Thread:Kefke Wren/@comment-7706473-20130402074410/@comment-7706473-20130404031430

Bethesda totally has taken most of the best ideas for their 'official content' from mods, ahahaha! I mean, not all of it - but a good portion tends to strike me as something that someone on the dev team noticed in a mod, slapped a fresh coat of paint on, and re-marketed as DLC. That doesn't mean I hate it all unanimously - but there are certainly times I sit back with a bemused expression and think 'wotthehell'.

I absolutely love the idea of a mystery based mod. In addition to my other hobbies, I'm a huge fan of both Golden Age era mysteries, and 1920's style noir; this City of Nerervar sounds like it'd have kind of the feel of certain visual novels. I don't know how many branching paths or variants you'd want to actually have, but closing off (or making more difficult) areas of investigation through previous choices is always good. Again, I'm reminded a little of the old Delta Green setting for Call of Cthulhu, where you essentially were stuck working for a very ruthless organization... Who was, of course, one of the only hopes humanity had.

Not to foister ideas onto the theoreticalness of the work, but perhaps the player would be presented the choice of infiltrating one (or both) factions, and doing so would require doing difficult, unpleasant, or otherwise nerve-wracking things. (For the Dreamer-like cult, perhaps partaking of the flesh of some Sixth House monstrosity?) Failing to do so would kick you out of the infiltration, but give the player some much needed sanity, while doing so might align you more towards the faction you're supposedly only infiltrating...

Actually, I'd been asking about your own work - I'm always curious about what stories writers themselves favor of their own brood (if any)! That being said, I loved the Yith. I don't know if it's just a sort of sympathy for the inhuman and yet entirely understandable motivations they had - but "The Shadow out of Time" is a very strong contendor for my choice, as well. It is like pulling a tooth, though - pull too many and we end up writing an altogether different sort of story, heheheheh!

For many the same reasons as you, I like Reanimator, Cool Air, and the Dunwhich Horror - all of which I feel are ultimately about human evils and human mistakes. Though the latter is of course infused with the doings (word choice unintetnionally intentional) of Yog-Sothoth, it is ultimately the madness and sorrow of the Whatley family that drives the plot. And if you remove the supernatural elements, it can easily be a story about isolationist families keeping their children seperated and ignorant, leaving alone in dilapedated lands... Which is terrifying in and of itself.

I guess in closing, humans are frightening, can be frightening; as scary as the unknown and unknowable is, suffusing it with an element of the knowable and familiar makes it more terrifying than any simple fiction would be.