So I've decided to take my players into the world of my favorite game: Bloodborne! So far I'm facing three major dilemmas:
1) How do (or should) I introduce and use the concept of the Hunter's Dream? It essentially allows the PC to be immortal, and gives them access to some powerful shit. Should they all get it? Should only one? Should it be completely absent? It just seems like such an important lore point, I'd hate to not bring it up. 2) How do I do cosmic horror in a meaningful and impactful way? I don't want to just say "oh it's sooooooo horrific and incomprehensible". I want my players to feel a real sense of unease and dread as they progress 3)I'm planning on just re-skinning 5e since I'm relatively new to DMing. But is there a better system for something like this? Ideally it would feature a lot of agility and dodging stuff.
Also, cosmic horror thread. Post some spooky shit!
1) why not do it in a similar fashion to the game? Have an extremely powerful monster beat your characters and when they die take them there. My main problem with this is how are you going to punish death, since they can essentially respond. Maybe take away xp or items but I do feel like it's not really enough. Maybe do the memory system from that one home-brew dark souls game where every time you die you lose a memory until you're character is hollow.
2)never ever talk about the cosmic entities. Always allude to it through the use of imagery, consequences and of course monsters that come about as a result of their influence. If there is some sort of stuff you want to put in that directly references the entities, make it so that it's incredibly lethal or detrimental to investigate. Keep it vague and your players will fill in the gaps.
3)like I mentioned earlier there's a dark souls inspired home-brew called Fires Far Away that some user made which seems pretty perfect for this. You could also look into Call of Cthulhu for inspiration on how to deal with sanity mechanics and other things.
Jace Martin
I always felt that a blood borne game would be best if it was set way before the events of the game. Make the players students of byrgenwerth, or just citizens of yharnam, just as all the supernatural shit starts. Early on they hear about old tombs bring discovered underneath the city. First few games are investigation and discovery, then it escalated from there.
Of course all of this would be ruined I'd your players know the lore back and forth and can't shut up about it
Jaxon James
1) I will think about it but remember that rule n1 of adapting your favourite setting to a campaign is managing your autism and not force in every single "lore point" if you can't or don't know how to manage it. Tweak it, add something and drop something else. If you want to show your group how cool bb's lore is just have them playing fucking bb. 2)The only way to sell cosmic horror is if you don't present it as a cosmic horror campaign and let your party figure it out little by little. This connects to point 1, don't force the actual bb setting or they'll know beforehand and the ancient ones will just be spooky scary space monsters. I don't know, dwell into romantic horror or take something from german idealism and make it spooky. 3)No idea but please limit switch weapons autism
Christian Ramirez
Oh man user, you like BB? Imagine the same game, but with good level design, far more interesting enemies and combat, better and more meaningful builds, more weapons, respecs, a ton of content, deeper theme, and great co-op.
It's called Nioh and the only thing it's worse at is story.
Julian Evans
>1 I would nix the dream entirely, at least from a player standpoint. Don't make the players capital "H" Hunters, make them regular hunters, people from the city who are unattached to this crazy cosmic madness at the start. There are many hunters in Yharnam, but only a few of them actually are tied to the dream. Instead, you could do things like use the Dream Hunter as an antagonist. Having the party have to fend off a villain who they can kill, but cannot stop could be an awesome sequence.
>2 and have the right of it. To do the cosmic horror angle right, hide it. Vaguely allude to strange things, but completely hide the nature of things. When the reveal finally comes, make it massive and dramatic and terrifying. Remember that the game itself hid ALL of its cosmic horror content in its trailers. Everyone went in thinking it was werewolf souls.
>3 There was an user a while back who tried making a homebrew bloodborne system and I liked where he was going with it, but 5e should be fine if you work on tweaking it enough.
Speaking of bloodborne though, what kind of homebrew Beasts and Kin do you like Veeky Forums? I really like going way harder on the deep sea stuff than the did in game, bringing in vampire squids and sea spiders and anglerfish and shit.
Well, its worth pointing out that the Hunter's Dream wasn't, like, a constant thing. In the "real world" there was no dream. If you died, you died. Its only in the hazy, in-between dreamworld that exists between the real world and the higher realms of the 'gods' that the dream logic applies. This dreamworld is also where most of the real eldritch shit can be encountered, little of that bleeds through to the real world.
So I would say start off the campaign in the real world with Yarmham and beasts and whatnot and only slowly ramp up the eldritch stuff, until at some point to deal with godly problems they have to go into the dreamlands. In the dreamlands, they benefit from the Hunter's Dream and are essentially immortal but things are much much more difficult in the dreamlands and they can expect to die a lot.
You could even have them do this multiple times, where after they do it the first time they find they occasionally have to go back into the dream again and again. Maybe certain areas of the dreaming world can only be accessed from certain points of significance in the waking world, requiring you to travel around and find them.
If you do it like this, then you can say that death has no real penalty in the dreaming, but total time spent there does. Like, its dangerous to stay in the dream for too long for spooky magic reasons like going crazy or coming back wrong or just straight up losing your connection to your meat body and dying in the real world. Getting killed and having to repeat stuff over in the dream takes up valuable time.
Parker Howard
>inb4 that one guy that avatarfags as the doll shows up
Gavin King
Not OP but that dark souls game sounds interesting. Link?
Lucas Parker
Bump
Carson Evans
Different user, but I remember that thread! Here's the pdf I pulled from the archives. It was looking pretty promising.
I like the idea of that, punishing them for death. While I’m still not set on using the dream, it’s not a bad idea. Maybe a system like Borderlands or Bioshock where you lose money or something. Hollowing could also work.
The general plan was to make it occur roughly 20 years before the fall of Yharnam and progressively work towards it, with the campaign hopefully ending at roughly when the game takes place. How stuff would occur is mostly based off a home brewed autism involving in-game lore, cut content, an a healthy level of tinfoil theory.
Nice, I could probably adapt this for my campaign.
Colton Miller
How would one handle trick weapons? Count them technically as two separate ones?
Jayden Powell
Give them two statlines and the ability to switch between them quickly.
Juan Cox
Thats actually pretty cool.
Jack Powell
From what I know of it, Shadow of the Demon Lord might be a better pick for running the game. It's a system that's similar-ish to 5e, but with a little more Grim mixed in, they already have rules on dying and coming back (Basically your mind begins to slip each time as more of your soul is lost to the void). And the game has a little more blood in its teeth in general. HP is often low and damage is often fairly high. It's rather barebones on the Non-combat skills front. But hey, it's Bloodborne, how often are you going to be haggling for goods?
Benjamin Williams
Sounds fun, do you have a PDF or something by chance?
Brayden Davis
What's it like having such shit taste?
Grayson Smith
I've seen lot's of stuff about Nioh, but never had the chance to play it. I take it it's pretty cool.
This should do you just fine, Core Rulebook is SotDL - Shadow of the Demon Lord.
Brandon Cruz
Nioh's pretty fun, but I definitely wouldn't call it a paragon of design, especially compared to Bloodborne's more self-contained experience. There's a lot of bullshit in Nioh, and I don't mean bullshit as in the traditional soulsborne "artificial difficulty" traps and the like. I'm talking shit like Hino-Enma's absurdly godawful boss design, the pile of bullshit that is Nobunaga, the weird tonal breaks where the game completely drops all seriousness, and the general gamey-er feel to the combat and mechanics that I feel detracts from the tone and themes it's trying to get across.
Don't get me wrong, Nioh's a great game and I enjoyed the hell out of it, but just like Bloodborne it's a flawed creation.
