Mieszanie gatunków gier a sztuka gotowania

From the outset, GURPS Screampunk was intended to be an unholy mixture of gothic horror and steampunk. Mixing genres has a lot in common with cooking; when it works, the results look spectacular and taste great! When it doesn't, you can add more spices and turn it into a curry ("What if we added characters from childrens' TV series?"), and if it fails spectacularly then there's always the option of calling out for a pizza (in gaming terms, this probably means playing Star Trek instead). To string the metaphor out, if the mix works, then the individual "taste" of each of the ingredients is detectable in the results, and they subtly enhance each other, creating a much more exotic dish than either alone.

Okładka GURPS Screampunk

- - -
Jo Ramsay "Designer's Notes: GURPS Screampunk", July 27, 2001

A Flower Grows in Hell

Me and the boys went the other night. It was raining. We caught the city bus and rode all the way through Eastbridge Tunnel. Sad Mary was already on top; she gave me one of her dead lilies.

I love the tunnel – so dark, so gloomy. There are no eyes in its darkness; I can relax there. Only there does the voice leave me alone.

I got hung up for a bit watching this Skinner kid carefully eat a sticky bun he'd been given. He was eating it so slowly, so passionately that I could almost taste it myself. I touched him and got that lightheaded feeling I always do when I touch kids. It didn't take long before I found what I was looking for. The taste of that bun flowed across my tongue. The sugar, the pecans, the cinnamon: pure delight. I got a rush from it, sitting there, my arm snaking through the window of the bus, my hand right inside the kid's head. Mary had to shake a rush off me; otherwise I probably would've fallen of the bus.

---
"Wraith: The Storytelling Game of Death and Damnation", promotional leaflet, Dragon Magazine 2007, July 1994

Spokojna wyspa ignorancji

Wydaje mi się, że największym dobrodziejstwem na tym świecie jest fakt, że umysł ludzki nie jest w stanie zrozumieć sensu naszego istnienia. Żyjemy na spokojnej wyspie ignorancji, pośród czarnych mórz nieskończoności i wcale nie jest powiedziane, ze w swej podróży zawędrujemy daleko. Nauki - a każda z nich dąży we własnym kierunku - nie wyrządziły nam jak dotąd większej szkody; jednakże pewnego dnia, gdy połączymy rozproszoną wiedzę, otworzą się przed nami tak przerażające perspektywy rzeczywistości, a równocześnie naszej strasznej sytuacji, że albo oszalejemy z powodu tego odkrycia, albo uciekniemy od tego śmiercionośnego światła, przenosząc się w spokój i bezpieczeństwo nowego mrocznego wieku.

---
Opowiadanie "Zew Cthulhu" w zbiorze "Kolor z przestworzy" (Wydawnictwo SR), H.P. Lovecraft, s. 5

The Picture in the House

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.


Rycina Theodore de Bry'a z książki "Regnum Congo" autorstwa Filippo Pigafetta (Włoch, 1533-1604)

---
"The Picture in the House" w "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories" (Penguin Classics), H.P. Lovecraft, s. 34

The Colour Out of Space

When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the bottom they saw a fearsome sight. At the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well - seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.

---
"The Colour Out of Space" w "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories" (Penguin Classics), H. P. Lovecraft, s. 195-196

The Grave

While some affect the sun, and some the shade.
Some flee the city, some the hermitage;
Their aims as various, as the roads they take
In journeying thro' life; -- the task be mine,
To paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb;
Th' appointed place of rendezvous, where all
These travellers meet.

---
"The Grave", Robert Blair (1699-1746), fragment

To the Grave and Back

As the twentieth century dawned, the horror genre moved on. The Gothic tradition gave way to the weird tales of authors like H. P. Lovecraft, who retained a Gothic aura of decay while creating fearsome alien entities, reflecting a society humbled by scientific discovery and the inhumanity of the Great War. Vampires, ghosts, and werewolves were soon dismissed as threadbare cliches.

But they always come back. A few decades passed, and then the Gothic tradition burst back into the world, like Mr. Hyde too long repressed. With each Gothic revival, new writers twisted the old archetypes, applying the anxieties of their age. Every era has a disease that can walk in a vampire's shoes; every generation has seen the cautionary tales of Frankenstein and Moreau come one step closer to reality.

The Gothic genre refuses to lie quiet in the grave. Its horrors — vampires, madmen, ghosts — continue to resonate within us because they are us.

---
"Ravenloft Campaign Setting, 3rd edition", Andrew Cermak, John W. Mangrum, Andrew Wyatt, s. 7