Hi everyone. I’ve had a couple related horror game thoughts rolling around in my head, and they have somewhat come together. I want to share for a bit of feedback.
Premise
The premise is that the party is a group of dreamers in a shared nightmare, and the nightmare takes place in the abandoned husk of a suburban American neighborhood subdivision. They have to enter a house, deal with its horrors, and find something from your real life to wake back up. Each session is a different dream with a different set of houses. It’s a mix of dungeoncrawl and dream-logic escape room.
Mechanics
Player facing stuff should probably include a combat system. I want combat to be entirely modular (since combat mechanics are a sticking point for many people), so doing d20 rolls D&D style or resorting to Violence should be fine. Let me know if you think a particular combat system feels right!
I have a mechanic called “moments of lucidity.” There isn’t any magic in the setting, but it’s a dream after all! If the party notices something inconsistent in a house, call it out, and self-inflict the kind of injury that might wake them up (more than a pinch, of course), then they gain a “moment.” At a future time before the dream ends, you get a lucid dreaming type effect: you get to change a thing in the dream. (Too OP? Need to be rare?)
The kinds of inconsistencies might be: stairs that go down to the top floor of the house, objects disappearing out of your inventory and returning to their original spot, voices from an adjacent empty room (you hear them when not in the room), or not taking damage when you clearly should have. The kinds of things that when you think about them, you realize you must be in a dream (like how you would prompt lucid dreaming).
Players need a bit of gear too, so bear traps, kitchen knives, shotguns, rope, flashlights, incense, a hammer, lighter, a shovel, and other stuff, should all be in inventories at the beginning of the session. All the mundane equipment disappears when they wake up.
House Design
Probably the most important element is the House. I like having about 5 houses on the street where the party wakes up, and they get their pick, for each session (recycling unvisited houses would be OK). House design is totally up to the GM (the Architect?). I think a time limit would be good for each house: the dream must be ended in a certain amount of time, or the house/its inhabitants rampage. Having clocks in the house would be how time is tracked.
The gameplay is probably largely episodic, except the wake-up object stays between dreams (or until you die). That object not only helps you wake up, but grants a boon. That adds some continuity between sessions.
I think you could make campaign play from this by having thematically connected houses… or something. Hmm.
I don’t have much developed in terms of GM procedures. I think time tracking is a good idea, but don’t have a great idea of what to suggest. I think random encounters could fit certain houses, but would leave that up to the house designer. Being a dream, it makes sense to have small house-specific procedures, but some guidance could be good (example houses?). I probably need to playtest some and find what works and what doesn’t. Maybe it’s a dream and these aspects are fine to ignore for that sake. I’m not sure what it would add, generically.