Editing Setting:HR Giger's Dark World (section)

===Wammnebu Suggestions and Methodology===

Some ideas for setting up the combat system. Will be filling out over time. Everything is still brainstorming so i will figure out how the stats actually work later.
==== General Guides ====
A couple guiding ideas im working with.
;Easy to adhoc
This is a game that is going to have a lot of ideas and creative monsters and creatures to it, whether developed by SavageReaper, based on the Game, as well as created by the GM. As such we need a system that lets players improvise and the GM make decisions on the fly, and be able to stat and resolve things quickly.
;Emphasize the Survival horror aspect of the game.
Essentially I want to make running away fun. For most of the game, characters should be out of their depth with these monstrous beings and trying to find more clever ways around the problem. 
;Madness is its own reward
:Trying to avoid a "sanity" meter. Instead of Lovecraft’s "Oh it’s so awful I can’t describe it" we are going to go for the idea that madness is you acclimatizing to the Dark World. Which means when you go back you are going to come back changed. I’m thinking particularly of Isaac Clark's character arc in the Dead Space series. As we progress through he does reach the point where he is just effortlessly killing all of these monsters, but Isaac himself is now a broken man.

==== Core problem with making Darkseed an rpg ====

I think if there was a key obstacle to making an RPG about an HR Geiger universe unlike say Lovecraft, is that HR Giger is not a writer, he is a visual artist. Which means we have to translate his visual language into something that works in a primarily auditory and conversational format like a tabletop RPG. Its not going to be enough to have HR Giger art in the splat books, we are going to have to find ways to make the characters feel uncomfortable and lost in Geiger's world without having to put unnecessary burden on the gm to have to describe everything unneccessarily.

I would love to bounce ideas back and forth on this, because i suspect one of the key issues we are going to run into is that we need some effort in the mechanics, objects, rules and society of the dark world. Objects cant just look weird they have to behave weird as well. your character has to react weirdly, and acclimatizing to the world should come at a cost.
====Other influences to draw from====
I don't think it would hurt to draw from other, similar, sources besides HR Geiger, so long as they don't overwhelm the main source material.
;David Cronenberg
:Fairly obvious one, but definitely one of the major designers and producers of Biomechanical objects (though it might actually be closer to mechano-biological). Im thinking of eXistenZ and VideoDrome in particular
;Prometheus
:I don't care about the hate, I really like this movie, especially the art style.
;Tarsem's The Cell
:Another good aesthetic
;40k
:Im pretty sure its an open secret that WH40k's Admech, Dark Mechanicum, and Tyrannids has some very heavy inspiration from Giger
;City of Lost Children
:French Children's classic has a lot of useful ideas for inspiration.
;doom 
:you can easily tell that doom has some giger influnces, especially in the hell levels.
;terminator 1 & 2 
: The future scenes can help craft our vision of a war-torn dark world and the terminators themselves have some nice design elemrents like the t-1000's liquid metal body and the t-800's metal endoskeleton.
;quake 
:quake 1 has many gothic influences and the antagonists of quake 2 are cyborgs called the strogg and there couid be some useful ideas there.
;blood
:the game has many giger influences but its most blatant one is the penultamate level of episode 4: in the flesh this level is litterally made of flesh and incorporates many giger-esqe elements
;ailen (duh)
:giger literally designed the xenomorph for alien and parts of the nostromo also he derived the basic shape of the ailen from an earlier painting: necronom iv 
;tyrian
many of the planetary environments in this vertically scrolling shooter have a biomechanical influence

====Stories over stats====
So instead of a player picking stats as numbers, they build the character similar to how Mount and Blade does it. You choose certain events in the character's life (or pick it randomly). These events lead to different stats being added to the character's sheet. We will eventually make a list of major character events that will include childhood events to illnesses that will have appropriate stats and roll modifiers. If something isn't mentioned, the GM will have discretion on how to stat it. Personally, I think it would be important that players not really know how their abilities and personalities work in the Dark World to continue to have that sense of discomfort. They should be encouraged to guess its effects and be (un)pleasantly surprised. Essentially where other games would stat these, these would now be feats.