Backlot Gothic

[theron]

Today at lunch, I picked up Shadows Over Filmland for Trail of Cthulhu.  To be honest, I have yet to fully absorb ToC, much less give any thought to running it, but I like the work Ken Hite and Robin Laws sufficiently to support their efforts where I can.  Since I've been on a big old supernatural/urban fantasy/horror kick lately, the subject matter looked to suit my current interests, at least tangentially.

And how.

Shadows takes the basic conceits of ToC and firmly sets them in the context of the Universal and RKO horror films of the 1930s.  Eschewing the cosmic horror vs the real world style of your average Cthulhu Mythos game, the authors set the adventures in what they call the world of the Backlot Gothic, "East of Switzerland and west of Hell."  It's a wonderful conceit, appropriate to any horror game portraying this genre.  To add to the ambiance, they include pages of "Stock Footage" descriptions of various places and events, encouraging the GM to re-use them to enforce the feel of the movies.  Even if I never run this, that's something I'll definitely file the serial numbers off for future use.

Which is the real reason I buy stuff written by Laws and Hite: they always seem to deliver at least one glorious gem of GMing lore per product.  Given all the paint-by-numbers stuff out there, that's enough.

Comments

[blinovitch]

That backlot conceit makes me think of Hammer horror movies in particular for some reason.

[theron]

Yeah, it's certainly doable. They went with the Universal faux-Central Europe to keep it in the same general period at ToC, but they give some guidelines for setting it in England. Doing a Hammer approach would be easy.