{"id":8304,"date":"2022-11-23T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-23T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8304"},"modified":"2022-11-09T11:32:29","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T16:32:29","slug":"the-darkest-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8304","title":{"rendered":"The Darkest House"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Monte Cook\nMonte Cook Games\nSystem Agnostic (Uh uh. Sure.)<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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That house on the outskirts of town, sitting empty behind a crumbling wall. The one people whisper about. The one that has gone unlived in for years. Sometimes a few hearty souls creep in, it is said, to see what treasures or secrets they can find. Most find nothing\u2014just an empty old house. Some return shaken. A few don\u2019t return at all. You\u2019ve seen this house before. If not in this city, then in some other. You\u2019ve heard the rumors\u2014and if not, well, someday they\u2019ll find you. What happens to a house when it sits alone for so many long years? What jealousies and hatreds does it quietly nurture? What whispers echo through its empty hallways? What waits, crouched within its dark rooms, hungering for the return of life? For you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(I just yanked a quote of the Mel Brooks Stand Up Philosopher bit. Which shows you where my thinking was going)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is 150 pages of pretension fronting about seventy rooms\/pages in a haunted house. It\u2019s been designed for online play and has some interesting themes. Atmospheric, but, ultimately, an empty experience for most I\u2019d guess. Actual adult themes inside. Seriously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This thing is basically a computer program that you run, on your MAC or PC. It\u2019s optimized for online play, although I believe a print version is available as well. I don\u2019t think online play works well, ever, but, I\u2019m open to the position that the tools and style of play still haven\u2019t caught up with it. IE: We\u2019re trying to emulate  a tabletop experience when we should we looking to facilitate something a bit different. Vassal vs Unreal. So, Monte is trying, with this, to handle the online play environment. A page with everything the DM needs on it. Descriptions for the players, DM notes, a map, some artwork for the room to share with them, and for the monsters if they are present. And some \u201ccollapsible\u201d bullet points that you can expand when the major room elements are explore. \u201cI look in the chest\u201d results in the DM expanding the \u201cchest\u201d section for the details relevant to it. It seems like a little more clicking, which I don\u2019t think is good, but, also, that\u2019s probably not meaningful given that the online game does tend to be a bit slower paced. Hyperlinked to fuck and back, it\u2019s an ok effort in the core formatting. There IS a decent amount of red\/maroon text on black background. OOOO!!!! How fancy! And also unreadable. I keep finding myself having to highlight, as if to copy\/paste, in order to read it. That\u2019s not good Monte. I don\u2019t know how the fuck anyone involved thought it WAS a good idea. Anyway. Decent cross-references and core presentation. Elements the room descriptions are done well, for scanning purposes. Bullets, whitespace, and so on. But, then, also, some rooms have PARAGRAPHS of text for the expanded bullets. And in a room with a dozen sections to expand, with long paragraphs in some of them \u2026 these seems like a miss. It\u2019s amiss both in editing, to make the descriptions shorter and more scannable, and in formatting \u2026 following your own innovations to perhaps embed more information in deeper levels of the \u201ctree.\u201d I really, really, really want to hate this just for the illegality of the red on black text. I shall not though<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shall I hate thee for a summer breeze? No, shall I for the 150 pages of pretension that contain \u201cThe GM\u2019s secrets of the house.? IE: the GM guide. It has no secrets. It does not tell you, the DM, what is going on in the house. I don\u2019t know, maybe, four pages have some info on running the house? Some themes in the five sections of the house and what happens when the house gets mad at you. The rest of it? Bullshit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Monte spends a decent amount of time explaining a new RPG system that he wants you to use. So you can concentrate on \u201cthe story.\u201d Shove it up your ass man. Your system aint better or worse than anything else. Credit where its due, you\u2019re not shoving a plot down on our throats, imposing the designers Story on the party and DM, but, also, your system aint better or worse than D&D or CoC. He does spend a LARGE number of pages defending choices made and so on, trying to undercut the nerdrage that all of the fanboys feel for their home systems. I can only imagine what its like having everyones targets on you all the time. Anyway, this entire GM book is bullshit. The house can whatever it wants. \u201cThe mystical tools disappear lost in the house again, hidden in different places now because the house hates you\u201d or \u201cThis essentially means that time works exactly how you, the GM, wants it to. If you don\u2019t want to pay attention to the passage of time and then suddenly say, \u201cIt\u2019s been a long time since you have eaten anything. Your stomach is growling,\u201d that\u2019s fine. If you want to keep closer track than that, that\u2019s fine too.\u201d So, basically, do whatever you want, as a DM. This is bullshit and when I, as a player, detect a DM doing this then I tune the fuck out.  So, 150 pages of bullshit that appraches indie garbage. LIke \u201cHave each player think of a truth and a lie that is true for them. A truth is something tha player and character believe and the lie is something that the character believes but the players does not.\u201d Uh huh. You see where this is going, right? Yeah, telling the DM to challenge the players, character growth, blah blah blah. Fuck off with that pretension man. Anyway, like I said, you can just throw this entire thing out. All 150 pages. It\u2019s pretty much useless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The house isn\u2019t really system agnostic, as it claims. First, it wants you to convert to his system, and second, its clearly a CoC\/modern horror setting. Telephones, etc are in the game. And in fact, a rining phone is a big theme. Blah blah blah \u201cfit it in\u201d blah blah blah. Monte handwaves this shit in order to say its system agnostic\/any system, when he should really just lean the fuck in to that fact that its a horror game in semi-modern times. (Conspiracy X bitches!) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
His advice to the DM can be terribly non-specific. If you anger the house you are inflicting with a DOOM when you leave it. DOOMS such as \u201cTerrible nightmares and night terrors\u201d and \u201cA physical malady, such as a limp that impedes quick movement, a back injury that flares up at the worst times, or a prominent\u2014perhaps even animate\u2014and disturbing scar, OR a mental malady, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome that incapacitates in moments of stress, a terrible paranoia, or a serious and lengthy bout of depression.\u201d THis whole DOOM shit is supposed to be a major theme, selling your soul to the house for success, but its impacts are, again, just hand waved. Wrong decision. POh, oh, and lets not forget those rooms that \u201care placed to build dread.\u201d Blah blah blah \u201cits the house fucking with you\u201d explains why you hear footsteps walking upstairs. Ok, sure, It\u2019s horror. So Maybe. But, fuck your handwaving explanations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The actual rooms don\u2019t tend to be bad. And, in fact, I\u2019d say the theming is pretty damn good. In the first section of the house The Father roams about. His description is \u201cHe appears impossibly tall, with a dark face and yellow eyes, and usually carries a massive leather belt as a weapon. He\u2019s always angry and violent.\u201d I\u2019m not one for that consent checklist\/trigger shit at the table, but this is bordering on needing that. Especially once Mom shows up. We gonna assume you didn\u2019t just drop this on the players out of the blue. That would be rude of you to inflict actual adult themes in a game. So, if you can handle that \u2026 then this is well done. And I don\u2019t say that lightly. Its got more its fair share of crappy rooms. But also its got a lot of decent puzzley rooms that dont feel too much like a puzzle. And then when the themes show up \u2026 The closest analog, I think, might be those 90\u2019s horror games. Maybe crossed with a little Myst. The rooms are very atmospheric. The art contributes to this. The read-aloud borders on being a sentence or two too long, but it not terrible. And the actual challenges are pretty decent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019re gonna have to help sell the horror, as the DM (I\u2019m thinking specifically of the second room, a completely dark one, and the third one, with a potential ghost.) The format can be clunky at times. The GM\u2019s guide should just be thrown away. I\u2019m only looking at the electronic version, I have no idea how a print version would pull this off. Whoever decided on Red Text On Black should be banned forever from ever being able to share an opinion or doing design. Otherwise \u2026 if you\u2019re cool with some adult themes, not a bad effort. Which, frankly, is NOT the conclusion I though I was going to come to when I started this review. This may be Monte\u2019s best work in a LONG time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I might run this. If I were looking for something to run for a few sessions, Horror Related, then I might do this. Man, I really don\u2019t like online play. But, if I were to do it I might use this. It brnngs down some of the highbrow theme shit present in the Indie press while still retaining some of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jesus fucking help me, I think I’m giving this a No Regerts. You gotta go in to it ignoring a bunch of shit. And you gotta wanna run online. And be a good DM to convert this to your system and bring the atmosphere to life. That’s a lot of requirements. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $45 at DriveThru. There\u2019s no preview. The DriveThru page gives you an idea of the artwork to be shared with the players. And the youtube video shows you a little of the \u201croom page\u2019 layout, with the map, art, DM text, expanding bullets, etc. Also, if you read through the product description you can get a feel for the kind of pretension you have to deal with in that book you are going to throw away. There\u2019s nothing, though, to give you the vibe of themes, which is really too bad. That description of The Father? Go with that. You chill with that in your game?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/358910\/The-Darkest-House?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Monte Cook Monte Cook Games System Agnostic (Uh uh. Sure.) That house on the outskirts of town, sitting empty behind a crumbling wall. The one people whisper about. The one that has gone unlived in for years. Sometimes a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-no-regerts","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/darkest.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8305,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8304\/revisions\/8305"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}