Cabinet of Curiosities

I found myself rereading the first part of the John Dies at the End 2, John and Dave and the Temple of X'al'naa''thuthuthu.

It's true that this story takes place after John Dies at the End (an amazing book that I cannot recommend highly enough), and thus contains spoilers by its very nature. But it is also true that all of the real surprises are artfully concealed (okay, except for one), and that it is a radical/hilarious/soul-crushing story.

It's your choice whether you read it. I have read it before, and I was reading it again today, when I was greatly inspired by the following bit, which I think requires no context.

I slipped the key into the padlock and snapped it open. I pulled the tool shed door slightly ajar and turned to the cop.


"What's in here... don't freak out or anything. I collect things. It's a hobby, that's all. And as far as I know, there's nothing illegal here."


Though you could say some of it is, uh, imported.


"Could you go ahead and step back, Sir?"


I stepped back. The cop opened the little shed and stabbed the darkness with a flashlight beam.


I held my breath. He went right to the floor with the light, where a body would be, I guess. He spotlighted my lawnmower. Just a little push mower, Briggs and Stratton. A crust of grass on the wheels.


Then he flicked the flashlight beam to the set of metal shelves along the back and side walls of the toolshed. The beam hit a glass jar the size of a can of paint and illuminated the murky liquid inside.


Officer Franky Burgess stared at it, waiting for his brain to register what he was seeing. Eventually he would figure out it was a late-term fetus, a head the size of a fist, its eyes closed. It had no arms or legs. Its torso had been replaced by a jointed mechanical apparatus that hooked around to a point like the tail of a Seahorse.


I manufactured a chuckle and said, "Heh, uh, I got that off ebay. It's a, uh, prop from a movie."


The cop glanced at me. I glanced away.


He shined his light back onto the shelf. Next to the jar was an ant farm, a children's toy made of two panes of glass with a half-inch layer of sand in between. A colony of ants lived inside and you could watch them make tunnels and lay eggs and scurry around. On this particular ant farm, the tunnels had been dug neatly to spell out the word "HELP."


Next to that was my old XBox, the cables wrapped around it.


He moved the light down a foot, to the shelf below. He passed over a stack of old magazines, not noticing that the top one was an issue of Time depicting a swarm of Secret Service agents around a dead Bill Clinton, the words "WHO DID IT?" blasting across the picture in red.


Next to the magazines was a stuffed red "Tickle Me Elmo" doll, the fur faded with dust. At the moment the light hit it, its sound box crackled to life and in a cartoony voice it said, "Ha ha ha! Five point six inches erect!"


Franky stared at it in puzzlement for several seconds.


"It's, uh, broken," I said, finally.


Franky the cop inched the beam to the next object, a human skull with a single thorn-like protrusion of bone from the middle of the forehead, about the length of a finger and sharpened to a needle point.


He went to the next object and again stopped for much too long for comfort. It was a 38 caliber stainless steel revolver. This one wasn't going to get used in the commission of any crime, though, as the barrel ended it a twisted lump of molten metal that looked like chewed bubble gum.


Next to it was a mason jar containing a twisted, purple tongue suspended in clear liquid. Next to it was a duplicate jar, only with two human eyes floating side by side, trailing a tangled tail of nerves and blood vessels. The cop didn't notice that when the beam swept past the jar, the eyes turned to follow it. Next to the jars was an old battery from my truck, matted with smears of black grime. Where do you throw away one of those things?

Now, just to confirm what you already suspect: at no time in the original novel or what has been released of the sequel, has any of this stuff been explained, introduced or, indeed, referred to.  Each of these items clearly could have any number of zany and mind-blowing stories associated with it, but we're just given a tiny glimpse into Dave's world via the simple descriptions of the items and our own imaginations.

When I was a young adult, I used to love this show called Eerie, Indiana, about a big city kid named Marshall who doesn't understand why he can't convince his parents that their new home in seemingly-quiet, seemingly-boring (wait for it...) Eerie, Indiana is in fact the weirdest place in the entire world.  Marshall - who, by the way, predated Fox Mulder (that robotic simp) by two years - had a tree house, and in the tree house there was a cabinet, and into the cabinet he would place "evidence": frequently, the one item that could serve as a reminder of the zany events that had ensued in a given episode.  This cabinet would be opened at least once every episode, and was full of both the signs of previous episodes, as well as much unexplained junk.

I remember also, how the Young Indiana Jones Adventures sometimes used the framing device of Old Indy saying something to the effect of "Ah yes, I remember that adventure quite well..." and off it would go.  And for that matter, how about that awesome warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark?  How many movies worth of crazy crap was hidden in all those other non-arked boxes?

And also, though I can't remember it clearly, I feel that at least some Sherlock Holmes adventures have involved or begun with Watson asking Holmes to explain a strange article lying about the great detective's study. 

So this idea of a Cabinet of Curiosities that the hero keeps and uses to either remind us of his adventures, or introduce us to them, or just evocatively allude to them, seems to be a recurring trope.

So, to change tack only slightly, let's talk about Oracles.

Recently, there's been some talk in the RPG Design Community over the idea of moving away from providing the players with Tolkeinien descriptions of vast worlds with histories of arbitrary detail, and towards giving the players tools that assist (and force) them to make their own setting, in line with and appropriate to your game.

Typically, games that allow vast setting customization didn't provide many guidelines.  Their systems might be almost entirely setting agnostic, like Prime Time Adventures, where all that's definitely required is Characters with Issues.  Or they might only require a particular social pressure or configuration that could map to any particulars, like My Life with Master's need for the tension between serving the Master and becoming able to love, or Sorceror's tension between the characters and their "demons" (which could actually be drugs or emotions or fighter-jets or special kung-fu techniques or anything that grants Power but demands a Need).

So an Oracle is a way to give players a setting that they still create themselves.  Paradoxical, I know. The best example of this technique that I've personally seen is found in In a Wicked Age. 

At the beginning of each session, the group chooses an Oracle: Blood & Sex, God-kings of War, the Unquiet Past or Nest of Vipers.  Each tends to produce situtations like you'd think from their name.  Then each player draws a card from a normal deck of fifty-two and consults the appropriate chart in the book (but those following at home can use the online oracles.

For example, three people who felt in the mood for "the Unquiet Past" might draw and read:

• The 2 of Clubs: "A scholar and antiquarian, unmindful of danger."
• The Queen of Diamonds: "The fey and unfriendly guardians of an enchanted glade."
• The Jack of Diamonds: "A murderer-for-hire, luckless and in poverty, from whom the gods have turned their faces."

Each player can now choose a character referred to by the oracle to play for this session.  Obvious possibilities include the Scholar, the murderer, or one of the glade-guardians.  Each of these, by the nature of their description, imply an adventure involving the unquiet past: the scholar will seek out old and dangerous things, like perhaps the unknown power of the glade, but where does the murderer come in, and what did he do that caused the world to turn against him?  Penetrate and pollute the glade?  Has he been hired by the scholar due to his expertise in these matters?  What will he be willing to do to regain the favor of the gods, or wealth, or death or whatever it is he craves?  And so on, and so on.

In a Wicked Age is designed for long-term play: this process is repeated over and over, with some characters earning the right to re-appear.  The result is an inter-woven tapestry of tales unique to the group, but incorporating and reinforcing those same key events, steering the whole she-bang right into the thematic territory that the designer wanted for his game.

So my obvious point is, there should totally be a game that's framed by an oracle of the contents of the bookcases/evidence lockers/etc of a detective/detective agency/special bureau/etc.

I'm imagining beginning at the crossing grounds between Warehouse 23 and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

In Munchausen, a player is challenged by an opening request for a story, like "Dear Baron, do tell us about the time that you successfully invaded the palace of the Grand Turk armed only with a house cat," and then proceeds to say so, interrupted only by those players who offer him points to complicate his story further.

Warehouse 23 was the name Steve Jackson games gave to that warehouse at the end of Raiders, or to one very much like it, filled with every bit of stuff that the conspiracy thinks you can't handle.  It had it's own supplement for GURPS, but I first encountered it as an online oracle of the contents of random crates.

So it could be as easy as replacing the Baron with some equally eclectic but curiosity-collecting personage and making every challenge "Excuse me, but what the hell is THIS?!"

But Baron Munchausen sounds (I confess to not having played it, though I'd very much like to) as if it only has a single emotional note: wit, high spirits, jesting apparent-seriousness, old-world politeness and charm.  I feel like I'd most like something that can run a gamut of moods, but takes a much more somber tone as a baseline.

And very few of Warehouse 23's contents, even the scary ones, can be seen as serious, and most of them are downright ridiculous.  One box is described as containing every bag lunch the opening character has ever lost, most marked "Results: Negative," except for the most recent one, which seems to have been more promising.  This is hardly the kind of elliptical-but-suggestive and inert-but-threatening object I mean.

So I'd need the framing device to be more thoughtful than raucous...perhaps the Collector has always spent all his energy and put all adventures behind him.  Perhaps they are dead at the start of the game.  Are we intruding on them in some way?  Did we not know them, or at least, not know this part of their life?  I need to spend some time at farmhouse auctions...

Then it's just a matter of making a few deliciously-themed lists of fifty-two super-cool Curiosities!  Yeah, you're gonna have to give me some time for that.

And!  I can imagine doing something like a tarot spread with the cards each person draws.  Each card would be placed in a position that represented a particular phase in the collector's life, like Passions of Youth or Settling Down, or maybe a particular kind of event, like the first (or last) meeting with a life-long love (or enmity).  You continue until the spaces of the spread are all full, in which case you've handled and told the Collector's life along with his gewgaws.