Pre-Enlightenment Horror, Urban Fantasy, et cetra

[Prince Charon]

There isn't so much a line between horror and urban fantasy, as an overlapping section on a Venn diagram, with bits of a few other genres overlapping there as well; often, the difference is in the capabilities of the protagonists, and how the setting is presented. In most such settings, the monsters & magic are not something that suddenly appears, they were there all along (there are exceptions, of course, but for a lot of those, it was more that they were mostly hidden until the stars were right/the mana tides came in/whatever). Thus, the settings included these beings in earlier eras when fewer people per-capita would refuse to believe in them (before the Age of Enlightenment, hence the title).

This, then, is a thread for discussing historical settings of this sort (e.g. Monster Hunters: Florence, which I'd call a Renaissance Urban Fantasy setting, though I haven't played in it), as well as campaign ideas, adventure seeds, items, creatures, characters, and so on, that don't yet justify creating a new thread for them. That includes adjusting more modern characters for earlier eras, though if you want to go into a lot of detail, a dedicated thread might work better.

This may not be the best thread for discussing why the Masquerade/Veil/whatever exists, but knowing whether it does and how it works can be pretty important (you need one to have already existed for the Age of Reason to be as skeptical as it was, and it should pre-date the Age by at least a generation if not longer, but it isn't as necessary for stories in earlier eras, and perhaps it's something that came in gradually), so if it comes up, it comes up.


To start things off, imagine a world where spirits are common and somewhat active, and spirit-based powers (including some forms of PC-usable magic), items, and monsters are common enough for the myth parts of mythohistory to be dangerously real, even if they aren't over-the-top, world-shakingly powerful. Grendel and his mother might be evil spirits (perhaps Embodied by ritual), or mortal beings empowered by them (given their deaths, I'd go with the latter; EDIT: Grendel's mother is sometimes depicted as a witch, so perhaps she empowered and/or Embodied him). The gods would likewise be spirits, either powerful individual beings or groups of spirits acting in a collective name in the mortal world.


Thoughts?