Bad Things Happen: Unknown BFGs, Twits and Witches

As a father I have become reacquainted with the books of Roald Dahl, most of which I haven't read for well over thirty years. One of the things I have been struck by is that is ouevre, at least when it comes to the main big children's novels, can be thought of as a kind of worked example of what I have taken to calling Demonic Intrusion: in most of the books a child in 'ordinary' circumstances - though never that ordinary - finds his or her world subject to a rupture of the paranormal or weird which transforms everything. The main examples of this are I suppose the BFG, The Witches, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach; it is probably no coincidence that these are probably his best-loved books, though The Twits (my own favourite) does not fall under this category. (As an aside, I have never been a big fan of the two Charlie books - the sequel is just a bad book, but the first one is pretty boring and disjointed.) 

This is obviously by no means unique to Dahl - it's a trope of children's stories, of course, dating back at least as far as Alice in Wonderland and, from there, back to the fairy tales of yore. But what makes Dahl a particularly good, paradigmatic example is that in each case under discussion the setting is so recognisably 'real world' and the intrusion in question so recognisably 'not real world'. The child reader sees a set of surroundings that feel familiar and then experiences the interjection of the unfamiliar very starkly. In the very best examples - The Witches and Matilda (unlike, say, the Harry Potter books) the familiarity of the surroundings largely remains. The child is not transported to what is in effect a completely different world; he or she is still located in bucolic England - it is just one that happens to have witches or magic in.

This gives Dahl's books (you could include other authors like Dianne Wynne Jones in this) a feeling of a juvenile version of Unknown Armies. And it is a source of some surprise, when one reflects on this, that nobody has (at least as far as I am aware) come up with a Dahl-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off game. I have from time to time heard about games in which the PCs are children. But I don't know that I've ever come across one which channels the atmosphere of a Dahl book exactly.

I think this is because when adults think to themselves 'RPG in which the PCs are children' they tend to immediately leap to the horror genre (no doubt thanks to the innumerable horror films that have been made with children either as chief protagonists or antagonists). But the crucial aspect of Dahl's tone in relation to his children's books is that they are not horror stories. Dahl is said to have had a memo on the wall of his writing shed which included the maxim: Bad Things Happen. But this is not the same as 'horrible things happen'. The books are better to be understood as adventure stories with a dark edge. Bad things happen but in the end good triumphs and the villains get their comeuppance. 

The Demonic Intrusion Generator would in any event be a good mechanism through which to operationalise this. Just draw up a random table designed to throw together 'weird' events, possibly in connection with fixed archetypal PCs (the headmistress turns out to be.....a medusa! the local used car salesman turns out to....have a time machine in the staff restroom! etc.), use a few of these to populate a small town, and have the PCs simply present as precocious children - perhaps with special abilities - who have heard some curious rumours.....