Matt Corley, the creative mind behind; Tales From The Margreve, Lamp Light's Sanitarium, and Harper's Tale has recently turned his focus to investigative horror set at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century building up from a basic foundation of 5e D&D. So what I'm saying is, if you like:
-D&D 5e
-Horror RPGs
-Call Of Cthulhu
-Ravenloft: Masque Of The Red Death
-Investigative RPGs
-Horror stories or games based on real (seriously!) world events
...then this is a Kickstarter you owe it to yourself to check out!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/37222410/the-devils-city-for-5e
The Devil's City Kickstarter is basically comprised of two books. First up an illustrated 90 page novella co-authored by Matt Corley and Sara Tantlinger based on a fictionalized version of the story of HH Holmes (I'll come back to that in a bit for those of you not familiar). Like I said I'll elaborate in a bit but if you're a horror fan, the story of HH Holmes is definitely a case of truth being far stranger than fiction.
The second book will be Horror In The Windy City. A 5e compatible campaign book that will build on to Mr Corley's existing Whispers In The Dark game. The author has extensive experience writing horror gaming and he has shown he consistently 'gets it' in terms of writing excellent thinking-person's horror rather than classic D&D hack-n-slay style.
So that's what the Kickstarter is, now let me tell you why I backed it, and why I hope you'll consider backing it too.
From a gaming point of view I've always liked D&D as a game system and it's the system the greatest number of existing players are familiar with, and the greatest number of potential players are open to. Most of my gaming friends and I have always liked the idea of Call Of Cthulhu and in all fairness it is a good system but in my opinion it doesn't have the familiarity or the ease of use of D&D. I really think for a ton of gamers investigative games could be a real inroad to discovering D&D outside of the more traditional 'dragons inside dungeons' style of gaming. As prep for this I'm planing on running a group through Whisper In The Dark in two weeks. I'll let you know how it goes, and how it works.
From a story point of view the story of HH Holmes has always fascinated me. Again I have to reiterate, this is a TRUE story from our real world. I'll give you the truncated version but if it interests you the way it interested me do some research online and back this Kickstarter!
HH Holmes was 1890's version of Jigsaw from the Saw movies. He built a hotel in Chicago that was filled with secret passages, dead-end hallways to nowhere, and (in a manner of speaking) traps. In short he built a hotel, invited people to stay there, and then starting murdering them once he got them inside. I can't stress enough, this is a real thing that happened in an American city just over a century ago!
So there you have it. An investigative horror RPG set in an only slightly warped version of our own world 130ish years ago. A talented creative team, a game that manages to be familiar and new at the same time, and an inroad to a whole new genre of gaming.
I hope you'll all check out the Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/37222410/the-devils-city-for-5e and my plan is next week to write a full review of the novella, and the week after that to provide a review of of my Whispers In The Dark game-play experience (hopefully integrating) Horror In The Windy City's new alignment system.
-Jay
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