monster-driven plots...

[Uratoh]

Do these work well, in anyone's experience? are they good for starting out? I'm working on ideas for GMing this, and Ive got a couple potential monsters lined up, I can tell what I've got about them, if it matters...

[Mike Holmes]

Seems to me that "monster driven plots" are the bread and butter of LF. Most plots that I have seen are really just complicated backgrounds for the monsters. This is cool, because it means that you just have to come up with the fiend and the details of its existence, and you're all set.

(this fact is one of the most subtle, yet powerfully Narrativist things about the game; the plots develop out of how the players approach the situation with their characters)

Let's see whatcha got fer creepies.

Mike

[Uratoh]

Note: I stole these from media, and adapted them (and toned down their powers!) for LF.

Nightmare: An amorphous, semitransparent blob of goo that mindlessly seeks out children. If it gets near one, it will attempt to grab it by forming pseudopods and pulling the child in (a test against the child's Feet), and if sucessful the child will end up in a strange, surreal place (a dream, actually) where they are subjected to various scary things, based on the overall fears of the child. Nightmare's purpose in existance is to find a child, scare the bejesus out of it (sending the child's fear as high as it can, usually 7 or :cool:, then spit it back out and return to Closetland full of the good stuff. It can't actually take children back with it.
Its only weakness is its lack of a true mind. If the child it 'swallows' manages to overcome and actually defeat whatever is currently being used to scare it at the moment, Nightmare will violently spit it out and withdraw for the moment. This won't stop it from trying the same trick on that same child later.
To actually destroy a nightmare, more than one child has to go inside it (not hard, since it can't even tell if it's got someone inside or not unless they start hurting it). They will also be knocked out and put in the same dream as the first child. This will severely mess things up inside, as Nightmare cannot sort out so many different fears. If the children defeat the current fear-monger inside Nightmare, which will most likely be a frankensteinish combination of all their fears, then it will shatter and reveal a strange orb, that almost seems to be breathing. If the children attack the orb it shatters like glass, and there is a blinding white light, and they will find themselves sitting wherever Nightmare was at the time that they defeated it. From the outside it looks like a thousand points of light are piercing nightmare from within, and it then explodes.
If the children encounter a Nightmare in Closetland, it benefits from the 'adult' modifier of two dice, and choose the highest on any tests it must take (usually by the creatures it conjures up inside), and if the children destroy it from the inside, they are immidiately transported to the place where that particular Nightmare last left our world (which really could be most anywhere). Its essense will linger for a few moments like any other monster in closetland, allowing any stragglers a way (albiet a risky one) to follow their friends, who are obviously gone.
Pseudopod: 2

I dont feel like typing out the other one right now, cos he's nowhere NEAR as developed and I'd just be embarassed :smile:

[Uratoh]

gah, I should have turned off smilies...

Nightmare will try to send a child's fear level to 7 or 8.

it turned up with :cool: because I typed an 8 directly followed by a ). doh!