The Occult Underground

[Bordermarcher]

Pending my fleshing-out of some new ideas of mine and posting them up here, I wanted to know if people thought a) that this was an idea worth continuing and b) whether I should go with a setting where the supernatural exists in it's own highly-secretive world (a la the World of Darkness or Underworld) or where it is public knowledge (more like True Blood or the Anita Blake series)?

[DeeL]

I have a suggestion.  Split the difference.

No game I know of has set an 'occult underground' campaign in a World of the Rending Masquerade, but really that makes a lot of sense.  Up until the mid-20th century supernatural creatures could keep themselves a secret by killing any credible witnesses they couldn't intimidate, and it also makes sense that as of the '70s and '80s such creatures would try to makes themselves part of emergent technological industries in a way that would permit them to control information access on a large scale, but it seems inevitable that such a policy would eventually fail. 

So consider making the setting about that failure.  I live in Savannah, GA, widely touted as the Most Haunted City in America, and I have a number of contacts with the local tourism industry.  How might that industry change if the local ghosts held a meeting and said, 'You know what?  We could have some real fun with this.' and started posing for pictures?  How might the Catholic Church handle it if some bishops held a press conference in the Vatican and announced that it was unfair not to tell people that they had been vampires for decades?  What if a pro wrestler stood up in the ring after pinning his opponent and turned into a bear before leaving the arena?  ...or before the match started, whatever might have the more amusing result...

I can easily imagine the Libertarian candidate fielding a question about whether his party is a front for the Fairie Queene by saying 'What if we are?  We pay taxes too!'

I know, I'm somewhat losing the Punk ethos, but that general concept doesn't stress my suspension of disbelief the way the various 'it's all a well-kept secret' settings do.  And as for True Blood and Anita Blake, there's something kind of staid about them.  It's like we enter the setting with all the disbelief kind of settled down, and the resulting traditions already entrenched.  You can tell some good stories there, but we never get to see the Crazytime before that.  And seriously, there should be some Crazytime.

My two cents.

[Bordermarcher]

Beautifully put DeeL, beautifully put. That really helped me crystallize the direction I want the setting to go in, so thank you very much for your input.

I'm thinking in the world of the Occult Underground, the supernatural's always been something that's lurked just beneath the surface, behind the absolute thinnest of veils. The only thing that ever kept it a secret was low population densities, limitations in information technology, and a general refusal of most mortals to accept the bloodsucking elephant in the room. It's only in the past couple of decades that things have begun to change, that the protective masquerade has begun to peel away, with the monsters finally "coming out of the coffin" within the past decade. Even now though, they're still not widely accepted, or even acknowledged at all. They may have a presence in pop culture, but they still have a world of their own that regular humans don't really understand and aren't all that welcome in. It's a bit like the Mafia or the Free Masons: it's not hard to find out who they are or even where they meet, but not a lot of outsiders have any idea what goes on with them.

How's that sound?

I'll post up my reworked list of supernatural categories. Right this instant, they're probably going to be Vampire, Shapeshifter, Faerie, Ghoul, Ghost, and Possessed, but that's subject to change.

[DeeL]

I think I neglected to mention it before, Queen of Quiet, so I'll say it now - I really like this setting idea, and your way of expressing it.  It's the kind of thing that makes me want to see more.

Have you ever heard of Nightlife, a PnP RPG that some insist was the inspiration for the World of Darkness?  It's got most of the tropes of the genre - the PCs are monsters, the supernatural is a big secret, underground wars are common - with a massive layer of splatterpunk.  I've always admired the simplicity of it's system, gameplay is all percentile with modifiers based on your character traits and skills.  What system were you thinking of using with this setting?

[Bordermarcher]

I'd heard bits and snippets about Nightlife before and always thought it sounded like a cool retro-RPG, but now that I've gone ahead and actually read the book, I've got a whole new appreciation for it. Mind you, it's 90s as fuck, incredibly on-the-nose, and leaves practically nothing up to the imagination, but I dig the heavy emphasis on splatterpunk (something that's definitely going to be a major theme in my setting). I also like their mix-and-match system for supernatural powers. I don't know if I'll necessarily go with that sort of system, a stripped-down version of Storyteller, or something completely different.

Anyway, I've narrowed down the list of supernaturals that will make up the majority of the Occult Underground. They are...

Vampires

AKA: Vampers, fangs, Counts, Orlocks, Draculas.

The perfect pale poster-children for the Occult Underground, the unliving embodiment of what happens when you mix the Victorian's ridiculous sexual repression with an unhealthy obsession with death and a dash of paranoia about mysterious foreigners defiling their virginal women. One part necrophilia, one part cannibalism, one part sexual predation. Mix well and serve over ice.

Power source: Vitae

Magic: Disciplines


Shapeshifters

AKA: Weres, shifters, ferals, 'thropes (from therianthropes).

Aristotle called man a "rational animal". Well, as it turns out, some of us got a little less of the rational and a whole fuck of a lot more of the animal. People like to focus on werewolves because they're a nice balance of sexy and terrifying, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Were-cats. Were-bears. Were-spiders. Were-falcons. Even fucking were-alligators.

Power source: Feral Heart

Magic: Aspects


Faeries

AKA:  Fey, the Fair Folk, Grimms, goblins, Morgan (as a name).

Even next to talking corpses sipping blood martinis and skin-changing beast-men, faeries are a bunch of weird little fuckers. Most of them look like they stepped from the pages of some Black Forest fable that would make the Brothers Grimm's beards curl. Which of course leads to the annoying-ass chicken-egg about whether or not they inspired primitive folktales or just ripped them off, but that's neither here nor fucking there. I'm not even going to begin to try and categorize them: it's a madcap clusterfuck of sprites, elves, pixies, trolls, ogres, goblins, nymphs, both familiar and different enough to get their asses way the fuck down in the Uncanny Valley.

Power source: Glamour

Magic: Contracts


Ghouls

AKA: Zombies, Zeds, wights, Cannibal Corpses.

Ghouls are a lot like vampires, only cranked all the way up to eleven. They died (for realsies) and when they came back, they came back wrong. Really, really fucking wrong. Their emotions are so dull they're basically fucking sociopaths. There's only one passion in existence: the Hunger. It's a constant buzzing, an inescapable ache, and they will do anything, ANYTHING, to try and satisfy it...however brief that satisfaction might be.

Power source: ?

Magic: ?


Ghosts

AKA: Caspers, sheets, haunts, phantoms.

As you may or may not have been able to deduce thus far, everybody dies but not everybody dies quietly or for very long. Ghosts were once mortals who shuffled off this mortal coil but got cold feet when they dipped their toes in the River Styx and came running right the fuck back to the land of the living. But just like your boyfriend after he found out what you pulled over Spring Break, it wouldn't have them back. So they haunt their old stomping-grounds, incorporeal, invisible, untouchable.

Power source: Essence

Magic: Numina


The Ridden

AKA: Linda Blairs, horses, channellers, Voodoo Children.

It must really suck being human and having so many invisible horrors that just want to fuck you over in all sorts of creative ways. As frail as they are, mortal bodies look really, really good to all sorts of insidious little nasties that, if they can find a way in, make themselves real comfortable in some poor fucker's grey matter. In a particularly-horrific team-building exercise, the two minds are smashed together and something loosely-resembling a whole personality sometimes crawls from the wreckage.

Power source: Synthesis

Magic: Mutilations

[DeeL]

Also coming are Ghosts and Possessed (really need a more evocative name for them), but I wanted to put up what I had so far.

The ridden?

[Bordermarcher]

Added bits about Ghosts and The Ridden, fleshed-out Faeries, named the Power Sources and Magics for the different supernaturals.

Right now I'm working on an actual geographical write-up for Kentucky which, in addition to being my native state, never seems to be used as a setting for this (or really any other) type of horror. I'm juggling this with school starting, so it's going pretty slowly, but I hope to have something worth reading soon.

[Bordermarcher]

[ooc]This is the first bit of my attempt at re-doing the Occult Underground to be something a little less mainstream urban fantasy and a lot more macabre and splatterpunk-y, which I'm tentatively calling 'The Underworld". Let me know what you think.[/ooc]

Fuck your "Occult Underground". You think a bunch of wannabe Harry Potters with holes in their ears you could stick a dick through tonelessly fingerbanging their daddies' old guitars and underhand-tossing watered-down hexes at each other in some shitty suburban basement is "underground"? Motherfucker, you don't even know the meaning of the world. You people, you infernal fucking hipsters, you bandy around words like "chthonic" and "squamous" and "cyclopean" like they make you sound like any less of a pathetically self-indulgent little nerd now than they did eighty-six years ago, when you haven't even seen the sort of cerebrum-searing shit that first put those words on a madman's tongue and gouged out his eyes as royalties. Nerd culture and undersexed fangirls ate supernatural horror alive, like, two fucking decades ago, but you know it was all bullshit to begin with because it didn't chew its way out of their fucking stomachs like it was one of H.R. Geiger's homoerotic wet dreams. If there was even enough truth in the most ludicrous of the post-bath salts zombie conspiracy theories to bump off a Vegas showgirl's tit, you quicks would be tying anyone who yawned too throatily to lampposts and pouring on the gasoline.

I'm not here to put this nicely, or politely, or in such a way as to ensure you don't take your grandma's .38 and aerate your own brainpan with it, because by all means, go ahead and bite the not-so-proverbial bullet: we'll have a nice welcoming committee, just for you. I'm here to grab you by the hair and drag your ass out of the comforting light of your supposed reality and into the horrid actuality of a world you didn't even know you didn't know existed.

I hope your momma left you some pocket change, because we're going to The Underworld, baby.

You got one thing right, at least: occult really did used to mean "knowledge of the hidden" or some crap like that, which makes it all the more mind-boggling that you people use it to describe the sort of shit you write fucking comic books about. And don't give me that crap about "the meaning of words changing over time": that shit only flies when you're too short-lived to remember what they meant in the first place or too pants-on-head retarded to go look it up yourself. So no, the occult, the real, honest-to-squamous "occult", does not include the likes of vampires, werewolves, witches, and faeires. Am I saying they don't exist? No, but you better believe they stopped being allowed to eat lunch with the cool kids about the time the first picture of Lestat started to get a little bit crusty, and much like your beloved H.P. Lovecraft and literally any ethnicity in the whole fucking world, you wouldn't know one if you saw one but you'd still probably shit all over yourselves anyway.

I stand corrected, two things: Aleister Crowley really was a limey fuck, wasn't he? Great Beast, my wormy, fucking ass.

Actually, the more I look at it, there's a few bullet-points that don't totally suck dick, so I'll let them stay:

It's Not Business, It's Personal: The Occult Underground might seem like a great big place where you can just slip under the radar, but believe me when I say it isn't. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows everyone else and you better believe you are on one of those someone's shit-lists because this place is too goddamn crowded to not step on a few toes. So when the gloves come off and the knives come out everyone goes at it with so much relish they wouldn't spread it on a Coney Island hot dog.

Real Punks In A –Punk World: All these genres chocking on their own post-modernism and jilling-off to Isambard Kingdom Brunel and William Gibson and you know what crucial element they've forgotten in their obsession with steam and cyber and a million other interchangeable aesthetics? The Punk. The anger and the disdain for any king you didn't vote for and the refusal to obey any laws you didn't write in your own goddamn blood and tears. Not us. The Occult Underground is all about that barely-contained anarchy, DIY attitude, and self-expression so radical Anton LaVey would tell you to back the fuck up and cool it.

The First Rule Is Looking Cool: Call us a shallow bunch of motherfuckers, but we all knows the importance of weaponized fashion sense. Everyone's got their own personal aesthetic and biting someone else's shit is almost as bad as biting someone else's throat. Bodies tattooed with alchemical formula from Paracelsus and Jabir. One-percenter colors with Solomonic pentacle-patches. Ear lobes pierced with coffin-nails. Denim jackets embroidered with grimoire-text. Go crazy.

The Obits: Unusual Suspects

There're a few general rules to keep in mind when talking about the denizens of the Underworld. Actually, there's, like, three, so you got no excuse if you can't remember them.

First things first, we don't stick out heads out from beneath the manhole covers during the day. For some of us, sunlight sears like an acetylene torch; for others, it just gives a nice tingling sensation a lot like getting dick-acupuncture inside of a light bulb. But it's more than that. The sun is life and energy, hope and warmth. It's a symbol of inspiration to the quick, and the blazing antithesis of everything we are. You want a good comparison, imagine waking up every morning with a fiery fucking skull staring down at you. Yeah, so you can probably see why we keep in on the subterranean until after dark.

Second thing, we're not fucking sexy. I don't know when vampires suddenly became crazy postmodern sex-symbols, but rest assured that shit doesn't really fly. Would you think someone who wanted to fuck an ice-cold Victorian corpse is any less of a goddamn deviant just because said corpse could talk? Didn't think so. Now, not all of us are monstrously-hideous, but even the ones who seem like they'd be pretty hot on paper have that particular sort of charnel aura that surrounds fresh roadkill: no matter how much you like venison, it's still not some place you'd want to put your tongue.

Last and certainly not least, there is absolutely no Grand Unified Fucking Field Theory of Undeath, no easy answer why we haven't shuffled off this mortal coil like so many other billions. For some, it's because of a curse, or a taint, or a pathogen, a mutation, possession, a parasite, a fungus, or just an inhuman act of will.

Now then, on to the juicy bits! Or the bony bits. Or whatever.

The Undead are your run-of-the-mill (and not-so-run-of-the-mill) walking corpses, bodies possessed of consciousness and animation but severely lacking that essential spark of life that makes the quick so, well, quick.

The Spectral have the opposite problem: they're nothing but spirits, nice and incorporeal. Sure, most can manifest enough to move objects or possess a body that may or may not already be occupied, but that's a lot of work.

The Twisted are what happens when a normal human gets exposed to the eldritch radiation that bubbles up from the bowels of the Hateful Earth. Ever wonder why subhuman mutants always seem to live in caves? It's not just because they've been shunned by the mortal world: living in a cave actually turns you into a subhuman mutant, at least some of the time.

The Outsiders come from realities outside our own, the kind of places the more pretentious of fucks like to call "dark anthropic zones": realms where life exists, but a kind of life that's wholly incompatible and quite often hostile to what we call life. Of course, because of the shape and constraints of our world, they get forced into boring three-dimensional bodies. Or at least, part of them does: like a circle talking to a sphere, only a cross-section of their entire being exists at any one time, the greater whole lurking in a space their new brains can't even comprehend anymore.

The Ancient are the last remnants of the antediluvian races that once ruled the earth in eons before humans even discovered fire, only to have fallen into centuries of degeneration and inbreeding. What few remain may or may not remember their past glories, which would only make the sting of having to cower in the shadows of the upstart apes burn all that much more.

[ooc]I still don't have a system totally nailed down, but my intention is for each of the five groups to have a handful of intrinsic attributes, with the players further selecting their own optional traits and abilities to better define their own breed of Underworlder a la Nightlife.[/ooc]