Lullabies for Dead Children

"I have such nightmares, and you're all in all of them"

It is 1947 and your family has just moved back to England after many years in colonial India. Your mother has accompanied you and your siblings to the family home in rural Hertfordshire, a strange house in a strange country. It is early summer and school is not due to start for several weeks. Your father is still in India, wrapping up his business affairs in the shadow of partition. Your mother seems more withdrawn than ever. You and your siblings have only the company of the servants and their children to help you make sense of this strange new world. Or at least that's what you thought...

It is 2005 and you, the surviving children, now in your sixties, return back to the family home to lay your ghosts to rest, both figuratively and literally.

"Lullabies for Dead Children" is a mini-campaign (probably two or three sessions) for Little Fears, inspired by classic ghost stories like Turn of the Screw and The Woman in Black. Three to five players will take the roles of the children mentioned above or children of the servants in residence, as well as their adult or ghostly counterparts in the present day.

The gameplay will switch between the two time periods as required, moving from the present to the past when an event that shapes the present is remembered or uncovered, and then back to the present when it is resolved. In order to support this, one key part of character generation will be deciding who survived the events of 1947; those who did will participate in the present as their aged selves, those who did not as the restless spirits of dead children. The focus of the game will be to create the events that led to the deaths of those who did not survive, and to resolve the repercussions for all involved in the present.

This will be quite an experimental game and will rely a lot on the players to make it work. I'm optimistic that with a bit of flexibility and imagination that it should prove to be at least interesting.