I’ve opened Shadow Beach for playtest, which is a supernatural horror game built in Evennia. It’s set in a Florida Gulf Coast town — strong occult horror / Southern Gothic vibes.
It owes a great conceptual debt to Haven along with many old classic World of Darkness games I played on. The core thematic difference is about the relationship between supernatural characters and the world: the occult history in the Shadow Beach setting is that the Enlightenment represented human beings banding together to prevent the supernatural from ruling the world, and so in the modern age supers live in pretty confined communities under the watchful eye of the Authority, who seeks to prevent them from gaining power.
There is also less of an emphasis on PvP combat — Tyr’s work building mass combat operations and the like is unparalleled, and it’s just not something I tried to replicate — but there are expanded patrol/encounter/destiny like systems to push characters together. There are also deeper connections to setting NPCs and background setting stories that give reasons to people to cooperate or compete.
None of this is intended as a challenge to Haven, which is a game I’ve loved now for years. But I hope to explore some different stories, and Evennia is a much easier codebase to work with, since it is based in Python. We are open for playtesting now at shadow-beach.com or game.shadow-beach.com:4000. I expect the playtest to last through Thanksgiving, at which point there will be a wipe and the game will open officially. Folks who contribute during the playtest will get a build point bonus on their account when the game goes live as a thanks.
http://www.shadow-beach.com
game.shadow-beach.com:4000
Come check it out and see if it is for you.
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