Witches, Ghouls and inspiration

I picked up two books this week to help out with the campaign preparations. I haven't finished either of them, I guess that happens when you try to read both at once! Ghouls being one of the main antagonists in the campaign, at least in the beginning phases, need some meat! While I have discussed them before I wanted to nail down some rules for them. I thought that the sourcebook for them would be enough but actually it isn't. It is very Vampire centric which I should have suspected really. It deals very much with using Ghouls in a Vampire setting rather than just in a World of Darkness setting. Witchfinders has been great. It has detailed Witches pretty much as I wanted them too. The book is about twice as big as the Ghouls book and it contains everything relevant for a Hunter campaign. What it doesn't do though is present the horror of the setting well. It attempts to portray horror by the repeated assertion that Witches are just humans. To me that engenders a feeling of paranoia rather than horror. I guess that injecting the horror into the campaign is the problem of the games master and relying on supplements to do this isn't going to be satisfactory for anyone involved. The examples given in both books are fine and have sparked my imagination. I hope I can lift some examples directly and place them in my city while others with some simple modifications should also be easy to use.

I have slowly come to the realisation that I need a vampire. This guy will be the season finale. The players won't know it but defeating him is the reason they are playing. The Ghouls are indirectly linked to him and the Witch Coven have no links at all. I am thinking a Nosferatu as it gives a good chance for a dungeon crawl. Exploring the sewers underneath the city gives plenty of scope to bring in various elements of the World of Darkness. Also cramped confined spaces with an ugly as hell Vampire in them will be pretty nasty. The Ghouls will be subservient to him but will be clannish and look after themselves. The Ghoul book provides information on families and the inhabitants of St. Casamirs will be represented by one of these, most likely the Angustri. These are essentially gypsies though in my world east european is close enough. This demands a Mekhet Vampire regnant but I will have to read up more about them to see if that is better than the Nosferatu.




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