Versailles (pronounced “Ver-Sales”) is a city built in the middle of an ore-rich northern area. A massive smelter sits north of the city, with tracks leading from it to the surrounding mines. Smoke from the smelter blows over the town whenever the wind shifts, smogging up the city and poisoning the people.

Versailles is a small town, with a population of somewhere around 10,000. A rail line bisects the town, and people are regularly delayed by trains carrying ore to the smelter, slag to the slag dump, or metal somewhere south. A lot of the town, including the train cars, is covered in graffiti of varying degrees of skill.

The town is small enough that you can get around just fine on a bike, which is good, since the protagonists in this setting are probably teenagers. There are no dedicated bike paths, so watch out.

Supernatural Elements

The Bargain

Every adult who lives in Versailles knows, on some level, that the pollution from the mine is bad for the people. Everyone who stays accepts that the harm to themselves and others is worth the paycheck. This is The Bargain, the exchange of welfare for wealth. Nobody talks about it, not seriously at least. They’ll make a remark about the smell of the air, or how much trouble they’re having with their lawn, but no one acknowledges any real harm.

The Dark World

The collective psychic strain of the Bargain has created a strange phenomena, a dimension overlaid on Versailles where the repressed knowledge and comforting delusions mix and merge into strange creatures. Particularly severe cases of dissonance twist the Dark World even further, creating distorted environments populated by monsters to keep the truth protected.

The Dark World is an endless, twisting series of caves populated by monsters, punctuated by the occasional twisted version of a real building.

There are two main types of monsters in the Dark World Mines: Tool-wielding, hardhat-wearing miner grunts and hazmat-clad supervisors, who buff the grunts. Each twisted building in the Dark World gets its own set of monsters, which occasionally stumble out into the Mines.

The Dark World is home to beings called Shades, created from the thoughts and emotions of the people of Versailles. Most are nobody in particular, an amalgamation of worries and experiences, but strong cases of cognitive dissonance can lead to more direct representations in the Dark World.

Locations in Versailles

All of these locations are within a short bike ride of each other, and the exact orientation of them is not important, so here they are in alphabetical order. If you need a way to track who is where at any given time, you could print out some stock photos of various types of buildings, pin them to cardboard and use tokens for each character.

The Rink

The rink is a large, gray building in the middle of town. It is open every day, and when there aren’t active hockey games, people pay to take lessons on hockey skills or just to practice skating.

The front area of the building is a foyer-like space with several tables, a concession stand, and a display case of trophies the local teams have won over the years. There are not many of them. This is a popular hangout spot for teenagers, since the food is cheap and it’s right beside the high school.

The concession is always hiring.

The Dark World version of the Rink is a gladiatorial combat arena where juiced-up warriors beat each other up for the entertainment of the crowd. Unlike most Dark World locations, this place isn’t inherently hostile, and there’s good money to be made fighting monsters in the Pit. You could also die, though, so there’s that.

Sam’s Sports Shack

The Sport Shack is a locally-owned hunting, hockey, and hiking equipment store. It sits in a quiet section of the local mall, where most of the other suites are empty.

The Sport Shack is the best place to get weapons for fighting terrible things in the Other World: Baseball bats, archery equipment, airsoft guns, all that fun stuff. Of course, any teenagers will either need to befriend somebody at the shop or get help from somebody else if they want an airsoft gun.

You can tell who’s working based on what’s playing on the store’s TVs: If it’s Japanese baseball or Bigfoot hunting shows, Sam is working. If it’s martial arts films or hockey, Holly is in charge. The Sport Shack is always hiring, and working there is a good way to make friends with Holly.

St. Barbara High School

St. Barbara is the only high school in the area. It sits right beside the hockey rink. St. Barbara is a blue, blocky building that has been clearly added on to over and over again. What is now the cafeteria used to be an open-air courtyard, but was turned into an interior space a decade ago. The outdoor benches and lights have been kept in place, either for budgetary reasons or as a charming reminder of the open-air days, depending on who you ask.

The high school has whatever facilities would be narratively convenient to your campaign, as well as quite extensive fabrication and automotive shops, perfect for training teenagers in skills that would be useful in the mines.

The exterior of the building is a light blue, marred by streaks of black ash. The roof can be reached by climbing on top of a locked storage container and then scrambling up the drains. There’s a lovely view of the smelter from up there, and you can just barely make out the slag being dumped outside of town at night.

The Dark World version of St. Barbara is a factory with stained glass windows, where bricks of meat are fed through extruders and pressed into the shape of miners before being dropped into a meat grinder. Nun-like figures populate the area, asking obscure questions and trying to kill anyone who gets them wrong.

Versailles General Hospital

Before this area’s vital resources were discovered, this building was a mental asylum, located (in)conveniently in the middle of nowhere. When resources were discovered in the area, the then-abandoned asylum was taken over and used as a dormitory and medical center. In the decades since, the medical aspect of the facility has overtaken it entirely, and now it serves as the primary hospital for the area.

The hospital is constantly overcrowded, and promised expansions keep getting pushed back. Emergency room wait times regularly exceed 10 hours, even for severe injuries. If a major accident were to happen in the mine, the hospital would be unable to handle it, despite their claims to the contrary.

The Dark World Hospital is a squeaky-clean building with no patients, where dog-faced security guards patrol alongside nurses in uniforms that look like they came from a Halloween store. The nurses carry either a rifle that fires comically oversized pills, or a giant syringe that they wield like a rapier.

The Dark World Hospital is the stronghold of Dr. Vogel, created out of her firm desire to believe that nothing is wrong in Versailles and the patient numbers are under control. Her Shade is an octopus-like creature carrying syringes, clipboards, and lighters, which attacks by throwing balls of flaming paper, or stabbing targets with the syringes.

Hangout Spots

Victoria Park

A scenic park by Victoria Lake, where swimming, fishing and boating is prohibited, allegedly due to the ecologically sensitive nature of the lake. In reality, the only living thing in the lake is algae, since pollution from the mines has killed off all the fish and left the lake so acidic that exposure to the water can cause chemical burns.

Slag View Point

A slightly elevated hill outside of town, with an excellent view of the area where molten slag from the smelter is dumped into a valley, creating an impressive light show. Teenagers come out here to drink, make out, and have a few laughs together while they watch the slag cool.

Factions

Northern Mining Enterprises

The current owners of the mine. They are the third company to own the mine, and insist that there are no health problems associated with the mine, and if there are, they are the result of the previous companies’ periods of ownership, and nobody can prove otherwise.

The CBRO

The Canadian Bureau of Reality & Occult, or CBRO (pronounced “Sea-Bro”) is a secret government department dedicated to the research of what they call Transreal Phenomena. The local branch is headquartered in a “closed” shop space in the mall. The doors and windows are shuttered, and every employee enters through the staff access hallways around the back. The headquarters has a device that allows travel into and out of the Dark World. They do not want anyone else to know about the Dark World.

The Protagonists

The heroes of this campaign are teenagers, people who live here by circumstance instead of choice. For one reason or another, they resent this city and the pollution that fills it. Maybe they lost a parent to a workplace accident, or a sibling has some long-term health issues from growing up here. Maybe the hero themselves has a terminal illness from the poisoned air.

Townies

People who live and work in Versailles, with no particular malicious intent.

Adventure: The Abandoned Mine

This adventure provides a good reason for the party to be together, even if they wouldn’t have known each other beforehand. Over the course of the adventure, they will enter an abandoned mine, get attacked by spectral miner-monsters, get their first taste of the Dark World, and awaken their Other Selves.

It’s a beautiful spring day, and you’re being forced to help clean up trash. Today is the yearly “Trash Roundup,” an event where students across the town clean up the local parks and natural area. Your cohort has been assigned to Valentine Park, a scenic area on the edge of town.

Valentine Park is a small green area on the edge of Valentine Lake. The park has tables, raised firepits, and a small playground. It’s an ideal place for families to hang out during the day in the summer, or for teenagers to get up to a bit of mischief at night. The view of the lake is ruined slightly by metal signs every 20 feet which read “ECOLOGICALLY SENSITIVE AREA: NO SWIMMING, NO FISHING, NO BOATING.”

The eastern part of Valentine Park is woodland, with a trail running through part of it. This is where your group has been assigned. There is a lot of trash around here, some recent, some dumped here during the winter.

You follow the trail of trash into the woods. Chip bags, beer cans, plastic bags, all the usual suspects. It’s not hard work, but it is tedious. Eventually, you find yourselves overlooking a deep, muddy pit. One side of the pit is made of a brick wall with an entrance wide enough for two people to enter side by side.

You all know what this is: An old mine entrance. The kind of place you’re not supposed to go. But there’s trash in the pit, and trash going in to the mine, and you’re here to pick up trash, right?

The interior of the mine is cold and damp. A few feet in, there is an old folding chair surrounded by old beer cans. As you gather them up, you hear something from further in the mine. A voice, sorrowful. Wailing, almost.

If the party decides not to investigate, they finish their trash cleanup for the day uneventfully. Give them a brief epilogue about how they live in this town, work the mine, and die of industrial accidents or chronic health issues.

If they do decide to investigate, carry on:

The mine twists and turns as you walk. 50 feet in, one of you almost trips on metal mine-cart tracks.

The voice becomes clearer as you keep walking. As you reach a four-way intersection, it finally becomes clear: “Do you think you’re better than us?”

Approaching from the left and right are a small group of hulking men carrying pickaxes and shovels. They shamble closer, slowly, wearily, and they repeat the question: “Do you think you’re better than us?”

These are Miner Shades, ghostly apparitions born from the stress of the men who have worked the mines over the decade. They are not intelligent and can’t respond to questions, they can only repeat “Do you think you’re better than us?” and other ominous phrases.

If the party does not flee, the miner shades will attack them. Give them a round or two of peril before their Other Selves awaken and they get their JRPG Protagonist Powers.

This battle should not be a life-or-death affair, and should serve as a quick tutorial for the combat mechanics of the system you’re using.

Once the battle is finished, the party is completely exhausted. The only thing they can do is stumble back to the pickup site for the class with their bags of trash.

Give them some time to talk about this experience while they rest before ending the session.

On Systems

There are a few TTRPGs designed for Persona-like adventures. The one I looked at most often while I wrote this was The Velvet Book, a hack of Monsters & Other Childish Things. It has an incredibly robust section on generating towns and characters, which helped break through the writer’s block on more than one occasion.

The Midnight Generation, a fan supplement for Masks: A New Generation, is another option. If you want a more narrative, Powered by the Apocalypse type game, you want The Midnight Generation. If you want more mechanics and the fairly neato One Roll Engine, check out The Velvet Book.

Afterword

The most obvious touchstone for the Dark World side of things is the Persona series of video games, but the real world elements mostly come from Fort McMurray, Alberta and the oilsands operations in that area and the book Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen.

Other inspirations include Darkseed 2, the YouTube video “Dumping slag at Bethlehem Steel in 1994” by steelmanjules, and the general experience of living in a province whose economic prosperity comes at the cost of our future.

-Garm

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