After the War: Thoughts on a Campaign Style

I recently read JG Ballard's autobiography, Miracles of Life, written in 2008 when he was already dying. The fact that he must have known this lends the book a poignancy, but also a disjointedness - it obviously wasn't in his power to really dedicate himself to realising the project fully. By far the most interesting sections are at the beginning, when Ballard reflects on his time in Shanghai and his famous internment at Lunghua by the Japanese occupying forces between 1942 and 1945. And the most interesting aspect of this story is the brief account of liberation and what followed - the orgy of random violence which the Japanese soldiers inflicted as they vacated Shanghai (he recounts some brutal examples) and the subsequent American takeover of the city.

Ballard asserts, and I have no reason to dispute this, that for months and months (perhaps years) after the end of the war some Japanese troops remained in Shanghai under American leadership, performing guard duties and the like. In the general atmosphere of destruction and chaos, this strange union of former enemies appeared perfectly natural. It reminded me of a film I saw nearly twenty years ago in Japan, called Ari no Heitai or 'Ant Soldiers', which told the story of the Japanese soldiers (some 30,000 of them) who remained in China, after the Second World War had ended, as mercenaries or volunteers fighting for either the Kuomintang or the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. 

It also reminded me of the strange fate of the Japanese soldiers captured by Soviet forces in the closing weeks of the war. In Embracing Defeat, John Dower puts the figure of these soldiers at 1.6 million - but nothing like as many were ever repatriated. Some 625,000 were officially returned to Japan by the USSR, and more arrived illegally or unofficially in dribs and drabs after that, but there are still thought to be anywhere between 250,000 and 500,000 who are unaccounted for. Presumably some of these will have died or ended up in gulags, but occasionally on Japanese TV documentaries will be aired about the discovery of the descendants of such soldiers in the far-flung corners of Siberia. 

Widening the focus, there is of course the famous story of the Czechoslovak Legion, a unit of the Imperial Russian Army comprising Czech and Slovak volunteers, who found themselves stranded in Russia in 1918 when the Bolsheviks, having recently seized power, negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and ended the war. The Legion, its members desiring to travel to the Western Front to continue fighting the Central Powers, but unable to get there directly by land travelling westwards, decided to go eastwards instead and go all the way to Vladivostok, then catch a boat to France. They then became embroiled in the Russian Civil War on the side of the Whites, and at one point even participated in the seizure of the old Russian Imperial gold reserve. 

And widening it yet further to fiction, there are a few examples of books and films taking place in the immediate, and still often violent and chaotic, aftermath of a war. Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist series is one of my favourite examples - the action takes place shortly after the climax of the failed invasion of Greece by Persia at Plataea in 479 BC, and the main character, Latro, it is assumed sustained his amnesia-inducing head injury during that battle. The detritus of war, and the confusion, with vast numbers of people (civilians and soldiers alike) going this way and that in search of home, whether the old home or a new one, is nicely described by Wolfe in that novel. A leftfield choice, but a very enjoyable flick, is Three Kings, in which three bored US soldiers with nothing to do at the end of the first Gulf War decide to go off on a heist and become embroiled in the general chaos and mayhem of post-war Iraq. You could probably also put Cold Mountain in this category; while I'm not sure whether the events depicted in it happen before or after the US Civil War ended, the depiction of a wandering soldier making his way home across a landscape torn and destabilised by conflict is truly compelling.

The beauty of the War Aftermath campaign mode is that it creates a landscape within which adventure and derring-do are pretty much assumed, but also that it creates the space within which a very wide breadth of choice opens up in respect of play style. The PCs might be purely self-interested rogues wandering here and there looting treasure. But they might equally be self-conscious 'good guys' trying to help the weak and unfortunate - or anything in between. 

And the generalised atmosphere of chaos and confusion can be highly conducive to creative DMing. Imagine a bucolic fantasy landscape such as the Shire in the aftermath of an invasion by an army of interlopers from the Abyss and the subsequent vanquishing of said Abyssal horde by an army of quasi-angelic high elves. What strange beings would be hidden in that landscape, wounded or hidden? What might have been left behind by way of loot by the retreating army? What wandering mercenaries, bands of prisoners and their guards, messengers and refugees would be coming and going, hurrying along or tarrying, behind the next hill or forest? What opportunities would like in store for a band of ex-soldiers now foot loose and fancy free? What would befall a group of ordinary peasants searching for a lost home or family? 

Ode on Discovering Oriental Adventures in the Used Book Giveaway Shelves at the Local Tesco

 

My life is brilliant

My love is pure

I saw a sourcebook

Of that I'm sure

It was sitting on a bookshelf

It was with some other books

And I didn't lose much money on it

'Cause it was going secondhand

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic, it's true

I saw your cover on an old bookcase

And I knew just what to do

'Cause I only had a copy of you on PDF

Yes it caught my eye

As I walked on by

Anyone could see from my face that I was 

Fucking overcome with the desire to roll some d20s

And I don't think that I will play it again

But I took it with me and put it in my study

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic, it's true

I saw your cover on an old bookcase

And I knew just what to do

'Cause I only had a copy of you on PDF

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic, it's true

Gary Gygax must be up there with a smile on his face

When he thought up your unnecessarily complicated rules

But it's time to face the truth

I will never play with you

Metaphysical Syphilis

Syphilis - although I understand there may be some debate about this - likely arose among North American native populations prior to European contact and was spread back to Europe (and to the rest of the world) after the Spanish first began to explore the continent.

Of course, this was far from one-way traffic: North America got off far worse by comparison with regard to the Eurasian diseases which came in their direction after first contact. (I've written about the apocalyptic consequences of this before.) But, separating the conceptual from the awfulness of the actuality for a moment, there is something compelling about the idea of explorers/adventurers being unwittingly exposed to some disease which has potentially history-defining consequences when taken back home.

Disease, though, is not a very interesting or appetising subject for a pen & paper RPG. What if instead we were to think about a metaphysical version of the phenomenon? What is metaphysical syphilis and how is it to be made gameable?

Metaphysical Syphilis: Definition and Examples

syphilis, metaphysical noun a condition of corruption, deterioration or confusion which typically accompanies transition through ontological gateways

A metaphysical syphilis would most commonly arise in the context of adventure. After the PCs have gone from the place of safety (the town, the tavern, the guild, etc.) to the place of danger (the dungeon, the wilderness, the underworld, etc.) there is a risk that they bring back with them an ontological disruptor that causes the place of safety to instead become itself dangerous, different, or discombobulated.

This could be as simple as a literal parasite (as in Alien) or a haunting (a poltergeist or somesuch which follows the PCs back home) that spreads when brought home. But there are other more creative examples in the literature.

One that springs to mind is from the Chronicles of Amber. I only recently re-read the Amber books (about 12 months ago) for literally about the fifth time, but I am now a forgetful old sausage and the exact details have already slipped from my mind - somebody will appear in the comments to tell me I am an IDIOT for getting it wrong - but the main superplot of the first five novels concerns the corruption by blood of the 'pattern' by which Amberites are able to transition between realities. This results in a 'black road' of chaos spreading across all known realities and bringing with it all kinds of ghoulies and ghastlies. This eventually comes to threaten 'home', Amber, itself. 

Another more leftfield and perhaps benign version is the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 'Force of Nature', in which it is revealed that travelling by warp speed at too fast a speed (this was conveniently forgotten about the following week) actually causes reality itself to deteriorate. It is only a short step from there to 'causes reality itself to deteriorate and for demons to come through the gaps' (now that I think of it, this is I suppose the plot of Event Horizon), which would be a nice way to add complications to any campaign involving actual physical travel between two different planes of reality. (For example, each time one passes through a Planescape gate, there is a chance the gate loses coherence and opens a branch in a totally random other plane, creating a three-way juncture.)

Then there's magic. In MERP, it's the case that any use of magic might attract the attention of a 'shadow'. What if the use of magic may cause reality to decay in some way? Or may indeed cause magical entities to appear as byproducts? 

And, finally, there is the, if you like, biggest 'meta'-metaphysical syphilis of all, which is the PCs themselves. What are the PCs, in the end, other than syphilitic in the purest sense - travelling from one reality to another and, whichever way they go, bringing violence, magic, disruptions, and so on with them - and thereby subjecting it to fundamental change? How about that, eh? 

On Being Grateful

I am going to do something unexpected, unusual, uncharacteristic and even, dare I say it, unbecoming now.

I am going to do something sincere. I am going to say 'thank you'.

The first set of people I am going to say 'thank you' to are the regular readers and commenters on this blog, some of whom - these people, let me be clear, must be stark raving mad - have been consistently doing it literally for years, in some cases a decade or more. Others have come and gone; some have frenziedly commented on every post for a period of time and then disappeared; some pop up from time to time between gaps of many months; some appear with mysterious aliases that may or not shift from appearance to appearance; some are forever 'Anon'. 

The surprising thing about these people is that 99% of the time they are respectful, intelligent, creative, polite, and interesting. There is the occasional heaping of abuse, the occasional yelled slur from the sidelines, the occasional cowardly anonymous criticism. But those episodes are gratifyingly rare. I can honestly say that the people who comment here are a cut above: they contribute. You guys have made writing this blog a consistently rewarding experience over the years, and the periods of time when I have enjoyed writing it the most - the periods of time when I have really felt the process seem to sing - have been when a proper feedback mechanism develops and I am able to post in response to and in light of the creative comments that readers have offered. 

So - sincerely. Thanks.

But there is a second set of people I would like to say 'thank you' to - a more diffuse category, most of whom will not even be aware this blog exists, and some of whom are dead. These are the people who, down the years, have created the games, the settings, the books, the concepts that have enriched my life by making it possible to write this blog, and to provide me with the creative outlet it - and the spin-out products I've made - has been. Without this hobby my life would have lacked something important: the opportunity occasionally to escape the prison of the mundane, and to run scampering out across the meadows of the imagination. Those opportunities have become rarer as the prison guards have become more insistent, thorough and hard-working. But they still exist, here and there - with a little help from these friends I've mentioned. 

So thank you to them, too.

I have nothing else to add. I wanted to write something positive.

When the Clouds Come Down

 

On certain days, at twilight, the clouds gather themselves down along the horizon and become indistinguishable from hills. At such times, the onlooker imagines that the two phenomena - the clouds and the land itself - merge into one. If only he could get there quickly enough, before night descends, he feels, he could step up into the clouds and be borne away into the dusky sky.

What if the clouds did in fact one evening come and lay themselves down on the land to create a whole new range of far-off hills of solid earth? A distant Shangri-La perhaps - or a rugged badlands filled with terror? What would any self-respecting adventurer do, other than gather his belongings into a pack and strike off to explore the fresh new landscape? 

Where these hills loomed large such adventurers would congregate for mutual support and supply, and frontier villages or towns would spring up to serve their commercial needs and exploit whatever opportunities for plunder they unearthed. Life among these people would be short and cheap - it is hard to imagine that the New Hills would be a place of safety or ease, and it seems likely that whatever strange life the Hills brought with them would threaten constantly to escape beyond their confines. But still adventurers would come, certain that in their case skill or good fortune would see them through and make all the risks worth taking. 

Mappers. Traders. Pioneers. Magic-users searching for new knowledge; priests searching for new converts; heroes searching for monsters to slay and maidens to rescue; rogues in search of treasure. All would come and test their mettle in the New Hills' crucible. Would you?

The Most Difficult Single Class Campaign

I've long been interested - really since I was an adolescent reading the old 2nd edition 'brown book' Complete... series - in the idea of a single class campaign. There is something that is simply innately appealing about its combination of challenge (how would a party of 1st level Magic-Users navigate the problem of combat?) and possibility (what type of world, setting, scenario is appropriate for a party of Magic-Users to exist within?).

Some classes are, however, much easier to single-classify than others. Fighters, for example, seem ready made for it - a single class fighter campaign would correspond pretty closely with the presumptions of a traditional sword-and-sorcery setting of the Conan variety, not to mention of the Greek myths (what is the Odyssey or the legends of Theseus or Jason if not single-class fighter campaigns?). 

Thieves are another easy sell - the PCs are a gang of assassins, tomb-raiders or burglars; they are perhaps members of a guild....a single-class thief campaign almost writes itself and, like the single-class fighter campaign, has a ready-made implied setting (an archetypal Big Magical City).

Other, more specialist or optional classes, likewise seem tailor-made for 'Everything Is...' campaigns. Everything is druids = PCs are protectors of a pristine natural region against interlopers. Everything is paladins = PCs go around smiting evil or protecting against demonic or undead interlopers. Everything is rangers = PCs are responsible for the guardianship of a vast border region or badlands, etc.

The most difficult single class campaign to conceptualise and sell is, I think the single class cleric campaign. This is for two reasons. The first is that clerics are, stereotypically, like the goalies or bassists of D&D. They are necessary but their roles - protection and healing - are unglamorous and even dull. The second is that a single class cleric campaign is hard to envisage without too much of an overlap with other single-class campaign motifs. If the clerics are going around fighting demonic entities or the undead or whatever, how is that different to a single-class paladin (or fighter) campaign? If they are scouring the world for holy artefacts, how is that different to a single-class magic-user campaign? And so on.

The route forward for a single-class cleric campaign would be I think to focus on two things. First, it would be necessary to pay careful attention to the institutional environment in which clerics are situated. Whether the medieval warrior-priest of OD&D archetype or a heart-ripping Aztec thaumaturge or jungle witch-doctor or steppe shaman, a cleric is part of a broader religious infrastructure. A single-class cleric campaign would thus have to I think be centered around the furtherance of the ends of an order of some kind and may therefore concern, to a much greater extent, an idea about the systematisation of internal politicking and perhaps also the extent to which there are theological rights and wrongs. 

Second, it would be necessary to clarify what a gang of clerics would be motivated by. 'Quest-dispenser' campaigns are boring and railroady - I would not be an advocate of 'mission of the week' style adventuring in which a holy oracle of some kind simply declares tasks for the PCs to carry out. What then would clerics do?

Some possibilities:

• Pilgrimage - a long journey across a pre-defined and dangerous route.
• Protection of a religious minority - perhaps the PCs are clerics of a religion that a specific, relatively small group of people hold dear against a majority that is indifferent or vaguely hostile
• Roaming about applying holy law in a quasi-Dogs in the Vineyard format
• Tending to a flock of believers in far flung places scattered across a vast landscape filled with mystery and terror 
• Searching for sacrificial victims of a particular (rare) kind

The trick is pulling this off in such a way as to avoid 'quest-dispensation' and maintaining - and making maximum use of - the specific role of clerics as such. 

The Crossing of a Threshold: The Ontological Condition of Adventure

 

Doorways and thresholds do not exist in nature: it requires a human being to conceptualise even a cave opening as being an 'entrance' from one location to another. Animals may understand variations in temperature or light; they may understand comfort vs discomfort; ants may have a hormonal sense that they are within/without their nest. But it takes human intelligence to have a grasp on the concept of a space which itself constitutes an opening into or out of - a gap which is literally liminal. Not empty, because something is there even though it is not. 

Passing through thresholds has long been understood to be an ontological act - a way of going from a humdrum reality to one in which Adventure takes place. Sometimes the thresholds are literally doorways, though they might not be in places one would expect (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). Sometimes they are of a less obvious kind: think of Alice going through the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole (Lewis Carroll was obsessed with doors, and there are of course doorways-within-doorways-within-doorways in his work). Sometimes they are hidden or magical (as in Harry Potter); sometimes they feel as though they trade on being not quite literal or metaphorical but somehow both (as in The Secret Garden). Sometimes they are imbued with mythical or religious significance - Theseus going down into the caverns of Minos - while at others they are technological (think of Neo passing into and out of the Matrix through a cable jacked into his brain). Sometimes they signify adventure through passage outwards (like Bilbo going out of his front door); sometimes they signify it through passage within (like the crossing of the threshold into Moria). Thresholds, in speculative fiction, are everywhere.

And they are also everywhere in tabletop RPGs. There is something that we sense to be important about passing from one ontological condition, the condition of there being nothing particularly at stake (the tavern, the market, the village, etc.), to another - the condition of there being everything up for grabs. And the point of passage or embarkation from one to another strikes us as significant. We like the idea of transferring from one to another and back again.

Thresholds can appear, and operate, in three ways.

First, there is the threshold of the most obvious kind - that which signifies entry into adventure. The stereotypical example is the dungeon entrance, the tunnel, the cave, the crevasse, the descent into the Underdark. Here, the PCs are most in control of their fate. They know where they are going. They know that death awaits. 

Second, there is the type of threshold that signifies exit into adventure. Here, what is at stake is Out There in the big bad world, and the threshold is the city gate, the harbour, the bridge, the time machine, the transporter. The PCs start within a place where everything is understandable, manageable and graspable, and they go out through the threshold to something vast, open and chaotic. It has the feeling about if of unpredictability, much more so than going into, say, a dungeon. A feeling of an abandonment of control, 

Third, and least well understood, is the type of threshold that signifies intrusion. This type of threshold troubles us. We are more comfortable with the first two types of threshold because they are volitional. The adventurer, usually, makes a choice, or at least performs a positive act, to go through. But here, in this third category of threshold, things work the other way around. The adventurer does not cross a threshold, but adventure instead passes through to look for him. Demons, goblins, evil spirits, magical entities, pass from one place of being into ours and thereby threaten it.

The third type of threshold is most closely identified with horror because it signifies the potential for ontological disruption. Just as the presence of an unwanted person in one's home - whether a burglar or an unwelcome guest - seems to make it unstable, to make it no longer feel indeed as a home at all, so intrusion from 'out there' into 'in here' changes the fundamental nature of 'here' itself. 'Here' is transformed into something altogether different. And the quality of being itself thereby shifts. From safety, security and the known into danger, hostility and mystery. 

Thinking about the type of threshold that one wishes to deploy may therefore be a useful conceptual starting point when thinking about the style of campaign one would like to play and the mood one would like to facilitate. What is being crossed? How is it happening? And who is doing the crossing - the adventurers - or that which lies beyond? 

So, What Is So Bad About Space Knights?

One should never put one's faith in Google Gemini. (I learned this after discovering that searching for information about The Lord of the Flies resulted in the AI spitting out false information pruned from a wikipedia page about the Tongan Castaways.) But if you Google, 'Are the space marines the goodies?', you get an interesting response:

Unequivocally then, our tech overlords have spoken. The Space Marines are baddies. They are part of a tyrannical and oppressive regime and all is GRIMDARK.

This chimes with what I have heard from people much more deeply embedded in the world of Games Workshop than I am. I played a huge amount of Warhammer 40K when I was an adolescent, and what I remember was that in those days the Imperium generally and the space marines specifically were sort of implicitly the good guys in the Warhammer universe - and that was indeed what made them, to the eye of a teenage boy, a little bit boring and lacking in edginess. But it seems now times have changed and all the factions in 40K are supposed to be baddies in their own way - a war of the shits.

One could do a calm and considered sociological analysis of this and doubtless come to the conclusion that it says something important about our age's discomfort with the idea that something called an 'empire' could be good - and especially if it is vaguely coded with Roman imagery. And this seems linked to a problematisation in particular of the male hero who carefully calibrates the use of violence and force in the interests of a civilisation which is inherently better than others. We live in an age with quite a clear idea about what is right and wrong in some ways, but we have by and large become less and less comfortable with the idea that these things are inherent within a particular civilisation or other. In this respect, the old school interpretation of space marines as Goodies all feels a bit too cowboys-and-Indians. 

This is understandable to a certain respect. I'm not here to post a rant complaining about the purported wokeness of Games Workshop. But I do think there would be something genuinely refreshing, given our prevailing cultural mood, about making it explicit that there is something good about humanity as such and that, in a galaxy populated by orks, tyrannids, chaos mutants and eldar that there would be something to be said for actual heroes: defenders of humanity against enemies that are simply objectively worse. These heroes might have to do deeply undesirable things (the 40,000 AD equivalent of bombing Dresden or dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima) but they would bite the bullet - and deal with the guilt - of doing so in the interests of what they would percieve rightly to be the greater good: the continuation of human civilisation per se.

In a world dominated by mean-spirited, bleakly nihilistic content I think there would be something rather interesting about more openly foregrounding a goodies-and-baddies narrative in 40K. Perhaps it does already and everything I have heard, including from the AI oracle, is simply wrong. I hope so.

The Posts That Never Were

Every so often I get an idea for something to write about and jot it down by creating a post and putting the idea in the title, and saving it to 'drafts'. 80-90% of the time these later get worked up into full posts, or else deleted. But there are some that hang about in the ether, always the bridesmaids and never the bride, until I forget entirely what they were originally supposed to be about. These lost souls sit forlornly as 'drafts' in perpetuity, hoping in vain for rescue. So I thought I would drag some out into the open to give them some fresh air and see if anybody can do anything with them. Your duty: pick a title, and then write a comment or post in your own blog to correspond to it.

Here are some that caught my eye:

• What Is So Bad About Space Knights?
• On Being Grateful
• Types of Campaign by PC Class
• The Appropriate Subject of Complaint
• Isekai/Other World PCs Must Be Special
• The Psychic Importance of Other Worlds
• Deep Wilderness
• Great Places
• Games Workshop Doesn't Like or Care About You [this possibly is a title that could in itself be an entire blog post]
• Slaad-punk
• Syphilis [I cannot now even begin to imagine where I was going with this...]
• Why These Treasures?
• The Philosophy of Elves
• The Importance of Adventure-Site Insularity
• Shitty Fairy Tales and the Importance of Death

Have at it - I hope these poor blighters can find a loving home.

The Lynchian Paladin

Regular readers will know that I harbour a long-simmering ambition to write up rules for running explicitly heroic campaigns oriented around the idea either that all PCs are of the paladin class or that all PCs are conceptually 'paladins' in the sense of fighting against evil.

A long series of irregular posts, which I really ought to assemble under their own tag, lays this out:

• Into the Abyss: More on Being the Good Guys
  
• Random Demonic Incursion Generator Test Case
  
• The Incursion Generator Expanded
  
• The Single Class Paladin Campaign
  
• Single Class Paladin Campaign Book - First Glimpse
  
• The Clan of Cain: Ogres, Elves, Evil Phantoms and Giants
  
• Feel like my soul is beginning to expand - look into my heart and you will sort of understand
  
• Space Paladins in the Demonic Future
  

As you will see if you carefully read these posts (as all true disciples of the Order of Noisms must do, and indeed must already have done dozens of times) I've suggested a variety of models of such campaigns, which ideally I would like to write up as a series of volumes the, if I have my druthers, would come out in a posh slip-case finely decorated:

• The traditional D&D paladin, a paragon of lawful good, who attempts to 'do good' within a typical TSRan type setting
• A more Arthurian, Pendragon-inspired 'knight of the round table' fighting for Christian order within a world imbued with ancient magical forces
• A pseudo-Japan in which mighty heroic samurai do battle against demons and evil spirits 
• A pseudo-Ancient Mesopotamia or Levant where Gilgameshian heroes or 'Book of Judges' style judges fight against primordial chaos embodied in monsters and devils
• A vaguely Iberian class of holy knights who do battle againts evil infidels
• A somewhat Warhammerian set of 'demon hunters' in a reformation-era Old World (with the serial numbers filed off)
• A group of dwarven warrior-priests in Lanthanum Chromate
• Space Paladines in the demonic future
• A Beowulf-inspired 'Clan of Cain' scenario

The main idea here is that each of these scenarios involves some systematised way (on which notes can be found in the pieces linked to above) through which incursions of evil find their way into the human world and have to be rooted out, uncovered, battled, etc., by said paladins.

A friend of mine recently raised the issue of David Lynch and his sad (fairly) recent death, and I immediately started to see a connection between this type of campaign and Lynch's approach to what we could call 'worldbuilding'. I am obviously here talking about Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me most of all, but I think across most of Lynch's ouevre we see a similar concern playing out - the idea that, lurking around every corner, behind every closed door, reflected in every mirror, hiding at the foot of each bed, waiting at the bottom of every car park, there might be something supernaturally and unspeakably awful. This is I think most readily 'gameable' in Twin Peaks, which in a way almost reads like the Actual Play Report to the world's greatest Unknown Armies campaign: evil entities from interdimensional 'lodges' come to the human world to do dastardly things and law enforcement tries to cope with the fallout. But in its own way Blue Velvet follows a similar pattern - and even A Straight Story has a very mild hint of that flavour, with the main character taking on the quality of a roving wizard casting spells to solve people's slightly otherworldly problems (like the woman who keeps mysteriously killing deer by accident). 

In this paradigm the PCs could take on something of a Kyle McLachlanian aspect as straight-jawed Philip Marlowe-investigator types, but this is by no means a pre-requisite and one could paint with a much broader brush than that. What is chiefly needed - and as I have begun to lay out - is a means by which to systematise the crucial mechanism of intrusion: how evil manifests itself in the setting through some at least partially random method, and how it is that the PCs encounter it.