See P.

XX: Family Horror in Fear Itself

site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/see-p-xx-family-horror-in-fear-itself

A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws

When the original Fear Itself came out in 2007, horror was in the depths of its torture phase,
typified by the Saw and Hostel franchises. Always the most reliable indicator of the zeitgeist,
horror cinema reflected America’s anxieties about its place in the world under the shadow
of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. The early Obama years saw a retrenchment into
Hollywood’s recycling ethos, with a spate of remakes recapitulating the shock cinema of the
70s and 80s. Both of these horror cycles predominantly featured casts of young friends and
peers facing the hideous fates that await most scare-flick protagonists—the default
assumption of the game. One current horror wave, post-dating Fear Itself, places the family
unit in the crosshairs of supernatural or monstrous danger. A Quiet Place, Hereditary, Sinister,
Bird Box, Us, and the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House all evoke fears of family
dissolution in the face of threats from without. The more ghostly variants often show the
influence of Kubrick’s The Shining. Political in a different way than the previous torture cycle,
they touch on domestic economic unease, depicting families fighting to survive, and remain
intact, under crushing external pressure. (Although they’re still going strong, I’d categorize
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these as products of the inward-looking late Obama period. Cultural waves take a while to
show up on screens, so Trumpian horror may mark another imminent shift, with The Purge
and its follow-ups as leading indicators.) To tweak Fear Itself for family horror, revisit
character generation to create a cast of close relatives who will face a terrifying situation
together. Start by dropping Drives. The implicit need to protect one another, literally and
metaphorically keeping the family together, motivates the characters. Drives ensure that
PCs act like horror characters, often giving them a positive reason to head into danger. In a
family game, the characters generally seek to escape a situation which continues to ensnare
them.

They’re socked in for the winter at the creepy hotel.

The ghost manifestation follows them even when they abandon the creepy house.
Monsters are everywhere and no place stays safe for long.
The source of horror is coming from inside the family.

Here, characters investigate to escape the problem, not to burrow deeper into it. The GM
must actuate that by keeping the pressure on, driving them toward the information that
might just allow them to get through this. During character generation, ask each player in
turn to specify their role in the family. You might specify that at least one player must take
on a parental role. Or, if no one wants to be Mom or Dad, most characters wind up as
siblings—presumably orphaned in an earlier manifestation of the scenario or campaign’s
central menace. Some players may try to wriggle free of emotional obligation by creating
distant relatives. Redirect the urge to play third cousins or distant uncles. A recently arrived
newcomer to the family, such as a new spouse or a biological half-sibling who showed up
waving a genetic test, still works. Specify that they’ve had enough time to commit
themselves to the family unit. They might have an outside perspective but still need
desperately to preserve their connection to the others. In a DramaSystem game you’d then
devise a map of blocked emotional agendas that each seeks from the others. Although
conflict may exist or arise between PCs, in this case the focus is on coming together against
an outside danger. Characters might be distant from another at first; if they survive, it’s
because they bond in pursuit of survival. This theme appears in some familial horrors, like
The Haunting of Hill House , but isn’t so much a factor in A Quiet Place. Instead start off the
collective thinking by asking the group to come up with an answer to the following question:
What blow has the family recently endured? Groups who like to dig in and find their own
way can take it from there. Ones who prefer to choose from supplied prompts can pick one
of these choices, perhaps riffing a variation:

We all mourn our missing family member, who was killed either recently, by known
means, or many years ago, in an incident we still struggle to understand.
We underwent a bankruptcy or are on the verge of one.
The head of the family has been suffering professionally.
One of us committed a crime that made life hard for everyone.
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 One of us underwent a medical crisis and yearns for tranquility and quiet.
One of us was victimized or traumatized.
We survived a terrible accident, perhaps of mysterious origin.
A weird destiny encircles us.
Our family has been cursed for generations.
We have just moved house, and we have to make it work.

As GM, you might instead specify a collective blow tied into the premise. That last item on
the list fits a classic haunted house outing. A crime within the family might trigger
supernatural vengeance. The head of the family in professional crisis could be headed for
the psychic break that escalates the horror, because as we all know, ALL WORK AND NO
PLAY MAKE JACK A DULL BOY. Skip the step where players choose Sources of Stability.
Instead, each family member treats all the others as sources, suffering the ill results when
one of the PCs fatally succumbs to the horror. Family-based horror works well for
convention scenarios, providing an immediate premise and stakes for the players. Save time
by handing out pregens with family roles already specified, allowing participants to pick
which ones that appeal to them. Some players prefer to avoid the emotional intensity of
familial interaction, often for strong personal reasons you don’t want to blunder into. They
may have already experienced family dissolution, or regard relatives as people to escape
from. In horror, this impulse might be called “Mummies? Yes! Mommy? No!” Be sure to
secure buy-in, either by talking to your players at home or clearly signaling the premise of
your con game on the sign-in sheet.

Fear Itself is a game of contemporary horror that plunges ordinary people into a disturbing
world of madness and violence. Use it to run one-shot sessions in which few (if any) of the
protagonists survive, or an ongoing campaign in which the player characters gradually
discover more about the terrifying supernatural reality which hides in the shadows of the
ordinary world. Will they learn how to combat the creatures of the Outer Black? Or spiral
tragically into insanity and death?

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