Flavors of Horror: Part 4 of X: Lynchian/Surreal Horror

 David Lynch's works were a big influence on me despite the fact that I didn't watch any of his work until my sophomore year of college. His television show, Twin Peaks, co-created with Mark Frost, premiered in 1990, and ran for two seasons before its cancellation, getting a prequel of sorts in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in 1992 (not long after the end of the show) and a much-later followup in 2017 with Twin Peaks: The Return, effectively a third season that leaned much harder into the surreal side of the show, likely because of the increased clout Lynch had to wield.

While surreal horror is a much broader genre than just the works of David Lynch, I think he's a good person to look at when considering the aesthetics and nature of the surreal horror, even though I suspect that he might take issue with my using such a term to describe his works.

At the heart of surrealism is incongruous reality. Things appear in ways they are not supposed to, or rather in ways that they don't in our waking experience. While not all surrealism makes this a direct line, the surreal typically takes on the logic of a dream. The things we see are not literal, but metaphors for something else, and the way they behave has its own logic that, at least while experiencing it, appears consistent even if it ultimately isn't.

The connection between dreams and storytelling is a rather obvious one. Just like dreams, stories operate on their own logic, sometimes eschewing realism in the name of serving the deeper thematic purpose.

However, I would draw a bold line here between storytelling and dream-logic, in that a story is constructed with intention, and the meaning of its metaphors is something that can be discerned through study and analysis. There is certainly a case to be made that A: not all metaphors or thematic connections are intentional, and thus can be discovered by critics (meaning those engaged in artistic critique, rather than those judging a work good or bad) even if the author was unaware of the connection and B: the imagery and themes of dreams could also be based on internal, perhaps subconscious metaphor, and thus could also yield more concrete meaning with sufficient analysis.

Surrealism as a storytelling style, then, plays with this, and can take different forms depending on how deeply the author wishes to delve into that dream-like nature. Because art is created for others to experience, there are two layers on which art can operate: there is art for the audience's perspective, in which all that we can consider is that which exists in the text, sussing out meaning and subtext using only the work itself, and, in the second layer, the deeper meaning for the creator.

In the first case, the symbolism of surrealism is almost a sort of puzzle that the audience can work out - and is often the realm of dream-sequences in otherwise straightforward narratives. The second case, though, can create a serious sense of disorientation.

What I think makes Lynch such a fascinating artist is that he seems to conjure up imagery and metaphors that even he does not know the meaning of. Yet his imagination allows him to create this imagery in a way that is fascinating and compelling to watch.

The difficulty in adapting this style of storytelling to any interactive medium - from video games to tabletop games to other forms - is that a game (or other interactive medium) requires some kind of consistent rule set for players to feel like they are doing something meaningful.

This series is about the Ravenloft setting, and building adventures into different subgenres of horror.

Well, one thing we haven't touched on yet is just what makes surreal horror distinct from surrealism.

And the answer, unfortunately, isn't readily apparent. In simple terms, it is about nightmares rather than dreams.

A nightmare is a dream that fills us with fear, or less commonly, other unpleasant emotions. But this is not a total dichotomy, as dreams can often be just sort of weird and confusing, rather than being the pleasant counterpart to the nightmare.

However, I think one of the major elements of surreal horror is the breakdown of the barrier between a predictable, mundane reality, and the illogic of dreams, to the extent that one might be put in danger by this breakdown.

I hesitate to cite it given that I'm less than 100 pages in, but Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves seems (to the extent that I've read) to be another example of surreal horror - there is a nested narrative of analysis that goes into the details of a non-existent (within the narrative) documentary about a house that has spaces inside that seem to grow and expand despite the house seeming to be the same size on the outside.

In one of the cited scenes in said documentary, the family living inside discovers a passageway between two of the bedrooms that hadn't been there before they left on a vacation, and then they discover that the passage is 3/8 of an inch longer than it should be compared to the house's exterior. But the family learns to live with it and the matriarch builds a bookshelf using the walls of the passage as bookends. When one of the books falls off what had been a perfectly packed bookshelf, she screams, and I, for one, experienced a chill down my spine, reading it.

Surreal horror uses dream logic to turn things that ought to be mundane and unremarkable things into monsters as frightening as ghosts and vampires. The great monster of Twin Peaks, at least in its original run, was an entity named BOB, who appeared like a normal, middle-aged guy in a denim jacket with long, stringy grey hair.

Lynch, always ready to seize on an instinct, created the character after one of the set-dressers accidentally got trapped behind a bed on one of the sets, and so Lynch simply cast him as this otherworldy creature who ultimately turned out to be the possessing spirit behind a cycle of horrific murder and abuse (spoilers, I guess, though I feel like spoilers don't really apply to Lynch stuff.)

I find that Cosmic Horror often works well with Surreal Horror. The distinction between Lovecraft's creepy crawly alien entities and traditional demons and evil spirits is more about the framework within which we see them. Demons, for instance, in the Christian view, are understood as beings who rebelled against God, a perfect, eternal, and invincible nexus of all that is good and right. This makes demons very frightening, as beings who chose to rebel against that, but also creates a framework by which they can be opposed, with the strong implication that victory against them is guaranteed as long as you keep up the fight.

Lovecraft's monsters, though, exist within an uncaring and godless universe - or worse still, his most vast creatures are the true gods of the cosmos. But beyond that, while the Christian view of God still holds that He is something that cannot ever fully be understood by anyone but Himself, He's benevolent enough to give us a set of rules and guidelines to ensure that we can act in a harmonious way with Him. In Jewish tradition, he is less anthropomorphic than in Christianity, yet is also all the more logical and reasonable - a sufficiently wise and thoughtful person can argue with God and come to a better understanding.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft's conception of these god-like beings is that there is no simplified language that allows humans to commune with or converse with these entities - communication will inevitably shatter human minds, which are insufficient to address the complexity of these entities.

But Cosmic Horror renders this, often, with a kind of regressive aesthetic. Reason is abandoned and instead we have a return to pre-rational understandings - cults and magic and demons.

Lynchian Horror, though, suggests that we must go on a journey to discover a new language for understanding the forces at work.

Ok, but this is a gaming blog, and I've rambled on for a long time about this genre. What about practicalities?

The notion of a darklord is pretty core to the Ravenloft setting, but an antagonist is also somewhat less important to the subgenre. Instead, I think the key thing to emphasize is how unreal the Domains of Dread are.

Remember that Barovia and the other domains are not on the prime material plane. While there is the appearance of a physical reality that operates on real-world logic, in fact the Demiplane of Dread is more like a preserved nightmare afloat in... um, the Ethereal Plane or the Shadowfell. I'm going to let Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft answer that definitively.

And in that way, I think that one needs to remember that the real and the illusory are one and the same. Indeed, this is actually connected to earlier lore, where illusion magic was deeply tied to the Plane of Shadow and later the Shadowfell. If you want to heighten the sense of weirdness, consider making momentary impressions persist.

To take a page out of House of Leaves, one thing could be that the structure of a building in which the players find themselves changes over the course of their adventure. This is, admittedly, hard to pull off (especially if playing with a physical map and miniatures - you know, post-pandemic of course).

Likewise, allow things that are plainly illusions to become all too real - maybe a whorl in a piece of wood that kind of looks like a face changes its "expression."

The appearance or disappearance of NPCs without comment can be disconcerting.

Another thing to play with is how well your players take notes. If, for instance, the party encounters some innkeeper and her family, maybe the next time the party goes there, there's an extra kid. Or better yet, there's a different inn. This can be a little tough - because the players might simply miss these details or think they've made an error. You'll thus probably want to call attention to it.

But this is important: some of these changes don't mean anything (at least nothing obvious or strictly relevant to the adventure.) The appearance of a new teenaged son for the innkeeper will likely get players thinking of doppelgangers and changelings and all sort of magical creatures that can be "solved" with a classic monster battle. But we want to try to keep things disorienting - so such changes should usually be uncommented on, and the new reality that replaced the old should simply be off-putting, with no obvious narrative to attach to it.

Overall, I think this is a tough genre to built an entire domain of dread around, at least in a way that will play well into D&D's problem-solving gameplay. But I do think it's a really good genre to look into for creating a sense of otherworldly dread. In Ravenloft, reality isn't really trustworthy because, well, it's not "real" in the strictest sense.

Some of my favorite works in the subgenre include, in no particular order:

Legion - the TV show based on the Marvel character, but unlike any other comic book superhero show you'll ever see. It's about a man with nearly omnipotent powers but who is also profoundly mentally ill, and the reality of the show is the world as seen by him.

Welcome to Night Vale - a podcast about a small American town in the Southwest where every conspiracy theory is true, and where the most horrifying, dystopian, nightmarish, and simply bizarre stuff is treated as the charming quirks of their lovely burgh, taking the form of a local radio show.

Twin Peaks - a TV show that is ostensibly a police procedural about a troubled prom queen who's found murdered, while also being a demi-parody of soap operas as well as a story of otherworldly entities spreading hate and corruption... I think.

The Elements of a Ravenloft Domain

 I'm going to be up front here that this is basically a neophyte's breakdown of what will basically be a chapter in the upcoming Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. It's the most excited I've been about a D&D book in a while (I'm a bit torn, because the collector side of me want to get the limited edition, which my local store only charges 5 bucks extra for, but I think I might like the art of the standard cover better) and I've been thinking a lot about the possibility of running a Ravenloft campaign (though one that I think I'd make pointedly limited in scope, maybe having it only run to level 10 or 11.)

Ravenloft is built out of many different miniature worlds - regions like Barovia, Falkovnia, Dementlieu, etc. are all partitioned off by the Mists. In previous editions, there was a sort of "continent" that connected the various realms, so that if you found a way to traverse the mists, you could step into another domain. On one hand, this opened the possibility for the various domains to war against one another, and set up figures like Strahd and Azalin as rivals for supremacy over their miserable world.

On the other hand, I think that this continent, known as The Core, pushes the setting to be a little too much like other fantasy settings. WotC has announced that in 5th Edition, the Core is shattered, and each domain is an island adrift in the mists, which I think is thematically a lot more appropriate (though it also doesn't bar any interactions between domains.)

I think it is important to the Ravenloft setting that you are not in the Prime Material Plane. While its presence in either the Ethereal Plane or the Shadowfell does mean it's in one of the Inner Planes, which tend to have a more familiar relationship to things like space and distance, the fact that you're not in the mundane, physical world means that things don't have to behave in entirely realistic ways.

The Dark Powers, mysterious and unseen beings that make the Domains of Dread function, are essentially the intelligence of the Ravenloft setting - the land itself is aware and thinking, and it wants to scare you.

The alignment, per se, of the Dark Powers is an enigma. On one hand, you could see the Domains of Dread as a prison for the material plane's worst monsters, sealing them away so that they cannot continue to harm their home worlds. This could make the Dark Powers seem like good guys. But on the other hand, the way that the Mists drag potentially innocent adventurers into their worlds, and those who are dragged along with the Dark Lords (the evildoers around whom the prisons are formed,) makes the Dark Powers seem at best callous in their lack of surgical precision.

In fact, it almost seems as if the motivation for trapping the Dark Lords is not to keep them from harming the worlds from which they are taken, but simply to torment them endlessly, which implies that the Dark Powers are vindictive and cruel at best, or worse, they might gain something out of the torment they cause.

So, how do we put together a domain?

I think there are two questions to consider to begin with. The first of these is what subgenre of horror you want to explore. Gothic Horror is the bedrock of Ravenloft, but many of the tropes of Gothic Horror have been remixed and reinterpreted to create subsequent subgenres, so it's worth looking at even if you want to do something more like Cosmic Horror or another variant.

Secondly, who is your darklord?

While the trappings of the genre will be very important for fleshing out the overall environment, and some of the themes you can play with, the darklord at the center of it all is key.

While some domains might have multiple darklords, you'll want to have at least one. We'll assume you have a single darklord, though they can have lieutenants and henchmen who can have their own interesting personality, so don't feel like you have to have just a single interesting villain.

The darklord must be monstrous in nature - physically dangerous to any ordinary person. Vampires are great for this, given that they are intelligent and mostly human-like, but robbed of the human traits necessary to be good, like empathy and humility. A darklord needs to be relatively intelligent - at least at a humanoid level of intelligence - because it needs to have had the knowledge to be responsible for the evil acts that got it trapped. A fiend, for example, isn't going to make for a great darklord because their evil is part of their nature, and not a choice made that the darklords would seek to punish. Again, intelligent undead in general work well in this case, because they have that vestige of humanoid free will, but have transformed in such a way to no longer be able to return to that humanity.

Humanoid villains also work here, for the same reasons, but you'll want to ensure they are empowered in some way - they have some magical ability, or some kind of mutation brought on by mad science, which has made them formidable (granted, you could run a purely tier 1 Ravenloft game, but even then, you'd want to have a villain who's at least scary enough to pose a threat to a group of level 1 players.)

But while the physical nature of the villain is important, the key is their personality. The nature of the Dark Powers' torment of their darklords is that the darklord is trapped in an endless quest that is always frustrated by failure. Strahd's quest is to find the reincarnation of his "beloved" Tatyana. But because he has mistaken obsession and a desire to possess her for love, even when he does find her, her attempts to escape lead to his killing her, beginning the cycle anew. Strahd blames himself for his failures, but not in an empathetic way that would cause him to stop this horrific pursuit, but only by considering his strategies and tactics for getting what he wants to be wrong.

Strahd is a compelling villain in part because he presents the illusion of having some sort of redeemable side. His brooding nature and his passions might trick you into thinking that there's a good person somewhere deep down. The truth is that he will never change, and will only manipulate and gaslight others into questioning his villainy. Strahd, more than anyone, is convinced by this trick, and that leads us to a good concept for any darklord: that they are the hero of their own story.

Really this is a good thing for any villain, as the vast majority of people don't think of themselves as bad guys, even as they commit evil acts. There's rationalization, delusion, or even just compartmentalization that they use to avoid any feeling of remorse that might lead them to change for the better. This is true for evil people in the real world, but Ravenloft heightens this to supernatural extremes. Strahd is a complete narcissist. To clarify what I mean by that, narcissism is not simply a self-adoration, but it's a kind of solipsistic worldview in which only the individual's desires, beliefs, and even sentience exist - all other people, in the narcissist's mind, exist solely in how they can serve the individual's needs. This can manifest with overwhelming praise and adulation for those who help them that can then turn, in an instant, to bitter hatred the moment someone does something that the individual doesn't want them to do.

Strahd, for instance, presents himself with an air of magnanimity, but if the players get in the way of his attempt to take Irina (the woman he believes is Tatyana's reincarnation) they become his nemesis.

So, to review: the darklord needs to be someone in a Sisyphean loop, which is how the domain persists, and their impossible task is the cause of most of the ongoing strife in their domain. Furthermore, they need to be powerful enough to keep the realm afraid of them and doom any attempt to overthrow them.

Next, let's talk about the realm itself:

Because Ravenloft's domains are focused around and built for the various darklords, the domain should reflect the darklord's personality. You can play with variants on the themes of their character flaws, having little microcosms of the cruelty that drew the Dark Powers' interests. Furthermore, you can also have some horror come out of the responses people take to the unassailable power fo the darklord.

In Barovia, there is, for example, a haunted ruin populated by the spirits of a group that opposed Strahd. There's also an area where a well-intentioned person has been constructing terrible monstrosities in an attempt to give Strahd a replacement for Tatyana that can survive his rages, hoping (vainly) that this will break the loop.

In Curse of Strahd, at least, they introduce a rather chilling concept: there is a small, finite number of souls to go around in the domains of dread. As such, most people you meet don't have souls. In many ways, they're examples of the philosophical zombie, which actually suggests that the darklord's narcissism isn't, actually, 100% wrong. However, unlike the philosophical zombie, the people without souls do seem different - disaffected, cold, and uncaring. Also, the souls that do exist within these realms are trapped there, which is why the same people (like Tatyana) keep getting reincarnated, forced into Strahd's Sisyphean loop over and over, only they're the boulder.

The isolated nature of the domain should make the place feel oppressive. Locals will treat the adventurers as interlopers, sure, but there's also a certain level on which they might treat the party as the new inmates at the prison. Cynicism and pessimism are likely the baseline mood for most people within one of these realms.

However, beyond that baseline, you can have a certain zeal that might arise. Locals within a domain might be loyal to the darklord, or they might just try to keep their heads down and engage in depressive behaviors like excessive drinking to try to escape their misery. But you can also get a lot of mileage out of a militant resistance to the darklord.

On one hand, you can use these as potential allies for the party, and I don't think it totally breaks the vibe of Ravenloft as long as they don't stand a chance (at least without the party) of actually overthrowing the darklord.

But another thing you might consider is that the actions of the darklord have spurred a rebellion that is just as dangerous. Real-world history has plenty of examples of religious hysteria and moral panic leading to evils greater than anything that inspired them in the first place. Thus, you can have a fiery inquisition is far too quick to execute people suspected of collaborating with the darklord. The party, being outsiders, could easily be mistaken for agents of the darklord, and have to fend off a zealous inquisition.

While this behavior could arise on its own, you could even have the Dark Powers stirring the pot to ensure that this kind of thing continues. Or, you could even have the darklord himself using this inquisition as a method to sew mistrust among their enemies.

I'm very curious to see how the new book outlines the steps needed to create a domain of dread. As someone who really prefers homebrewing stuff, I think that I'd be likely to do so if I run a Ravenloft campaign.

Yes, Armorers Are Fun

 Tonight, when my roommate's D&D game he runs for co-workers only had three people show up, they decided instead to run a one-shot and I joined in as the fourth player. One of the players, who also plays in a few other games I'm in, including the one I run, had a level 18 character rattling around, and so we rolled up high-level characters for the night.

I actually wound up rolling up a Wildfire Druid at level 18 but decided that there were too many spells to choose from for a character I hadn't leveled up the slow way, and so instead made the tank-focused artificer that I'd always wanted to play.

Our party actually wound up being pretty melee-heavy. We had the evocation wizard at the back while we had a paladin, my artificer, and a battlemaster fighter.

We did, admittedly, have some free rein on picking our magic items, which allowed both the paladin and fighter to pick up belts of Fire Giant strength (aka 25 Strength, for a +7 bonus.) The items I picked for myself were actually not very combat-focused, because I was an artificer anyway - the entire class is built around cherry-picking magic items.

So, I had the following:

Enhanced Weapon on my built-in armor weapon

Enhanced Defense on my chestplate (armorers get to infuse different pieces of armor separately starting at level 9, and also get to infuse two more items as long as those are part of the armor.)

Goggles of Night on my helmet (weirdly, everyone rolled a human)

Repulsion Shield on my shield.

Winged Boots on my boots.

Ring of Protection (on a ring)

Cloak of Protection (on a cloak)

And I used by last infusion on a ring of water-walking just in case (it didn't really come into play, even though we wound up fighting a foe who could swim.

Between all those things, I had an AC of 25. I was also a variant human and took Tough as my level 1 feat, and so I had 201 hit points.

We fought The Curator, an archfiend from Tome of Beasts 2 who is basically a large frog-devil who likes to collect souls. The fight only lasted about two rounds and change, so I only got two turns. But I've got to say, between landing Faerie Fire on him (with a +3 all purpose tool my DC was 22) and then hitting him twice with my thunder gauntlets, which then gave his attacks disadvantage against targets other than me, I think I managed to do a good job at support. After the paladin, wielding a Holy Avenger, crit and dropped a max-level divine smite, doing 93 damage in a single attack, the Curator did wind up attacking her despite the disadvantage, but missed on one of those thanks to the effect.

Meanwhile, the fighter had grappled the Curator (he was built all around grappling) and dragged him toward me and the paladin, and while she blasted him away with smites, the wizard (learning a little late that fire was not great against devils) finally wiped him out with a Sunburst.

Level 18 characters are very powerful.

Anyway, I'd love to play one of these in a long-running campaign so that I could do things like use downtime to build an airship for the party, but it was nice to see that my super-tanky character concept seems to actually work.

Flavors of Horror, Part 3 of X: Cosmic Horror

 The universe, as in our own very real universe that you and I are currently occupying, is astoundingly enormous. No human being has ever gone farther away from their home than those astronauts who circled the moon (give Michael Collins some credit as the first person to be that lonely in history while Neil and Buzz were on the surface.) And yet our planetary system is just one among several within our solar system, itself just one among an absurd number in our galaxy, which is itself just one among an absurd number of galaxies.

Likewise, the human race has only been around for about 300,000 years. By contrast, the Earth is 4.54 billion years old. And even within that 300,000 years. Human civilization, on the other hand, is generally held by historians to only have existed for about 5,000 years. The entirety of humanity's recorded accomplishments exist within a 1.7% sliver of our species existence and the entire span of physiologically modern humans is just .007% of the planet's existence. The universe itself, dating back to the Big Bang, is thought to be 13.77 billion years, which means that there's more than twice the amount of time before this planet formed than there has been since it did.

Space dwarfs us and time dwarfs us, and there is a certain existential dread that bubbles up when you realize just how utterly minuscule and insignificant you are in the face of the cosmos.

That is cosmic horror.

Or, rather, I think that's the emotion that inspires cosmic horror. At the core of the subgenre is the notion that everything we, as a species, has accomplished is insignificant, and could be washed away in an instant. Furthermore, humanity's identity on Earth is one that is built upon the assumption that we are the apex of evolution - that no other creature on this planet has ever matched our imagination and intelligence. Though we are a young species, our accomplishments are unprecedented, as is our power.

Cosmic horror imagines that this assumption is incorrect.

I think it's notable that some of the most iconic figures of the Cthulhu mythos are not, though they might seem to be, actually extra-terrestrials. Cthulhu himself is from Earth.  The bizarre barrel-shaped creatures from In the Mountains of Madness and their Shoggoth servants that turned on them are from Earth. Any sense of actual human supremacy is exposed as a lie, that our seeming dominance of the planet is just a momentary interlude between the reigns of far greater beings.

Cosmic horror, particularly the works of H. P. Lovecraft, have been a major influence on the fantasy genre. In particular, Lovecraft was a contemporary of Robert E. Howard's, the author of the Conan the Barbarian stories, as well as other serialized heroes like Kull and Solomon Kane. It was actually these pulp-fantasy figures, rather than Tolkien's high-minded fantasy epics, that were the primary inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons. Howard incorporated some of the Cthulhu mythos into his Hyperborean Age inhabited by Conan, and the earlier Atlantean age that was home to Kull (I believe both were set within the same fictional history.)

And in D&D, the figures that resemble parts of the Cthulhu mythos are reflected in things like aberrations, Elder Evils, and Great Old Ones (the latter of two can often be conflated, though I'd argue there could be subtle distinctions - a Great Old One, I think, might not be evil because it is too alien in its mindset to hold any actual contempt.)

There is a great deal of overlap, though, with demons. Of course, D&D has its fair share of fiends. Devils I think most generally match the portrayal of evil as depicted in the Western/Christian model. They are corrupters and more often have the classic horns, forked tongues, hooves, and tails. Demons, on the other hand, are somewhere between that and Lovecraftian horror.

In particular, Demogorgon, one of the most powerful of the demon lords, borrows an element of the King in Yellow, a figure created by Robert W. Chambers, which Lovecraft incorporated into his mythos as a being called Hastur. The original story, the King in Yellow, is about a play that drives anyone who sees it insane. The King in Yellow has a sign - an abstract symbol - that has the same effect upon people. Demogorgon, likewise, has a sigil that can induce madness in those who see it.

While the more explicitly cosmic horror monsters and the more classical demons do overlap quite a bit in their use as monsters in a D&D story/campaign, this actually just gives you the opportunity to pick and choose which you want to use. Indeed, Tharizdun, a Greyhawk deity who is also something of a broader, setting-agnostic one, is more or less a Great Old One himself, and it's said he created the Abyss in the first place, so the connection between him and demons is there already - the otherworldly madness a stark contrast to devils' more classical Mephistophelean mold (though one tin-foil hat theory I really enjoy is the notion that Asmodeus, the evil god at the pinnacle (or nadir, rather) of the infernal hierarchy (who is basically The Devil as opposed to a devil) might, in fact, be a Great Old One as well, and the whole bureaucratic business of Hell is actually a cover for some other, more eldritch plot.)

While cosmic horror has, at its core, these very disturbing questions about the relevance of humanity and the machinations of unknowable, unspeakable ancient evils, the truth is that most of their stories are grounded in a more mundane environment.

The Lovecraftian protagonist is typically someone who is well-educated and rational. Scientists, explorers, or just well-to-do but highly educated men of means are the usual viewpoint character for a Lovecraft story. Oftentimes, the story takes the form of some kind of personal account of an investigation of some sort. In The Call of Cthulhu, the narrator has received the research materials left to him by his recently deceased uncle, who has been compiling notes on the bizarre worldwide cult to an entity called Cthulhu. The final vignette of the novella describes a ship that discovered an uncharted island which turned out to be the sunken, now risen city of R'lyeh, where Cthulhu was in some kind of death-like hibernation before his crew accidentally awoke the titanic monster, leaving the few survivors traumatized to the point of suicide.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is the account of a man who decides to take a tour of the northeastern coast of Massachusetts to see if he can track down stories of his own ancestry, only to become trapped in a hostile and dilapidated town where the people have interbred with some sort of bizarre fish-like people known as the Deep Ones, worshipping some underwater entity known as Dagon, and chronicles the narrator's attempt to escape the mob of deformed residents who want to capture him for mysterious purposes.

Lovecraft himself is a deeply, deeply problematic author, as his stances on race were considered bigoted even in the 1920s. It's ironic, given that the core of the subgenre for which he is the quintessential author is built upon humanity's irrelevance, that he should favor the white anglo saxon over the other insects that could be swept away at any moment if the Old Ones sneezed in our direction.

Still, countless authors have deconstructed this bigotry, even transforming inhuman aliens into relatable creatures with whom we can have a relationship of mutual respect (man, Star Trek is awesome,) but also reconstructing it by approaching the subgenre from places that are not solely the domain of the white man.

Horror is often built upon the disempowerment of the protagonist. Ironically, cosmic horror does not require this, because it, instead, goes the route of having monsters that are so powerful that there's nothing we could possibly do that would even grab their attention, much less harm them.

However, it also typically has a hierarchy of power, and therefore the monsters we face, while certainly frightening in their power compared to ours, might themselves be the tiny fleeing prey of a far greater monster. This actually allows a cosmic horror story to contain monsters that can be fought by an adventuring party, while still retaining the sense of dread that comes from knowing there's something much scarier out there.

All that being said, I generally think the best cosmic horror stories are the ones in which the "monsters" are either on the periphery or not even present. Instead, the antagonists can be other humans (humanoids in D&D, but you get it) who are convinced that they understand the eldritch powers at work and can profit from them.

I highly recommend the game Bloodborne for this. While in typical From Soft, Dark Souls fashion, the story is very obscure and must be pieced together from item descriptions and such, what eventually becomes clear is that the setting's primary religious organization is actually the attempt to build a society around the use of "blood" of a Great One. Yharnam, the city the game is set in, has descended into total chaos, but in the midst of this is a schism between the scholars of the School of Mensis and the church's leading elite, the Choir. By the time you arrive at either's headquarters, disaster has already struck - the Choir's headquarters have been overtaken by Beasts (essentially werewolves, but as revealed later in the game, the result of these eldritch experiments) while the School of Mensis attempted to commune with the Great Ones and died when their brains were essentially overloaded by the power of the things they sought to communicate with.

Thus, a humanoid antagonist in a cosmic horror story is one that will likely cause their own destruction - the heroes are more concerned with preventing collateral damage, as these experiments that the villain wishes to perform will likely cause massive harm if not apocalyptic destruction for the rest of the world.

Cosmic horror often adopts an aesthetic found in other late 19th/early 20th century genres. This often includes the detective story, with the twist that uncovering new knowledge is not the way to correct some injustice, but instead will expose the protagonist to truths so disturbing that they will break their entire worldview.

Notably, not all cosmic horror stories end as bleakly as The Call of Cthulhu or The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Sometimes, like Van Helsing in Dracula, the rational, scientific mind can prove capable of overcoming the monster, such as in The Dunwich Horror.

Personally, I think you could make an argument that surreal horror is a variation on cosmic horror. This would be exemplified by creators like David Lynch, whose works like Twin Peaks deal with unexplained and dream-like terrors, but emphatically raise more questions with each potential revelation of the logic behind it all. In Twin Peaks, the entities of the Black Lodge are clearly alien and terrifying, but there's a dream-like familiarity to them.

Surreal horror might deserve its own post, though I'll be frank that the broken logic of surreal horror can be difficult to adapt to a game like D&D. Still, it's my favorite horror aesthetic, and so I think deserves some exploration.

Flavors of Horror, Part 2 of X: Slashers

 Ravenloft is most often associated with gothic horror, as best exemplified by the adventure that started it all, with the evil vampire Strahd and the classically-gothic setting of Barovia. While many other regions of Ravenloft are built on those tropes, there's a lot of potential to explore other horror subgenres.

In American culture, one of the most popular horror subgenres of the last 40 years is the slasher film.

Arguably debuting in 1960 with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, the genre really began to take its true form with movies in the 1970s - 1974's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1978's Halloween, and then 1980's Friday the 13th, and 1984's Nightmare on Elm Street.

The formula for a slasher film really became codified in 1980s, and then were deconstructed in the 1990s by one of genre's architects in Wes Craven's Scream - one of the many 1990s deconstructions that sort of has its cake and eats it too.

The slasher film is an enduring formula, but what is that formula, exactly?

First and foremost, while the protagonist is usually one of the potential victims, the true star is of the movie is the murderous villain. In fact, these villains are so iconic that we would later have things like the bizarre Freddy vs Jason crossover.

The iconic nature of these villains is largely accomplished through the design of unique, unusual costumes. Jason Voorhees (who isn't even in the original Friday the 13th until the jump-scare ending) is never seen without his trademark hockey goalie's mask. Michael Myers, of the Halloween series, is always wearing his bizarre bleached-white William Shatner mask. And Freddy Kreuger's face is not hidden, but it's disfigured with terrible burns, and he always wears his trademark striped sweater, his hat, and his bladed gloves.

These movies generally have a cast of archetypes. In fact, another deconstruction, Cabin in the Woods, plays with this notion by having the organization running the story using mind-altering chemicals to transform otherwise nuanced characters into the archetypes (like turning Chris Hemsworth's smart academic who happens to also have an athletic build into a dumb jock). These films generally try to intentionally alienate us from the characters in order to soften the horror of seeing them brutally and gorily slain. The exception tends to be the primary protagonist, even though she (because it's usually a she) also tends to conform to a particular archetype: the "Final Girl."

In a weird way, despite the genre being profoundly transgressive, the final girl archetype is often a weirdly conservative ideal. This (again, usually female) figure is virginal and reserved in temperament.

Also, of note, the victims are usually young - either teenagers or those in their 20s. In part, this is used to justify irrational and reckless behavior that gets them killed, but it also coveys a sense of helplessness - the limitations on youth make them more vulnerable to the killer.

And I think it's this last reason that it's really tough to pull this off as a genre in D&D.

There are basically two ways to make a monster horrifying. One is to make it more powerful, while the other is to disempower the potential victim. D&D, structurally, is all about empowering the players. You survive long enough, and you begin to learn powerful magic or peerless fighting techniques that can lay waste to hordes of demons, or take down nearly god-like powers.

The Slasher genre's monsters are typically less about devastating power, and more about the inability to destroy them. Jason, Michael Myers, and their ilk can be shot, stabbed, exploded, burned, and they somehow always manage to survive and continue their murderous rampage. But in their implacability, they also tend to be slow, and their weapon is typically nothing more than a big knife of some sort - generally, evading them is the best solution in the longterm.

If I were to stat up a classic Slasher monster, its damage output wouldn't be particularly high - after all, it only has to do four points of damage to take out its typical victim - a commoner. But it would have a lot of HP and resistance to most damage, and possibly some sort of regeneration or rejuvenation trait.

When your protagonists (the party) are all from walks of life dedicated to being able to kick monsters' asses, the monster needs to be a little more than just a big dude with a knife, because it's hard to distinguish that from any other D&D monster.

One method I've used to try to recreate this idea is denial of equipment. I ran a one-shot around Halloween last year in which the party (all level 1) woke up packed in crates in the attic of a large house. The party could explore the house, which was filled with creepy things and the remains of previous parties who had been slaughtered by the monster, which allowed them to find some basic equipment (all, notably, less powerful stuff, like maces instead of war hammers, except for a musket with some bullets) but as soon as they reached the front hallway, the monster - a murderous dwarf named Bloody Oleg - entered with a greataxe and began chasing them. They could kill Oleg, but he'd always come back with a little more health, and so they needed to bring him to a ritual room in the basement where he could be permanently killed.

(Yes, the premise was borrowed from one of the Haunts in Betrayal at House on the Hill.)

But I think what made this work was the sense of disempowerment - a slasher is scary only if the potential victim doesn't know how to fight back. And again, that's a tough balance to strike for a game that's all about making the players feel powerful.

Flavors of Horror to Explore in Ravenloft, Part One of X

 Yeah, they just announced the book and it's not coming until mid-May (making it a couple weeks early for me to get it as a birthday gift to myself) but I have gone down a deep rabbit hole of obsession over the potential for Ravenloft content.

Anyway, as a setting based in horror, I thought it would be interesting to explore the possibilities of what kind of places we might find or design to fit within the Ravenloft setting.

The emphasis for Ravenloft has historically been gothic horror. But how, then, do we really define Gothic Horror? And is that truly all of Ravenloft, or are there other horror subgenres that we can touch on?

First off, Gothic Horror is typically associated with the 19th Century. That being said, the classics of the genre are extraordinarily wide-spread. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the novel that arguably created the entire science fiction genre along with the Gothic Horror genre, was published in 1818. Bram Stoker's Dracula, on the other hand, came out in 1897. While Frankenstein and Dracula are, arguably, the most iconic figures within the genre, but consider how different the same distance of years looked in the 20th Century - the end of World War I compared with the year that Final Fantasy VII came out.

Granted, I think that these two icons of horror are likely better-linked by the Universal Horror films of the 1930s

Stoker's novel takes an unusual approach to form, composed of letters, diaries, and newspaper articles that, collectively, tell the story of the vampire Count Dracula, who seeks to corrupt and turn the innocent woman Mina Harker. The collection of heroic men who save her (yeah, gender dynamics were not super evolved in the 1890s) includes their expert, Abraham Van Helsing, whose rational worldview and breadth of scientific knowledge arm the heroes with the tools they need to defeat and destroy Dracula, saving Mina from the damnation of undeath.

That this embrace of rationalism and science is part of one of the iconic works of Gothic Horror is sort of ironic given how the genre started. Mary Shelley, along with her husband Percy and their friends (including Lord Byron) were part of the Romantic movement. The Romantics were a response to the previous style in vogue, which had been a literary style defined by an almost fussy precision with language and a hyper-rational manner of description. The Romantics embraced the emotional, with characters whose motivations were passions (often un-virtuous passions) rather than carefully-deliberated ethical decisions.

Also, fun fact, the same friendly competition to write "ghost stories" that led to Frankenstein also led to a fragment of a story by Lord Byron that became the basis for the first English Vampire novel, so maybe there is a deep connection after all.

Amongst American authors, you cannot talk about Gothic Horror without mentioning Edgar Allen Poe. His stories, like Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, the Pit and the Pendulum, and maybe my favorite, the Casque of Amontillado (though damn if Tell-Tale Heart isn't awesome as well,) along with the Fall of the House of Usher and his poem, The Raven (which the first Simpsons Halloween episode adapted fantastically,) are crucial to the canon of the genre.

So, then, how are we to define Gothic Horror?

Monsters are certainly a common trope to most horror, but there is a common element to basically all gothic monsters - they are all some sort of perversion of humanity. Vampires are human in shape, but they are entirely uninhibited. Vampires are usually portrayed as hedonistic, but they are just as uninhibited in their wrath and violence - all restraint and respect is gone, and they simply take what they want. This makes them a bit seductive - after all, wouldn't it be nice to just be able to take whatever you wanted, however you wanted it? There's almost a Nietzschean superman aspect to the vampire - and Nietzche was a creature of the 19th century.

Frankenstein's monster (who, by the way, is also a Frankenstein as he takes his "father's" last name) is particularly tragic because his evil is not inherent, but what was taught to him by a neglectful creator. Though he is built of the parts of several dead people, Adam is a unique, new individual. But by showing him nothing but hatred thanks to his unsettling nature, Viktor Frakenstein ensured his creation would become the monster he saw him as.

Werewolves don't, I believe, have quite the same iconic exemplar, apart from Lon Chaney's Wolf Man (but we're talking literature for now.) Still, they represent a certain abandonment - the beast within humanity, some deep animalistic instinct that manifests monstrously as a transformed body and a bestial mind. Robert Lewis Stephenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde explores similar themes, along with themes related to the Nietzchean superman - a timid scientist creates a serum that transforms him into the hulking brute, and the allure of being free of those inhibitions allows him to remain a monster.

Man, I guess all of Gothic Horror is about the desire to break out of a repressed culture!

Well, hold on. We haven't touched on Poe.

In Poe's works, there's often only the suggestion of the supernatural. Of the stories I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, the only really explicitly supernatural event occurs at the end of Masque of the Red Death, when the terrifying visitor's mask is removed and only empty robes fall the floor, the Masque representing the plague's ability to strike both the poor in the town below and the decadent nobles in the castle above.

But the Tell-Tale Heart's still-beating heart of the man the narrator murders could simply be a hallucination based on his overwhelming guilt. The Raven's seeming connection to that narrator's grief over his lost love is probably all in his head.

Poe's focus is not so much monsters that represent the corruption of human morality, but the fallibility of the human mind, and the possibility that madness can alter someone's behavior to transform them into an all-too-human monster.

It's still about the breakdown of reason and rationality, but where the British works externalize that to physical monsters, Poe's focus is internal fracture.

And that, finally, takes us to the next subgenre: cosmic horror.

There's no author more closely associated with Cosmic Horror than H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's work is often difficult to read as he was considered particularly bigoted even within the context of the 1920s. The casual, matter-of-fact way that he spouts racist canards, tropes, and slurs can be shocking and take you out of the narrative, which is unfortunate given that he also created some of the most enduring and fascinating horror concepts in the genre.

Lovecraft was a massive fan of Poe's, and even name-checks him in some of his early works. The notion that one's mind cannot be trusted is a common trope within his work.

But in many ways, Lovecraft was, like the Romantics a century earlier, reacting emotionally to the scientific developments of the era. In the early 20th Century, the fundamental understanding of how the universe is structured and works was overturned by Einstein's theories (the more you learn about physics, the more mind-blowing it is that A: Einstein came up with so many ideas and B: that they turned out to be mostly right).

In the face of a universe that was now known to be so profoundly old, so profoundly big, and in which the relationship between space and time on a cosmic scale was actually so different than the relatively intuitive Newtonian model that had preceded Einstein inspired a kind of existential dread that Lovecraft turned into horror fiction. If humanity was so small and so recent, what other things might lurk out there that are so much grander than we are?

Much as Mary Shelley had effectively created science fiction by having Victor Frankenstein as the original combination of ambitious innovation without thinking through the implications, Lovecraft helped to create the notion of the callous and powerful alien. (H.G. Wells of course had really pioneered the alien invasion genre with War of the Worlds, though despite the technical victory for Earth at the end of it, I think you could say that that work was also one of Cosmic Horror.)

But I think what distinguishes Lovecraft from the alien-invader stories that became particularly popular in B-movies in the 1950s, though, is that his emphasis was on a breakdown of the rational. Lovecraft connected the ideas of extraterrestrials or prehistoric lost worlds with the tropes of fantasy, fairy tales, and myth. He imagined that these alien beings might as well be gods, given their level of power, and then extrapolated the idea that the gods we humans worship are only naive fantasies - that on a cosmic scale, the only things that could have such a level of power would be utterly unrecognizable and incompatible with the human psyche.

In a weird way, Lovecraft more or less seeks to recreate the feeling of hiding from monsters under your blankets as a little kid - you'd rather just not know they were there, capable of destroying you any moment, than to test reality and potentially confirm their presence.

We've got a lot more horror genres to talk about here, so I might have to make this a multi-part post. But before I lose the thread entirely (can you tell that I don't write multiple drafts of these?) I wanted to talk about how these tropes can apply in a D&D setting.

Being a fantasy game, there's already a certain abandonment of the rational - you already live in a world of magic and gods whose existence is provable. But there's also another approach to take: after all, a rational person who entered a world with such things would simply have to adjust to new data - science has no "canon," and therefore any information that contradicts previously-believed theories simply means that the theories need to adjust to account for the new information.

I think it's clear that any gothic horror villain should be some perversion of humanity - which could mean a monster like a vampire, werewolf, ghost, etc., or it could mean an actual person whose behavior has begun to stray from what is acceptable (like, to use an example from the upcoming book, someone who decides they'd like to hunt other people for sport.)

There's something appealing to becoming a monster, even if, when you think about it, it's actually horrifying. But the monster can use that to their advantage. Giving the monster appealing attributes, even making them kind of likable, will go a long way. I think Strahd is a great example of this, because he's a villain you can empathize with - which might lure you into thinking there's some good in him. The horror, then, comes from the fact that he's actually a complete narcissist, and that his "love" for Tatyana is nothing more than a toxic desire to take control of another person. (Weirdly, I think the portrayal of Thanos in Infinity War and Endgame actually works in a similar way - throughout Infinity War you see him constantly arguing that his plan is actually altruistic, and that he's really just a good guy who can see what others can't. But, in fact, once we see things from a different perspective in Endgame, we can see how this is really just a self-serving narrative he's using to allow himself to pursue ultimate power, and that he's ultimately, yes, just a narcissist.)

In fact, a self-serving narrative might be one of the major common elements between the British gothic works and Poe - Montresor in the Casque of Amontillado and the unnamed narrator of the Tell-Tale Heart give themselves weird and off-hand justifications for their murderous actions. The former claims that Fortunado insulted him and thus deserved to be walled-up in the wine cellar, and the unnamed narrator claims that his victim's blind eye contained some sort of evil, which sounds like some major BS.

Thus, I think that any gothic horror antagonist should have some kind of justification for their actions. In their minds, they are the hero, not the villain.

Now, things get complicated with Cosmic Horror.

Tonally, the two can be very similar, especially if you lean into the cults-and-conspiracy vibes common to cosmic horror. However, the worst monsters in cosmic horror are anything but human-like. Indeed, the scariest thing about them is that we have no frame of reference for what they are or what they want. The bizarre barrel-shaped star-fish-headed creatures from At the Mountains of Madness are actually closer related to plants than animals, but they are intelligent, and seem to have vivisected some of the researchers that the narrator finds - and they're not even the actual monsters of the story!

Lovecraft's monsters are of the "kill it with fire!" or the "run away screaming" variety, when they're not "hope I have a psychotic break and can't remember seeing this" levels of terrifying.

However, there is an avenue to connect this with the tropes of gothic horror, as Lovecraft often did: the monsters themselves are too alien for us to even understand as "evil" per se. However, other humans (or, given that it's D&D, humanoids) have different ways of reacting to these monsters. For some, the promise of power might be worth selling out the rest of humanity to get it. Some might seek transformation, to abandon humanity and become something more like these alien beings. Others might act purely out of a misunderstanding of what the effects of their actions will be.

I think you can layer the tropes of Gothic Horror with those of Cosmic Horror in this way. One manner would be to have a gothic figure of evil whose narcissistic worldview makes them believe they can handle what mere mortals couldn't, and threatens to unleash something a whole lot worse than vampires or the like.

The other is to invoke Nyarlathotep.

While beings like Azathoth, Yogg-Sothoth, and such are so vast and powerful that it's hard to imagine they truly want to do harm to humanity (if they're even aware of us,) Nyarlathotep is the horrifying exception: a Great Old One who does, in fact, take actions intended to directly affect us. Granted, Lovecraft was creating an entire mythos in which there was no separate category for demons or the like - his Nyarlathotep is a kind of cosmic Mephistopheles.

But that also means that you can play with these tropes using fiends as well as aberrations. (In fact, Demogorgon, the demon lord, has some elements of his lore borrowed strongly from Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow, a work that heavily inspired Lovecraft and whose eponymous figure was appropriated into the Cthulhu Mythos.)

The monsters in Lovecraft can be the source of the kind of madness that animates the villains of Poe's horror stories.

In fact, the Ravenloft setting itself is, in its own way, somewhat cosmic in its horror. While the Darklords are center-stage, the mysterious Dark Powers remain emphatically unexplained, which could suggest that there's something even more terrifying going on underneath all the predatory vampires and zombie hordes. (Hey, you ever play Bloodborne?)

This far in, and we've only really addressed two subgenres of horror. These are also limited to Western culture. Horror, as a genre, is pretty universal given that fear is a pretty universal emotion. In fact, the line between horror and other genres can be a blurred one - indeed, the entire fantasy genre (and the myths that the genre grew out of) are about overcoming monsters symbolic of real-world fears.

One I think I'd like to touch on (though I have very little familiarity with it) is the Japanese Kaidan, which are ghost stories. I highly recommend the movie Kwaidan (which is just an archaic transliteration of Kaidan), by Masaki Kobayashi).

30 Domains in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft

 Ravenloft, as a setting, is quite different from most because while it is all within the same plane (or rather, demiplane, as 4th and 5th Edition canon places it as a sort of partition of the Shadowfell) the lands are not exactly physically related to one another the way that, say, the major cities of the Sword Coast are.

While there is a continent, of sorts, referred to as the Core, on which many of the famous realms exist, each realm is separated by the Mists of Ravenloft, which act as an ethereal gateway as well as a boundary that prevents people from escaping. It's also the way that people arrive in the realms, and these Mists do not follow the normal rules for spatial relationships - they can arrive anywhere (well, I think anywhere in the Material Plane, other than the Phlogiston, which will only be relevant if you're doing a Spelljammer campaign) and sweep you into these realms of terror.

We've gotten a list of some of these 30 realms, so let's go through them:

Naturally, Barovia will be included. This is the realm of the Vampire, Strahd von Zarovich, who is trapped in an endless cycle. He drove the woman he is obsessed with to suicide when he killed his own brother - her fiancé - out of jealousy. Now, every generation he searches for Tatyana's latest incarnation as her soul is trapped in Barovia just as he is, but every time she is reincarnated, when he finds her, he always winds up killing her as she resists or he is overcome with bloodlust. Within Curse of Strahd, you resolve to help Irena, Tatyana's latest reincarnation, escape Strahd's grasp.

But we already know a lot about Barovia thanks to the expanded lore in Curse of Strahd, so let's move on.

Dementlieu is ruled by Saidra diHonaire, and is where a twisted fairy tale inspired in equal parts by the courts of the Feywild and Edgar Allen Poe's Masque of the Red Death. Here, an endless decadent party continues while death and darkness stalk the realm.

Lamordia is home to Dr. Viktra Mordenheim, who chases her creation, Elise, across the land. Mordenheim is a take on Victor Frankenstein, and both the good doctor and her creation pose threats to the party, along with some of the mad scientist's other experimental crimes against nature.

Falkovnia is a land dominated by the tyrannical Vladeska Drakov, but which is now undergoing a plague of zombies, and endless and unwinnable war against the undead.

Kalakeri draws from Indian folklore (and was written/designed by an Indian-American writer, which... is for the best). This realm is the site of a constant war between three Darklords who each wish to dominate the region.

Finally, Valachan is a dense jungle in which the darklord, Chakuna, hunts people for sport - kind of a "The Most Dangerous Game" situation.

That's only six, though, meaning we only have a fifth of what is mentioned. There are plenty of other established regions that I'm sure will show up.

I am curious how detailed they will be with these settings. The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount I think really spoiled us for granular detail, giving us at least a paragraph and one or two quest hooks for every city, town, or even small village in the whole continent. I'd love it if we were able to get the same sort of characterization for the various settlements in, say, Lamordia that we do for towns like Krezk or Vallaki in Barovia, but I wonder how much room they'll have in the book for that.

Personally, the realm I most hope to see (even though canonically it might have dissipated given that its darklord escaped) is The Burning Peaks, which was a realm fought over between the evil Lich God Vecna and his lieutenant/nemesis, the vampire Kas. Vecna's side of the realm was called Cavitius, and was a massive, haunted desert wasteland with a city that stood inside an enormous skull.

The book will also have guidance on creating one's own domain in the setting, which is something I really appreciate as someone who prefers to homebrew settings. I'm curious to see what they say about the magical mechanics on Ravenloft, like how the realms relate to one another and how the threshold of the Mists can be crossed.

While I think I'd be most interested in running a straightforward campaign, I do have a concept for a campaign called (working title) Ingothicous Basterds (seriously, need to work on that) in which Van Richten recruits the party following the events of Curse of Strahd, to try to convince the other darklords to attend a big party at Castle Ravenloft after you've backed the crypts with enough explosives to destroy the castle with all the monsters Monster Mash-ing within.

The book will have a section about tailoring a horror game to the sensibilities and sensitivities of the players - one thing to consider is that horror, as a genre, isn't inherently an adults-only genre. Scooby-Doo is an example of a spooky mystery that's still perfectly appropriate for younger and/or more sensitive audiences. While most people I play with would automatically try to check in with players and make sure that people are having fun as the top priority, having tools like soft and hard limits and a general framework for players and DMs to talk about what they're comfortable having at their table is a good thing to have written into the official rules, even if it's a more philosophical chapter.