Gothic Campaign Setting I'm considering

[Rel]

This thread might more properly belong at our CM Shared World Brainstorming forums but I wanted to get input from those here who are not involved with that little venture.

Kiznit basically laid out how his part of the world was going to have a sort of Gothic-horror feel with Vampires and Werewolves and stuff like that. I thought it was a pretty cool idea. Then last night it got decided that I'm running the next game for our group and that next game is going to be fantasy of some stripe.

I may throw out some other setting ideas for consideration but right now I'm kind of grooving on this Gothic horror deal and want to see where it takes me. Here's what I've got so far:

I'm thinking that there is this central struggle between Light and Dark that is ongoing. Obviously, given the nature of the setting, dark is currently winning. WAY back in the day, Light laid the smackdown on Dark and pushed Dark into the far corners of the world. And for a long time Light did a pretty good job of keeping Dark on its heels.

The trick is that Light was represented by the "True God". Unlike the Lesser ("Pagan"?) Gods, the God of Light didn't grant followers any powers. The God of Light was very meta, simply holding the promise that his ascendancy would hold the Dark at bay.

But the Lesser Gods held the promise of personal power, and that has a way of corrupting the minds of men. Gradually, over the centuries, the Lesser Gods began to chip away at the edges of civilization and then fragment it entirely. The lands of the God of Light held the promise of enlightenment and technology. But what use is a gun that you can fire a couple times a minute when faced with an enemy who hurls bolts of fire every few seconds? Thus, over time, the people lost the faith.

Enter Darkness...

Now The Vampire has risen in the east and every year the Dark creeps across the land. Literally. A permanent cloud hangs over the east and casts a shroud over everything there. Crops die and people starve. The Vampire is said to suck the blood of those who stand up to him and their Ghosts are added to his army that needs neither light nor food. They are coming and nobody knows if they can be stopped.

So the players get to decide who their characters are. A Van Helsing style crusader for the crumbling Church of Light who wields blade and gun against the evil enemy? A pagan sorcerer who thinks that the Dark can be stopped without the antiquated God of Light? One of the Fey creatures of the forest who have returned with the worship of the Lesser Gods? Maybe even a lieutenant of the Dark who has decided that he wishes to depose The Vampire and remake the east in his own designs?


Thoughts? I'm at the very early beginnings of envisioning what I might do with this so let me hear any ideas you might have regarding this. Oh and I'm pretty certain I'll be running this with Savage Worlds.

 

[Janx]

This thread might more properly belong at our CM Shared World Brainstorming forums but I wanted to get input from those here who are not involved with that little venture.

Kiznit basically laid out how his part of the world was going to have a sort of Gothic-horror feel with Vampires and Werewolves and stuff like that. I thought it was a pretty cool idea. Then last night it got decided that I'm running the next game for our group and that next game is going to be fantasy of some stripe.

I may throw out some other setting ideas for consideration but right now I'm kind of grooving on this Gothic horror deal and want to see where it takes me. Here's what I've got so far:

I'm thinking that there is this central struggle between Light and Dark that is ongoing. Obviously, given the nature of the setting, dark is currently winning. WAY back in the day, Light laid the smackdown on Dark and pushed Dark into the far corners of the world. And for a long time Light did a pretty good job of keeping Dark on its heels.

The trick is that Light was represented by the "True God". Unlike the Lesser ("Pagan"?) Gods, the God of Light didn't grant followers any powers. The God of Light was very meta, simply holding the promise that his ascendancy would hold the Dark at bay.

But the Lesser Gods held the promise of personal power, and that has a way of corrupting the minds of men. Gradually, over the centuries, the Lesser Gods began to chip away at the edges of civilization and then fragment it entirely. The lands of the God of Light held the promise of enlightenment and technology. But what use is a gun that you can fire a couple times a minute when faced with an enemy who hurls bolts of fire every few seconds? Thus, over time, the people lost the faith.

Enter Darkness...

Now The Vampire has risen in the east and every year the Dark creeps across the land. Literally. A permanent cloud hangs over the east and casts a shroud over everything there. Crops die and people starve. The Vampire is said to suck the blood of those who stand up to him and their Ghosts are added to his army that needs neither light nor food. They are coming and nobody knows if they can be stopped.

So the players get to decide who their characters are. A Van Helsing style crusader for the crumbling Church of Light who wields blade and gun against the evil enemy? A pagan sorcerer who thinks that the Dark can be stopped without the antiquated God of Light? One of the Fey creatures of the forest who have returned with the worship of the Lesser Gods? Maybe even a lieutenant of the Dark who has decided that he wishes to depose The Vampire and remake the east in his own designs?


Thoughts? I'm at the very early beginnings of envisioning what I might do with this so let me hear any ideas you might have regarding this. Oh and I'm pretty certain I'll be running this with Savage Worlds.

sounds like a decent setup and explanation for some real world cultures....

But to make it gothic:
rain. It should be raining or overcast all the time The sun should seldom come out, except for very special days or events.

black eye-liner. It's in style to be dark, to match the mood of the world.

You really can't go wrong with black clothing. It's the new white, even in spring.

The good should do good because somebody has to hold back the darkness. Not because it makes you feel good inside.

In a way, the darkness has tainted the world, and everyone's feelings. SO the good are still good, but they feel down.

 

[nedjer]

Very game

As a player I'd like lots of ill omens and creepy stuff like the thread on creepy stuff that's on the front page , , , I should go get the link but the warrior child is poised to decapitate me with a vorpal battleaxe if I don't hand off the computer right now

 

[DM Howard]

Maybe instead of having it that the "Pagan Gods" as you put them not able to overthrow the Dark. Maybe they are not able to overthrow the Dark unless they work together, thus they are divided and cannot conquer the Dark for various reasons.

On top of that, why can the True-God overthrow the dark by himself? (Yet another plot point that could turn interesting.)

 

[Rel]

Maybe instead of having it that the "Pagan Gods" as you put them not able to overthrow the Dark. Maybe they are not able to overthrow the Dark unless they work together, thus they are divided and cannot conquer the Dark for various reasons.

On top of that, why can the True-God overthrow the dark by himself? (Yet another plot point that could turn interesting.)

These are all good questions that are caught up in my brainstorming. I want part of the theme of this campaign to be some exploration of what it means to have faith in something that there are no outward signs of, compared to the directly observable powers of these "Pagan Gods" (that's not a very good term for them but it probably makes it fairly easy to talk about for purposes of this thread).

Also I wanted a monotheistic faith that I can use as the focus of the various crumbling cathedrals I want to include in the setting.

 

[Starman]

These are all good questions that are caught up in my brainstorming. I want part of the theme of this campaign to be some exploration of what it means to have faith in something that there are no outward signs of, compared to the directly observable powers of these "Pagan Gods" (that's not a very good term for them but it probably makes it fairly easy to talk about for purposes of this thread).

Also I wanted a monotheistic faith that I can use as the focus of the various crumbling cathedrals I want to include in the setting.

I would make the god of the monotheistic faith very mysterious with its believers forced to defend it on faith alone.

"Why hasn't God destroyed the Dark?"
"Because...

people lack faith."
he is testing people."
his ways are unknown to mortal ken."​

I would make the pagan gods more visibly powerful and direct, but still mysterious enough that people who don't believe or don't follow them are just dumb. Are they demons? Are they different aspects of the Dark?

 

[kitsune9]

Cool idea Rel!

I do have the Savage Worlds book, but haven't really delved into it yet.

There are probably several concepts that I'd get across to the players for this campaign:

1. If horror is used over and over again, it becomes mundane. Save the vamps, werewolves, and zombies for the end-game encounters. Have most the baddies and minions be ignorant peasants, cultists, murderers, and other truly despecable people.

2. Killing the horrors shouldn't just be tough, but downright difficult. Everyone knows that a silver bullet kills a werewolf? Yeah, but what they don't know is that there must be a special ceremony to be performed during a full-moon that when making those silver bullets infuses them with a power to kill the werewolf. Otherwise, going against werewolves with "normal" silver bullets is like shooting it with tinker toys.

3. The more powerful the magic is, the more corrupting and damning it becomes. Cast a lesser spell and you're good. Cast a powerful spell, you'll have to perform a complex ritual in which you may have to make less-than-moral decisions and risk your own soul, but then you're ready to take on the BBEG vamp.

4. Ignorance and fear are great background stuff. The PC's come to a village and the first thing they should see is the villagers burning some village woman whom they accused of being a witch. The PC's are strangers and therefore immediately suspect. Even if they are heroes who have thwarted an evil, they are just as likely to have pissed off the village elders for bringing the "true evil" upon the village and things were fine before the meddling adventurers showed up. No feast in the heroes honor here. Church authorities have witchhunters who prefer the 1% solution of burning a village to kill the one cultist hiding within. Villagers are quick to accuse their neighbor of witchcraft, curses, etc.

5. It rains a lot. Use the weather to affect the mood of the game. If Savage Worlds doesn't have mechanics on how rain or snow affects encounters, create them and frequently incorporate them. Sunny days should be rare or infrequent. Also, to get the weather on board with the campaign, you can check each day and roll as to how the weather will turn out and tie it to the player characters' ability use fate points/beenies/etc. If the day is sunny, they get full use. If it's cloudy, they are at a disadvantage, if it's downright pouring, they have nothing in their disposal.

6. Make holy ground mean something. Think Sleepy Hollow the movie.

7. Avoid dungeon crawling, but make heavy use of gothic ruins / old chapels / graveyards with mausoleums in autumn covered woods.

8. Bad stuff happens at night. If the PC's are out at night, camping, make full use of being in the dark. The PC's should realize that camping is a bad idea.

9. Madness and panic are common tropes in horror games, but our PC's are heroes, so we'll skip this and go with something else--despair. As the campaign progresses, the more the PC's gain knowledge and realize that the world is truly a dark place. This builds up despair and impairs their effectiveness to fight. The only way to overcome this is through the use of ritualistic magic (which invokes a cost in of itself), or there comes a point where the characters reach a "retirement point" and either become corrupted by the things they've been fighting or commit suicide or some other tragic malady.

10. Seeking special kinds of aid comes with a terrible price. The PC's realize that there is a vampire lord who rules over a particular barony. The PC's go to the foretune teller to seek out a way to discern the vampire's weakness. The fortuneteller grants that aid, but the PC's must give a great deal of their blood in the ritual and once they have the answers, they also learn that each of them are Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hide kind of person because they've been cursed for the knowledge. It's just the way fate works.

Happy Gaming!

 

[Rel]

Those ideas are full of complete awesome.

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...

[sblock]I'm kind of leaning toward a fairly humanocentric world but I want to leave the other races as options (especially if I keep this in our shared worldbuilding project). One race that I was planning to have already been swept under the cloak of darkness is the Dwarves who have retreated deep into the mountains. They have unlocked the secret of "Ghost Steel", weapons that can strike the incorporeal. These will probably be critical to the PC's long term success and survival if they venture far enough into the "darklands" to run into the ghost army of The Vampire.

But the Dwarves are feeling pretty hard done by. Kind of a "Where were you when OUR lands were being destroyed?! Basking in the sunny west! And NOW you want our help!?" There may ultimately be a choice placed upon the characters to steal from or openly attack the Dwarves to get the weapons they feel they need in order to combat the evil of the Darkness.[/sblock]

 

[Shades of Green]

One possibility is to replace the pagan gods with animistic spirits. Sure, the God of Light might promise ultimate salvation, but, unlike him, you can actually see the Dryad near your village with your own eyes, have a meaningful conversation with her and convince/bribe her into giving you a bountiful harvest; the God of Light cannot be seen, can rarely be talked with and doesn't affect your harvest, only promise to beat the Darkness on the very long run.

Same goes to all sorts of fey as well to ancestor spirits.

 

[Rel]

One possibility is to replace the pagan gods with animistic spirits. Sure, the God of Light might promise ultimate salvation, but, unlike him, you can actually see the Dryad near your village with your own eyes, have a meaningful conversation with her and convince/bribe her into giving you a bountiful harvest; the God of Light cannot be seen, can rarely be talked with and doesn't affect your harvest, only promise to beat the Darkness on the very long run.

Same goes to all sorts of fey as well to ancestor spirits.

This is a much better description of what I'm talking about than "Pagan Gods". Thanks very much for that input.