Terrible People
Have you gotten a look at the neighbors?
- TODO (lokathor): This section should provide introductory level info about monsters and stuff
- Extras / Luminaries
- There are 6 monster groups for players to play as
- There are additional monster groups that you don't play as
- Maybe find some more modern examples that a modern person is likely to have seen
The realm of horror described in Nightshift is not merely the existence of nightmare worlds from which danger constantly leaks in to disrupt suburban homemaking, it also has people in it. People who are major characters and people who are the victims in slasher flicks. Sometimes, these are the same people.
People in Horror: Extras and Luminaries
"Do not run upstairs! There is no exit upstairs!"
Remember that in horror movies there are a lot of people who serve no real purpose save to be eaten by the monsters. We call them Extras even if they happen to get some lines. These people may be strong, or smart, or beautiful, but ultimately they are doomed. If they get bitten by a zombie they will turn into one of the shambling hordes that our heroes must eventually chop through with a chain saw. They will not get cured and will not turn into leaders of the walking dead. Game mechanically, these people have no Edge score. If they turn into a supernatural creature of some kind they will become a Spawn. These hapless victims will not become the next Dracula, they will always be the horde vampires in From Dusk Till Dawn. They will not become Shelly Winters or Sheila, they will join the hordes of deadites and get cleaved through with fire.
On the other side of the coin, there are people in the horror genre who rise to the occasion. Whether they are introduced as bad ass adventurers like Van Helsing or Rick O'Connell, or are "normal people" who rise to the occasion like Meg Penny or Ash, these people have a certain spark of bad assery in them regardless of what they happen to be doing. They are Luminaries, and they have Edge. If they become Supernaturals they become the real deal. They may turn evil but they will still have lines and character development.
This is why characters will occasionally fight their way through a horde of zombies (who are of course all ex-humans) just to try to get a cure for one woman who happens to have been turned into a zombie. It isn't that they've completely lost perspective, it's that the transformation into a monster is a one way trip for absolutely everyone except a reasonably small number of luminaries. You actually can "save" Alice or Sheila if they get transformed into the living dead. There's literally nothing you can do for the rest of the people except shoot them in the face.
The Playable Types
The Universal Monsters have a lot of stuff in there which is not really appropriate for emulation. Sure, Lon Chaney is full of awesome and I have no problem watching his movies, but neither the Phantom of the Opera nor the Hunchback of Notre Dame is especially supernatural. They are both just really creepy guys. On the other end of the spectrum, the existence of space aliens really harms the whole eldritch intrigue thing. So while This Island Earth is a good movie and part of the official pantheon, the Metalunans and Zagons are not going to be part of this. At all.
Which leaves Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Gillman, the Mummy, and the Wolfman - who all appear in the motion picture classic The Monster Squad, and the Evil Wizard, the Invisible Man, and the Mole Man - who don't. It is of note however that Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, and the Invisible Man all appear in the equally mandatory movie Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and there is of course Evil Wizard and Mummy in the substantially less mandatory Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It seems clear that life would go on without Mole Men, but what the heck? We've got Mole Man in After Sundown, we call them Troglodytes.
Vampires
An eternity of melancholy and betrayal is, after all, an eternity.
The Vampire is a rockstar of the living dead. They drink blood, live forever, and look great in black. Vampires are emotionally attenuated individuals who have to consume metaphorical life in the form of actual human blood. They are parasites whose very existence is a powerful metaphor for the consumptive and conflict-torn nature of the world.
Exemplars: Dracula. Did we mention Dracula? I mean sure, we can talk about the vampires from Blade or Buffy, and we will even. But all Vampire mythos in the modern world always comes back to Dracula, because he is that awesome. And a special "also-ran" to the beast from Nosferatu, because he is also awesome.
Animates
Once created, a work has a life of its own.
An Animate is an artificial person. Created by unwise science, magic, or both, each Animate is a race of one. They have no peers and no possibility of children. Every Animate is created knowing that their entire people dies with them. It is a lonely and frightening existence. The Animate story is classically one that exists to explore the tragedy of dysfunctional human relationships - whether it be a child scorned by their parents, a lover scorned by the object of their affection, or simply a working person cast aside by those they worked for. The book Frankenstein explores much the same themes as a Bruce Springsteen album.
Exemplars: Frankenstein's Monster, Rotwang's Robot, Loew's Golem
Lycanthropes
Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night...
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.
A Lycanthrope is someone who is cursed to transform into a rampaging beast when the moon is full or they get excited. There is plenty of mythological basis for shapeshifters who are born with the ability to turn into animals or who have attained the magic powers to do so to protect mankind, but they aren't normally figures from horror stories, and have no place in horror and are not represented in After Sundown. Being a Lycanthrope means that you are a danger to people you love and the furniture around you. You can unleash the beast to rip things to pieces, but lycanthropy is a curse and it is not generally very fun.
Exemplars: John Talbot, Irena Dubrovna, Yuki Sohma
Witches
Bubble Bubble.
Witches are people who have learned Magic. In a horror setting, magic is in almost all cases bad. The genre is pretty light on Glinda the Goods and Merlins. Magicians are generally vindictive cackling gypsies, satanic sorcerers, mysterious strangers, and a myriad of other titles both hackneyed and terrifying. They spend a lot more time sacrificing people to gods ancient and evil and a lot less time preparing good children to go to the ball than magicians in other genres.
Magic that humans can use comes from three sources in After Sundown. There is the magic of Death, which is evil. There is Devil magic, which is evil. And finally there is the twisted sorceries of Nightmares, and that's evil as well. It's not that you can't do good as a magician, you totally can. It's just that the magic itself is evil and using it is dangerous even if you are the virtuous Chandu. The horror movies of the 30s didn't distinguish particularly between people from India and China (both were in "The East"), and we hearken to that slightly by leaving all traditions of magic as variations of the basic three. While a character may well be a voodoo death magician or an Aztec or Egyptian death magician, the magical set is all the same. Death magic is death magic whether you call upon bones with Chinese runes or African chants.
An important thing to realize is that The Mummy is actually a Witch. That's just how they do immortality. Sometimes it's an immortality where you do evil magic and you look like a normal person (see the 1933 or 1999 The Mummy) and sometimes you look like a crazy corpse in special bandages (like in Bubba Ho-Tep). It really depends. Either way, if you want to be a leftover from Egypt or Aztlan you are a Witch (or a Vampire of course). However, and this is important, the Mummies from the middle Mummy movies such as The Mummy's Ghost and... sigh... The Mummy's Curse, where the Mummy lurches around and smashes things, that Mummy is an Animate instead. So pick a schtick and go with it.
Exemplars: Imhotep, Roxor, Hjalmar Poelzig, Chandu
Transhuman
Just a scientific experiment. To do something no other man in the world had done.
Humans do not, in general, have supernatural powers. However, in the horror genre there are a number of people who experience an event which changes them irrevocably into something different. Something more. These people generally go stark raving mad, and in not very long. The certainty that they are no longer human causes them to lose sight of human priorities, human morality. While they have become something more, they are also something less.
The transformational event can be scientific or magical. Or a bit of both. A Transhuman always has an "origin story" which is to some degree unique. The Invisible Man took scientific chemicals. Anck Su Namun simply woke up one day and realized that she is the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess. Ayesha stepped into the mystical flame of life and stepped out an inhuman thing. Whatever the event was, it was the last thing that he or she did as a human, and the reality of that fact is as destructive to the self as the subsequent revelations of the magical world and the horrors which inhabit it.
Exemplars: The Invisible Man, Mr. Hyde, Anck Su Namun, Ayesha
Leviathan
His face was fish-like.
Supposedly in pre-Sumerian times there was a great mother of monsters. Her name was Tiamat. Or Vritra. It's not really that important what her name was, because she was killed by a powerful human sorcerer around 4000 BCE, and most of her monstrous brood is gone as well. But not all of it. Some of them interbred with humans and hid their lineage in the darkest corners of the world. They hid from the world of men for millennia, some lurking in darkness and plotting revenge and others merely living their own lives - the ancient conflict long forgotten.
But that's not really possible now. Things are modern, and there is nowhere to hide. Those who carry the taint of Tiamat's spawn in their ancestry or are cursed with the taint during their lives are both hunted and feared. They are destructive, and eating their flesh can make you live forever. Of course, eating their flesh makes you like them, and puts you into the same danger. But hey, immortality.
In After Sundown, these creatures often hang out at the edges of society - places which while nominally explored aren't actually watched very carefully.
Exemplars: Gillman, Mole Man, Robert Olmstead, Moth Man
The Non-Playable Types
Not only must we make explicit what appears on the player's side, we also need to decide ahead of time what is around, supernaturally speaking in the world. Many people protest this. If they want to have unicorns show up for a storyline, why shouldn't they, as the MC, just do that? The answer is that in a cooperative storytelling game, the players need some sort of ground state to tell their own back stories and to make plans for future intrigue. Whether or not the character knows that such and such a creature exists or such and such a world spanning organization is up to its evil schemes, the player needs to at the very least have access to that information. And while it may seem like that would spoil surprises - and it does sometimes - in a much more important way it prevents narrative dissonance. Narrative dissonance appears in cooperative storytelling games much the way continuity errors appear in horror films. And while it is certainly jarring to watch the part in Leprechaun where they drive off in the second car despite the fact that they had earlier lamented being stranded when the first car wouldn't start - it is still a movie and thus the plot (such as it is) just keeps rolling along whether you notice the discrepancy or not. In a cooperative storytelling game however, such an event would just crash everything to a halt. The players and the MC would have to sit down and work something out, because they are all imagining the world together and there is no "next scene" until everyone gets their imaginations working together.
Zombies
Brains!
Zombies are the result of evil magic, ghastly diseases, or super science which transforms dead bodies into lurching, brain eating monsters. Zombies hunger for the living and have a tendency to rampage constantly. Some zombies are fast, some are slow. Some can figure out doorknobs and others can't. But they all hunger for the living. Zombie spawn can create new zombie spawn just by killing extras, so zombie outbreaks can get really big, really fast.
Exemplars: Shelly Winters, Sheila, Ed
Goblinoids
Ha! Ha!
TODO: Rewrite this section. They ain't fae no more.
Fairies in horror movies come from the same ghastly hell dimension that the demons do. These are not the shimmering pixies from Neverland, these are the hideous flesh eating goblins from the Goblin Market. They come in small and extra large sizes, and are generally easy to confuse.
Exemplars: The Leprechaun, Rumplestiltskin, Pan, Pyramidhead
Demons
"My God!"
"Not yet, human. Soon... very soon I will be."
Made entirely of evil magic, the demons are a strange force that seeks to hurt humans and steal souls. Some appear as beautiful humans with or without horns and wings, and others look like the most nightmarish beasts the special effects budget could afford.
Exemplars: Wishmaster, Azazel, Buju, The Lady in Red
Ghosts
Boo!
When humans die and they are super pissed about something, they will occasionally linger on after death and become a ghost. Ghosts don't interact properly with physical objects and other people, and in any case are fed only by strong human emotions. So they gradually lose themselves and go batshit crazy, becoming a force that is more and more destructive.
Exemplars: Slimer, Patrick Swayze, The Mist
Paleofauna
Rar!
TODO: Possibly tie in the name here.
The wilderness of horror is a dangerous place with a spectacularly large array of things that can kill you. Man eating beasts of tremendous size roam the woods, the lakes, the swamps, and probably the mountains. Being eaten by sharks, crocodiles, tigers, or whatever is a severe threat. And yes, these super charged zoo rejects have magic powers sometimes.
Exemplars: Jaws, Joe Young, Boa, Python
Malaflora
From now on, I'm shooting my salad before I eat it.
Malaflora (or "bad plants") grow out of the ground in weird pods that make the soundtrack want to bust out theremin tracks. They grow out of humans and often have mind control and other weird powers. These things might actually be from Space. But since they don't have a civilization or space ships (that we know of), it's not super important.
Exemplars: Body Snatchers, The Thing, Swamp Thing