Darkness and Dread: Anyone have it?

[NeghVar]

Very informative thread!

Thanks!

 

[Desdichado]

Very informative thread!

Thanks!

Indeed! Thanks to all who answered questions, especially in quite a bit of detail!

Although I was unlikely to miss this book anyway given the subject matter (once I found out about it; how did this get such a low profile release, anyway?) I've now confirmed that it has enough material I can use to ensure that I will want to buy it this year.

Now, the only thing we need is to have someone page Mike to pop in and give us some author's insight.

 

[mearls]

Now, the only thing we need is to have someone page Mike to pop in and give us some author's insight.

You rang?

Darkness & Dread was an interesting, but at times frustrating, project. I originally intended it to be a stand alone, complete game, but that couldn't happen in the space I had to work with. For instance, the creatures chapter was supposed to be much longer, and I wanted to do 4 or 5 sample adventures instead of one.

The character classes were a risky choice - I knew that they wouldn't be useful to a lot of people, but for gamers who were new to the concept of dark fantasy they'd prove useful. A character class is a player's window on to the world. Nothing demonstrates the downshift in power to a player more than giving him a character class that isn't necessarily optimized for an adventuring career. Since horror games tend to have high PC fatality rates, I went with the classes to make character creation as fast as possible.

The adventuring vice has the reaction that I pretty much expected, and it mirrors a lot of the reactions to the stuff I've done for FFG: when in doubt, I tend to assume that the reader hasn't done this sort of thing before, whether it's running a planar game or dark fantasy. One of the issues I have with most sections of GM advice is that they focus on higher concepts and ignore practical, simple approaches that can directly influence a game. I call it the foreshadowing problem - a GM's advice section might say "Use foreshadowing to make your adventures cool" but it never actually explains how to do that. It's sort of a given that you know how to think, "OK, I'll have this big villain show up for a scene before mysteriously disappearing." No one ever says exactly how to do that.

The reaction to the advice section is pretty much what I expected - to people who already do this stuff, it's redundant. But, to people who haven't tried horror games before or haven't been happy with how their games have gone, it's very useful stuff. The way I see it, I'd rather design something that provokes a bifurcated reaction rather than one that makes nobody particularly happy. I guess I'd take limited success over universal mediocrity.

When I finished this book, I was intensely unhappy with it. I really wanted another 60 - 90,000 words to play with. I would've added a lot more monsters, a complete pantheon of gods, and a chapter on integrating horror into a standard D&D game.

The most important thing I walked away from this project with was a revelation about marketing. RPG books only show their real value after you've read one nad used it in your game. That takes a while. I think that RPG companies should be more aggressive in getting in-depth information about a release to gamers. I have this sort of marketing philosophy about this - I'd rather that someone who will end up not liking a book not buy it in the first place, and I want people who would like the book to know enough about it to make an informed decision and (hopefully) buy it. I have some ideas on how to do that, and I'm going to try to implement them for the Book of Iron Might, one of my projects for Monte Cook's Malhavoc Press.

 

[Desdichado]

I'd agree on the marketing angle. I'd probably have bought this site unseen at release if I had known about it. As it is, it's out, so I can ask opinions, plus I'm sitting on a cash flow downtime right now, so I'm being a little extra careful on my hobby purchases than I have at times in the past. Ergo, I start threads like this. It's too bad this one wasn't a bit more aggressively marketed. Grim Tales, for instance, I knew all about, because there was a lot of pre-release discussion here on the boards about it.

It's interesting that you had as much additional material planned as you do; any chance of a web enhancement to round some of that off?

 

[Gothmog]

When I finished this book, I was intensely unhappy with it. I really wanted another 60 - 90,000 words to play with. I would've added a lot more monsters, a complete pantheon of gods, and a chapter on integrating horror into a standard D&D game.

I'm going to echo Joshua here, and say PRETTY PLEASE can you get this extra stuff released as a web enhancment? I'd love to see your ideas for integrating horror into a standard game, and how to deal with establishing the dark mood with powerful standard D&D PCs who are anything but helpless (that one has always been a bugaboo for me when I've tried). Possibly also some more ideas for dark pacts- those were a really cool idea, and very well done.