11: WILDERNESS
Most of my games are urban in focus, so trips to the wilderness are rare. I pretty much went straight from dungeons through comedy one-shots to investigations.
I have at times jokingly threatened to do a Blair Witch LARP years before the Escape Blair Witch game became an official thing.
But there are urban wilderness areas as well, the places where adventures often happen out of sight. The empty warehouses used as the stage for so many battles, the derelict houses that might be haunted or the lairs of monsters. In a setting with a hidden world, the thought of this going on behind closed doors can be chilling.
Bonus round:
Listen - How you talk matters as well as what you say. I try to use my speech patterns to emphasise aspects of narration, to show character while generally not doing accents, and more.
Heavy - Having discussed Light game tones, some games are intended to be heavy. Call Of Cthulhu is about existential dread. Vampire: The Masquerade is about what we do to survive and how we justify it. Ten Candles is about resisting the inevitable and then it happening anyway. This can be great if you’re in the mood, but the first two have lots of other things to do and the last is for one-shots only.
Despair - Indeed, some are meant to invoke this. I try not to cause it in the players, though. I’ve been in games where the sense of hopelessness bled out, and I don’t recommend it in the long term.
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