Welcome to another edition of Campus Tour– your behind-the-scenes look at the people and places you can encounter in Degrees of Horror. This week I’m taking the tour off the beaten path, and off campus. The thing about fighting the forces of darkness in a “real world” setting is the need for supplies. Buffy and Willow went to “the Magic Box” for supplies of an arcane nature, but what about all those wooden stakes? As a student in East Texas, just where do you get your hands on a silvered dagger or body armor on short notice? My answer (in part) was Vanderhorn’s Workshop.

Paul Vanderhorn

Paul Vanderhorn’s mobile home and workshop lies at the end of a gravel road 100 yards off highway 96. At first glance, the property bears a strong resemblance to a junkyard. The cast-off frames of lawnmowers, weed wackers, and less identifiable machinery litter the yard like abandoned carcasses. Yet sheltered from view by the workshop, target range of punctured targets and mangled mannequins hint at something deeper.

Vanderhorn’s reputation as a wizard at small engine repair keeps his workshop busy and the bills paid, but his enthusiasm for renaissance reenactment earns him many a sideways glance from his conservative neighbors. When he isn’t fixing chainsaw engines, this modern blacksmith can be found tinkering with armor and weapon designs. Inside the shop, swords, crossbows, pikes, and maces sit in various states of completion alongside dismantled chainsaws and lawnmower engines. The eccentric tinkerer even has a working catapult.

Vanderhorn isn’t blind to the paranormal activity in Pinebox’s, but age and a bad knee keep him out of the fight. Although he may repeatedly warn characters of the dangers in meddling with the things that go bump in the night, he still looks favorably upon anyone willing to stand against the darkness.

“Class Note Wednesday” has once again blown past “A Little Late Thursday” and right into “Oh-Oh Friday”. The good news is that I can finally report that the edits to Plot Point 6 are complete. Here’s the breakdown:

Plot Points Completed: 6 of 12
Pages:  29 of 41
PP word count:  1,750 of 21,585

I exceeded my word count goal for this plot point by 250 words and I still need to move the character stats from its place in a separate chapter to this one. This is not an action-packed adventure like the one I wrote for plot point 4. This is much more about investigation. It’s made more difficult because the heroes don’t know what they’re looking for, only where to find it. As with plot point 5, this adventure has the potential to be memorable and fun, but as with all plot points I’m relying on the GM to fill in the grace notes.

Anyway, on with the campus tour!

The Roost

The Ravens Multi-Use Indoor Arena, aka the Roost, has served the campus community for more than 60 years. Unfortunately the ugly grey, windowless, round building suffers deeply from its cold-war era design aesthetics.

Despite the basketball arena’s occasional renovation and creative decorating every couple of decades, the building still shows its age. From peeling paint to vacant fire extinguisher racks to struggling air conditioning, it’s no wonder most campus tour guides skip this building. Even so, the building has not completely lost its luster. Every college campus has certain “dare” make-out spots, and ETU is no exception. Making out atop the ETU Ravens logo on the floor of the basketball court is the “Mount Everest” of challenges for adventurous lovers.

Inside, a high-ceiling breezeway circles the ground floor. From the breezeway, patrons enter at the top row of arena seats. Visitors who walk down the aisles to the basketball court can find entrances to a basement level circling the arena situated under the bleachers and breezeway. This basement area circles the entire building includes locker and sports equipment rooms, a loading dock, offices, multi-use classrooms, cramped conference rooms, and so on.

Second only to the football stadium, the Roost is the largest capacity building on campus. Consequently, its use frequently extends beyond basketball. For events like freshman orientation, staff appreciation, talent shows, science fairs, concerts, and so forth, the university covers the wooden floor with padded mats and erects a stage at one end of the court.

It should also be noted that, like many buildings on campus, the Roost has its own urban legends with regard to hauntings. Two ghosts are rumored to make the building their home. One is a serious but otherwise harmless young woman, said to smell of smoke. This ghost has been known to actually speak to people–usually just to say hello–then disappears a moment later. The other ghost only appears in the basement, and is often mistaken for a rival mascot at first. In a typical encounter, a lone student or staff member is walking down the basement hallway when he sees a brown-skinned figure dressed only in a loincloth and carrying a spear. The figure lets out a bloodcurdling scream and charges with spear held forward before disappearing a few steps in front of the hapless victim.

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Beginning next week I’ll make separate posts for my Class Notes updates versus Campus Tours. I have plenty of material I can queue up for Campus Tours, ensuring that those posts come out every week on time regardless of how things are going with the edits. Hopefully I’ll get back on track with my Class Notes posts as well, but the truth is that all the plot points to come either require significant revisions or are complete rewrites.

Let’s play good news/bad news!

The good news is that plot point 5 revisions are done. The bad news is that I feel like I’ve caught The Plague from my son. We’ll see how that affects progress on the next plot point. Anyhow, on with the numbers!

Plot Points Completed: 5 of 12
Pages: 25 of 38

Plot point 5 has a much different vibe than 4 did. Whereas 4 was a very classic, somewhat linear, 12 to Midnight adventure, plot point 5 is more about setting the circumstances and letting the GM squeeze the most from the situation. I really like the new antagonist in this revision. As a GM, I know I could definitely create a memorable session with this plot point. I hope you agree.

In the meantime let’s continue our tour of the campaign setting, shall we?

Although becoming more absent-minded in recent years, President “Grandpa” Nelson is a much-beloved figure on the East Texas University campus.  The president is spry man in his 80s who can still be found walking across campus each morning on his way to his traditional cup of coffee at the student center. Nelson immediately puts students and faculty at ease with a steady handshake, warm smile and a twinkle in his eye–even if he usually gets their names wrong. In fact, Nelson’s soft, steady voice frequently calms otherwise contentious debates at faculty meetings and Student Council. In terms of actually running the university, with his advancing age Nelson leaves much of the day-to-day university operations to his loyal staff. Having served as president for nearly 20 years, “Grandpa” Nelson has become as much a school mascot as the Ravens. Attempts to force the president into retirement have been met with public outcry, both from students and alumni alike.

I apologize to anyone who has gotten accustomed to the weekly updates. I’m shooting for updating every Wednesday, but this Wednesday rolled around and I hadn’t made much progress on PP5. I kept thinking I’d be able to devote time to it, knock it out, and still report in only a day or so late. But here it is Friday and I’m still not done. Since these weekly updates are my way of keeping myself honest and on track, I figured it was just time to come clean. Here’s the status:

Plot Points Completed: 4 of 12
Pages: 23 of 37

I have a page and a half up over last week, but the plot point is only 70% done. This one wasn’t a total rewrite, but it was more than I’d counted on. The location remained the same but the encounter changed so there’s still a lot of new writing. I’m still struggling with my problem of wanting to add too much prose to plot points. I probably spent 15 minutes really honing a certain paragraph describing the setting, then later in the shower I realized I should have summed it up in a one or two short sentences and left the rest to the GM. That’s really what plot points are all about. I give you the story framework, but you fill in the details to make it your own. Working on plot points is a good exercise in “less is more”. In my case, it’s also a painful exercise.

Last week I wrote about GlenMac and Jackson. This week I was planning on giving you the scoop on President Nelson, the most well-liked administrator on campus. However, since I’m overdue on a plot point, I think get back to writing and save President Nelson for next week when I have actual progress to report. I hope everyone has a safe and happy Easter!

I’ll be honest. I kinda assumed I was whistling in the dark with these updates. After all, we hadn’t posted anything new in over a year. Other than those who hadn’t dropped it from their RSS feed, who would bother to keep coming back? Apparently Jeremy does, and I wanted to give him a shout-out for sending us a word of encouragement. It really means a lot, Jeremy.

Today I’m going to talk about how so many people seem ignorant of the supernatural activity in and around Pinebox. Before I do that though, let’s dispense with the weekly status report.

Plot Points Completed: 3 of 12
Pages: 20 of 38

You’ll notice I finished the new draft of plot point 3, although actually that was no great feat since I was much of the way through it last week. The next one will be a total rewrite. The original had the potential to be a fun adventure, but as I was revising the outline I realized that it was weak in delivering supernatural action. The new plot point is going to be a lot more fun for players while driving the plot arc forward, but since it’s a brand new adventure I’m not sure how long it’ll take me to knock out. I have a basic outline, but the devil’s in the details.

But enough excuses. Let’s talk about Pinebox and ETU. Since the setting is supposed to reflect the real world, how is it that characters (both PCs and NPCs) seem to encounter ghosts and monsters on a regular basis without the greater world seeming to take notice? In the age of cell phone cameras, how can anyone deny the evidence? Different modern horror settings have different ways of explaining it away, including magical veils, mass amnesia, and so on. Here’s how it works in Pinebox.

Look Away, Baby

One of the big reasons the citizens of Pinebox don’t seem to recognize the danger around them boils down to willful ignorance. But don’t judge them too harshly. There’s a measure of safety in choosing not to notice the supernatural. Often, when you take note of the spirits and creatures just beyond our periphery, they take notice of you in return. Consequently, deflecting evidence of the supernatural becomes a self defense mechanism, and it is one that generations of locals have honed to perfection. Those who refuse to look away either rise to become unacknowledged guardians of their friends and family or they become an object lesson in the wisdom of  just fitting in.

It has been said that we use our logic to justify what our emotions have already decided.  Guided by an undercurrent of fear at being “noticed”, witnesses in Pinebox commonly convince themselves of more “logical” explanations such as an elaborate hoax, visions brought on by carbon monoxide poisoning, poor lighting, alcohol, or any number of other excuses.

Photoshop

You’d think that a single picture would blow the lid right off Pinebox’s many dirty little secrets. Yet, a side effect of the Internet has been to sharpen our skepticism to a fine point– as well it should. All too frequently the quality of photo manipulation leaves only our common sense with “proof” that an image is faked.

In Pinebox, those who face the darkness stand alone. When presented with a photo of a ghost, bigfoot, or chupacabra, isn’t your very first instinct to think “hoax”? The Internet and Photoshop has ensured that no photo or video, no matter how realistic, will convince a normal, rational person of the supernatural. The heroes might even keep a blog documenting–with photo and video–all the weird happenings in Pinebox, but at best such a site would receive notoriety mainly among paranoid conspiracy theorists and hipsters playing along for irony.

MIBs

When all else fails, in swoop the Men in Black. If you’ve played Pinebox adventures such as [redacted to prevent spoilers] then you might have encountered these individuals. While they don’t follow the traditional physical descriptions of the MIBs, these teams have been known to swoop in and erase evidence of a paranormal event. We’ve never spelled out who they are, who they work for, or their ultimate motives. This was intentional on our part because we wanted to keep things as open and flexible for the GM. Once you start defining something then you limit it.

That being said, in Degrees of Horror book we do crack open the door a bit wider and give you a look at certain human agencies that seek to influence paranormal events. Some operate for their own gain while others are more benevolent. Many operate at an entirely different level than the everyman-turned-heroes who make up the PCs in a typical Pinebox campaign. As such, what sometimes appears as an inscrutable monolithic organization to the players are actually multiple groups with shifting allegiances and conflicting goals each jockeying for the upper hand.

In fact, just about the only thing these groups each have in common is a deep, abiding desire for secrecy. Secrecy allows them to continue pursuing their goals, so the less the public (and their rivals) know, the better. Most groups actively cover up evidence of the paranormal, although their methods vary as widely as their motives.

So there you have it. Even in the modern world, it’s nice to know there’s still room for the unexplained. Though, you’d better consider the ramifications the next time you try to get someone to believe you about your run-in with a ghost in Mom’s Diner.