Here's some recent sources of inspiration for the strange world of perpetual darkness which is The Gloom:
This great podcast touches on two Gloom-adjacent themes: exploration in a place of complete darkness and the strangeness of distant biology. Not only that, but the quotes of Beebe are a kind of taxonomic Lovecraft - a verifiable horror story of what lurks beyond. This podcast has inspired a number of Gloom creatures I shall post later.
Here's an appetiser of Beebe's prose:
"These descents of mine beneath the sea seemed to partake of a real cosmic character. First of all there was the complete and utter loneliness and isolation, a feeling wholly unlike the isolation felt when removed from fellow men by mere distance … . It was a loneliness more akin to a first venture upon the moon or Venus than that from a plane in mid-ocean or a stance on Mount Everest: no whit more wonderful than these feats, but different."
John Carpenter's The Thing
Oh man but I love this movie and I doubt a single reader of mine is not intimately familiar with it. It's gore, its protean horror of a monster, its gruff fatalism - all are Gloom in the extreme. A recent rewatch has inspired me to try and capture that same sense of terror and isolation and paranoia in The Gloom.
It's a difficult atmosphere to capture in an essentially D&Dish game, but I am considering systems for betrayal and in our pre-game discussion we discussed a soft tolerance for PvP - provided it did not dominate sessions and result in an overall bad experience. Introducing some 'Thing-like creature which could imitate and replace players would require considerable buy-in and an incentive for players to keep playing. Its definitely something to consider, perhaps for some kind of Gloom Halloween one-shot.
A History of the World in 100 Objects
A truly great series. Much of the treasure players find is from the 'Preumbral' civilisation that predates the Gloom, and much of the exposition and story-telling they're going to receive about the continent is going to come from that source. To that end, I need each treasure-artefact to tell a story. Each of these objects is layered with incredible depth and nuance and meaning, and says so much about the civilisation to which they belong. Some are almost mythic in their story-telling potential (the Harappan Dancing Girl, for example.)
"These descents of mine beneath the sea seemed to partake of a real cosmic character. First of all there was the complete and utter loneliness and isolation, a feeling wholly unlike the isolation felt when removed from fellow men by mere distance … . It was a loneliness more akin to a first venture upon the moon or Venus than that from a plane in mid-ocean or a stance on Mount Everest: no whit more wonderful than these feats, but different."
John Carpenter's The Thing
Oh man but I love this movie and I doubt a single reader of mine is not intimately familiar with it. It's gore, its protean horror of a monster, its gruff fatalism - all are Gloom in the extreme. A recent rewatch has inspired me to try and capture that same sense of terror and isolation and paranoia in The Gloom.
It's a difficult atmosphere to capture in an essentially D&Dish game, but I am considering systems for betrayal and in our pre-game discussion we discussed a soft tolerance for PvP - provided it did not dominate sessions and result in an overall bad experience. Introducing some 'Thing-like creature which could imitate and replace players would require considerable buy-in and an incentive for players to keep playing. Its definitely something to consider, perhaps for some kind of Gloom Halloween one-shot.
A History of the World in 100 Objects
A truly great series. Much of the treasure players find is from the 'Preumbral' civilisation that predates the Gloom, and much of the exposition and story-telling they're going to receive about the continent is going to come from that source. To that end, I need each treasure-artefact to tell a story. Each of these objects is layered with incredible depth and nuance and meaning, and says so much about the civilisation to which they belong. Some are almost mythic in their story-telling potential (the Harappan Dancing Girl, for example.)
No comments:
Post a Comment