Weird fiction has inspired a lot of roleplaying; some of it leans into the Undisentanglable Weird, while others skew to one or other of the genres that branched out: flavours of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and arguably even superheroes.
I love a good weird story, and enjoy playing and writing scenarios for things like the various Lovecraft-derived strands of gaming. While I like different flavours of weird, I'm starting to notice that the scenarios I write have a tendency to be broadly scientific, and frequently end up querying why I'm having to write about physics again when I am canonically Bad At Physics.
Even the scenarios I write that are more magical tend to skew occult: there are some fairly definable things happening, there are principles at play. The Perishing of Sir Ashby Phipps is an exception, being fundamentally supernatural, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it was directly inspired by someone else's short story.
On reflection, I think a lot of this comes down to first causes.
When you write a story or scenario that revolves around science (no matter how mad or pseudo-), you're drawing on the existing rules of the world. Sure, you're probably bending it or entirely making things up: this mineral is antigravitic, this combination of sounds induces weird visions, you can cross over into higher-dimensional space, these plants are mobile and sentient and hunger for human flesh. You might need inventors and trails of evidence, but you only rarely need to make up a reason for the thing to be true at all. Even alien technology boils down to "somebody else invented it".
But when you're writing about supernatural problems, you have to, at some point however deep down in the background, accept that something is happening which can only be explained by "just because".
The victim was murdered, because the inhabitant of the Evil House killed him, because the residents keep turning into vengeful monsters, because they suffered hideous visions, because the old governess' malevolence lingered in the house and tormented its occupants, because her anger at being betrayed had uncanny power, because she was a witch, because magic works.
At a certain point you have to decide that the rules of reality are not in fact how we think they are, and some specific arbitrary set of things can happen which contravene them.
If those hew closely to folklore and superstition, it's easier to accept, and easier for players to navigate: "dead people can become ghosts and haunt the living in various ways" or "you can bestow ill-fortune on somebody through sympathetic ritual" feels accessible in a way that "looking at a cat in a mirror leads to personalities from the Collective Unconsciousness taking over your body" doesn't. In historical games, you can treat some of these as science, because they're widely believed to be true. Even if not, their grounding in common belief makes it easy to justify the PCs thinking of and accepting them.
I think for me, I have difficulty accepting the magical first cause in an otherwise realistic setting. I don't have a problem with it when I'm reading or watching media, or playing games - but my type of inspiration doesn't often seem to land on it as a concept for my own games. My brain always seems to be seeking a further explanation: why does this work? I don't naturally gravitate towards the "just because", even though I'm perfectly happy to accept it. It's odd because my creativity is apparently fine with clearly made-up science as a justification.
There's also the aspect of establishing the bounds of the broken rules. Once magic is real, how do the PCs (and the players) learn that? How do they reasonably come to that conclusion (I assume a gaming group who is willing to lean into genre, but you want some kind of in-character justification)? What kind of magic is possible? If wronged governesses can lay curses on entire houses, are ghosts also real? Might we need to discover a complicated occult ritual which somebody has conveniently written down and perform it, or is this a sympathetic magic thing where you need to find the governess' old engagement ring and put it in her grave? Do occultists, mediums, self-proclaimed cunning folk have actual magical power that we should seek out? Is it worth studying the names of angels and trying to summon one? Can the priest PC banish her by the power of faith?
That isn't a direct influence on my writing, but it is something that comes into play which isn't really true for scientific scenarios. Science might alter the boundaries of what's possible, but it doesn't tend to open the floodgates for potentially hundreds of entirely new sets of rules to suddenly be true.
Folklore and horror tend not to systematise their magic. I do.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, is it "magic is a science we don't understand yet" or "magic is strange and incomprehensible"?
As a game master I want players to be able to engage with the complicated thing. That doesn't mean they need to know everything about it, but there should be some predictable behaviours. So the governess's curse worked in this particular case because of other factors aligning by chance, but that doesn't mean that this is a thing another dissatisfied governess can do.
And the reason for this is that I'm not writing a story in which the narrator can say "ooh, I saw a scary thing" and that's it. I'm working with interactive fiction and I want the characters to have a part in the story, and the easiest part for them and for me is that of occult detectives who can find out the root cause and what needs to be done to deal with it.