New World of Darkness/Nightmare Fuel

The Nightmare Fuel page for New World of Darkness.

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• The New World of Darkness sourcebook Asylum probes the fear of lobotomies for all it's worth, tying it into a setting where having one's brain destroyed is not the worst thing that can be done in the asylum. It's one of the most unsettling books in the line.
• The entire Changeling: The Lost line is terrifying. At any moment you could be dragged away by immortal, unstoppable fae creatures and turned into their slave. If you ever regain your mind and fight your way back into your own world, you find a double has been leading your life and you've been physically warped by your whole ordeal. It's the sort of thing that keeps you awake at nights, jumping at every little noise.
  • And all of that happens to your character before the game even starts...
  • And if by some miracle you become powerful enough to convincingly oppose the True Fae, you are almost certainly too far down the road to turning into one of them to ever turn back. Enjoy!
  • The premise of the game is that you were abducted into Arcadia by the Fae and subjected to mind rape, soul rape, torture rape, and/or actual rape. For years. Until the abuse metaphysically changed you into something not entirely human. Meanwhile, a 'fetch' has been left behind to wear your face, own your memories, live your life, and eventually die in your stead. So assuming you finally escape, you are (at minimum) unable to live a fully normal life, bear all the PTSD and then some of having survived years of literally inhuman abuse at the hands of Eldritch Horrors who are nigh-omnipotent in their home realm, and are still being hunted by said horrors. Oh, and since the fetch is created unknowing of its role as an impostor, getting even a fraction of your old life back requires you to murder an innocent being. But this isn't the Nightmare Fuel. Oh no. The Nightmare Fuel is all of the above is the True Fae reproduction cycle. That's right. The purpose of kidnapping you and twisting and breaking you into something not entirely human? Well, if your Wyrd score gets high enough as a Changeling, you can become one of the True Fae. Seriously, it's all right there in the Equinox Road supplement, particularly chapter 2.) Of course, you may still may try to Screw Destiny...
    • Becoming a Changeling requires only three things: Entry into Arcadia, sufficient exposure to Arcadia to acquire certain Arcadian characteristics, and a return to Earth (technically, the last isn't required). Usually this involves unpleasant or flatly traumatic experiences, but they're not essential, just extremely common. The main author has said that he wanted avoid romanticizing abduction and imprisonment, and in retrospect went a bit too far the other way.
  • Also disturbing is how the four Courts of the Changelings, and their different approaches to life, map almost exactly to four of the possible reactions for survivors of sexual or emotional abuse: hedonistic escapism (Spring), violent acting-out and revenge fantasies (Summer), abused-turns-abuser (Autumn), and paranoia (Winter). Notice how the faction of "eventually overcome the trauma and move on with your life in a healthy fashion" doesn't exist in Changeling society.
  • They also map to the five stages of Grief, also without Acceptance:
    • Spring Court is Denial, pretending that they've taken all the good things from Arcadia and ignoring the bad.
    • Summer Court is about taking out violence and Anger.
    • Autumn Court is about Bargaining their time away by with the occult.
    • Winter Court is Depression. They hide from the world.
  • More interestingly, one could see Privateers (Changelings who work as mercenaries for the True Fae, which usually entails dragging OTHER Changelings back to Arcadia) and Loyalists (Changelings who either didn't escape before they were totally brainwashed, or escaped and are being heavily blackmailed to do their Keeper's bidding) to encapsulate Acceptance. And becoming a True Fae at Wyrd 10/Clarity 0 could be seen as Understanding.
  • Also of note is the fact of how the founders of the Seasonal Courts made their Courts: By besting the Anthropomorphic Personification of the seasons at their own games. Mother Susan had dreams of motherhood that were ruined by the fae infertility. She forged Contracts with who-knows-what, and then gave her child up to Spring. Sam Noblood took a tree branch of autumn leaves as a spear and chased down Summer itself and forced it to make the pact (okay, that's not so much Nightmare Fuel as it is awesome). It's not said how Clay Ariel got the pact with Autumn, only that she left with no weapon and a 'wry smile'. Considering the Autumn Court draws its power from Fear, whatever did happen must have been Nightmare Fuel. Snowflake John disappeared and came back a year later, claiming that because Winter couldn't find him, he got the pact.
  • And Clarity, the morality stat equivalent from Changeling: The Lost almost perfectly mimics PTSD as the consequences of its lower values. At 0, the least disturbing thing that can happen is just mysteriously vanishing forever. Instead, you can go into complete nonfunctioning catatonia as the scope of your trauma finally fully catches up with you... or become debilitated by constant hallucinations that you never escaped your torment.
  • In-game, the Scarecrow Ministry actually creates Nightmare Fuel, for good purposes. In New World of Darkness, the monsters are real, and they hope that by keeping the masses afraid of dangerous places, they can keep them safe. If you see an urban legend, you had better pray that it's just one of them...
  • Even the True Fae themselves aren't immune. A big part of why they're constantly looking for sources of conflict and struggle in their "lives" is that they cease to exist without it. And one of the best ways to make a source of conflict that gives you an "other" to define your own existence against? Making a Changeling.
• One of the sourcebooks for Mage: The Awakening focuses entirely on grimoires (magical texts), and contains the only thing I have ever shuddered at in all the game lines: the Hildebrant Recording, a CD of a man holding a seance for what he thinks is a ghost but turns out to be an Abyssal being. Equally creepy for the snippets of dialogue from the CD, the effect it has on people who listen to it (they gain the ability to see the world through the perspective of the Abyss, as in, twisted and wrong), and what people are willing to do to get their hands on it.
  • Also, the Hildebrandt Recording is explicitly stated to be an impossibility. Hildebrandt himself was an ordinary man who should never have been able to summon the being at all. He used ordinary equipment, which should have been unable to record its sounds if he did. And for the recording of the seance to become a genuine grimoire should have been flatly impossible. It is, quite literally, a thing that should not be.
• The Tremere Liches, as a base concept-immortal soul-eaters-are pretty horrific in and of themselves. Then you learn their backstory, and realize the initial ones were made accidentally, and you start imagining how utterly horrific it is to be one...
  • They also have the way that the Seers of the Throne create Grigori and Hollow Ones.
• The section 'What Monsters Fear' in the sourcebook 'Mythologies'is pure Nightmare Fuel. It really makes the reader imagine how incredibly lonely it is to be a vampire, and then, to top it all off, shows you just how scary it is to face something alone in a world of perpetual night, surrounded by peers who'll look down on you for admitting weakness. Pleasant dreams....
• The nWoD games are filled with guys trying to show evil is the only true way. There's implications everywhere, both in powers and fluff, that they are indeed correct. It's like WW is saying "Dude, this is a horror series. Whachu expect?!"
  • Vampire: The Requiem gets Belial's Brood and the Strix.
  • Werewolf: The Forsaken gets the entire amoral spirit world, the idigam, the Bale Hounds, etc.
  • Promethean has the Centimani, but they are much less of a pure, unified "evil" faction than their counterparts in other game lines -- quite a few aren't really evil, just world-weary and hurt, or simply follow unusual philosophies.
  • Hunter: The Vigil is no picnic, either. The Cheiron Group, the Lucifuge, and the Cainite Heresy are of dubious morality, while Ashwood Abbey, the Hunt Club and the Knights of Saint George are considerably more than dubious. Consider that that last one serves the local analogues to the Elder Gods...
  • Oddly enough, Geist: The Sin Eaters doesn't seem to have this, at first. That's right, the game where you play a person who came back from the dead by making a bargain with some sort of incredibly alien ghost-spirit hybrid is in fact probably the lightest and happiest member of the nWoD gameline.
    • Of course, there's a catch. If you die again and haven't fulfilled your end of the bargain sufficiently (and you aren't dying of natural causes like old age), the Geist brings you back and someone else dies in your place. You get to live through the death of your replacement, and the trauma of being brought back can cause your grip on sanity to slip. Die enough times and the Geist takes over. Sure, you can say you want to be allowed to die next time, but the Geist can always do it anyway. To me, that gives Geist: The Sin Eaters the most potential for Nightmare Fuel, especially once you read far enough back in the book to find out what happens to the ones who go through this. And that's not even taking into account the Kerberoi.
    • The Geist themselves ARE the "guys trying to show evil is the only true way". By all means, they are insane half-death spirit ghosts. And they're ALWAYS hanging around the Sin-Eaters. In fact, your soul is bound to them. And when the Geist actually take over...it's not pretty.
• The Zeka from Promethean: The Created. All Prometheans have things really bad, but Zeka are a whole different story. For starters, they are in constant pain. That's all there is to it, they just have to live with the pain. Unlike normal Prometheans which can heal from electricity, Zeka need to be exposed to huge doses of radiation. They have some of the worst Torment and Disquiet affects, causing hysteric fear where they go and becoming Omnicidal Maniacs when overcome by Torment. No prize for guessing what their Wasteland looks like. When you take all of this into account, it's no wonder that not a single one has completed the Pilgrimage, and that it's ridiculously easy for them to become the aforementioned Centimani. The worst part? Their numbers are growing.
  • It says volumes about Promethean that it gets worse. If Zeka do achieve their Pilgrimage, they immediately take a potentially lethal hit of radiation (intensity is equal to their Azoth, which kinda sucks if they have Azoth of 5 or above - five-dot radiation is automatically lethal). It generally goes "Yay, I managed to become human! Fuck, is that thing my intestine? Aaaargh." [DIES]. Yes, even completing the Pilgrimage screws them over.
  • The sourcebook with the Zeka in it also applied this to Pandorans. Not from the perspective of Prometheans, although this is entirely the case. No, being a Pandoran or Sublimatus. You have a ceaseless hunger for Promethean flesh; you petrify on contact with humans; you have a number of instinctive sadisms; and, to make matters worse, you're doomed to spend the rest of your existence as a monstrous undead thing devoid of hope. Unlike Prometheans, you can't be cured.

“Not us,” the Timekeeper hisses. “We’re hungry forever.”

• Hunter: The Vigil takes all these horrors and adds the layer of potential insanity. You can't let your loved ones know what's happening, because they'll either think you're a loony or be put in danger. Vampires could have control over your job or the police, so you can't just go around staking every bloodsucker you see or you'll find yourself out of a job and under arrest. Werewolves are stronger, faster, and more vicious than you and won't hesitate to tear you to shreds. You can't kill ghosts with bullets, and they can possess you. Slashers have no human morals or code, and would just as soon slice you up than say hello. Even Prometheans are frightening, since they are unnatural aberrations and a sin against all nature and reason. The changelings are probably the worst, since they had no control over what happened to them and are sometimes so twisted they cannot interact with human beings without harming them in some way. The worst part of it all is the fact that a hunter must make a moral decision, slowly wearing away at themselves until the line between man and monster is nearly nonexistent.
• The fan supplement Genius: The Transgression has a number of things:
  • Clockstoppers, who stop technology from working. O.K. you're thinking, but some of them see clothes and language as technology, reducing everyone in the area of their influence to cavemen who communicate in grunts (think about what happens to Commander Riker in that de-evolution episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.)
  • Unmada are nigh on impossible for Mages to tell apart from Abyssals - they alter the area around them so the physics they believe in is true. (The Creator of Genius has stated they are not Abyssals, but a Mage wouldn't know that.) The bad part is if they end up in a hospital and their physics makes the equipment go wrong or ambulances pass their place of residence and stop.
  • An Insane Genius looks like a Mage, and An Insane Mage looks like a Genius, if one takes the wrong training, they can go mad from having the exact opposite philosophy to the one they're meant to have. An Obligation 0 Genius sees everything and everyone in a Measuring the Marigolds way, for example: "I just want to peel your face off, while keeping you alive using this machine, so I can see how your muscles work." Chances are they'd only keep you alive until the experiment was over, and then turn the machine off because they needed the electricity for something else.
• Maybe the scariest thing of all in the World of Darkness isn't the monsters or ghosts or strange happenings that sometimes have no explanation, even by magical means. No, what's possibly scariest of all is that these evils still pale to what still happens in the unknowing mortal world. Wars are still fought, people are still raped, and children still die. The monsters may cause it sometimes, but then there's the times when all it took was one sick person with their own ideas. The human evil, the real, non-mystical human compulsion for hate, is still a more powerful force than any magic in this setting.