NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 8277419" data-attributes="member: 20323">Well, my priority was crafting a well-designed murder mystery. Even though the horror tone/feel was tied up in that, it was a secondary goal. There were little mechanical touches, yes, but mostly it was story/NPC/location crafting, with a dash of advice.Let's see... mechanically the random encounter table started at a d4 but as things got more dangerous (according to specific events called out in the adventure), it escalated during play to a d6, d8, d10, and I think d12 was the max. With higher results being scarier and more more dangerous. So traveling you'd have an encounter with wolves escalating to three worgs giving an ominous prophecy to potentially meeting a character of fable who may or may not be an arcanoloth.Narratively... an example would be discovering that the entire manor population basically was in cahoots on stoning a dwarf NPC to death, and then when the dwarf NPC came back there was a "wrongness" about him. That was a very human touch of horror – the inhumanity of man upon their fellow man. Also the constant threat of hidden monsters (that were dangerous for the low-level PCs) lurking among the population, potentially with hidden minions, built up that horror feel. Also, I really delved into motive – the WHY the villain believes they're justified in their killings – which is really essential for gothic & psychological horror.Advice-wise... the main thing was giving advice on how to handle curses in horror with the existence of remove curse. That became like a half-page writeup that involved a mix of narrative specifics in the adventure (I carefully crafted a "resilient" curse) & general thoughts echoing the original Ravenloft boxed set's discussion of curses, just updated to 5e's spell description.</blockquote>

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