#Urban Horror

[yomeiu]

no rhythm to guide our steps, only the clamour of our minds and the asbestos polluting our lungs. walz macabre, our places.

[krystal-prisms]

Honestly, urban and suburban horror is so under utilized

Getting lost in a parking lot full of endless rows and columns of cars. You can't find yours, you don't know how long you've been walking. You keep seeing cars that you think are yours, but they don't open when you try your keys. You press the horn button on your fob, but can't tell which direction the faint honking is coming from. The stalls are all full.

A grocery store late at night. No other shoppers are there. It's dark outside and yours is the only car in the parking lot. The aisles are filled with brands you don't recognize, but seem oddly familiar, all knock offs of each other. It's too cold. Your cart has a squeaky wheel. The cashier is the only other person in the store. They don't make eye contact. You don't remember what you came in for.

You're taking the garbage out late at night. Your elevator doesn't work so you have to take the stairs. The dumpster smells, and there is fluid on the ground beside it. You don't want to think about what it could be. You hear noises down the alley. You toss the bag into the dumpster, and run to the door. You fumble your keys and take longer to get in. You slam the door and lock it. The lightbulb flickers in the lobby.

Rows and rows and rows and rows of identical houses. You don't know how you got into this neighborhood, you can't afford any of the houses here. They all look the same, white square houses, white picket fences, perfectly even and manicured lawns. A good neighborhood. A nice place to raise your kids. There are no kids. The weather is nice, the sun is shining, they should be outside. You drive your used car, looking for a turn off to the exit, but there isn't any. Just endless white square houses, white picket fences, perfectly even and manicured lawns. You're sure you passed this area before, but there are no house numbers and they all look the same. The sun is shining and there is not a cloud in the sky. Or another living creature in sight.

You're on the bus. Surrounded by people, you stare at your phone and ignore them. More people get on. Your stop is coming soon. More people get on. You sit at the back of the bus to avoid conversation. More people get on. Someone bumps into you, and you apologize to them, but you're not sure why. They don't acknowledge you. More people get on. Everyone is staring at their phones, ignoring each other. Your stop is next. You try to stand up to get to the exit, but there are people in the way. You can't get to the button to let the driver know you need to get off. You try to get to the door, but there are so many people in the way you can't move. The bus slows to a stop, and you try to push your way to the exit, but the bus is too packed. The doors open, but you can't leave, and nobody hears you when you ask them to move. More people get on.

You walk downtown. You pass a billboard advertising a product you've never heard of. You keep walking, passing flyers, billboards, screens, all selling things. Things to make you prettier. Smarter. More successful. A whole new person. A new person to fit into society with all the other people, but only if you spend money. For just a few dollars, you can have a better life with our product. You need our product. You would be so happy if only you had our product. Look at all these people in our advertisement, aren't they happy? Don't you want to be like them? You could be if only you just had our product. You can't afford any of them.

You're in a crowd of people, walking the sidewalk. You have your earbuds in. You feel someone watching you. You casually glance around, to try to catch someone staring. You can't pick out individual faces among the hundreds of other people. You continue on your way, thinking you imagined it. You imagine you hear footsteps, and walk faster. The feeling doesn't go away.

Your air conditioner is broken. You told your landlord, he said he'll fix it. It's been days. The air is hot and muggy. Leaving the windows open doesn't help the heavy feeling. The air from outside is just as warm, and carries the scents from the city. There should be sounds coming from outside, but the city is silent.

You're walking at night. You can't see even a single star.

[critlore]

Ex Stasis Games needles at some uniquely modern fears with a new collection of system-neutral roleplaying scenarios.

Do Not Adjust Your Set is an anthology of system-neutral adventures based on writers’ favourite urban legends. With everything from infernal paintings and extradimensional arcade games to masked vigilantes and cutthroat academic competition, creepy one-shot TTRPG opportunity oozes from between the ectoplasm-slimed pages.

Do Not Adjust Your Set is a follow-up to 2022’s Midwinter Ghost Stories - a successfully Kickstarted anthology of system-neutral scenarios in the tradition of Victorian ghost stories. DNAYS features more modern stories and scares.

Do Not Adjust Your Set finishes on Kickstarter on 28th November!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exstasisgames/do-not-adjust-your-set

[skullingwaydraws]

Def judging you

[cultofcreatures]

well that doesn’t look right.

[thryth-gaming]

Monster of the Week supplement

So, this is a project I've been part of or working on since at least 2019 with elements of it going back earlier than that. It is a combination of a personal project of mine with a project of Marek Golonka's (of Codex of Worlds's fame) which we took to Evil Hat, and now it's on it's way to the general public.

[horror-aesthete]

Rigor Mortis (殭屍), 2013, dir. Juno Mak

[heir-of-the-chair]

I love spooky forests, and creepy lights in deserts, and idyllic suburban towns hiding dark secrets as much as the next person but WHERE IS THE URBAN SUPERNATURALISM?!

Give me spooky sludge living in pipes, abandoned lots between buildings that maybe were abandoned for a reason, street performers playing songs strangely familiar late into the night. I want urban/new york city gothic!

[horygory]

Ekusute AKA Exte: Hair Extensions (2007)

[krystal-prisms]

There's something much scarier about an abandoned building that's clean.

Abandoned buildings are supposed to be dirty. Years and years of dust and dirt. The gradual degradation of the man made reclaimed by nature.

Abandoned places aren't supposed to be clean. Pristine floors, without a speck of dust. White walls. Unbroken windows that don't let even a light breeze through, not even that much movement is allowed.

The door hinges are perfectly oiled. A squeaky door is a telltale horror sign, but the silent open and close is much more sinister.

Complete silence. No creaking of floorboards. No whistling of wind. No settling of old supports.

There is absolutely no inteusion by nature. No dust tracked in. No smell of mold, no black stains on the walls. No cobwebs.

There are no signs of life. No buzzing flies. No spiders spinning webs. No pigeons in the rafters or rats in the walls.

What is so fundamentally wrong with this place that it has been forsaken even by roaches.

Abandoned places shouldn't be clean.

[apilgrimpassingby]

Some of you may remember me making a post a while back about "urban dark Abrahamicana". Well, now I've gone and made a setting for that aesthetic.

This will be a long post. Tagging @idylls-of-the-divine-romance because I think you'll like it.

The City of Bevel-on-the-Water

(Sorry for the poor quality of the image; that's the lighting in my room. Try turning up the brightness of your screen to make it clearer).

History

Bevel-on-the-Water was founded in the 13th century in northern Lincolnshire atop Bevel Carr, an alder carr that is now reduced to a few fragments. The town remained a minor settlement for several centuries, before expanding in the late 18th century with the Industrial Revolution, with the several rivers passing through it and its location between the coalfields of Yorkshire and the economic centres of the southeast making it a valuable transport artery, and continued to grow and prosper thanks to adopting rail technology.

The town has been less fortunate in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the Second World War, it was a target for German bombing raids, and much of it had to be rebuilt. Combined with the closure of coal mines and privatisation of railways in the 1980s, and the city spent the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st as a shell of its former self.

However, from the 2010s onwards it has been improving economically; the rock-bottom rents and proximity to important locations make it a popular place for young graduates and immigrants; in particular, the area is a popular "staging post" for Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants, who spend a few years working here before accumulating enough money and experience to move somewhere more upmarket.

And most are very eager. The history above can be found in history books; the history that the people of the East Midlands and Yorkshire would recognise it for is not found in those, but in folklore collections, internet forums and, above all, stories on the streets. Some of it will be related below.

Areas of the Town

Bevel-on-the-Water Halting Site

The trailer park located on the south bank of the town, filled with caravans and campervans atop litter-strewn stretches of sickly grass and tarmac housing not just the city's unusually large Romani population and various other poor people but stranger things as well; caravans home to itinerant occultists, tents dwelt in by demoniacs, shadows dancing in the night. The aforementioned Romani are well-established here, and hence are unusually well-liked and prosperous.

City Centre

The old medieval centre - albeit now mostly consisting of neo-Gothic architecture with substantial Brutalist additions - of the town, containing both the Town Hall and Bevel University, a university founded in the 1920s and shuttered in 1994, with much still inside it, including a great many ancient and esoteric texts rotting inside its crumbling Neo-Gothic library.

Eastwalk

Eastwalk is a small suburb on the east bank of the city, near the edges. While as impoverished and decrepit as the rest of the city, it is notable for having an active Anglican community (based around the city cathedral, St. Michael's Cathedral) and almost none of the macabre legends attached to the rest of the city. Other Christians, most notably Methodists from a major campaign conducted here in the 19th century, are also here.

Greensford

A large and particularly declining neighbourhood, located in the southwest of the city. The decay affecting almost everywhere here is particularly acute in this neighbourhood. Ivy smothers abandoned buildings, dandelions and brambles carpet streets, and half-feral children spend their days playing in the adjoining woods and swapping stories of sorcery, ritual murder and even cannibalism - many of them true.

Ironfields

The centre of economic activity during the city's industrial heyday (and still containing its train station), and an exemplar of its decline today. Everywhere one turns are crumbling houses, shuttered factories and graffiti. Only people who bother (or dare) to spend time there see what lurks beneath; the saints and crucifixes adorning the hearths and doorposts of inhabitants, the se'irim dancing inside the factories and seen only out of the corner of the eye, the graffiti proclaiming "Satan lives" and "Jesus Christ conquers" in equal quantity.

Johnstow

The smallest of the neighbourhoods of the city, located south of Eastwalk. The main characteristic of this neighbourhood is the great number of junk shops and second-hand bookshops, which become noticeable, like everything else, upon closer inspection - the bookshelves contain The Hypostasis of the Archons and the Nisibene Hymns, the shops sell icons and censers and the like, all softly carpeted with dust. The most notable one, Johnstow Books, has a mysterious proprietor - John Egapus, an extremely ancient Near Eastern man who seems to have been doing his job as long as anyone can remember.

Mortlake Heath

Mortlake Heath is the richest neighbourhood of the city, with an abundance of genteel 18th century houses and statues in the street and a shortage of children due to most of them going to private school; however, almost all of them eventually return to Bevel-on-the-Water or vanish. Again, a little look behind closed doors is a walk into darkness - candle-lit rituals in basements and attics, occult books hidden under the covers behind mundane ones, pentagrams and sigils drawn on the walls of rooms that the inhabitants think visitors won't go into.

Northgate

Northgate displays openly what the rest of the city thinly veils. Hardly a street lacks a portrait of Baphomet or an inverted pentagram, and everyone here has seen a ritual with inverted crucifixes and people dressed in black. Bloodstains are also not hard to see, and everyone dreads going into this district of the city - few people in Lincolnshire or South Yorkshire have not heard stories of occult murder or demon-summoning associated with here.

Oldstreet

West of Eastwalk, Oldstreet is another strong representative of the city's decline. A 19th-century suburb that never recovered from Second World War bombing, every turn here shows a burnt-out building or a rotted house, and the few people still living here are old and haunted. The most famous site of destruction here, St. Paul's Chapel, is a burnt-out church with the floor carpeted in thorns and a single crucifix shining amidst the rubble.

Southgrove

Southgrove, to a passer-by, looks like a pristine town - all hedgerows and suburban housing and smiling families. The town keeps its secrets well, but not infallibly - all those who research find that self-harm, domestic abuse and alcoholism run rampant here. Deeper research finds yet more things; sigils drawn in the margins of books, rites conducted in the school basement, books of magic in the library.

Stonewater

Stonewater represents the 20th century rebuilding project; a great mass of concrete towers and blocks where people live, perpetually bathed in mist and rain. This is where most people live, and is no less accursed than elsewhere, having its fair share of stories of Satanic sacrifices and sorcery, along with tales about mysterious strangers and visitations from Heaven. The town's 19th-century cemetery, Stonewater Necropolis, is where most of the city's dead are buried - unsurprisingly, many of the stories of the occult revolve around here.

Westcourt

Westcourt is where the city's immigrant community has always lived; Irish in the 19th century, Eastern Europeans today, the latter served by the Romanian Orthodox Church of St. James. As such, it has a large number of Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, as well as plenty of dark myths - the usual legends of the city, along with tales of strigoi and the Children of Judas brought by the newcomers. Few people live here for long, with most moving from one of the many cheap flats to a more prosperous town as soon as possible.

Forests

Bevel Carr: The primal forest of the city, now reduced to three pateches in the north, east and west, with ravens croaking and warblers piping amidst waterlogged meadows of ferns and mead wort, mist rising up amidst the clusters of alder, willow and birch and the wind singing mournfully.

Bevel-on-the-Water Tree Plantation: The tree plantation is a large and gloomy forest of spruce, planted after the Second World War in the hope of providing jobs. The plan largely failed, but the expanse continues to carpet the western edge of the city, and provide the backdrop to dark myths; everyone has heard of the human sacrifices atop Hanger Hill on May Eve and Halloween, or the werewolf who lurks in an abandoned maintenance shed, or the spirit of the elder oak remaining from the previous forest.

Johnstow Woods: Outside the town of Johnstow lies the woods that give it its name; a hollow filled with hawthorn and rowan, centred on the tomb (or stow, in Old English) of the 9th-century abbot who lived here inside St. John's Chapel, a small Anglo-Saxon church.

Demographics

Total Population: 264,900

Ethnic

White British: 74.2%

Bulgarian: 9.8%

Romanian: 6%

Black British: 4.2%

South Asian: 2.8%

Romani: 2.2%

Other: 0.8%

Religious

Non-Religious: 58.2%

Anglican: 11.8%

Methodist: 9.6%

Orthodox: 7%

Pentecostal: 5.4%

Roman Catholic: 5%

Islam: 2%

Hindu: 0.8%

Other: 0.2%

[skullingwaydraws]

Some apocalyptic nyc postcards I’ve been working on. Now I actually need to get them printed as postcards lol

[cultofcreatures]

[thryth-gaming]

Same Breed, Different Hunters: Vampires

So, in Monster of the Week, playbooks all provide a lot of versatility in how they can be put together or interpreted. In this case, however, we're going to zoom in on something more specific: the Monster's Breed.

This one is less about the mechanics of the game and more about considering the vast number of specific entities that we lump into certain famous categories we've convinced ourselves are far more narrow than they really are. Part of this is due to a decision to take folklore from various cultures and lump it together into whatever category due to certain superficial commonalities.

For example, European dragons are very different creatures both in terms of metaphysics and role in the cosmology from Asian dragons. For that matter, Norse and Greek dragons are very different, as are Japanese and Chinese dragons. About the only thing these beings have in common are they have a vaguely reptilian appearance... which often takes a bit of mental gymnastics to get even there.

However, for this case, we're going to talk vampires. And we're going to talk pop culture vampires, because I'm not going to trust my approximate knowledge of many things on actual folklore that I'm ripping off from the top of my head.

I'm going to hit the Curse, Natural Attack, and Moves rather than a full build.

Violet O'Neill - Feeding as Need

Violet O'Neill never appeared in a game in a condition where she was actually depicted as a full on undead creature. When she was first introduced she was paraded as a case where the science team had "cured" someone of undeath, much to her perpetual discomfort. It turned out later that, no, they hadn't cured her. They'd just stabilized her and made attempting any other cures a bit more dangerous. Which resulted in her just persisting as a stable-undead woman.

Here would be the characteristics of an alt-timeline Violet:

She needs to feed on life-energy through breath. If she doesn't she grows progressively more corpse-like and feral.

Her vision would start to fade and be replaced by an ability to detect life-force or breath.

So, for her, this would be her build:

Natural Attack: Breath Stealing (1-Harm Intimate Life Drain Ignore Armor)

Curse: Feed (Breath)

Moves: Supernatural Sense (Breath), Something Borrowed: Connect the Dots

So, she would need to constantly satisfy this need in order to keep as human as possible. Every time she backslides or fails to satisfy her hunger, she would lose a bit more of her past self. And as her Luck is spent, her need would get more and more demanding.

EDIT: I originally had her borrow Invincible. Instead, I had her borrow Connect the Dots to represent her skill as a data analyst.

Patricia Althius - Blood as Addiction

Patricia Althius is a character I played in a game of City of Mist and her vampirism came as a result of falling into a cursed tomb while she was deployed to The War (when we play CoM we always use vague labels of places and keep it ambiguous if this is a real physical world or some sort of dream space) and attracting attention from the Mythos of Lamashtu (a pop culture version).

Here were some of her characteristics as a vampire:

She did not need to drink blood to survive, but it made her stronger and it felt good.

She was being molded by the mythos according to the cultural of aristocratic beauty perfection Patricia grew up with.

So, for her, this would be her build:

Natural Attack: Claws (2-Harm Hand), Bite (3-Harm Intimate)

Curse: Pure Drive (Lust)

Moves: Unholy Strength, Unquenchable Vitality

In this case, the "Lust" is not sexual, but rather an overall drive to feel that enhanced sensation she experiences whenever she's drunk blood. For her, she has to manage her willingness to give in to the thirst and remind herself that it is not something she needs. And over time, her addiction would be increasingly difficult to resist. Also note that she doesn't have the Life-Drain attack. Instead her healing method comes from one of her moves.

Eloise Weaver - Master and Stalker

Eloise is a Lasombra vampire that I have not yet gotten to play and represents a twist on the normal Dark Master situation as well. Someone had hired a vampire as an assassin and the vampire had set up an escape room as a deathtrap. Eloise was one of the unfortunates that had "won" a ticket to the escape room to give it some sort of legitimacy. She managed to not only survive but escaped and caused the vampire to obsess over her, stalking her for some time before finally catching up to and turning her. And then, it turns out that he is unable to bend her mind to his will, so she escapes again and this just deepens her sire's obsession.

Looking at her traits:

Her basic traits as a vampire don't stand out much. The strongest element is the pursuit by her sire.

While her sire has no ability to command her through supernatural influence, he will continue to harass her, hoping to "convince" her to his side.

So for her build I'd go with the following:

Natural Attack: Bite (1-Harm Intimate Life Drain), Shadow Constrict (1-Harm Magic Close)

Curse: Dark Master

Moves: Something Borrowed: Predator and Prey (Host), Shadowsight

In this case, the Dark Master's influence would get more and more intrusive as time went on and any mystery might be complicated by the involvement of one of her sire's traps or trials. Some misguided attempt to make her stronger and hone her perspective to match his. If the team manages to kill him, well, maybe word will get back to his masters.

Important here, is that the other traits of a vampire aren't gone. They just don't have near the same narrative heft. She still has to drink blood, but she clearly has that mostly under control. Getting in a situation where she is tempted to drink someone's blood is not off the table, especially when it'll help her heal, but it's not as close to the surface as the problem with her obsessed sire.

Helen - Burned by the Sun

This is referencing Kikoskia's current VtM: Bloodlines run as a Toreador by the name of "Helen." Not for any particularly reason aside from the fact that I generally don't make vampires with this Curse because it is a bit on the awkward side to use. I can see Monster of the Week making it work, but in mixed company it does often make it difficult to cooperate with the other hunters.

For the vampire characteristics here I'm going with the following:

The sunlight burns her and weakens her.

I'm going to lean into the Toreador thing and how often Kiko relies on Celerity.

So I will build her like this:

Natural Attack: Bite (2-Harm Intimate Life Drain)

Curse: Vulnerability: Sunlight

Moves: Preternatural Speed, Unnatural Appeal

The first two versions of a vampire I wrote had traits that made them a direct danger to those around them. Both Violet and Patricia could be driven to harm people that in their right mind they wouldn't want to endanger. With Eloise, she is an indirect danger to those around her based on the fact that she is a target and everyone around her is basically in the blast radius. In Helen's case, the danger is entirely focused on her, though it will limit how well she can protect other people.

And as her Luck dwindles, then it will take less and less sunlight to affect her. Maybe initially she'll be fine if the sky is overcast, but after spending a luck, that isn't enough to prevent her from taking a -1 ongoing. And finally as her Luck gets very low, she can't go outside during the day and unless she's in a magically prepared sanctuary, doing anything during daylight will be at -1.

Bathori - A Blight on the World

This build is reference to a facet of true undead from my Divine Blood setting and one such individual. But we're going to deviate from that concept in the following ways. She will not have nearly as high a requirement for active feeding and she won't have an option to just stop doing it and letting herself die. Perhaps in this case, I'm going to assume at one point she was possessed by an undead spirit that performed that starts of the ritual that would have bound it to her body but she somehow fought it off, and now has to deal with the permanent effects of the bits of the ritual the undead spirit completed before being forced out. And that will come to these traits:

Bathori saps the life-force of the land and life in her general area.

Her soul is basically stapled to her body and because it wasn't her will, she doesn't know how to undo it.

And I'll do the following build.

Natural Attack: Bite (1-Harm Intimate Life Drain Infection), Unarmed (0-Harm Hand Poison)

Curse: Inimical

Moves: Immortal, Toxic

So, in this case, she will progressively kill the land she walks on, encouraging her to lair in places that are already dead and can't be hurt by further. Occasionally, her aura of blight and draining will flare to risk causing harm to the people in the area around her and they might now even be directly aware of that. In addition, as she runs out of Luck, the region of her blight will get wider and wider. And the blight will get hungrier, being more likely to siphon the people she's trying to protect.

I also took "Infection" in reference to how people who survive a feeding by an undead might be warped such that they become "dhampir". Usually they'd die shortly after, but some will manage to survive the condition and become their own sort of immortal. Within the Divine Blood setting, Wilhemina Harker is a dhampir who manages to survive the effort to adapt to the twisting. (not that she's even been mentioned in any fiction yet).

Infection is an extra benefit though, so normally, the hunter could maybe deliberately twist a person's soul as she feeds on them in order to possibly kill them even if they escape. Or maybe she can use it carefully as part of a big magic ritual to give another hunter a permanent power. But as her Luck drops, then I'd tie that infection more and more into an expression of her Inimical trait. Meaning she might accidentally create more dhampir as she travels. And while dhampir that adapt are mostly stable people rather than Monstrous with a curse to struggle with, most of the infected will just die.

Summary

All of the characters above fit the concept of a vampire, and they are all even from a variety of pop-culture things ranging from anime jiangshi to VtM characters, but they all express the concept in very different ways. I do reuse the Life Drain option of magical attack a lot, but I ignored it for one build and gave it different flavors in the others. I was also tempted to give every version of the vampire Immortal and certainly the idea of them being ageless would be a narrative thing, but it would be a more fragile sort of immortality unless they take up that move later.

[triplecastgames]

Keep watch at your window; the night is long and comes with teeth. The Hidden Keys Beta v1.1 is now available for pre-order; get it this Friday, 17 January, along with Nightfall, Verse Two: Nights of Blood - the Official Soundtrack of The Hidden Keys.