Tag: creepy

January 16, 2009

How to start a secret invasion-thing

I saw a bit of John Carpenter’s The Thing last night. My favorite parts of the movie are the tensions that build up around people not knowing if their companions are impostors or not. I thought (because I’m a geek) about how to accomplish this in a RPG. It would be tricky. My best suggestion (which wouldn’t work with certain...

January 12, 2009

Boredom and Undeath

Yesterday, Angela and I went out for brunch and had a chat about the undead. In her game, a minor theme that’s continually crept up has been that undeath is boring. A necromancer had a recreation room for his ghouls (kept in a portable hole, which we stole… filled with ghouls. Yes… the same portable hole that now has an...

October 31, 2008

Happy Halloween

Some random thoughts in honor of Halloween: What looks scary in a fantasy world? We typically think of twisted, non-human visages as scary, but would they be in a world in which goblins, zombies, and such are commonplace? One tool in creating fear is solitariness. When you are alone in a dangerous situation, it tends to be much scarier than...

October 28, 2008

Real Magic Items: creepy magic weapons

Back in the day, everyone wanted Blackrazor, the nasty Stormbringer knock-off from White Plume Mountain. There were two other powerful magic items in that module of comparable power – the trident Wave and the hammer Whelm. Why the Blackrazor love? Some of it might have had to do with its form factor (a sword) and powers (soul-stealing). On the other...

August 13, 2008

Carnival Post: There goes the Zombiehood…

The Undead I don’t use a lot of undead in my games. There are a number of reasons for this. First is the zombie issue. Zombies are among the most commonly used undead, but (I know this is sacriledge among many) I don’t get excited about zombies. Zombie movies? They can be OK, but only if they aren’t about the...

January 9, 2008

Necromancy in the Second Age

Upon death, the spirit of a living thing shatters. Shreds of it stay with the physical remains, becoming the spirit of the corpse (or the spirits of the pieces of it). What happens to the rest varies. In some cases, however, it is known to remain more-or-less intact as a free-floating spirit, or ghost. Other times, the shattering of the...

May 31, 2007

PC is for PsyChopath

The other night, I saw the first episode of Dexter, a TV series on Showtime which is based upon the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter. It was really good, but that isn’t the point of this post. Dexter is about a guy (named Dexter. surprise.) who was adopted at a young age after some sort of traumatic incident. He believes himself...

May 21, 2007

They come for your brain!

On Friday, Jeff asked an all-important question… what the heck is a Bathalian supposed to be? OK. Maybe the question isn’t that world-shattering, but the answer got me thinking. The answer, of course, is that a Bathalian is a non-copyright term used by miniature producers for something that looks an awful lot like a mind flayer. I don’t want to...