theoretical curiosity for the arcane and a yearning for adventure in her head. Let’s say this character is running through the 5^th edition starter adventure, Lost Mine of Phandelver.

The adventure starts with an ambush by goblins on the road. Just four goblins versus the party of adventurers; simple enough. This fight can be pretty brutal if the GM plays their cards right, though; the goblins can employ some pretty scary hit and run tactics with their Nimble Escape feature. In this playthrough, maybe none of the PCs die, but our wizard gets hit by a couple of lucky arrows and drops. The cleric saves her with a Healing Word, but she comes to with the knowledge that she almost died.

Personally, I would imagine this fledgling mage would feel pretty freaked out. I don’t think it’s a stretch that a brush with death would be traumatic for someone coming from a life of pampered luxury. However, D&D has absolutely no game mechanics to support this line of roleplay. I can decide she sticks behind the paladin from now on, or learns more defensive spells as she levels up, but as far as the game is concerned, I have no reason to act like that. My hit points are back to full from a single spell or an hour of downtime; let’s get back to the killing – I mean, the adventure!

To that end, the same logic applies to the reverse: maybe my elf got some good attack rolls in and killed three of the goblins herself. Goblins are unambiguously sentient people with their own society and culture by D&D’s official lore (as well as how they’re presented in Lost Mine). What if my elf feels remorse or disgust at her actions? In this case, it would actively detract from the game experience. This is because D&D is a violent power fantasy above all else.

Not to go on too much of a tangent here, but D&D (in its current iteration’s base rules) allows characters to improve through violence and nothing else. What’s more, the improvements they earn are almost exclusively pertinent to killing and avoiding being killed. This isn’t necessarily to knock that style of game, although I don’t personally prefer it.

But this is the reason D&D doesn’t model trauma, especially the mundane (as opposed to magically inflicted) kind. If my wizard gets more and more distraught over her bloodshed as the adventure continues, and the adventure is 80-90% about killing more thinking beings, sooner or later I will have to roleplay a breakdown, a sadistic change of heart, or a tearful departure before bringing in my next character.

This flavor of escapism doesn’t work if you look too hard at the consequences of your actions, even on your own character. There’s plenty of deconstructions of this in the hobby, such as John Tynes’ Power Kill, which frames the characters as psychiatric inpatients who have gone rampaging, thinking they’re murderous adventurers.

As a last note on D&D, early editions had explicit rules for characters being afflicted with real-life illnesses such as schizophrenia, albeit gamified in a way that bears almost no resemblance to the experience of those with the actual diagnosis, and far more to harmful, sensationalized depictions from other works of fiction. This was clearly an afterthought in the 70s and 80s, and is even more so now, with the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide retaining slightly smoothed versions of these effects without the real-life name (because we can’t be insensitive, now can we?)

 

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Lost Mine of Phandelver (2014, Wizards of the Coast)

 

Let’s move on, then, to a game that actually wants to explore these things. Call of Cthulhu is no power fantasy. You are set up to play as ordinary people, and in some ways, CoC investigators are actually feebler than your average joe. One of these ways would certainly be their sanity. In CoC, sanity is a meter that starts at a certain value and only goes down. Once it’s empty, your character is “permanently insane” and you can no longer control their actions at all.

This deprivation of player agency is at the core of CoC’s sanity system. Whenever you go insane, be it “temporarily,” “indefinitely,” or, as mentioned above, “permanently,” the manifestation of this debility in the game is determined randomly, unless the GM wants to fudge it and pick an entry from the tables in the book.

The way this works is not only horrendously inaccurate to any kind of real mental illness or response to trauma, it’s so swingy that it’s often not even a fun gameplay experience. Yet another example: I recently ran a prewritten scenario from the 80s, One in Darkness. The investigation was a little slow at first, maybe, but heading swiftly to an interesting climax when the central monster first reared its head to the whole party.

Despite being depicted in the art as a giant, demonic rat, this was an avatar of the god Nyarlathotep, and so simply witnessing it cost the characters either 1d10 or 1d100 sanity points (SAN), depending on if they made a singular roll. That meant losing an average of 5 SAN and going temporarily insane if you failed another roll, or an average of 50 SAN, which for many characters means permanent insanity and automatic loss of your character.

Here's how it played out: I had the avatar pop out of a sewer grate while the PCs were driving to an NPC’s home. They were split across two cars. In one car, all three PCs went permanently or indefinitely insane. They crashed into the avatar (who, as a kicker, was immune to harm from nonmagical objects) and all died because the driver’s madness manifested as, essentially, road rage. The other car’s driver was also properly insane and drove into a house while her passenger fainted from temporary insanity. Those two survived until the cops showed up, but obviously that was the end of the adventure. The avatar simply walked away.

Obviously, reducing the numbers on the SAN loss would mitigate some of that fiasco, but I still feel that CoC is regularly hamstrung by the simultaneously rigid and chaotic way its characters react to trauma. This is to say nothing of the way it takes a sampling of real-life symptoms and diagnoses and attaches them to game mechanics completely haphazardly.

One more example of the disservice CoC does to this subject is in one of the very few ways you can regain SAN. Investigators who successfully unravel a mystery, protecting innocents and apprehending no-goodniks in the process, regain a die or two of SAN. This has the implication of moralizing the game’s attempt at portraying mental illness. You might stop being crazy if you’re a good Samaritan – because that’s how mental health and trauma work, right?

 

 Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Core Rulebook (2014, Chaosium, Inc.)

The next game I want to touch on is Free League’s Alien RPG. This system chooses a broader, perhaps more generic “stress” mechanic; every time your character experiences something stressful or traumatic, or pushes themselves hard, they get stress dice. Stress dice can make you more effective, but they can also make you panic. This creates a neat little flow in which you start reacting effectively to the dangers that surround you, right up until you’re so freaked out that every little thing you have to do is almost guaranteed to cause a meltdown or overreaction.

I feel this captures the Alien movies quite well, and also seems a decent way to represent how competent people would fold under such distressing circumstances. I also don’t feel that it would be fair to criticize the game for its avoidance of the subject of real mental illness or the more nuanced effects of trauma. This is because the scope of the Alien RPG is focused on the encounters with the titular creatures, not on deeper character interiority. The character sheet is simple and focused on telling you what you’re good at when it comes to space exploration; Alien PCs are meant to die far more than change and grow.

I would contrast that with D&D because that game claims to have three “pillars” of gameplay, all equally important, and roleplay is one of them. 5e D&D also tries to do it all, with some mechanics included to flesh out your character’s personality. Alien is up front about its intent to terrify and maul your character, and its ruleset supports that.

 Alien RPG Core Rulebook (2019, Free League Publishing)

Lastly, let’s look at Unknown Armies, a game I love, and the one that gets closest to my ideal for handling this subject. It actually has a lot of similarities to Call of Cthulhu: eminently mortal characters, similar dice mechanics, a focus on what skills your character is and isn’t good, and of course, a system for modeling trauma.

The first thing UA does better than CoC is splitting “sanity” into five “shock gauges.” These are categorized as Helplessness, Self, Isolation, Violence, and the Unnatural: the kinds of trauma you might encounter in UA’s occult underground. I might monkey with this division a little (maaaybe combine Helplessness and Isolation?), but on the whole I don’t feel it needs adjustment; it works well.

The next refinement: a shock gauge doesn’t just decrement when you are subjected to a relevant traumatic event. Rather, you either get a hardened or failed notch. The former means you become more resilient to the trauma, but also develop a more detached or warped relationship to that category. The latter means you are more frightened and shaken for future encounters, and in the moment, you fight, flee, or freeze. Notably, the player chooses which of these happens to their character, not the GM.

I find that this is a much more believable model, and also lends itself to thinking about who your character is and how their traumas change them. Characters are actually expected to begin with some notches, allowing you to be someone used to killing others (by adding hardened notches to your Violence gauge) if you want to be that kind of murderhobo. There are tons of other ways you could assign notches, though, and this leads to some really interesting characterization through the lens of trauma.

Where I feel UA drops the ball is what happens when you gauges fill up, specifically the failed notches. This is where the game brings in real-world symptoms, and under the category of “ongoing madness,” no less. The game allows players to “work with [their] GM” to figure out the specifics (unlike CoC), but you’re choosing from a list including flashbacks, substance addiction, and so on. I do appreciate the designers’ conscious choice to leave out dissociative identity disorder and schizophrenia (they include a half-page explanation on why they felt this would be going too far), but I feel that if one or two diagnoses are better off left alone, you should really question what is so different about the rest that makes it okay to include them (and, again, label them “madness.”)

 

 Unknown Armies 3rd Edition, Book 1: Play (2016, Atlas Games)

Okay. This has gone quite long. Let’s end on some takeaways that I want to keep in mind as I think about how I would create a system for stress, trauma, and/or mental illness in a game of my own. First, I am not really interested in designing a power fantasy, and I am interested in exploring these topics intelligently and compassionately. This means I will want to at least acknowledge them in my thinking about the design, if not include mechanics on them.

Second, I do think mechanics would be wise. My reason for saying this is that mechanics are how we engage with all aspects of a game. When you don’t address something you claim is important through a mechanical lens, it won’t end up being important at a lot of tables (see my comments about roleplay in D&D 5e – and this applies for the exploration pillar, as well.)

Third, there has to be nuance. A 1-100 meter isn’t going to cut it for such a deeply nuanced subject. Fourth, as we learned from Alien, it has to be in line with the overall scope of the game. Fifth, player agency must be preserved.

Sixth, avoid disrespecting the real lived experience of people who have undergone trauma (which to some degree is basically everyone) and who live with mental illness. This would include not calling people “mad” or “insane” for struggling with addiction, for example. This one is definitely easy to screw up, but it’s also very important. Research, sensitivity readers, and so on are key.

And lastly, seventh, is the point I’m still chewing on: how do you represent real mental illness in a game, if that’s something you decide you want to do? I’ve established that it has to be incorporated into the mechanics, at least to some degree. But any attempt to attach real symptoms to mechanics that I’ve seen has not looked good in practice.

Maybe separating trauma from diagnosable mental illnesses is a place to start. After all, the idea that you can develop schizophrenia from seeing a spooky fish-man has always been a laughable flaw of Call of Cthulhu. If you didn’t know, you can’t just “become schizophrenic” at the drop of a hat. That’s not how the illness works.

I still need time to think on that one, so I’ll come back to it later. This is a 3,000 word monstrosity as it is. I’ll sum all this up by saying that whether you’re writing or running an RPG, you should give at least some thought to the depiction of trauma and mental illness, because it’s probably in there somewhere, and if it’s a focus area for that game, don’t make an ass out of yourself by doing the subject injustice.