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tremulus trailer

Hooray! Reality Blurs’ Sean Preston posted today that the launch of the tremulus Kickstarter is only a few days away. The stars are right on August 27th! Ia! Ia! Cthulhu ftaghn!

tremulus–a storytelling game of lovecraftian horror

If you are a fan of storytelling games and Lovecraftian horror you definitely should check the Kickstarter out as soon as it’s live! I had the chance to play in a game of tremulus lead by Sean himself and I can safely say it was one of the most awesome gaming experiences I ever had!
Stargazer

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

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johnkzin

Hm. I dunno about you, but I found that trailer to be completely underwhelming. I know they were trying to build tension and horror-type suspense with the soundtrack… but that depends on mixing with compelling images. Those images, to me, were just pedestrian. There wasn’t anything about them that drew me in, in a horror way, nor in any other way. So, that made the music “just annoying”. Which is pretty much my summary of the trailer. It has done more to turn me off of the coming product, than draw me into it.
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    Stargazer

    I actually found those images are perfectly fitting for a Lovecraftian horror game. Nevertheless you shoud definitely have a look at the Kickstarter on Monday. Tremulus is really a great game (you can trust me on this!).
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      johnkzin

      I think they’re appropriate for the _era_ of a most lovecraftian games… but they didn’t suggest anything to me that was horror-related. Nothing that made me connect the image to the tension-building music. It was like if someone showed me a picture of the Mona Lisa, with the stereotypical “bow chicka wowow” porn base line playing in the backdround … the mere presence of both doesn’t suddenly make me think of the Mona Lisa in a sexual context. There has to be more to the connection than mere simultaneity… something has to link them together. IMO, the trailer completely failed to do that. So much so that it actually made me _less_ interested in the product.
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Boogerface

I felt that the artwork was just fine and the music was very appropriate. What kind of production value did you expect from a teaser trailer Johnkzin, a full-feature movie?
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KFC

He suspected tentacles and shoggoths 😉
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    johnkzin

    No, I would have found tentacles and shoggoths flashed all over the place to be to overt, which CAN be fine in a horror product, but isn’t really what would have been a ‘teaser’ to me either.

    What I expect is that if someone is going to go to the trouble to make a trailer, that they actually work the material so that it relates to each other in a way that fits the theme of the product. Having a trailer implies a level of resources for the project that isn’t just a fan product … but having low production values in that trailer becomes a contradiction.

    A bunch of wood-cuts from the right era can be anything. If I don’t see any kind of stress, anguish, or worry in those faces, then it doesn’t say anything about subtle nor overt horror to me. It just says “oh, 1910’s or 1920’s, wonder what the subject matter is going to be? WW1 war rpg?” (it’s been a while since we had, say, the WW2 war rpg — and the closest thing to a particular theme those woodcuts had was 1 pic of two soldiers posed together) Nothing about those images said “lovecraftian horror” to me. Not overt horror, not subtle horror. Nothing.

    The music suggests “something isn’t right”, because the music itself isn’t right. But if you don’t connect that with at least one image that shows anguish, worry, or stress on the faces in the pics, or some “something isn’t right with these people” queue, especially toward the end, then it doesn’t say “the music is connecting this”. It could just be “the editor/composer has lousy taste” or “the editor/composer doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing”. Neither of which are good signs for the product… because, as I said, if you’re doing a trailer, that alone implies something about the product. If they’re taking on a marketing aspect that they can’t actually pull off, and they go ahead and release it anyway, then that definitely implies something about the product and product team.
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Reality Blurs (@RealityBlurs)

Michael,

Thanks for sharing our trailer on your website. As we’ve stated, this isn’t the final form of the one we’re using for our actual KS campaign. It was a cut from the first part of the trailer which ran overly long (and that we, ultimately, pared down), and decided it would be fun to share with friends and fans to generate some buzz about tremulus. And it has definitely been doing that!

Best,

Sean
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