A game to make an angel weep?
A couple of weeks ago a friend sent me a link she said I should only read if I was "feeling brave and strong and feminist" (a warning you should heed, especially if you or anyone you love has ever been raped). It's a well written, thought-provoking blog-post entitled "How I became a rape victim" and it's made me profoundly rethink my interpretation of past events.
So this morning I woke up with my (as yet nameless) Kapcon scenario in my mind... As with So Cold in Alaska and White Rabbit, its a game I feel a compulsion to run... Some aspects of life I need to understand better. A story I can learn from by filtering it through the experiences of different players.
The idea is the lovechild of Bryn's after party suggestion for a game with "the same people at different ages in their lives" and anarchangel23's demand that my game next year be so bleak and depressing that he cries within the first hour. There's a whole thread on NZRAG about that, but this is not (or not exactly) that game :) I'm not sure now that players will roleplay more than one stage in their characters' life (though there will be that possibility), but this will be a game about how past experiences and mistakes define us and our relationships, and affect our choices. The scenario will have themes of "normal" violence: low key physical and emotional abuse and "grey area" rape of the kind that is generally unnoticed or at least not considered noteworthy in our society.
Since the drive home from Kapcon last year, I've had an image of a teenager plummeting from a concrete ledge into a gorge... At the weekend, I saw the gorge and I expected a dam. There is a weir but downstream a bit I think. I suspect my memory has morphed the bridge to the strainer station and one of the Mangahao dams :) In any case, it's a perfect setting with convenient maps for an episode of "Monster of the Week". I guess ideas have been floating around in my subconscious and have finally meshed into something I can run with. It'll be a supernatural horror story set in Kaitoke Forest Park. The scenario will start with a flashback to the boy falling... a past event that profoundly affected all the characters (though one was not born at the time). Strange phenomena will be upsetting the happy campers at Kaitoke this summer. Are these disturbances related to that long ago tragedy? Tune in at Kapcon 2013 to find out.
