Q: What's an Extreme movie? A: Something cool I made a list of that you can watch a lot of for free

The public library system in LA County uses a streaming service called Kanopy. It's free, doesn't make recommendations, displays all titles uniformly (no annoying splash images or promo slideshows or god forbid autoplay). I love that. 

I like how deep and eclectic the selection is. Do I need to be able to watch a documentary about like, every single thing a documentary could be about besides a murder, or to be able to watch every single film by South Korean mumblecore director Hong Sang-Soo, who makes one or even two movies every god damn year - No. I like that I could. 

I reaaaaaally like that I could watch - and did - so many movies distributed in the 2000s under the brand Tartan Asia Extreme.

What's That

Tartan Films was a UK-based film distributor - that means it was The Money bringing movies to the different kinds of places people could see them: theaters, festivals, DVD & video-cassette players. In the period I’m concerned with, someone named Hamish Mcalpine ran Tartan. Larry Clark, famous for taking pictures of his friends shooting drugs, once tried to strangle Mcalpine for want of patriotism after a disagreement the two had about the incipient War on Terror. Mcalpine introduced Pedro Almodovar, Todd Haynes, and the Wong Kar Wai film IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE to Europe, and theoretically got the Gaspar Noe film IRREVERSIBLE through British Film Board censorship.

Asia Extreme was a brand created by Tartan to market crime and horror films made in East Asia. Reportedly what inspired the label was RINGU and AUDITION. AUDITION, which features torture, might be the kind of movie we'd expect to inspire a label Extreme, but RINGU is pretty lowkey. Maybe what it has that's so extreme is using something from the premise of watching a movie against you. Point is: the movies weren't Extreme just because they were violent. They got under their audience's skin in creative ways. What that has to do with Asia - which, in the case of the titles referenced in this post, means two very different countries, whose histories involve war and enslavement and xenophobia of the other, and the enormous burdens that may separate people therein - I don't think it's for me today to entirely know.

Horror is the genre par excellence of getting under the skin. But an interesting thing about Tartan's marketing brand is that it also included crime movies, and, in some cases, movies where there are no obvious genre elements, such as in the filmography of director Kim Ki-Duk. Crime and horror movies have a pretty convincing single origin - if you're attached to genealogies - German expressionist film. But I thought it'd be more interesting - as an experiment - to take for granted there could be something as Extreme for a genre of film. And from the movies, try to work out - independently of them being horror or crime or exoticized foreign imports - what makes Extreme extreme.

Extreme Trouble

What's not in any of the films? No, like, vampires, no science fiction really, nothing not roughly set in the present day - (just two: R POINT, during the Vietnam War, and BATTLE ROYALE in a near-future). Across the crime-horror-drama divide there are such things in the movies as: maniacs, ghosts, and something like, being down-and-out. The ghosts have different grievances, and the maniacs have different perversions, and the people who are down-and-out have different terrible luck, but these three dreadful things - across the small catalogue I'm working off of - seem ubiquitous. 

What ghosts, maniacs, and being pinched in the gears of industry have in common is that they seem to be modern problems. There might've been a great extreme movie released in Bangkok that year about a horrible monster that could not be confused for a ghost, or a crime movie about the Rape of Nanking, and for marketing purposes, movies set in the present day may seem more believable as cutting-edge contemporary. Or: a movie that is Extreme rarely stars something that is both dreadful and strictly fantastical. 

Ghosts

The ghosts in the ghost selection of the films are dead women, four of the six are specifically young girls. The most dreadful shot in A TALE OF TWO SISTERS is a sequence where we are told there is a girl under the sink, glimpsed in a second of out-of-nowhere chaos, a sudden seizure that brings someone down to the floor. When we do finally get around to seeing what's under there it's a necrotic hand. DARK WATER has, in its most dreadful moment - when the mother thinks she's saved her daughter and sees that actually she was cradling the ghost - a waterlogged corpse. The corpse in ARANG has been perfectly preserved, however, not because of ghostly glamor, but from - possibly bogus I'm not sure - it was convincing at the time - chemistry reasons: of being buried in a salt pile. Even the I suppose life-affirming gore of birth is purified by the salt in the also possibly unbelievable fact that the dead body delivered its fetus, also preserved. ARANG, like a TALE OF TWO SISTERS, is based on a fairy tale, and this must go far to explain the latter's convolution and the former's beggaring belief. R POINT isn't really that scary but there are shots of the wind in the grass at night. In RINGU of course the most dreadful scene is immediately after we watch the cursed video tape and find reflected in the dead television set's round, the ghost in the corner who was watching us watch it. The WISHING STAIRS also isn't scary but it does have one perfect shot of the eponymous steps at the end. SPIDER FOREST, a third not very scary film in this collection, has, again, for its most under-the-skin moment, a wonderful wide, which shows the ghost in the forest levitating with perfect stillness far above and ahead of the one observing it.

A good movie ghost has routines that are brutal. It does this on these days it goes here at night it wants only this because of the single horrible thing that happened to it: cause-and-effect become brutal - crude and exaggerated - in the matter of a ghost. Children know regimes - parents, soccer practices, homework - and in the case of certain of these countries, their educators corporal punishments. The ghosts are hiding under the sink, or in the art room, or in the salt pile, or in the viewing of a video tape, and seeking them out is usually the most dreadful moment in ghost horror movies. Because then you're playing its game. You subject yourself to the crude exaggerations of the regime. 

Maniacs

My personal favorite of the movies discussed, BLOODY REUNION, by Director Im Dae-Woong, has several of the most fucked-up kills I've ever seen in a horror movie, a deeply unsettling dramatic premise whereby the pathetic are also despicable, and a desolate twist. The scariest thing in it is probably when someone is force-fed broken razor blades. In I SAW THE DEVIL it is a script element: not only is there a total psychopath which the hero has to deal with, but that, with the breeziness of strolling over to a neighbor's front yard, one can find: even more fucked up people. It's the cannibal friend in I SAW THE DEVIL that is its most appalling feature. H is a messy movie, with a messy idea about reproductive health, but it does have a luxurious image of someone's personality destroyed oceanside. Director Takashi Miike's AUDITION - which started this whole thing - is good all the way through, with its nearly SCREAM-like postmodern-y refusal to straightforwardly engage with the conventions of a horror movie, dreadfully concealing its maniac in a blue little drama about getting a little old and being a little tired and wanting a little love. One second of its final sequence I can't forget: the way the maniac lopes away, like a child excited to surprise someone for a birthday party. 

A good movie maniac will pervert trust bonds. Whatever it is that's supposed to hold people together, a good movie maniac confuses. They make their tortures out to be happy birthday surprises. Their favorite teacher is their sworn enemy. Their mother is someone they want to have killed (I dunno I fell asleep during H). Or that to them, paying a visit is a tour of hell. The most dreadful sequences with movie maniacs in them are when the maniac is shockingly identified - and before that - their fetishes. 

Down and Out

The unlucky and unloved. Which are horrible get-underneath-your-skin type problems. It may be that in the way that RINGU leaps out of the screen with its premise, these movies do the same with the notion you paid $25 bucks to see them. Depending on what $25 dollars means to you, and what it can be like to think of what $25 dollars might mean to someone else, this is a very unsettling premise. To be down-and-out in a movie - when the movie is good - makes prices sharp. Most of them here feature kids sold-for-parts. And knives, lots of knives (Many East Asian countries have laws against owning firearms). 

The most dreadful moments in these films are when the children are ruined. SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE's drowning. THE MAN FROM NOWHERE's jar of eyes. LADY VENGEANCE (a possibly self-reflective example) parent characters who watch footage of their kids' tortures and executions. BATTLE ROYALE gives the kids a fighting chance - but maliciously. The movie, so much more hardcore than any of its later inspirations - which are, strangely, a lot of content marketed to kids, YA novels like the THE HUNGER GAMES, video games like FORTNITE - never cuts less than to the bone with the fact that in a kill-or-be-killed environment, one kid's fighting chance is at the expense of another. Its best scene is either every of one these murders or its first scene: when the kids first get distributed to them their provisions. Director Kim Ki Duk provides a few outliers with movies not primarily featuring kids. His down-and-out films have in common their best scenes taking place during brightest day, in the lucky people places: a mall where an insane former coast guard in the COAST GUARD does bayonet drills, and a park where the good and normal girls go walking around, and - when you're the bad guy in BAD GUY - you are irrepressibly drawn to kiss them. 

THE SCORE

So an Extreme movie seems to be one where 

something dreadful

is defined by

• the pervasiveness of a crude and exaggerated order 
• shockingly confused attachments to people and things
• the invincibility of high costs of living 

• in the vernacular of the present day

 

       

.

.

So basically here's a list of some really good movies you can like watch for free dawg...

A Tale of Two Sisters	KIM Jee-woon	2003	South Korea	ghost
Arang	AHN Sang-hoon	2006	South Korea	ghost
Audition	TAKASHI Miike	1999	Japan	maniac
Bad Guy	KIM Ki-Duk	2001	South Korea	down and out
Battle Royale	FUKASAKU Kinji	2000	Japan	down and out
Bloody Reunion	IM Dae-Woong	2006	South Korea	maniac
The Coast Guard	KIM Ki-duk	2002	South Korea	down and out
Dark Water	NAKATA Hideo	2002	Japan	ghost
H	LEE Jong-hyeok	2002	South Korea	maniac
Horror Stories	IM Dae-woong JUNG Bum-sik HONG Ji-young KIM Gok & KIM Sun MIN Kyu-dong	2012	South Korea	maniac
I Saw The Devil	KIM Jee-woon	2010	South Korea	maniac
Lady Vengeance	PARK Chan-wook	2005	South Korea	down and out
The Man From Nowhere	LEE Jeong-beom	2010	South Korea	down and out
R Point	KONG Su-chang	2004	South Korea	ghost
Ringu	NAKATA Hideo	1998	Japan	ghost
Sorum	YOON Jong-chan	2001	South Korea	all
Spider Forest	SONG Il-gon	2004	South Korea	ghost
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance	PARK Chan-wook	2002	South Korea	down and out
Wishing Stairs	YUN Jae-yeon	2003	South Korea	ghost

.

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Scare Tactics: Empty - The Ditto

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.

Nothing Going On

We were talking about movies in the demon city discord and someone asked this good question.

The quote is Andrei Tarkovsky, who among other things made a movie in the 70s that had a long train-riding sequence of passing landscape, the backs of people's heads, and nothing going on, in sepia - and it was good. 

 

In film school there’s an idea that a marked difference in movie-making occurred when people starting making movies like this. Someone inclined to say about them, it’s just nothing going on, might’ve preferred the theoretically previous kind of movie: which star movement. Granted that there is something going on, what it is, in the Tarkovsky case, would be more like the kind of thing a movie is made from than the kind of things movies can depict. These other movies might be said to have made time-keeping the star. 

Like if someone were to think to themselves, the train to the Zone was five whole minutes longggg, they would be using the sequence to tell time, like it was a clock. If they thought it was zoom crash bam look out aiiiiiiieeee and Buster Keaton almost died on it, it would be like it had moved. And these two modes correspond to different periods of film history, goes the theory. 

"Clock-watching" is, like the question suggests, inherent to movie-watching. Kind of like how watching paint dry is inherent to seeing a painting (typically all-the-way dried).  Jackson Pollock's paintings, like clock-watching shots, take something obvious and inherent to their existence as things, like that a painting is stuff that starts wet then gets dry, and with other details, like say, the exclusion of any recognizable figures, make this material fact one of its stars. So: Tarkovsky’s train ride has a mysterious destination. The movie starts in sepia and arrives there in technicolor (exactly when it arrives there is an interesting question - made interesting by the shot's length). 

Horror movies may have long clock-watching-esque shots of nothing going on. But the shots will often instead star - with dreadful anticipation - movement. There's a Thing and it's out There, waiting some Place. It may be that to get such dread involves a wandering mind like with Tarkovsky's shot. But in a Horror movie our boredom doesn't have to get farther than the image on the poster to reach the Zone. To understand the long empty Horror shot we would be better off considering the techniques in movies that star movement. 

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.

It's Out There

The opening sequence of It Follows very clearly spells out for us that There's A Horrible Thing Out There Some Place. 

It goes:

1. Shot that is long and wide and moving and that will give us a clear view of the whole street from both angles, a view which includes one house with something bad in it that a girl comes running away from - a shot that in effect contains within it a couple of other shots - such as a shot of the girl in the street reacting to something - which, because it is a reaction, suggest to us another shot (like in our heads) of the thing being reacted to. So that's four shots in one. Time is money and mounting a camera onto a crane is expensive.  

 

2. Shot of desperately speeding away 

 

3. Shot that is from far away: of the girl and her abandoned car in the middle of nowhere. 

 

4. Shot that is of the girl but closer. Note the light over the water far away behind her. 

 

5. Shot of what the girl is looking towards: her car, far away. 

 

6, Shot of the girl dead by morning.

That the Thing is horrible and Out There is understood; the question is, how's it going to get to her? From the road, like she thinks, defensively illuminated by her car's interior lights? From the water like I'm convinced of, trying to outmaneuver the inevitably scary failure of the road-approach defense? Shot 4 is especially dreadful. I imagine someone striding out of the dark, up the hidden side of the beach dune, from where the girl thinks she safe from having to watch. The sequence makes emptiness dreadful with excessive information about distances. 

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Finally: A Toy

Movies have lots of tricks for deploying scare tactics, but there's one big thing that they rarely ever have, which RPGs do: nobody - but you - the host - knows what horrible thing is on the movie poster.

Here's a Horror:

Dittos are aliens that can assume the appearance of any inanimate object nearby. They can do it nigh undetectably, in the blink of an eye. Because of this, they often hunt in plain sight of their human prey, hiding as a duplicate across open terrain, office spaces, gas stations, waiting for the target to turn to get closer. Dittos in their true liquid form are incredibly fast and capable of squeezing through slivers of space. 

R -

A 9 (liquid) 0 (solid)

T 6

P 2

A -

C -

K 6

 

Special Abilities 

Dispersed Form

The Ditto can only be hurt by weapons or tactics that move large parts of its body away from the main mass or by area effects. Firearms are useless, though explosives can work. 

Asphyxiation

The Ditto can swallow a creature, depriving it of air, causing Standard Damage each round until the victim is freed.

Regenerating Metabolism

Any time the Ditto throws the Sun it gains a point of Toughness.

Acidic 

Touching a Ditto causes Standard Damage at 8 Intensity  

Mimic  

Dittos can assume the form of any inanimate thing - but they dont change their mass so: their copies are nearly always lighter or heavier than the original thing. One Ditto weighs about 250 pounds. It is rumored in UFO conspiracy circles that certain buildings are in fact an enormous mass of mimicking Dittos, waiting for something…

Weaknesses

Use of weak bases (alkaline compounds) like ammonia can neutralize or drown acidic Dittos, causing Standard Damage each round. Defeating Dittos can be an opportunity for clever uses of real-world chemistry by PCs.  

 

Once PC notice there's two of something that there was one of a second ago - they'll probably try to light it up. They get a flat 50 chance to guess right. Otherwise the Ditto will evade and liquify and slip between the cracks of something. PCs may try to identify Dittos by making note of how close suspicious objects are to them in the room. As Host, you can make any empty space suddenly seem suspicious by noting in your description what inanimate objects are closest to the PC and how many of that kind of thing there are. Or tell them that there's one less chair at the table than a minute ago. 

"HORROR WANTS PSYCOED"

In The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film, it says there's seven scare tactics in horror movies -- 

1. dead space

2. the subliminal

3. the unexpected

4. the grotesque

5. dread

6. the uncanny

7. the unstoppable

I keep forgetting what they are so I came up with a mnemonic:

PSYCOED

as in

HORROR WANTS

P        ervasive       (the subliminal)

S        hocking        (the unexpected)

Y        ucky            (the grotesque)

C        orporeal         (the unstoppable)

O        dd                  (the uncanny)

E        mpty             (dead space)

D        read      

I think when it comes to scares in movies, the name of the game is Dread and there’s six ways to having it. 

As for why Corporeal for Unstoppable: I think the unstoppable-ness of the Horror is usually most dreadful in scenes where the Horror can wreck people in spite of a capacity to be targeted. I figure what The Book of Horror calls The Unstoppable must be the Horror's terrible transcendent impossibility when its impossibility seems most scraped out -- when we have to deal with the fact that it is indeed there and it really did all that, and so we may fail to stop it purely because it is just that good. 

How to Use The Horror's Deck To Help Estimate Game Time

The Unit Length of A Good Time 

Body Counts

Last sesh, my players left the enormous snuff-film production soundstage that is glamoured in the wild hills above Diamond City, concluding their investigation ravaged and cursed, blinded or burned, and with an explosive gunfight car chase down a winding two-lane road. It took like 7 weeks. 

dog that is a panther - castrated

rooster that is a falcon - speared

"cowhead" - tabletopped then curbstomped

"timothy" - clubbed with a kindergartener's desk

well-armed pink-haired gentlemen - shot, run over

the dogwalker's camry - blown up

the journalist's corolla - half blown up

How many sessions is that? 4 if you count the one where we were all late and there was a show after we had to get to -- 5 if you count the one where I should've called it earlier because I had no clue what above Diamond City was hidden in the hills. Call the soundstage 3 proper game sessions long, then.

Calendar Alerts

It's been a year, and in the 5e game I play in, our party is still in Hell, still trying to take down The Big Bad Guy. When I pitched playing an RPG to my friends  -- most of whom had never played one before -- they were all curious how much of a time commitment it was going to be. Some were wary of the other pitches DnD enthusiasts had made them: how rich and amazing the character development will be, the responses of the fantasy world to their actions, after three long years sitting at the same table...

I told my friends, basically, its a new game, everyone playing it is new playing anything like it, I'm new running it or anything like it -- don't worry -- we are all prepared to swiftly abandon this project if it sucks.  

I wanted to run Demon City because I don't like fantasy and it seemed impossible that I could ever coordinate my work schedule and my friends' work schedules with the kind of consistency I thought something like a Game-of-Thrones-length series needed. But a horror movie? One bad night -- oh, that could be arranged.

Hostage Negotiations

My players

talk

a 

lot.

Except when they're freaked out :) 

But overall, the sound of our game is a three hour long argument about everything. 

This is particularly true for Action Rounds. We've had enough of them now that they understand the odds are against them -- they gotta scrap for every advantage -- and one tactical error could put them down. So when it comes to make a choice, every time its like 

"Okay but I have this [skill that doesn't apply to the present situation] so it should be better for me...!"

"Well but like lets imagine how that would go in real life..."

or 

"Okay but for them you said [previous judgement call about advantages that doesn't apply to the present situation]...!"

"Yeah but lets consider how this situation is unique..."

Which is good because it 

- affirms the reality of the fiction,

- and that the players are invested in it 

- and that the problem before them is a challenge

- a challenge in the way real life abstract problems involving the cooperation of a lot of different personalities might be a challenge

- that is, by requiring we insist from each other careful thinking about how things go in real life and how situations are unique 

 

Brain Pain

Does the mental picture of an RPG session as something like a sustained argument among friends suggest anything useful for writing them? Putting one together, wondering how many sessions I'm looking at, I'm might ask, how long might the back-and-forth be for these different player-characters to enjoyably describe a solution to these problems? 

In an epic fantasy world of warring states, it might make sense that, to resolve it, if the problem was imagined to be as challenging as it might be in real life, would probably take three years of conversations every couple weeks. Sooner maybe, if the people at the table were the trustworthy and competent representatives of the citizens of the states and not, say, violent attention-deficit plunderers (though, to be sure, what DnD player couldn't imagine a committed team of lucky violent and attention-deficit plunderers bringing some kind of positive resolution to bear upon a warring-states campaign-long type problem?). 

How long does it take to solve a problem like a snuff-film-directing illusionist necromancer?

If you are one of my players

stop

scrolling

now

thank

you

(cuz of spoilers)

How to Use The Horror's Deck To Help Estimate Game Time

Simple or Complex Discussions

The card spread above is the horror deck I'm throwing. 

The campaign element each card represents is as follows:

On the left are cards pertaining to a below-the-line snuff-film production crew (The Heirophant) who, upon realizing they are never going to receive the necromantic power (Ace of Wands) that was promised them, went on strike (2 of Wands, Dominion). It is their more brazen torture-murder-movie-making (9 of Swords, Cruelty) of Silvia Moreno (3 of Swords, Sorrow) that puts Investigator PCs onto the case. PCs begin the campaign in their clutches, about to be snuff-filmed in a rank basement lair (7 of Cups, Debauch). The lead agitator, Silvia's boyfriend Wolfgang, is squatting in his Uncle's foreclosed coffee shop, Cafe Mr. Nice Guy (8 of Cups, Indolence).

On the right is the transcendental horror herself, Duchess Emmelina Plurolle (Art) and her associated cards. She hunts Wolfgang for stealing from her production offices a magical focus --  her camera (Ace of Wands). It had been used for the movies she makes catering to a rich and perverted clientele, one of whom is a police detective colleague of the PCs (4 of Cups, Luxury). Emmelina has some terrifying ideas about nature and art which are evidenced in recycling the meat of her human victims for disgusting sculptures of animals that she then glamours to appear as simple taxidermy -- to be sold to tourists at her store, Scales & Tails (9 of Disks, Gain). 

Wolfgang has lots of terrifying ideas about how Emmelina is a necromantic poser.  An omnipresent theme in the campaign is of appearances (6 of Cups, Pleasure). Paranormal-skilled characters will be able to see through the necromantic set-dressing of the renegade snuff-film crew. Emmelina, whose necromancy is real, will test them with all kinds of illusions and doubles. 

The point is:

Adventure Themes 

- describe the kinds of problems PCs will face.  

- help rate complexity

- are, in the case of this spread:

- stuff pretending to be other stuff (6 of Cups, Pleasure)

- psychopathic torture (9 of Swords, Cruelty)

- obscure entities in conflict (2 of Wands, Dominion)

Major Horror NPCs 

 - are always complex: these are the best thing to try to kill the PCs with after all. 

 - from them emerge campaign themes

Minor Horror NPCs & Locations

- can be simple or complex: it depends.

- campaign themes give a hint: if a lot are in play, it's probably complex. If one or none: probably simple. 

Stuff Not in the Spread

- inevitably, an unexpected Minor NPC or Location became significant

- as above, the number of campaign themes at play may hint at if it should be counted as a complex or simple problem. 

Talking through a complex game problem can take a couple hours. Nearly a whole session. Sessions usually start with a simpler problem that spirals into the complex problem, or they end with the simpler one, possibly to hint at spiraling yet to come (like Downtime or a Hook). Simple problems may then take at most like an hour. 

Accounting for Bullshitting

If I had it my way, everything would be richly complex, all themes firing for every campaign element all the time even unexpected ones, we would start the game exactly on time and I would remember all the rules. So the adventure would be 8 hearty-and-perfect-sessions-long. Accounting for previous half-starts and fuck-ups, it will probably be closer to 6. 

The fun of the themes are about dried up. The clues are all in the party's hands, whether they know or not. All that's left is for them to talk out the picture (Complex) and get murdered by Emmelina (Complex). 

RPGs aren't diplomatic episodes. But the picture of them as fun and challenging discussions among friends may bring into relief even other table-side necessities like colorful description and making jokes and taking wild chances, or in a word, the bullshitting. 

   

Problem Character Changelings or What to do when its your first time as Host and a Player wants to be a type of Problem Character that’s not in the game book

Say no

— unless they are cool and use she/fae pronouns and own a cool knife that looks like this:

— in which case you should come up with a Changeling-type Problem Character for them.

Charles Voss, Sandman #18

In the folklore Changelings are fairies masquerading as human babies. What happens to the baby that's replaced is nothing good -- something to build a Horror around.

So there's a crime... 

But How Can Fairies Be Horrifying?

I don't have the book in front of me but in A Red & Pleasant Land, there's a note about flavors of absurdity Alice in Wonderland figures can have for adventure role-playing. The gist I recall is

• purple cat talking nonsense: zany
• purple cat talking nonsense who you suspect has ulterior motives: creepy. 

In Pan's Labyrinth (2006), fairies are creepy. Because mundane human-engineered abominations are equally at the table, and the movie encourages the suspicion that one fictional moral universe contains both worlds, however real they are, however plausible that is. So we may be as nervous about Pan as we might be about any adult-sized stranger in a lawless place taking pains to be alone with a vulnerable child. 

A child entertaining obscure cloven benevolence isn't scary. A child in a war zone and unsure what's real is tense to observe but not Horror. Both true, both child the same child, they may start to color each other.

So -- fairies worked out from the Crime angle could be horrifying. If things are getting too High-Fantastical, I may try losing the plot in some mundane human-engineered abomination.

If obscure cloven benevolence seems cozy, I may want to focus on its cool detachment from the world the PCs act in -- a lack of discrimination. Like R&PL says for Alice in Wonderland roleplay, make the punishment never suits the offense. 

The difference though, between creepy unfair Humpty Dumpty judgement and creepy unfair fairy judgement may be that fairy judgement is old and we are separated from it by time as like a memory. There are laws. But the codices are lost to us and the courts are long out of session. 

The Rules

To start 

• PCs starting as a Changeling are in the process of realizing they are one.
  
  Calm is 0 and the PC is as if randomly Garbled
  
  (50-50 when they speak to a new NPC that they can be well understood -- the PC should know this is a possibility but the throw itself should be secret)
  
  until they steal an object that is precious to someone that if lost would cause that person to despair
  
  (an engagement ring, a child's pet, candy from a baby, etc.)
  
  Will lose 1 Toughness a day until they steal that kind of thing
  
  Cannot activate any supernatural abilities until they steal that kind of thing

Supernatural Abilities

• Regain Toughness only by stealing precious things.
• Precognitive Dreams - visions, gets to see associated cards from the Horror's deck
• Weakness to Iron - iron will harm the Fae as easily as it would a human
• Invulnerability - cannot be reduced below 0 Toughness by ordinary means
• Sense Despair
• Hoard - stolen precious things must be kept in a Hoard. Items removed from the Hoard will damage the PC, treat each removed item as one normal attack.

Fae Form

• size of a child, fur or feathers, enormous cat's-eyes, huge mouth, can speak without moving lips, weird pointed baby teeth, (cute or cartoon aspects are disturbing in the right light) throw calm checks around it
• selective invisibility: as a spell can become invisible to all but the wicked or the pure of heart
• any other acquired supernatural abilities (see downtime)

Downtime

• 1-40 Toughness +1. This benefit can be gained twice, Max 6. After that, no ability is gained on this Throw.
• 41-61 Perception +1. This benefit can be gained 3 times, Max 6. After that, no ability is gained on this Throw.
• 72-82 Appeal +1. This benefit can be gained twice, Max 6. After that, no ability is gained on this Throw.
• 83-94 Agility +1. This benefit can be gained 5 times, Max 7. After that, no ability is gained on this Throw.
• 95 Gain the ability to Lie as the necromantic spell, at an Intensity equal to Appeal. When used, the changeling must check Calm vs an Intensity of 6 or lose a point of Calm. If this is thrown a second time, no ability is gained.
• 96-00 Results in no ability being gained unless all other abilities on the table have been gained up to the maximum benefit. If they are, then:
• 96, 97 Gain the ability to Curse (as a spell, PC can throw on the Curses table in the back of the book). When used the changeling must check Calm vs an Intensity of 6 or lose a point of Calm. The changeling's maximum number of Cursed individuals is equal to their Calm. If this is thrown a second time, no ability is gained.
• 98 Animal Enslavement ability. The changeling must check Calm vs the creature’s Appeal to use this ability or lose a point of Calm.
• 99 Shadow Movement. The changeling must check Calm vs an Intensity of 6 or lose a point of Calm when using this ability. If this is thrown a second time, no ability is gained.
• 100 Transformation. The changeling must check Calm vs an Intensity of 6 or lose a point of Calm when using this ability. If this is thrown a second time, no ability is gained.

Mike Mignola, The Chained Coffin