Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Penny's Bookshelf

I am starting a reference shelf. Books and games which are inspirational and useful to the game we are building. I'll go over one book at a time, and encourage anyone else who wishes to bring something to our attention to do the same.

GURPS Horror, 3rd edition: In addition to lots of great advice on horror gaming in general, Ken Hite ncluded a "post-Martian Invasion" campaign setting in this book, in which Martians who survived Earth viruses have set up shop under London and are bio-engineering their guerilla war on humanity above. I intend to incorporate this into a pre-Martian Invasion "Fifth Column" set of antagonists -- Martians who have been lurking in Penny's world for a few years, making minions and plotting. This will give us, in addition to the Martians themselves (who have game stats in many products), Martian-uplifted animals called Marauds, ant-swarm minions called Myrmidons, psychic "ghosts" of humans created when a Martian psychic-blasts someone to death (used by the Martians as guards and alarms) and Martian Ghouls -- vat-grown scavengers and agents which fill the role of zombie minions. All these foes will be written up in True20 and made available to player GMs with story suggestions and GM notes.

Otherwise, the book has some solid tips on creating horror scenarios and the unique challenges of horror RPing. It has some frequently-appearing magic items which I will make up for our True20 toolbox.

3 comments:

Trivia said...

I approve!
Not really sure *what* all resources we have as far as literature goes (Dee's got a better idea), but.
As far as music goes, Jeff Beal -- he made the soundtracks for Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Carnivale etc -- has a lot of music available for listening online. Not download, but still: http://www.jeffbeal.com/Pages/FLIMShome.html
There's some nice stuff in there that might be suitable for the athmosphere we want.

Jason Tondro said...

I wonder if we could somehow find a way to use musical cues in the game. The technical aspects are out of my sphere, but it is tantalizing to think of somehow expanding the immersion and game experience to include music.

Trivia said...

Afaik that's entirely possible, but caters to one specific type of MU*client that might not be available to everyone. Playing it in game, that is.
On the other hand, we could maybe have a library of public domain or otherwise legal music/sound effect snippets and link to them in room descs/views?