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A Mechanical System for Stress, Fear, and Terror.

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"The youth are often warned of the great physical dangers of adventuring, but I often find that the mental toll is just costly.  Poor Blake.  They still wake up screaming and it's been five years..." ~ Sister Abigail, of Our Lady of the Light Parish.  As one would expect with the name of this blog, I'm a big fan of adding horror elements to my fantasy role-playing games.   I'm especially a fan of gothic horror   While the weird and the cosmic have their place, there's just something about the characteristic oppressive gloom that just gets to me. This system is designed to invoke that feeling with a relatively simple method, while also reaffirming an important tenant to the OSR; adventuring should be dangerous.   This was largely inspired by the game Darkest Dungeon, which I feel had a wonderful mechanical system for fear and stress.   Part I: Fear This is done with the accumulation of Fear.   Each point of Fear imposes a -1 penalty to attack rolls, saving thr
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So, About Vampires....

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My first real post on this blog, almost a year after I made it... And just in time for Halloween.   I love vampires, but I'm not a fan of the vampire as it's presented in Dungeons & Dragons.    It's a fairly decent representation of a specific sort of a vampire, specifically Bram Stoker's Dracula (and likely, even more specifically Bela Lugosi's portrayal).  While that's an iconic vision, vampires have evolved past that interruption;  we now have the literary works like those Anne Rice, other role-playing games like Vampire: the Masquerade, and even in Japanese media like Vampire Hunter D and Castlevania.  Then there's the infamous mechanic of energy drain. I don't like it.  At all.   For one, it doesn't feel something all that vampiric. I suppose if you think hard enough, you could make the argument that it's the act of a vampire draining their victims blood but it still feels sort of wrong. I also feel that it's largely an unfair mecha
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Well, I made this blog a year ago and forgot about it. It was originally intended to post stuff for my personal OSR game, Heroism & Horror, which was going to be a RPG of gothic horror and heroic fantasy....  But I've since fallen in love with Old School Essentials , so the rules I'm going to be writing will largely be for that game. Let's hope I don't forget about it.
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