Recent content by Paul Farquhar

Yeah, the trouble with being too serious is the seriousness itself becomes a joke. Same is true for excessive grimdark which 2e Ravenloft also suffers from - Warhammer parodies that. The original Ravenloft adventures are very much based on Hammer movies rather than the book. The Strahd romance...

Isn't that a Boston accent? I would think the people in remote coastal spots would talk differently.

As someone who extensively played 1st edition, that’s just the myth. PCs rarely died in my experience unless they did something really stupid. Well designed encounters and sufficient information available about death traps if players looked for it and everyone lives. The reputation for lethality...

I will point out again: horror does not depend on the fear of death. Any action adventure game or story threatens the life of the protagonist, without being horrific. Dying isn’t scary, everyone does it. As for horror, Marvel Comics* does it regularly, superpowered protagonists don’t make it...

Coming back to Innsmouth

So far they haven’t made major changes to non-core species, so I suspect it will still boil down to “you know change self and Hex, and can spy on people with an old fingernail”.

I thought it was just the whole of New England. I mean, this new Domain is Rhode Island isn't it?

Whist I have lots of opinions, 2nd edition Ravenloft not being the original is an easily verifiable fact.

The only “tool” you need in a GM toolbox is being a good storyteller. The original rules about mental illness were replaced because they stigmatised mental illness - something Lovecraft reasonably feared, given that he, like so many others, struggled with mental illness himself. As do many...

Good movie. Actually based on Shadows over Innsmouth. I mean, it might happen in my game, but may seem a bit silly for many players. Were- anything other than than wolf tends to be taken as a joke, and pirates tend not to be taken seriously either. I've never read that one, but the summary...

It's true for koi so it's not a huge stretch. I think sahuagin are like this. Which begs the question "which of D&D's many Deep One copies is swimming towards Innsmouth in the picture?" Kua Toa, Locathah, Skum? Edit: The art is inconsistent for all of these, but the large dorsal fin seems to...

The main theme of Lovecraft is “everything you think you know is wrong”!

Lovecraft is not the narrator. His PTSD protagonist is. There is no 3rd person “voice of God” narrator in anything by Lovecraft, everything is unreliable. All the narrator in Dagon sees is a huge fish man. One of many, judging by the carvings he sees. He later tries to explain it to himself...

I don't think San Francisco counts as a real place.

Dagon is a real world Mesopotamian god though, not a Lovecraft invention. NB, this is an interesting snippet from Wikipedia: To summarise, the deity worshipped in Innsmouth is falsely identified with the real world deity Dagon (who was not actually a fish god) by Obed Marsh and is actually...