Café de Nuit

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 Lovecraft-inspired Illithids, but I'm more interested in adding something like the surreal horrors of the Silent Hill video games or the film Jacob's Ladder.

Gothic horror seems to be about the sins and corruption of people. Lovecraftian horror is about the inhumanness and 'otherness' of the horrors. I'm looking for something that features the freakish, deformed monsters that you see in games like Silent Hill and themes of madness and illusion vs. reality.

Is there a place for this in Ravenloft? Are there any examples of it in published or fan created materials? Finally, any suggestions or ideas for surreal/psychological horror based adventures?

Well in my third Kaidan adventure - Dark Path, Curse of the Golden Spear: Part 3, I've used the plethora of phobias as the base from locations and horror encounters in that adventure - fear of the dark, fear of closed spaces, fear of spiders, fear of rats, and several others with the goal to touch upon some of the real phobias that people experience, even those by the players themselves. It's almost a cornucopia of phobias.

Where the first adventure had really more Asian/Gothic horror elements, and the second adventure a more tense being chased and hated by the locals kind of fear, the 3 part mini-campaign is an exploration on the different elements of fear and horror.

I see your location as Japan - I'm half Japanese which is the background I used to build Kaidan. This is not the stairway 'kaidan' rather 'Koizumi Yagumo' or 'hyakumonogatari kaidan kai' - Japanese horror. I borrow some aspects of modern 'hora', while most of it is based on 19th century and previous Japanese concepts of horror.

You might find it interesting... (I'd love to hear a critique by someone from Japan on my setting, adventures and supplements!)

Michael

dementlieu is a pyschological horror land IMO, not sure if there are any specfic pyschological horror adventures. But I tend to eschew adventures for the most part sans to mine them for ideas.

Sounds like the Nightmare Lands might be a good fit. They got their own boxed set treatment in later 2nd ed.

I used a bit of this approach in The Devil's Dreams, athough it was more of a classic freaky-family-and-hidden-crime Gothic.

The scenes with the toxic, hallucinogenic Devilshorn Fungus, and the mind-to-mind contact with the intelligent fungoid sojourner were a bit surreal.

The deformed goblins (1HD each, no magic powers at all) looked so freaky that my players assumed they were dealing with demons, and spent half the game terrified of going back into the caves to face them.

Vechor may well be a good starting point. Lots of opportunity there I think.

I think you can easily work issues of mind games and madness/illusion into gothic type stories. Madness and "unexpected" twists/turns seem like common tropes of the genre (unreliable narrators, the protagonist's own inner demons as the monster to be fought, madness brought about by familial decay or inbreeding, for example). I seem to recall a number of Poe stories featuring this sort of thing (Fall of the House of Usher comes to mind), and Robert W. Chamber's King in Yellow seems to thrive on it.

A lot of it's about building suspense by making the players question whether what they're seeing/experiencing is really what is happening behind the scenes. And then bringing them into situations where there is an inherent 'wrongness' to the situation around them- combining aspects of different situations that simply should not be. The creepy yet oddly innocent child who commits terrible evils is an example of this- mixing themes that in an ideal world would never cross. I like this type of horror because you can play on your players nerves even when they have powerful characters- from time to time you can get something that doesn't really threaten their characters but weirds out the players so much they just want to get the heck out of there. A sense of alienation in taking the normal and putting it in an abnormal context.

But yeah, dementlieu, the nightmare lands, or vechor seem like the iconic places for such stories. Depending on how 'spooky' it was, Mordent may also work as it captures the "old skeletons in the closet" theme (as well as ghostly phantasms etc) pretty well.

Sometimes the most frightening thing is not so much a violation by itself, but the reaction of others to it.

This happens a fair bit in survival works. Something aberrant occurs, and you turn to your colleagues... only to find they don't care much about what you're afraid of.

In Lovecraft, it's the fellow townfolk shrugging and going about their business as the bulge-eyed police drag away the outsider. In American gothics, it's the ladies fanning themselves and sipping mint juleps as they ignore the freedman's desperate flight from his pursuers. Even in Erica Jong's "Parachutes and Kisses" the hapless female protagonist fends off the loathsome sexual advances of her sister's fiance and runs to her family - and all the women laugh at her distress, saying "oh, yeah, he tried that with us too, you get used to it."

For me the most vibrant experience was when I was staying with relatives in Taiwan. I was getting ready to go to sleep when I saw the biggest god damn spider in my entire life running across the room. On the ceiling. I went out and got my aunt, who came in and looked up at the monster where it had stopped right above my pillow, and she said "hmmmmmm, I don't THINK it's venomous. You're probably all right..." and then went back to sleep.

I felt like going over to her daughter's bedroom and spending the night there and then telling my aunt "oh yeah, I don't THINK my cousin's pregnant. She probably won't be having an inbred mutant kid..."

(Note: I didn't do this.)

lmao, i don't THINK it's venomous? xD

Sorry for necroing a year-old thread pointlessly, but I'm just amazed nobody mentioned Scaena. Juste's domain is the perfect setting for a mindscrew adventure.

Hazgarn wrote:Sorry for necroing a year-old thread pointlessly, but I'm just amazed nobody mentioned Scaena. Juste's domain is the perfect setting for a mindscrew adventure.

Hey, don't apologize! If you bump a thread with a good contribution, it's not thread necro'ing - it's the right thing to do. It's even preferable to starting your own thread, because then you have all the great ideas in one place instead of two.

And yes, Scaena definitely has the chops for an "adieu, sanity!" adventure...

More on the topic of "wrongness" I have a question for people that have been interested in this longer than me and seem to have read a vast library more than me. (i've probably read nil horror/gothic things. Maybe a few exerbts from school by like Edgar allen poe or something.)

Can you give a few examples of something being "wrong" I have a hard time putting examples or coming with things that are "wrong" or not what they expected.

The book gives examples of vampires all around in this nice Inn, and they are the only humans. Ok i get that but anything else? A child killer, don't want to over use that so i'm left wondering what else other possibilities there are for this?

One example of "wrongness" is the living wall. Walls aren't supposed to be alive, for one. They aren't supposed to actually be undead flesh and arms waiting for victims to engulf victims who get too close hidden under the illusion of normalcy. For a fine example of a living-wall-turned-living-plot-of-land, watch the movie House of Bones. It has its grisly moments, but it relies more on psychological frights and story to build actual horror.

Another that is definitely surreal and psychological is Grave Encounters. A small crew that's as real as a three dollar bill, even a fake, overacting psychic, decides to document a supposedly haunted asylum. Only to discover it really is haunted. It's done in a Blair Witch Project style--basically the POV of the people involved told through video cameras--and drifts between things that could be explained as mass hallucinations and others that have no logical explanation whatsoever. Basically it keeps you questioning if these people truly are going insane, or if the insane dead are toying with them. Stairwells that cut off into ceilings, doors that went outside now leading into areas that didn't exist before, it's a serious mind-play.

Think of a person's understanding of the situation and imagine it as if they are standing on a stool. It might be a wobbly stool sometimes, but that's okay because the stool is still there between them and the floor (or the bite of a noose, if you prefer). "Wrong" is the sort of knowledge that breaks that understanding so completely that you're left (even momentarily) flailing to compensate. Basically someone has come along and kicked that stool out from under you, and you're either going to fall or hang.

A good example would be the movie Dark City. The character starts out with no concrete memories of who he is and as a suspect in a string of murders, searching the titular City for clues about who he is. That's a pretty shaky stool to stand on. But finding out that he doesn't have his memories because would constitute a critical stool failure.

An in-verse example would be a character learning that the past six years of his life have actually taken place on Juste's stage...or possibly being convinced he is merely a fictional construct the darklord invented for his plays, and never actually existed.

(Which, btw, does anyone else picture Juste as the Player from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead?)

The Doppelganger netbook plays around with psychological horror a lot. Heck, doppelgangers play around with psychological horror a lot, in-universe: it's their biggest strategic asset.