Gothic Campaign Setting I'm considering

[kitsune9]

Those ideas are full of complete awesome.

Thanks! Greatly appreciate the complement.

As to the bit about some of the baddies being difficult to kill...lemme sblock this in the unlikely event that my players drop by...

Okay, Rel's players. Gotta hide something here...

[sblock]

The dwarves do have the means to stop ghosts and maybe some of the other undead; however...

1. The dwarves are cursed themselves. They retreated and were cursed for it. They are depraved, corrupt, and/or vile. There are some "holds" within the mountains where there are "good" dwarves, but most of them lair deep, deep down in the mountain where the weapons are kept.
2. The weapons themselves are quite effective, but it's a dual-edge sword. When the PC's go around wielding undead / horror bane weapons, they realize over time that the weapons bring out a very corrupting influence upon the users. There is no removing the corruption and it just builds over time. The dwarves knew this and locked these weapons away, along with the corrupted dwarves who succumbed.
3. The dwarves hid away, because their secret is they caused it. The rise of darkness and all things vile and horrific were buried in the mountains. The dwarves mined and delved and released the horrors on the world. Now they are all that's left between the truly horrific things in the earth and the surface world. Some evil does creep up and that's why there are werewolves, vampires, and undead. They are hostile to other races as a way to just keep them away.
[/sblock]

 

[Rel]

kitsune9, you're like America's Greatest Untapped Resource (perhaps with the exception of Christina Hendricks)!

[sblock]I'm thinking that the way the Dwarves make Ghost Steel is that the metal is infused with actual ghosts. That's what lets it interact with other ghosts but it also requires that somebody be unrighteously slain in the forging process. Hence the reason for such weapons being inherently evil and gradually warping the person using them.

Also, my friend and muse Kiznit, suggested that for his version of the setting that he might have a floating megadungeon as the focus of the "bad guys". I actually think that is a sort of cool idea. Maybe The Vampire can't really move around and is confined to his buried coffin all the time. So he used a portion of his power to uproot the whole mountain and fly it (very slowly) toward his enemies.[/sblock]

 

[kitsune9]

kitsune9, you're like America's Greatest Untapped Resource (perhaps with the exception of Christina Hendricks)!

I'd agree that Christina Hendricks would beat me anytime.

[sblock] The floating dungeon is a interesting concept as I love a good dungeon crawl, but instead of a floating mountain, why not a cloud with the mountain hidden within? That way, the terrible storm that comes is just a storm (until villagers ended up missing, which just gets passed off as being swept away from the storm).

Another way is the Krull technique in which the dungeon moves from one location to another. That old abandoned chapel is now the entrance to the dungeon, villagers go missing, and after a week or so, a graveyard 30 miles down the road is now the entrance.

[/sblock]


A concept that I also like in Gothic campaigns is tying them to a negative energy plane. The Ravenloft setting was set in the Ethereal plane, but we have our world tied to a negative energy plane, a shadow plane of itself, or some kind of netherworld. We can tie this nether realm physically to the realm that the souls of the departed literally go to some place in the world (similarly to what the dead people were doing in Pirates of the Carribean 3). Adventures are constructed where the player characters may have to journey to such a dead realm in order to get information from a long dead person. Getting there would be one of the most difficult things to do in the campaign. Those who have died and cannot find their way, become undead. If they were vile and wicked in life, they become terrible and evil undead such as ghouls or zombies. If they were good then they become forlorned ghosts or spirits.

 

[Roland55]

Hmm. Consider a brilliant young scientist-acolyte of the God of Light who has possibly just made a breakthrough -- a technical way to interfere or even entirely block the connection between the lesser gods and their arcane followers.

That oughta stir things up.

 

[Stalker0]

Since you are going for darkness as a concept, in addition to the big wall of darkness out there you could make it that any place that has true darkness could contain evil inside.

Basically if there is an area in a city or in the woods that is truely dark...it could be the gateway to allow monsters through or other terrible things. The people constantly tend to the light, for woe to he who encounters true darkness.

 

[Piratecat]

We once ran in panic from a gelatinous cube with a darkness spell cast on it. The most terrifying Call of Cthulhu game I've ever run was one where the monsters were stalking the PCs through the hip-deep water in the sewers, and they didn't know where they were or what they were. My best Dread game had the PCs stalked through an old basement by an ancient, undead crone they could hear but not see.

In other words, horror comes when you can't name or see the thing attacking you. If you can label it, it ceases becoming scary.

Use this. Reskin monsters and concepts to be terrifying, like the brilliant Wulf Ratbane/Grim Tales non-Euclidian monster that was nothing more than a displacer beast that could teleport through angles in walls. Freakin' terrifying.

 

[Rel]

Good points about the horror aspect of the game. For all of my GMing experience, I've never really run that sort of game before. I've had sessions here or there where I wanted things to feel kind of creepy or wrong but I'd say I've only achieved moderate success with that.

I'm considering at some point a crossover where they have to enter the plane of the dead or something like that and might opt to run that as a one-shot Dread game. Give them something to accomplish in that realm and if they knock the tower down then that character gets forcibly ejected from the death plane, perhaps with lingering consequences.

 

[avin]

Take a look at deadlands rules from Deadlands RPG.

 

[Rel]

Take a look at deadlands rules from Deadlands RPG.

I've got those and ran a Deadlands game over the summer. While fun, not exactly the timeframe I'm after. However another Savage Worlds product, Solomon Kane, does seem like it fits the bill and I'm looking into that.