Last time, we talked about The Invisible World; a world that has grown so familiar that it goes unnoticed. This time we’ll talk about one of my favorite setting tropes, The Hidden World.
The hidden world setting is often a world that begins by modeling the world around us, but adds a concealed truth. There are levels and levels of hidden worlds; sometimes the secrets are literally unknown worlds (like the hollow earth popular in pulp novels–a great place to stash your dinosaurs), others feature a truer level of reality (like Mage‘s awakened, or the Princes of Amber and their understanding of Shadow, or the similar Lords of Gossamer and Shadow), or more terrible truths (Call of Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones ). Sometimes the hidden world is like ours, even to the physics– there’s just a conspiracy (Illuminati, Bourne Identity) that secretly runs things. You could stretch things a bit and even include crime games (playing 1930s gangsters, or the mafia, or even Ninjas and Superspies) as a world of hidden influence. Meddling aliens, as you might find in X-files or Conspiracy X, are another popular hidden truth.
An Aside: I loved Mage: The Ascension; some of my most best campaigns were run in that system, and one of my most beloved characters was for a friend’s Mage campaign. The whole World of Darkness does a great Hidden World, but I’ll try use experiences broader than Mage and the Storyteller system.
Tone
Strangely, one of the most influential questions about Hidden World games has nothing to do with the composition of the conspiracy, or the nature of ‘true reality’. Instead, the most pervasive choice comes down to tone: what does the world feel like once you know about the conspiracy? If the twist is that a bucket of paint can get you into Toon Town, your Hidden World can be full of laughter.
Most hidden worlds are bleaker than our world, encouraging creation of PCs who are brave and bold–willing to take direct action to fix a broken world. Often this is convenient streamlining, so that the niceties of warrants and such can be blown past–the nature of the foe and the lack of allies means you’re more likely to convince a judge to send you to a nice sanitarium than to get a warrant when you explain that it’s for a vampire’s haven.
The same game system can have very different tones, depending on your approach. For example, one Mage game was intended to begin as an investigative, explore the world game. That didn’t survive contact with the PCs; soon it was a tense conspiracy investigation and resistance movement. Constant evasion and concern about surveillance and their foe’s technological mastery kept them on the move, rural, and off grid. But that’s not an inevitability of the system; that same game can be friendly competition between esteemed rivals, tackling monstrous foes who want to unmake reality, or surviving technicolor hailstorms while tracking the sentient color purple throughout dream worlds.
The tone of the game interacts with the setting to influence many other factors. For example, a game about traveling between realities might lead the PCs to consider the people they meet disposable–to be used once and discarded. The same planeswalking warrior could feel embattled, every friend precious, if the tone is one of betrayal and inevitability. Or if his foes have destroyed the worlds with his allies, leaving him adrift.
Next Time
The next article will talk in more detail about the supernatural dial’s effects on the Hidden World. Your method of introducing the PCs (and players) to the Hidden World will influence the apparent depth of the setting–and certainly change the expected plots. They’re big topics.
Meanwhile, tell us about your Hidden World games. Do you homebrew your own? Pick up the Weekly World News and assume the articles are all true? Unleash MiB on careless investigators?
Well, I’m running Delta Green and it has been ticking over for two and a half years now. The players seem to enjoy it and I have enjoyed building story arcs for it, some of them very complex indeed.
One of the challenges for me is that as a member of the generation before that of my players (actually, I’m old enough to be the grandfather of the youngest player, just) I’ve seen rather too much of the “hidden world” trope, though I’m using the term to indicate “Hidden, and the players must/should/will be forced to keep it that way” rather than “only just discovered“. No-one would call Heinlein’s “Tunnel in the Sky” a hidden world story, for example, whereas Wilson & Shea’s “Illuminatus” is obviously so.
Hidden World was fresh in the 1980s and no-one was really doing it but the Call of Cthulhu crowd. Then came X-Files and Millennium and suddenly everyone and his Thing That Should Not Be was publishing a “dark” setting pitting a few brave people against a world shattering threat in a Universe Gone Mad.
And then, being a grumpy old man, it seems to me that the vast majority of authors working up a Hidden World setting fail to take it anywhere new or interesting. It’s all been done before, and done to death.
Especially Vampires. Is there a monster so utterly uninspiring as a vampire in the Twenty-Teens?
To my mind the recent crop of Zombie-flavored games (yum) is a reaction to this, taking the setting from “nobody but you knows” to “everybody knows but most of them are dead (and shuffling)”.
I’m getting rather more fun from a Deadlands:Reloaded game I’m running (which has elements of hidden world but they don’t form the core of the player experience) and Space 1889, which has a conspiracy but the players aren’t forced to conceal it from anyone else, and they are believed when they don’t.
I don’t play WoD myself, but Hunter and Mage are extremely popular in this neck of the woods, far more than any of the other WoD Noun: The Gerund settings (a shame as my kid is jonesing to play Geist). It speaks well of the system and individual settings that they generate such brand loyalty.
Hidden worlds games are a lot like urban fantasy is for me these days. It was bright and very cool when it was unique; these days it takes an interesting twist or really good characterization to excite me about a new urban fantasy series. If “the formula” is too clear, I set it aside; setting books aside is rare for me as a reader, so that’s a clear sign that cookbook “fantasy” wears on me.
The same holds true for gaming. It doesn’t have to be unique in the history of everything, but our new game has to feel different than the last games we played. Fortunately, a Call of Cthulhu game feels quite different from a Son of Ether heavy Mage game, which itself feels different from the somber emotions of Wraith. The specific hidden reality can do a lot of the heavy lifting to distinguish one game from the next.
I realize I’m committing a bit of thread necromancy, but I’ve only recently discovered this place and need to make up for lost time.
I’m kind of the reverse of you, Roxysteve. High fantasy like D&D is something of the baseline I grew up with, but I’m kind of growing to like the prospect of a hidden world setting. D&D often tends to be combat-oriented among the people I’ve played with, and subtlety is rarely an option. So, I’m working on a Changeling: The Lost chronicle. In it, I’m hoping to encourage players to think of interesting solutions to problems that avoid the spotlight and minimize how much they tread on the toes of the seasonal courts. Some monsters are easier to defeat with flattery and bargains than with sword and sorcery. Violence will be a scalpel, not a club.
Though I’m on the same page as you on the topic of vampires. I don’t see the appeal, either.
I good friend of mine and I co-created a hidden-world that we’ve played in several times.
It all started with a simple premise. A temple got uncovered during the current War on Terror and magic was released back into the World, all at once. There was suddenly a new reality that no one knew how to deal with… You could wake up suddenly be a mage with uncontrollable powers, a werewolf, or have demon’s blood pumping through your veins.
We played a too brief game that occurred during the Change. Then my buddy and I developed the idea of what people, governments, etc. were doing about this new reality. Since then we’ve run a couple of games at about 6 months past the Change. It’s been fun because not only are the character’s discovering the hidden world, they’re creating it.
That sounds very cool. If you’ve ever read the Wild Cards series, the setup is similar. I really enjoy a setting with the real world up to a point, then X happened, as a setting. It’s certainly easier to pitch than handing out 200 page setting books.
IMHO, “Night’s Black Agents” does a great job of refreshing the hidden world of vampires and making it new. The PCs are all ex-spies gone freelance who find they are working for vampires, and that knowledge has just put the PCs on the menu.
To make things unpredictable, instead of stat-blocks for vampires, there are 22 pages in the section “Building a Vampire.” Vampires may be based on Bosnian folklore, any novel you care to use, space aliens from other dimensions, viruses born in bio-weapons labs, or anything else the GM can think of. Weaknesses, powers, and everything else is up to the GM. The only requirement is that vampires really kick ass.
The hidden world is modeled by a conspiracy pyramid, where the bottom might be hired thugs who know nothing of the truth, and the vampires sit at the top. As the players crawl up the layers, they travel deeper into the hidden world.
I find the “conspiramid” (yes, they did call it that) a great way to gradually bring in a hidden world into a campaign. It can be stolen and used in other settings, other games. (I’m using it now in an Ashen Stars campaign.)
Somehow I’d never heard that pitch for the book–it does sound like a “right up my alley” setting. Thanks for pointing it out!