Appendix T&T

This post is part of the "Appendix N" blog bandwagon. I decided to share some of the many influences that have shaped a game I've been working on for a few years called Tricks & Treats.

It's a game about having spooky adventures on Halloween. You roleplay as kids and teenagers celebrating the best holiday ever, taking advantage of a rare night of unsupervised freedom, navigating the complex and unforgiving social landscape of adolescence, and investigating a mysterious horror that needs to be thwarted in order to save the day.

It's built for one-shot mini-sandbox scenarios, each one revolving around a major Halloween activity (trick-or-treating, going to a haunted house, attending a costume party, etc.). They always prominently feature a cast of NPCs thoroughly stocked with conflicts, rumors, and various hooks, and a unique "puzzle monster" that can't be defeated without gathering clues and forming a clever strategy.

There are many obvious cultural touchstones that you can connect to this game. You might expect the Appendix N to include things like Goosebumps, Hocus Pocus, The Monster Squad, The Goonies, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, etc. Maybe even adult horror like IT and Halloween. And like, sure. Those things are all part of this game. But they weren't part of what I personally put into it.

That's what this post is about. If someone playing it says "wow this is really giving Scooby Doo" or "I'm getting big Over the Garden Wall vibes from this" then that's awesome. By all means, bring those influences to it when you play. But those aren't my influences. These works are.

A 3-page Lasers & Feelings hack

Many of you who follow my work know this story, but for those who don't: once upon a time, back in October of 2020, Octava Oculta (u/shardsofcrystal on Reddit) posted a Halloween-themed Lasers & Feelings hack on r/rpg, which they called Tricks & Treats. I thought it looked cute, and decided to run it for my players. It ended up being the best session I'd ever run before, and my players demanded more.

It's not an exaggeration to say that humble little homemade game changed my life. I'd been struck by an inspiration and passion I've never known elsewhere, making my expansion of Oculta's work into my number one creative project as an amateur game designer.

I don't know when it'll be done, or how exactly this project is going to turn out. It's grown so far beyond that little game they made. Maybe the final version won't even be called "Tricks & Treats," if I can't get their permission. I'm still pretty early in this project, so I have "sort this out with the original creator" penned in for sometime way down the line. But whatever comes of it, I want to make sure the world knows they deserve the proper credit, not me.

In a list of works that inspired me, the first and most important of all is obviously Tricks & Treats itself, by Octava Oculta.

The Tricks & Treats cinematic universe

First, here's a list of movies that are secretly already cinematic adaptations of this game:

1. Gremlins, dir. Joe Dante
2. C.H.U.D., dir. Douglas Cheek
3. A Nightmare on Elm Street, by Wes Craven
4. Return of the Living Dead, dir. Dan O'Bannon
5. Prince of Darkness, by John Carpenter
6. Killer Klowns from Outer Space, by the Chiodo Brothers
7. The Blob, dir. Chuck Russell
8. Tremors, dir. Ron Underwood

If you really want to understand the design of these scenarios, you should watch a few of these movies. They're not all masterpieces, but if they were written down with some maps and random encounter tables and whatnot, then they'd be top shelf Tricks & Treats adventures.

More specifically:

• They're mostly about groups of teenagers / young people, just trying to live their normal lives when suddenly they have to step up and face the darkness.
• They're mostly confined to one location, oftentimes a small community or even a single building, and the action becomes very "location-centric" in an OSR-like way.
• They're mostly about puzzle monsters and action mysteries, especially totally original monsters that neither the protagonists nor the audience would know how to fight initially.
• They mostly take place within a single day (or night), and are very focused on a sense of escalation and building momentum.

Gremlins, Freddy Krueger, Graboids, and the Blob are some of the best examples of puzzle monsters I can recommend. C.H.U.D. and The Blob really emphasize the "mystery investigation" component of the genre. Return of the Living Dead nails "you're a group of teens trying to have a good time when suddenly you've gotta become heroes." Prince of Darkness has a monster that manifests through many disparate elements of the scenario. And man, Killer Klowns just has, like, all of these things.

The one trope in T&T that most of these don't have (at least, before the credits roll) is my favorite stupid cliché of "somehow, none of this actually ends up changing the status quo at all." After you and your friends survive a night facing off against aliens or demons or whatever, rescuing your neighbors and classmates from danger and confirming the existence of the supernatural, nobody believes you and nobody remembers any of it except you. I think that shit is hilarious.

This could be the whole list right here, but there's a few other individual works I'd like to spotlight.

Stranger Things

Okay yeah yeah I know people have grown to love shitting on this show over the years. Not just because it's popular, because because it is genuinely very flawed. Smugly derivative and filled with annoying television writing. But it's on the list because 1) I still quite enjoy it despite it problems and am looking forward to the final season, and 2) it really does balance so many of the ingredients of T&T incredibly well. It's a lot more bloated than T&T, but it features: puzzle monster + social drama + small community event + spirit of adventure.

Maybe most importantly, it's the easiest single work I can point to when someone asks me what this game is like. If you don't want to watch any of the movies in the previous entry, then you can just watch season one of Stranger Things instead and get pretty much all the same stuff.

The Twilight Zone

The Twilight Zone is mostly informative for its tone rather than its structure or content. I watched a ton of this show growing up, and I credit it for setting my baseline for basically all fantasy fiction. The vital theme here is "normalcy disrupted."

Every T&T scenario includes a hefty first third (sometimes first half!) where there's no supernatural horror elements present yet. I want my players to spend a good long time enjoying a mundane status quo before I toss in the chaos. The horror needs something to contrast against, y'know?

Of course, what you treat as the "mundane status quo" is a pretty charged question. And like The Twilight Zone, the answer here is "familiar, even cardboard-like, Americana." Even moreso, the lovely contrast of wholesome Americana + a sinister twist. See also: the works of David Lynch (obviously).

A (probably questionable) principle I took from The Twilight Zone at a young age was "in a work of fantasy, you always start with 'the world as the audience knows it.' Every fantasy device you employ strains the audience's willingness to suspend their disbelief further. Thus, you only introduce the minimum amount of supernatural elements (or other departures from the world as you know it) necessary to tell your story."

A far cry from the mythopoeia fantasy that Tolkien pioneered! As I later got sucked into D&D, of course all fantasy eventually became about "worldbuilding" for me. And I cherish the joy of adding weird magical ideas just for their own sake. But one of the oldest criticisms against fantasy is its escapist appeal, which I think there's a lot of truth to. Bringing the fantasy closer to home makes it harder to attain that feeling of escape.

T&T is my return to that childhood Twilight Zone approach to fantasy. Not because I care about "willing suspension of disbelief" like some amateur. But because there's actually 1) a surprising utility to setting your fantasy game in the modern day real world that the players already know quite well, and 2) a profound emotional impact of placing your fantasy elements in a context that the players could see themselves in.

Little Shop of Horrors

Again, this is far more informative for tone than for structure. While The Twilight Zone presents a very respectable, 1950s TV-friendly vision of American society, that's basically impossible to reproduce in an RPG. The rule of thumb in tabletop is, "whatever tone you're aiming for, expect the result to be one degree sillier in play." It's why every Vampire: the Masquerade campaign that's trying to be Interview With a Vampire ends up just being What We Do in the Shadows, instead.

Hence, a far more heightened and cartoonish caricature of Americana. T&T isn't a musical, but it exists in the same tonal range as musicals. In particular, I think Little Shop of Horrors's tone of "dark comedy driven by very silly optimism" was especially impactful on me. Plus, it tells you "don't take the lore too seriously," which is likewise a good attitude to bring to T&T.

Lastly, while this may be a bit too meta, another parallel I've thought about a lot is the dual-endings of the musical. Most people who've seen Little Shop know that there are two versions of the ending. The original was dark and apocalyptic, while the "official" one is triumphant and saccharine. They filmed both for the movie.

I genuinely love both endings. But even more than that, I love that the story has both endings. To me, they are equally legitimate, and are each enhanced by the existence of the other. 

And of course, this is vital to how I approach T&T. It's important to me that the game still works whether the players succeed or not. If you can't envision a satisfying ending to the story where the players fail to save the day, you gotta recalibrate your expectations.

Stand by Me

I am, as you might imagine, a big fan of the coming-of-age genre. Some of my favorites include The Sandlot, Almost Famous, Lady Bird, and Licorice Pizza. And that's just scratching the surface. But I've picked this one as the most relevant to T&T for a few reasons.

A lot of those stories are very lazy and meandering in their plot. Lots of slice-of-life stuff. A few of them are romances. And I love all that. But Stand by Me is about conflict, and danger, and bravery.

Works in this genre are pretty much always nostalgic to some degree, but this movie doesn't sanitize childhood as much as those others. The very first thing it tells you is this brutal fact: being a kid is hard. It's a period when life kicks your ass again and again and there's nothing you can do about it.

As mentioned, T&T focuses a lot on time pressure. Not merely as a challenge element, but to instill the feeling that "there's never enough time in the world." Childhood is a fleeting thing. But if you catch it in your hands for a short moment, like a firefly at the end of summer, even just a day or two can suddenly feel like a lifetime.

The other thing it captures can be found in that iconic line: "Do you guys wanna go see a dead body?" The weird feeling inside that drives you towards the scary and the dangerous. Of all the quintessential childhood emotions, it's among the most strange. The most uncomfortable. The most disturbing. Halloween is one of the only rituals in childhood that speaks to this emotion, that tells us to explore it. Don't just dismiss it as "morbid curiosity." Go towards the danger.

Every coming-of-age story has something to say about what it takes to grow up. In The Sandlot, it's mostly about learning to leave your comfort zone. In Almost Famous, it's about learning to see through fantasies and recognize what's real. In Lady Bird, it's about learning to love the parts of yourself you didn't choose.

But in Stand by Me, it's about learning to become the danger.

Sounds pretty harsh, huh? Make no mistake: this movie has so much softness in it. These boys love each other, listen to each other, protect each other. They open up and cry together. But it also says in no uncertain terms "that's not enough to survive." This world will harden you.

This is usually regarded as the great tragedy of masculinity. But it doesn't have to be. This movie doesn't claim that men have to give up their tenderness. On the contrary: this is a triumphant turn. Becoming a little dangerous, when you need to be, is the first step to ending life's ass-kickings. There's a reason we dress up as monsters on Halloween. And as the movie's title indicates: you become the danger in order to protect your friends just as much as yourself.

So it is in Tricks & Treats. You'll quickly be reminded how much it sucks to be a kid. How powerless you are. Yet every time I play, the players still thwart the monster anyway. I don't think any D&D game I've ever run has made my players feel as heroic as T&T does.

It Follows

The first time I saw It Follows, I thought it was okay. I didn't read deeply enough into the movie's meaning. Honestly, I kind of just dismissed it as a cautionary tale about the dangers of sex. A heavy-handed allegory about STDs, but with surprisingly "artsy indie horror" execution. And indeed, I'm fairly certain that's all most horror fans think of it.

But it simmered in the back of my mind. At some point, I realized it really had nothing to do with STDs at all. That's a shallow interpretation which ignores so much of the film's substance. Because although the source of their problem is sex, the solution to their problem isn't "don't have sex, kids."

Sex = adulthood is a classic trope of the coming-of-age genre, and sex = death is a classic trope of... all art? One of the most common interpretations of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden is that it conferred an understanding of sex, and with this must also come mortality.

The point is that it's a threshold you can't return from. Once you cross that line, there's no going back. You can't regain your virginity, in the same way you can't return to childhood once you've grown up. The only way to survive adulthood now is to go through it with others. People you love and trust who can share the burden with you.

That's how the monster works. Once you've inherited it, you can never lose it. Like death, it'll catch up to you eventually. There's no way to return to the Garden. Sex might be what got you into the situation in the first place, but it's also the only way you can delay the inevitable. I don't know about you, but when I was a teenager, I remember sex being pretty scary. Alluring, yes. But also something that took no small amount of courage to embrace.

So yeah, in regards to Tricks & Treats, this movie is relevant not merely because it's about a group of teens fighting a puzzle monster, but because it also scratches deeper into a lot of the themes I find most compelling in this genre. Of course, over time I've come across many alternate readings of the film that I think are fascinating as well. Arguments that it's about abuse and trauma, stagnation and the economic recession, living with anxiety, and more. It really is a much better movie than I initially thought.

It also resonates with me because, like, I was surprised how closely Detroit resembles my hometown! It's one of the only times in my life I saw a movie that looked like it could have been filmed in the neighborhood where I grew up. As I've discovered, pretty much every former-industrial rust belt city looks like that. They just usually don't show up on your screen.

One minor difference is that grownups are useless in T&T, whereas they're merely absent in It Follows. But you still see the same kind of fierce independence from the child protagonists. "This is our problem to solve." There's a really great moment where the kids have to cross over the eight mile road splitting Detroit, venturing into the "bad parts of town" that their parents had always warned them away from. I think that single plot point is maybe the perfect encapsulation of what this game is truly about.

-Dwiz