My Favorite Horror Movies

In case you want skip my ramblings, feel free to do so. I want be offended, since they are for me mostly anyhow.

There’s two reasons I wanted to do this list. First, What the Flick?! started a series about the best horror movies of this century, which got me thinking about this and I brought it up on our forums as well, where it sparked a little bit of discussion on the subject. Second, I’ve done my Top 100 favorite movies every five years (so, once during the history of this blog, and I’ve done it two times before) and I always enjoy doing those lists, but I also need to give them space, so I don’t want to do them more often. This is more about giving me something to do in between those. I’ll probably do others with different focuses as well.

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Underdark Without Nightvision #3

Spoiler Warning! Underdark Without Darkvision is a based on my experiences on playing Out of the Abyss campaign and will include a host of spoilers. Thread carefully!

After the second session I was not that sure if I liked where things were going. I really do not have a lot of free time for gaming anymore and I usually like to spend it on games that are interesting and entertaining. And lets face it – random encounters are not high on my list of “interesting and entertaining”.

I was a bit hesitant about the third session but Sami (DM) had been telling me that he had been planing the upcoming session and was prepared to enhance the story aspects of the game. And since the undertone of Out of the Abyss is quite excellent I (luckily) came to my senses and took part to this third session.

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Horror in Dungeons

With all the OCR-stuff going on dungeons are getting better rep than in ages. Dungeon World is a certain classic and a game I would be willing to play at any time. Almost a year ago I talked about making dungeons on the fly and this subject raised its ugly head last Tuesday when the party descended into an ancient underground city in Egypt. Granted I was pretty tired then but I still think I had something good going on.

We are going to continue our descend into this forgotten tomb tomorrow and while I was searching the web for ideas and made notes about how to get it right I came into a conclusion that what I am actually doing is building a dungeon while I thought I was making a scenario for Call of Cthulhuish game.

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Trying out: Dread

dread2This post is almost two months late. I rely on the notes I made and the vague memories that still haunt me of the one of the most successful horror scenarios I have ever participated.

For during Saturday of this year’s Ropecon I was lucky enough to get a seat in a game I have been itching for ages to try out – Dread.

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Ropecon 2014: Trail of Cthulhu, or How I Stopped Avoiding Fear and Immensely Dug Kenneth Hite’s Way of Playing Cthulhu

An essay on the session of Trail of Cthulhu I played at Ropecon, being a rather lengthy treatise on what made it work and on the merits of the rules and the GM, and on the responsibilities of the players in horror roleplaying games, and by extension, in other sorts of roleplaying games that try to engage the participants’ emotions.

ToC

I’ve loved Trail of Cthulhu ever since I read it. The art is perfect for a Cthulhu book, Kenneth Hite—the author—really knows his Lovecraft, and the system is trimmed down to the essentials and really suits my playstyle. There are some bits that I don’t like, but are really easy to hack; overall, it’s very versatile beginning from the system right down to the Mythos monsters, so that every Keeper can make it their own. One year at Ropecon, I ran my ass off of Trail—25 hours within 48 hours—but now was my first opportunity to play it. Bonus: it was run by a woman, which I don’t get too often. This was also my first opportunity to play Cthulhu (and horror) after reading Kenneth Hite’s Nightmares of Mine (which has been updated to GURPS Horror) and his terrific essay on Cthulhu in his Dubious Shards. Continue reading