The world is a lie.
Most people spend their lives in the mainstream of society, living in the cities and listening to the official stories, never thinking about the horrors of the world beyond the odd glance at a screen. But outside the streets, in dark alleys, lies another world. A world of darkness and secrets, where you can look past the lies and find out what's really going on. Most people never find out about it, but some stumble into it, and once you see a glimpse of the truth? How can you avoid looking further...
In Dark Alleys is a 2006 cosmological/psychological horror by Vajra Enterprises, found here
. In it, the players are the "touched", people who have seen some glimpse of the wider world. By day, they live normal lives, but by night they explore the worlds often the beaten path and slowly uncover the truth about the universe they think they live in.
In Dark Alleys contains examples of:
- Ancient Conspiracy: The Powers That Be control all mainstream organizations and are behind most of history. Even they're just pawns of the real force controlling the world, Demi and the Powers From Beyond.
- Ambiguous Innocence: The original humans and Sophie. They're lacking in any of the psychodynamics, meaning they lack any degree of shame, morality or guilt. Their legacy is one of sociopathic play and exploitation, with no understanding of even the concept of "wrong". Sophie's rape of Demi is never mentioned as a problem, and indeed the one glimpse we have shows the humans laughing over it.
- Arc Words: "Pain". It replaces all language in the Deserted City, people who are part of the touched start seeing it everywhere, and a lot of supernatural artifacts print or say it. It's Sophie, humanity's creator, calling for help.
- And I Must Scream: Sophie has been in paralyzing agony since the fall of the Deserted City, and a number of original humans seem to have been caught up in it too
- Anthropomorphic Personification: All humans have 8 in their Mental World— The Anima (embodying your gender), the Ego (embodying your self-awareness), the Id (embodying your desire for pleasure), the Reptile (embodying your animal instincts), your Superego (embodying your guilt), your Shadow (embodying your shame and self-loathing), your Stranger (embodying your understanding of others) and your Thanatos (embodying your desire to die). They're not natural, being instead ways to divert your mental energy. Ascension involves removing them, and realizing humans originally had none of those drives explains a lot about the Deserted City)
- The Adjectival Man: The Grey Men, non-descript men in grey trenchcoats who can reshape reality and alter memories. They appear when people get too close to finding the truth and are the most active members of the the Powers From Beyond.
- Bathroom Stall Graffiti: Cosmic secrets are left scrawled in far-away places by the Scribblers. This does mean they're hard to remove. It also does mean they're hard to find, thus the need to explore the world.
- Blessed with Suck: Most of the touched, but the Survivors have it worst. They come back from death Nigh-Invulnerable and with control over their bodies. They're also constantly being hunted by Death — most don't last a month before dying again.
- Brown Note: Momentos are oddly familiar photographs, videos and other images of happy strangers. Looking at them causes you to gain great power, and also makes your body start to burn, eventually killing you.
- Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The "wolves" and "storks" of the Invisible are flying manta rays with sharp teeth and long worms respectively
- Came Back Strong: The Survivors came back from the dead with at least invulnerability, and often powers like shapeshifting, superhuman strength and immortality.
- Complete Immortality: Humans. "Death" is the result of a Reaper dragging you to the afterlife — if you can escape that, you can just keep going no matter what happens to you.
- Crappy Carnival: The Deserted Amusement Park is an almost supernaturally crappy theme park. It used to be a lot better when humans were running it.
- Creature-Hunter Organization: The Professionals are agents of one of these, destroying supernatural threats to the world. However, its motivations are actually to keep people from using the supernatural in ways that undermine the authorities, and most professionals realize they're working for the bad guys as they raise the ranks. Most have stopped caring by the time they do, though, and those who don't...end up "supernatural threats to the world".
- Deal with the Devil: Faustians are the dispossessed and poverty-stricken who have made a bargain with a Dance for power in exchange for performing (often extremely bizarre) tasks.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype: Heroes are a deconstruction of the With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility superhero. They're people who gained supernatural powers and decided to use this to set up a secret identity and fight crime...which of course isn't something a healthy person does. The character page explicitly says that most Heroes have a very strong psychological similarity to serial killers.
- Demiurge Archetype: Demi is the creator of the fake world we live in, and the ultimate force behind all the threats of the setting.
- Eldritch Location: The Deserted City, an abandoned and ruined city that's constantly shifting, is full of Humanoid Abominations and Artifacts Of Death, and doesn't obey any earthly laws of physics..
- Genius Loci: Dances are the minds of abandoned buildings, born from the emotions of their inhabitants. On a grander scale, it's strongly implied that the Deserted City is Sophie
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Red Sun, an alien sun bent on subjugating humanity that has no real connection to any of the mysteries of the setting and is never brought up again in any of the sourcebooks.
- God Is Dead: Downplayed. Sophie is alive, but in too much pain to act on the world beyond calling for help.
- Familial Body Snatcher: The Wonderlanders are being groomed for this, by a series of "family friends" who have survived since the Victorian era by jumping to the Metal Worlds of subsequent generations. To be fair, the Wonderlander's mind remains afterwards, making them more of a growing Mind Hive.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: The world before our imprisonment on earth isn't comprehensible to humans. The images and places we see are metaphors — being able to see the genuine truth literally sets your soul on fire.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In-universe. Bubbles are hostile stories that attack those who read them.
- Humans Are Cthulhu: We were once godlike beings who held control over the entire world, before being bound to this dreamworld.
- Humanoid Abomination: Deserted City Creatures usually appear as humans, but naked, sexless and with severe deformities and strange powers. They're utterly inscrutable in their motivations and actions, and are broken creations of humanity.
- Invisible to Normals: A large chunk of the world, with entire ecosystems of invisible creatures running reality from behind the scenes. Disease, disasters, mental illness, births and deaths are all caused by inhabitants of the Invisible, and Outcasts can see them.
- It Runs On Nonsensium: A rare serious example with H-Tech, which works via flaws in the laws of physics. This means it tends to be made by wackjobs with no understanding of actual science, engineering or technology (as actual experts would "know" the mechanism was impossible and not even try), making most of them extremely inefficient, over-engineered and dangerous.
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Subverted in the "This Is A Dark Ride" sourcebook — while it avoids saying the name of the park, it still gives enough detail to make it explicit that it's talking about the actual, real-world Disneyland.
- Lie to the Beholder: The Deserted City appears to each person as their conception of "a metropolis", whether that be a modern-day city or a series of tents.
- Louis Cypher: Demi and Sophie, the Demiurge and Sophia from Gnostic theology
- Magic A Is Magic A: While the rules magic follows aren't made clear, the game does an impressive job at making it clear they're being followed. You can figure out a lot just from keeping track of what is and isn't possible.
- Mental World: Everyone has one, and its entirely possible for portals to open between them and the real world. At the bottom of each one is a gateway to the Citadel and our true selves.
- No Delays for the Wicked: Averted. The Powers behind the cosmos, for all their power and knowledge, are far from infallible. A number of touched and supernatural events are just the unavoidable mistakes that come with running the entire world.
- Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Wonderlanders find out about the supernatural when their childhood imaginary friends return in adulthood, and are now capable of directly interacting with the world.
- Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous: The Androgynes are a strange example. They start off as just non-binary humans, and then use their ability to transcend the gender binary to become genuinely supernatural (and often extremely inhuman) creatures.
- Psychopomp: The Reapers appear to take people away to the afterlife. No-one actually dies. They're not facilitators, they're enforcers.
- Rape and Revenge: The alleged reason Demi imprisoned us — we're all his children by rape at the hand of Sophie. One of the sourcebooks implied the final straw was us mocking him about it.
- Reality Is Out to Lunch: Deconstructed with shatters, which break the laws of physics in an area and thus usually just kill everyone nearby. Turns out the human body can only really survive within a small number of physical states.
- Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: Humans are all incredibly powerful reality warpers. As none of us know this, our power acts randomly, creating things like bubbles, dances and shatters
- Riddle for the Ages: While the setting gives enough information to infer a lot, it rarely gives detailed answers to any of the big questions of the setting, even in the GM section. The closest we have is a garbled, metaphorical letter at the end which tells us of the broad strokes , but even that still leaves many questions open.
- Ritual Magic: The Animists have access to this, although they don't really understand how it works. Most other magical systems don't do anything, being just philosophical musings — it's mentioned in passing that the witches were the last European Animists.
- Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: If the players are unlucky enough to meet him personally, Demi can just incapacitate any human he sees with no roll or resistance.
- Sinister Sentient Sun: The original sun of our solar system was intelligent and often cruelly punished humans for any transgression. The-Powers-From-Beyond (the forces that have trapped humans in their current form) decided it was too violent and flung it into another galaxy. Now it's trying to find its way back and has been contacting people via their dreams, giving them the power to set fires with their minds.
- Special Person, Normal Name: The only names we're given for the two most powerful cosmic forces in the setting, the creator of the real world and the dream world respectively, are "Sophie" and "Demi". These probably aren't their real names, but they're still the only ones we're given.
- These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The premise of the game. You know a few, and discovering the full picture is the core quest of the setting.
- Throwing Off the Disability: The Cannibals lack various body-parts ...physically. Spiritually, they're still there, and they can make the tangible and better then before at will.
- The Underworld: The land of the dead is a bleak, empty canyon where souls are forced to march until they lose all memories of their past.
- Van Helsing Hate Crimes: The Professionals kill the supernatural to keep humanity imprisoned. The lower members think they're fighting evil, but the higher-ups are fully aware most supernatural things pose no real threat to humanity, and they're only fighting for their own benefit
- Weaksauce Weakness: The Lost can teleport...but only when drunk off their ass. At first.
