Quote from: Aos;517248Hey, misterg, can we get a preview of your appendix n?

Here you go.

Quote from: Silverlion;517247Fortunately my "Gothic Fantasy" has more elements of horror, with combat, heroes and the like. A more "dark and scary" Hammer Films if you will. Or if you will a game setting drawn from Frankenstein, Dracula, and Werewolf stories. Set in a fantastic world so we don't run into "Historical" problems, and can add our own monsters* as well.
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I tend to stick with very hammer style horror for things like Ravenloft myself. Combat is far from unseemly in my games, but for me the funzone is more on the side of investigation and intrigue. Usually the adventures culminate in a combat against the big bad vampire, werebeast or what have you, and there is often a terrifying encounter or two elsewhere, but i dont structure the adventure itself around combat encounters. That isif i am doing something suited for rp heavy play like CoC or Ravenloft. If we are talking zombie apocolypse then combat will take a more central role.

I think where people get tripped up on gothic horror is doing mood amd atmosphere for its own sake (if that makes any sense). And with CoC in particular the issue I see is too rigidly adhering to the lovecraft story format. It is a great game for mystery and investigation, but if you only keep it about the pcs eventually going mad or things imploding, it can be hard to have a cool ongoing campaign. With Ravenloft the problem I have seen is GMs making things to monotone in order to "go gothic". You really need to mix in some other elements to keep the game fresh. Also, in my experience taking horror rpgs too seriously can lead to problems.

Quote from: misterguignol;517250Here you go.

Thanks for the list.

Edit: looking at list now. Some I have read, some I haven't. Dracula, Frankenstein, Jeckyl and Hyde (rosemary's baby is on there and that is probably my favorite horror novel) i like stuff like that because they are all pretty exciting. Some other stuff, like lefanu, i read but just didn't enjoy because I fund it dull or just felt like I was struggling to find the story (this isn't a knock on your list though). With at divider in mind, are there any on the list you would especially recommend or disuade me from? I haven't read the monk or castle otranto because i assume they will bore me. And though I go to the house of the seen gables twice a year here in salem, i have never read the book because i always assumed it was a familily epic/love story that happens to have a curse and some witch trial background elements.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;517279Thanks for the list.

With at divider in mind, are there any on the list you would especially recommend or disuade me from? I haven't read the monk or castle otranto because i assume they will bore me. And though I go to the house of the seen gables twice a year here in salem, i have never read the book because i always assumed it was a familily epic/love story that happens to have a curse and some witch trial background elements.

You actually might like The Castle of Otranto; it's a short novel and has a ton of melodramatic action per page.  It's got a rapid-fire plot with unlikely developments all over the place.

The Monk is similarly littered with action and crazy developments, but some people find the frantic pace of the plot twists a bit much.  Still, I can't see it boring you necessarily.

The one it sounds like you should stay away from is Ann Radcliffe.  Her books are looooong, and are infamous for big stretches where she describes the majesty of nature while nothing happens.

Quote from: misterguignol;517292You actually might like The Castle of Otranto; it's a short novel and has a ton of melodramatic action per page.  It's got a rapid-fire plot with unlikely developments all over the place.

The Monk is similarly littered with action and crazy developments, but some people find the frantic pace of the plot twists a bit much.  Still, I can't see it boring you necessarily.

The one it sounds like you should stay away from is Ann Radcliffe.  Her books are looooong, and are infamous for big stretches where she describes the majesty of nature while nothing happens.

Thanks. Sounds like I have been wise to avoid Radcliffe.

Quote from: RPGPundit;517217I am, but some genres are more pretentious than playable.  The problem that I see emerging here is the type of mentality that you get from the CoC or WFRP - Swine: namely that everyone has to have gimped characters that are all about playing their weaknesses until they get devoured by something they're powerless to do anything about, and they themselves are never heroic, and always morally corrupt in some way, and combat is seen as something unseemly.

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I do think this is a genuine pitfall of the genre and it can happen if people take some of the above suggestions as universal advice. Personally I think horror campaigns work best when the characters are themselves good and heroic like van richten. And I am someone who loves evil campaigns. But in my opinion, playing evil characters just isn't that scary for some reason (one of my chief complaints with games like vampire). Where I think Misterguignol's tools are useful is they provide the possibility of interesting backgrounds that can come up in play and challenge the rest of the party. That is why I said everyone shouldn't have a dark secret. Because then it just becomes an excercize in characterization (again it is kind of the same issue I have with vampire). But if there is always the possibility someone in the party made a pact with the devil or is cursed for some past misdeed, that keep you on your toes and can provide some fodder for adventure if used judiciously.

This is also why I like the Ravenloft powers check system. For the most part it keeps the party relativley heroic, since it both punishes and rewards evil behavior. But it also makes for some interesting session when characters do decide to go down that path. In all my years of playing I have never had more than one character in a given party fail any powers checks.

Pundit, when and if you run horror style campaigns, what approach do you take and what do you avoid?

Quote from: Silverlion;517247Fortunately my "Gothic Fantasy" has more elements of horror, with combat, heroes and the like. A more "dark and scary" Hammer Films if you will. Or if you will a game setting drawn from Frankenstein, Dracula, and Werewolf stories. Set in a fantastic world so we don't run into "Historical" problems, and can add our own monsters* as well.

After all combat was dark and brutal against Dracula, but the characters were heroes (most of them) facing him down.

Don't get me wrong, that's awesome.  I'm complaining about when people want to make Gothic fantasy less Hammer Films' (or even the original Bram Stoker's) Dracula, and more Wuthering Heights.

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Quote from: misterguignol;517250Here you go.

Ah hah.. and speaking of Wuthering Heights, there it is...

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;517302Don't get me wrong, that's awesome.  I'm complaining about when people want to make Gothic fantasy less Hammer Films' (or even the original Bram Stoker's) Dracula, and more Wuthering Heights.

RPGPundit

God forbid people have different play styles than you!  

To make this nice and clear though: what I am making is a toolkit; people can dial in the style and type of Gothicism they want with it, from light touches of Gothic atmosphere to Hammer Horror to full on Romantic dramatics.  

How other people make use of it is no business of mine.

These distinctions are also quite silly; while you fear that the Gothic is pretentious, it seems you haven't read much of it--The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel by most estimates, has more sword-fighting than any Hammer Horror film, for example.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;517295Pundit, when and if you run horror style campaigns, what approach do you take and what do you avoid?

Well, first, there's horror, and then there's "Dark Fantasy", which is the style that Albion is in. For horror, I would use my CoC games as the example. The player characters are usually in a position of being investigators of some kind, either through happenstance, or because they work for some government agency or secret society, or because they're law enforcement or detectives.  The horror is found as a seemingly quirky but average town is revealed to be a cesspool of dark and ancient secrets,  or a murder case turns into a ritual killing spree, or some old indian mounds turn out to hide unspeakable terrors from unknown dimensions.
The player characters should first be investigating the situation, reel from it as they start to discover the stark and terrible truth, and then get to work on figuring out how to KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF IT, even at the cost of their own lives.

For "Dark Fantasy" I would give you the example of my Dark Albion game, and recent events in the English campaign.  You have a party that includes a Cleric who's somewhat cowardly for a paladin of the Unconquered Sun, and a rogue who had been mutated by exposure do primal chaos material and has gone somewhat mad from lengthy ownership of a cursed chaos dagger. The rest of the party are your average good guys: a hard and dirty soldier, a very well-studied and highly moral Oxford Magister, a slightly crazy warrior woman, and a Scots Man.
The group went out into the border regions, in the Pennine mountains near the Wall, to search for a Cleric who had gone missing; they found out he'd gone to Deathfrost mountain, and that he'd gone there because he'd heard about the existence of some ancient Fae evil in that place. They follow him there, find out that the mountain was once, thousands of years ago, the site of a particularly dark elven temple to a god of death, that they had slain on that mountain thousands of human slaves as sacrifices, and that the selfsame (other) Fae had ultimately struck out against the leaders of this cult thinking them too dangerous, and magically entombed them.  They also found the cleric, who had gone mad and froze to death on the mountain, near a very ancient stone building.
A couple of the players, the chaotic rogue and the crazy warrior woman, manage to find a secret tunnel in the stone building leading into the tomb; the others, meanwhile, scared shitless by the magic of the place, are trying to hightail it out of there and go back to warn their lord (Lord Percy), and the Clerical Order, of what they've found here.  The rogue and the warrior woman accidentally break the seal that keeps the dead sleeping, and soon ELEVEN THOUSAND zombies and ghouls are awakening under and on the mountain.  Trapped, the two women flee deeper into the dungeon, while the rest of the group aboveground flees from the 2000 or so surface zombies, down to the tiny village of Dun at the foot of mountain.  Do they keep running, or bemoan their fate while sipping vermouth and reciting bad poetry, or just go existentially mad?
FUCK NO.  They rally the 50 villagers and make an organized retreat to the nearest castle, even though they had already heard that the castle had been recently abandoned due to a horrific massacre caused by the ghosts of a pair of dead lovers.

While they're running, the two ladies in the dungeon end up finding the tomb of Cyris, the Elven Vampire Lord who was high priest of the cult of Duvan'ku, Lord of the City of the Dead.  He is trapped in the tombs, and the only way to get out for him is to have a mortal invite him out of their own free will.  The crazy warrior woman refuses and runs off to keep hiding in the dungeons. The chaos rogue readily accepts, her soul already corrupted, and agrees to work with Cyris to restore the rule of Duvan'ku on earth.  With her help, Cyris revives his Mummy general (while the crazy warrior woman slew his Wight commander, in the process of finding a hiding place) and he leads his 9000-zombie army up to the surface world.

The other PCs get to the haunted castle, they investigate and learn that star-crossed lovers from rival families had consumated their love over the Raven Stone, an ancient Cymri shrine, and were later both slain when the families fought.  After confirming the fortified manor house is haunted by the ghosts of these dead, the PCs head into the forest with some of the peasants to dig up the hastily-buried corpses of the lovers so that the Cleric can give them a proper burial under the Unconquered Sun. While the corspe-exhumation is happening, the first of the hordes of zombies begin to catch up to the PCs. They fight very valiantly to try to hold the line while the peasants take the bodies back, managing to retreat to the keep, and the corpses of the star-crossed lovers are properly sanctified.  The peasants can now safely enter the keep, and the PCs, rather than hiding out there, ride hard north for the Wall, to send out a warning from there with the Wall's signal fires, to Percies and Nevilles alike, of the great army of undead that is forming in the mountains.

That's as far as they've gotten, but as you can see while I don't forbid someone from succumbing to dark forces, or being corrupted in their souls, or being cowardly (even though its particularly unbecoming in a cleric), the message here is HEROISM. The PCs didn't just lie down and die in a fit of ennui over the existential nihilism of life when they were faced with thousands of the walking dead, they made a plan, they organized a retreat, they fought back, they saved the innocents that they found themselves in charge of, and now they're leaving safety to go do their DUTY.
I imagine the next adventure will involve Lord Percy, badly outnumbered and his men terrified, hoping to get help from the Neville family who hate and distrust him and will thus be likely to think it all a trick, or failing that from anyone he can, to try to march out and fight Lord Cyris, trying desperately to kill him before the Fae Vampire can have time to replenish his strengths, build a new temple to Duvan'ku, and become too powerful to be stopped. And of course the PCs being sent in as "specialists" to do whatever the really impossible dirty work might be that's required.

This sort of stuff is, to me, Dark Fantasy.

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The Monk and The Castle of Otranto @ Project Guttenberg.

Free and instant access to 19th century lit, the classics and an ever growing library of pulp sf- reasons why you should buy a kindle.

Quote from: Aos;517308The Monk and The Castle of Otranto @ Project Guttenberg.

Free and instant access to 19th century lit, the classics and an ever growing library of pulp sf- reasons why you should buy a kindle.

I'm definitely seeing more and more Kindles and Nooks in my classroom in place of printed books.  On some level it weirds me out, but that's the shape of the future.  It probably makes sense for English majors especially.

That sounds like an awesome campaign to me pundit. I think the key is you basically expect the pcs to confront the threat heroically but you allow for the possibility of corruption which is cool. Generally this is how I approach horror. As I said, as much as I love evil parties in things like modern crime rpgs, evil parties in a horror campaign just dont work out well for me.

The ennui thing you describe is something I have encountered a lot in vampire cpcampaigns around here, and so I can sympathize with your position (though I have been following misterguignol's blog for some time now and his horror advice all seems pretty cool to me and free of pretention--though he does bring his knowledge of the suibject to the table in a good way). The angst filled vamire thing doesn't have much appeal for me. Characters succuming to temptation or being warped by evil on occassion can be cool, but I tend to dislike games where people are doing little more than using their characters as vessels to voice their own bleak world view (which is how I usually interpet such behavior).

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;517312The ennui thing you describe is something I have encountered a lot in vampire cpcampaigns around here, and so I can sympathize with your position (though I have been following misterguignol's blog for some time now and his horror advice all seems pretty cool to me and free of pretention--though he does bring his knowledge of the suibject to the table in a good way).

First, thank you for your kind words!

Second, I actually can't think of a single Gothic tale that is all about ennui and simply lying down in the face of terror or horror.  I'm not quite sure where that idea came from, to be honest.  I mean, you see it in parodies of the Gothic (Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey springs to mind), but the early Gothics especially are all about heroic action.  

The Castle of Otranto has dungeons, sword-fights between knights, etc.  The Old English Baron has yet more knightly combat and encounters with the undead.  Even Ann Radcliffe's more flowery works have dungeon exploration, encounter in which bandits and assassins must be fended off, and wilderness treks.

Sounds like typical D&D-isms with a specific atmosphere to me.

Quote from: misterguignol;517314First, thank you for your kind words!

Second, I actually can't think of a single Gothic tale that is all about ennui and simply lying down in the face of terror or horror.  I'm not quite sure where that idea came from, to be honest.  I mean, you see it in parodies of the Gothic (Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey springs to mind), but the early Gothics especially are all about heroic action.  at to me.

I blame Anne Rice.