Black science

Mention black magic and what comes to mind is curses, necromancy, blood sacrifice, summoning demons, making pacts with Things From Beyond. All of this is obviously bad and wrong. You can immediately recognise that magic is black because there's never any positive outcome from, eg., raising the dead. A curse is a nefarious thing, even if you're cursing for a good reason. 

I'd like to create a concept of black science. Not just science conducted by illicit means, but science that poisons its goals, offends the gods (if they exist) and generally gets the scientist chased out of town by a pitchfork-wielding mob. Which might turn out to be nothing more than magic with added blinkenlights, but if that's the case then so be it.

Science is often considered to be equal but opposite to magic, particularly in RPGs. If you're talking about black science, you're talking about:

• Re-animation
• Opening portals to the hell dimension
• Mind control
• Mutating victims
• Harvesting organs/fluids
• Killer robots
• Blowing up the moon. (Too specific?)
• Draining energy from intelligent beings
• Planarianism (learning by extracting the brain of someone who knows what you want to know)
• Altering history
• Biowar/chemwar
• Bargaining with evil aliens

(Note: Since assembling this list I've been informed that it's only black science if you don't know what you're doing. If you know exactly what you're doing, it's black engineering.)

There's obviously some cross-over here. You could imagine a guy in a labcoat and butcher's apron trading threats with a guy in a purple robe and butcher's apron over the top of a freshly filled grave. Elizabeth Bathory took blood from her servants to stay young, Alexander Bogdanov took blood from his students. In DC's old Captain Marvel comics, one of the villains was Dr Sivana, who could speak a scientific formula that allowed him to walk through walls.

What does a black scientist want?

Money, power, revenge, respect... the usual gamut. He may also be motivated by a pure but reckless curiosity about things that mankind were obviously Not Meant To Know. A willingness to sacrifice others in pursuit of forbidden knowledge is a given. You don't make a megalomania omelette without breaking a few egos. Black scientists aren't necessarily mad, but they have an intensity that smaller minds can't match.

 

Signs and portents

 

Evidence that there's black science going on should leak out in the form of mass headaches, deformed animal births, mass bird deaths. A hint that someone's messing with radiation and/or ultrasonics. Power drains? Stepford people? MIBs? Mysterious lights at night?

Stepfords could be people who've thrown their ambitions in with the scientist ("Dr Deathbringer is a respected member of our community! His portal to the vampire dimension will bring industry and business back to this town!") or actual smiling zombies ("Dr Deathbringer knows what's right. We should do as he says. Dr Deathbringer knows what's right. We should --"). In the latter case, they could turn into rage zombies if something takes them outside the parameters of their programming.

I like the idea that black science inadvertently summons or even creates Men in Black. Maybe they're observers from elsewhere. Maybe antibodies in a universal immune system. Always enigmatic. Sometimes working for the scientist, sometimes opposing him.

 

Witch marks

 

Lab coats, jacob's ladders, and cackling laughter are a bit on the nose, aren't they? So maybe we don't use those. Wild hair and a tendency to rant is fair game, though. Poor social skills. A general lack of patience for ignorant outsiders.

Question: is this just a reskinned magician? Mmm, possibly. Better question: what kind of game do I intend this for? Probably not off-the-shelf fantasy. Something pulpy? Something post-WWII-cold-war-red-scare-stranger-danger-ish.