Masks of the Afternoon

In Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff 603 we riffed a series of plot hooks arising from the career of experimental filmmaker and Vodou researcher Maya Deren. But maybe that left you unsatisfied, wanting a Yellow King: This is Normal Now scenario hook that drew in all of experimental cinema.

You absolutely requested that, so here it is.

Students in the film studies department at the university in your home base city begin to display signs of paranormal psychic displacement.

In Ironic Normal or post-Normalcy Shift modes, they might be walking into the jaws of rampagers, blank-eyed and doom-seeking.

In Real Normal, the PCs know one or more of them and notice minor but worrying signs of imminent Carcosan deterioration.

Interviewing the affected, they find a point in common: all attended a first year Introduction to Cinema course. None major in film studies. They all took it as an apparently easy course allowing them to watch movies and get a credit for it. Some complain that it was harder than they thought it would be, and that the lecturer, John Gerome, was pretentious and mean.

Each reports vivid hallucinations of Carcosa, beginning with a dream in which a skull-faced king appeared in a dreamscape resembling a classic experimental film. One saw the king in a dream version of Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon; another, in Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique; a third, in Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother.

When interviewed by the investigators, Gerome admits to being annoyed with students who openly jeered at the works shown on the day devoted to experimental film.

On a questionnaire distributed to students, the team finds invisible ink images of the Yellow Sign. They appear only on some copies, the ones Gerome gave to suspected mockers. Their unseen presence has been enough to alter his targets’ minds.

As they work to retrieve the infected questionnaires and prevent him from doing it again, the investigators may notice an odd resemblance between the embittered lecturer and 19^th century French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Gerome confesses that he often dreams of life as his more famous namesake, an instructor at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts. Particularly striking are his dreamed encounters with a group of American art students mixed up in the occult.

If they break into Gerome’s storage locker they find it kitted out like the ceremonial space in the ritualistic Invocation of My Demon Brother. Also present, a knife like the one Deren wields in Meshes of the Afternoon. If they handle it, it cuts open a reality hole leading them to the PCs from the Paris sequence.

The Yellow King Roleplaying Game takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines, pitting characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. When read, this suppressed play invites madness, and remolds our world into a colony of the alien planet Carcosa. Four core books, served up together in a beautiful slipcase, confront layers with an epic journey into horror in four alternate-reality settings: Belle Epoque Paris, The Wars, Aftermath, and This Is Normal Now. Purchase The Yellow King Roleplaying Game in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.