I think, and this has a lot to do with the media and books I was raised on, is the Haunted House.
Haunted house scenarios, especially ones with long and tragic backstories are my favorites of any game.
This all goes back to this reoccurring nightmare I used to have that I called "The Very Haunted House". The house was an old Victorian manor complete with spooky attic and sub-basements.
It was haunted by the ghost of an evil old woman that used to torture kids.
This house was based on a few things in real life. The biggest was "Maplecrest Apartments" in my old home town. It used to be an old tuberculosis hospital turned into low-income housing. I delivered newspapers back then and that was on my route. Scary place. The house took more form when I went with my dad to see the Dana Thomas house in Springfield, IL. These nightmares plagued me forever to be honest, and they were not the "whew that was a weird dream" nightmares these were the "oh my god I am going to die in this dream" sort where you wake up afraid and still full of terror. I added details to dream with every movie I saw or book I read including a bathtub full of black water with a rotting corpse that I am sure I got from "Silence of the Lambs".
Oddly enough they stopped about 15 years ago. I had the dream and in it, my wife was standing in the dark attic only now it was bright. She held a mop and had her hair tied up, she looked at me and said "What? I cleaned it." Cheesy as it sounds I think she helped get over whatever fears it represented.
I have since used this house in other adventures I have written. I first used "Cotton Crest" in my Buffy RPG adventure "Under a Cajun Moon". Years later "Oak Crest" made it's debut in "The Haunting of Oakcrest Manor" in the Guidebook to the Duchy of Valnwall Special Edition.
I am considering also doing it again, only this time Willow Crest. Cotton Crest was haunted by demons, Oak Crest by ghosts and other undead. Willow Crest? Extra-dimensional aliens.
So yeah, give me a good haunted house and I can have a blast with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment