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Game Design for 'Innsmouth High'

This belongs in the 'bad idea' file, but it won't let me stop thinking about it, so I'm writing it down.

The one-line summary: you're a highschool student in a town captured by horrors, fighting bullies and evil while keeping your grades up.

One primary concern is combat: non-lethal in almost all cases. Only grown-ups (NPCs only, early on) can initiate lethal combat. However, wounds like noogies and indian burn take time to fade, and you won't attack whoever gave them to you until they do.

You could be a tough guy, a skinny geek, an outsider, or from the wrong side of the tracks... You'd choose where your family lived during character creation, and a bit about yourself. Orphans would live in Saint Christopher's Mission with the priest there. They'd have very low social status, but probably be damn good at sneaking stuff past the teachers :-)

There'd have to be 'bad kids', a gang led by somebody with the last name Marsh and with a couple of Gilmans thrown in for good measure. You know they'd have to be dastardly, obviously mean, even from a distance, and some of the teachers would have to love them. Think Malfoy and Snape, or any smooth-talking school bully in your own history. This would provide a more normal set of day-to-day opponents without having to leave the school, and opponents who would side with the cultists and horrors to do a little of their in-school dirty work. But these bullies can't initiate lethal combat, have to stay within the watchful eyes of the teachers, and are just generally kid-sized.

Day-to-day opposition wouldn't always be the same gang of bullies (some of whom might be players!). That could get boring. But remember that teachers, janitors and the principal all provide regular opposition. Classes provide quests (keep those grades up! Make a diorama! Collect fifteen different kinds of bugs for Science class!). It'd be nice to have really cartoon-style quests, things like joining a clique or meeting the new kid or things like that, but I'm not sure how well it would work. Most of it requires heavy NPC participation. I'm sure some of that could be done as player TinyPlot sorta things, but that requires setting the right atmosphere so that people are cliquish and kinda petty.

Cliquish is easy. Provide in-character societies with different benefits. The bad boys gang, the social in-crowd, children of Irish or Polish immigrants, the outcasts whose parents are originally from another town... Make sure the groups have their own chat channels, their own identifying insignia, their own advantages and disadvantages, and that adults treat them differently. Keep track of various deeds and competitions between them. Voila! Players will ostracize each other, compete with each other, and generally keep the groups as separate, clannish, infighting little units. Just like high school, and for many of the same reasons. For extra brownie points, they should be paranoid of each other with constant rumors of nasty plans and lots of tattling on each other to the teachers. An unduly-strict player justice system (i.e. see a crime, report it to the teacher, player gets punished) will do this nicely. Again, just like high school, and again, for exactly the same reasons. To keep people from absolutely hating the game, members of a particular social group should disapprove highly of tattling on people in your *own* group. There should be serious penalties. 'Cause otherwise nobody would want to be in an NPC-supported group, it'd be too dangerous with too few benefits.

Fighting horrors is something that academics did in Lovecraft stories for a reason -- people expect them to be eccentric, they have a lot of free time and a relatively loose schedule. This is true of high school students as well. To further increase the Lovecraftian atmosphere, book-learning makes you uncool -- therefore, few high-schoolers can learn to anything like professorial levels the arcane and occult chants necessary to cast spells. This keeps IH from having any significant number of mages, avoiding the explosion of casual magic-use that CthulhuMUD suffers from.

Cultists could initiate lethal combat, but usually wouldn't against kids -- it's bad form, and the kids aren't perceived as much of a threat. More often they'd bind and gag them, then remove all evidence (including memories?) and dump them somewhere with a dire warning. Another option would be to drive them temporarily insane and dump them, so that their story wouldn't be creditable.

Speaking of sanity -- kids are both less rigid (mostly) and more resilient than adults, so sanity losses wouldn't be as earth shaking, and would come back more easily. Of course, regaining sanity might cost memory, along with skill points gained that way...

Eventually, after enough experience as a kid, a character could 'grow up'. Early on, that would mean character retirement. Later it would mean a remort character, one that wasn't welcome in the high school, but could fight horrors more directly, more powerfully, and with more chance of actually dying.