Thoughts on slasher fantasy

Fantasy RPGs

While I was listening to the Imaginary Worlds podcast an email ad arrived regarding a 5e slasher setting. It turned out to be Crystal Lake done using 5e rules, which wasn’t what I was expecting based on the email subject. 

My uneducated feeling….

• Slasher films are in the end about someone against an implacable enemy: even if the protagonists starts as a powerful character, they get knocked down very quickly (I’m not sure I’d call Aliens a slasher film, but the Marines are clearly outmatched at first by the aliens). It’s not an adventure if you walk in, mow down the monsters, and leave. (However, you might watch Dog Soldiers for competent professionals discovering they are out of their depth.)
• The protagonist is usually someone regarded as weak or vulnerable at the beginning: there’s a reason we say “final girl” or “enduring woman” rather than “protagonist.”
• The monster is fixated on our protagonists: getting out of Dodge isn’t an option (even if the protagonist thinks it is).
• It’s rare there’s recourse to “official” powers, or if there is, those fail. The deputy is not there at the finale of Scream, for instance.
• The adventure might officially be in a populated place, but the set-pieces occur somewhere it’s isolated or private: a sleep away camp, a house, a cabin in the woods. Again, part of cutting the protagonists from help.

So what would a cod-medieval fantasy slasher movie/adventure be?

Well, some of that is already common in the setting. Official help isn’t coming; there are excuses to have the monsters fixated on the protagonists.

As far as weak…imagine the main characters are left behind by the dungeon delvers because they’ve been injured. Just to avoid the whole near-a-dungeon thing, let’s say the protagonists are not especially effective fighters. By virtue of being player characters, they're better than the ground beef that surrounds them, but they can't go, “Oh, it’s a troll; boil some water for tea.”

No, our protagonists are injured or are the least effective fighters in the party. They are low level or low point value or have a condition that makes them less effective.

More to come.

Icons

A bit of world building.

Our city — maybe yours too — has had supers since at least the 1950s, and one of them was a possibly-grim definitely-human vigilante called “MidKnight.” (I’m sure the name looked clever in 1958.) Possibly because child endangerment laws were different then, he had a sidekick, “Squire.”

Actually, he eventually had a metric butt-load of Squires.

At least one went on to become a superhero in his own right, Wild Justice; some later retired (one founded a sporting goods chain and capitalized), and one probably died in the course of superhero-ing. Teenagers made their own costumes, became vigilantes, and sometimes MidKnight picked them and they became the real official-as-it-gets Squire.

MidKnight stopped being active in 1974, which made him positively ancient by urban vigilante standards. By then, being the Squire was like being in a garage band: many tried it, and a few went on to be actual superheroes. The trend mostly died out by the 1990s but it never vanished.