Malice: Not just scary dolls

I have been working on Malice, the game formerly about scary dolls. Now it's a game that celebrates the low special effects and high character development horrow movies from the late 60's to the early 80's. Before the obvious thing to be feared could be seamlessly and realistically featured onscreen. I'm thinking of movies like The Omen, The Brood, and The Shining.

I just happened to misplace my handwritten notes from the last time I worked on the game. This has turned out to be a very good thing. I have the bare bones, the pieces I really like, and I've been able to look at the game from a fresh perspective. A few nights ago, we playtested character creation, which is done in character, and in conjunction with establishing a plot. That was really fun. We ended up with the beginning of a story set in the summer of 1972, Michigan, with a cast of four teenagers who witness "Mark" die at a party, from excessive drinking. They call the police and an ambulance (after a lengthly discussion), but when they arrive, Mark's body and any evidence he was ever there are gone. That's about as far as we got. In subsequent scenes, the GM would play Mark--the Malice--of the story. I'm still working on the dice mechanics, and how exactly how to propel the story.

Another fun thing is the character sheet, which looks like a smudgy mimeograph of an Intake Form for therapy, institutionalization, etc. You fill this out in character as well, and talk about who your character is while you create her. The GM acts as a Case Manager to help the dialog along, and players establish which character (a PC) is their character's nemesis. It was all terribly fun, and I look forward to seeing how this story unfolds.

And I should be finishing Tales of the Fisherman's Wife by June, so if you ordered a handbound ashcan, it will arrive as a finished game. Hope it's been worth the wait!

Loving the Monster

We had a mini playtest of Malice the other day, and the mechanics that I tested did what I wanted them to do. This game will be GM-less. Players take turns telling the story from their character's point of view. You will always have a doll, a child who has a relationship with the doll, and the family, friends, and maybe the pets of the child. The first scene sets up a conflict between the child (and I use that term loosely. It's anyone under 21) and her family. The next scene establishes through a dice roll the relationship between the doll and the child. The child always loves the doll, but dice roll determines if the child trusts or fears the doll. And that's where I left it. That's where I got stuck.

Malice is supposed to be like those ghost and horror stories you tell while you sit around a camp fire. In the story, the ghost, the monster, the evil doll is, well, evil. You're not supposed to empathize with it. You're supposed to be afraid of it. You feel it staring at you, and you see it lurking in the brush, ready to do horrible things to you. By making the doll a PC, I think I changed that. The doll in Malice is the protagonist.

Where I thought I was doing campfire story, I'm actually doing Disneyfied fairy tales. It is the alleged villain who is the most dynamic character. And I say alleged, because I always believed that Maleficent had every right to be pissed at Sleeping Beauty's parents. And how can one possible feel like part of the family if she's always referred to as "The Wicked Queen"? Snow White was a brat, and she was not the fairest of them all. Her step-mother had brains, beauty, and power. She was the real hottie in the kingdom.

I'm not stuck anymore. Malice will explore pediophobia by making the object of fear the protagonist. I didn't say good guy, I said protagonist. Where Steal Away Jordan has gobs of dice, Malice is all about bluffing. You never know if the doll is acting with benevolence or malice.

I might run Acts of Evil at JiffyCon in November. I played a little of it at GenCon, and I'm very curious. If I understand it correctly, the PC's are the antagonists. I didn't realize that until we wrapped up our scene and talked a little about it. How cool is that? I can't wait to see how it works.


The Project Gutenberg Ebook of Household Stories, by Grimm

The Villain
And oh crap, I just discovered someone is working on a game called Malice. It has nothing to do with dolls, but still. I need a new title. Crap.

Alice

Based on a true story, and only slightly embellished. The names have not been changed.

The moment she saw the baby doll, Ingrid fell in love with her. She loved her musty old house smell, the crazing and cracking on her composition finish, her frayed red cotton dress, and even the voice box that sounded more like a death rattle. The doll was older than her grandmother. Mama wouldn't tell her where she got it. It didn't matter. Ingrid named her Alice and she loved her dearly. She swaddled Alice in a fabric scrap that mama gave her and supported her neck so her head wouldn't fall off.

Her big sister, Bea, on the other hand, would not go near Alice. She smelled like the creepy basement, she looked dead, possibly evil. Where Ingrid saw a loving gaze in Alice's hand painted eyes, Bea saw malice--towards her. "Keep that thing away from me!" cried Bea when Ingrid held Alice up to her to adore. "She's scary!"

At last, Ingrid had something that Bea didn't want. She had something that kept Bea away from her. Ingrid loved Alice, and Alice loved Ingrid. She didn't even notice that the cats hissed at the baby doll. Alice was special. By the end of the day, Ingrid and Alice were inseparable. Mama tucked both Ingrid and Alice into Ingrid's toddler bed. Ingrid snuggled up to her old new friend, and whispered secrets in her ear.

That night, something startled Bea awake. Something lurked in her room, and it wasn't a cat. Something crept up on to her bed. Something hard and cold touched her foot. She turned on the light. There sat Alice at the foot of her bed staring at Bea with those dead painted eyes.

I Scared My Daughter!

This is a picture of one of my scary doll project dolls. I got another one today, and four more are on their way. That will be all for now. I asked my mom to send me the doll I was originally afraid of, but she couldn't find it. It wasn't where I last left it when I visited them!

So when Bea came home today from school--Proud mama moment: Bea rode her bike to and from school. I just happened to be getting the mail when she cruised up with her little black corduroy messenger bag, in her black yoga pants, on her black Electra bike with the pink flames details. Bea is just so much cooler than I ever was in school. I mean, at eight years old she's got more cool in her dirty little finger nails than I did in my size 9 1/2 army surplus combat boots that I wore with my cheerleading uniform my senior year of high school. Even better, she's so cool, she's not embarrassed that she's wicked smart. And not only that, she's cool, smart, and disturbingly beautiful. Chris and I have our work cut out for us in 5 or so years. And it won't let up, because Ingrid follows in her sister's skateboard tracks.

Anyway, so I just happened to be getting the mail when she cruised up on her bike, and there was a package on the porch. "Oooh It's another scary doll!" I said.
"You mean, like a Living Dead Doll?" Bea asked. She was fishing to see if it was for her.
"No, it's an old creepy looking doll I'm using for a project."
"Can I see it?"
So I spent the next 10 minutes trying to open the damn package. (I'm not really cool in action.) All the while, I explained to Bea why I wanted scary dolls, where the other scary dolls were, and did she want to see them?
"NO!" She yelled. "I'm scared!"
"I can show you pictures..."
She settled on pictures on the computer. She would not let me bring the dolls upstairs, or even pick up the bag. After she saw the pictures (and was sufficiently freaked out), she asked me over and over again where I left the dolls, because she wanted to go downstairs and get a snack. HA! I scared my "I collect Living Dead Dolls, I love to wear black, scary movies don't bother me, so why can't I stay up late and watch them with you and papa" daughter. A small but significant victory.

I'll post more photos of my new acquisitions very soon.

In the works!

I'm working on a supplement to Steal Away Jordan which will be set in Brazil, where the PC's will attempt to escape to Quilombo de Palmares. It will be the uplifting sequel. But I'm brainstorming another game. This one's a little more fun, horrific, and unnerving, but in the fictional could-never-happen-or-could-it way. Today I started jotting down ideas for Doll: Tales of Love and Horror. I've mentioned it a few times here, I love dolls. And I've had some scary ones in my life. So this game will be a love and horror story to ti-bonanj (or petit bon ange, New Orleans style), the smirking Barbie, the bubbly Kewpie, that lives in our room or toybox, whom we love and fear, and to whom we reveal our deepest darkest secrets. And these dolls love us, keep our confidences, and hold nasty grudges because we are children and treat them like toys and don't give them the respect they deserve.

So each player will create a two characters: a child and a doll. The child has a secret, something she's done or has been done to her. It can be truly horrible, even to adults, or truly horrible as perceived by a child. Stats I'm playing with are secret, age, imagination, and fear (Child's stats). But each player also creates a a doll character, with the stats, love, malice, life, loyalty, and movement. So the players look at the doll characters and each one chooses one as her very own. The person who created the doll, plays that doll to the player's child who chose it. The child confesses the secret to the doll, and so play begins.

I'm trying to go for scary, intimate, and deliciously terrible. At first I wanted it to be pure scary story telling with no allegory of relationships, but I realize that's inevitable. Que sera sera. I want the game to be like children sitting around a camp fire or at a slumber party, telling each other horror stories, trying to out-scare each other, trying to decipher what was real and what was not real in the story.

I have in mind a complimentary project for this game, though. I'm scouring ebay for old dolls in disrepair (like the one you see above. I'm bidding on it, for sure!) to fashion into nightmareish looking dolls for artwork for the finished project.

Anyone want to join me in the Scary Doll Project? Gather your old dolls, and make them evil looking, send me a photo. Here are some examples and inspiration:

Cute Little Threat
Demon Kidz (kinda like Living Dead Dolls) I'm really going for a more subtle, organic look, but I can certainly appreciate a scary doll, as can Bea, my little punk rock/goth chick in training. (She's certainly one of my muses for this game!)
Yikes!
Creepy Dolls!