I'm creating a short, "kids investigating supernatural events in a small, rural town"-type of campaign...

and then they see her walking around near the old abandoned mill

Theres a mirror in the woods that makes noises at night, the mirror is actually a portal to another world, but it only works around children and at night.

It's actually her mentally handicapped twin sister who ran away while mourning.

The sister isn't actually mentally handicapped, that's just an excuse to keep her at home because her father is molesting her. The abuse has turned her a little weird, which keeps people from questioning the lie.

Super 8 you dolt

What system will you be using?
Monsters and Other Childish Things?

Let's collect a series of sources to brainstorm topoi and shit.
>Super 8 by JJHack
>Stranger things
>It and other Stephen "be a man, take a van " King stuff
>the goonies and other Spielberg stuff
>Gravity Falls
>Detentionaire
>Harry Potter first 3 books, if we consider the school as a isolated enviroment like a little country town

Maybe a PbtA system would be good, with moves like "when you call an adult for help", "when you stand up to a bully", etc...

Dogs man. "Dogs attracted to local secluded park stream." "Dogs chasing their tail more in local supermarket." "Dogs barking in strange patterns on Thursdays."

Then you can just make it the most generic shit cause there is, if you feel like it. "Someone dumped some dog food in the stream."

>there is a faceless man seen walking around the backroads during nights
>local kids claim that he is a monster that eats kids
>investigation ensues
>turns out that he is just war veteran who lost most of his face and nights are the only time of the day when he can go on walks without scarring the children shitless
>of course given that he likes to walk around during the nights he has also seen a fair share of weird shit and if treated respectfully he might be willing to tell pcs stories of what he has seen over the years

>Monster Squad

This thread has too much molestation (do we need to call the police, user?) and too high a focus on the investigation side.

The OP also asked about Puzzles. Personally, I like the "ancient society buried under small town" trope. So while some urban legends and creepypastas with tweesty noodles could make for some easy results and nice red herrings, it misses the potential scope that is being asked for here. The best part being that if the main arc is about a local cryptid eating kids, a side story where the kids get stuck in some puzzle-filled secret stone temple system is a great way to divert attention away from the main arc and make it seem like the root of the story you started on was itself the red herring.

Mostly, though, it also presents the opportunity to involve actual dungeon puzzles in a modern setting. And, after the initial Urban Legend is solved, if your players want more, you've got a much larger backdrop you can pull from.

Like running IT/whatever over top Legends of the Hidden Temple. Make the kids small-town Indiana Joneses. Most people I know would eat that up at least.

>Maybe a PbtA system would be good, with moves like "have creepy kid group sex", etc...
Better example, Steven King and Apocalypse World mixed together

Just for your infomation OP, some swedish dudes are making a RPG inspired by Stranger Things :

kickstarter.com/projects/1192053011/tales-from-the-loop-roleplaying-in-the-80s-that-ne

I'm very tempted to pledge it, their previous RPGs are quite good...

>This thread has too much molestation
I was wondering if someone would pick up on this.

This is taking place in a small, rural town - the outwardly wholesome kind where kids can run around having adventures, but it has a dark secret. So what is this dark secret likely to be?

The point being that in this type of place, the number one cause of dark secrets is /always/ child molestation of some kind. In films like Stand By Me, Super 8, and probably half a dozen others from this genre that I can't remember, this is touched on by having one of the group of children come from a home where physical or emotional abuse is prevalent. But they always shy away from addressing the actual biggest cause of childhood traumas.

Any gang of kids who set out to investigate strange goings on in a small, rural, outwardly wholesome community would have do some pretty selective mental editing when it comes to clues if they somehow end up investigating The Case Of The Abandoned Tunnels In The Woods About A Mile Out Of Town instead of the far more immediate Case Of The Girl Who Is Suspiciously Eager To Play Doctor, or The Case Of The Choirboy Who Suddenly Develops A Phobia Of Men In Dresses.

>that moment you realise the reason that children in all those coming of age films never investigate the classmate who is clearly deathly afraid of going home, and instead go chasing random werewolf sightings in the woods, is because they already KNOW that that kid isn't having any supernatural problems at home. They more or less know what's going on, but they pretend not to see because that's how the adults around them deal with it and they've been passively conditioned to do the same.

Eerie, Indiana

Did ya really have to?

Yes. Yes I did.

It is always the time to talk about child rape. No more conspiracies of silence, even on the gaming table.

...

But what if. I mean. Hear me out. What if. What if that wasn't going on?

Terribly lacking in creativity if that is the only acceptable answer for a side quest in a small town to you, and you should probably consider what that says about yourself. Yes, it does happen, but that's not the only small town problem that can cause trauma. And your assertion that it is lacks understanding.

ANYWAY.

Alternate things that stick with the supernatural:

The neighborhood family with the shut in child that people sometimes see peaking out of the attic window turns out to be a changling who is being hunted over some fae court reasoning and the family has grown attached and is being protective.

The High School Bully's car is actually possessed by a minor demon that has limited ability to influence and lacks the power for human possession, but is actually the reason the guy is a dick.

The local dentist has a hobby that requires fresh animal carcasses (what is he making?!) - because he's an amateur taxidermist, and his girlfriend is embarrassed so he isn't very open about it.

The Librarian at the public library never seems to know who anyone is or what they have been helped with consistently, and never seems to leave the library. (It's run by twins who deal in vintage collectibles so they don't actually have to hold down two jobs.)

The night guard at the power plant is a vampire. But he doesn't like human blood.

There have been long standing rumors of a clearing in the woods on the east side of town where a small ring of stones has an altar. On the altar is a rough, spherical stone that can be used for communication. Or it's just an old Magic 8-Ball.

One of the PCs' cats is possessed by a minor demon. He's not doing any harm, other than making sadistic jokes and generally being a cynical asshole.
Sometimes he gives the kids little tasks and as a reward he tells them plot-relevant information.

Ironically, this speaks much more of the people who made those movies and novels and the men they were dealing with when they made them.
The alcoholic outdoorsman? The rural teacher? The ever present pedo preacher? Pastiches for their producer or agent and their baby-foreskin sucking friends. But we'll never read about that because daddy'd lose his job.

Molestation is a traditional rural small town activity.

do they all gang bang the female in the group to create a bond that lets them fight the monster better?

...

Have a dark childrens tale get passed around. They hear about it from local kids talking about it and being all mysterious.

The adults laugh it off as a childish superstition and old fairytale. They joke about the Groke's cave but nobody remembers where they found it.

Have some children go missing looking for it.

Have the party track down which direction the Groke comes from. Make it a challenge for them to find the direction, a second challenge to find the time when it comes, and a third challenge to determine how to see it.

Have it turn out that the Groke is just a shadow cast from between two nearby hills or something that creates a shadow in the trees. The missing kids are nearby and cold and hungry, but not in any danger.

Later on tie a different mystery to a cave located between those two hills or something.

Muh Groke

> youtube.com/watch?v=jHyR8kD2Uuw

That was totally not who I was thinking of. No, not at all.

I was working on that, thinking I got something original.
Then people told me about Stranger Things.

how would they notice it wasn't just a normal cat?

great, now i have a boner

>You little shit spent all day exploring the town and completely forgot to feed me. Again.
>I should barf up my prey just to show you what dirty little creatures your negligence has forced me to eat.
>Next time you pull this shit I am going to dispose the half-digested carcass of a rat in every single shoe you own, and then I am going to mate quite audibly with half a dozen cat-ladies in heat in front of your window. All. Night. Long.
>I thought you were aware of who's in charge around here. I thought better of you.
>Not pet me already you ungrateful little shit.

Early seasons of Buffy would also have some material.

Sounds like pretty normal cat behavior to me.
>fucking pet me already slave
>3 seconds later
>stop petting me you fucking lobotomite or else i'm going to maul your hand

Yeah, but a normal cat won't speak to you in a British accent.

>player has a conversation with a cat
>excitedly notes on his character sheet that he now speaks cat

>only acceptable answer for a side quest in a small town to you
I didn't say it was the only acceptable answer. I said that it was the statistically most likely scenario that would be encountered.

Statistically, there's almost certainly at least one kid in the town being molested (and probably more). So if the party ends up investigating
>The neighborhood family with the shut in child
>The High School Bully's car
>The local dentist
>The Librarian at the public library
>The night guard at the power plant
>The altar in the woods
but somehow in all this adventuring never manages to stumble across the 'mystery' sitting right in front of their faces, that suggests that they're deliberately ignoring a certain type of clue.

I guess it depends on how many cases they end up investigating, and whether they go looking for mysteries or whether one just gets dumped in their lap. If there's just one story line that they get handed by accident, then that's plausible.

But if the party manages to sleuth through a whole town and somehow never ends up taking a look at the Case Of The Girl Who Hates Her Stepdad For Reasons She Refuses To Talk About, Even Though He's A Great Guy That Everyone Loves, then it's time for everyone to admit that they're purposely avoiding looking into a certain type of case.

Remember dick in your underaged relative's butt is OK so long as you apologize to Jesus (even if the dick goes to the butt once again after you apologized and promised that it won't happen again).

fun fact: as a child you almost certainly knew a kid who was being molested.

>Early seasons of Buffy
later seasons of Buffy have their moments too.

pic semi related.

Old vw microbus with faded yellow and green paintjob streaked by years of rust abandoned in the woods,mummified dog in back that seems to have died of dehydration amid a massive pile of cookie wrappers.

>mummified dog in back that seems to have died of dehydration

>implying it wasn't an overdose on one of them reefers the kids are taking nowadays.

You wouldn't happen to be referencing what happened in the novel version of Stephen King's It, would you?

Because that shit was weird.

How did King get away with that scene anyhow?

Maybe the book was too long for readers to get that far kek

lets be honest, people might publicly pretend that they're disgusted by the idea of children having sex but in private they can let out their inner twelve year old. And their inner twelve year old wanted to get laid. I honestly think that if King had made it a story about kids in modern day America there would have been more outrage, but because he wrote it as adult characters reminiscing about their childhoods it made it easier for his adult readers to identify with the character instead of just viewing them as children.

Bump

Great movie. Fucking brutal.

I found one.

Round the Twist comes to mind, too

Have you ever heard about Three Investigators series?
Use just about any case from those as a filler, since they are exactly what you expect (at least when the boys are hired for them) from a three teenagers running a semi-serious investigation bureau. They all sound weird, they are all "kid friendly" and they are almost always heavy supernatural undertones at the start, which are revealed later as a hoax.

Or he will order them to dig a hole, meter by meter by meter, in a triangle shape.
Or just molest them.

God, I love how the movie skipped all the molesting parts from the book and was just about two jerks trying to be worse than they really are.

How messed up are you trying to make this story? Are we talking Spielberg or Stephen King?

He posted Twin Peaks, so go figure

There is one factor you either missing or it's lost in translation for me (I'm just finishing a graveyard shift and English is not my native language).

See, the point of all those stories is also about the (supposed) children innocence. In short, the kids don't see a clue, because they don't know it's a clue and that makes the molesters even more evil, as they prey on that innocence.
Of course there is the part when they are conditioned by adults to ignore certain clues, but the thing is - it's more complicated than single reason. So on one hand there is societal acceptance. On the other is just pure naivety and lack of knowledge.

Now I'm not sure how you were doing as a, say, 10-years old, but the sole concept of abuse, not to mention molestation was a complete abstraction for me back then. I wasn't even thinking about it. My aunt ended up beaten to bloody pulp when I was 5, she filled a divorce and he ended up in prison soon after, disappearing from the family. Nobody ever talked about it with me, since it was most definitely not a thing you want to talk with a 5-year old. I was just told that the uncle did something very bad. I wasn't even thinking about the whole thing until I was 13 and started to realise how much this fucked up my two cousins.

And here I am, proving your point that in almost all cases there is someone molesting someone, in a bit to prove that's not always the case... Fuck, when this shift will finally end?!

...

This shit is getting really stale. I mean the cheapest came Scooby always makes is being found by someone dead. In case of Veeky Forums-terms, maybe only kids from the Dungeons & Dragons makes more "appearances" of this kind

ST is way better.

Both are lame as fuck.
Try Chronicle

or maybe it just makes for shitty stories, and just as shitty gameplay, especially in a case where there's actually a fucking monster hunting them

stop looking so fucking deeply into everything and stop injecting your stupid obsession with child molestation into shit goddamn

Not him, but the cliche about molestation is kind of widespread, so get fucking real. The easiest way to create cheap drama in a coming-out-of-age story is making one of the secondary characters molested. Never the main character, but some of their closest friends.
On the same principles, hookers are always killed in criminals, because, duh, hookers get killed in criminals.

so you're just being an uncreative nigger

Which point of "widespread" you didn't understand, you stupid cunt?
It's all over fucking media. Read any fucking story. Watch any fucking film or a TV show. Play a video game. If they are about coming-out-of-age story, then someone is going to be molested in them.

But better hurl ad hom at me, because you are too fucking stupid to even graps what's the real problem.

The fact that rural communities are filled with old men that like to put their dicks into their younger relatives?

Ideas for NPCs

The sheriff of the town is an older guy, blond going silver. Built like a quarter back but with the inquisitive mind of Sherlock Holmes. Enjoys doing the puzzles in the newspaper, the more cryptic the better, but he particularly enjoys physical puzzles. He isn't from the town originally, but settled down there almost twenty years back.

He's married to the local librarian, who he brought with him to the town. A sharp eyed, sassy woman with a warm nature for kids, favoring fuzzy sweaters even in summer and always carrying around a couple of books. She has a skeptical mind and doesn't put up with any superstitious talk.

Down by the river there's an older hippie guy living in his van. He spends all his time chilling out listening to music and eats like a horse. He speaks a patois of out dated slang. A nice guy, but a bit of a coward and not much use when danger comes lurking.

There's a woman in town who keeps to herself, rarely seen outside. They say when she was young she was very beautiful, a red haired bombshell. Her looks have faded with age, but the few people that get a look at her are still taken back. No one knows why she became a shut in. Some say she has a broken heart, others say she's under some strange curse. Others say she's trapped there by an unseen mad man. The few that have spoken to her say that she's very polite, but has little to say.

What are you even arguing about

Are you aware such ideas need also the reason why they are the way they are? This is the entire point of their existence of the story. Without it, they will make not just a distraction, but may ultimately make PCs entirely focused on solving non-existing case.

>The sheriff of the town is an older guy, blond going silver. Built like a quarter back but with the inquisitive mind of Sherlock Holmes. Enjoys doing the puzzles in the newspaper, the more cryptic the better, but he particularly enjoys physical puzzles. He isn't from the town originally, but settled down there almost twenty years back.
>He's married to the local librarian, who he brought with him to the town. A sharp eyed, sassy woman with a warm nature for kids, favoring fuzzy sweaters even in summer and always carrying around a couple of books. She has a skeptical mind and doesn't put up with any superstitious talk.
Mulder and Scully on their retirement?

So the washed up Scooby Gang

...

Where is the dog's ghost, scaring the living shit out of the kids?

What about the Korean Elevator Game?

The kids think the adults don't know what's going on, and every time they try to investigate the adults (be it their parents, teacher, or local policeman) tries to distract them with pointless chores or side quests. They think the adults aren't taking it seriously.

It turns out the adults are aware of what's going on, and are trying to keep the kids out of it while dealing with it themselves.

So who is molesting who in this version?

Stop force-feeding an obvious troll goddamn

Supernatural molests adults. adults molest children, children molest supernatural

>an obvious troll

Do I want to know what this is?

Supposed game which involves you to getting teleported into another dimension by messing around with an elevator. Of course the real reason why it is famous is because a college student by the name of Elisa Lam was caught on camera playing it before her disappearance (she was found couple weeks later dead, mysteriously stuck inside of a rooftop water tank).

Don't you fucking die on me!

The elevator game involves going to different floors. The elevator just wasn't working for her. Not sure why. Also not sure if the video I saw were it works right after she leaves is legit or doctored to make it more mysterious.

>children molest supernatural
I'd watch that movie.

>show me on the queer clay bas-relief where Billy touched you.

So Twin Peaks?

>but the cliche about molestation is kind of widespread
look at the list here . Does sexual abuse ever feature in any of them? No. That's the entire point I'm trying to make. All these coming of age stories just sort of sidle around the issue. There's always that one kid that comes from a "bad home", but its never really confronted head on. At most, physical abuse is talked about, but never sexual abuse.

And the thing is, the 'sexual abuse' theme is a cliche in every other genre because its extremely widespread. It's far more common than murder, and yet no one ever calls a writer cliche because they include a murder in their work.

>Does sexual abuse ever feature in any of them? No
Yes, sexual abuse does feature in 'It' and other Stephen King books. Explicitly so in 'It' when wassherfaces dad tries to shove his fingers up her vag when she was a kid.

the exception that proves the rule. That was cut from the film version, wasn't it?

If I am remembering it correctly, the three hour film/miniseries cut out every sexually implicit scene.

>the exception that proves the rule
You are using that expression wrong.

>That was cut from the film version, wasn't it?
Who gives a fuck.

>Who gives a fuck.
It's pretty much the best example of my point that sexual abuse is generally avoided in the Coming of Age genre even when it should be included.

>You are using that expression wrong.
the very fact that it had to be cut from the TV version proves that there is an implicit rule that King violated when he wrote sexual abuse into his coming of age story.

No it isn't and no it doesn't, all it means is the you, personally, are ignorant of the stories that involve sexual abuse of minors.

>all it means is the you, personally, are ignorant of the stories that involve sexual abuse of minors.
well go on then. Give me a list of all those well known coming of age stories that feature sexual abuse.

Its mostly shit, but Channel Zero could be used for a bit of inspiration too

What's the point? I could give you ten and you'd find ways to argue that they don't count, because you're a goal poster shifter who can't accept the fact you're wrong.