Candid thoughts on pixels, polyhedrons, and paper.
I’ve been running a lot of horror in my game lately, mainly due to the fact that my current homebrew campaign is a 4th edition rendition of 2e Ravenloft with a touch of my personal flavor.
Sure almost every homebrew I’ve ever created has had a lot of horror elements in it, whether it was rife with undead or a vampire posing as the main antagonist, but never before have I created (or in this case used) a world where everything is dark.
We are six sessions in right now and while my players and myself are definitely highly enjoying it, I cant help myself from picking my own work apart already. One thing I’m always trying to do is analyze my own GM’ing habits to then self prescribe a way to improve them. So I thought I should share with you some of my follies and triumphs in running the campaign so far – bear in mind this is definitely an art form I’m very new to but I’ll try and share my shiniest pearls of wisdom.
While when you think about a horror campaign you often think of writhing zombies, skeletons, vampire bats, werewolves and all that sort of thing, but what you don’t often ponder is “how often should these things will be showing up?” The photo montage of awesomeness in your mind shouldn’t be an instant replay of every game session.
These are climactic moments in your game, and if every time your players turn around they are faced with something extremely gorey, depraved or outright horrifying they’ll soon grow numb to your ‘shock effect’. One thing I learned in desktop publishing that I believe applies to all facets of life is the phrase “all show is no show”.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” ~ H.P. Lovecraft
First go read “Burning down the tavern” over on @rjschwalb’s blog to understand where I’m stealing this concept from. Go on….go. Okay now that we’re on the same page allow me to introduce the cast of my Monday night one shot coming up next week. I had originally planned to have a good friend of mine (@danjbailey) who’s never played D&D come over for a night of beers and some role playing boot camp but after realizing I’d only have two players I put some calls out.
I only expected maybe 3 of the 6 people i contacted to respond with a possible yes but instead I got all of them. Turns out when people don’t get their D&D fix they pull out all the stops to get together for a game – either that or my exquisite DM’ing skills are just that alluring (just kidding, I’m terrible).
Anyway, I decided to ditch the tavern for the first time in a while and opt for something more predetermined on my behalf and chosen to go for the ‘band of traveling entertainers’ option. Hey, anything beats that awkward “uh yeah so we’re all in a tavern, we have drinks and become friends – can we kill stuff now?” I’m pretty excited about running this one shot because it’s going to be the first one shot I’ve done in a long while and because of the following:
I’ve come up with a light background and personality trait or two for each character to help in adding flavor and since the players will all have the option to pick whichever character they want I think they are unique enough everyone should feel they have a specific role and there won’t be any squabbling over who get’s to play who. Since this is a first time for at least one of the players
