Rime of the Frostmaiden, the just-announced new adventure book for D&D 5E, has been teased as a more "modern horror" adventure, in contrast with the edition's most famous (and probably most popular of all the published adventures) horror book, Curse of Strahd, which was built around the tropes of Gothic Horror.
But what do we mean by Modern Horror?
The horror genre is as old as human civilization - we've always been telling stories to explain our irrational fears - and even ancient myths had horror elements; there's a reason why classical heroes were fighting unnatural monsters.
But what do we really mean by Modern Horror?
Given that this is vaguely spoileriffic, I'm going to put it behind a cut (it's only really spoilery given the influences on the adventure, rather than any specifics, but hey, a cut's cheap.)
Horror storytelling is pretty broad in this day and age - in 21st Century cinema (can you believe we're already a fifth of the way through this century?) there's been a ton of horror to come out in the indie film world, largely due to the large bang relative to the bucks spent on making such movies. We've gotten a few franchises like the Conjuring and the Purge, but my sense is that this isn't quite what they're talking about.
Instead, we can look to a genre that grew out of Gothic Horror combined with advances in science that began to give us a better picture of just how enormous the universe is and how oddly nature acts under extreme conditions. And that is Cosmic Horror.
Cosmic Horror has been around for over a century now, and the genre's most famous (and infamous, given his reprehensible views on race) figure is H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's influence can be seen throughout D&D's history - Mind Flayers are basically person-sized, wingless Cthulhus, and have been part of the game since first edition.
But in the late '70s and the '80s, we got a couple of seminal sci-fi horror films that, while not directly based on Lovecraft's works (though the short story one was based on was clearly influenced by Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness") managed to translate the cosmic existential dread of Lovecraft into a violent and visceral fear of some of film's most terrifying monsters: Alien and The Thing.
Both are movies about isolation and a terrifying, implacable monster amidst a group of unsuspecting people who are driven to paranoia.
Both are also great examples of sci-fi horror, with monsters that emerge from the cold, alien expanses of space that seem uncannily well-equipped to defeat humanity.
On the off chance that you don't know what these movies are about, here's a brief synopsis:
Alien is set in the future, at a point when humanity has become an interstellar civilization, and the starship Nostromo is basically the interstellar equivalent of a freight truck, hauling cargo across the cosmos. The crew respond to an alien signal on an uncharted planet, discovering a clutch of bizarre eggs, one of which hatches, and a strange, floppy creature attaches itself to the face of one of the crewmembers. Eventually, the creature seems to die, but the crew member shortly thereafter dies as the newborn alien "xenomorph" erupts from his chest, the floppy thing apparently just a parasitic device to implant an individual with an egg.
The Xenomorph stalks through the ship, growing larger and stronger and killing the crew members, until only one person is left, the iconic Ellen Ripley, who just manages to escape after shoving the Xenomorph through an airlock into outer space.
The Thing is about a group of American researchers working in Antarctica. After a group of nearby Norweigan researchers die chasing down a dog running from their own research site, crashing their helicopter, the Americans go to see what happened at the Norweigan camp, only to discover everyone is missing, plus the ominously empty sarcophagus of what seems like some sort of alien life form.
In fact, the "dog" they saw was no dog at all, and was instead some kind of colony of alien organisms that can infect other life forms and mimic them as it begins to take over their bodies. Before long, not only are some members of the team killed and revealed to be grotesque mockeries of themselves, but the surviving team members grow paranoid and unable to trust that anyone is who they say they are.
The Thing ends even less triumphantly than Alien, where it's certain that no one will survive, and it's not even clear if the surviving researchers managed to kill The Thing by blowing up their own camp.
So what does this mean for the adventure?
Setting the game in Icewind Dale clearly sets us up for the grim, cold isolation that we see in both of these movies. Chris Perkins talked a lot about the notion that everyone is extremely bundled up when they go outside, so you never know if the person you're passing on the road in any of the area's small towns is actually a person at all.
What I suspect they're hesitant to mention is that this could be the first adventure to really focus on aberrations as the primary villains.
Aberrations are, after all, the creature type designed to fit with Cosmic Horror, and while the iconic Beholders are a bit sillier than the genre calls for, the other iconic Aberrations, the Mind Flayers, are full-on Lovecraft, and also fit in well with the H. R. Gieger aesthetics found in Alien.
If I had to guess the ultimate reveal of the adventure, it's that there is some aberrant relic to be found beneath the ice - a Mind Flayer Nautiloid, for instance (their interplanar ships.) Something deeply wrong is out there, and it's warping the life in the area. But rather than a sort of vague corruption, this could really be something intelligent with an agenda that is capable of manipulating people - or rather, taking them over and transforming them.
Gothic Horror, at its most elemental level, is, I think, about being trapped in somewhere with the monster. You're trapped in the castle, or trapped in a cave, or you're trapped in a country that no one will let you leave (think of Poe stories like the Pit and the Pendulum or The Casque of Amontillado.) But I think this "modern horror" is more about being trapped outside - the monster is not safely contained in a castle or a demiplane of dread from which you are trying to escape, but rather, you're out in the cold and the dark, seeking relief from the thing that is hunting you.
The book does not come out until September, which in 2020 terms means it'll be about three million years before we see it in print, but I'm super-eager to check it out. (Also, I imagine this will mean some horror-themed AL content, meaning I should probably get into that when season ten starts, assuming I can figure out how to do that online.)
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