“No!” Dr. Nesbit’s voiced crackled over the radio as he placed himself between my pulse rifle and the hostile coiled around the Lieutenant.
The lights flickered again, and my breath turned to frost against the visor of my hardsuit. Another airlock must have been forced open.
“Out of the way, Doc. The LT doesn’t need you now,” Sarge barked.
The Doc turned his back to us as he approached the Lieutenant, “There is so much to learn from it. We must communicate with it—”
“I plan to communicate plenty with this here rifle. Now move it, Doc,” Bergensen chimed in.
I sidestepped for a clear shot. That was when the hostile wrenched the Lieutenant’s head all the way around, so that his glazed eyes were staring at me. His mouth worked up and down like a marionette’s, but I couldn’t hear anything.
Then, softly, over the radio as the Doc got so close, his helmet was practically touching the Lieutenant’s face, I heard it: “Come closer, child. Closer now.”
Morality and horror are bosom buddies from the very beginning. No part of the horror we enjoy today is untouched by our common concepts of morality. When the Puritans landed in the colonies, they saw within the dark woods demons and devils waiting to tempt and torture those weak of faith and moral structure. Over 350 years later, promiscuous camp counselors are regularly and graphically torn apart in dark woods on the silver screen. The social mores of a culture are often blatantly reflected in the horror they tell, and this makes them excellent tools for the host.
Moral themes in stories can take several different forms. They could be presented as a clear-cut allegory. In this case, the story literally has a moral to it and any character who defies this moral will suffer for it. Designing these stories involves creating tests for the characters with the moral in mind. The tests are usually in the form of temptation, with those who succumb to it perishing in gruesome ways.
Many slasher flicks are classic examples of these. People are seemingly slain at random, but usually in the order of who the audience disapproves of most. So you’ll find the self-centered, cowardly, or mean-spirited perish early in the film, followed by the promiscuous and weak willed. The “tests” that occur in these stories take the form of how selfless the character is during times of stress and what the characters choose to do when they are unaware of any danger. Rarely do the tests seem predetermined nor do they appear to directly cause the characters’ deaths. As far as the plot is concern, they appear to only be coincidence.
Many stories from classic TV shows and comic books like The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt are moral allegories by nature. In these, the plot of the story revolves around a single test of a tragic flaw. Usually the character is driven to achieve something: fame, wealth, women, immortality, power, or other classic goals. This makes the character toy with something one should never toy with: mad science, pacts with the devil, séances to contact the dead, and the like.
The plots of these allegories should be fairly straightforward. You can spend your first two acts piecing together what is done to pursue the sinister goal, and have it all go wrong at the beginning of the third.
Not all the characters will have the same ideals about right and wrong. This can make for an interesting story; especially if something horrifies one character while another is not bothered by it. Keep these issues in mind while hosting the game and accentuate them with pulls. If a character is repulsed by an act they have to perform, make their player pull to overcome the revulsion. Let the players of characters not repulsed by it get by without a pull and watch how the dynamic of the game changes.
Conversely, you can wrap a story around a moral dilemma. Instead of a black and white answer, the characters have to muddle through the messy grays. For this sort of game, you can dig through the questionnaire for ideas about how to place two moral imperatives at odds with each other. Do the characters save the child of one of their own, or the lives of thousands of strangers’ children? If they let the man who killed their father live, he may discover a cure for cancer. Can they kill the knifewielding maniac now that they have captured her and she begins to act like a child again?
In these games, you may wish to make a note or two about pulls you will demand. If you know that the characters will face a difficult decision, and one solution would never sit well with certain characters, then make sure you make a note of when and why you think they might have to pull to overcome the power of their own conscience.
Look to the players to find which morals to exploit in your tale. Use the questionnaire to ask about the morality of their characters: “Who is your hero?” “What is the one thing you regret doing for love?” “With all the lives your projects have ruined, how do you justify what you do for a living?”
Find where the characters learned their morals: “What is the most important lesson you ever learned, and who taught it to you?” “Why have you rejected the faith of your parents?” “Where do you find the strength to save you from your self-destructive tendencies?”
Explore just how moral the characters really are. Many people hold morals in high esteem, but rarely practice what they preach. Confessing sins is as good for the questionnaire as it is for the soul.
If you are hosting a game of moral allegory, you will also want to focus closely on the characters’ vices and tragic flaws. Each character should have one well-defined vice or flaw that would either put them in a position to be slain, or cause them to pursue it to dire ends. Why must you discover the secret to immortality? Why won’t you keep it in your pants? When did you knowingly put a loved one in danger so you could turn a profit?
While hosting the moral game, you need to pay attention to the choices the characters make. Are they following their own moral code? Does this help or hinder them? Is it better to be right and dead or alive and wrong?
Are the characters following the moral of the story, if it has one? If they aren’t, should they be punished for it? In many cases you won’t need to be clear about why they are being punished, but you don’t need to be deceptive about it either. Just be consistent. Most of the work for hosting a moral game is done in the creation of the story’s framework. Still, you will be making morality a theme as important as isolation and deception, so you will want to take steps to reinforce that theme.
The tower is a great way to nail down a character’s own morality or the morality of the story.
When sensibilities are offended, people can have visible, even physical reactions to it. A hungry child offered a meal might be initially grateful while eating it, but may lose control once they find out the meat was from a stray dog. In this situation, the player may have to pull just to keep the character from vomiting, screaming or sinking into a depression. Those with a high moral backbone are often susceptible to such pulls.
On the flip side, stories with a moral can force those characters with looser morals to pull. In those stories, gluttony, greed, lust, and the other deadly sins can often be literally deadly. If the character contradicts the moral of the story, you can have the next threat focus on them, which in turn causes them to pull more.