Thanks to the existence of Paul StJohn Mackintosh’s Casting the Runes, I don’t have to answer the question of how to do M. R. James in GUMSHOE.
Still, as the holiday season rolls nearer, reminding me of the Jamesian tradition of ghost stories told in the yule log’s glow, I can’t help but hear a terrible scratching at the door. In an unearthly murmur a question is posed: can you do James in DramaSystem?
Well, as we covered in a recent segment on Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, James’s alma mater claims a rich legacy of haunts. The ones that stick in my head recall the English civil war. At King’s College, where James served as provost from 1905 to 1918, they recall the disturbances of that long-ago era. Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers desecrated its chapel, using it as a barracks. The uneasy hooves of their horses, presumably wanting to distance themselves from any such blasphemy, can still be heard on its roof. A ghostly choir, purportedly still angry at Cromwell, periodically gives unseen voice to admonishing hymns.
Though these have been heard for a long while, the ghost of Oliver Cromwell’s head arrived relatively recently. By the time Charles II returned from exile in 1661, Cromwell was already dead and buried in Westminster abbey. Undeterred by this wrinkle, parliament showed its fealty to the freshly installed king by ordering Cromwell’s body dug up and hung, with his head then displayed on a spike on the roof of Westminster Hall. It remained there for nearly a quarter of a century before passing into the hands of private collectors and then a series of museums. Finally in 1960 Cromwell’s desiccated head was buried in a secret location on the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which he attended in his youth.
Five years after the interment, the action of our scenario begins. The players all create characters who are students at King’s College, and feel in some way like outsiders. This has created a bond between them, though with conflict bubbling beneath the surface. Most if not all of them belong to the college’s M. R. James Association. With no better place to go over the holidays, the student outcasts remain at Cambridge, where they plan to recreate one of his Christmas ghost story nights.
In 1965 Britain the countercultural energy that makes London swing is gathering fast. When creating characters players determine how much they, as students at Cambridge fascinated by a late Victorian writer, are drawn to or repelled by this youth movement and its strong element of class disruption. As with any first DramaSystem session, they also specify their dramatic poles and the unmet needs they have toward one another.
The GM specifies that they get to narrate ghostly elements of the story at any time, whether they have called the scene or not. This does not preclude the players from adding their own eerie elements. The GM calls the first scene, with the group together beginning to launch into their staged reading. Then the echoes of an earlier great upending in Britain reach out to their sensitized minds. First they hear the hooves on the roof. Then the intonations of the ghost monk choir, buzzing with hatred toward rebels. Later they are drawn from King’s to Sidney Sussex, where they witness the recently reported manifestations of Oliver Cromwell’s hovering head, with its temperature drops, awful murmuring, and terrible deathly face. What message does it have for them?
Unlike a GUMSHOE scenario, the characters aren’t trying to discover something or solve a problem by putting Cromwell’s spirit to rest. Here that can remain a task too challenging to permanently settle. Instead the manifestations provide a catalyst exposing the dramatic tensions between them. As the GM, you nudge them toward the theme, provoking them to grapple with the contradictions that leave them yoked to the isolating, lonely past as their nation hurtles into the future.
Hillfolk is a game of high-stakes interpersonal conflict by acclaimed designer Robin D. Laws. Using its DramaSystem rules, you and your friends can weave enthralling sagas of Iron Age tribes, Regency socialites, border town drug kingpins, a troubled crime family, posthuman cyberpunks and more. Purchase Hillfolk and its companion Blood in the Snow in the Pelgrane Shop.