Screams on Screen

They say that if you want to make it big in Hollywood, you are going to have to sell your soul. Not necessarily the devil, but to some studio executive for certain. Life is hard trying to make it big in Tinseltown, but that does not stop a whole lot of people trying—and when they get there, from working just as hard to stay on top, or as close as they can get. Fame and fortune, and your name up in lights on the marquee at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard beckon if you work hard enough, have got the talent, and get lucky. Right now, you got some of that and more—a contract. A contract with Starfall Studios, where, “The Brightest Stars are brought down to earth, just for you!”. In truth, you are a B-List actor, perhaps on the way up, perhaps on the way down, and also in truth, Starfall Studios has not had a hit in years. However, you know you can change that, because you know you are good and with the new management and the new funding, this could be your chance to get noticed. If not make a big hit, then big enough to maybe get an award nomination, get picked up by a bigger studio, and get put in bigger pictures.

This is the set-up for SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream, a cinema-themed campaign for Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown, the horror roleplaying game published by Parable Games. In the campaign, the players take on the roles of actors working for a small film studio in Hollywood, trying to make some blockbusters and get noticed. It has five scripts, each bound to be a surefire hit in which the actors get to prove how good—or bad—they are and make Hollywood sit up and take notice! Effectively, each player is roleplaying an actor who is playing a role in five different films, so five times—and slightly more—the roleplaying as in any other campaign or roleplaying game, unless they always play the same role and play it to the camera. Then, the best thing of all, a roleplaying game like Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown and thus SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream, has got a budget bigger than any Hollywood studio. So, it can make any film and it will never blow the budget!

Actor creation in SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream works like that in Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown. First, a player selects an Archetype, a Background, and a Fear. Then for SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream, he selects a Starring Role. This can be ‘The Leading Hero’, ‘The Stunt Performer’, ‘The Thespian’, ‘The Heartthrob’, ‘The Love Interest’, ‘The Comic Relief’, ‘The Method’, and more. Each Starring Role has a Star Power and Audience Expectation. The Star Power is a unique ability that the Actor can perform once per quarter of the Doom Clock, whilst the Audience Expectation is something that if done on screen will gain the Actor the favour of both the audience and the Director, and so boost his career. So, for ‘The Love Interest’, the Star Power is a ‘A Healing Heart’ that enables the Actor to make a Heart Check and regain Hit Points if they perform a romantic scene, whilst the Audience Expectation ‘Break Heart/Bow Minds’ in which the Actor wants the audience’s favour to fall in love with them and so will make romantic confessions, and have moments of passion or tear-jerking moments to get the audience to love them.

Depending upon how well an Actor performed, he or she can receive an Accolade or a Review. Both are awarded by the Director. Engage in both Star Power and Audience Expectation and an Actor will earn an Accolade, but if not, he or she may be in line for a Bad Review. Accolades include the ‘Performance Award’, ‘Hall of Fame’, ‘Rabid Fanbase’, ‘Top Billing’, and so on, whilst Bad Reviews include ‘Hamming It Up’, ‘Worst Actor Ever’, and ‘Boring Performance’. Accolades provide a minor benefit, whilst Bad Reviews act as minor disadvantage. For example, ‘Performance Award’ gives the Actor a piece of armour to use in the next film, but once used, it is gone, whilst ‘Looking Fit’ grants Advantage on acts of athleticism. The Bad Review, ‘Diva Reputation’ means that if the Actor fails a Check that would advance the Doom Clock, if they also fail a Strange Check, they suffer Soul damage.

It is possible for a player to change his Actor’s Starring Role and the book suggests that if multiple players want their Actor to take a particular Starring Role, then they should audition! However, the awarding of Accolades and Bad Reviews is the purview of the Director and can be subjective. The problem is that they are effectively grading a player’s roleplaying skill and performance—good, bad, or indifferent—and that is not natural to roleplaying as a hobby. The advice on the matter is cursory, but nevertheless, this is a fun mechanic and enforces the film studio and life in pictures set-up of SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream. What the Director might want to do perhaps is encourage the input of the players in deciding the Accolades and Bad Reviews, possibly forming an association of Hollywood critics and roleplaying its members too to expand the roles that the players take?

Once set up, SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream presents five very different ‘scripts’ or scenarios. Each is very nicely formatted, including a set-up, a Classification Board, details of what the Director knows, enemies, weapons, and items, the epilogue, and the Doom Events. The Doom Events are the four events per scenario that can be triggered over the course of the script, whilst the Classification Board categorises the scenario. Actually the ‘SHIVER Board of Classification’, for each scenario it lists the length of play time, number of players required, Subgenre, Film Age Rating, Content Warning, Recommended Ability Level, and Watchlist. The latter includes the archetypal films that the script references and that the Director should watch for inspiration. Every film lists the roles required as well.

All five adventures in SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream can be played through in a single session, or two at the most. The first is ‘A Little Adventure’, which is inspired by Honey I Shrunk the Kids and The Incredible Shrinking Man and finds a family visiting Grandpa for the weekend only to find him missing and themselves suddenly shrunk into a big world where they must battle toys, pets, and insects from doll’s house across the garden to find a way to get back to the right scale. ‘Crossbones’ Treasure’ is inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean and The Goonies, and is a classic pirate tale that has the cast race across the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure and facing ghosts, undead, and a giant crab. The third scenario is ‘Intergalactic Planetary Temple of Terror’ is a Science Fiction film which is in parts Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars, and Flash Gordon. The Player Characters are galactic criminals who escape space prison and are chased by their robot masters known as the Authority all the way to an ice planet where they will be faced by a dilemma whose outcome will affect the universe! A combination of Lord of the Rings, Legend, and Clash of the Titans*, ‘Medieval Dead’ is a fantasy romp in which the Player Characters are would be heroes, apprentice members of the Adventurer’s Guild, who are forced to suddenly graduate to actual, proper heroes when at the annual Merry Heroism Festival, an army of skeletons and a skeletal dragon, led by the Necromancer kills them all. Plus, he also kidnaps the princess. So not only a revenge mission, but a rescue one too which pokes a little fun at Dungeons & Dragons too, all the way to Mount Gloom. The last scenario is ‘Deep Red Sea’ which is inspired by the Indiana Jones series of films, Jaws, and Atlantis: The Lost City. What starts as a shark hunt to improve the tourism of a Pacific coast town in 1941 turns into a confrontation with a big sea monster and an evil cult from under the sea!

* Hopefully the original and not the dire 2010 remake.

Now all five of the scenarios in SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream are linear. This is to be expected, as after all, they are meant to be films being shot by a film studio. They could also be extracted from the book and run as one-shots, but that would be to ignore the meta-level written into the campaign, that is, the fact that the Player Characters are Actors. Where the players get to roleplay Actors in five different films over the course of SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream, in between, they get to play the Actors themselves. Between each film there is an interlude. Starfall Studio is running a very busy schedule, so the Actors will have little time between wrapping up shooting on one picture and shooting the next, so will be confined to the Star Trailer Park. In the first interlude, between ‘A Little Adventure’ and ‘Crossbones’ Treasure’, the players get to introduce their Actors and what their Starring Role is and each is visited by their Agent for the dreaded Performance Review. This is when the Accolades and Bad Reviews are handed out. One odd issue perhaps is that the Actors all share the same Agent, but that does also suggest a certain creepiness to their situation and this is only enhanced by the ominous events which can occur to one or more of the Actors. These ominous events are inspired by the previous films which the Actors have just finished making and serve to add to the creepiness as more and more of them occur as more films are made. One option to offset the oddness of the single Agent, is to have the players roleplay the different Agents for their Actors, which will add another level of roleplay to the campaign and make it a little more like troupe play.

Over the course of the four interludes, life at the Starfall Studio lot gets more and more mysterious, like the scriptwriter on all five films going missing or a rabid fan running amok, until ‘The Last Reel’. Drawing inspiration from This is the End and Scream 2, in this campaign climax, the Actors are forced to step out of their heroic roles and become heroes themselves as they attend the Star Gala at Starfall Studios’ Ciné Star Megaplex and confront one big conspiracy and one big villain, who has been pulling the strings all along, proving, of course, just how evil Hollywood actually is!

Supporting the campaign in SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream is ‘The Compendium’. This lists all of the NPCs and monsters which appear in the various films, plus the Inventory for each.

SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream is not just a collection of film-themed and film inspired horror adventures. It is more than that and in part, that is where the campaign comes alive, in having the players not only roleplay the cast of characters onscreen in the campaign’s five films, but also step back from that to have them roleplay the Actors performing as the cast of characters. It calls for more roleplaying upon the part of the players, which can be as hammy as they like, because, after all, the Starring Roles are archetypes. And if they want to be inspired by particular actors who resemble those Starring Roles, then all the better.

SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream is a really entertaining campaign that in presenting five films to make, offers lots of variety, and having the players roleplay both the film casts and the Actors, gives them lots of roleplay to get their teeth into—a clever, well-executed combination.