13: A Ghost Story For Christmas
There are plenty of horror games built for one-shots and plenty of one-shot-able adventures for others, but which fit the right kind of “a ghost story for Christmas” mood?
The M. R. James Gumshoe RPG Casting The Runes deserves a mention here. It takes its name from James’s most well-known and RPG-friendly story, which has a distinct villain and a solution based on the protagonists being active. (See also film versions including Jacque Tourneur’s Night Of The Demon, and the basic setup reappears in the Ring series.)
My first non-review article in an RPG magazine was about the James stories, and how their lack of a general “mythos” made them most suitable for one-shots.
(His time running King’s College Cambridge is also why The Watch House is set there.)
James’s stories are generally thought of as quite genteel, but this is mostly because the children with Lost Hearts and victims of Count Magnus’s face-sucking familiar are only described in passing. Visualise the former on TV or the latter in comics and they play a bit differently.
One option looking for a plot is his essay Stories I Have Tried To Write:
Then there was quite a long one about two undergraduates spending Christmas in a country house that belonged to one of them. An uncle, next heir to the estate, lived near. Plausible and learned Roman priest, living with the uncle, makes himself agreeable to the young men. Dark walks home at night after dining with the uncle. Curious disturbances as they pass through the shrubberies. Strange, shapeless tracks in the snow round the house, observed in the morning. Efforts to lure away the companion and isolate the proprietor and get him to come out after dark. Ultimate defeat and death of the priest, upon whom the Familiar, baulked of another victim, turns.
(I would say lose the specificity of the sketchy priest.)
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