Naril
Tinker, tailor, lover, thief
Demimonde
A Paranormal Investigation Story
A Paranormal Investigation Story
The pitch:
There have always been monsters under the bed. The thing is, these days, for the most part they've figured out that the best way to make it from one night to another is to maybe leave the beds alone. After all, the kids have flashlights built into their cell phones now, and nobody wants to wind up being the next viral Tiktok video.
The supernatural world is tough gig, these days. Modern society, as a rule, doesn't have a lot of room for werewolves that aren't on a movie screen, and besides, it turns out that quantity of bullets can count for even more than whether or not they're full of silver. The creatures of myth and legend, the things that inspire campfire stories and tall tales, and the heroes who can get a whole tavern pounding the table ot their stories, well. They might still be out there - but you'll find them at the edges, in the margins, in the places where the shadows are deepest. At least, that was the story for a long, long time.
At the turn of the last millenium, while stock brokers, bankers, and the denizens of the nascent Internet worried that their computers would count a year with three zeros as the End of Days, the dead rose. Not all of them, of course, and not all at once - and that isn't even the strangest thing that's happened since NSYNC was at the top of the charts. But it is one of the more alarming, even for the creatures of myth and legend that have been here all along, living in the cracks between this world and the next. And on the heels of the dead came other things, or at least the feeling, the dread, that there was worse out there, waiting for their moment.
The rules had changed. The world is different, and little by little, some things have come out of the shadows. But that doesn't mean that we're living in an age of magic and mysticism. For the most part, the supernatural has proven itself to be...inconvenient, at best. When the ghost of your dead uncle won't leave the house and just hovers over the mashed potatoes, silent and impassive, it puts a real damper on family dinners. And at the same time, there has been no nation of the Fair Folk stepping into Fashion Week and beguiling mortals, and if there are any gods about, they still aren't picking up the metaphorical phone. The sharp rise, however, of supernatural chaos has created a new field of those with the ability, inclination, and, perhaps, heredity, to deal with things that can't otherwise be managed by church or state.
And that's where we come in. Our characters will be part of a paranormal services firm - agency being much too grand a term. We're somewhere between the Ghostbusters and the BPRD, between exterminators and private eyes. We are exorcists, god-botherers, ritualists and kitchen witches. We're not the last line of defense - not even close - but we straddle the line between the real and unreal, living between the world that was and the world that is. We don't have the answers, and we might not even know how to get them, but when something weird happens...well. We're in the phone book.
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Hi! This is an idea I've had swirling around for a little while. This will be an urban fantasy/paranormal investigation story in a world that draws tremendous inspiration from Mike Carey's Felix Castor series, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, NK Jemisin's Great Cities books, Cherie Priest's Cheshire Red Reports (And probably a little from the Clockwork Century), the Penny Dreadful television series, the Hellboy and BPRD movies and comics, Ghostbusters, and a thousand other places besides. It's spooky season, so it's time to do some spooky writing, right?
So, here's the very quick rundown:
- This is just the interest check, so for the handful of you who have written with me before, I'm making an effort to be a little less baroque and wordy than usual.
- Consider this advanced-literate, I suppose.
- I don't get a lot out of elaborately-coded posts. If you do, great, and I won't stop you. But what you're seeing here is about the limit of what I'm all that interested in.
- Posting requirements will be "when we can get around to it." Read to the bottom to see why I'm not going to have any "post by this time for momentum" reasoning.
- The story will be set in Los Angeles, California, in the United States.
- I am looking primarily for both older writers and older characters. This is firmly 18+, and preferably quite a lot older than that.
- I'm not looking for a lot of grimdark and ultra-noir feeling here. We may go to dark places, but there's dark and there's dark.
- I'm not looking for a very large cast. This will not be first-come, first-served.
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Still here? Great! So, let's talk a little bit about how I'm planning to build this - provided it gets enough interest.
On Characters
This will be an ensemble cast kind of thing. I'm not certain if I'm going to have a character in play, but what I'm looking for is a group of folks who get along, and who want to tell the story together. Everyone will get their chance to do something awesome, but I will be looking for characters that function well in a group. I really am not going to be looking for a Main Character and a bunch of Supporting Characters. Everyone should have something that makes them unique, special, or interesting, and then it's our job to make sure everyone gets to do cool things.
I want to be very clear that your characters are all going to the protagonists of the story. They're the good guys - or at least the less-bad-guys, let's not pretend that every solution will be so clear cut. I don't need everyone to hold hands and get along, but they all need to be able to face in the same narrative driection. Very likely, it will make sense for the characters to have known one another for a little while, and worked together already.
This means that I am, for example, not looking for the moody, orphaned loner who communicates only in ironic sneers. I am not looking for a psychotic berserker. I'd quite like for characters to have an interesting reputation, but I would prefer that reputation to not be "The Butcher" of anything (Unless, I suppose, they own a really good carneceria). I am not looking for the "Secretly the Villain" character, unless we have a very long conversation and I'm impressed with the idea. I don't think the passive wallflower, wracked by self-doubt and who goes with the flow will do well in this story.
I'm only putting this here because it's happened to me before - I'm looking, broadly, for original characters. If your character is a mythological creature, a household spirit, or a folk hero, that's one thing - but if they're the title character from Mob Psycho 100 or "One of the K/DA Girls," I will not be particularly impressed.
I do want your characters to be old enough to be out of college. Unless you give me a really good reason, I'd like everyone to have a body of knowledge and both the physical and mental maturity of someone in at least their mid-twenties. The gag of not knowing what a smartphone is, or of being surprised at the existence of a car, is funny exactly once, you know?
I have no problem if your character isn't human. But if you're a three-meter crocodile monster, I will have a lot of questions.
While this isn't first-come, first-served, I'm not going to make you come up with a full character sheet right away. That's a lot of work, and I get it. Nobody wants to feel like that work went to waste. I will, instead, be asking you to give me your character's elevator pitch - something short, to the point, that gets a broad but complete view across, and we'll work from there.
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On Story
I don't really want to do the traditional GM Post / Cast Posts call-and-response. I want to try something a little...experimental.
Provided this gets enough interest, I plan for OOC stuff to be handled through Discord. I have several ideas for 'cases,' and a general notion of an overarching story that I think could be fun, but I want us to create the story together. I want us all to have the outline for the story built, at least in broad strokes, before the first post goes up. In other words, I want to have the bones of the story for all of us to see, agree on, and modify as and when it may be necessary - which means that the actual posting will be the all of us showing one another what we're doing with the story, together. I am always excited to read a post, no matter where or from who, but this will let us have the anticipation of "How is this person going to write this scene," or "How will that person write this combat sequence." I want to try an environment where we're writing not only to impress one another, but in a way where we're all building the story with our own craft, rather than tabletop-style "The GM says something, and you respond to it." It may not work! But I'd like to try.
I have some wrinkles I can suggest for this that will let us still surprise one another - but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.
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