Ravenwick: What's This All About?

What's this? Ravenwick is the beginning of an idea I've had kicking around in the back of my head for a few years now. It's the first in a series of system-neutral locales intended for horror roleplaying games that will include detailed location descriptions and NPCs, both friend and foe. Ravenwick is a fictional seaside town by the windswept moors set in Britain's late Victorian Era and presented in the Gothic horror tradition. It draws inspiration from the horror movies of Hammer Films, the Whitby of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the works of J. S. Le Fanu (particularly his imaginary English village of Golden Friars), Ravenloft's Mordentshire, and more. I'll be sharing elements of the setting here on my blog as the project progresses, then compiling and expanding that material into a published work complete with poster maps. Eventually, I hope to do the same for a fictional Old World "Überwald" setting taking inspiration for Stoker's Transylvania, Le Fanu's Karnstein, Shelley's Barony of Frankenstein, and their interpretations by both Universal Studios and Hammer Films.

Ravenwick is the prominent settlement located in the fictional county of Ravenshire on the eastern coast of England. Ravenshire is the ancestral family seat of Lord Ravenstone who lives with his family at Ravenstone Hall in Ravenwick.

The Village of Ravenwick and surrounding environs will feature:

• A seaside village on Raven Bay surrounded by dangerous, foreboding cliffs 
• Superstitious villagers, fishermen, and farmers
• Prominent old families enduring cursed lives in their haunted ancestral homes
• Werewolves roaming the windswept moors
• An imposing lunatic asylum on a hill overlooking the village
• Haunted ruins dotting the countryside
• A centuries-old cemetery where the dead do not always rest in peace
• Ancient pagan sites surrounded in legend and witness to forgotten prehistoric rituals
• A mysterious African prince recently arrived in England who has taken up residence in the ruins of Norfax Abbey
• An exciting locale to explore steeped in dark secrets and the supernatural!

In the coming weeks, I will be sharing more details about Ravenwick as well as sneak peaks at the area map as it progresses. And even though this is primarily a system-neutral project, I'll probably throw in some gameable content for CRYPTWORLD and more.

Rocky Cliff with Stormy Sea, Cornwall, 1902 by William Trost Richards

New Cryptworld Unsettling Power: Slam

I was recently reading through the old Pacesetter THINGS supplement and rediscovered an Evil Way discipline called Slam that I thought would make a nice addition to CRYPTWORLD. I've rewritten and reworked it as an unsettling power and added a little something extra - your CRYPTWORLD investigator might not be playing the piano for awhile!

Get out. GET OUT!!!!

Slam: This power allows a thing to forcefully slam shut any single portal (door, window, or gate) within a range of 100’ that it has previously shut normally. No amount of human effort can reopen the portal while the slam remains in effect, although the portal can be destroyed by extraordinary means (e.g. using explosives on a door or throwing a heavy object through a glass window). If a character is unfortunate enough to have their fingers caught within the slammed portal, they remain trapped until the thing relinquishes control of the portal and suffer a -20 penalty to DEX for 24 hours afterward. Use of this power costs 5 WPR per round of use.