I have done quite a bit of drawing this Christmas. I determined not to work today, but the art stuff is very much for my own enjoyment. I hare the sketches on Instagram because I like getting advice from people with talent. One such person is Steve Brute. He is always quick with supportive comments and is a fine comic book artist. His last mini comic, the head, was very cool. That prompted a discussion about ghost stories and lead me to M. R. James. I then spent Christmas Eve reading ghost stories.
Today, in that post gluttony slump, I did a bit more drawing, and then had an idea for a blog post. It didn’t really fit on to this blog, but it would be ideal for High Level Games, who I occasionally write for.
So I wrote the blog, and that got me thinking about solo, and cut ups, amongst other stuff. So far I have been rather predictable and Conservative with my subjects, Conan us iconic swords and sorcery, HP Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror, and Bram Stoker the father of the modern vampire story.
A cut up book based on ghost stories would be different. It is not the author that that is the draw, it is the genre and content.
Cut up is all about seeing patterns in the snippets, or imposing patterns on them. It would be entirely possible to scare yourself playing a horror game using cut up solo snippets. If you don’t know the source books, you really would not know what is coming.
What the cut ups offer is that richer content that is coming from another writer, not from your own imagination. It is virtually impossible to scare yourself in solo play, it cut ups could be the way that I could finally run a scarey solo game.
A rather different book for cut-up ghost stories would be the Gazetteer Of British, Scottish & Irish Ghosts .
I haven’t read that. I was reading M R James on Christmas Eve. I had read that back in 2000 the BBC had Vincent Price reading them by candlelight. From then on I was hearing his voice in my head as I read the stories.