Van Richten's Monster Hunter's.pdf - Askadesign.com

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-George Seferis, Last Stop
&FEWlX FORTHE Pw
eferis' quote captures an
important quality of horror
and the horrible. What is
truly horrifying cannot be
conveyed by mere words.
of our worst nightmares,
language fails us. We are stripped of all
civilized conventions, of our secure
knowledge of what can and cannot be,
and we are left alone, incapable of
trusting what we have always relied on.
Golems are horrifying creatures on
many levels, not the least of which is
their strange parody of humanity. In
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the
villagers see a hideous monster and
immediately leap to the conclusion
that it is a monstrous being both inside
and out. At first this may not be the
case, but as the monster is rejected
again and again by those it meets, as
Dr. Frankenstein fights to control it
body and soul, the monster indeed
becomes what the villagers have
condemned it to be: a creature of
irrefutable evil.
The Created's closeness to
ourselves brings the horror into our
very laps. It is difficult to ignore or
escape. In the movie Halloween, a
murderous child known as Michael
Meyers returns to his placid middleclass
suburban neighborhood to wreak
mindless, unstoppable violence on the
teens living there, and he does so with
unnerving calm. (Meyers is the
prototype of a new wave of Hollywood
golems that includes Jason and
Chucky.) At the end of the movie,
despite the best efforts of the film's
heroine, and despite the fact that he
should have been dead many times
over, Michael disappears into the
3 darkness,
.,e
There is no reasoning with golems,
no under standing their true nature.
They do seem to have a perverse
understanding of us, however. Still, this
understanding never leads to
compassion. Rather, it only imbues the
golem with a greater capacity for
tracking and tormenting its victims.
Golems are the true bogeymen of
the ADID game. They are the
creatures lurking under the bed, the
things that go bump in the night. When
a golem is handled to its best
advantage during play, no other
monster can equal the sheer heart-
stopping terror it creates in a
campaign.
GOletTI AdVWfirSS
There are four basic elements of
particular importance to golem
adventures: obsession, terror, intimacy,
and tragedy. The whole tenor of an
adventure can change by focusing
upon a particular element or dements.
For instance, using Dr. Van Richten's
gibbering golem as an example, if the
DM focuses on the tragic situation of
the creature, born into a chaotic world
with only the insane for company,
desperately searching for a soul mate,
the PCs may see their mission as one
of release: freeing the gibbering golem
from its mad and doomed existence.
However, if the relentlessness of the
golem is the focus of the scenario, the
PCs may well begin to think they are
mad as effort after effort fails to stop
the horrid thing that laughs at them
from the shadows and seems to be
waiting around every corner, behind
every door.
Before a Dungeon Master begins to
work on a scenario involving golems,
each of these four elements should be