Right! Welcome back to another TTRPG Tuesday. I’m still on my kick for The Company RPG, so today I’m going to brainstorm more scenario pitches, but as opposed to throwing out premises like last time, I’m going to use my Experience-First approach and come up with some of the right feelings I want to evoke, and work backwards from those.
There are a lot of corporate horrors that take advantage of cold settings. Space, the Arctic or Antarctic, various other frozen hellholes. The cold echoes the unfeeling, inhuman nature of the company that is pushing the characters to keep going despite the deadly environment. The cold also creates conditions for some horror to hibernate, only to be awoken by the hubristic intrusion of the characters. So how can we meaningfully invert that temperature? Personally, I love the cold, it’s the heat that drains me. Extreme heat, wiping out the characters’ fatigue, making them want to shed their armour, making their weapons and tools too hot to touch, making them feel forsaken by company and God. The heat gives us mirages, and otherwise drives us toward seeming safe havens, only for something else to have already taken up residence there. The heat can hide radiation, the brightness can allow hunting things to escape detection. Sunglasses break, early-detection equipment fries, vision fails. Maybe some cold-blooded creature loves the sun-baked deserts, where it can camouflage itself and hunt the heat-stricken ARC team, picking them off one by one, laying ambushes and digging sand traps, mutating along to a radiation leak, swelling and spawning and changing form to rule the hellfire wastes.
What’s another feeling of corporate hopelessness? With H R Giger’s designs for Alien, I was struck by the techno-organic synthesis. I believe the franchise later makes it canon that The Second-to-Perfect Organism is designed, and I’m not surprised. Everything about the xenomorph mirrors the optimized, parasitic, predatory capitalist machine that puts the crew of the Nostromo in its path. There are two other elements that contribute to the dread of the original Alien; the fear of playing host to an unspeakable metamorphosis, and the failure of our trusted weapons to protect us. How about an ARC Team salvage effort in a weapons lab, where they serendipitously acquire massively overpowered experimental future tech weapons, that cut down the scientists who’ve been taken over by a sickening grafting plague that marries flesh and metal? And the mission’s tough up until that point, and easy and profitable after that - until they notice their skin taking on a gun-metal hue, and the extra cables and filaments that have somehow secured the weapons to their incubators. Now they need to find a way to get these god-like weapons off of themselves, before they become the mindless guardians of this iron plague’s epicenter.
I wonder what’s at the core of our fear of insects (beyond arachnophobia. Entomophobia?) And I wonder why it is that the bug-themed horror I know of in film is so, for lack of a better word, zany. Eight-Legged Freaks, Slither - they’re horror for sure, but they’re also kind of tongue-in-cheek. Bugs are genuinely scary! They provoke a primal reaction in us, I believe because they could not be more different from humans. Big cats, snakes, bears, sharks, wolves, gators - even these predators that loom large in our mind have more of a claim to the terror they inspire. How can locusts or slugs or spiders inspire a similar feeling? I think it’s twofold: their segmented simplicity is so far removed from our own mind-bogglingly complexity as mammals, as to be rendered alien. They’re a step away from a virus. Furthermore, their size is compensated for by their quantity. The hive mind of a swarm is a collective intelligence that fill us, as individuals to a fault, with an immediate fear of being overcome, of being consumed, not only by the mandibles but by the consciousness. And on top of it all - they’re creepy! They’re crawly! They’re in graves and excrement and walls and under rocks and in shadows and that’s no good. So let’s start from there. Let’s send the ARC team into a perfectly hygienic place, opulent and rich and textured. But there are roaches in the banquet, and cobwebs on the chandelier. Lines of ants cut up the walls and floors with their single-minded purposes, and there’s a slime trail but where is whatever made the trail? Beautiful surfaces peel away to reveal pale things wriggling away underneath, and every richness is corrupted from within, ripened and swollen and set to burst, to pour forth a living tide… and all the eggs it needs to keep growing. And somehow, across the lines of species and phylum, the infestation all appear to be working towards a shared, unfathomable goal…
Well, that’s all scary and gross! I hate it all. But that’s the genre, and I think if I hate it, someone else will love it. Three more pitches to throw at Logan, how about that. Well, I’m off to jot down some playwriting stuff and do my Accountability Club email. Til next week!
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