Family Life
Mar. 2nd, 2004 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cdybedahlOn Steve Jackson Games' online forum, I happened to mention that I and a friend once upon a time once wrote a roleplaying scenario for a convention that made some of the players petition the convention organisers that we should be thrown out and not let back in again ever, and a couple of people asked me about the details. Since I spent the time writing the story down, I may as well inflict it on you people as well.
It was back in 1994, at a convention called LinCon. Kult was a pretty new game, and heavily pushed by the publisher. Also, the couple who wrote it, Mikael Petersen and Gunilla Johnsson (two people with impressively sick minds, who according to Gunilla started writing Kult because Call of Cthulhu was just too darn happy) used to write Kult scenarios for all the major Swedish conventions. Including this one. Except they go too busy writing the first big Kult supplement, so a couple of weeks before the con they contacted the organisers and said that, sorry, they wouldn't be able to write anything in time.
No problem, the organisers said, and scrounged up a gang from Norrköping to get something done in time. And they wrote, and time passed, and when it was less than a week left until the con was to start, they called the organisers and said "We have a scenario for you, but we want to get paid for it". And then they named a sum that was about a tenth of the con's entire budget.
Unsuprisingly, the organisers told them in no uncertain terms what they could do with their scenario. Then they called my friend Peter and screamed for help. Peter called me, and we decided that we could just about get it done, with a quick playtest and a chance for a rewrite, if we wrote something over night.
"Sure," he told the organisers. "We'll do it. Stop worrying."
Then we sat down to write. Or, rather, I sat down and typed. Peter paced back and forth and ranted, and I filtered the rants into some kind of coherent prose, occasionally suggesting ways to make the ideas worse. It was a horror game, after all.
At about 3am we had a scenario that we felt lived up to the level of horror and grossness that people had come to expect from Mikael and Gunilla. Peter took a printout and went home, with a playtest scheduled for early next morning. I went to sleep.
The next day I read the scenario and found it much too sick to be inflicted on people. Unfortunately, there wasn't time to do anything about it...
The scenario was about a family. The title was "Family Life" ("Familjeliv", in Swedish). The story was that a pretty damn dysfunctional family was on their way to have a really shitty camping vacation, and on their way there they crash their car and die. The scenario starts when they wake up in Hell, still sitting in their car. They don't remember the crash. As far as they remember they all just fell asleep for a little while. So they go on driving.
The family (and thus the player characters) consisted of the domineering mother, the cowed and resentful husband (with failed no-hope career), the neo-nazi 17-year-old elder son, the seriously condescending and arrogant but otherwise near-perfect 16-year-old daughter and the four-year-old youngest son. Since the kid didn't have much of a personality of his own, the authorities of Hell replaced him with a random sufferer who was sandpapered down to size and told that if he could get the other four to make each other's lives (or, well, whatever you'd call it) really, really suck he'd be promoted to torturer.
So we had these people who all hated each other, stuck in a car on a journey that never ended, on a road that they couldn't get off. Pretty soon they also discovered that they couldn't even die. There were some scripted events (passing a recent car crash, a diner where they could stop and try to buy food, being stopped by the police for speeding, things like that), but they like everything else just served to provoke the players to be as unpleasant as possible to each others' characters. As time went on and they travelled further into Hell the scripted events got progressively worse, so that the first time they got stopped by the police they only got beaten up and insulted a lot, the third time the policemen handcuffed the adults the steering wheel, raped the teenagers and torched the car. The first time they stoped at the diner, it was just dirty and unpleasant with rude staff, the third time it looked more like a demented bondage club and the staff demanded payment in degrading sexual services.
The first screams of "These people are insane!" came shortly after the gamemasters got the printed scenarios and had had time to read it. Quite a few of them flat-out refused to GM it. But enough stayed, and enough new ones volunteered(!) that we had enough for the groups that had signed up to play. So play started.
Some groups hated it. Passionately. Several just stopped playing and walked out. One group started that petition, which the organisers ignored. Still, it's quite the review, a thing like that.
Other groups loved it. Even more passionately. If Peter and I thought we'd been gross and unpleasant, that was nothing compared to what the players came up with. Of the groups that kept playing until the end, all had perpetrated incestous rape long before those policemen showed up for the third time, usually of every possible gender combination (and some you wouldn't think were possible). I vividly remember listening to a guy who had played the demon gleefully telling me how he had trapped the father by smearing superglue on the steering wheel and then spent a long, long time slowly cutting him up with a shard of glass, and later to a girl who had played the daughter loudly complain that one of the other players in her group had been too chicken to rape her character when he got the chance. That girl also asked to have a copy of the scenario, so she could take it home and play it with her friends. At which point I claimed to have none left and escaped, thoroughly creeped out.
We didn't get a single lukewarm response. Numerically, it was about fifty-fifty between those who loved it and those who hated it. People kept asking us for a sequel for years afterwards, but that never happened. We started on one, but soon realised that "Family Life" really had gone way too far, and anything to follow it would be either too gross or too tame to be any good. We'd also both come to be of the strong opinion that sexual violence isn't a proper subject for roleplaying games (sooner or later you'll run into a player who's a victim, and believe me, that's really not fun), which also made it difficult.
It was back in 1994, at a convention called LinCon. Kult was a pretty new game, and heavily pushed by the publisher. Also, the couple who wrote it, Mikael Petersen and Gunilla Johnsson (two people with impressively sick minds, who according to Gunilla started writing Kult because Call of Cthulhu was just too darn happy) used to write Kult scenarios for all the major Swedish conventions. Including this one. Except they go too busy writing the first big Kult supplement, so a couple of weeks before the con they contacted the organisers and said that, sorry, they wouldn't be able to write anything in time.
No problem, the organisers said, and scrounged up a gang from Norrköping to get something done in time. And they wrote, and time passed, and when it was less than a week left until the con was to start, they called the organisers and said "We have a scenario for you, but we want to get paid for it". And then they named a sum that was about a tenth of the con's entire budget.
Unsuprisingly, the organisers told them in no uncertain terms what they could do with their scenario. Then they called my friend Peter and screamed for help. Peter called me, and we decided that we could just about get it done, with a quick playtest and a chance for a rewrite, if we wrote something over night.
"Sure," he told the organisers. "We'll do it. Stop worrying."
Then we sat down to write. Or, rather, I sat down and typed. Peter paced back and forth and ranted, and I filtered the rants into some kind of coherent prose, occasionally suggesting ways to make the ideas worse. It was a horror game, after all.
At about 3am we had a scenario that we felt lived up to the level of horror and grossness that people had come to expect from Mikael and Gunilla. Peter took a printout and went home, with a playtest scheduled for early next morning. I went to sleep.
The next day I read the scenario and found it much too sick to be inflicted on people. Unfortunately, there wasn't time to do anything about it...
The scenario was about a family. The title was "Family Life" ("Familjeliv", in Swedish). The story was that a pretty damn dysfunctional family was on their way to have a really shitty camping vacation, and on their way there they crash their car and die. The scenario starts when they wake up in Hell, still sitting in their car. They don't remember the crash. As far as they remember they all just fell asleep for a little while. So they go on driving.
The family (and thus the player characters) consisted of the domineering mother, the cowed and resentful husband (with failed no-hope career), the neo-nazi 17-year-old elder son, the seriously condescending and arrogant but otherwise near-perfect 16-year-old daughter and the four-year-old youngest son. Since the kid didn't have much of a personality of his own, the authorities of Hell replaced him with a random sufferer who was sandpapered down to size and told that if he could get the other four to make each other's lives (or, well, whatever you'd call it) really, really suck he'd be promoted to torturer.
So we had these people who all hated each other, stuck in a car on a journey that never ended, on a road that they couldn't get off. Pretty soon they also discovered that they couldn't even die. There were some scripted events (passing a recent car crash, a diner where they could stop and try to buy food, being stopped by the police for speeding, things like that), but they like everything else just served to provoke the players to be as unpleasant as possible to each others' characters. As time went on and they travelled further into Hell the scripted events got progressively worse, so that the first time they got stopped by the police they only got beaten up and insulted a lot, the third time the policemen handcuffed the adults the steering wheel, raped the teenagers and torched the car. The first time they stoped at the diner, it was just dirty and unpleasant with rude staff, the third time it looked more like a demented bondage club and the staff demanded payment in degrading sexual services.
The first screams of "These people are insane!" came shortly after the gamemasters got the printed scenarios and had had time to read it. Quite a few of them flat-out refused to GM it. But enough stayed, and enough new ones volunteered(!) that we had enough for the groups that had signed up to play. So play started.
Some groups hated it. Passionately. Several just stopped playing and walked out. One group started that petition, which the organisers ignored. Still, it's quite the review, a thing like that.
Other groups loved it. Even more passionately. If Peter and I thought we'd been gross and unpleasant, that was nothing compared to what the players came up with. Of the groups that kept playing until the end, all had perpetrated incestous rape long before those policemen showed up for the third time, usually of every possible gender combination (and some you wouldn't think were possible). I vividly remember listening to a guy who had played the demon gleefully telling me how he had trapped the father by smearing superglue on the steering wheel and then spent a long, long time slowly cutting him up with a shard of glass, and later to a girl who had played the daughter loudly complain that one of the other players in her group had been too chicken to rape her character when he got the chance. That girl also asked to have a copy of the scenario, so she could take it home and play it with her friends. At which point I claimed to have none left and escaped, thoroughly creeped out.
We didn't get a single lukewarm response. Numerically, it was about fifty-fifty between those who loved it and those who hated it. People kept asking us for a sequel for years afterwards, but that never happened. We started on one, but soon realised that "Family Life" really had gone way too far, and anything to follow it would be either too gross or too tame to be any good. We'd also both come to be of the strong opinion that sexual violence isn't a proper subject for roleplaying games (sooner or later you'll run into a player who's a victim, and believe me, that's really not fun), which also made it difficult.
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Date: 2004-03-02 03:07 pm (UTC)Oh, btw, I've added you back. How can I not love somebody who has a picture of Delenn on her blog's front page? ::glomps::
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Date: 2004-03-03 01:35 am (UTC)