For the curious or unobservant, I added a new blog to the list on the side there of blogs that I "recommend" if you will, Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque. The blog description says that it is a repository for "game ready Weird Gothic fantasy bits." That's an interesting mash-up, since normally Weird Tales and Gothic are two separate (yet obviously bearing marked similarities) genres, and adding either of them to fantasy comes close to approximating SWORD & SANITY; the label coined by Shane Magnus and adopted by me, as a combination of horror and fantasy--Call of Cthulhu + D&D.
In particular, I found this blog at an opportune time; right as he's adding a ruleset for stripped down and simplified fear effects. I've got lots of options for his, and in many ways, the options I have are more similar rather than different, so I don't know that I necessarily need another one. But at the same time, I find the notion of these fascinating, so I'm always drawn to see how someone else does it. What makes Jack's (the author's blogger username) approach different is that he goes back to Gothic literature theory and makes a distinction between terror, horror and madness. While the mechanics are similar for all three, a canny GM must decide which of the three is most applicable, and therefore which table to roll on.
Personally, I think that having three tables that are all basically "fear effects" is probably a bit much, but as I'm fond of saying, I'd rather have more tools that I don't necessarily need than need tools that I don't have.
Terror rules
Horror rules
Madness rules
Go check out the blog; it's actually chock full of all kinds of other fascinating ideas about combining fantasy and horror.
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