#roman dirge

[freakinfur]

[motelgoth]

Lenore, The Cute Little Dead Girl by Roman Dirge 🦇

[stickety-doo-da]

there needs to be more spooky cartoons

[jburneko]

The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow on RPG Trader

Bare Bones Edition

So, let's talk about "The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow". This game started with me thinking about an RPG that played out like Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Which is to say, each player would effectively get a single turn in which they played out a single panel vignette about their character.

It rapidly evolved to be a bit more than that. You see, it plays like a card game. Each round of play is a bit like this Lenore comic, "Leap Frog" creating a vignette that frequently results in the demise of either one of the PC children or NPC adults. The whole game is just one long Series of Unfortunate Events, if you catch my meaning.

The goal of the game is to be the last child standing but like all my games that's a bit of misdirection as it's almost impossible to achieve that with any kind of intention or purpose. In fact, the fastest way to lose is by trying to win or rather to win too directly.

You see, "The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow", like all my games, is a meditation on crime and punishment. While the children are the subject of the story, they aren't the narrative's true protagonists. That would be The Ravens.

You see once a child player is "eliminated" they take on a new role: A Raven. The children can only be vicious to each other or the adults. There are, after all, extraordinarily horrible children. Ravens, on the other hand, have vast sweeping abilities to shape the flow of the narrative and the outcome of the game. That's why you can't intentionally win a game of Raven's Hollow. No single child has the power to decide that. The collective actions of the Ravens decide that.

Most people know the collective noun for crows is "murder", less know that the collective noun for ravens is "unkindness" or "conspiracy." And that's what The Ravens in this game are: an unkind conspiracy passing judgement on the horrible children.

The way to win a Raven's Hollow game is to get The Ravens on your side. You know, the characters played by the people you just spent the rest of the game trying to eliminate. That's why playing too viciously will just cost you the game faster.

By the way, it's not enough to JUST be the last child standing. You also have face the mob of angry adults who have slowly been catching on that something isn't right with the children of Raven's Hollow. It's a very delicate balance of:

Murdering your fellow children.

Murdering the adults.

Not earning the ire of The Ravens while doing the above.

Only players who can do all three win games of Raven's Hollow. Who can be the most Deniably Horrible Child of Raven's Hollow? The rest get sent to the orphanage.

[magenta13]

i <3 mall goth fashion (all of my pics/collection)

[irkunt]

as someone who didn’t watch invader zim at all when i was younger but did read a lot of lenore, i only knew jhonen as the guy that shit himself in japan

[dailyjhonenvasquez]

Roman Dirge and Jhonen in Japan circa 2000

[blatantsatanist]

badly made stamps!