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[#] Pffff, listen up, boy, and I'll show you some classics.
11:40pm UTC - 10/06/2008
So, The Frighteners, an interesting mix of horror and humour, though mostly on the humorous side. Not somewhere to go for a scare, but a nice choice if you like horror but need to watch a movie with someone who's a total wuss. Surprisingly gory, and has a fucking AFRO GHOST and the Grim Reaper himself. Sort of.
Next: The Shining. Now, the Shining was a damn fine movie. Very good for its time, with the only real downside being that dear God, the wife was shrill, annoying and kind of pointless. A lot of fine scenes and good acting from Nicholson, though. Most people seem to say the new miniseries is worse, but I'd like to disagree, I think they're both good, but in different ways. The miniseries lacks Nicholson and they wussed out a bit on the ending, but it kind of fleshes out the hotel and the happenings there a lot more.
Now, your RPG's...
Call of Cthulhu: Very fun to play for novelty or humour value, loses attraction real fast when you realize no matter what you do, the game ends the exact same. You're honestly better off playing Kult, which has, let's be frank, far better fucking fluff, and actually a possibility, albeit faint, of ultimate victory at some point.
Little Fears: Great concept, but somehow I can't help but feel that a lot of people would be VERY VERY CREEPY about this game. Two things that are easy corridors to fuckups in RPG's played by neckbeards: Kids and women.
Unknown Armies: Never paid attention to the damn fluff, but the system isn't bad. It needs a lot of DM arbitration to really work, though.
All Flesh Must Be Eaten: Holy shit, a horror game with a great, really modifiable system useable for just about any sort of modern or sci-fi stuff. System requires a bit of jiggering, but that's about it, and since it has a sanity/fear mechanism, if you're willing to stat up Nightgaunts and shit, it's a good system to apply for CoC and other settings. Personally I've used it for Kult's setting a few times, since Kult has a somewhat cumbersome system. Or you could just use it for what it was meant for, shooting zombies in the fucking head. The main flaw it has is that all of the pre-made settings pretty much only have one enemy to fight all the time, not necessarily a crippling flaw in the fun of a game, but it could be a bit tiresome in the long run.
Kult: Cumbersome system, and little-known, originally Swedish but translated to English. Long story short: Humanity used to be the fucking Gods of the universe, hunting exotic prey across dimensions, jaunting across time for holidays and crafting our own sub-realms in the worlds of dreams, change and nature just for laughs. Then some day the Demi-Urge comes along and starts fucking shit up, basically, he convinces humanity that they're NOT Gods, makes them forget their powers and hides it behind veils of self-illusion that also hides all of the amazing powers and weirdness of the university from us. And so we arrive at the modern day, after a few millennia of that. Reality is cracking our minds and slowly allowing more and more people to look past the veils of reality while the Demi-Urge(now disappeared) and his minions battle madly to shore up the illusory walls and our old prey, slaves and pets stalk us between the hollows of the dimensions. Going completely insane may just break you, or it may unlock the powers you've had all along. Plus the sanity system is awesome, it doesn't just put you in an asylum, as your brain slowly cracks, the remnants of your divinity lash out and reshape the world around you. If you go insane while under attack you may accidentially grow a chitinous carapace, you may panic and raise the dead or freeze time for several hours while you begin a panicked sprint across the countryside. But seriously, grab the PDF and at least read the damn fluff.
Now, CPRG's that scared the shit out of you WITHOUT using bullshit shock and monster closets? The first one that springs to mind is STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Hearing howling mutant dogs in the night, cracking lightning that makes the shadows in a half-collapsed old factory dance in confusing patterns, knowing there are Bloodsuckers nearby but not exactly where, and knowing that you probably won't seem them until they're right on top of you(except for the goddamn eye-spots, fucking things), shiver-inducing. Oh, and Snorks, fucking SNORKS. Tall grass, fuckers who crab-walk towards you before making beast-like leaps that WILL almost entirely kill you in one shot. Oh, yeah, and then you get to fight them inside a dark, ruined building where they WILL crawl out of little holes and shit and hit you from behind. They were less horrifying when they actually came, than the anticipation was. That's good horror in my mind.
~PurpleXVI
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As for Little Fears, playing it straight seems like a really dark and honestly unpleasant experience. You'd have to have a group of very mature gamers to do it, and I don't even know if it's possible to do *right*.
I've played it twice, though, as a starting point prior to an Unknown Armies game - a rules-light origin story for the characters that shows why they're brought together to fight a greater evil when they're ALL GROWED UP. Naturally the fluff is chucked out the window, and for the games I played the actual UA fluff was tossed out too, but the concept worked pretty well. (The UA games fizzled but it wasn't a problem with the formats.)
If you're doing a modern horror campaign of any sort and you want to build the characters from the ground up, there are worse ways than running a prologue session or two in Little Fears before time-skipping to the real game.