"Are you looking for a mystery, or a secret?"
"Of course there's a difference! Mysteries are wonders that you can ponder and share. Secrets are a burden to carry alone. Choose ..." - Alan Moore, Abandoned Houses
MysteriesDullesville, Idaho, population 51, 201. A good place to grow up in, a good place to come from. The kind of place where nothing much ever happens, much to the disappointment of the members of the J.C. Clement College Science Fiction and Mystery Fan Club, who have come together with two aims. One is to find a mystery to solve over the semester break. The other is to play their Angst in Dullesville Vampire Chronicle until their brains hemorrhage. The latter aim has been frustrated by the discovery that no-one has the rule-book. The group phones Mark, who borrowed the book, but there is no answer. Several more phone calls establish that Mark has disappeared, along with the book. The group look at each other conspiratorially, and as with one voice declare: "We have a mystery!" PG: contains drug references and low-level violence. |
Secrets
R (18+): contains sexual references and adult themes. |
A diptych by John Mack, using the Hunters Hunted supplement to Vampire: The Masquerade. The two modules can be played in any order. Five players, one session each.
Character Lists: Mysteries | Secrets
This diptych is designed to explore the niche that vampires fill in the western collective psych. Secrets uses some characters that, at first glance, seem fairly stereotypical, to explore different aspects of the modern vampire myth, and why they strike chords with modern audiences. Mysteries uses a simple metafiction motif (bad role-players, role-playing badly) to contrast fictional with "real" vampirism.
It is also an interesting exercise in firewalling, for players who play both modules. Playing Secrets first means that players will know exactly what they're getting into in the second session, which makes the inevitability of the outcome all the more poignant. Playing the modules in the reverse order is much more challenging for the GM, as the second session may need some manipulation to follow the course of events uncovered in the first session; I've made it possible to vary the interdependence of the modules, depending on how confident the GM is of steering their players.
This diptych had a difficult birth. The first playtest crashed and burned so badly that the convention organisers actually pulled it rather than risk allowing me a re-write. The second worked mostly because I had an experienced group who were very much in co-storytelling mode, carefully analysing what was necessary to make the module work. With some trepidation, I finally ran Secrets at SiliCon '94. All went more-or-less as planned, one player even going so far as to say it was the best-written module he'd ever played.
Comments from the players and playtesters mostly involved the level of character identification. The characters in Secrets, some felt, were so extreme that the required level of in-character identification was hard to reach. The Mysteries characters had the opposite problem; some players saw too much of themselves in the characters, and felt that for that reason their role-playing suffered, they were much more circumspect and more easily frightened than they otherwise would have been (the module does require some genre-appropriate behaviour, which these players saw as undermined by the feeling that they were playing versions of themselves). Another problem related to the slow revelation required in Secrets; while the title gave away to most players that everyone had secrets they would need to share, some had difficulty finding the motivation to do so.
I've tweaked both modules to hopefully deal with the problems above, but intending GMs should still be aware of the potential difficulties.
Secrets is loosely based on a module by Michael Hitchens, called Tender Prey (run at SydCon 1993), which in turn owes a lot to the John Hughes module, Memory. The character archetypes used in Mysteries were first described by Steven Caldwell in a satirical module called Systemless, and are used here because they neatly sum up the basic styles of play. Secrets was run at SiliCon '94.
If you are a GM interested in reading or running either or both of these modules, Email me with details of your role-playing background and experience, and the kind of group you are playing with. Also tell me what file formats you can read, the original is in MS Word 6.0 format but I can translate to a few others (also specify if you can un.ZIP files). And no, there is no cost involved. I would appreciate hearing feedback on how the module went for your group, or any other comments you may have.