12-Bar Blues In the Key of Some Psycho Is About To Rip My Face Off… and Eat It
Here’s the situation:
You’re on your way home from work. It’s rush hour and traffic is backed up as far as you can see because some idiot was paying more attention to his cell phone than to the car in front of him and now, two lanes of traffic are squeezing into a single lane to get around the fender bender. You keep looking at the clock on the dash because it’s already getting close to 6:00 p.m. and you are supposed to have a table full of gamers looking at you for their weekly fix of role-playing goodness in about an hour. Normally, you spend some time during the week preparing for your weekly sessions, but this week you’ve been slammed at work, the kids needed help with homework, or the dog had fleas, or whatever. Your slack ass didn’t get the prep work done and now you’re brain dead from a day in the coal mines and you have a deadline. You can’t jab that role-playing needle right into their junkie brains if you don’t figure something out, and quick.
I really don’t know if you’ve ever been in that kind of circumstance, but I damn sure know I’ve been there, done that. Unfortunately, my gaming group can vouch for me on this one. Sometimes I need something… some kind of framework to help my already tapped-out brain get jumpstarted for a session. Sure, there are published adventures out there, but I usually run an on-going campaign and it still takes lot of work and preparation to fit them in there. If I run a published adventure, it’s never right out of the box. It’s usually heavily customized, almost to the point of unrecognizability. If I haven’t finished that work, I can’t use it.
Though I don’t play nearly as often as I should, I’m a musician. I love to play some jazz. I’m comfortable improvising, but man I need some changes. Throw out some chord changes and give me a rhythm section to lay it down for me and I’m good to go. In the above situation, what I really need are some chord changes. I need the gaming equivalent of some good old 12-bar blues so that I can lay down some riffs. Thankfully, those types of things exist. There are actually a bunch of them out there on the market, whether for download as PDF’s or to buy as hard copies from either an online retailer or your FLGS. Since I usually run modern horror games, I need to find products that are geared towards that genre. Say, 12-bar blues in the key of some psycho is about to rip my face off… and eat it.
Two of the products I have found extremely useful in this regard are 100 Horror Adventure Seeds and 100 Dark Places by Postmortem Studios. You can download them as PDF files from RPGNOW for a pretty good price ($7.50 each) Hopefully you find them useful as well – after all, why else would we be having this little show and tell? Okay, so I’ll be honest. I’ll level with you here. Lean in. They’re offering up some of their role-playing goodness for me to shoot directly into my brain just for sharing this with you. Have I sold out? Maybe. Do I want to get free stuff? Of course! I promise that after I receive it and read it, I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll let you live vicariously.
What do these products do? They lay down some solid chord changes that you, as gamemaster, can improvise on with fairly little prep time. Each product lays out 100 story starters for you to take off with. They’re easily good for a night of gaming and many of them, if you’re players are digging what you’re laying down, can spin off into either recurring encounters or an on-going scenario.
In 100 Horror Adventure Seeds, each “seed” is conveniently laid out on its own page. This makes it easy to print out just the page you need for that night’s gaming session. There’s lots of negative space around the text, with simple illustrations (or no illustration) and clear margins. This way, you can write all over the page. There’s plenty of space to make notes, take food orders, or whatever you want. Each “seed” consists of a description of the event, location, antagonist, or circumstance that forms the basis of the “seed”, followed by a number of potential twists. You can incorporate any of these twists as desired, combine them, or use none of them. The “seed” then concludes with an epilogue that sets out some of the conditions for resolution, some possible outcomes, and often some potential for taking things further.
100 Dark Places is very similar, but each story starter/plot hook is based around some version of the archetypal “bad place” that is so common to horror gaming. Like in the previous title, the places are each laid out on their own page. The margins are smaller on this one, with less room for notes and such, because the pages are crowded with text. While this takes away some writing space for you, it gets a lot more juicy information on each page for you to use. Hey, write on the back… or borrow some paper from your kid’s school notebook (or your own, if you’re still in school). Each place starts out with a description that is followed by a section called “The Horror.” This section explains what is so dark or scary about the place. After “The Horror” there is a layout of the place, but no map. While the inclusion of a map would’ve been nice, it would make for an unrealistically long product. I use floor plan websites and real estate sites as the source for most of my maps, so it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a map if you or your players feel the need for one. After the layout, there are three brief stories about each place that you can easily expand into at least a full gaming session, if not longer. The stories are easily combined with each other, or you can go off on your own and throw your own story creation into the mix.
If you run horror games, check out the links above and take a look at these excellent products. If you do, or if you already have, please let me know what you think.
