Dark Shadows

If you want to play Shadows in the Fog as a take on the TV show Dark Shadows, you obviously need to start by watching some of the show. You will also need to make some changes here and there in the game, although most of them are issues of emphasis rather than mechanics.

Situation

You need a central situation, almost certainly a family and a house. The Collins family, and their house Collinwood, in the town of Collinsport, is the model here; you will want something pretty similar.

The period and location don’t matter much in Dark Shadows, all things considered. As you’ll see, violence tends to come in two forms—lethal and not lethal—so differences of technology in that respect are irrelevant. Everything else is about color and atmosphere.

Speaking of atmosphere, your situation should be Dark. A brooding manor all alone on the moors is good, as is a strangely decrepit vast townhouse in Kensington (but it has to be vast). If you set the game in the middle of London, think about why there isn’t a constant bustle of people. Perhaps your house is set right on the edge of Hampstead Heath, on a dismal side-street, far from the madding crowd.

A final note on atmosphere: don’t let it get too campy. Sure, this is high melodrama, with heavy atmosphere and monsters and all that goes with it, but it’s not The Munsters.

Character Generation

Everybody must be connected to this family and its situation by fairly straight-line connections. Blood and sex relations are tops, but really strong hatred is okay too. Start by designing your character concept as usual, but make very sure that the connection is central to the conception. Your Brief Holmes Description should begin by stating this: “Elizabeth Stoddard is the current matriarch of the Collins family. She... [and go on from there].”

The Host should make a brief list of required positions (one person has to own the house, after all), and then get proposals from players about who they want to be quite early. Only one person can be the Patriarch, for example, and you don’t want everyone to be a long-lost cousin.

Every player will have three or four PC’s. One of these should be designated your Primary character; this is the only character who, at the start anyway, will get his or her own PC Plots (i.e. the special secret facts, described below).

Occult skills should generally come in one of three forms:

• Skeptic: You don’t believe in any of it, and won’t start to do so until your nose is pushed in it.
• Sensitive: You know nothing about the occult, and probably don’t care, but you are oddly attuned to occult influences. You pick up “vibrations,” or “feel that there is some terrible evil here,” but you can’t really explain why.
• Hard-Core: You are a knowing, practicing occultist, with very real powers. You strive to keep this very, very secret. Not too many characters should be like this.

One character, to begin with, may be something much more extreme: a vampire, a werewolf, etc. But you don’t want a lot of this or the whole thing will get silly.

Keep skills to a minimum. Most people probably should not have more than one Brilliant and one Terrible skill. Everybody should really be pretty normal.

Work out a little bit of your back-story, and make a list of all the characters necessary for it. For example, if you are the eldest son of the family, you should note that you will need parents and siblings. If your baby was murdered by an unknown maniac, you will need a maniac and a baby (this is Dark Shadows: how do you know that the baby is dead? and even if it is, how do you know it’s not still moving?)

Write up a 3x5 card for every one of your PC’s.

Make a brief note on a card for every necessary other character, implied by your back-story. Write on it your character’s name, and some general note on who the implied character is.

Character Generation Session

At the session, everybody should lay down every one of those 3x5 cards, explaining the basics. You should keep your secrets, of course, but at least all the characters who must exist in or around the house should be explained.

Now everyone should start picking up those brief note-cards and adding to their own. This should be done by mutual consent, not by some sort of mechanic. For example, if the wayward half-sister needs an alcoholic father, some other player might have a character who could be the alcoholic father. That information should now be made definite between these two players. Keep information to a minimum: you don’t need to explain why the half-sister is wayward, nor why the alcoholic is still hanging around the house, or any of that.

Once as many such cards have been collapsed as possible, you have a roster of characters. Every PC must have at least two other PC’s to whom he or she is connected in this fashion.

Now everyone should go have some private conversations and work out a little more of the back-story of each pairing. In every such story, there is one fact that both parties would like to keep secret. Both players should take scrupulous notes, but reveal nothing to anyone else. At the end of the discussion, both should be able to write, on a 3x5 card, a very similar story of their relationship. The card should include the secret fact.

Keep doing this until every single such PC pair has established its secrets and its back-story.

What you now have is a roster of some twelve to twenty characters and a bare minimum of twice that many secret facts known to only two people. You have a few characters who are clearly more important (the Primary PC’s), a number of secondary characters, and a number of incidental characters (the NPC’s nobody picked up).

As a group, draw up a relationship map. Start with the Patriarch or Matriarch of the family (there’s always one), then draw a set of links that pass through everyone else. Just the above-board stuff goes on the map (“friend” is just fine, especially for those friendships where it’s obvious to everyone else that the two people hate each other but keep saying they’re friends).

The Host should plan to write this up as cleanly and clearly as she can, and provide it to everyone in advance of the first session (for study).

Final Character Setup

As usual, tinker to make sure everything is in order, and study up all those secrets until you have them down pat.

For your Primary PC, if you haven’t already done so, invent a secret that is yours alone. The PC doesn’t need to know what it is: the governess might be a foundling who doesn’t know who her parents are. On the other hand, “I am a werewolf” is obviously a secret known to you.

Starting the Soap

One of the Primary PC’s should be the designated starting-point. This should usually be the Primary PC who is farthest from the center of the situation, as for example the foundling governess, the long-lost cousin who’s visiting for the first time, or whatever.

This Primary PC arrives at the house (or whatever) and begins meeting people. Every other Primary PC’s location should be decided at this time: “I’m in the library,” “I’m in town at work,” “I’m lurking around the garden,” “I’m upstairs getting my beauty rest” are all good answers. Somebody should be home, though, to greet the new arrival.

Now for the first whole Episode, you’re just going to have people meet each other. Don’t bother bidding or anything; just move around the Plots by association or counter-clockwise. That is, if Victoria is sent upstairs to meet Roger, you might want to shift to Roger and Victoria’s Plots (see below for double-plotting); if there’s no obvious association, cut to Burke and Willie in town.

Plotting the Soap

Every Scene has at least one Primary PC, and must have at least one other PC. So you could have two Primary PC’s at a time, or a Primary PC and a secondary one. But you can’t have a Primary PC and a minor NPC unless some other PC is going to enter shortly after the Scene begins.

No one player may have two characters in the same Scene. You may only do this if you give one of the characters to someone else, and even then that player may choose to keep the character if he or she wishes. This is why certain people very rarely meet on-screen.

As secrets come out, which they inevitably will, try inventing some new ones, perhaps between different characters. For example, if David finds out Barnabas’ secret, Barnabas could start threatening him to keep him from revealing the secret; now they have a secret together. If Mitch kills Willie, Elizabeth should be on hand to see the body; now they have a secret together. And so on. The idea is that there is an ever-shifting body of secrets that all the players pretty soon know about but the PC’s are weirdly not aware of. This creates tension and suspense: everyone knows that these two characters are really discussing the fact that one of them is a werewolf, but the other PC’s in the room don’t know that and so they don’t quite get what all these references to the moon and dogs are really about.

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004

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