Café de Nuit

I recently played a few of the old Silent Hill games on PS 2 and got thinking about running a Silent Hill style horror scenario. However, I'm not sure how well the surreal/psychological horror of Silent Hill would work with Ravenloft. On the other hand, there are the Lovecraftian domain of Bluetspur ...

As much as I like the Ravenloft setting, I have noticed that a fair amount of character and place names are really silly for anyone who has studied French, German, or Russian. Although standard D&D fantasy settings have random character and place names, they generally aren't based on real world ...

I've been thinking lately about adding more surreal / psychological horror in a Ravenloft campaign. As it stands, most of the horror of Ravenloft is very 'Gothic', based directly on various 19th century horror novels (and their film derivatives). There are domains like Blautspur, which features ...

Last night I had a nightmare.

I was commuting from work and had to switch trains. However, the station seemed huge...much more towering and labyrinthine than I remembered it; I had to run down several stories of stairs to get to the platform. I ended up getting to the platform just as the train was ...

For me, it was the 2e hardcovers Domains of Dread . I saw it on the shelf at the local B. Daltons Bookstore and decided to give it a glance. Before reading the book, I had thought that Ravenloft was just "D&D with more zombies and vampires". The biggest irony was I never was much of a gothic horror ...

I tend to avoid sexual situations in my games. Not because I'm prudish and "puritanical", but because I have yet to see a sexual situation in a game that didn't devolve into innapropriate comments and/or jokes. So when such situations come up in a game, I always have the characters go to the bedroom ...

I find Ravenloft, and horror games in particular, only work if the players are willing to play along. I've played with groups that really got into the gothic atmosphere and really had a good time with the game, with other gamers I've found the game fell flat.

Although I never had players feel ...

Neat! A little strange, but I suppose that it's the name of the game. It's certainly different than what I thought of when read the thread title. The way magic and technology is mixed, makes a lot more sense for Ravenloft than a "pure" cyberpunk domain. I would be interested in reading about some of ...

IME, making madness in a game too realistic is a bad move. Some topics -- rape, child abuse, mental illness -- can cause real distress in players who've dealt with these things IRL, in themselves or their loved ones. And even discounting that possibility, truly realistic insanity in PCs seldom ...

As someone who has an interest in psychology, I have always had somewhat of a problem with most RPG madness systems. Mainly - they all assume that one can develop pyschological disorders such as multiple personalities and schizophrenia from fear and horror alone.

In psychology and psychiatry ...

Differs, but mostly afraid of the known.....(no not the unknown). Hinting at powerful beast, NPC's. That usually works only for the players though.

For most horrific I tend to go for restrained movement/trapped while in a scene of mental or physical brutality.

And hint of being aware of something ...

This question came to my mind recently as I began to think about the different types of the horror genre.

Gothic horror: curses, tragic villains, the supernaturaly, feelings of isolation and helplessness.

Pyschological horror: insanity, questions of identity and reality take center stage ...

how bout this: Have you ever wondered how you would react in the hours past midnight waking up in the middle of the night and having a nearly skeletal corpse slowly rise into view from the side of your bed?

I think about wierd junk like that when I can't sleep for some reason: ( Doesn't help at ...

I was wondering where fellow fraternity members got inspiration for the dark plots and horror appropriate for a Ravenloft game. For me, I get a lot of ideas from television and movies. The old Twilight Zone series of the 1960s have a lot of great ideas for horror (see especially the episodes It's a ...

I've used to suffer from nightmares, and I still do have the occasional nightmare every once and a while. The interesting thing for me is the fact that none of my nightmares involve monsters, dreadful creatures, or any other direct threat - rather it is the surreal and oppressive atmosphere that ...