I'm going to be running a Silent Hill game with my group.
I have a good understanding of the setting and lore, and my players have no experience at all, so I have a lot of freedom and their lack of knowledge minimizes any chance of accidental meta.
I'm going to be using the Call of Cthulhu system, unless you guys can show me something that would be better.
Anybody have any experience with tabletop silent hill or something similar?
here's the map I'm using.
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I ran a Silent Hill-esque campaign in Dark Heresy once. The main things I learned are to keep combat to a minimum and use the "air-sirens-turning-everything-to-hell" thing sparingly. Rely on atmosphere to maintain suspense as much as possible, and make sure to know the characters your players are playing so you can tailor the monsters to them.
Gotta wonder what kind of civic planning committee agreed to put a strip bar next to a hospital.
silent hill is 90% hospital
Have you played CoC? I've never touched Dark Heresy, so I wouldn't know how it compares to the system. is it much different?
Right now I'm working on a hook.
Because I'm going to have more than one person, I can't go SH2 and have everybody experience their own version of Silent Hill.
So I'm going to have to dig into the cult shiggydiggy.
I'm thinking that I'm just going to start them off as a group of friends on a road trip, and their vehicle gets fucked when they get to town, or a little bit beforehand.
I'm really excited. Because they never played the games, I can pull stuff from them without them knowing. It's a little lazy, but if it works, it works.
It's gonna be hard to recreate proper SH experience with a group but nothing is impossible.
If you gonna focus on the cult - I'd suggest focusing on the religion itself, the creation myth, the ambiguity of the goddess.
Develop and figure out the pantheon to which games always allude.
Make it feel like there is something more, something unseen and giant in that city, most likely at the bottom of that lake.
Holy fucking shit I'm doing the same thing. I'm going to try using the Call of Cthulhu 7th Ed book to run it, because the people I usually play with seem pretty interested in it.
I'm not the greatest GM, but I hope it goes well! I'm definitely going to take notes from this thread.
It's population is also high in faceless sexy nurses and sometimes they like to spook in places other than hospitals
you know, everyone who get's called by the town after James should be really thankfull to him for making the nurses hot
glad I gave you an idea. I hope it works out for both of us.
Tom Hewlett can fuck right off the edge of my dick.
that shit didn't happen until after the fourth game.
SH3 nurses were ugly as fuck, because heather isn't a sex deprived man.
>SH3 nurses were ugly as fuck, because heather isn't a sex deprived man.
Huh, yeah, they are pretty ugly, I guess I was just misremembering them as being kinda sexy
Yeah. SH2 nurses were hot as fuck. they should have only been like that in SH2, because they looked that way for James.
He was lusting after nurses while his wife was dying of Mega-Cancer and he couldn't fuck her.
You're thinking of the nurses in Homecoming. There is no reason for those nurses to be sexy. let alone sexy and in an abandoned hotel and everywhere else that isn't a hospital.
If homecoming was a real human being, I would un-ironically tell them to kill themselves.
the same sentiment goes towards any silent hill game made after SH4.
Back in the day, this wasn't uncommon. A rural community in 1890s-1920s could become pretty important just by having a big hospital, a railway station/docks, a post office, and a bank. There are a lot of stories about shady bankers building/financing buildings in the middle of pretty much nowhere to drive up local land prices... land they also happened to own.
Alternatively, some of the larger tuberculosis sanitariums had towns grow up around them. Silent Hill is a poor candidate for tuberculosis ward (all that fog, lake wind, and ash...), but it's still possible.
So apperantly Book of Lost Memories refers to murals in the last area of SH3 as being ancient, predating and inspiring the religion, and things like flauros were escavated from this area as well (which I guess means that it exist in some form in the real world as well)
Just something fun that you could possibly use to better develop the pantheon and mythos of the SH, since the game itself is extremely vague on that regard
...
I thought Downpour was decent...
OP here. Here's what I'm thinking so far.
The gang shows to up silent hill a number of years after the events of SH3.
The cult is now a small group, maybe one to four people who have no ties with the original cult from the first four game.
all this new cult has are the books and other "notes" from the previous. They like the Idea, so they go about to finish what the original started, but they have no idea what they are doing.
This results in a horrible attempt at birthing a new god that is much more brutal, heavy handed, and just wrong. It won't work, unless by accident or some shit, but the players won't know that.
Still working on the idea. input?
Downpour is the second best of the post-SH4 release, preceded by Shattered memories.
If it had nothing to do with Silent Hill, it probably would have been more than acceptable.
Their biggest crime is the butchering of the lore, story, and all other non gameplay aspects that are so important to the formula of "good" silent hill games.
The town was actually struck by a plague in it's early days, resulting in the founding of the first hospital. Brookhaven, I think?
it started off little more than a shack and just grew over time to accommodate the growth of the town.
and again, like my other posts suggest, the problem of there being a fuck-trillion hospitals is mostly the fault of the writers of the games past SH4. They apparently made no attempt at researching what was in the fucking town and just added what they needed when they needed it, even if it was already present.
I went the SH2 route when I ran a game, so I can't comment on what will work for you besides keeping the horror personal in the sense of what you and your friends and the NPCs are afraid of or obsessed with in an abstract manner.
As far as the cult goes, give them competing factions that are equally unlikable. They'll choose the worst one to like. I'd actually keep at least one of the sects as the 'good guys' working to keep some asshole new cult from doing some fucked up shit (so they can do their own fucked up shit).
What I ran into is that you have to have the town semi-functional in some capacity. Like there has to be a population, even if it's a skeleton crew of bartender, nurse, hotel owner, antique shop guy and some asshole because players are stupid as shit half the time.
This might start a debate for anybody who cares, but depending on who you ask, everything in silent hill is in the "real world" Even the monsters and all the other fucked shit.
Ok, that might work - the thing to focus here then is the motivations for those people - their loss and hatred, their reason for bringing the Paradise. If you develop some good and interesting characters then instead of trying to tailor the town to your players, you could create the otherworld of those cult people (or one specific person) and your players would get drawn into it, learning more about them through that inviroment
so like Vincent being the "good guy" in SH3?
I'm thinking that anytime that they get stuck I'll introduce a guiding character, or bring back one previously used, like laura in SH2.
and I'm going to have them play themselves, because I know their fears and stuff. they'll roll for stats still.
I wont introduce game characters in person. nobody would ever willingly go back to the town after what they've been through.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Personaly I'm of the opinion that everything that happens in Silent Hill is real - the town doesn't just makes monsters in people's heads, it's literally births them in the flesh.
You could explain it by the Alternative Realitys idea or in many other number of ways.
In the end of the day I suppose it's not the best idea to try to use hard logic on something that by design supposed to be abstract and surreal
oh shit.
I just remembered something.
at the very end of SH1, the death of the "god" resulted in the birth of a normal human. That baby turned into Heather.
at the end of SH3, the game doesn't show it, but the developers stated that the thing that heather sees as she leaves the chapel is another baby, that Heather just abandoned.
So that new baby could grow up to be the new cult leader. AFAIK, he/she would be the only living person with ties to the cult anymore, at least before they'd recruit new members.
So the manifestation of their silent hill I think would have an immense focus on abandonment by parents and friends.
The town could be actively trying to separate the party. of course this would suck to play and I'd have to make the separation attempts not work like 8/10 times, but I think it's a good idea.
The best way to think of it is a physical manifestation of the dreams and torments of the victims of the town, caused by whatever twisted curse has been placed on it. I guess curse is the easiest explanation of why the town is fucked, but in reality its a lot of things. The cult, Samael/Metatron/Metraton, Alessa/Cheryl/Heather, the fucking plague that happened. Lets not forget about the serial killer that killed 26 people in SH4. and the SIX houses that burned down as a result of the boiler explosion that disfigured Allesa.
and this place is a popular tourist town.
Actually I remember seeing an interesting theory/interpretation on SH lore - the idea being is that God is trying to be reborn again and again, through out the centuries, but eveytime it's results in a horrible failed abomination, because everytime it gets corrupted by the hatred of those who try to bring it forth.
Sort of, yeah. I planned a game that started in the middle of a kind of turf war for the cult with the different sects trying to gain control of sacred sites and places of power, tomes and relics, hearts and minds. I was going to run it before SH1 or just as its own thing, but I think it would still work.
The idea was to, really just have a reason for fetch quests through hell, but also give the town a living dynamic. Each side would have colored the hellscape in a different way and the everyone had a fundamental hatred of one another. Thee was also something about baptismal drownings in there.
I think I read something about that too. Like the original people who came up with the ritual never intended for it to work, or just by the very nature of trying to birth god, it is doomed to fail and never work.
It's amazing when you think about it that every person ever called into silent hill wins. that we know of at least. All seemingly "normal" people who lead "normal" lives, disregarding a few murders and other fuck ups.
I myself chalk up all the victories to Alessa helping the protags, because she is also going through that same hell for all of the foreseeable eternity.
I feel like a lot of people see Alessa as evil, but she only ever tries to help.
and it was a sacred spirit ground for indias
who then got killed/kicked out
and then there was some witch hunts
and some bloody executions
and a civil war hospitals
and a plague
and a bunch of prisons
and in the modern times there was a drug problem
which most likely was a magical super drug
and also the fog of the lake catches the spirits of the dead and doesn't let them leave
But hey, they got a nice hotel in front of a pretty lake, right next to an amusemnt park!
Except the hotel got burned down, and ther is a secret occult church under the park and there are probably like 6 or 7 Old Gods sitting in that lake
>Except the hotel got burned down
It was later rebuilt. I'm pretty sure, I might be mis-remembering that.
>It's amazing when you think about it that every person ever called into silent hill wins
Cybil in the canon ending get's killed. Eddy get's killed. Angela is still in otherworld somewhere for all we know.
Plus, there is no canon ending for SH2 so James might be dead, stuck in some hellhole or tormented by aa dog forever
Did you make up your own sects or did you use
>the Valtiel sect
>the sect of the holy mother
>the sect of the holy woman
and we aren't going to acknowledge the existence of the the shepards glen sect.
shepards glen doesn't fucking exist reeeeeeee
You're totally right, I just wasn't fucking thinking apparently.
fuck me up the ass. damn.
If anybody has no idea what the fuck is going on and you want a good introduction to the SH games, Id highly recommend watching TBFP's play through of the second game.
It's what got me hooked in the first place.
youtu.be
I never got to that point. I was going to use at least one and then make up another but never name more than one if I didn't have to. I was honestly busier trying to work indian lore and freaky syncretic practices in than I was who the sects were and what they believed.
I'm no expert, but I never really got the impression that the whole Indian thing was ever that important.
it sounds stupid when I say it now, because I'm pretty sure that I just don't know anything about the Indians involvement. either that or I've forgotten about it.
I know that pet cemetery was a big influence on Team silent, but I don't remember reading about the town being on top of buried Indians.
And then go watch their playthroughs of Downcomming: the Axe Dilogy
It's implied that the cult inehereted the religion from the indian rites (or at least partially)
The lake was in fact home to indians, who did their spiritual rites there, and the names of the two biggest angels of the cult are xuchilbara and lobsel vith. Plus the goddes herself might nothing less but a Sun Deity - the classical pagan belief, as her sybol is called "Halo of the Sun"
okay, that makes sense, thanks for explaining.
what Indian religion has golden sewer pipe faeries?
I'm watching their playthrough of Catherine right now.
Troy baker does a great job as Vincent, but his portrayal of James in the HD collection of SH was just really, not good.
Op here again.
So this is what I've kinda thought up so far. another, updated synopsis, I guess, and a few new ideas.
the "BBEG" is a woman named Emilia, or Emily or whatever. She was born from the defeat of god at the end of Silent Hill 3, and abandoned at "birth" by Heather. She was later found in the chapel by somebody who brought her to the Wish house/hope house orphanage near toluca lake.
She is adopted by a young newly wed couple and life for them proceeds as normal for awhile until something happens to her mother (maybe she left with another man, or she died in a car crash or something else terrible that seems to always happen around silent hill) and she is out of the picture, leaving Emilia with the husband who only wanted the child because his wife did. Or some shit like that, i'm not good at telling weather or not an idea is stupid, and I'm open to suggestions.
Her dad leaves in the night and never returns, leaving Emily abandoned again, this time at an age that she is capable of being at least a little independent.
A day or two after her fathers disappearance, she starts to wander the town looking for him. Lets assume that the household was religious and when Emily gets desperate, she finds the church nearest to her to pray.
While in this church, Emilia saw some kind of symbol, or marking that prompted a reaction similar to Heather's when she would save in SH3.
to be continued -->
continued.
Now Emilia is curious as to why this imagery is making her feel this way and she starts to research and learn about the cult that birthed her.
Maybe she could somehow trace back the sequence of events to Heather Mason and find out about her, Emilia's, first abandonment.
Emily takes this idea of a cult and paradise on earth and runs with it, because it's all she really has, and she feels like it's her destiny or something.
Right now I'm trying to think of what she might need the party for, in terms of rituals or other stuff like that. Maybe she needs one of them to attempt a "physical impregnation" of the new god or something similar.
I'm open to suggestions, because I'm not too sharp on how the whole ritual thing worked in the first place.
thanks guys.
Anyone with a fatal illness gets a final lapdance.
man, that strip club is really nasty too.
kinda related, there's a strip club in a city near me called scuttle butts. always thought it sounded like a nickname for an STD.
Hey, do you have a download for 7th edition? I've been wanting to play it but haven't found it anywhere.
Could always, World of Darkness.
o shit, I wasn't aware of this. thanks a lot man.
I'll read through this.
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cool?
Thanks, user.
Ok, that's not bad
Let's say that because of her abandonment she subconciosly wants to be closer to people, and other peopole to be closer to eachoether. In fact her Paradise is for people to to become one - one being, one consciousness - no more hate, violence and abandonment. I think you can figure out the designs from there. Monsters are bodies of people infused in eachother:
Two "people" holding eachother in a passionate emreace, thier skin fused together and as a result it's awkwardly walks on 4 legs. every step seemingly bringing it's pain and descomfort.
On other hand, to bring out her fears - they will find singular bodies and monsters that are bound to be always alone, stuck in tight metal holes or deep dark corners.
As for the reason she needs the party - let's say for the ritual she needs a number of artifacts, but she has no idea where to find them and some of them might not even exist anymore. And then, after studying the nature of SH's power she has an idea - she will perform an incantation that will bring to the town people with exact desires and fears to CREATE those items and then she will trick them into runnung all over the town and gather them for her, saying that it will help them get out of the hell town.
That's just an idea, I'll post some more then I have some. Alternativly you can always just say that Players got drawn into Emilias world by chance or desteny.
Also, as far as Emili goes - I'd suggest to not make her like Dahlia and Claudia, just a preachy crazy person speaking occult bable
I'd say make her more like Heather for a change - young, kinda punkish, angry and with sense of humour.
Holy shit man that's awesome, I would have never thought of that.
Reminds me of evangelion, which is a great idea.
And I actually chose the name because it's similar to the other two, Dahlia and Claudia. I felt like it was fitting, they're all crazy bitches.
But I totally agree that she shouldn't be a crazy hag.
I think it might be a good idea/plot device to have her seem to the party to be someone trying to help them, or depict herself as another victim so she can get close to them to do what she wants.
If I know my players, they'll probably fall for it and take her in and be nice and shit to her. Which, if that happens, would provide an awesome opportunity near the end when the party discovers her true intentions.
I hope they end up really caring so that they have to face a difficult decision.
You rock man, I was focusing too much on the fears of the evil and didn't think about manifestations of want.
I'm about to go to sleep, so I hope this thread is still here when I wake up, I'm really liking all the ideas coming from this.
Yeah, glad I could help, I'm just happy to talk about SH really
I'll post some more ideas later if I think of any