Making The Band

Playing to a packed haunted house

Campaigns in Tales from the Haunted Jukebox put the focus on the "band" in "band of adventurers."  If every party member chooses a different musical skill, the group can actually serve as a literal rock & roll band (after all, those are known to wander countrysides in search of fame, glory, and riches, just like mighty-hewed barbarians and crafty rogues).  Alternatively,  if they all choose to focus on Singing, they could be a traveling doo-wop group.

In either case, as they tour the music circuit and try to work their way to fame and fortune, the party will regularly encounter forces of darkness and the macabre.  Thus, the campaign becomes one of fighting monsters with the power of music, instead of (or alongside) a trusty switchblade.

Drag-racing will be a major way of settling conflicts and defeating challenges in a Tales campaign, as well, so having someone on hand who's good at driving and fixing cars is also a good idea.

Of course, characters don't have to be in a band.  Instead, they could be a wandering biker or greaser gang, a group of traditional Universal horror movie monster hunter types, or anything else appropriate to "the Fifties."  However, to keep that musical horror fantasy feel, PCs should still have musical and dancing skills to call upon.

As noted in my previous post, all characters in the Tales can choose one musical skill and one dancing skill, in addition to their normal class abilities.  An ideal formation is a party of four or five characters, each with a different musical focus (Guitar, Bass, Drums, Singing being the classic line-up, though Piano or Horns can fit in, as well).

New LotFP skills that will be relevant in the Tales are listed below. 

Alchemy (the ability to brew potions)
Automotives (repairing and enhancing cars)
Dancing (choose one)
Driving
Mad Science
Medicine
Musical Instrument (choose one)
Piety (using purity of heart to access Cleric scrolls and rituals)
Singing
Songwriting
Witchcraft (use of Magic-User wands, scrolls and rituals)

Members of the LotFP Specialist class can allocate skill points to these skills as normal, if they choose.  Other character types will have access to one or two of these skills on a limited basis, depending on their class.

The inclusion of Alchemy,  Piety, and Witchcraft as skills should tell you that I personally wouldn't include traditional Clerics and Magic-Users in a Tales campaign. That leaves Fighters and Specialists, and versions of the Dwarf and Halfling both re-skinned as human classes.  Maybe one or two other new classes. More about that in a later post.

Dance-Offs & Musical Challenges

Monsters,  it turns out, like to dance and sing.  This often curdles the blood of mortals who witness it, but it is a fact nonetheless.  And some more adventurous mortals have learned it's possible to beat the monsters at their own game.

When a monster is encountered, it can possibly be turned or defeated by challenging it to a dance-off or musical battle.  But the catch is, the reverse is also true!  Monsters in such contests against PCs  can potentially turn or destroy them, as well.

Both parties use the turn table described in the turn undead spell, with the loser suffering the listed effect.  Generous DJs (that is, GMs) can allow PCs a saving throw vs. paralyze to resist a monster's turning effect on them if they fail, but players are never entitled to this.

The roll for both parties can be modified by their skill aptitude in a given musical instrument or dance routine, as noted below.

Every PC and many important monsters in a Tales from the Haunted Jukebox campaign should have both a musical/singing skill and a dance specialty in one of the more popular dances of the 50s and early 60s.  One of these skills begins at a 2 in 6 chance of success and advances at the same rate as the elf's Search skill.  The other skill begins at a 3 in 6 chance of success and advances at the same rate as the dwarf's Architecture skill.  Treat a monster's HD as its level for purposes of determining how skilled it is at its listed musical and dance abilities.

Success on a dance or musical skill roll grants the character or monster a +2 bonus on their next turn attempt.

Note that in a Tales campaign, this is the only way any character can turn a non-vampire undead being.  In Transylvania, USA, only vampires are susceptible to non-dance or non-musical turn attempts.

Welcome to Transylvania, USA

Children of the night.  What music they make!

Listen closely.  Do you hear it?

There's a song seeping through the cracks in reality... a song about monsters.

We laugh at it, maybe hum along to its catchy rockabilly rhythms, see it as a gimmick.

But it's no laughing matter to the people who live in the reality described by its lyrics, a strange land that's equal parts Cold War America and Universal horror movie Old Country.  It's a realm of whimsy and menace, where zombie plagues inspire teen dance crazes, Count Dracula stalks the hot-rod circuit, and Frankenstein's monster is a member of The Beatles.  Our world hears merely a snippet of life in this dimension, through the medium of the novelty monster songs of the 1950s and early 1960s.  But we can only perceive this world on a vinyl disc, darkly.  We've no visceral conception of what it must really be like to have our life depend on winning a dance-off against The Wolf Man.

And so, we laugh, safe on this side of the curtain, convincing ourselves that it's just a silly song. If only we were right...

Transylvania, USA, is a musical horror fantasy setting implied by the lyrics of records found in The Haunted Jukebox.  In Transylvania, USA, it's always the 1950s and the moon is always blue. Doo wop, rock & roll, the Red Menace, classic cars, rebels without causes... it's all here.  And yet... there's always a haunted castle just outside of town, or a mad scientist's secret lab in the high school basement.  The horrors of the night are never far, but they can be held at bay, or even at times defeated, by people in the know, with the right tools.

And as many of Transylvania, USA's young people are learning, the right tools doesn't just mean guns and crosses and wooden stakes.  Lacking easy access to lethal weaponry, they have learned to confront the supernatural with high-school science, cool dance moves, and the power of rock & roll.

Tales from the Haunted Jukebox is a table-top RPG window into the world of Transylvania, USA. Though I prefer "OSR"-style games, and most of what I share here will default to the excellent Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules by James Edward Raggi IV, I hope to write material that's broad enough to work with just about any RPG system, given a few tweaks.

Don't be frightened. I bid you welcome.