Reference Interest Measurement Thread

Reality, didn't I suffer through that to get here?

 

I'm talking with the Mod of that world-building game I play on another website about possibly porting it over here...dumbed down of course, so its more 'wacky nation-building fun!' and less 'strategy-heavy'. Hopefully I'll have good news on that front (and on my RL problems) that way I can get back into the swing of things here.

 

Yes that was the general idea, sometimes I have good ones. I definitely was not after reality.

 

A friends of mine has an awesome Cthulhuesque horror game in the Gaslight era and is looking for a place to run it. Wondering if he would find a home here and thought . . . why not ask about interest, in the interest thread?

 

A What? In the What era?

I had an interesting idea a mixture of the earth renaissance and Star Wars.... hmm I wonder if it would work?

 

Man I'd play the hell out of that. If I had time. Which I'm not sure I do.

 

You said Gaslight and Cthulhu in the same post, dammit. Now I have no choice but to submit a CS.

Lukes_Apprentice, "Gaslight" is, roughly speaking, a nickname for the era of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper -- early to mid-Victorian times, when most of the streets of London were lit by gas lanterns because electricity had yet to come along. It was, if you will, the embryo of modern Western civilisation. Although it was a period of "reason", there was still a lot of room for myth, horror, and magic in the shadows. Science and magic were, if you will, in the death throes of their struggle, with science holding the upper hand and magic not going down without a serious fight...and fighting dirty. The aristocracy was still powerful; being a knight or a duke still meant something, and the British Empire ruled unchallenged on the waves and consequently across the world. Gaslight can be thought of as either concordant with or just before what's called the "steampunk" mythos, since the technologies we know and take for granted were still in their earliest days. Like I said, you have the combination of gas-powered lanterns in the streets, and yet people still get around in horses and carts. Policing was few and far between; Scotland Yard was still relatively new, and there were massive class distinctions between rich and poor.

"Cthulhuesque" refers to the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, a writer who basically took the overall theme that there are ... things. Horrible, omnipotent things, that lie just beyond the walls of our reality, greater than gods, more destructive than chaos. The only reason they do not obliterate all of our existence in a microsecond is that they sleep. But their sleep is not peaceful, and sometimes a poor unfortunate opens the doors of reality sufficiently to witness them. Madness, if not early death, follows. You can find exemplars of this concept in most of Lovecraft's work, but the most obvious ones are his short-ish stories The Colour Out of Space or At the Mountains of Madness. One of these "elder evils", as they're called, is one that he describes as Cthulhu. There's an RPG system based around this concept -- The Call of Cthulhu -- where a "Total Party Kill" as you call the death of all your players players' characters is not only frequent, but damn near expected. Your characters are always toying with powers beyond their imagination and beyond their sanity - and sanity itself is a dwindling resource in CoC games.

Combine this with the Gaslight era -- and you have a pretty popular setting.

Be warned, as with reading anything by Bram Stoker (like Dracula) Lovecraft comes across as pretty old-fashioned, not to mention racist at times, and the stories are tedious by modern standards. Nonetheless, they're a rich vein for tapping, and most modern horror if not a lot of modern fiction at least makes some reference to Lovecraft's concepts. Probably the most recent and least-disguised effort are the Reapers in the series Mass Effect -- again, invulnerable machine-sort-of-things that eradicate all life from the galaxy every 50,000 years or so. Their overall design -- space krakens -- also gels with most of the descriptions of Lovecraft's horrors, too.

 

Did you just list literally the longest thing Lovecraft wrote as one of his shorter stories?

 

Shhh, I'm trying to send L_A mad. It's all ... part of the plan ...



EDIT: And I didn't say it was one of his shorter stories. I said his stories are short-ish. In comparison, to say, any of the volumes of Crack of Thrones.

 

I suppose that's true, but then, so is freaking Ulysses. Most things are shorter than those behemoths.

Edit: But that's ultimately besides the point - Lovecraft is sort of like his idol Edgar Allan Poe. Even if you're not a horror fan you really owe it to yourself to read a couple of their finest works.*

Spoiler: *

At the Mountains of Madness, The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, The Call of Cthulhu for the fomer, absolutely everything ever for the latter.

 

I also strongly recommend Shadows over Innsmouth. A creepy tale, indeed. And just by the way Herbert West Reanimator might have had a bigger influence on modern zombies than anything from Haiti. The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward is also highly recommended, as being the most twisted supernatural "who-doing-it" of all times. And a little known juwel which he actually wrote as an lector, but it is common knowledge he wrote more than 90 percent of the story is "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" (not sure if it is the right title, as I retranslate it from German back to English). The definite haunted house story if you ask me.

Anyway, I guess I´ll tell my guy that we cannot be considered uninterested It is actually not a total stranger to us. We knew him as TGI also he has given up that username recently. But he has GMed here before, so maybe I can lure him here. Would be quite practical to have all my game on one board

 

I would play. Why don´t you make him post what he got? I think the GDG is open for new submission until you do post your game Draco. I´d like to see what the game will be like.

 

Pickman's Model is Lovecraft doing his best Poe. Well worth reading.

 

Not sure if I can do anything with it, but I just had another random idea pop into my head. What about a game that combines Star Trek and Star Wars (NOT A CROSSOVER)?

And by that I mean this...the exploration part of Trek, but in a Wars setting. I have two versions floating around in my noggin...one where a ship (or group of ships) is exploring a new Galaxy (hyperspace barrier? What hyperspace barrier? ). And the other is set in early Wars history (VERY early) and has the same overall concept. But exploring the early Wars galaxy.

Thoughts? Is this just another idea that I should drop? After all, I'll probably have another one in a week or so.

 

Interested. Just for the record. Never sure if I can join anything nowadays. But Lovecraft is one of my favourite writers of my younger years. So I´d try to do something with it!


And Sky, that one sounds familiar.

 

It does?

EDIT: I mean, its safe to assume SOMEONE would have done something like this before. But I didn't see one like it in the current RPs going.

 

Sounds... a lot like Corellia, actually. So there's probably interest.

 

Ahh...Corellia...yeah, it does sound similar. Except this one will be either in a different galaxy, or at least far enough along for hyperdrives to be 'semi-reliable' means of transit.

 

I believe you can resist Lovecraft when I see it, Fin. Anyway, I put my pal up on the GDG list. Now it´s his job to show up and post his OP and we´ll all know more. I must say I would love to see that one around here . . . would be so much fun to have a real horror game once again.

 

I don't know about su

Hmm that concepts sounds similar to the idea of vampires and other fun, but yet very different. This idea is appropriate for October so it gets a thumbs up for that.

However, I had an idea it is one of those very interesting ideas that really interests me which is space travel and earth. I was thinking it would be fun to be an astronaut going to mars for the first time it would of course be the not to distant future and the idea would be to live on mars and find ways to survive in an "alien" environment in hopes of discovering way to further mans reach into the cosmos. However, this just may be a pipe dream.

 

Yeah, Draco you might be right about that one.

And LA, if done right Lovecraft is much, much more scary than any bloodsucker could ever, ever be. So yeah, we might need a horror game to get us all through the winter, right? And Space and Explorartion have always fascinated me, too. It will just be one hell of a challenge to make such a "slow burning" experience an interesting RPing ground, I´d say. But if you manage to do that, itcould be an amazing game.

 

And LA, if done right Lovecraft is much, much more scary than any bloodsucker could ever, ever be.

I've emphasised the important bit.



EDIT: More generally, maybe this is a topic to slide over to the GDG - doing horror right.

For a masterclass in how toscare the living hell out of people with nothing but words, I give you the first three minutes of the old John Carpenter film The Fog:

 

I stole half my "being scary" tricks for SotS from TheVulture so ironically the part about being scary is not what I am concerned about when it comes to his game. You just need the right group of people to get scared, which is always the tougher call. Horror games are not about writing, but about group composition. You cannot go into a horror movie with a guy who simply is not scared of anything. doesn´t add anything to the fun.

So yeah, maybe GDG stuff. If the game comes up we´ll certainly have room for discussion.

 

Lovecraft, Victorian Age, TheGoodImperial, where do I send my CS?

 

Thinking more on that random exploration idea...an Outbound Flight Mk.2? It could work as long as it is placed pre-Vong War.