One last twist in the tale…

This month’s Blog Carnival, hosted by Campaign Mastery, is almost finished yet – but there are still a few days left for those who want to contribute!. The subject is “With A Twist” and it covers anything about Surprises, the Unexpected, etc.

I started with an article on the rules interpretation of Surprise, and followed that with a two-part article looking at types of Plot Twist that would work in RPGs after discovering that the literary types all had problems when applied to a communal format (Part One, Part Two). After a mid-carnival break, I came back to the subject to look at the plot potential of the unexpected gift and random results, which are – by definition – always a bit of a surprise, in last weeks’ Pieces of Ordinary Randomness.

Early in the new year I will wrap up this Blog Carnival, having handed the baton on to the next host in line. But before we get there, I have one last shot to fire – on the plot potential of the Christmas Season itself…

The Christmas season carries a mindset that differs significantly from that of the rest of the year. This can be exploited by a GM to ratchet up the emotional intensity of an adventure or to make plots possible that would not be possible, otherwise.

Intensity

Some things just seem worse against a background of “Peace and Goodwill amongst men”. Scrooge is both victim and villain of A Christmas Carol, and Mr Smith Goes To Washington is a perennial favorite for this time of year, for good reason.

Excessive Greed, Corruption, Cheating, Betrayal of trust, Conning the weak, elderly, or helpless, Stealing from Children – these and many other crimes are even more disgusting against the backdrop of Christmas, and are prone to even greater intensity when the real life season coincides with the adventure timing.

Opportunities

At the same time, the festive season brings with it unusual behaviors and rituals, and these can be exploited. There are a number of Santas, providing a natural disguise for villains. But the effectiveness of this disguise is wasted if you use it on simple bank robbers; with a little more creativity, you can employ it for industrial espionage or sabotage, or a spy ring, or an assassination – something with a little more cleverness, complexity, or flair.

People gather in groups and social circles that they don’t normally frequent. This was the cornerstone of an episode of NCIS entitled “Homesick”.

Synopsis, contains spoilers
The episode begins with a serviceman returning home from overseas deployment in Afghanistan just in time for Christmas. He is greeted by his wife, who tells him that their little girl is in bed with a cold. He goes upstairs to see her and discovers that what was a mildly elevated temperature such as you might get with a cold or flu is now a raging fever. After this teaser, we have some holiday-related interaction between the NCIS members before Tim McGee mentions that the daughter of some friends of his is in hospital with a mystery fever that has the doctors stumped. It isn’t stated explicitly that these are the couple we saw in the teaser, but that is the obvious inference. Gibbs then informs the team that it’s not one child with a mystery illness – it’s eight. (This introduces a plot device that is used repeatedly throughout the episode to increase tension, as the number of sick grows with every status update, all children of servicemen).

The Naval Medical Research Center and CDC are concerned at the potential that this is a bioterrorist attack on Naval and Marine servicemen, and the escalation of sick in various ICUs with similar symptoms lends credence to the possibility. Abby, Assistant M.E. Jimmy Palmer, and another scientist begin attempting to identify the illness in hopes that a cure is on file, while the rest of the team makes the necessary worst-case assumption (deliberately targeted bioterrorist attack) and begins hunting for suspects.

Dig hard enough with sufficient paranoia and eventually you can find a suspect for any crime, and the team eventually focus on a (lab tech? assistant?) who was fired for stealing biohazardous material from the lab where he worked and taking it home with him. Raiding the man’s home, they discover an opened container with biohazard warning labels and no contents, increasing suspicion. Eventually, they locate and intercept the suspect, who they take into custody and begin to interrogate, a process that is interrupted by Lab Tech and Forensic Specialist, Abby Sciuto, who slides a manila folder into the interrogation room advising that he’s not their man.

The material that was removed from the lab by the former suspect bears no resemblance to the disease that has afflicted the children. It’s molds and spores, not a viral agent. The investigation is back to square one.

The team focuses on trying to identify patient zero in hopes that this will generate a new lead. To do so, they resume searching for commonalities between the victims, something that had been happening in the background throughout, interrupted only by the investigation into the suspect. The problem is that they can’t find one. Eventually, they determine that the commonality is a seasonal factor, and that the outbreak is not a deliberate attack: a returning serviceman accidentally acted as a carrier for a rare African disease, which spread to the children when he played Santa Claus at several different Christmas parties for the children of servicemen. This lead narrows the search sufficiently for the lab trio to identify the virus and find that it is known to respond to a particular regimen of antibiotics.

When I watched the episode for the first time, I was drawn to the plot potential of the idea that the carrier may have been deliberately exposed, perhaps by contaminating the premises that house Santa costumes. This would have produced victims city-wide with even fewer commonalities.

To be honest, the seasonal aspect of the plot had been nagging at me for some time, as the investigation didn’t seem to be taking it into account. At Christmas time, people shop in places they don’t normally go. They gather in small groups for seasonal activities like carol singing, or pause to listen to such groups, even if only briefly. Many people volunteer time at hospitals and nursing homes. Social hierarchies are breached both up and down in ways that rarely occur at other times; normal social behavior undergoes a temporary metamorphosis into something completely different. And that represents an opportunity for plots that would also not be possible at any other time of year.

Still more plot opportunities

The principle doesn’t end there. Christmas is one of those rare occasions when a character of iconic appearance is a common sight. There is often a subconscious expectation that the people wearing the disguises and costumes needed to assume this role will share in the personality traits attributed to the role. It is always particularly shocking when one Santa turns out to be someone bad, or is the victim of a crime or injustice.

Inverting expectations in this way can produce a great plot. One of the first plotlines that I ran in the current Zenith-3 campaign was the quest for a serial bomber who struck one random post office each year, and had been doing so for many years, by mailing the explosives in a standard parcel envelope addressed as being from “Poppa Christmas”. Each year was spent planning the next attack – a random mailbox or post office at which to dispatch the device into the mail system, timing how long it would take the parcel to reach the place it was to be detonated, and so on.

The adventure was designed as a way to introduce the team to various aspects of their new environment – the technologies that were in place, how they had altered everyday life, and so on – and to give them the opportunity to interact with different levels of society. The whole thing was inspired by a piece of art that I had stumbled across on the net called “Bad Santa” or “Evil Santa” and which may be related to the movie “Bad Santa” (2003). The earliest reference to it that I can find on the ‘net these days is (in traditional Chinese but there aren’t a lot of words to worry about), and the image clearly predates it’s Jul 4, 2008 dating (The image in question is the first one shown, the page is clearly a collection of themed images).

The concept seems to be German in origin, based on the folklore description of Krampus at Wikipedia. But most concepts of Santa seem to have discarded this element or aspect of the myth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sheer variety of ways that Christmas is celebrated around the world – spend some time at Christmas Traditions around the world and how Christmas is celebrated in different countries and cultures and you’ll see what I mean; if there’s not fodder on that page for an adventure or two, in any given genre, I would be very surprised! (Brief side-note: These articles only scratch the surface, leaving out as much as they include and focusing on ephemeral differences, to judge from the entry on Australia).

Holiday Celebrations are what we make of them. But our duty, as GMs, is to explore the potential for taking the social & cultural norm, flipping it on it’s head, giving the box a shake, and seeing how we can use the results as backdrop or story element to both make the adventures we create seasonally topical and more entertaining to the players. And if that means that we need to get into the holiday mood weeks or months ahead of everyone else, that’s not necessarily all that bad a thing, either!