A Note on Secrets

Everyone is welcome to read everything here. Just because something says “Host” on it doesn’t mean it’s secret. In fact, nothing is absolutely secret. With the limited exception of one’s own player-character, nothing is private property, including secrets.

Because occult horror and conspiracy literature and film runs on secrets of one kind or another, it’s tempting to keep secrets from other players. The Host in particular may be inclined to have vast secret plots for the players to discover. This is fine, and in fact recommended, but be aware that you do not control those secrets. There is so much narrative power distributed in Shadows in the Fog that if you try to hang onto a secret plot, you may soon find that the other players have rewritten it without your input, and that you have no way to stop them.

We’ve found that this is hardest on the Host, but it can bother anyone. If you have carefully designed a whole back-story to some character, and you reveal a couple of subtle hints about that story, it can be very upsetting to have the other players seize on those bits and pieces and rewrite everything without so much as a by-your-leave. Hosts find themselves tearing up their notes.

There is a complex balance here, and it will have to be worked out on a case-by-case basis. On the one hand, detailed planning and forethought should not be discarded in a heartbeat just because other players have some narrative control. On the other hand, the tremendous power to invent plots and details on the fly should not be lightly abrogated.

In actual practice, we’ve found that the distinction between ordinary play and magical play almost exactly maps onto that between secrets to be kept and secrets to be rewritten. In ordinary play, most secrets should be discovered, not created, by the players whose characters do the investigations. In magical play, however, everyone should recognize that they have total authority to create whatever they like so long as they do not undo something already created by someone else.

Every now and then a piece of magical or meta-play will challenge the whole basis of work that has taken someone else weeks or months to put together. When this happens—and it doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d think, so long as Hosts lighten up a bit—a certain amount of open discussion among players is a very good idea. Sometimes it’s useful to “take it back” and work around the secret; far more often, the secret something can become much more complicated and interesting by incorporating the new play and twisting around a bit. Open discussion prevents this from getting personal, as in, “You just trashed something I was really excited about, just for laughs.” Don’t let that happen!

See also the discussion of Host Overruling below.

{Boundaries <--> A Word to the Players}

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 23 Dec 2004