Fire and water

You're in Paris. It's 1910, the year of the floods. You've been touring a doll factory. After looking around the workshop on the first floor (American: second floor) where the celluloid dolls are made, you go up to the second floor (that is, the third floor in US English). You stay there for a few hours, unaware that the Seine is flooding. The ground floor is soon completely underwater. The level rises to almost waist-height in the workshop, shorting out a fuse box. Sparks catch on the inflammable celluloid dolls. By the time you come back down, half the workshop is already ablaze.

You have to get out of the building. There are large windows behind you, not blocked by the fire, but you're on the first floor. Hurrying to the stairs, you find the stairwell completely submerged. To get down to the exit you'd have to swim underwater. It's only about fifteen or twenty metres, but the sun has set and the electric lights have fused. The only illumination down there is whatever is cast from the flames in the workshop.

This is in fact a scene from the 2023 movie The Beast. I won't give any spoilers except to say that the movie is 150 minutes of your life that you'll never get back, and that confusing and strident are not the same things as enigmatic and beguiling. If you do want a movie that conveys real emotional mystery, watch The Double Life of Veronique instead. Or you could read the Henry James short story, "The Beast in the Jungle", that the director Bertrand Bonello claims to have been inspired by.

But this is not a film review, it's a post about how screenwriters really ought to hire gamebook or RPG players to stress-test their scenarios. Because I can see an easy way to get out of the building which obviously didn't occur to the filmmakers because they didn't have a full mental picture of the characters' surroundings. (They also showed it as daylight outside. Unlikely at 7:30pm in January, but it allowed them to provide a lot more light in the submerged ground floor.)

OK, so what would you do? And can you think of any other movies where the characters missed an obvious solution?

Game write-ups

Game write-ups make for notoriously bad fiction. It’s not that surprising. “What happened in last night’s game?” someone asks, and we’ll trot out a great wodge of incident. But a story is much more than incident, as the Master reminds us. Incident – that is to say, the plot – is just the foundation. On that a storyteller builds the real narrative, which is a personal journey of change. Fighting a shoggoth has to mean something. You know this; you’ve seen “The Body”.

The best games would anyway make the worst stories. Fiction is designed to have endings that are “surprising yet inevitable”. We know Luke has to hit the thermal exhaust shaft, we just don’t know how he’s going to hit it. But we don’t want games to be inevitable, we want them to be like a second life. And our lives, engrossing as they are to us, don’t have the neat symmetries and moral and thematic patterns to be found in a work of fiction. The only way to achieve that effect in a game is if the referee (“games master” to me evokes a low-wattage sadist in a rugger shirt) twists events to come out the way he or she wants them to – which is the antithesis of good roleplaying. Not only must it be possible for defeats to occur, but they might be pointless. Shit must be able to happen - as, in our play-through of this adventure, it most definitely did.

All that aside, background incident is a useful resource to a writer. A lot of creative writing graduates could do with more of it. So in theory it should be possible to grow a good work of fiction out of a roleplaying game. Raymond E Feist infamously based a lot of his early novels on Tekumel campaigns. Still, we were talking about good fiction… I have been pestering Paul Gilham to turn his blisteringly brilliant Ghosts of London campaign into a novel. Paul demurs because I’m sure he realizes that all that meticulous plotting, vital though it is, is only the start. He’d need to break it all apart, insert a character with a need to change, and let us see the succession of plot events as the conduit for that change.

I did none of that with this write-up for our current 1890 campaign run by Tim Savin. It’s just the bare events of the game, albeit in the voice of my character. But it might be of interest because it’s based on a published scenario (“The Night of the Jackals” from Cthulhu By Gaslight 3rd edition) and because it gives a glimpse of our own games, which some of this blog’s readers have enquired about. Tally ho.