Claimh Solais

Wednesday Weird #1: The Mugging

What is the Wednesday Weird, you ask? Like many memes that can be found in the blogging world, the Wednesday Weird is a writing exercise where each week, a topic will be posted and participants will write about in it in their own blogs, livejournals or the comments section below. The Wednesday Weird is for gamemasters, writers and anyone else who wants to practice their creativity through this excersise. To understand why I have started this meme, read this previous entry. Each week in the Wednesday Weird, I will supply a fairly common cliche in gaming and/or fiction. Participants will then be challenged to take that cliche and give it an original twist.....something a little weird.

The best way for me to explain is to do this, so here goes.

The challenge for the first Wednesday Weird is: the mugging. It's a classic scenario that anyone who has ever played a "street-level" superhero game or read a lot of noir fiction has bound to have run across before. Variations of it can be found in almost any genre. I am sure that countless D&D characters have stopped some thief or half-orc from roughing up some nobleman in an alley. Someone with a weapon is stealing from some (presumably) helpless victim. This gives a chance for our protagonists to swoop in and save the day...or perhaps the protagonist is the muggee and the poor mugger has picked the wrong victim. Either way, it's been done a million times. The mugger is usually hopelessly outclassed by our stalwart hero or heroes. A few classic examples of this cliche being used in film are Superman (Clark and Lois are mugged leaving the Daily Planet) and Crocodile Dundee ("That's not a knife....").

Having GMed a lot of superhero games, I must admit having had the heroes beat up on a few muggers in my time. It's a great "first fight" scenario where you give the heroes some fairly easy opponent to give the players a bit of a feel for the game's combat system. The hero, a masked vigilante of some sort, sees a mugging taking place and jumps in to save the day. A man has another man held at gunpoint.

Now, to spruce it up. The hero notices that the victim is acting a little strange while jumping in. The victim is probably in shock. Struggling with the mugger, the would-be thief drops the gun. They struggle for a few moments more and then stop as they notice that the muggee has picked up the gun and is holding it on the two of them. When, the hero starts to step toward the victim the guy freaks out and starts yelling about demons and threatens to kill both the mugger and hero.

Can the hero get the gun away from the man without getting himself or the mugger shot?

The reason for the weirdness: The victim, we'll say "Johnny," was coming home from a rave. His friends were supposed to drive him home but he couldn't find them. He's tripping on Mescaline or some other hallucinogenic and was having a pretty good trip. He was looking at the sky and not really paying attention when he wandered down the wrong alley. Then his trip turned bad as someone threatened him with a gun...and got even worse when the demon swept down from the sky with gigantic wings. Innocent things that were said earlier in the evening to him are replaying in his head and now he's certain they were warnings about the demons all around him and now......

That's how it's done. You can write your answers up as detailed as you want. It can be a short story or just a small scenario like I wrote above. The important thing is to come up with a creative twist.

You can put a link to your answer or your answer itself in the comments section below. If you have any suggestions for topics for future Wednesday Weirds or any comments in general, please email me at Nuadha at SkySeaStone dot net.

Posted by Nuadha at February 4, 2004 2:48 PM