Horror is a remarkably difficult emotion to bring about organically. Games and improvised narratives especially tend towards the easier to promote terror when attempting to develop fright.
What follows is a tool you can use to create horrific images on the fly.
Take some form of oracle system that randomly produces images and ideas. You may have a set of such dice lying around, you might use Tarot cards…
Choose one aspect of that image / idea. For example, a lightbulb could offer its luminescence, its filament, its transparency.
Select a part of something else to be used in the narrative. For example, glance at the nearest person; settle on the first limb / feature you spot.
Grant the feature from the random oracle to the aspect of the desired element. For example, the nails on someone’s hand might be glassy and transparent; their breath gives off a faint glow in the shadow of the glade.
If you’d rather this as a motto:
Assign, refine, combine.
Some examples, applied to a newly discovered corpse:
Rather than a circle, one pupil looks like a keyhole.
It takes a great deal of effort to stop looking at the corpse’s face, almost as if it were magnetic to sight.
From its palm grows a single reed, though this vanishes when the arm is moved. It was as if the palm itself was a crossing to the pond where it was found.
There’s a secret scratching beneath the surface of this town. A secret that Annie Bishop and “Big Al” Halifax are going to split open for the whole world to see. A secret powered by my completed EXUVIAE rules, within two and a half hours and with no preparation whatsoever.
Annie Bishop works the taxidermy store at the top of town. It’s a stuffy job, but she’s got the stomach for the work and the intermittent deliveries of Big Al. So, Big Al pulls up outside her house one morning, having “hit something” on the freeway again, but there’s something up with this moose. Intricate patterns have been carved into its skin — though clearly not by any knife or claw that Al’s familiar with. He hauls the carcass into her house — the symbols are weirdly familiar both to south American ancient cultures, but also European and Asian paganism too — though what’s less than familiar is the fact the moose’s liver has calcified into a lump of granite.
The two are both hot up on their conspiracies — Annie reads a ton of occult books and their authors tend to take too much seriously, and Al is a regular listener of those radio stations where you’re allowed to speak out against the vampire lizards. This stoneliver is clearly a sign: and probably tied to the fact that the florist opposite Annie’s taxidermy shop was broken into a few days back, but still no cops have turned up to turn the place over.
So the two hit up the florist: Al taking his usual subtlety with a heavy kick to the door. Inside is dark, and the place stinks of rotting lilies and bloating flesh. There’s a body on the floor and someone rooting through the pockets, but this guy stands up and holds his hands into the air.
But then, see, the body on the floor, it sits bolt upright. Al spooks, throws his wrench at the guy with his hands up — guy whose head snaps back with a flailing proboscis. Annie flees the scene, but is barged to the floor by some heavy who steps into the doorway.
The clearly-not-a-corpse has gotten to its feet by this point and grabbed Al, who stares transfixed at the empty eye sockets of the thing. By the time he breaks free, a steady stream of mosquitoes pour from the sockets, and Annie’s looking through Al’s truck for something to lever open the nearby hydrant.
Except that she sees someone over the road and is promptly interrupted by her mother, who’s not only clearly friends with the brute who knocked Annie to the floor, but also friends with Al’s ex-wife who also crosses the road. The brute grabs Annie, Big Al runs into the brute’s mate out the back of the shop, and the pair wake up tied to chairs in a dockside warehouse.
This first act of the game led to the players uncovering almost half as many truths as they needed to win: and after escaping the warehouse and resting up at Al’s contact, they researched an abandoned truck-stop at the edge of town. Eventually leaving that in flames and with the corpse of a hybrid human insect in the back of a truck, the pair fled along the coast road to Annie’s father, where they eventually learned the truth of her mother’s involvement…
EXUVIAE is currently in the run-up to a Kickstarter later this year. I’m organising artwork, layout, printing, &c. However, if you want to get access to the beta reader rules then send me an email at SEANatBOOKSEANSMITHdotCOdotUK.
This has been translated from a French collection of lays. Originally written in a freeform structure, I’ve taken the liberty of corralling it into rime royal. The second half is lost.
Inside the palace crypt Cassilda sings
A mournful song of lost now in Carcosa,
Such as the recent passing of our kings
From living to the lake-side land Carcosa:
Beneath the baleful suns of far Carcosa.
Yet time upon our city now to mourn;
Bid patience ’til successor be inform’d.
Swiftly from the tomb Cassilda steals
And to the waiting arms of her Diego:
A close embrace then at her feet he kneels.
“Do tell me that Camilla does not know.”
“Neither of our love nor poison, no.
The secrets of his murder with him rest;
No need that talk of treason be suppress’d.”
Yet the late king’s illicit lover waits
And hears the dialogue admitting guilt:
Lucrezia stands hid behind crypt gates.
Initial thought of confrontation wilts
To better guard her safety ‘gainst swordhilt.
“I’ll shed the falsehood at the masquerade
And that the coronation might be stay’d.”
While edge of town a tattered stranger knocks
With vivid hand cowl’d under yellow shawl
And cover’d face as though to shield a pox.
The door opened by royal chef full tall
Who in but a breath is under stranger’s thrall.
The stranger he invites into his home.
Then feastly preparations to be done.
For now the lights are dim, the wine is set:
The guests arrive in rich excellence clad.
Despite disguise all as a king are met.
Among the throng the yellow robed nomad.
So look upon the dance as one near-mad
And hear the conversations overheard
Regardless of who took intended word.
Come midnight bell the call to then unmask
And all but one reveal smiling delight.
All but one — the stranger he — “I wear no mask.”
Camilla from him turns her face in fright
Surveys the scene all pallid in moonlight.
Cassilda from the room has turned and fled.
Camilla’s husband: lying, twitching; dead.
The nobles clutch their stomachs full of pain.
The stranger tall he stands amid the scene
Looks on while gore and bile from faces rain.
The toxin wine gone from decanter clean
Absence brighter than yellow tatters sheen.
Into the street fleeing Cassilda thrust:
“Not upon us, oh king! Not upon us!”
This is something I’ve been doing off & on for a while, but realised it would be worth formalising the concept.
I would like to offer my services consulting on interactive & genre narratives.
“From experience, I can assure you that Sean has both a serious interest and a deep insight into game mechanics.”
— Magnus Hedén of Spiritmask RPG
Whether you’ve got an RPG adventure you’re running or a ruleset you’re writing, whether you’re writing a horror novella or a sci-fi play, I could help you eke out the greatest narrative resonance from your story.
Who is this clown?
Well, I’m not actually a clown. But I am a magician.
That means I spend a lot of time thinking about what each audience might expect and how to achieve & manipulate that.
It means I’m used to thinking about objects & the interactions between them in different ways. No-one thinks about cards like a magician does.
I can solve problems you have with interactive or static narratives.
I can help you understand the core conflict within your narrative.
I can highlight & clarify the emotions your game mechanics will promote.
I can simplify & refine unwieldy systems or stories.
What do I care about?
I like players & characters to have agency – the ability to visualise & enact narrative consequence.
I like brevity & clarity.
I like people to be social & to promote their ability to tell stories.
What is my fee?
I’m taking a leaf out of the book of someone I greatly admire. My standard initial consultation fee is the price of a cup of caffeine. Buy me a coffee & we’ll talk through your needs. If you envisage needing a longer conversation, you can buy me lunch. If you’re in a different country, we can do PayPal & Skype.
From there onwards, we can arrange further services according to your needs. But for many people, that little nugget of insight will be all you’ll need.
Email me today at SEAN at BOOKSEANSMITH dot CO dot UK & we can arrange a coffee.
What are people saying about this?
“Thanks for all of your advice, and your assistance. You’ve been a huge help, and it really helped me re-structure a lot of the rules, explanations, and organization of everything. Your feedback was invaluable.”
—David Schirduan on Mythic Mortals
“I think these [ideas] are, no contest, the best feedback I could get from this project. Thanks :D” —Sangjun Park
Please take my hand, ascend the stage,
(The lights are warm, the platform bright)
You’ll help to shape our show tonight:
Allow your sight to wander cross the page.
A word will fix firm in your mind –
Just lock it there and hold it tight,
Against your limbs don’t try to fight
But let them seize as sockets start to grind.
Put yourself in my control and
Make a PRISON of your soul;
Sit still, I’ll fill your face with ants.
The Hive will take you in its fold
And nurture you, and make you old,
The Queen will hatch her children in your brain.
Today, I received a letter from Black Static, the address written in my fair hand. Of course, the first response was a flutter in my chest and a quiet, upbeat, “Ooh!” The second response was to lever the edge of my keys under the flap and tear the aperture apart. I’m not sure if I directly expected the form rejection slip within, but I think part of me always did. (Another, more optimistic part, thought that the bulkiness of the envelope was caused by a lot of cheques rather than the advertising leaflet within.)
I’m not surprised, and I’m not saddened. I have read far too often that rejection is the most common bedfellow of the early writer. Conveniently, I seem to have internalised that straightforwardly enough – but I think I’ve always been oddly good at this: somehow mildy impervious to rejections from Oxford and UCL, much to the annoyance of my then lady.
There’s nothing more that can be done, so onwards.
Two paths beckon.
The first is the most simple. Keep on writing, keep on sending. Rejection slips are proof that work is getting finished and read. A readership of one is better than an unfinished manuscript, and I’d be more arrogant that I’d humbly admit if I expected 100% of my readers to enjoy my work. To that end, I need to finalise “Phage” and I need to actually write that steampunk Macbeth.
The second is a forked path, and where my dilemma lies: I could send “The Trees” and “Not a Bedtime Story” to another market and hope for publication and success. (I’ve been told by people whose readerly opinion I trust that they are of publishable quality, even if they’ve yet to be sold.) Or, I could save time submitting to markets that I’d need to find and spend that on new creation. Really that makes the most sense.
So what to do with these finished stories? I’m loath to let them rot in a digital fortress until they gain sentience and lose sanity. I don’t want to self-publish them, because I’d have to spend creativity time on making a good looking e-product. I had thought of combining a few of my similarly mythosed stories together. I still may.
The most likely option is to give them away, but the precise howness I have yet to decide. Really I ought to use the opportunity to gain a proper mailing list like Writing Magazine keeps telling me I should. That would require the software and the investment in actually writing a newsletter of sorts beyond the intermittance here. Is it worth it? Or shall I polish them into simple PDFs, put the download links here and elsewhere, with the links back to the site and the suggestion that people pass the e-papers onwards?
I have a terrible tendency for misspelling the words poetry (see above) or pome, which may or may not be inherited affectations from an English teacher. That being said, I am naturally drawn to creating humorous* misspellings surprisingly often.
What I am not so naturally drawn to creating is the aforementioned tree itself. I do not know why, particularly, considering that I have naturally created prose in sheathfulls. Maybe when most were going through that teenage phase of angsty pomes, I found myself writing gamebooks or variably complex systems for role playing games. Considering the numerical focus of my writings’ development at this time, it is perhaps unsurprising that I (may) have taken to poetry in the manner I seem to be at the moment.
I am currently reading Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, which has stared at me for from a variety of bookshelves, if never my own. I am now borrowing milady’s copy, and am sixty or so pages in – on the fifth exercise.
What I am enjoying most about it is the whittling craft of it, at least under Stephen’s tutelage. It is the shaping of meter** and the warping of words, and less the act of creation. It’s not the preconsidered product but the process.
I can only remember writing one poem off my own back. It’s called Pearl Hoard and came to me whilst I rode beside the North Sea. I don’t know if my future pomes will be similarly horror or else another genre. I like the idea of staying to a genre though – and sci-fi quite appeals.
Hmmm… A cyberpunk poem..?
…
* In my opinion, if not others’.
** As an archaist, I am in agreement with Fry’s preference.
This post will be of particular interest if you are well/partially versed in the game that is Magic: The Gathering. Give it a try even if you’re unaware.
Mid-November, I read an article of Inkwell Looter’s on Gathering Magic about a new MTG format called Filth Casserole. Essentially, it’s a Constructed variant of 50 card Modern singleton; which means that you can use any card from Eight Edition onwards, although only once (with the exception of basic lands).
I’ve been a fan of restrictions for a long while, especially when connected to a game as open ended as Magic, and the restriction of deck-size and construction rules make it really interesting. What’s perhaps most appealing to me as a “Casual investor”, is that it allows me to build decks around one or two cards – especially choice rares that I happen to open. (The vampire deck below came into being because I opened a Stromkirk Noble.) The smaller deck size makes for further restriction of what can be included, but allows for an interesting amount of consistency.
How have I dealt with the restriction? Mostly, I’ve tended towards creating themed decks. I really like the concept of the format, and really enjoy building decks for it – at least have done so far. My favourite theme decks I share with you below – an aggressive RB vampire deck that allows you to repeatedly pummel opponents while calling out “I am a wampyr!”, and a slower, more controlling GU deck based around insects and themed heavily on a recurring character from my horror short stories called Gustav May.
These two decks are currently sleeved up and paired together – even if they haven’t been built as duel decks, they provide interesting foils to each other, and hopefully a good real-world introduction to the format to any MTG players I chance across.
What I like about the way I’ve been creating these decks is that I create a basic theme and allow a couple of subthemes to creep in – such as a vampire’s captivating and compelling nature. I’ve been designing these decks somewhat open ended in the hopes that they’d suit multiplayer games. Inkwell Looter has mostly focused the format on duels at the moment, as has Marcus Bastian in his post on the format, but I think that the format would lend itself brilliantly to multiplayer in all its glorious variety.
Either way, I tend to include a few what-ifs to help with whatever comes my way.
…
The paired decks I’ve created are as follows – and mostly based on what I can get my hands on. My favourite thing about singleton formats, though, is that if I can’t find one thing, there are several alternate versions that can take the deck in a different direction. Watch out for interesting synergies, such as Delver of Secrets plus Reclaim, or Traitorous Blood plus Altar’s Reap.
// Deck: Gustav May (50) // Lands 10 Forest 1 Inkmoth Nexus 9 Island // Creatures 1 Blightwidow 1 Delver of Secrets 1 Necropede 1 Phyrexian Swarmlord 1 Somberwald Spider 1 Tangle Mantis // Spells 1 Asceticism 1 Carrion Call 1 Contagion Engine 1 Dissipate 1 Fog 1 Frightful Delusion 1 Gitaxian Probe 1 Grasp of Phantoms 1 Hysterical Blindness 1 Leeching Bite 1 Lost in the Mist 1 Memory’s Journey 1 Overrun 1 Pistus Strike 1 Psychic Barrier 1 Rampant Growth 1 Reclaim 1 Shrine of Piercing Vision 1 Silent Departure 1 Spidery Grasp 1 Steady Progress 1 Tel-Jilad Defiance 1 Trigon of Infestation 1 Twisted Image
If you want to make your own Filth Casserole deck, here are the rules:
How to Make a Casserole
1. Your deck has a minimum of fifty cards.
2. You can only have a single copy of any card other than basic lands.
3. Legal card sets and banned cards are the same as for the Modern format.
4. No sideboards (so Glittering Wish is bad; sorry).
5. All the other usual stuff applies. 20 life, mulligans, blah, blah, blah.
If you want a game, either find me out in North London, or on Magic: Online as seanfsmith.
Considering the sheer overwhelming variance in my pressures at the moment, the above title is somewhat ironic!
However, the title itself refers to the writing downtime I’ve accumulated since the completion of NaNoWriMo. Well, the termination at least. I reached half the target, handwritten, for which I’m happy enough. Rather than let it rot away and be forgotten, as it seemed that many people who I met at the Write-Ins* had chosen to do so, I have decided to let the novel lie fallow for a month, while Irgard hangs perilously from the World Tree, to pick up the story again in January. I hope to get the first draft finished by the end of Feb: two months for a further 25k words is perfectly acceptable.
As such, I’ve got a random urge to keep writing (which I suppose is a large point of the challenge), but I mean to (re)turn my hand to other things. Amongst the fold are these:
Sending off Not A Bedtime Story to some more publishers. I mean to try Black Static again with this one; it’s a little shy of one-thousand words, so not quite suitable for Nightjar.Tweak my latest short story, Phage, which is mostly set in St Pancras station and polish it beyond its current second draft.Return to my cyberpunk universe, Slick Thames. It’s set a little into the future in an imagined London, but the current early nightfalls and sleeting rain draw my mind back to the setting. I’ve a couple of pieces of flash grouped as my Short (Circuit) Stories that exist, and a few thousand words of a started novel somewhere.
Precisely what I try to do, I’ve yet to decide. However, I’ve opened a world of possibilities with writing on trains from my NaNoWriMo experiment, and there’s only so long I can control myself. I bought myself a new premium notebook today.
It’s already begun.
…
* Great sessions where many a writer on the NaNoWriMo would take over a large section of various London cafés and fill them with the sound of clicking keys and my own scribbling pen. There’s a great video here, which documents a session at Starbucks where I finally crested 10k words.
At a later Write-In, I wrote a ten page paragraph. Very pleased with that.
Last night, I joined the “cool kids of the London horror scene” (to paraphrase Will of Spooky Reads) in rubbing shoulders and exchanging idle chit-chat with some notable names in British horror at the lauch of Solaris’ new horror anthology, House of Fear. The anthology is editied by Jonathan Oliver, “the hottest new horror editor […] since Stephen Jones”*, who downplays the complexity of his role by saying that he “finds a lot of stories he likes and puts them together.”
He also chaired the release event, leading a panel of Christopher Priest (him that penned The Prestige), Sarah Pinborough and Paul Meloy. I hadn’t read any of these authors yet, despite all intentions, but I hadn’t heard of the last at all – however, I found myself most impressed by his thoughts and contributions.** Sarah was affable and only semi-coarse, relating her thoughts to a well received response from the audience – most notably to over-loud (and over-lustful?) laughter from the man seated beside me. Chris’ mike lay on the table, and his calm contributions*** had the audience leaning forward to catch his words, calm and rapt. He reminded me of when I saw Philip Pullman talk at a panel at the Oxford Literary Festival.
I’ve not read beyond one story in the collection yet, but the tales range across the wide realms of haunted house literature. It’s an interesting topic, and one that generated much interest, and much discussion, on the night.
I’ve a mind to recreate that here.
…
* So says Jonathan Strathan, who is quoted on the back of the book itself.
** Indeed, I read his story as soon as I got home, rather than waiting to reach it in the collection as otherwise I would.
*** Sorry I contribute that word too freely in this entry.
ersatz esoterica 