I've been debating posting about this, but I figured, heck it's on the brain and a few of you folks are gamers or semi-gamers and might be interested like I was.
I noticed this gaming book a few years ago while browsing Pandemonium in Harvard Square. It looked cool, but I did not have the money to spend on it at the time. Last year I ended up picking it up from a mostly gaming bookstore out by North Hampton. I read it in it's entirety in one sitting and then had to banish it to a book pile in my book room, because quite honestly, it just creeped me out. I picked it up again a few days ago and re-read it. It's still a fascinating concept for a table top RPG, and really really creepy. It's called
Little Fears by Jason Blair, and I would link to it but as I recently found out it's basically out of print. It's possible a well stocked gaming store may still have copies, but the print run it basically dead.
Anyway, what fascinated me so much about it is that it's an RPG based upon playing children who go up against 'childhood fears'. In essence, the monsters under the beds and in the closets are real and a serious threat to children. But that's a really simple explanation of what the game actually is. If that were all, it would bring to mind scenarios from Monsters Inc. But, Little Fears is a horror based RPG, so things are much, much worse. Jason Blair went and did a lot of research into child abuse and abducted children and made a game based around the concept of what if there were a parallel dimension where all these horrible attrocities were devised and coming from. Closetland (an appropriatly childish name)is a world made up of fear where the denizens feed off of innocence. The closet monsters are only the base foot soldiers of this place. The generals or kings are each based on one of the seven deadly sins and each have their own agenda and reason why they are hunting children. Regardless of how I feel about this idea, it an amazingly constructed mythology, in a really short book. Belief plays a huge factor in the game, and can be the children's strongest weapon or worst enemy. If your character believes that his teddy bear will protect him from monsters, it will. Conversely, if your characters believes there is a hideous tentacled monster hiding under his bed, he better not put his feet on the floor.
On of the other game concepts is the loss of innocence, defined in this case by one's willingness to believe, basically. As one gets older (the oldest a character can be in the game being 12) the less likely they are to believe in what is happening and the more likely they are going to try to rationalize a logical explanation. This translates to adults neither can see nor believe in the monsters. The kids are on their own.
This concept of belief is what truly sucked me in. I spent several hours reading the old forums for this game and was blown away by the consistencies of what folks reported as things they feared as children, and what they did to combat these fears. Very similair things were talked about from people living all over the globe. So regardless of the author's weird Closetland mythology, there is already a very strong childhood belief system.
I don't think I would ever actually want to play this RPG. It's trully dark and horrifying, but it's just a neat storyline. I just thought other folks might find the concept of childhood belief sytems kind of fascinating. So much of it is still reflected in children's literature, which is not surprising since so much of it originated from folk lore and fairy tales in the first place. I have to say, this is where I found fault with the author. While he obviously did much research into the horrible crimes children are subjected to he sort of missed the boat on researching belief systems and fairy tale "rules of engagement" for lack of a better way of putting it. (I have no idea if that will make sense to anyone. I'm sorry, I've been collecting fairy tales since I was very small, and I know the rules.) So, to try to sum that up, the game feels really misbalaced in favor of the bad guys. But maybe this is acceptable in a horror genre scenario.
Well, that's it. Just some musings on a neat game concept.
