I definitely think that d6, TN 5 is the way to go for horror. Also, I agree that WoD has huge problems and that people should be able to play monsters or main character humans. One of the projects I have on the back burner is much along those lines. And while I have a fair bit more of it literally on some scratch paper in my room, you might be able to go somewhere with the stuff that's nearly formatted:
SR4: World of Darkness
A Complete Overhaul of World of Darkness material using SR4 rules.
The World of Darkness is Overcrowded
You can't have been Rasputin, our guys were Rasputin!
Let's face it: the World of Darkness is cluttered. oWoD has way too many secret groups and supernaturals, and the nWoD is no better. With each group having their own sub-groups and politics and multiple groups of antagonist supernaturals it gets explosively, exponentially more complicated with the addition of every book, and no one knows how it works. That's not good for a political game. The players need to know at least enough of what's going on that they can advance agendas and make plans – otherwise there aren't any political maneuverings; it all devolves rapidly into hack-n-slash or just plain slash.
The concept is that you are a classic Universal Studios Monster and you engage in narrative driven dramatic role playing of both horror and intrigue. This is essentially impossible when there are too many world running conspiracies to keep track of or when people are going all Dragon Ball Z on things right next to you.
So we're paring things down. A lot. We don't have, need, or even want a bajillion clans of vampires, or fifteen tribes of werewolves. There
should be few enough flavors of things that all the players can remember what the differences between them are. Ideally, people should be able to play whatever supernatural guys they want, sort of like the
League of Extraordinary Gentleman, in practice you have to put explicit limitations on what is part of the story or things get all weird. Like with Martian invasions and stuff. A story that doesn't have specific exclusions does not truly have any specific inclusions. It's not really a story at all, it's a mess.
It is important to note that you can't take everything from myth and legend and cram it into a story. I'm not saying that your story will be completely incoherent, although of course it will be. I'm saying that you are literally incapable of doing that.
The Vampire Book is an encyclopedia of just vampire lore from various cultures and it is literally
over nine hundred pages long. And we're not talking about character backgrounds or rules text or any of the other crap that we know eats up word count like you wouldn't believe. We're talking about just a bare list of facts by mythical origin. So it is imperative not only that you acknowledge that you're going to have to cut things down to a manageable amount, but also that you establish specifically what is off limits and what's fair game.
A Life in Horror: The Good and The Bad
“
Interesting fact: The Final Girl trope emerged shortly after young women became a major component of horror movie attendees.”
Life in the World of Darkness is actually pretty horrible, and extremely dangerous. Life in the World of Darkness is life in a horror movie. Or rather, it is a world where all the horror movies are real. This means that body counts are extremely high, and it is very difficult to get help. This is good news if you happen to be a vampire, but really bad for anyone looking for a life of vaguely normal properties. Here are some important things to remember:
- The Police are no help at all. Heavily infiltrated by cultists and secret societies, the police in the World of Darkness are astoundingly ineffective. Sure they will occasionally bring down a killer, but the vast majority of crimes go unsolved. Many crimes don't even get investigated, especially if something supernatural is afoot.
- Telecommunications are Shoddy Sat Phones aren't available in the World of Darkness. Cellphone coverage cuts out constantly at inopportune moments. Regular telecommunication wires go down frequently and are out for days at a time. The inability to get a call out of a building or town isn't unusual, that kind of thing happens a lot in the World of Darkness.
- People Don't Travel Much It's not weird for people to not know what goes on in the next town over in the World of Darkness. Things are just more dangerous, and people keep to themselves more.
Keep this in mind when you're planning your nights in the World of Darkness. Life is less connected to other life in the World of Darkness and it is
much easier for dangerous elements to thrive in such an environment.
People in Horror: Extras and Luminaries
“
Do not run upstairs! There is no exit upstairs!”
Remember that in horror movies there are a lot of people who serve no real purpose save to be eaten by the monsters. We call them Extras even if they happen to get some lines. These people may be strong, or smart, or beautiful, but ultimately they are doomed. If they get bitten by a zombie they will turn into one of the shambling hordes that our heroes must eventually chop through with a chain saw. They will not get cured and will not turn into leaders of the walking dead. Game mechanically, these people have no Edge score. If they turn into a supernatural creature of some kind they will become a
Spawn. These hapless victims will not become the next Dracula, they will always be the horde vampires in
From Dusk til Dawn. They will not become Shelly Winters or Sheila, they will join the hordes of deadites and get cleaved through with fire.
On the other side of the coin, there are people in the horror genre who rise to the occasion. Whether they are introduced as bad ass adventurers like Van Helsing or Rick O'Connell, or are “normal people” who rise to the occasion like Meg Penny or Ash, these people have a certain spark of bad assery in them regardless of what they happen to be doing. They are
Luminaries, and they have Edge. If they become Supernaturals they become the real deal. They may turn evil but they will still have lines and character development.
This is why characters will occasionally fight their way through a horde of zombies (who are of course
all ex-humans) just to try to get a cure for one woman who happens to have been turned into a zombie. It isn't that they've completely lost perspective, it's that the transformation into a monster is a one way trip for absolutely everyone except a reasonably small number of luminaries. You actually can “save” Alice or Sheila if they get transformed into the living dead. There's literally nothing you can do for the rest of the people except shoot them in the face.
The Four Worlds
“
Things are crawling in all over the place these days.”
A very common trope in horror is the inclusion of additional worlds that are full of terror and danger. This is very useful, since of course having an extra world around allows you to fit things into the narrative that would be otherwise very difficult to fit into the Earth. Demon armies, forgotten cities, and strange and deadly plants can be piled to the sky and beyond without otherwise upsetting the world provided that they were never in the world in the first place. Furthermore, the idea that monsters can come in sideways is by itself a wonderfully useful notion for the horror genre, because it severely undermines the concept of safety in a fortress or locked room.
That being said, it is also true that there are a lot of alternate worlds to be had in various stories. Too
many alternate worlds to be anything vaguely approaching something workable. And so it is that
- The Dark Reflection The best rendition of the Dark Reflection is probably in Silent Hill. It's a world very much like our own but scoured with demonic powers. Ash falls from the sky like rain and everything looks abandoned or scorched. Demons prowl the Dark Reflection.
- The Gloom The best rendition of the Gloom is of course in Nightwatch, which even calls the place that. It's a cold and oppressive world where darkness presses insistently upon the light and heat of travelers. Powers of death leak in from every crevice and extinguish fires and the lives of small animals. Blood hungering insects and ghosts scour the Gloom.
- The Wilds Think of a combination of the deadly dreamworlds of Nightmare on Elm Street and the fantastic realms of Narnia. This is where dreams and fairies go, but since this is the World of Darkness the dreams are often as not inspired by Freddy and the fairies are more likely to be Warwick Davis than Tumnus.
Basic Mechanics
When you perform an action, you roll a pile of d6s called a
dicepool. Dice which come up as a 5 or 6 are
hits, and dice which come up as 1s are
botches. A task will normally require a number of hits to succeed equal to the
Threshold, and any hits gained in addition to that are
Net Hits. If half the dice come up botches, then you get a Botch Effect, and if you get half or more botches
and no hits that's a
Critical Botch. If you get 4 or more net hits, you get a
Critical Success. This basic terminology will be most familiar to those who have played Shadowrun, but it is really not much different from the Storytelling System (save that it uses d6s rather than d10s).
Dicepools: Your dicepool is generally speaking Attribute + Skill + Equipment. If you are using Magic, you will often be able to add Discipline to that as well. As such, it is expected that supernatural critters will roll more dice on actions that their powers apply to than normal humans do.
Basic Attributes: Physical, Mental, and Social
- Physical Attributes:
- Strength
- Agility
Mental Attributes
- Intuition
- Logic
Social Attributes
- Charisma
- Willpower
- Why no Body or Reaction? Those familiar with the SR4 system will be quick to note that the attributes of Body and Reaction have been omitted. That is not an accident. Those attributes are used by almost no skills and primarily exist to add extra granularity to combat. Combat is hopefully not the point of most World of Darkness games, and in any case the granularity of “normal humans” in combat isn't even especially desirable. Folding Body into Strength and Reaction into Agility makes for a simpler system while losing relatively little. After all, granularity is being added back into the system with the physical disciplines that are in the hands of many player characters.
Special Attributes: Edge, Magic, Power
Edge in WoD is structurally similar to Edge in SR4. You can spend it to reroll dice that fail or to purchase a number of dice equal to your Edge attribute to improve any test. Edge refreshes between sessions.
Power in WoD is a parallel attribute similar to Edge. Rather than being spent on any test, Power is spent to activate specific supernatural abilities that a character might have. Power by itself doesn't do anything and does not refresh. Characters will have things to do with their Power and ways to refresh it if they are a supernatural creature.
- For example: Genevra is a vampire with the discipline of Celerity. As a vampire, she can spend Power points to increase her Strength for a scene. In addition, she can spend a Power point to take extra actions during a scene with her Celerity discipline. Because she is a vampire, she can refresh her power points by drinking blood from other people through their necks.
Magic in WoD functions much as it does in SR4. When sorcerous powers are employed, one uses the Magic attribute to determine the base dice pool. All supernatural creatures have a Magic of at least 1.
Grade When a character's powers increase they may get a special attribute called
grade. This works similarly to SR4 Initiation Grades, save that Grade is added to the limits of every attribute, basic and special (including Power).
The Playable Types
The Universal Monsters have a lot of stuff in there which is not really appropriate. Sure, Lon Chaney is full of awesome and I have no problem watching his movies, but neither the Phantom of the Opera nor the Hunchback of Notre Dame is especially supernatural. They are both just really creepy guys. On the other end of the spectrum, the existence of space aliens really harms the whole eldritch intrigue thing. So while
This Island Earth is a good movie and part of the official pantheon, the Metalunans and Zagons are not going to be part of this. At all.
Which leaves Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Gillman, the Mummy, and the Wolfman – who all appear in the classic
The Monster Squad, and the Evil Wizard, the Invisible Man and the Mole Man who don't. It is of note however that Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, and the Invisible Man all appear in the mandatory movie
Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and there is of course Evil Wizard and Mummy in the substantially less mandatory
Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy. It seems clear that life would go on without Mole Men; but
what heck?
- Vampires
An eternity of melancholy and betrayal is, after all, an eternity.
The Vampire is a rockstar of the living dead. They drink blood, live forever, and look great in black. Vampires are emotionally attenuated individuals who have to consume metaphorical life in the form of actual human blood. They are parasites whose very existence is a powerful metaphor for the consumptive and conflict-torn nature of the world.
Exemplars: Dracula. Did we mention Dracula? I mean sure, we can talk about the vampires from Blade or Buffy, and we will even. But all Vampire mythos in the modern world always comes back to Dracula, because he is that awesome.
- Prometheans
Once created, a work has a life of its own.
A Promethean is an artificial person. Created by unwise science, magic, or both, each Promethean is a race of one. They have no peers and no possibility of children. Every Promethean is created knowing that their entire people dies with them. It is a lonely and frightening existence.
Exemplars: Frankenstein's Monster, Rotwang's Robot, Loew's Golem
- Lycanthropes
Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night...
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright
A Lycanthrope is someone who is cursed to transform into a rampaging beast when the moon is full or they get excited. There is plenty of mythological basis for shapeshifters who are born with the ability to turn into animals or who have attained the magic powers to do so to protect mankind, but they aren't normally figures from horror stories, and have no place in the World of Darkness.
Being a Lycanthrope means that you are a danger to people you love and the furniture around you. You can unleash the beast to rip things to pieces, but lycanthropy is a curse and it is not generally very fun.
Exemplars: John Talbot, Irena Dubrovna, Yuki Sohma
- Witches
Bubble Bubble.
Witches are people who have learned Magic. In a horror setting, magic is in almost all cases bad. The genre is pretty light on Glinda the Goods and Merlins. Magicians are generally vindictive cackling gypsies, satanic sorcerers, mysterious strangers, and a myriad of other titles both hackneyed and terrifying. They spend a lot more time sacrificing people to gods ancient and evil and a lot less time preparing good children to go to the ball than magicians in other genres.
Magic that humans can use comes from three sources in the World of Darkness. There is the magic of Death, which is evil. There is Devil magic, which is evil. And finally there is the twisted sorceries of the Fairies, and that's evil as well. It's not that you can't do good as a magician, you totally can. It's just that the magic itself is evil and using it is dangerous even if you are the virtuous Chandu. The horror movies of the 30s didn't distinguish particularly between people from India and China (both were in “The East”), and we hearken to that slightly by leaving all traditions of magic as variations of the basic three. While a character may well be a voodoo death magician or an Aztec or Egyptian death magician, the magical set is all the same. Death magic is death magic whether you call upon bones with Chinese runes or African chants.
An important thing to realize is that The Mummy is actually a Witch. That's just how they do immortality. Sometimes it's an immortality where you do evil magic and you look like a normal person (see the 1933 or 1999 The Mummy) and sometimes you look like a crazy corpse in special bandages (like in Bubba Hotep). It really depends. Either way, if you want to be a leftover from Egypt or Aztlan you are a Witch (or a Vampire of course). However, and this is important, the Mummies from the middle Mummy movies such as The Mummy's Ghost and... sigh... The Mummy's Curse where the Mummy lurches around and smashes things – that Mummy is a Promethean instead, so pick a schtick and go with it.
Exemplars: Imhotep, Roxor, Hjalmar Poelzig, Chandu
- Transhuman
Just a scientific experiment. To do something no other man in the world had done.
Humans do not, in general, have supernatural powers. However, in the horror genre there are a number of people who experience an event which changes them irrevocably into something different. Something more. These people generally go stark raving mad, and in not very long. The certainty that they are no longer human causes them to lose sight of human priorities, human morality. While they have become something more, they are also something less.
The transformational event can be scientific or magical. Or a bit of both. A Transhuman always has an “origin story” which is to some degree unique. The Invisible Man took scientific chemicals. Anck Su Namun simply woke up one day and realized that she is the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess. Ayesha stepped into the mystical flame of life. Whatever the event was, it was the last thing that he or she did as a human, and the reality of that fact is as destructive to the self as the subsequent revelations of the magical world and the horrors which inhabit it.
Exemplars: The Invisible Man, Mr. Hyde, Anck Su Namun, Ayesha
- Leviathan
His face was fish-like.
Supposedly in pre-Sumerian times there was a great mother of monsters. Her name was Echidna. Or Tiamat. Or Vritra. It's not really that important what her name was, because she was killed by a powerful human sorcerer about 4000 BCE. And most of her monstrous brood is gone as well, but not all of it. Some of them interbred with humans and hid their lineage in the darkest corners of the world. They hid from the world of men for millennia, some lurking in darkness and plotting revenge and others merely living their own lives – the ancient conflict long forgotten.
But that's not really possible now. Things are modern, and there is nowhere to hide. Those who carry the taint of Echidna's spawn in their ancestry or are cursed with the taint during their lives are both hunted and feared. They are destructive, and eating their flesh can make you live forever. Of course, eating their flesh makes you like them, and puts you into the same danger. But hey, immortality.
In the World of Darkness these creatures often hang out at the edges of society – places which while nominally explored aren't actually watched very carefully.
Exemplars: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Mole Man, Robert Olmstead
The Non-Playable Types
Not only must we make explicit what appears on the player's side, we also need to decide ahead of time what is around, supernaturally speaking
in the world. Many people protest this. If they want to have unicorns show up for a storyline, why shouldn't they, as the storyteller, just do that? The answer is that in a cooperative storytelling game, the players need some sort of ground state to tell their own back stories and to make plans for future intrigue. Whether the
character knows that such and such a creature exists or such and such a world spanning organization is up to its evil schemes, the
player needs to at the very least have access to that information. And while it may seem like that would spoil surprises – and it does sometimes – in a much more important way it prevents
narrative dissonance. Narrative dissonance appears in cooperative storytelling games much the way continuity errors appear in horror films. And while it is certainly jarring to watch the part in
Leprechaun where they drive off in the second car despite the fact that they had earlier lamented being stranded when the first car wouldn't start – it is still a movie and thus the plot (such as it is) just keeps rolling along whether you notice the discrepancy or not. In a cooperative storytelling game however, such an event would just crash everything to a halt. The players and the storyteller would have to sit down and work something out, because they are all imagining the world together and there is no “next scene” until everyone gets their imaginations working together.
- Zombies
Brains!
Zombies are the result of evil magic or super science which transforms dead bodies into lurching, brain eating monsters. Zombies hunger for the living and have a tendency to rampage constantly. Some zombies are fast, some are slow. Some can figure out doorknobs and others can't. But they hunger for the living. Zombie spawn can create new zombie spawn just by killing extras, so zombie outbreaks can get really big, really fast.
Exemplars: Shelly Winters, Sheila, Ed
- Fey
Ha! Ha!
The wilds have portals to fairy realms where horrible blood drinking nature spirits languish. They come to Earth to steal children and murder people for their own enjoyment. The fey use fairy magics instinctively and often phase between the world of reality and the other world.
Exemplars: The Leprechaun, Rumplestiltskin, Pan
- Demons
My God!
Not yet, human. Soon... very soon I will be.
Made entirely of evil magic, the demons are a strange force that seeks to hurt humans and steal souls.
Exemplars: Wishmaster, Pyramidhead, Azazel
- Ghosts
Boo!
When Luminaries die and they are super pissed about something, they will occasionally linger on after death and become a ghost. Ghosts don't interact properly with physical objects and other people, and in any case are fed only by strong human emotions. So they gradually lose themselves and go batshit crazy, becoming a force that is more and more destructive.
Exemplars: Slimer, Patrick Swayze, The Mist
- Giant Animals
Rar!
The wilderness of the World of Darkness is a dangerous place with a spectacularly large array of things that can kill you. Man eating beasts of tremendous size roam the woods, the lakes, the swamps, and probably the mountains. Being eaten by sharks, crocodiles, tigers, or whatever is a severe threat. And yes, these super charged zoo rejects have magic powers.
Exemplars: Jaws, Joe Young, Boa, Python
- Evil Plants
Hiss!
The evil plants grow out of the ground in weird pods that make the soundtrack want to bust out theremin tracks. They grow out of humans an often have mind control and other weird powers. These things might actually be from Space. But since they don't have a civilization or space ships (that we know of), it's not super important.
Exemplars: Body Snatchers, The Thing, Swamp Thing
The Limits of Magic
“
She made me into a newt!”
Magic in a told story does not need to have
explicit limits defined for it because it has
implicit limits of whatever it is that magic happens to do in the story. One can assume that many of the things that magic never did in the narrative were actually outside of its capabilities for one reason or another and that it all worked out somehow. A novel or a movie does have to tell you that an evil magic car
can't turn into a giant robot, the fact that it
doesn't is sufficient for the purposes of the medium. However in a
role playing game this is absolutely not the case. Since magic is going to be used in creative, goal oriented ways by multiple story contributors (which is a nice way of saying “people are going to push magic as far as it will go into unintended directions in an effort to gain personal advantage”), it is imperative that what magic is specifically capable (and by extension
not capable) of doing be codified.
Magic in the WoD comes in several flavors. The first and most obvious kind is “Inherent Magic.” This is the stuff that supernatural creatures can do just because of what they are. A golem doesn't need to know anything special to be ale to lift and throw a car, it just does it. The fact that it is a golem gives it the inherent magic to have supernaturally powerful strength. All supernatural creatures have some form of inherent magic and they get more of it as time goes on. The next kind of magic to discuss is “Sorcery.” This is a type of magic that is explicitly learned and comes from elsewhere.
Every supernatural type has some inherent magic associated with it. Even though a Transhuman may have been granted all of their power from a mystic ritual that looks suspiciously like Sorcery, once they have attained that status they are able to use many of their abilities without having to remember mystical formulas or speak arcane words. The Invisible Man can fade from view without “doing” anything, and it is this point which makes his signature Invisibility power an inherent rather than sorcerous one.
Magic also falls into one of three categories, regardless of whether it is new or old, inherent or learned. These are Demonic, Dianic, and Death.
Power Schedules
“
It's five O'clock, time for your ass whupping.”
Power Points are regained on a
schedule that varies depending on the type of supernatural creature. This means that different characters and enemies will need to do different things to restore their powers, which will occasionally come up as a substantial advantage or disadvantage for one character or another, depending upon the needs of the plot.
Common Power Schedules include:
- Feeding – Characters who must feed upon mortals to regain power points have obvious advantages and disadvantages. Firstly, they can often schedule their power gains whenever. People are all over the place and you can take time out of your schedule to devour them whenever you aren't pressed for time. Of course, when you're in polite company or you are pressed for time, that may not be possible. Also, leaving a trail of victims is a dangerous thing to do, even if you have the ability to wipe their memories – it angers people. It angers people who are luminaries. All vampire types are on the Feeding schedule.
- Moon Rise – Characters who regain power points when the moon rises are able to pull fancy time shenanigans where their powers are restored fully in the middle of major scenes. Unfortunately, they also have to wait about an entire day between times when they get their powers back.
- Ritual – Characters on the ritual schedule have a specific and time consuming action they have to perform in order to regain their power points. This takes substantially longer than feeding on a mortal (usually about 2 hours), but hopefully entails less personal risk than actually victimizing someone. The ritual required varies depending upon the type of character, but usually requires special equipment. For example: a Robot needs to hook themselves up to special equipment in order to literally recharge their batteries while one of the Fallen has to bathe in the magical glow from their artifact.
- Periodic – Some characters get their power on a continuous basis. These characters are at “full strength” scene after scene. They are narratively tireless, but have reduced power point maximums to compensate.
And then of course, there's a bunch of specific material based on the way magic works and what supernatural societies are assumed to exist. But you get the idea, right?
-Username17
