In the first part of this three-part series, I reviewed Firestarter, the 2022 adaptation of Stephen King’s 1980 novel. In the second part, I looked at turning the mean characters into characters using Onyx Path Publishing’s Deviant: The Renegades RPG. For the final article, I’m going to talk about The Shop, the antagonist organization in Firestarter, looking at their history and some of the setup for them using Deviant’s rules. Finally, we answer the question of whether you should play this game at your gaming table.
STEPHEN KING’S THE SHOP
Among other traits, Stephen King is known for his underlying shared universe. It’s not overt, but it is there. The recurring elements of that shared universe include The Shop, an evil government organization. Featured or mentioned in Firestarter, Firestarter: Rekindled, Golden Years, The Lawnmower Man, The Tommyknockers, The Stand, The Langoliers, and The Mist, this group is a dark branch of the government. The Shop is an organization designed to defend the position of America with policies as ill-conceived as an army trying to win hearts and minds while conducting zippo raids and massacring civilians. In Firestarter, The Shop executed the plan that resulted in the title character’s powers before murdering and kidnapping everyone in her vicinity in the hope of manipulating the all-powerful eight year old.
Charlie McGee’s parents met after The Shop drugged them with Lot Six, a drug granting those that survived it minor telekinetic powers, which magnified in their daughter. After those powers manifested, The Shop became obsessed with abducting Charlie to weaponize her. Their schemes ranged from kidnapping to murder to subterfuge to worse. All failed, leaving only an angry eight year old with a burning desire to avenge those wrongs done to her.
While the ending of Firestarter (1980) sets flame to the greater part of The Shop by burning the headquarters and exposing this secret organization to the wider world, The Shop appeared in a few more stories afterwords. However, the concept of The Shop seems to have fallen out of use after 1991’s Golden Years. It’s last unofficial mention was in the King-inspired Firestarter sequel, Firestarter: Rekindled in 2002. King’s spiritual successor to Firestarter, 2019’s The Institute, features an evil agency, but it’s not The Shop, instead opting for a new, less American-centric group.
As antagonists, The Shop is the perfect opponent for a roleplaying party of nuclear children. The Shop enjoys the unlimited resources and support of the government, as well as the implications that it’s a part of the bureaucratic monstrosity that authorized Native American policies including forced sterilization, the contamination of the water in Flint, Michigan, and many more legislative horrors that destroyed lives. This bureaucracy offers the faceless, unending antagonists every GM wants to employee to give the enemy narrative purpose combined with believable motivations.
CONSPIRACIES
In Deviant, all of the evil organizations, cults, and governments are known as conspiracies, and they’re built with a ruleset akin to character creation. The campaign’s threat level determines how powerful your characters are and how dangerous the conspiracy is. In this case, The Shop is meant to be serious, emotionless, deadly, and worldwide. The rules help to build the organization, but Stephen King’s work covers most of the important pieces.
What’s more important are the conspiracy’s actions, the rules that help the Storyteller to do more rolling than dictation. As an organization, they’ll surveil the renegades, work between encounters, coerce PCs, NPCs, and touchstones, fight their targets, and, possibly, have conflicts outside of them versus the renegades.
As an added bonus, Deviant: The Renegades has a variety of sample conspiracies and NPCs to help flesh out The Shop. There’s more than enough material here to make The Shop a force for bureaucratic evil.
WILL THIS SPARK YOUR GAMING TABLE’S INTEREST?
For the purposes of this article, I’ve focused on Onyx Path Publishing’s Deviant: The Renegades as an engine for a Firestarter homage. There’s a lot of tabletop fun to mine here. I failed to mention another source of support for a Firestarter homage, World of Darkness: Innocents. While this book is for a prior addition, it’s worth a solid review for a superpowered kids campaign. It provides the Storyteller with thoughts and options to help address the concepts and physical differences when children fight adults. There’s emotional guidance an adventure options to pull from the novel. If this type of campaign speaks to you, it’s the companion piece for it.
By design, I’ve left out many aspects of Deviant out of this article. These options range as wide as a grimdark Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a deadly X-Men, a sinister Robocop, and more horrors. Instead, I’m looking at the game through a narrow focus, bending all of its splendid rules to one novel from 1980.
As such, will Stephen King’s Firestarter by way of Deviant: The Renegades be right for your gaming table? It depends if playing with the Storytelling System as hunted, scarred, superpowered children running from the horrors of an exploitative government is going to electrify the table. If long form stories of loss, fear, fleeing, and lashing out and fighting back appeal, then I highly recommend grabbing Onyx Path Publishing’s Deviant: The Renegades developing a conspiracy with plans to make psychic commandos.
Egg Embry participates in the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, Noble Knight Games’ Affiliate Program, and is an Amazon Associate. These programs provide advertising fees by linking to DriveThruRPG, Noble Knight Games, and Amazon.
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