In this seminar, Sandy Petersen — original designer of Call of Cthulhu and owner of Petersen Games (among many, many other accomplishments) — walks the audience through his process for writing a horror scenario. Along the way he offers a prodigious grab-bag of advice. I thought the material was fascinating enough that I took notes and broke his process down into a step-by-step model. I’m polishing those notes up and sharing them here because I think they’ve got a general utility.
THE BASICS ACCORDING TO M.R. JAMES
Petersen draws inspiration from three rules M.R. James set for his famous ghost stories (a body of literature which inspired, among many others, Lovecraft himself):
1. The ghost is malign.
The antagonist for your horror story doesn’t necessarily need to be a ghost. (And, in fact, M.R. James’ ghosts were quite varied in their properties.) But your antagonist shouldn’t be revealed as having good intentions.
2. Place your story somewhere the players can imagine themselves.
Petersen discusses that his original intention for Call of Cthulhu was to set it in the modern day: Lovecraft wasn’t writing historical fiction, after all. He was writing cutting edge thrillers. When he wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1922, for example, a steamship was the biggest and most powerful thing that had ever been accomplished with human technology. So when he rams Cthulhu with the steamship, it’s not an historical oddity — it’s Lovecraft saying “the biggest thing we have can’t stop Cthulhu”. Petersen asserts that if Lovecraft had written the story in 1945, he would have nuked Cthulhu.
This is not to say you can’t set your scenario in other settings. It’s just that you have to work harder: You can do it in the ’20s, the 1890’s, the 15th century, or on a spaceship. But you have to make the players feel as if they could actually be there.
3. No jargon.
M.R. James was talking about avoiding the terminology of theosophists and the other pseudo-scientific approaches to the supernatural that were arising during his time. For Petersen, this means using fiction-first declarations instead of mechanics-first declarations. Horror doesn’t come from game mechanics.
THE SCENARIO SEED
1. Pick a scene from a movie, book, etc. (Example: Burning the rabbit from Velveteen Rabbit.)
My thought on this (and I suspect it’s probably true for Petersen outside of seminar contexts) is that it doesn’t need to be a scene you’ve literally plucked from an existing piece of literature. What you’re looking for is a strong, emotionally powerful image or event.
2. Pick a place. (Example: Hot springs.)
3. Pick an opponent. (Example: 500 year old undead ancestor.)
THE SCENARIO SPINE
A. Look for interesting combinations/connections in the elements of the scenario seed.
For example, the ancient undead is somehow connected to the hot springs. (Note how this nicely distinguishes them from any other ancient undead.)
B. Look for connections between the PCs and the bad guys.
For example, one of the PCs is a descendant of the ancient undead. (This makes the horror personal. It also provides a convenient scenario hook in keeping with the Lovecraftian literary tradition.)
C. Start with the bad guy’s plan or purpose.
Don’t worry yet about what the PCs will be doing, but leverage the connection to the PCs if possible. For example, the ancestor calls a family reunion for the extended clan at their hot spring. His goal is to transfer his consciousness to one of the younger members of the family.
D. Check your scenario seed and make sure you’ve used all the elements.
For example, we haven’t used the imagery from the Velveteen Rabbit yet. So the ancestor will give everyone coming to the reunion a reliquary memento containing a piece of one of his former bodies, enchanted so that he can track it down in the future. (Thus simplifying any future attempts to locate his descendants when further body transferrals are required.)
DEVELOP DETAILS
From this point forward, you’re simply developing the details of the spine you’ve established. (I’ll note that this shouldn’t be trivialized, however: It’s in these details where the scenario will truly come to life.) For example:
- What is the reliquary memento? A small statue made out of scrimshaw. (Why? Because it’s cool.)
- Who’s the undead ancestor? Heidvig Petersen. He was a whaler (hence the scrimshaw).
- What happens at the reunion? Nothing, actually. It’s a red herring of paranoia. The players will constantly be expecting things to go horribly wrong or explode in an orgy of violence, but Heidvig is really just scouting his potential victims.
- Is he working alone? No. Most of the employees at the hot springs are actually cultists dedicated to him. The staff may accidentally refer to him as “The One Who’s Below”.
MEDIA INSPIRATION: As you’re developing the details of your scenario, don’t be afraid to pull in more imagery and cool ideas from favorite pieces of media. (Transform them to the context provided by the spine of your scenario.)
MYTHOS LORE: Have your scenario operate consistently with or connect to other Mythos stories… unless that’s inconvenient. (For example, have Heidvig connected to Captain Marsh of Innsmouth from his whaling days. Or look at how soul transference works in Lovecraft’s stories and see how those principles could be applied to Heidvig’s ritual. For example, in “The Thing on the Doorstep” there needed to be an emotional connection.)
THE CREEPY STUFF RULE
In order for creepy stuff to work, you can’t just open a random door and then be eaten by the shoggoth on the other side. You need to give your players three chances to avoid being killed by the creepy monster.
1. Hint. (Example: There’s strange slime and a viscous mud outside.)
2. Clear Indication of Danger. (Example: You find the slime-encrusted body of a dead, decapitated sewer worker.)
3. The Monster. (Example: Emerging from the sewage is a black, protoplasmic blob.)
When the bad things go down (and, since this is a horror story, bad things will go down), you want the players to blame themselves for what happens. (My note: If they externalize that blame to the GM, it becomes external not only from themselves but also from the game world. This robs the events of meaning, and without meaning there can be no horror.) With the Creepy Stuff Rule, if they’re still here, then they can’t blame you: They did it to themselves.
Petersen applies the Creepy Stuff Rule to the example scenario like this:
Hint: Heidvig’s hot-spring cooked body stalks the halls at night, leaving behind a distinctive odor of cooked flesh and, upon closer inspection, bits of boiled flesh.
Clear Indication of Danger: The PCs dicover that there are multiple levels of hidden hot springs underground, each more intense than the last. This progression leads to Heidvig’s pit, which lies adjacent to a bubbling pool of lava.
The Monster: Heidvig.
THE SOLUTION
The GM needs to come up with one viable solution to the problem they’ve created. (If the players come up with something else, more power to them.)
For example, they can throw the scrimshaw reliquary they were given into the lava pit. Its destruction will break the emotional connection between them and Heidvig, preventing him from possessing them.
In this process, revisit the points of inspiration in your scenario seed. For example, a ritual is being performed, at the end of which he will walk into the lava pool, burning his body away (like the Velveteen rabbit) and freeing his spirit to inhabit its next host. The PCs need to STOP the monster from being destroyed!
RANDOM TIPS & INSIGHTS
- When running games, Petersen will generally summarize NPC-to-NPC interactions rather than trying to talk to himself at the table. (I think the implication is that he will rarely if ever do so when the NPCs are talking to the players. Which is a technique I agree strongly with.)
- Have people see things out of the corner of their eye that aren’t there. (He takes this technique from the movie Night of the Demon, which was adapted from M.R. James’ “Casting the Runes”, in which characters keep asking the protagonist if they can take their bag or assert that the character can’t bring their dog on the train… even though the protagonist doesn’t have a bag or a dog.)
- Let the characters think they see one thing, but then it moves. (This is from “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”: Someone reaches into a niche to pull out a satchel containing the treasure… and then the satchel wraps its arms around their throat. I would generalize this to anything so alien that the mind would first interpret it as being an inanimate object.)
- Be okay with the players failing. That’s when a lot of interesting options open up.
- Give NPCs a method for disengaging from questioning. (An activity they have to do; a pager that goes off; they stop understanding English; etc.) In other mediums, the author can simply choose to end an interrogation scene. In an RPG, players tend to zero in “like a hammerhead shark” and just pound away on every NPC.
- As part of your scenario prep, think about what happens if the cops are called. (Blocking the cops from taking meaningful action is fine — the cops are cultists; the cultists can talk their way out of it when the cops show up; etc. — but try to be creative about it and be prepared for it!)
There’s also this article from 2010, which shows a similar but quite distinct process: The Lazy Man’s Guide to Constructing a Call of Cthulhu Adventure.
This undead spirit from the hot springs is so unique and well pieced together that it seems like it could be the plot of some formerly well-known story or movie that is only now being rediscovered by modern gamers. Thanks for this summary.
[…] time then The Alexandrian has also kindly written up his ordered and concise notes on the session, as a handy blog post that can be digested in ten […]
Cool video and scenario crafting process.
In his article, Petersen suggests using this kind of technique:
“You may not know until the actual event whether you want the ritual to summon a monster, or turn the cultist into a monster, or whatever. If the ritual gets thwarted by the players, then you can have it be as fearsome as you want (after the fact).”
Do you see it as prepping to improvise, or as a kind of illiusionism (the monster is only very fearsome if thwarted by the players)? And is it maybe more natural to use when running CoC one-shots than say D&D sandboxes?
It certainly straddles a line, right?
If you honestly haven’t prepped the outcome of the ritual, then you’re just improvising the result. There’s lots of times when running a session where you need to improvise something you didn’t explicitly prep, and that’s not illusionism.
But that doesn’t sound like what’s actually happening, right? It’s not that you’re not prepping the outcome, it’s that you’ve prepped “would’ve been horrific if they’d succeeded vs. not so horrific if they do succeed”, and even if the specific details of horrific vs. not-so-horrific haven’t been specifically worked out, that’s prepped illusionism.
This also gets into some of the same territory as quantum ogres, where it feels as if choosing between two seemingly identical paths in a dungeon is a meaningless choice, but that’s actually deceptive because in that scenario the meaningful choice is not figuring out a way to distinguish between the two paths (augury, questioning goblins, etc.). Same thing applies here: In an abstract, hypothetical scenario we can kind of analyze this scenario where the PCs know nothing about the ritual they’re trying to stop, and then try to figure out exactly where to slice the difference between illusionism and not-illusionism. But in actual practice the PCs will have either deliberately made the choice not to find out what the ritual does, or the GM will have been railroading them pretty heavily to get them to this hypothetical position.
So in actual practice it kind of becomes a moot point.
It also comes back to the GM’s intention being a really important factor: If you’ve reached a point where you need to improvise details in good faith, then you’re probably not railroading. If you’re trying to justify why what you’re doing isn’t illusionism, it probably IS, right?
Yes, it straddles exactly the line for something I’ve been struggling with recently.
I think I am comfortable with prepping that it could be either very horrific or not so horrific, and decide to improvise which when it is called for. I am not comfortable (yet?) with prepping “if this then very horrific” and “if that then not so horrific”. I might very likely make the same decision when improvising, though, but as you say it’s the intention that matters to me.
And it doesn’t seem to influnce player agency either, because player’s aren’t really making a choice or fooled into believing they are making one. For me I think it is establishing a scenario and respecting it that matters here, not changing it underway. It feels dishonest to the players to present it as one scenario, when it is in fact multiple at ones and haven’t decided which yet.
In a D&D game I can always improvise something without using this technique, but in a CoC game it seems more like players buy into playing the scenario, and there’s not so much more to do if it is short circuited early. So maybe I will be more comfortable with it there…
“There’s lots of times when running a session where you need to improvise something you didn’t explicitly prep, and that’s not illusionism. But that doesn’t sound like what’s actually happening, right? It’s not that you’re not prepping the outcome, it’s that you’ve prepped “would’ve been horrific if they’d succeeded vs. not so horrific if they do succeed”, and even if the specific details of horrific vs. not-so-horrific haven’t been specifically worked out, that’s prepped illusionism. […] But in actual practice the PCs will have either deliberately made the choice not to find out what the ritual does, or the GM will have been railroading them pretty heavily to get them to this hypothetical position.”
I think you spell out something very important here.
In my opinion, the DM’s willingness to give specific and actionable information to players about the game world is a very important practical test of whether they are running a game relying on illusionism and railroading or not. This willingness does not mean they give away all of the important information automatically, but that they don’t make it unreasonably hard (or even impossible) to get it if the players act in a way that could reasonably yield it. Putting super high DCs to checks for finding informations, giving almost no useful information when a check is sucessful, making divination spells almost worthless (everything is immune or feeding false information, the info is super ellusive, etc.) are all good examples.
The reason is simple : as you say, Justin, a GM must make stuff up all the time at the table, and cannot (even must not) prep specifically everything. The fact that a GM prepped an Ogre encounter (or whatever else : an aristocrat looking for bodygards, a dark ritual, an entire dungeon) without knowing where it’s going to happen AND with the intent to eventually put it in front of the PCs when it feels right is not illusionism : it’s smart prep (or smart reusing of past prep that did not see play time). Suppose the GM decides that the Ogre will be met in the forest; even worse, suppose they decide it will be met *whatever* path the PCs will take. I’d say it does not (yet) amount to illusionism or even railroading (it might not be the best way to plan an encouter, but that’s another post).
If the players don’t try to look around or use magic or whatever else to get a lay of the land and know what might lurk around, and then encounter the ogre, well, their choices were not negated (or made to look important while being entirely irrelevant) : they did not make any informed choice.
Now, if the players do these things (maybe looking for tracks, asking the villagers nearby about monsters in the forest, communicating with animals, etc.), then the GM must, in this very moment, decide where the ogre actually is, and give the players actionable, useful information about it. Now, they can use this information to move around the Ogre or encouter it on their own terms.
The ogre encouter is in a “quantum state” up until the point where PCs observe it. But “PCs observing it” must not only mean “actually encountering the ogre” : there are many ways to know about something before or without encountering it. If the does not allow a reasonable chance to get players actionable, useful information about “quantum ogres”, they refuse to let player choice “lock stuff down”, out of the quantum state, where they then can act upon it. By keeping stuff in “quantum states” even when the PCs actions should bring it in “actual state”, the GM keep the possibility to force their predefined encounter on the PCs regardless of their actions (thus, railroading or illusionism). But a GM putting a predefined encounter in front of PCs blindly rushing into action is not illusionism : it’s simply running a rpg game.
Some criticism against the quantum ogre essays did not understand that : some people even said that random encouters were all quantum ogres.
Obviously more should be said about that, but I think it’s a very important practical (instead of purely theoretical) litmus test for illusionism.
(Of course, I followed the link in your previous comment after typing mine, and see you basically wrote there what I wrote here. Oh well. ;: )
Jordan @7, with the “I have an ogre and will throw it in front of them” situation that is illusionism to me because an ogre is something that has presence. Even if the players don’t specifically look for one there is Petersen’s “Three warnings” rule that foreshadows the ogre, or should. You can have surprise monsters from time to time but if you are in the habit of putting desired monsters on the players unavoidably they notice. Its illusionism because it becomes a habit.
I also like to think of Alfred Hitchcock’s discussion about suspense. Imagine two people at a table in a cafe. They talk for 10 minutes about football. Just as the audience are getting bored with the scene a bomb goes off under the table. Big surprise and shock.
Now rewind to the beginning and this time show the audience there is a bomb under the table, with the timer set to 10 minutes. Then the people at the table start their conversation about football. This is now a dramatically different scene.
@DanDare2050
What you say is good advice. I personnally try to foreshadow stuff in my games, and use random encounter table where an encounter does not automatically means “a monster attacks”, but might means that the PCs comes accross tracks, a victims remains, or sees the creature stalking them at a distance.
But all that said, I still maintain my point : planning to put an encounter in front of the PCs (whether it’s “the ogre attacks” or “you see an ogre taking a bath” or whatever else) and putting it in front of them when they did not previously made some choices that could reasonably lead them to approach this ogre on their own term or move around it is not illusionism. As I said, it may not be the best way to prep a game (and the habit it instills is a good reason not to do that, as you point out), but illusionism specifically means to give the PCs the impression their choices have an impact on the world while they truly don’t (because whatever they do, the same things happen anyway). In this instance, they did not make a choice, so the GM does not act in a way to maintain the illusion that it mattered. Hence, not illusionism.
Jordan I think you are still misunderstanding the player’s perspective. If the Gm wants the players to meet an ogre, and the players don’t want to meet an ogre but have no way of avoiding it they get pissed off. Especially after the third time.
Dan: “lets go this way to rescue the princess”
GM: “Theres an ogre named Ralph, he hates you and attacks.”
Big fight. Ralph dies.
Dan: “ok lets go back to the village and find out a better way to get to the princess”
GM: “On the way you meet Frank, the Ogre’s uncle. He hates you for killing Ralph.”
Big fight. Frank dies.
Dan: “are there any more ogres? How can we avoid them?”
GM: “No idea”
Dan: “Ok, we go west to the mountain pass and look to use a hang glider across the valley”
GM: “Amelia, Ralphs grandmother is just there picking strawberries. She hates you for killing Ralph and Frank”
Dan: “I’m not playing any more. Lets watch a movie.”
Having written that last comment I finally realise what I have been trying to articulate.
Players want to be able to make meaningful choices. That means they want to be supplied with knowledge about what they are facing. Hence Justin’s 3 clue rule and all its consequences like his article about letting players hack systems.
When a GM is hell bent on using an encounter they made earlier, no matter what the players do, they do it by having the encounter pop out of an information vacuum. The players just run into it out of the blue. Its not part of the knowledge base that they are using for their decisions.
Where a GM doesn’t see a problem with this the players find themselves having these unavoidable encounters a lot and they start to figure, instead of saying we go here or we go there and investigating stuff they should just say “ok, what’s the next encounter”.
Hi DanDare2050
Our discussion was about illusionism, which is a specific GMing technique. I think it’s bad, just as you. But not all bad GMing technique are illusionism : not giving any info to the players is bad, but not illusionism; railroading players in unavoidable encounters is bad, but not illusionism; we could go on.
When I say something is not illusionism, I don’t necessarily mean it’s not bad, and when I say something is bad, I don’t necessarily mean it’s illusionism. Reading your replies, I’m under the impression you use “illusionism” as an umbrella term encompassing all bad GMing techniques.
You also don’t seem to understand what I actually wrote. Your example in #11 (especially the third encounter) is basically an example of what I said in #8 : the GM refuses to give useful, actionable information to the PC, and refusing to do so amount to railroading or illusionism (depending on how it’s handled). What you say in #12 is not a counterpoint to what I said : it’s basically restating it.