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Message: <blockquote data-quote="demiurge1138" data-source="post: 2713302" data-attributes="member: 7451">D&D drew inspiration from many sources, because there are many different conceptions of "fantasy" that people have. One of these sources are fairy tales. And not just the happy, sanitized Disneyfied versions, of course - real fairy tales are dark. And various nursery bogeys and old wives' tales have made it into D&D, particularly hags (Black Annis, for example, was a hag queen in British lore). About a year ago, I tried to capture that scary story ambience for a neophyte group, and it worked perfectly. The monster was a splinterwaif, a spindly urban fey from the Monster Manual III (I've told at least part of this story before).The players were all relatively new - some of them had played D&D before, but none extensively, and it was only the second session we had. So they were completely unprepared.The party's rogues were trying to pick a wealthy woman's pockets when a child runs into them, panicked and out of breath, screaming that he's being chased by the "Crazy Thorn Man". The rogues think the kid is crazy, and use him as a distraction to pick the woman's pockets while she's paying attention to the kid. Later during the session, the same two characters are sneaking aboard a ship when they hear a faint click-click of nails on wood. And in the gloom, they see the exact same creature that the kid described, hissing about how succulent their sap will be.Their characters were frightened, sure, but so were the players, especially once their weapons proved useless against it. The splinterwaif was eventually killed, but not until after a lot of close calls in cramped corridors. One of my players even had a nightmare about the Crazy Thorn Man.So the splinterwaif was inarguably a success.Inspired by the Crazy Thorn Man, that game, and another game set in rough continuity with it, have encountered an organization called the Brotherhood of Nightmares. The Brotherhood is a coalition of various evil fey, monstrous humanoids or humanoid aberrations all borne from the ill dreams of children, who roam the earth seeking their tasty flesh. After all, who would believe a kid who claimed that the boogeyman crawled out from under his bed and ate his sister? Their works disguised as accidents and the work of more human killers, the Brotherhood slowly erodes the future generations, waiting for the time when dark dreams rule the world.This tactic also allows me a decent excuse to use every wierd humanoid-looking creature in whatever sourcebook I want - nightmares don't follow logic. An individual in the Brotherhood could very well be unique, and could have any sort of awful ability I think sounds good enough to base an encounter around. Invisible except in moonlight? Sure! Bleeds spiders and rats? No problem!(And, although it'd seem improper to get two PDFs in a row, I do really like the EN Bestiaries)Demiurge out.</blockquote>

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