[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

As usual, Jürgen, your ideas are spot-on. However, there's one big metagame problem: they'll actually work. Horror is mainly about scaring the players, getting the players scared of transhuman elements (which they're probably unfamiliar with) will play directly into the ick-factor tactics that bioconservatives love to use. In fact, a lot of horror is based directly on xenophobia. (Since I have the Xenophilia disadvantage, I'm a bit biased here.)

Well, excesses are a part of every technological revolution, and thus provide a fine source of horror that shouldn't be ignored. That being said...

If I were to run a horror campaign, I'd base the threat on Dolores Umbridge: a sadistic bigot with political power. In THS terms, this means jack-booted thugs from the GRA invading Seventh Heaven, or Exogenisis scientists enduring EDI goon squads, or being the the victims of genocide for the usual reasons (Armitage III: Poly-Matrix is a perfect example of this), or anything else based on Presavationist backlash.

How about a conspiracy of Evil Old Men trying to use all their resources to destroy parahumans before they can become the "norm" for humanity?

- Developing bioweapons that work specifically against certain types of parahumans.
- Sabotaging facilities that create parahumans so that the parahuman children will end up psychotic a few years down the road.
- Waging an intensive memetic campaign against anything parahuman that will wreck countless lives (which will be especially successful in Third Wave nations where most people can't afford to have parahuman children anyway).

Eventually, a group of young parahumans discovers this conspiracy and decide to fight back. Some only want a "parahuman homeland", while others begin to see non-parahumans as a threat to their very existence (you can plunder GUNDAM Seed for ideas...). The whole thing escalates, and the spirit of tolerance of the Transhuman Age vanishes as hate and bigotry begin to spread.

The point of this scenario is not about the dangers of new technology, but how humans can abuse them if they submit to hatred. One side sees the other as "less than human", and the other sees the first one as an "evolutionary dead end". Neither sees the other one as people who have any business surviving.

The themes here are the loss of innocence of the new age, the rule of hatred, and the suffering of the many innocent victims that get caught in the crossfire. And in all these themes you will find plenty of opportunities for horror...

Great Cthulhu deciding that San Francisco would make a good breakfast doesn't horrify me, a so-called parent threatening a child at knifepoint to not be gay does.

Great Cthulhu eating San Francisco only doesn't horrify you because you haven't thought the scenario throughly enough. Cthulhu isn't just some Gozilla-like monster that will stomp on humans, gobble them up, and otherwise do large amounts of property damage. No, He is something far more terrifying.

First, psychic emanations of His impending arrival will ripple ahead in time before Him. At first, only artists, drug users, and other sensitive people will feel anything and have strange dreams. These dreams get more intense over time, and an increasingly large number of people simply goes insane - gouging their eyes out, running amok, shouting "He is coming!" from tall buildings, and so on.

Gradually, the local, then the national, and finally the international media takes notice. Many of the disturbed people form small groups and cults, dressing strangely and constantly chanting "Ia, Ia, Cthulhu fhtagn!". Some sort of terrorist memetic attack is suspected, but the police can't find the vector spreading it.

Rumors spread that fish-men have been sighted in the Bay, and there might even be a few blurry recordings of them (quickly denounced as hoaxes - and indeed, some of them will be hoaxes). Then foetuses are being deformed in their wombs into tentacled somethings - in one clinic, all children in their array of artificial wombs are thus affected, leading to the suspicion of some proteus nanovirus. Panic and violence spread - people either start stockpiling goods and barricade themselves into their apartments, or head for the hills. Then the government imposes a quarantaine and a media lockdown to quell the panic (which, of course, does not work completely in this time and age of ubiquiteous communication).

Then, one night, highly abnormal weather is reported around San Francisco. It is getting harder and harder to get a reception from the region - there is so much noise in the conncetions that only text messages have a good chance of getting through the interdiction relatively intact, and multiple bloggers report on the anomalies.

One of the last files that get through is a blurry image of some gigantic thing raising out of the waters of the Bay. Then, only static on all channels.

The next morning, the shocked world wakes up to the news that a nuclear weapon was detonated in San Francisco.



Well, does that sound scary or not?