The Backrooms: modern-day underworld?

[tkdco2]

I'm not sure when this meme started, but it has spawned a bunch of videos I haven't seen until today. Still, maybe we can mine it for our games.


The Backrooms


Here's an example of a modern dungeon crawl: Found Footage

[Finarvyn]

Really strange stuff, and the first I'd heard about it.

[captainjapan]

I know there's a Minecraft mod of the backrooms.

[captainjapan]

Through the Looking Glass used to give me the same eerie feeling in it's opening page, of Alice's drawing room just like the familiar one ,but askew and devoid of the people.

For a modern take on the mythic underworld, you might also enjoy (if that's the right word) Mark Danieliewski's 'House of Leaves'. I started reading this in college.

From a summary on Wikipedia:

"Upon returning from a trip to Seattle, the Navidson family discovers a change in their home: a closet-like space shut behind an undecorated door appears inexplicably where previously there was only a blank wall. A second door appears at the end of the closet, leading to the children's room. As Navidson investigates this phenomenon, he finds that the internal measurements of the house are somehow larger than external measurements. Initially there is less than an inch of difference, but as time passes the interior of the house seems to expand while maintaining the same exterior proportions. A third and more extreme change asserts itself: a dark, cold hallway opens in an exterior living room wall that should project outside into their yard, but does not. Navidson films the outside of the house to show where the hallway should be but clearly is not. The filming of this anomaly comes to be referred to as "The Five and a Half Minute Hallway". This hallway leads to a maze-like complex, starting with a large room (the "Anteroom"), which in turn leads to a truly enormous space (the "Great Hall"), a room primarily distinguished by an enormous spiral staircase which appears, when viewed from the landing, to spiral down without end. There is also a multitude of corridors and rooms leading off from each passage. All of these rooms and hallways are completely unlit and featureless, consisting of smooth ash-gray walls, floors, and ceilings. The only sound disturbing the perfect silence of the hallways is a periodic low growl, the source of which is never fully explained, although an academic source "quoted" in the book hypothesizes that the growl is created by the frequent re-shaping of the house.

There is some discrepancy as to where "The Five and a Half Minute Hallway" appears. It is quoted by different characters at different times to have been located in each of the cardinal directions. "

[Finarvyn]

captainjapan, this reminds me a little of Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere where, if I recall correctly, there is a complete society that sort of falls off of the grid in the subway tunnels of London.

[captainjapan]

Then of course, there are those denizens of "the backrooms", who stalk, out of sight, until you momentarily surprise each other. In the Minecraft version, they appear in your periphery, at the edge of your field of view. They may also vanish, teleporting like the endermen, if I recall correctly.

The most immediate impression I get from the backroom creatures is that they are wandering 'true' trolls of the d&d variety, slender and shambling up until the moment they catch sight of you. There was a trend in supernatural horror films of the early 2000's that capitalized on this type of villain.

[Deleted]

This isn't the same concept, but it's a similar concept of an anomaly or a place in the real world with D&D underworld type connotations. 

[tkdco2]

The two works can be combined for an urban fantasy/horror campaign.

[talysman]

Apr 30, 2022 23:10:11 GMT -6 tkdco2 said:

I'm not sure when this meme started, but it has spawned a bunch of videos I haven't seen until today. Still, maybe we can mine it for our games.


The Backrooms

A lot of the "Backrooms" discussions were influenced by the idea of "liminal spaces", which are literally just connections between two or more spaces (hallways and thresholds,) but when people enter a liminal space that's not meant to be entered by the general public, like maintenance access, or enter them at an abnormal time, like after closing hours, they sometimes get an eerie feeling of "jamais vu"... basically the psychological or anthropological equivalent of liminality. That's a whole other rabbit hole you might want to explore.

Fans of Robert Anton Wilson would recognize this as being Chapel Perilous or Chinatown. There's also a lot of surrealist lit and film that explores this. I recommend Jan Švankmajer's Alice (adaptation of Alice in Wonderland) or the works of the Brothers Quay, including The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. And of course, David Lynch... everyone's probably seen Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, but the Black Lodge scenes in Twin Peaks are also good examples of a "Backrooms" concept. So is his Inland Empire, but I think that's not as good as Mulholland Drive. It's very draggy.

A more accessible film version of the Backrooms would be Being John Malkovich. That could be a good source of ideas.

May 1, 2022 5:41:27 GMT -6 captainjapan said:

Through the Looking Glass used to give me the same eerie feeling in it's opening page, of Alice's drawing room just like the familiar one ,but askew and devoid of the people.

I think Lewis Carroll was basically obsessed with the same concept. In Sylvie and Bruno, he even refers to this as an eerie state and compares it to slipping into another world.

There's an RPG called JAGS that covers a lot of the same ground in the JAGS Wonderland supplement, which I was temporarily obsessed with a while ago. I started a series of posts on Eerie Gaming (other posts under the label surreal) that was mostly about adapting JAGS Wonderland and other eerie settings to InSpectres, but I did a couple posts on doing the same thing in D&D, too. The rules are kinda old and creaky, though, so I should probably update them in the future.

[captainjapan]

talysman said:

There's an RPG called JAGS that covers a lot of the same ground in the JAGS Wonderland supplement, which I was temporarily obsessed with a while ago. I started a series of posts on Eerie Gaming (other posts under the label surreal) that was mostly about adapting JAGS Wonderland and other eerie settings to InSpectres, but I did a couple posts on doing the same thing in D&D, too. The rules are kinda old and creaky, though, so I should probably update them in the future.

I read your Eerie Gaming posts, applying Wonderland to the different game systems. The D&D application reminded me a little of Rip Van Winkle, particularly the time dilation aspect of adventuring in the liminal space. I've downloaded JAG Wonderland, and expect to read a bit of it soon. My impression from your posts was, I think, that the nature of the 'chessboards' reality is known to many npc's native to the setting. 200+ pages gives room for a lot of elaboration on the several planes of existence. I don't know how I feel about that level of detail.

I will say that the mind/ body split is an intriguing idea. I wonder if the lack of awareness of the waking mind in the Wonderland scenarios is played more like with astral travel or more like having a doppelganger interacting with the rest of the party. Sorry, if this isn't making sense. I'm not familiar with the Wonderland terminology yet. Personally, I am inspired by the idea that a twin, conjured out of the same dark magicks that also   maintain these liminal spaces (Backrooms), might take a character's place in the overworld and screw with his life and relationships while he's away. Creepy! 

[WItch-King of Tsámra]

There is a really neat RPG called Caught in The Backrooms by Point of Insanity Games. It looks like a really decent way to play In The Backrooms.

[captainjapan]

Well, whaddaya know about that ?!, I'm honestly not surprised that there's already a game.

It's difficult to see in what direction to take the 'backrooms' concept. From what I can suss out from these game rules, anybody from any time period can slip through the wall and enter 'the backrooms'. So it's like the Bermuda triangle in that people of any time period can be captured by the backrooms. That means having universal mechanics like GURPS.