Vampires In Twin Peaks
Originally published at Highmoon's Ponderings. Please leave any comments there.
Last week was the 20th Anniversary of the debut of Twin Peaks on television, a series that literally redefined the prime-time drama and opened the door to everything from The X-Files to pretty much every single geeky show on TV today. We didn’t get Twin Peaks in Puerto Rico (and I didn’t have cable) so I came to watch it about five years after it had been off the air, when the series first came out on VHS (my wife, however, watched the whole thing as it aired, behind her parents’ back, skulking down to the family room at night - she was the one who infected me with Twin Peaks fever).
I fell in love with this show once I saw it, and I continue to friggin adore it to this day. Given that at the time I was running a Vampire: The Masquerade Chronicle for my two players, I decided to express my love for the show in the one way I know how: by using it in my game.
More than 10 years after the fact, my players still remember, with unsettling fondness, that visit to Twin Peaks.
What I did was use a mix of elements from the show and Fire Walk With Me movie. The movie delved really hardcore into the mythology of the show, and given my player characters were supernatural creatures to begin with, I knew I wanted to make them realize that there are even stranger, stronger things out there than vampires. I also knew I did not want to define at all the nature of the Lodge denizens, and that I was not going to try in any way to speculate on what happened to Cooper and Annie after the end of the show (our adventure was taking place a year after the end of the TV series). I would maybe hint, but I was more interested in exploring the themes than in creating fan-fiction about a possible sequel. Because of the characters I had playing, I knew I would be playing on the idea of Nina being a possible next victim to BOB (thus why I presented the ring from FWWM), though the use of the little girl from a previous encounter Nina had had was truly what gave me the emotional key to the whole event. I also knew I would have the vampires face off BOB somehow, and the way it went down was amazing. As it should, it left scars on the characters, both emotional and physical (and spiritual, as in the case of Ben).
It was only a couple of sessions, and only two nights of in-game time, but wow, what a great story that was. It became instant legend in our circle of friends, and to this day we talk about the time the vampires went to Twin Peaks.
If you want to read a recap of the entire episode, then please read on.
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