Since Oli Jeffery @SinisterBeard released his excellent Forged in the Dark game of melancholy horror, I got right on it and had a handful of extremely fun sessions with my two groups. This is where I’m going to keep the scenarios I make for it, so others can enjoy them too. Feel free to add your own contributions and we can keep up a little community of gamers who like to be sad and frightened, and maybe make a little buzz about this fantastic game.
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Reunion
CW: family death, cannibalism
When you were young, there was an abandoned mansion outside town, where you and your brother used to hang out.
Why? How did you spend your time there?
When your family moved to another town, you never found a new place that felt as just your own.
How did this affect your relationship?
At the age of 18, your brother won a fortune on the lottery, but soon after, he disappeared without a trace.
What do you and your family think happened? How was the family affected? How do you all feel about him since?
It’s years later. Do you even still think about him?
You receive a letter: an apology in the strongest terms for the disappearance, and an invitation for you and the rest of the family to a reunion; a new start, it says. The address is that old mansion; he bought it a few years ago and has been slowly renovating it and preparing himself to reconnect.
You arrive alone. The renovation is incomplete. He apologises and tells you where not to go, for safety reasons.
The Horror
The PCs’ brother has travelled the world, learned many things, and gained many new insights and perspectives. Tonight, he will eat his family. If the relationship characterised by the players is such that he might hate them, it is out of spite, dehumanisation and a towering sense of his own superiority and entitlement; he’ll show them that he truly is better than them, and that they are just meat. If he might love them, it is a disturbed attempt to reconnect permanently, to take them inside himself and assimilate their essence, that they might never part again.
The first place he tells them not to go is the kitchen. Tonight is his treat for them, and he won’t have them trying to help out with the cooking. It’s also where he’s already got their parents, butchered and ready to be served as delicious hors d’oeuvres.
The Tower
The PCs are the first moving in to a brand new super luxury penthouse apartment, where the only expense spared was on-site safety during construction. There are rumours of several deaths while the landmark tower was being built. Now the spirits of those who died haunt the place, messing with everything from the plumbing to the electronics that control the lights, the under-floor heating, a/c, the white goods, the TV and stereo, the digital picture frames. If the PCs leave the apartment, they will get stuck in the twisted reality of the rest of the building, where climbing the stairs doesn’t always get you any closer to the top, and no matter which way you turn, corridors (some finished and luxurious, some unfinished with bare concrete walls and flickering lights) keep looping back to the mangled bodies of the dead construction workers. The tower is angry, and it wants you dead.
Character creation can use the questions from the book for this one, or we ended up with Fern and Sky, the shiftless and entitled heirs to the new money fortune that built this place. They were moving out for the first time, enrolled for a highly expensive education, and greatly begrudging their parents’ insistence that they try and make something of themselves.
This might be a slow one to get going. We ended up making a roll out of every interaction with the building and its appliances (something that made me really appreciate Quietus not using skills, which would’ve felt very weird when it’s about the consequences of trying to turn the oven on, or whether where you’re running actually leads where you think it should).