Dreamcatcher

By Rich Redman

"Learn the true topography: the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not inside your consciousness; you are inside them, trapped and howling to get out."

I was really looking forward to this film. I mean, it's a Stephen King movie directed by Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill, Silverado, The Accidental Tourist, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi), written by Lawrence Kasdan and William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride), and starring Morgan Freeman (I don't need to list things he's done!), Jason Lee (Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Enemy of the State, Kissing a Fool), Damian Lewis (Band of Brothers), Tom Sizemore (Saving Private Ryan, Enemy of the State, Strange Days), and the amazing Donnie Wahlberg (Band of Brothers, The Sixth Sense). Wow!

Having said all that, I knew very little about the film when I sat down. I'd never read the novel (my wife picked it up in paperback after we saw the movie), but I knew that Mr. King wrote it while recovering from being hit by a car. I recently read From a Buick Eight, and I treasure my copy of Stan Wiater's The Stephen King Universe, so clearly I'm a fan. I dragged my wife out of the house on a Monday night to a theater with Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) and watched it.

Dreamcatcher is about four friends who gained psychic powers in their childhood. I had no problems with that, considering it was a Stephen King movie, obviously dealing with themes he enjoys, and considering that all four grew up together in Derry, Maine, a setting familiar to all King-philes and abounding in weirdness. At the beginning of the movie, one of the men gets hit by a car and has a vision of someone they all knew as children. The movie then picks up after the man, Jonesy, is mostly recovered. All four have gone to a cabin in the Maine woods for a winter hunting trip, and in typical King tradition, strange things begin happening.

Without giving away the plot, I found this to be a very satisfactory movie. The storytelling (camera work, directing, acting, and writing) is rock-solid, and Mr. Kasdan and Mr. Goldman capture the humanity of Mr. King's characters and remember that the audience has to care about the characters in order for a movie to succeed. I will give you one caveat: This is much more a science fiction film than it is a horror film. If you're expecting It or Salem's Lot, you'll be disappointed.

Monsters

"Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops."

When you tell a monster story (and there are monsters in Dreamcatcher), you have to make choices about how much of the monster to show, and how early in the story. This is less important when running your typical fantasy adventure, but vital when running horror or modern games. Take Alien, for example. Due to budget restrictions, the xenomorph is rarely shown, and generally in very dark places. This heightens the tension because what scares us is the unknown.

If you hide the monster, the story is about fear and dealing with fear. You've got a horror story. If you reveal the monster, the story is about discovering and exploiting its weaknesses, if any. You may have a splatter film like Friday the 13th, you may have a police procedural, or you may have any of dozens of Godzilla movies. What you don't have is a horror story.

Monsters and Modern RPGs

"The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

Let's face it, GMs live for that moment when the monster leaps out and the players shriek. That means we got our players involved in the story, wound up the tension, and successfully sprang our surprise. As a GM, you have several tools at your disposal for hiding monsters.

Tell Most of the Truth

This is a vital strategy for scaring players. Tell the truth; just don't tell all of it. Once the players know the rules of your campaign world, they start to relax. Their guesses become much more accurate, because they've come to understand what's possible in your world. Some GMs who use published campaign settings refuse to allow their players to read the campaign settings in order to preserve as much secrecy as possible.

KISS

Never forget the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Keep the twists and deceptions to a minimum so that they're easier for you to track them. If you're a bad actor, or just a bad liar, describe things so that players ask questions you can answer truthfully (see What the Dog Didn't Do, below, for an example). Things don't have to be complicated to be effective.

Misdirection

Misdirection means getting the heroes to look in the wrong places for explanations. Techniques for misdirecting players include red herrings, hiding in plain sight, and something I'll borrow from Dr. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and call "what the dog didn't do."

• Red Herrings: A red herring is a false lead. For example, if heroes are investigating a series of wild animal attacks, they may find some animal hair and tracks. This could lead them to a den of coyotes in an abandoned warehouse. Finding a reasonable, mundane solution lulls them into a false sense of security just before the werewolf attacks. Red herrings work well with unintelligent monsters, since they're less capable of hiding in plain sight.
• Hiding in Plain Sight: This technique works particularly well with lycanthropes, puppeteers, replacements, vampires, yuan-ti (in snake form), and some fiends. Doppelgangers from Dungeons & Dragons also work well with this technique, since the monsters can be indistinguishable from the world around them. Similarly, gargoyles are hard to find unless you make a point of counting all the sculptures on surrounding buildings. Invisible stalkers are obviously very successful at concealing themselves. Another option for hiding monsters in plain sight is to use bulky uniforms that conceal faces, like SWAT uniforms with gas masks or hazardous material handler coveralls. Even a firefighter with an oxygen mask could be a monster leaving the scene of its latest atrocity.
• What the Dog Didn't Do: In a Sherlock Holmes story, the great detective solves a mystery by noticing that a dog didn't bark when the crime was committed; therefore the criminal was someone the dog knew. Players often assume they have complete information and don't notice the things you don't say. For example, heroes would assume that a security guard who saw an intruder would report it. So when a guard doesn't report an intruder, no one considers charm person used by an illithid. Similarly, when a dead person is found without signs of a struggle, everyone assumes the deceased knew his, or her, killer and had no reason to suspect the murderous individual. Few people stop to consider psionic or magical mind control.

Plausible Deniability

This technique provides heroes with a rational, mundane explanation for events they observe. Combining this with red herrings can be very successful. For example, a hiker is found dead in the Pacific Northwest, surrounding by gigantic, barefoot humanoid footprints. The obvious assumption is that Sasquatch killed the hiker. When heroes investigate, they find a group of xenobiologists in town to hunt for Sasquatch, that the hiker made enemies in town, creating an excess of murder suspects, and eventually a band of ogres that had nothing to do with the murder. Meanwhile a group of locals hoards its precious supply of polymorph potions and continues to plot....

Cat's Paws

A cat's paw is a pawn, an agent of a mastermind that acts in order that the master keeps his identity secret. This works best if the cat's paws belong to an organization the players consider disreputable. For instance, if your heroes believe all cops are dirty, it's worthwhile making at least some of the cat's paws cops and drug dealers, so heroes see a mundane conspiracy rather than the true plot by drow to distribute a new drug made from the blood of surface elves. Organized crime, the CIA, and the IRS are all mundane groups to which players often have emotional responses that color their, and therefore their heroes', thinking.

Assumptions

Don't discourage your heroes from making assumptions. Take advantage of them! If your heroes assume all werewolves are evil, have the monster be in human form when they encounter it. In fact, have it be contemplating suicide in order to stop the monstrous side of its character. If your heroes assume the CIA is testing a new drug on US citizens (which is how it tested LSD decades ago), then they're more likely to assume the CIA identification cards presented by the villains are real. When they turn out to be fakes that the heroes didn't bother to check, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you didn't lie to your players. If your heroes are going to jump to conclusions, give them a soft place to land on the other side of your monster. Sooner or later, they'll look behind them, and there it will be.

Twisting

Plot twists, like the werewolf that regrets its bestial side, are your last resort. In many ways, they present a great risk. The pay-off may fall flat, or it may provoke laughs. As a result, you should use them sparingly. Having said that, have some fun. Tell a story where "ghosts" and "mummies" scared people from a museum which was then robbed. Then have the robbers be disgruntled special effects and makeup technicians from the movie industry. Of course, if you want to add the vengeful ghost of a former museum curator killed during a robbery of the previous century....

Be Up Front

Present straightforward stories. If every adventure has a twist, or a hidden villain, your players will start expecting it. All these techniques are about confounding their expectations. They work best when used sparingly. You can stretch out their usefulness by switching which ones you use, and by combining them in different ways, but sometimes you want to show your heroes the monster early in the story and make the rest of the adventure about finding or pursuing it, discovering its weaknesses, and stopping its awful plot.

"I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly."

I'm Rich Redman, and I'll see you…at the movies!

Your Turn

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