The Horror of Mundanity (The Not-So-Fun Scary)
Content Warning: There's some discussion of harm to children here. There will be no explicit descriptions of harm to children in this thread, but it's part of this opening post because I'll briefly discuss a new campaign released for Delta Green called God's Teeth. It's possible we might discuss the inclusion of other unpleasantries in this thread, but we should avoid anything explicit out of respect for all participants.I'm not a Potter head, but I've heard from fans that Dolores Umbridge is hated, despised, and loathed to a greater degree than even arch-villain Voldemort. And one of the more commonly cited reasons for the hatred is that Umbridge is a more down-to-Earth villain compared to the cartoonish Voldemort. Umbridge is a character with a little authority who makes decisions designed to hurt others and we've all known people like that in real life. Maybe it was a teacher who went out of their way to make you feel like crap for getting an answer wrong, a boss who deliberately gives you the worst assignments because they don't like you, or maybe it was a police officer who detains you for twenty minutes for jaywalking. People hate Umbridge because they've met her many times while they've never met a Voldemort.
The other day I picked up God's Teeth, a campaign for Delta Green. For those of you unfamiliar, Delta Green was originally created for Call of Cthulhu back in the 1990s, and to keep it brief, was kind of like the X-Files meets Cthulhu. Let's be clear, it didn't copy the X-Files, it was actually created a few months before the series came out, but DG taps into the same UFO conspiracy theories that were part of the zeitgeist at the time. In God's Teeth, the PCs deal with some pretty horrific child abuse, and while the worst of it happens off screen, what happens during game is still pretty bad. For the first time ever, I've encountered a scenario I'm not sure I can run for my group.
I thought to myself about why I wasn't sure about running this particular campaign and it made me think of Dolores Umbridge. While I don't have any personal experience with child abuse, like Umbridge, it's too real. (I had a similar problem with Twilight 2000 once the Russian invasion of Ukraine commenced.) Here in the United States, And I'm okay with the product existing, I'm even okay with running it, but I'm going to have to run it by my players and if they don't want to participate I won't hold it against them. But now I'm thinking of the nature of horror.
Horror is most effective when it's touching on your fears or anxieties. Old horror stories don't always frighten us because we don't necessarily have the same anxieties people did in previous decades or centuries. I don't find a some cultist trying to ressurect an ancient god in their bid to end the world scary anymore than I do a comic book villain like Dr. Doom. It's just too silly to be scared. But that same cult tapping into the supernatural to rip people off by selling medical quackery for cancer treatment? That's scary. So I find horror more effective when it's tapping into something I find scary or disturbing.
Of course you should always talk to your players about what is or isn't okay to include in any horror game.
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