Project NEMESIS

I just completed & submitted the final pre-playtest draft of The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor which is a setting and expansion for Monsters inspired by, variously, the town from Hot Fuzz, the show Twin Peeks, the cartoons of Charles Adams, the Courtney Crumrin comics, the Series of Unfortunate Events books, and a vision of small-town America if Normal Rockwell collaborated with Edward Gorey. 

Not to be too specific, but I've made some mechanical additions and tweaks (because really, I can't leave well enough alone), and presented the setting of Candlewick Vale (a geographically and geologically unlikely valley on the New England coast) mostly in terms of game-ready chunks, with specific People, Places, and Things blocked out so they can be grabbed and used in play immediatly.

Characters are Orphans- sad, rejected... foundlings of the most unadoptable sort, for they are marked out as strange in some way. They're undeniably creepy. Sometimes, being afflicted with weirdness has its compensations- an eye which sees secrets and the shades of the dead can offer much insight... but of course, when Headmaster Stearnacker is looking for someone to blame for the disaster in the chemistry lab, will he single out Star Gonnoman, the beautiful and well-favored daughter of the local wool magnate, or the glowering Orphan in the patched dress with the dead white eye which seems to wander about on it's own?

You know who's in trouble.

You.

All the Orphans have only recently arrived in the Vale. They've been brought to Candlewick Manor- recently converted to a special home for the Unfortunate and Unloved. Nobody knows why Dr. Candlewick- the current master of the decaying Candlewick fortune- has turned his home into a glorified orphanage, and nobody knows why he's brought these troubling outsiders to the Vale. When you think about it... there's an awful lot nobody knows. Or nobody is saying, anyhow.

This dramatically complicates things, because one of the major themes of the game is Mystery, and uncovering a town's dirty secrets is hard enough when people like you. When you're already seen as a creepy outsider...

To this end, you've got mechanics for Revelation- the process by which an Orphan's own unwritten and unknown backstory and unguessed-at connections to the Vale are revealed through play. And, I threw in a One Roll Mystery gadget, so the GM can throw some dice and generate a confounding crime... or, if you want to get funkier and indier, roll the dice, and then use them as a guide for spontaneous creative input where literally nobody knows the answer to the Mystery, until it is decided upon through play.

The setting is presented like a line of dominoes, just waiting for some pesky Orphans to come along and throw it all into chaos, and is organized in a way that's meant to facilitate the GM setting all it's elements into orbit around the Orphans and their actions. They are going to change things. For the better? Oh, silly happy reader... do you think that at all likely?

Especially when Farmer Magruder's woodchipper sits, unattended, and so readily accessible...