Monday 19 September 2016

The Ligottian Shift; or Three Scenes from Horror Games Not Played

I have been reading Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe, recently released as a Penguin Classic after being near-enough impossible to get hold of prior to that. I am a great fan of Ligotti. So I feel awful using the word "cliche" to describe the work of a writer who is so distinctive and special. But I do think, after reading most of his short fiction, that I have worked out the one element that appears with enough regularity to merit the term; last night I was thinking about this and decided to call it "The Ligottian Shift".

I don't want to spoil any of Ligotti's stories for those who haven't read them, but those who have will know what I mean when I mention stories like "Dream of a Mannikin", "Eye of the Lynx", "The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise", "Gas Station Carnivals", or "The Bungalow House". (There will be others - these are the ones I thought of off the top of my head.) What tends to happen is this: there is a setup which makes you feel very uneasy. Often it has a kind of mini-horror story which exists within the first half of the story proper, so that you get a sort of false climax before the climax proper. Then at some undefined point, in a very seamless way, the perspective changes so that you find that the narrator is now somebody or someone else, or in a radically different situation, but you don't quite know why or how. All of a sudden the terms on which you understood the story are different to what you thought they were. You had bought into one narrative and now you are reading something altogether different. Everything has turned itself around. (The last section of "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story" suggests to me that Ligotti is more than aware that this is his very special and unique trick.)

This is, of course, what makes Ligotti's work so compelling - the reader is not allowed to settle, because of the content but also because of the form. (In some stories, like "Purity", it feels almost impossible to work out quite how things are holding together, like the narrative is a kind of slippery eel you are trying to grab with wet hands. All you know is that you are scared and you don't know why.)

I got to thinking about this and how you might incorporate something like a Ligottian Shift into a horror or horror-inflected game. One of the key elements of the Ligottian Shift is not so much reversal as a side-step - things don't flip so much as reconfigure, like a kaleidoscope being twisted. What the DM would need to do would be to, at a certain point, change the fundamental assumptions on which the game has been based - it's not a plot twist that we're interested in, but a form twist. What kind of thing am I talking about?

Imagine that you are a playing in a gaming session. The DM describes your characters doing something typically Call of Cthulhu-esque - let's say they've broken into the mansion of some rich eccentric in search of clues because they think he is associated with a cult. They are looking in rooms, in desks, under furniture, and so on, but at some point it becomes apparent that actually they are not in his mansion house at all but are in his mind, in which they are now trapped - they are in a memory-construct of his house and "outside" the doors and windows there is only blank nothingness. Somehow, imperceptibly, things have shifted so that they are not in the real world, investigating the mansion house, but rather trapped inside the creation of the mind of their erstwhile target of whom they are now the unwitting playthings. Crucially, the DM has not informed them that this shift has taken place. It just has.

Or; imagine that you are in a dungeoneering session. The PCs come across a meek kobold who they put in a wooden cage and start interrogating. It is pliant and pathetic and snivelling. It answers all of their questions. But then one of the PCs notices that...hang on...the kobold isn't in a cage. It is on the outside of the cage and they are in it. And suddenly it doesn't seem so pliant and pathetic and snivelling. And suddenly, looking around, the walls and ceiling seem much higher and further to the PCs. And turning back to the kobold, it is not as small as it was. It is actually now much much bigger than them.

Or, imagine that you are in a World of Darkness or Unknown Armies sort of game. The PCs are sitting in the office of somebody they may, or may not, know is a magician of some kind. On the desk is a snow globe. The DM tells you that your character has noticed this snow globe and is particularly drawn to it. He asks you to describe an incident from your character's past in which heavy snow was falling. You think for a second and come up with some story about how when your PC was a child he went to the funeral of his favourite uncle (who happened to be the one who initiated him into the occult). At the funeral, the snow was falling heavily, so much so that people had to dig out the hearse. You warm to your tale in the telling, and start feeling pleased about your creativity. The DM tells you that your PC is now back in his memories of childhood snow - so vividly that he can practically feel the snow flakes touching his cheeks, and the chill pinch the top of his nose. But that as he steps away from watching his family members shovelling snow and turns around, he looks up and sees a strange curved glass screen in front and above of him. He can't go through it. It is like a clear, invisible barrier. He turns back, but his family, the hearse, the funeral scene have disappeared. There is now just snow and glass. He is trapped inside the snow globe. And in the shell of the body which he once inhabited, way back in the magician's office, is a spirit of snow which has replaced him.

I would like to do this sort of thing in a game some time.

27 comments:

  1. John Tynes' Power Kill tried to do that, except in an unsubtle, social-message, Twilight Zone kind of way.

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    1. I just googled it. It made me sigh.

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    2. Yeah, although Tynes did some fantastic stuff (Delta Green, obviously, which I love and which got me back into gaming after a decade-long hiatus), not all of his output was gold. 'In Media Res', for example, was one of those scenarios which sound great but which in practice would probably suck - it's an improvised radio play (without the radio) and not an RPG scenario. Still, I shouldn't really criticize - I've produced nothing, he's produced amazing material. Few writers can put out stuff that good and not put out some crap along the way.

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  2. Great post. I bought the Penguin Ligotti a few months back, but have only read the first couple of stories (I've read a couple of more recent ones, I think, but have only scratched the surface; I must delve deeper ...).

    Your Cthulhu scenario (surely that rich eccentric is in fact a giant crocodile!) reminds me of Gene Wolfe's Peace, which does some very interesting things with the concept of the memory-house.

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    1. Now we get meta: you are reading this blog post sitting in your house. But is it really your house or just the memory-house of a giant crocodile? Think about that.

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    2. Hmm ... it *would* explain why Egyptian plovers keep plucking meat from the windows ...

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  3. I tried this in a horror game, once, although my reference point was Grant Morrison's 'The Invisibles' rather than Ligotti. Lots of stuff whose ontological status just shifted back and forth without explanation: a hallucination that suddenly wasn't a hallucination, a protracted lucid dreaming session which, at some non-specific point, simply became reality, and so on. It was OK, but it never really had the impact I hoped for. The players just tended to shrug their shoulders and roll with it whenever reality shifted under their feet.

    I still think that this sort of thing could work. It fits rather awkwardly with the RPG form, though, and I think you'd want a high level of player buy-in.

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    1. Yeah, it is very hard to pull of anything like that. Players never go "Ooh!" or "Wow!" when they're supposed to!

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  4. I am highly sceptical about this working in an RPG. It seems to be something that reduces player agency to very low levels and puts them more in the role of spectators instead of the main drivers of the plot.

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    1. I think you are right, so I wonder if maybe it works best as the initial set up for a campaign? All the PCs are trapped in a memory-mansion house inside the mind of a warlock. That's how they meet. What happens next is how they escape. Something along those lines.

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    2. Yeah something like that would be okay, if it happened early; I'd probably think 'ooh, this is pretty cool'. If it happened too late on though, I would probably feel jerked around.

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    3. Putting a single shift near the start or even the end of the adventure should work much better. For a trippy final confrontation it could be quite fun.
      The main concern would be that players might end up feeling unable to make any decision because established facts continue to change regularly. Being pulled into a weird otherworld early on can also work if the new rules stay reasonably consistent for the rest of the adventure.

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    4. I wonder if you can do it in a way that makes the players more influential rather than less? Start giving them some kind of godlike power it's not easy to use, by adding weird consequences to their actions. Then eventually you'll go through a third transition where the players learn to start using that stuff, but still, it'd probably work for a while.

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    5. Maybe Nobilis could have been/was like that? I've never read it but heard bits and pieces about it.

      Or a variant Amber Diceless for that matter. You could easily add in weird consequences to the use of Amberite powers or a simulacrum of them I think.

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    6. Nobilis is awesome, but not immediately set up to do this, the system's too set up for players doing that kind of weirdness to each other or NPCs, so you'd know if stuff like this was happening.

      Amber though definitely, or unknown armies.

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  5. You definitely make me want to read more Ligotti. I've only read one or two stories of his; I found him to be an author I could only manage in small doses. I like his insights: in an interview he said he came to love Poe and Lovecraft because 'they were sick people and so was I'.
    That said, I have to agree with Yora. It sounds very much like 'de-protagonization'. I've had good fun in Cthulhu scenarios where I'm in a very creepy, eerie situation and I've lost control, but part of the fun is that I know I've put my character in that situation. If it went on for too long, or if I stopped being able to make meaningful choices, I'm sure it would start to suck.

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  6. Have you not seen David Lynch's Mulholland Drive & Lost Highway?

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    1. A lot of the stories I'm talking about here originally came out in the 80s, long before those films. But there is something of Ligotti in Lynch and vice versa.

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    2. I lost the feeling for horror back in my teens, horror in film or story. I tried some Ligotti stories a few years back but they had no effect so the experience in general is like listening to standup comedians who can't make you laugh.

      I don't know if what other adults like about the genre is the aesthetic or style or they actually feel something. With Lynch I like his oddball characters and the WTF puzzles.

      All in all, for me horror is a genre of unfulfilled potential.

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    3. It's okay to like things, Kent.

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    4. I have a room filled with books I like and if you ever accidentally mention one I promise to be appropriately enthusiastic.

      My point was do people actually feel horror or just recognise horror as a subgenre of fantasy, as a style.

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    5. I definitely still feel horror. Arthur Machen has a knack of making me go 'brrr' (I think it's his style as much as the subject matter). The story 'Bright Segment' by Theodore Sturgeon has a sense of creeping dread - you know something bad is coming but can't look away. Obviously not all horror fiction achieves this. In gaming, I have felt genuine unease in parts of the best Cthulhu scenarios I have played. I actually find film is the medium where (for me) so much that is called 'horror' rarely achieves it.

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    6. 'Dread' is a good word. Passages in Melmoth the Wanderer & Confessions of a Justified Sinner achieve that for me. A sort of sickly feeling.

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    7. I have Confessions of a Justified Sinner but have never got round to reading it. Sounds promising though...

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    8. I don't think I got across that I love the idea of horror but I have lost the sensitivity to it. So I have tried Machen, who I think writes very well but if I don't grasp the effect he is going for there is a problem.

      Kafka and Beckett are the most successful weird writers I know but both are at least as funny as they are dreadful.

      There is a really nice illustrated folio society edition you can pick up cheaply for a few quid if you decide you like it.

      https://www.amazon.co.uk/Confessions-Justified-Sinner-James-Hogg/dp/B000J2UIHO/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474402253&sr=1-2&keywords=folio+society+confessions+sinner

      If you are more interested in essays and background this Edinburgh edition is really good

      https://www.amazon.co.uk/Confessions-Justified-Stirling-Carolina-Research/dp/B00SLVISYA/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474402467&sr=1-2&keywords=confessions+sinner+edinburgh

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    9. I recommend Ramsey Campbell's short fiction, especially Dark Companions.

      For me, horror is less about thrills and scares (although I am not desensitised to those) and more about "horror" in the true sense of the word - the presentation of a concept that, if you think about it, is genuinely horrifying. Campbell's work achieves this because the endings of his stories are often just impossibly bleak. I put Ligotti in that category too. Being chopped into little pieces is heaven in comparison to what might happen to you in a Campbell or Ligotti story.

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  7. The Monolith From Beyond Space and Time by James Raggi incorporates some of those types of rpg/story elements you described into play. If your players are willing to go to the kinds of places/experiences you've described, then take them there.

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