Helter Skelter
Within the seedy gambling town of Fork, the characters have heard rumors of Red Jack’s, a gambling house that holds secrets unimaginable. Within Red Jack’s there are doors, and there are wagers. Turn the wheel of fortune; draw from a deck of cards on a rusty mirror to see your fate.
Helter Skelter is suitable for four to six characters of fifth to sixth level.
I’m going to talk a bit more about the adventure now, so if you’re going to have a player character in it now is a really good time to stop reading.
Helter Skelter provides a crossroads that is nearer to home than the one in Vale of the Azure Sun. It can be a strange adventure without a larger campaign, or it can lead your game in a completely new direction of your choosing.
This is a fairly ambitious adventure. There are a lot of things in the resources file that you might enjoy playing with. You’ll find several Inkscape maps and some Scribus character sheets for NPCs, done up in a way that makes them useful as player characters for temporary players. There are lots of bits that can be used as clues before the characters find their way to Red Jack’s, and all of the source files are available for editing under the Gnu Free Documentation License.
One of my favorite bits is a historical newspaper mocked up in GIMP to provide ahistorical adventure info. Here’s how I did that:
- Get a scan of a newspaper page.
- Import it into GIMP.
- Choose an article to replace.
- Find some blank space near the article you want to replace, and copy as much of the blank space as you can.
- Open a new layer. Paste the blank space over the article as many times as necessary to erase it.
- There are crease lines that should be going into that blank space. Find some lines in the original, copy them, paste them to the new layer, and rotate them as needed.
- Find the closest font you can for the headline. Here, it looks like the original used something like Metro Sans. Futura is close enough for government work.
- Find the closest font you can for the text. Times is a good bet.
- Adjust font size & spacing.
- Fade text by adjusting text layer opacity.
- Age text with Pick at 5%, repeat 1.
- Hand to players. Report to room 101.
One of the themes in Helter Skelter is the intersection—the crossroads, if you will—between fiction and reality. That intersection is a subtle and integral part of old-school tabletop role-playing. Sometimes that intersection becomes a collision. I didn’t expect, when I started working on it in the summer of 2007, that two of the minor characters would be back in the news during our final days of play. But if your characters meet Bernadine Dohrn or encounter nail bombs designed by Bill Ayers, judge for yourself this adventure’s believability, and then try to tell yourself, wherever you may be, it couldn’t happen here!
Helter Skelter is heavily influenced by Grant Morrison’s• Invisibles• and Doom Patrol• runs, and by William S. Burroughs’s• various works (who also clearly inspired Morrison). It is also inspired by the general level of fear, loathing, and paranoia rampant in America in the late sixties and early seventies.
- Helter Skelter
- In the city of sin is a gambling house that was when the world began. In a lost alley is a door behind a door and within it a deck of cards and fortune’s wheel. Upon the deck are forgotten gods; upon the wheel the world rests.
- The Zodiac Killer in print
- “Here is the Chronicle’s coverage of the cryptic murderer who terrorized the Bay Area and mystified police.”
- Vale of the Azure Sun
- There are things in this world that defy all logic. Places that no door enters and no road goes, where the maps exist only in the minds of madmen. This Gods & Monsters adventure is suitable for three to six characters of 3rd to 5th level.
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Perhaps the purest of Thompson’s searches for the American Dream because it is untainted by politics; or perhaps the most pointless for the same reason, as politics have tainted the American Dream since the Adams anti-sedition acts almost as soon as the country was born.
- Inkscape
- “Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor. Supported features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.”
- Scribus
- Scribus is a very nice open source page layout application and includes full PDF creation. It is also scriptable using Python if you need to automate page layout tasks. Scribus is very useful for making documents that need to be shared with other editors, since anyone can get the Scribus application unrestricted.
- From Hell•: Alan Moore
- Alan Moore’s Twentieth Century psyche seen through the eyes of a Nineteenth-Century killer. Through Jack the Ripper’s murders, he sees visions of a mechanized future: “How would I seem to you? Some antique fiend or penny dreadful horror, yet you frighten me! You have not souls. With you I am alone.” That’s not Jack the Ripper speaking, that’s Alan Moore, using Jack as the gods used the Delphic oracle. This is a brilliantly dark book, made all the more so by Eddie Campbell’s moody pencils.
- GIMP
- The GIMP image manipulation program is one of the best free software packages of any kind. Fully multi-platform, the GIMP “is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction”.
- Doom Patrol: Crawling from the Wreckage•: Grant Morrison
- Doom Patrol begins as an odd superhero story but quickly becomes a twisting exploration of the psychological maze of Crazy Jane. Thrill to the adventures of the Doom Patrol in the City of Bone as an odd collection of superheroic misfits search for their humanity amid an increasingly odd and inhuman world.
- The Doom Patrol Book 4: Musclebound•
- This book examined ideas that Morrison would later handle more in-depth in the Invisibles, such as the ant farm.
- The Invisibles•: Grant Morrison
- With Invisibles, Grant Morrison is going off in a similar direction to his work on Doom Patrol and Animal Man. This is a search for reality where everyone wears great clothing! Grant takes on Michael Moorcock, Eastern Philosophy, and Sixties Fashion, and weaves them into a philosophical treatise so deep you’ll need to wear rubber pants.
- The Soft Machine•
- “Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.”
More adventures
- The Adventure Guide’s Handbook
- Weave fantasy stories around characters that you and your friends create. As a Gods & Monsters Adventure Guide you will present a fantastic world to your players’ characters: all of its great cities, lost ruins, deep forests, and horrendous creatures.
- Kolchak: The Big Creep (a Daredevils adventure)
- Inspired by The Powers of Dr. Remoux, The Big Creep is a Daredevils adventure for The Night Stalker set in the autumn of 1976.
- Skin a module 3: Thracia to The Lost City
- The Judges Guild module Caverns of Thracia is one of the classics of the old-school. It’s also eminently reskinnable by changing the names of gods and expanding on some of the magic items hidden inside.
- Skin a Module 2: The Fell Pass becomes Mansio Solis
- Karl Merris’s The Fell Pass, from Dragon 32, became the border between dusty desert death and the lush green jungle of the new and magical world of the City.
- Three ways to skin a module 1: from Chagmat to Dowanthal Peak
- I’ve always been a fan of explicitly reskinning adventures; here is how I skinned Larry DiTillio’s Chagmat.
- 13 more pages with the topic adventures, and other related pages
As usual, if you’ve added the Gods & Monsters RSS feed to your podcast reader, you should have the PDF version of this adventure already waiting for you.