House of Leaves inspired Horror Dungeon. Need help with subtlety!!

[~Nye~]

Hey guys!
I have been playing alot of Darksouls and I love the dark gritty elements and tone presented in that game. I liked the feeling of being marooned all alone in the vast expanse that is Anor Londo, and I thought that I should write a horror campaign, since I have never really ran one. I have spitballed ideas for some time now, and every idea before now has seemed a bit lack luster or unoriginal to really pursue at any real length.
I'm about as subtle as a brick being thrown through a window in broad daylight when it comes to DMing sometimes. So I'm in need of assistance, one of my friends who I play D&D with was telling me about the House of Leaves.

For those who don't know what that is, it's a horror story about a house, which has an ever expanding room, at first it starts off as a small room which just *appears* but as the story progresses this room eventually grows so much that the room turns into an ever expanding labyrinth. the logistics of the narration are convoluted, since a drug addled half crazy man is writing from what he is listening to of the recordings of the owner of the house and reading notes written by a blind man.

Anyway, I don;t know the end yet, and my friend implored me that I should get the book and read it myself.

So, I am currently inspired to the point that I want to write a dungeon based roughly on elements of this book. I have a basic idea that the players arrive at a house (I'm not really sure how or why they go there yet, but this is something I'm thinking about.) Everything is going to seem very normal for a good while, but I was thinking of having a journal appear, and every time the players read an excerpt from the book, a new room appears in the house, which in turn triggers (at first) strange events in the new mysterious room, but in time, I plan on making these events more blood bloodcurdling and gruesome.

The only *real* issue is that I don't really know how to make the book and the house relate to eachother, and how the story is going to unfold. I need to build suspense very steadily and having alot of surreal events occur before any real horror ensues. I kinda want to play on the idea, that the house is infact some sort of dreaful labyrinth designed to keep some sort of element of dread firmly trapped inside, and eventually having the players trapped to. But I don't know where to start or what to work with. I don't want Demons or undead as the element of horror. I first wanted something very human to be the real dread, but I decided on second thought, that maybe it is better to work with something super paranormal.

Any ideas guys? Or any useful ideas correlating to this horror theme of becoming trapped?:smallsmile:

[eggynack]

I dunno how well the specific stuff in House of Leaves would translate to an RPG. If you were remaining true to the narrative, much of the game would be spent travelling endlessly down infinite identical featureless corridors, occasionally hearing a groaning noise, and slowly being driven insane by the idea that there is something to discover in the darkness. Not much combat, in other words. One thing that might work for combat purposes is retooling Holloway Roberts into a guy who's been trapped in the labyrinth for awhile, and he occasionally tries to kill the protagonist because he believes them to be the evil that he's seeking out. The slow disappearance of things left behind could also be played for some horror, cause that's always seemed neat to me.

Anyways, you should probably read the book. There's a lot of horror stuff there, sure, but a lot of the thing is a meta-commentary on the nature of fiction versus nonfiction, and the main horror elements are a slow build over the course of a massive pile of pages. Also, maybe have a long aside during the course of the game to explain to your players the nature of echoes, ranging from the scientific to the mythological. That chapter is fun. Also also, perhaps spend an exorbitant amount of time describing all of the normal furnishings that aren't present in the labyrinth, along with a bunch of architectural styles that aren't anything like that of the labyrinth, as well as the creators of those architectural styles. Basically, try to be as arbitrarily pretentious as possible, to the point where your pretentiousness might be a satire of itself.

[bekeleven]

Anyways, you should probably read the book.

Caveat: My god are parts dense. After a month I finished the main narrative, then at the end there were another 150 pages of appendices and I think I made it through 40.

[~Nye~]

I get freaked quite easily, I'm a bit of a wuss when it comes to horror, my friend was describing it to me, and I was just getting freaked out by the short hand version he gave me. I have a very overactive imagination, I swear I started seeing things in my peripherals.:smalltongue:

I'm currently just trawling the net for potential urban legends and myths that could potentially give me some inspiration. I watched an animé called ghost hunt a few years back that had a mansion and deep within it's halls there was a freaky body snatching ghost that mutilated people. If you like animé and you haven't see ghost hunt I would recommend it, it's like most haunted hashed with supernatural... Kinda.

I kinda need to find a more dependable plot device at the moment. :smallannoyed:

[eggynack]

Caveat: My god are parts dense. After a month I finished the main narrative, then at the end there were another 150 pages of appendices and I think I made it through 40.
Quite so. I don't think I ever finished reading the random poetry stuff, and I know I didn't read the whole list of stuff in the window. Also, untranslated old English. It's a cool book though, especially when it focuses on the Navidson Record.

[bekeleven]

Quite so. I don't think I ever finished reading the random poetry stuff, and I know I didn't read the whole list of stuff in the window. Also, untranslated old English. It's a cool book though, especially when it focuses on the Navidson Record.

Said record is, unfortunately, broken up by the occasional 40-page chapter on the meaning of the word "stair." But yes, I agree, it does some things rather well.

I think I quit during the letter archives of the crazy guy's crazy mom.

[eggynack]

I think I quit during the letter archives of the crazy guy's crazy mom.
Really? I kinda liked those, though working through that whole set of pages that were coded such that the first letter of each word was the message was super annoying. Especially because I'm pretty sure that stuff was highly relevant to the plot. Also, I think that was the section with untranslated old English.

[bekeleven]

Really? I kinda liked those, though working through that whole set of pages that were coded such that the first letter of each word was the message was super annoying. Especially because I'm pretty sure that stuff was highly relevant to the plot. Also, I think that was the section with untranslated old English.

The problem is that those letters were telling a story that was already told at least twice in various forms in the first 550 pages of the book - 2 different levels explained the guy's history (his own and the level above his both went over his story). And what's worse is that the way it told the story - found archives chronicling a first-person slow descent into madness - is just an abridged version of the son's story that we just read 550 pages of.

Bleh. Nothing new, and not fun to read either.