Possibly offensive ideas to use in your horror games

[Tadanori Oyama]

I was just letting my mind wander back to high school during anti-drug mind cleansing. We did an "experiment" with little cups of water. Some had a chemical in them that was normally clear but changed to pink when you added something to it. So, everybody wandered around the class and "exchanged liquids" with the others for awhile and them we added the reagent to see who would be pink. Whole thing was supposed to show how fast STDs and junk can spread.

So, just now, it occured to me that while those with the potentially pink juice might infect other people, they couldn't do much of anything to each other. If they knew about their potential pinkness than they might have the opinion of only mixing juices with other pinks.

And that's when the idea for putting an "All HIV Sex Party" into a horror game popped into my head.

It seems like a really frightening concept to a "normal", by which I mean uninfected, person. If you replace "HIV" with whatever strange condition or disease you use in your horror game than it makes for an interesting scene. Give the players someone they have to meet or something they have to get that's located at the party/event and make sure they are made aware of the exact circumstances of the party.

On the one hand, their surrounded by potential enemies, the threat of infestion literally surrounding them. On the other hand, the people involved appear to be actively making an effort not to inject others.

It's a chance to creep your PCs out on more than one level.

I think it'd work best with a horror-investigation game but with a few tweaks the entire thing could be used in alot of different settings. Imagine the party acting as a sort of forced peace agreement between the villain and extremely violence inclined PCs in an action game. The villain will meet them but only at this party, where the people are not only innocent of any crime aside from being ill (and his own guards can hide easily). Any killing will be not only be possibly killing innocent people but also result in the nearly assured infection of the PCs.

So, anyway, I put like five minutes of thought into that. Might be a horrible idea, might offend everyone in the world. If you have offensive ideas for game scenes I urge you to share them as well.

[Robot Master]

Take it a step further...

...all of the characters are ill with a fatal disease and somewhere in the horrifying environment is the chance of a cure. I wouldn't go the SAW route, instead I'd make it an almost Faustian game, where the characters have to face the terrors of a hellish environment for even the chance that this evil figure that's brought them into the game is going to keep their word.

Part of the character generation process should include a "justify why your character wants to live against all odds" so that you don't end up with any "well I'm dead anyway" characters. Say one character could have a dependent that they take care of, or the other is soooo close to actually curing the disease, or another character hasn't gotten their revenge yet...

[clockworkjoe]

zombie infection with long gestation period - takes days or weeks before turning and 5% of infected people resist the infection - uncertainty and paranoia abound!

[Setherick]

zombie infection with long gestation period - takes days or weeks before turning and 5% of infected people resist the infection - uncertainty and paranoia abound!

Nah, overdone. What about something like this: http://futurismic.com/2010/03/01/new-fiction-tupac-shakur-and-the-end-of-the-world-by/

[Robot Master]

Ooooo I liked that. It had a little bit of an "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" element to it.

[Fizban]

I suppose it depends what you're going for.  To use the terminology that the RPPR guys used in their Halloween podcast, offensive stuff usually only goes so far as creating revulsion.  For that, I find you rarely have to go past looking at history to find plenty of things the modern person should find repulsive - whether it is rituals of initiation that require mutilation of various sorts, old punishments that make you cringe, cultural mores that have changed over time (the treatment of women and children and minorities has utterly transformed, for example), even the results of good old deprivation and poverty stood beside incredible wealth is pretty offensive.  Just take any number of historical practices and tweak them for setting, and bam - offensive.

If you're going for something really terror-inspiring though - that gives the characters a sense of lack of control, of the sense of lingering fear but not really jumping out and going "Blah!" at any given moment, I think the infection idea is a fantastic one.  Perhaps the next step is to start fiddling with the idea of contagious mental illnesses? When the group of characters can't agree on what they've seen, or what it means, and have to start asking which one is crazy, and what to do about it - I can see some terror being involved there.  Or perhaps rather than being contagious, the mental illness could be stigmatised and those with it could be treated harshly and horribly.  I can see that as being pretty offensive.  "You're on antidepressants?  You must be killed/neutered/lobotomised!"

[Robot Master]

While "offensive" is a subjective term, I think you need to meter it by the individuals in the game and save the more offensive stuff for your core group of RPers. When rolling out offensive stuff you really have to remove a lot of the guesswork as to whether or not they'll be personally offended. Everyone has a different point of when something has gone too far. One of the guys in my regular game can take any level of gore you throw at him, but the moment a kid gets hurt he checks out. Another person I RP with is really sensitive about rape, but used to work for the guy who created "Tracez of Death".

Plus, I think that you also have to be careful to not make the "offensive material" too out of place. I've run/played in some pretty gruesome things before but I also think you have to be pretty choosy about content. If you don't need over the top offensive stuff, I say don't use it.

I revisited this post and read your initial question again, Tad, and I think that if you bring up the concept of something like an "All HIV sex party" then (depending on how your players play) you're going to have to explain why their characters are there, why anyone would ever attend a party like that, and how it fits into the rest of the game. Maybe a dream sequence? I don't know. I've got strong opinions about horror and I think that the more bizarre the concepts get the more they sliiiiide into being near Monty Python-esque.

[Tadanori Oyama]

I revisited this post and read your initial question again, Tad, and I think that if you bring up the concept of something like an "All HIV sex party" then (depending on how your players play) you're going to have to explain why their characters are there, why anyone would ever attend a party like that, and how it fits into the rest of the game. Maybe a dream sequence? I don't know. I've got strong opinions about horror and I think that the more bizarre the concepts get the more they sliiiiide into being near Monty Python-esque.

Right, that was the whole second half of my post. I just had the idea come to me while I was bored and so I started trying to think of ways to work it into a game that would make sense.

It could be used to accent a villain. If a villain didn't care about the future because he himself was infected with an eventually lethal virus or condition than having him be the reason the PCs are at the party (and maybe the one who's hosting the party) makes sense and adds another layer onto the fucked up nature of the villain. It might not make logical sense but if your villain is supposed to be insane anyway than it works.

[Robot Master]

I revisited this post and read your initial question again, Tad, and I think that if you bring up the concept of something like an "All HIV sex party" then (depending on how your players play) you're going to have to explain why their characters are there, why anyone would ever attend a party like that, and how it fits into the rest of the game. Maybe a dream sequence? I don't know. I've got strong opinions about horror and I think that the more bizarre the concepts get the more they sliiiiide into being near Monty Python-esque.

Right, that was the whole second half of my post. I just had the idea come to me while I was bored and so I started trying to think of ways to work it into a game that would make sense.

It could be used to accent a villain. If a villain didn't care about the future because he himself was infected with an eventually lethal virus or condition than having him be the reason the PCs are at the party (and maybe the one who's hosting the party) makes sense and adds another layer onto the fucked up nature of the villain. It might not make logical sense but if your villain is supposed to be insane anyway than it works.

So, kinda like when Batman's fighting the Riddler, he sometimes ends up stuck in an environment created by the Riddler? I think another good example is that Jennifer Lopez movie "The Cell", where her character has to go inside of the mind of a serial killer...

I can dig that, and I conceptually I think that I would find any extreme situations surrounding that type of scene to be tied to the villain rather than the game itself so long as themes like that weren't central to the campaign as a whole. Sounds like a fun place to visit.

I was thinking about this a little earlier and it brought me back to a game I played in about a year ago. We (my fiancee and I) invited a few old friends that we hadn't seen in about 2 years to game. It was a married couple, and the husband decided that he was going to run the Street Fighter RPG. Our characters were a part of a signed and endorsed stable of martial arts fighters on the global circuit, and were invited to a party in Los Angeles. At the party, after a few drinks, he made my fiancee and his wife make stamina rolls, which they both failed. They had apparently been slipped roofies, and woke up to find themselves...erm...the unwitting victims of crimes. The husband who was DMing also refused my character from beating the living hell out of the bad guys responsible. The husband then wanted my fiancee to regularly go into detail about what her character was wearing. We...asked them to leave. We later found out that this sort of thing is pretty much par for the course for this guy's gaming habits. Now, in this case the guy was just a creep, but even if he was a close friend there's a few places where I'd say he kinda went over the line.

Long story short? Choose the content and read your gaming groups. If they're mystified by the content? Awesome. If they've got that "uhhh I don't know about this" look on their face...then pull it back a little.

[Shallazar]

Now that is fucking creepy shit dood.

[Tadanori Oyama]

Yeah, I was going for more of a creepy and uncomfortable in character feel with my suggestion. I am so glad that I've never had to deal with anybody like that... that I know of. My fiance says they've been people who approach that level of weirdness in my groups before.

Anyway, more ideas!

Here's one I'm stealing from a webcomic I read:

Deaf Night Club.

[Robot Master]

ahahaha Deaf Night Club? What, all kinds of flashing lights and Richard Dreyfuss is waving his hands around singing "BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL COOOOOOLE"

My personal favorite offensive scene in games is the good, old fashioned "crawl through a pile of guts" stuff.

...as for the previous creepiness I went through? There's something about my goddamned woman that makes my nerd friends step out of bounds. It's happened three times excluding my previous example and all of them were from that dreaded "friend of a friend that I'd like to invite to the gaming group because he can give me (a core player) a ride. Can we try him out?" Oh and one other time from the "husband". What can I say? I got me a nice woman I guess. Metal chicks are the best

Back to the topic.

Some of the more offensive scenes I've been a part of have been:

- A werewolf attack on harmless normal people, where the characters were the antagonist werewolves.
- The pirate captain requesting quid-pro-quo from one of the party members. He wanted to trade a ride(to the next habitable island) for a ride...if ye get what I mean? My old buddy Sean's character was the one that went along with it.
- Some more good, old fashioned survivalist cannibalism!

[Tadanori Oyama]

Yeah, Deaf Night Club. Alot of bass beat, no conventional music, certainly no lyrics, and lots of visual stimulation, visual displays of stylized human hands "saying" things is ASL. PCs have to meet an informant, who is deaf, at the club.

[Robot Master]

Damn you Tad, you didn't comment on my awesome "Mr. Holland's Opus" reference there...

Sensory Deprivation is AWESOME in horror games, by the way. Completely dark rooms so characters have to feel their way around, or near ear-splitting sound that takes away their ability to sense danger with their ears? Oh damn the idea of inputting that into a game just gave me nerd joy.