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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35518 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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If you casually established that some character(s) are trans in that way via some minor background detail, like an item description or document hidden in a drawer, people on the left would be pretty ecstatic. Celeste got a ton of positive press coverage and cheering because the main character is established to be trans by some very minor background details in one room in a DLC. (Of course, by the same token, this will piss off some people on the right...)

In this case it wouldn't really work; the general game loop is that you're trapped in a haunted mansion with a few other people, and you're supposed to figure out who the bad people are. Everything can be a clue, so for example, if you find yourself in a mansion with a lot of wooden stakes and mirrors and one female character and the rest male then this might be the Vampire Queen's Harem event. (Or it might not! Could be werewolves; did you notice the silver swords?)

But this means that anything that I call attention to has to potentially be a clue. And it's hard to come up with grade-B-horror plots that center around trans people.

it's hard to come up with grade-B-horror plots that center around trans people.

It's not difficult to come up with them, but it's hard for any to beat the landmark "or else it gets the hose again."

TBF you could do so much with that. Vampire that identifies as human, everyone's sympathetic until the skin peelers come out, etc.

Ah, interesting premise!

I can think of a few horror plots that "this person's family photos show a child that's the opposite gender instead of them" could be a clue for, off the top of my head. And at least a couple for "this person has a mysterious drug that they inject/take regularly" (which has other mundane explanations, of course).

"So we get to the coroner and he tells us something we already know: it wasn't wolves that killed him, it was an elf blade. Okay, he doesn't say that, but it definitely wasn't wolves." - Ross Scott.

Would this game essentially be Clue, but more supernatural?

It's based more directly off Betrayal At House On The Hill, except because it's got a computer backing it up, "figuring out which event you're in" is important; there isn't a hard shift between "exploring" and "the haunting". It's not really an investigative process, but I'm aiming for more triage; you're trying to deal with an upcoming supernatural menace without really knowing which supernatural menace, so you're kinda trying to cover all the reasonable bases.

Except with the guarantee that the bases can be covered - no werewolves without a ready supply of silver, for example.

"Clue but supernatural" seems to fit Phasmophobia well enough.

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