The Twist in the Tale
Unlike some events I’ve run, I can’t quite put my finger on exactly how Carry On Cthulhu came about. Andy and I had been kicking the name around for years as a joke, but I was more interested in doing a Wicker Man folk horror game. But how do you run a Wicker Man game without people knowing what’s coming and spoiling the creeping horror and shock turn of events?
Having done 70s and 80s events I knew I fancied having a go at the 60s and the contrasts of that decade, and we also fancied doing a game that was funny in some way, enjoyably light to play but that also looked at the fine line between horror and comedy. DE players have been making jokes for years about a game without a monster and how they’d be pretty good at creating rituals by now, and I guess eventually this whole mass of ideas eventually went critical and turned into something that drew a direct line from ancient village customs and fertility festivals to seaside postcard humour with a bit of subverting the LRP format thrown in. Oh… and I’d always wanted an angry mob of villagers with flaming torches.
After watching Hammer and Carry On movies and the Wicker Man a couple of times we felt that was probably enough in the way of research and we sat down and wrote a game. After the epic nature of Careless Talk Costs Lives, I fancied ditching IC paperwork – in fact ditching pretty much everything. No codes to crack or books to read, or instructions to follow (or weapons in the house, or useful player skills) – this time we’d spend the money and plot on people for the players to interact with. Being a bit fed up with country houses and wartime research bases, we figured a hotel would be a different setting with a lot to explore. And of course not a good hotel, but Fawlty Towers (or Swincombe Hall in this case) run by the Basil-esque Donald Sinclair and his oversexed barmaid, Molly. Cue the creation of passive aggressive hotel signage, the provision of hotel branded soaps and notepaper, the purchase of a traditional looking bar, menus (where nothing is available), condiment sets, muzak, plastic red roses, bells, guest books, old school pint glasses and well, basically Amazon thinks I run a hotel now.
Six months of pre-game later (including 11 million IC Facebook chats, a lot of Skype and a real IC cocktail party at a character's house) and I’ve slowly persuaded our hopeless band of actors, producer, director, assistants, writers and tech crew to put together a truly terrible film script, which includes a pig monster, started life as a comedy Holmes pastiche called the Swine of the Baskersnouts and has slowly morphed into a comedy/horror crossover entitled The Twist In The Tale (or Swine of Satan in Run 1). It’s enjoyably awful and by now all the characters hate each other or have formed alliances against the ones they hate more. Washed up alcoholics, unreliable FX guys, stressed out wardrobe mistresses, horror ’names' who can’t remember their lines, producers who owe money and the crew guy just there to lift heavy things (and offer protection from the East End gangsters who want their money back), an Australian animal handler and the young assistant who is trying her best to make this film actually happen will all be trapped together for location shooting.
So they rock up at the hotel, via a convoluted comedy of errors, brave the check-in process with Mr Sinclair, enjoy the Fawlty Towers dining experience (and can I say what a change to the dinner dynamic it makes to have people at smaller tables, restaurant style rather than one long banquet) and then settle in the hotel bar wondering where the hell we are going with this.
Where we are going with this is playing on their assumption that DE events generally only have six or so crew members. So we start sending Rich and Ben in on a loop, each time as classic eccentric village and Carry On tropes – the swinging couple with Ben in drag in curlers, the keen boy scout leaders Ben Dover and Neil Down, Trevor the frankly weird fisherman, Roger the autograph hunter with the hysterically false toupee and of course sex-mad Marsha the villager goer. It’s a local game for local people. So we’re firmly establishing the concept of a village near the hotel, one that has a festival tomorrow where Molly the barmaid will be Mocker’s Day Queen, while enjoying watching players desperately try to keep a straight face at it all. Mid-way through the evening the local folk band turn up and give a cracking and boisterous set (thank you Punch House Band!). There have once or twice been outside performers at DE events before on a Friday – generally a string quartet or something, but our players are not expecting anything like this. On the first run the actors and directors were doing a rehearsal and ending up missing a lot of this, so we ditched that for the second run to make sure everyone interacted with ‘the village’. The meta-gamers are probably starting to have Wicker Man suspicions about now, but soon it’s time for bed and a sneaky hotel room party as Mr Sinclair flaps and fusses.
Friday night 3am. Traditionally at this time you have the Friday Night Frightener, where the big monster reveal happens because the Professor’s ritual has gone wrong, or the stars are right, or in one memorable case because a rock band had an argument and tried to summon Bugg Shash and got Grendel. But this time it’s a (DPC) player – the prank-obsessed FX man in a pig monster costume, with a skeleton key and a sound effect he’s made himself who charges into bedrooms and prances up and down stairs in the dark, snorting and grunting like mad. I still feel we were a bit mean to use the fact that we have spent 20 years training our players to assume that a figure in a high quality Mark Cordory monster costume is ‘real’ instead of thinking ‘that’s just a man in a latex suit’ and going back to sleep. But then I thought how funny it would be. On the first run, they did indeed assume the pig was real, which included the wondrous sight of Dingo the animal handler attempting to bring it down with a tranquiliser dart to the bum. On the second run there was an initial ‘go back to bed, Johnny’ reaction which turned into genuine fear. Either way, of course he then can’t get the mask off, commotion ensues and then it all gets very serious very, very fast as the set piece ends with hotelier Mr Sinclair shrieking in fear, then demanding whether they think this is some kind of a joke before dropping dead of a heart attack.
At this point everything I need is in play. The village and the festival are firmly established, everyone loves Molly and knows she is looking for a King for her Queen. The pig suit is in game, the line ‘do you think this is funny?’ has been uttered, Mr Sinclair’s body is in the woodshed (with a cover-up plan being discussed), they have access to his private office, the phone isn’t working properly, and although they don’t know it yet, our characters are trapped in the hotel as all their cars have been vandalised. Oh and everyone has a hangover.
Saturday morning dawns. Molly and her Mum are weirdly unbothered by Mr Sinclair’s death as they bring the characters a nice cooked breakfast, and the Daily Mirror informing them of a ‘mad axeman’ who has escaped from prison and is roaming the countryside. We initially came up with the idea of an escaped prisoner via the Hound of the Baskervilles/Dartmoor side of the story when we set the first run in Devon. It also allowed me to build in some sharp suits and East End gang references and just seemed a really 1960s thing to happen. Some research gave us Frank Mitchell – a giant of a man with the mind of a child and an interesting read if you Google him.
Our players have just about had breakfast, discovered their vandalised cars, realised someone has stolen the pig costume in the night, managed to get the phone to work long enough to order taxis to take them to the shoot location and taken a morning stroll around Mr Sinclair’s terrible mini-golf course to discovered the severed and bloody pigs head resting on the final hole, when a group of Morris Dancers arrive to celebrate Mocker’s Day and help Molly crown her chosen king. The Morris dancers were the ‘outside performers’ who caused me the most anxiety – you’re asking a professional group with their own traditions to come and perform inside your fictional world as an ominous Wicker Man reference to a tiny audience of frankly weird people dressed in 1960s clothing. Throw in briefing via email, signage, contact systems and careful car park planning to stealth them on and off site and the vagaries of the British weather and LRP timing and it could have gone so wrong. Luckily on both runs it went without a hitch and they loved doing it. Phew.
So, in case you were worried I was going to carry on with a blow-by-blow of every moment of the event, don’t worry – this is where we cut to a montage. It’s a day of obstacles, oddness and a constant switch back and forth between comedy and horror. The pigs head on the mini-golf, the discovery of the axe murderer’s bivouac complete with tin of spam, girlie mag and sticky handkerchief, Mr Sinclairs irate letters about the local vendetta against him and the slideshow of holiday photos, 60s porn and blurry photos of a torchlit ritual in the woods, unreliable taxis, filming being cancelled, a delivery from the villagers of some incredibly strong local cider that causes enforced hilarity, the modern rock records going on in the bar, problems with the plumbing that lead to an exploding toilet incident (you need a lot of chocolate angel delight and treacle), a visit from the most menacingly unpleasant gangsters you’ve ever seen and finally Molly leaving the house in tears after a chandelier-shaking session in the hotel bedroom with her chosen King.
All of these are designed to keep players busy and off-balance with no real idea of what is going on and no pressing reason to try and run away from the hotel. We have a slideshow rather than paperwork to get across the idea of the villagers having done a ritual because I believe in ‘show don’t tell’ and preferably show as many people as you can at once. And make it a challenge with a projector that needs to be fixed and catches fire, giggles and awkwardness at the porn/holiday photo combo and later on in the game asking players to remember what a ritual looked like rather than read it from a book. We broke the IC plumbing because plumbing is funnier (and actually more important) than electricity. Which meant Andy Cooper could go to town building Mr Slurry – a multi-part plumbing challenge with a lot of hideous Dale Air smells, u-bends that sprayed you in the face and unpleasant ‘put your hand in the septic tank and see if you can find the blockage’ challenges – which eventually yield three broken parts of an ancient ceremonial knife.
We slightly misjudged the timing of parts of this on the first run – sending the gangsters who are looking for prisoner Frank Mitchell in while the players were still hysterical on cider. This time we calmed down ourselves down, took our time, spread events out a bit more and got what I think is one of the most horribly menacing performances I’ve ever seen my husband give. Controlling an entire house of players by force of personality is a big ask, but he and Ben carried it off worryingly easily, delivering their line ‘Do you think this some kind of joke?’ before breaking a character’s jaw.
All of this is leading to 4 o’clock and the ‘big plot reveal’ as Molly is dragged back up to the hotel with a black eye and rope around her neck by the village butcher and a large crowd of locals wearing crude pig masks and singing a song about ‘Moccus Day’. A large crowd? Where did they come from, seeing as we’ve established clearly that there are only 7 people on crew?
Cut to flashback of me getting Harry Harold to summon Norwich LRPers to the pub months earlier so I could tell them of my dream of an angry mob with flaming torches surrounding a house. Honestly, this is something we’ve always wanted to do – outnumber and outgun the players and make the threat to them credible. It’s a big ask for people to give up their Saturday to drive to a remote house, do complicated sneaking onto site and then hurry up and wait in a crew room to go and appear for 5/10 minute slots wearing a pillowcase over their head in someone else’s game. And a lot of sleepless nights for crew worrying if it would come off, a LOT of secrets to be kept, racks of costumes and tables to lay out with masks and classic angry villager weapons, call and responses to learn and briefings to give. We knew it wouldn’t work without a charismatic Butcher to lead the mob – so we got in two giants of LRP – Paul Simms on the first run with the Devon mob and Harry Harold on the second. Paul has the advantage in towering presence, while Harry pipped him to the post on slow and leery unpleasantness.
As the Butcher so creepily informs the players, their Queen is no good to them anymore. By sleeping with her they have defiled Molly and made her unsuitable to be Moccus’ bride. So they want a new one and will be back at 9 to collect. Side plot note – this was a scenario the players couldn’t win. If the player chosen as King sleeps with her she’s defiled, if he turns her down she’s rejected. Either way she’s no good. I should probably put in some kind of disclaimer at this point about nearly every single aspect of this game being problematic if not downright offensive to your average LRPer’s sensibilities, but we run adult games for adults set in specific time periods with awful attitudes. You sign up to a Carry On DE game, you know where we might go.
A paragraph here about Molly. When I asked Alex to play her, I knew she’d be good – I never realised the extent to which she would steal the show. It was a really big ask. Not only did she need to give a complicated performance that was central to the whole plot, she had to be in IC with the players for hours while simultaneously actually running a small bar, serving meals, tidying and doing everything a hotel maid would. Alex was incredible at this and ridiculously uncomplaining and tireless. She had to bring up Mocker’s Day, flirt with everyone, pick a King, get him to go upstairs and then convincingly play the sobbing and bedraggled version of herself later. I’m not going to write too much about how she pulled it all off because I left her to it and she probably would rather explain it herself. Suffice to say, I’m a bit in awe of her and Molly is so real and convincing, that in the second half of the game, the number one aim of players on both runs was to rescue her – which had never occurred to us when writing it and which we had to adjust to and factor in.
After a bit of pushing and shoving and bottle throwing our villagers depart leaving the players confused, low, hungry, tired, arguing about what to do and generally at a loss. They’ve got no weapons, they can’t leave without people taking pot shots at them, the phones don’t work, the booze is starting to run out and they have nothing in the house to shed any light on this whatsoever. Our plan for this point was that they should be utterly stumped and out of directions. Basically, however tired you are of reading this by now, that’s how they feel.
Luckily help is at hand in the form of gypsies. Yep. Random gypsies – a key part of any Hammer movie. Why? We don’t know, apart from being there to celebrate the festival of Moccus. Clichéd? You bet. Racist stereotypes? No, because they are actually modern 1966 travellers putting on a show. They weren’t 100% a surprise as the players had found patrins earlier and the local police had blamed then for the car damage. What we crucially needed at this point was a way to bring magic into the game. Until now everything has been real. The pig was a man in a suit, heart attacks are ordinary, menacing gangsters are real, even the weird village isn’t supernatural, just fucking scary. But DE games have magic in them and we needed a way to get the players to take that step, as well as feeding them, cheering them up and giving them something truly different. DE happens in houses – sometimes it’s the 1920s, sometimes it’s the war, sometimes it’s a 1980s field trip, but it’s predictable that on Saturday evening you all sit and eat your dinner at a long table, lay out what you know and form a plan. I really wanted to disrupt this and do something unexpected and delightful. So gypsies arrive outside (in all the best Brass Coast kit) and lead them to their camp in the woods complete with fire burning, lights in the trees twinkling, sari-draped awnings, halloumi and chicken wings and blackberry wine, dancing, singing, laughing and fun. Now, I will be the first to admit it wasn’t quite as good the first time – it was colder, windier, Battisborough has a fire pit but it’s more exposed, we had less gypsies to go around – it worked, it more than worked, but the second run we nailed it. A more compact camp, a warmer night – that 15% of event running that is not under your control. It just came together. On both runs we were blessed with an incredible Gypsy King and Queen to bellydance and storytell. On the first run we had Roy and Xenia Poulton, playing violin and performing the story of the pig god Moccus and the Hunter through movement. On the second run Irina and her dance partner were spellbinding in the sunset dancing to drumming and then House of the Rising Sun on the gypsies Dansette record player (OK a PA system inside a tent..) and Tom Francis made me cry a bit telling the story of Moccus exactly as I had written it years earlier. So, yes, that’s even more people to sneak onto site, villagers to costume as gypsies, a camp to hide, more briefings and pub meets and asking Trish to cater a campfire meal for 14.
By the time they leave the players know the story of Moccus, have been fed, had their fortunes convincingly told, been magically healed of any injuries (like the gunshot wounds from the gangsters) and have won a wrestling match that led to their broken knife being reforged into a new one in a splendid anvil-based ceremony letting Andy go to town with his performance and pyro skills. After the first run we got feedback that the blade ceremony had been missed by some players and not been quite the big impressive focal point we wanted so this time round we really ramped it up, brought it closer in and included a lot more player interaction with a ceremony, chanting, Panda and Irina doing fabulous things with drumming and spontaneous singing that I wasn’t expecting, plus a load of magic fire sachets and some exciting pyro things I’m not allowed to have anything to do with and are a magic Andy secret. Oh and we got the ‘You think this is joke?’ line in there as well.
Basically what I’ve learnt from these games is that the TL:DR secret to successful set-pieces is to spend years befriending people who are expert in what they do – whether that’s dance, sing, speak, fight, act, build things, write things, cook – bring them into your events, give them as much background as you can and then trust them to do their thing and just let them. Oh and make sure they have tea, coffee, snacks and a nice loo.
Back to the house and with the 9pm villager deadline approaching the players consider their options – try and fight their way out? Clearly not gonna work. Hand over a bride? Not acceptable – they found Molly’s beautifully embroidered traditional dress earlier and it had staining on it that made it pretty clear what happens to the bride. Follow the gypsy queen’s advice and try and talk to Moccus themselves? Worth a go. Part of the thought process here was the ‘stories change over time’ concept. There clearly was some kind of ancient God – the villagers have their version of worship him in one way, the gypsies have another. The pre-game for this event has been about clashing artistic visions and being pushed into things you aren’t comfortable with, telling stories in ways that aren’t right for you. Time is ticking and there is even more urgency when the scout leader from the night before turns up bleeding to death having been gored by a ‘giant pig’ in his tent. He wasn’t prepared.
In both runs they took the plunge and decided to talk to the God direct and negotiate with him. From a plot writer point of view, this all came out of the jokes we tend to make about how DE players would be pretty good at whipping up a scratch ritual after all the ones they’ve done at events. It took a few ref whispers to remind them, but the characters realise that all the horror films they have been in basically mean they know how to do a summoning ritual, so they collect candles, get the salt out, and write something up. It’s a really interesting experience for us on the crew side, not knowing what they will do and waiting for them to tell us so we can work out on the night moments at which we are going to want to do light and sound FX and what they might be. For this you basically need a load of possible tracks cued up ready, some remote controlled colour changing candles and to have done it a lot before.
Of course they don’t get to speak to the God, they get a bit of power going in the circle but only succeed in drawing Frankie the axe murderer, by now wearing the pigs head costume he stole and utterly insane, who smashes down the door, breaks into the circle and causes carnage. Bit mean of us really...
Why do this? So that now it’s nearly 9 o’clock and there’s no time left to come up with a proper plan, leaving only the bride option. Here I digress a bit. I’ve never been a fan of railroading players into doing things. I like sandbox games with multiple outcomes. But this game is pretty railroad. It still bothers me slightly, and in fact it didn’t work the first time and only just did the second. We banked on 1960s sensibilities meaning they would send out a man in a dress because the male characters wouldn’t allow a woman to do it. We assumed they would rationalise that he would get taken back to the village, not get raped and have a chance of escaping, and based a whole set piece around this. We assumed they would get the idea that this would be such a classic Carry On thing to do, we had player characters in both games who made a big thing in their backstory and pre-game about their penchant for cross-dressing on stage, we were thinking everything from pantomime dames to Bernard Breslaw in a frock to Monty Python to historical theatre with men playing women... and we were wrong. In the first run a plucky female character was determined to sacrifice herself for everyone else. I was honestly baffled at that point – I couldn’t believe that the male 60s characters were letting her and that anyone in the group was that brave (cowardly actors, remember). So we flanged it a bit, and it was slightly awkward and I reffed it badly but the upshot was there was a bit of a fight of players vs. villagers and then the Butcher pronounced her unacceptable and said they’d come back at midnight when Moccus would rise.
Second run it worked better – although it still involved basically telling a player to do it. A pretty willing one who’d made it clear he was up for that sort of thing, and it had been spontaneously discussed by the players as an option but still not 100% something that just naturally happened. But it did and it allowed the group to dress their bride in a combination of ancient dress and hotel net curtains and send him out in the dark to meet the Butcher and his torch carrying villagers. The butcher checks out under the veil, checks out under the dress, and then starts to laugh. For a moment there is relief, but then he asks ‘Do you think this is funny?’ and slits the bride’s throat. Rich Cartwright did a wonderful death and our turkey-baster-taped–to-a-big-knife blood effect worked a treat. Then the villagers pulled off their pillowcase masks to reveal the latex pig faces underneath, Harry shouted ‘Now git’em’ and they rushed the house like something from a film. Which made me very happy, possibly because I am weird. Was it worth forcing a set piece? I still think yes, overall, but I wish I hadn’t had to and I need to make less assumptions about what people will do.
Nice bit of fighting where the DE players have the unusual experience for them of an endless wave of attackers at the door of the room they are holed up in, and the extra crew discover how hard it is to take a room with one doorway. At one point we ended up with a queue of attackers in the hall and I wondered if this was descending into farce, but the players got it together and came out fighting and won back the house. To be told by the Butcher he’d be back at midnight when Moccus would rise.
Nearly there, I promise...
So – the traditional big finalé. Normally this would be something the crew had written. A big ritual, quite possibly with a creature suit, FX, pyros, impressive words etc. Well it still would be, but this time player-led and created. And this really did work, both times. With no other options left to them, the players realised they needed to do what they do best – put on a show. The villagers are expecting Moccus to rise, they can give them Moccus rising. They have an IC van full of IC lighting equipment, megaphones, phys rep for a smoke machine, fabric, paint, things they can ransack from the hotel. They have the pig suit back, they have the ceremonial dress, a fancy knife, they saw the traditional symbols in the slideshow photos, they have writers and performers and an FX guy and a hotel sound system. Basically they have us the crew phys repping their skill set – want to light the front of the house red? OK, you RP setting it up and we’ll do do it for you. Want to play Johnny’s pig noise from Friday night on the sound system, we will cue up the BlockRocker, want to whip up some cultist robes from the curtains, we can do that with the sewing machine we have. I can honestly say this was so much fun. On the first run we had Mark Cordory playing the FX guy and he went to town. On the second run we finally let Chris Heath get his hands on the pyros we never let him touch and he was in heaven. Anything they could IC justify being able to do, we could pretty much whip up in the monster room from our supplies. Two very different ‘rituals’ came out of it. Something from the erotic end of Hammer the first time, set against the wild Battisbrough cliffs with whooping villagers, a stately rustic marriage performed in rhyming couplets to an enthralled village audience the second. It was something that we could only do in a game set in a modern enough time period that all our special effects could be phys repped with an IC option. After 12 years we had finally found a way to make the players do the work for us ;-)
Anyway, at the end Moccus does turn up, possessing the character playing him with a booming piggy voiceover we got done by a guy on Fiverr who probably tells his friends about it as the oddest v/o he’s ever been asked to do. And he tells his villagers to go away and leave these people alone and delivers the line, ‘Now that was funny’ before telling the players to come to his circle at dawn.
After all the frenzy we wanted to end on a different note – something very quiet, meaningful, simple. Getting from the one to the other was tricky. The first run we left Saturday night with Moccus speaking and went straight in on Sunday morning with our dawn ceremony and the feedback was people felt a little dissatisfied with it, that they were expecting something else. So I wrote an extra scene this time – having the possessed player taken into the house, where by candlelight to the sound of a plaintive flute theme, he passed on his revelation. That they had it all wrong. It was the hunter not the pig. An old story, a weary man walking to the stones, a fading story that needed an ending. That all the hunter wanted was his knife back and an ending to a tale too long told. And that’s what we gave them on Sunday morning as they made their way down the track to where the circle used to be, speaking to them gently and telling them when they looked down now all they saw were ancient clothes, woad on their bare skin, the mist gently lifting over the brook. So when the Hunter walked out of the woods towards them, with his beautiful pig puppet walking at his side, a wordless ceremony of recognition was all it took. And that is the part I am most proud of.