Nightmare City

[Jack the Reaper]

Inspired by the movies "The Truman Show", "Dark City" and "The Matrix":

The Nightmare City is a place of perpetual night and horror. The skies are frequently overcast with clouds, sometimes lightened by blue and red lightning flashes. The tall buildings and streets are dark and twisted-looking, like a setting from a real nightmare. Most of the city seems to be vacant, but a sense of imminent dread is in the air, and travelers will get the feeling that every shadow conceals some threat, that eyes are following them from every dark window. And this feeling is very much true.
The Nightmare City is the home of the nightmare people. They are horrid looking beings, who may look like the Strangers ("Dark City"), the Gentlemen ("Buffy"), cenobites ("Hellraiser"), Freddy Krueger, or any other nightmarish appearance. Though there are differences between individuals, all of them, males and females, are bald, and have long, sharpened fingernails. Some have wings, tails, horns, scales etc. They usually dress in black robes.
The Nightmare City is a large metropolis, but its actual population is much smaller than its capacity. About 2000 nightmare people live in the city, along with about 100 human captives. There are also other nightmarish animals and creatures in the city, and some other monsters as well.
The nightmare people kidnap human babies and little children from the human world to their city. They cast a permanent enchantment on their minds, known as the Veil, which makes them perceive the world around them as a normal human world: the skies look blue, with shining sun rising and setting regularly; the city's buildings and streets look like what a normal city would have looked; and the nightmare people look just like regular human beings. There's nothing to raise the captive humans' suspicions about the true nature of the world they live at.
The nightmare people take the roles of the human's family and friends. They are excellent performers, and each plays his or her role in perfection, pretending to be the human's parents, siblings, schoolmates, and with time also his or her spouse and children (the offspring of human and nightmare people is always a nightmare people). When they are in a captive human's presence, all nightmare people behave just like human beings, taking great caution not to do or say anything unusual that may break their masquerade. Only when they are sure that no human is around, they revert to their natural behavior. In addition to the nightmare people, who take the important roles, the Veil also fills the captive mind with illusionary people and animals, which exist nowhere but in his head; he may speak and interact with them normally, but in fact they are just like creations of a dreamer's mind. Those illusions fill the roles of extras in a movie, and are intended to give the otherwise rather vacant city the image of a bustling, lively human settlement.
In this way, a captive might live all of his or her live in the Nightmare City, without ever suspecting that something is wrong. It is not clear what's the exact purpose of the nightmare people in doing this, but it seems that they produce some sustenance from the humans' spiritual energies. Other speculation is that nightmare people cannot reproduce between themselves, and they have to mate with humans in order to multiply. This way or that, when they decide for some reason that a human captive has lived out of his usefulness, they remove the Veil from his mind, exposing him to the true horror of his condition, and then kill him horribly and use his spirit in some unspeakable manner. This is the fate of almost all of the Nightmare City's human captives.
But this is not always the case. Sometimes, the Veil malfunctions, and the captive perceives the world around him as what it truly is. It usually happens when the captive awakens from sleep; he might open his eyes in the middle of the night, and find himself in what seems to be a nightmarish parody of his house, with some horrid being lying in the bed next to him. The nightmare people will try to convince this captive that it was only a nightmare, what he is most likely to believe. But the experience might repeat itself, in other places and during waking times, and some other disturbing clues may show up – fissures in the masquerade; an actor nightmare man might slip with his tongue, and say or do something he is not supposed to, or the captive may come upon nightmare people who are not aware to his presence, and see them behave very strangely… The captive may encounter other captives, who also have figured out some or all of the truth, and cooperate with them. They must be careful to the extreme - as long as their Veils are active, they can't even know whether anyone they meet (including people they knew all their lives) is a human captive, a nightmare man or just an illusion; and if their captors will know that their secret has been exposed, the captives lives would quickly come to a grisly end. It might be easier to pretend that all is as usual when the Veil is still on, and everything at least looks normal (even if the captives already know that it's not), but eventually the Veil will collapse, and the captives will have to face the true horror of the Nightmare City, and try against all odds to find a way out. The best option is to find one of the ways the nightmare people use to get to the human world and escape through it, but it is a most difficult task. And even if the captives make it with their bodies intact, what would happen to their minds? Can a human being discover that all of his life has been a terrible illusion, his beloved ones inhuman monsters, and remain sane? Will he ever be able to look at the world without the fear that maybe it is nothing but another illusion – to look at human face without imagining that behind the smile lurks a demon?

* * *

What do you say?

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

A very nice reconciliation of several disparate but similar ideas. Kudos!

[brass]

Sounds like you would enjoy the Kult RPG. It's a good read and I often mine it for ideas. Illusions and veils are great horror fodder.

[Manofevil]

Another movie you should definitely make a point of seeing and referencing while developing this is 'They Live'. It's what I choose to call a B+ movie about a group of people who make these sunglasses that allow them to see aliens hiding amongst us and the instruuments they use to control us.

[Jack of Tears]

Some good stuff here to start - though I might wonder why the creatures created a world in which they then do everything they can not to upset or surprise the residents. Seems they could have simply moved into a town and fed off the people without all the extra work ... but, alien psychologies and all that.

The main issue I have with it is that you're exceedingly limited in the kinds of stories you can tell here: Town seems normal and peaceful; you notice something is wrong; you go about unraveling the mystery of what; you meet others in the know; the nightmare horrors start hunting you down; you try to find other humans and then a way to escape.

After that your setting is pretty much over until you get a new group of gamers. It works fine for the old "weekend in hell" bit, but other than that has no real staying power.

I see potential for more here - perhaps tie in to "night terrors" as the horrors go searching for more residents - snatching them out of bedrooms at night and the like. You could also tie in the "old hag" and "alien abduction" experiences, but this only gives you one more angle and the city becomes more of a monster than a place.

Perhaps the creatures are experimenting with how far one can push the human mind - and every time the heroes believe they have escaped they are only emerging into another level of their fabricated world, designed to continue with their tests. When they finally do escape the group is then left with the "is this real?" uncertainty nagging at them. (to highlight this, one of the fabricated levels of their experiment should seem like a legit scenario - the party wakes up in a strange room with things feeding on them and cooing lies into their ears, trying to put them back to sleep. In the course of escaping this "reality" they discover at the end that it is just another layer and they "wake up" again. I'd have 3-4 layers of this, the first they are in the city, the second they wake up and it was some strange dream experience, they third they wake up from that into the scenario I describe above, the fourth they wake back up into something else plausible - so when they wake up for the fifth time they have no idea what is real or not)

Then you have the "why are they doing this, what is their end game?" angle to work with as well. And what if they are actually trying to "help" in their twisted way? Trying to find a way to aid people against the threat of the Bleutspur? Or the Nightmare Lands? (or both ... perhaps they were psychiatrists and the like who were corrupted by the things they did in the name of research?)

Just throwing some ideas out here, but I do think you'd get more satisfaction out of the setting if you opened it up a bit to the potential for more stories.

[Jack the Reaper]

The main issue I have with it is that you're exceedingly limited in the kinds of stories you can tell here: Town seems normal and peaceful; you notice something is wrong; you go about unraveling the mystery of what; you meet others in the know; the nightmare horrors start hunting you down; you try to find other humans and then a way to escape.

After that your setting is pretty much over until you get a new group of gamers. It works fine for the old "weekend in hell" bit, but other than that has no real staying power.

I agree; it's not supposed to be a whole campaign world, only the setting for one season or so. But I thought that the captives who have escaped might return later to the city, to help other captives see the light (or darkness), like in the Matrix.

Perhaps the creatures are experimenting with how far one can push the human mind - and every time the heroes believe they have escaped they are only emerging into another level of their fabricated world, designed to continue with their tests. When they finally do escape the group is then left with the "is this real?" uncertainty nagging at them.

I like this...

[Troile]

Perhaps the creatures are experimenting with how far one can push the human mind - and every time the heroes believe they have escaped they are only emerging into another level of their fabricated world, designed to continue with their tests. When they finally do escape the group is then left with the "is this real?" uncertainty nagging at them.

Add Inception to the list of movies.

I think it could be a neat way to start a campaign. The PCs escape into Ravenloft proper and go about their business while trying to piece together what happened. The ultimate truth could be anything too. Maybe the city doesn't even really exist and the whole thing is set up by some sort of mad scientist, the possibilities are endless.

A good start for a campaign focusing on madness for sure.

[Jack the Reaper]

I think it could be a neat way to start a campaign. The PCs escape into Ravenloft proper and go about their business while trying to piece together what happened. The ultimate truth could be anything too. Maybe the city doesn't even really exist and the whole thing is set up by some sort of mad scientist, the possibilities are endless.

BTW, in the description of Scaena in Islands of Terror, there is a very similar concept, of illusionary reality inside illusionary reality etc.
I think though that the point in my idea is the discovery that not only you are now trapped in illusion, but that you have been so for all of your life, that all your beloved ones were actually demons, and all your concepts a calculated lie. It is even more terrifying than facing the nightmare people in combat.

[Jack of Tears]

Add Inception to the list of movies.

Not where I got the idea, but a good movie nonetheless. I ran an adventure based on this concept about 10 years ago and the players seemed to enjoy it.

not only you are now trapped in illusion, but that you have been so for all of your life, that all your beloved ones were actually demons, and all your concepts a calculated lie. It is even more terrifying than facing the nightmare people in combat.

Yet, since they are human, at one time they did have a real family in the real world. Perhaps they were kidnapped as children and their real family is still out there in the waking world somewhere? It would be interesting, once they escaped, for someone to comment "my, you're the striking imagine of so-and-so!" opening the way for the pc to discover that so-and-so is his father/mother/brother and there is a whole other life here wanting to enfold them while the pc - no doubt - attempts to maintain some distance while he struggles to reconcile the two.

[Jack of Tears]

damned lag

[brass]

I think it could be a neat way to start a campaign. The PCs escape into Ravenloft proper and go about their business while trying to piece together what happened. The ultimate truth could be anything too. Maybe the city doesn't even really exist and the whole thing is set up by some sort of mad scientist, the possibilities are endless.

BTW, in the description of Scaena in Islands of Terror, there is a very similar concept, of illusionary reality inside illusionary reality etc.
I think though that the point in my idea is the discovery that not only you are now trapped in illusion, but that you have been so for all of your life, that all your beloved ones were actually demons, and all your concepts a calculated lie. It is even more terrifying than facing the nightmare people in combat.

It sounds more and more like you should read some of the Kult RPG for this. There is a good whiff of kabbalistic mysticism to their setting that adds a lot of flavour to these concept. Plus they give a great name to these controlling creatures "Lictors".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kult

[Jack the Reaper]

It sounds more and more like you should read some of the Kult RPG for this. There is a good whiff of kabbalistic mysticism to their setting that adds a lot of flavour to these concept. Plus they give a great name to these controlling creatures "Lictors".

I already picked a copy...

[The Giamarga]

Another movie you should definitely make a point of seeing and referencing while developing this is 'They Live'. It's what I choose to call a B+ movie about a group of people who make these sunglasses that allow them to see aliens hiding amongst us and the instruuments they use to control us.

"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum.".

A classic Carpenter movie with Rowdy Roddy Piper.