You Are Not a Hero
In Colonial Gothic, the most terrifying thing about the horror is who is facing it.
Strip away the supernatural. Erase the horror. Ignore the rules driving the game. At the heart of Colonial Gothic is one thing.
An ordinary person.
Not a hero. Not a chosen one. Not someone with powers that tilt the table in their favor. A farmer. A midwife. A soldier far from home who has never seen a forest this thick or this dark. People from different experiences, different backgrounds, different lives. People shaped by hardship into something resilient, but not extraordinary.
This is not an accident. It is the point.
The war was full of ordinary people doing things that history never recorded.
The women who stayed behind when the men marched off, alone on the frontier, working the land, raising children, protecting what was theirs from dangers that had no name. Their bravery is real. Their names are mostly lost. Colonial Gothic is built around people like them.
The soldiers who fought this war were not the polished professionals of European battlefields. Many of them were farmers who had never stood in a firing line. They faced an empire that considered them rebels, amateurs, savages who did not understand the proper rules of war. Stand in a line. Face your enemy. Fire your volley. Reload. Advance. Die with honor.
The colonists looked at that and said, “Screw that.”
Why stand in the open when you can hide behind a tree? The lessons came hard. They came at the cost of lives. The colonists learned what the Native Nations had always known. The land is a weapon. Cover is an advantage. A small force that uses both can destroy a larger one that does not.
They took it further. The officer leading the troops is the key to the unit’s discipline. Remove the officer? The unit falls apart. It was considered ungentlemanly, a violation of the rules of war, to target a man of rank. The colonists looked at that rule and asked a simple question.
“Why?”
This is who you play in Colonial Gothic. Someone who has learned, through hard experience and harder losses, that survival requires seeing the world clearly and acting on what you see, regardless of what the rules say you should do.
Now add the supernatural.
Add the thing at the edge of the firelight. Add the battlefield where the dead do not stay down. Add the horror that lives in the shadows of a world already full of fear. You are not a hero with powers to match it. You are a midwife with a musket and the knowledge that running is sometimes smarter than fighting.
Colonial Gothic’s horror works because you are ordinary. There is no cheat code. There is no rule. There is no design decision secretly buried in the mechanics that states risk is not plot and the effects of harm are temporary.
What you decide to do matters. How you react matters. And sometimes, failure means harm or even death.
That does not mean games designed to remove that risk are bad. There is no bad game or bad design decision. Every game is different. Every game serves a different purpose.
I have two rules I always keep in mind. They drive everything I do. I have been told I am not serious when I refer to them. For me, they have held true for as long as I have been making games.
One: the setting drives the rules. The rules never drive the setting.
Two: a game should be fun.
For Colonial Gothic, the setting drives everything. High risk. A real chance of failure. A real chance of permanent harm. But survival means something because of that. You live to play another day. That is the reward.
The fun here is survival. It is what you do to ensure it. The Action Point you spend to activate a Hook at exactly the right moment. The high Degree of Success that ends the fight before it ends you.
Some will not see the fun in that. That is fine.
Because once you have the game, you are in charge. You define it for yourself. You want to make things easier? Do it. You are using the rules to drive your setting, your fun. That is not breaking the game. That is the game working exactly as intended.
I have simply given you the means to define it.
Colonial Gothic: The Revolution Edition launches on Kickstarter July 4th. Follow the campaign on Kickstarter and sign up for launch day.
More soon.