Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG
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Forked off a big ol chunk to https://brandmuday.mythicus.net/topic/410/silent-heaven-gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss
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T Tez referenced this topic on
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For what it’s worth, by the way, I really liked my time at Silent Heaven and always found people very helpful. Jumpscare is good about looking into player complaints and does a good job at resolving things. I kind of bounced off of Silent Heaven because I don’t think RPI is the thing for me these days, but I really respect the work she’s put into it. Aside from the theme and setting, the technical aspects of the game are stellar, that chargen will be burned into my brain (in a good way) for a long time. So, if you haven’t tried it, I’d say give it a go.
they/them
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Moved a post from HB and a reply from Pavel off to the SH:GGG thread, so if you thought there was one here, you aren’t imagining things. I’m just gaslighting you by moving them.
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@somasatori said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
For what it’s worth, by the way, I really liked my time at Silent Heaven and always found people very helpful. Jumpscare is good about looking into player complaints and does a good job at resolving things. I kind of bounced off of Silent Heaven because I don’t think RPI is the thing for me these days, but I really respect the work she’s put into it. Aside from the theme and setting, the technical aspects of the game are stellar, that chargen will be burned into my brain (in a good way) for a long time. So, if you haven’t tried it, I’d say give it a go.
Going to enthusiastically second this. It didn’t end up being quite my thing, but the technical aspects are amazing, and I love the chargen, as well as things like the journal bit where you could keep staff updated on what your character was doing.
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@somasatori said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
I don’t think RPI is the thing for me these days
what is an rpi
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@Rinel said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
@somasatori said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
I don’t think RPI is the thing for me these days
what is an rpi
Roleplay Intensive! It’s usually a MUD or MUD-adjacent game where there are minimal OOC commands for the sake of immersion. You may also not see character names until you engage in an
introducecommand. There are usually other things involved like character occupations, automated economy, items, etc.ETA: On Silent Heaven, for example, there are no channels for speaking, but there is a ‘whispers’ system that allows you to kind of connect to people at a distance. There also isn’t a tell/page system. All of the OOC channels are on a discord, so the game itself is its own experience.
There used to be a game called Towers of Jadri that was a fantasy setting which incorporated a lot of these kinds of systems as well, as well as a MUD called Iconoclast that – while not using introduction commands – was RPI insofar as you had occupations, plots, engagement from that perspective, along with robust clothing and equipment options, mobs that would occasionally attack you, etc.
they/them
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Interesting! That sounds… in some ways like it would make being immersed a lot harder. But interesting!
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@somasatori said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
ETA: On Silent Heaven, for example, there are no channels for speaking, but there is a ‘whispers’ system that allows you to kind of connect to people at a distance. There also isn’t a tell/page system. All of the OOC channels are on a discord, so the game itself is its own experience.
This something I’m genuinely curious about the logic behind. Doesn’t the Discord introduce an OOC element that the game itself is built around minimizing, if that’s the design choice being made? Was it just seen as necessary for some kind of OOC communication and the Discord was already in place when the game opened?
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@Rinel I actually find it a lot easier to get immersed! There’s a reality the character lives in that has some more verisimilitude, like not knowing who people are on sight. It’s basically something a little more code-heavy than Arx is, for reference to a game you have experience with. Silent Heaven has things like move speed, labor effectiveness, attractiveness adjectives, and how fancy you can make clothing all based off of your stats.
@Third-Eye There’s really not a sense of OOC being not a part of this game. There’s anonymization of the help channel and we’re not allowed to share character info on the game’s Discord, but the OOC channel is pretty freely used.
Also a mild correction – there is an OOC channel, but it’s only for within the same room, and there are tells, but they’re in the form of the ‘hiss’ command and they’re ICly part of the in-lore explanation of how communication happens. OOC communication over hisses is largely discouraged unless actively needed for a few things – basically, the goal seems to be minimizing OOC chatter but not removing it.
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@Selira said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
Also a mild correction – there is an OOC channel, but it’s only for within the same room, and there are tells, but they’re in the form of the ‘hiss’ command and they’re ICly part of the in-lore explanation of how communication happens. OOC communication over hisses is largely discouraged unless actively needed for a few things – basically, the goal seems to be minimizing OOC chatter but not removing it.
Oh! Thanks for the correction there. I wasn’t aware of the hiss command when I was playing. I do agree that it very much felt I was in the town of Silent Heaven when I was playing
Simon(we need inline spoiler tags!)
It was a lot of fun, but also extremely strange as I haven’t done an RPI style MUD for at least 20 years. Maybe I’ll come back some time, it seems like people are still really enjoying themselves when I pop into the discord from time to time. -
ngl, delighted by the idea of everyone hissing at eachother
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Silent Heaven usually gets 1 new account created per day.
The day after Arx ended, Silent Heaven started getting 5 new accounts created per day. It has not stopped.
Around the same time, Andruid also posted an article about Silent Heaven! You can read it here: https://writing-games.com/silent-heaven-supernatural-horror-game/
I’m sure the player numbers will even out over time, haha. For now, though, I’m thankful that the core SH playerbase has been so supportive and accommodating to the new players. We’re doing our best behind the scenes to improve the game as well!
So I have to give my thanks to everyone who’s given Silent Heaven a try in the past week. Even if it didn’t hook you, I’m still appreciative that you gave it a try. And if you had a problem, my DMs are always open.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
I’ve been struck by how easy it is to hook into the town’s lore, get RP and start writing story. And I appreciate the lore is something the players are all learning together and there are not pages of things you have to learn/remember before you start playing. CGen was unmatched for its swift simplicity and for not making a very cgen averse person like me just flail and give up.
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@Jumpscare Fantastic article and some really thoughtful answers from you in there. I look forward to checking out some of the resources you linked – and I’m curious to look at the rest of the website, too, to see what our text gaming cousins are up to!
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This is so exciting for me! I’d forgotten this was in development, and now it is not in development.
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I’m already in character creation :^)
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Very cool vibe and chargen!
Two pieces of feedback as a new player:
- Issue: Being unable to tell NPCs from PCs is really frustrating as a brand-new player and made me nearly bounce off the game.
Without friends nudging me to stay I would probably have just given up the fourth or fifth time I had a moment of social paralysis because “here’s yet another character standing alone in a room or street, and if they’re played by a human I want to pose and interact properly, but if they’re an NPC I’m going to need to use very clear
tocommands to trigger dialogue from them, but my character would never just wander up to an actual person and demand their name and job title, but if they’re an NPC there’s no ramping up with smalltalk and I just need to run through the dialogue tree for this NPC to get an idea of their role in the game, but if I guess wrong and use my NPC-greeting routine at a human I’m going to be mortified, and oh my god whatever, I only have an hour of free time tonight, I’m going back to the hotel and logging off and doing something else.”I know that NPCs being puppeted by storytellers will have a clear flag for that, but for every other NPC in the game there’s absolutely nothing distinguishing them from PCs except that they’ll usually auto-talk at you once you introduce yourself. That doesn’t solve the problem of knowing how to interact with them on first contact, and as someone who already gets pretty overwhelmed when trying a new game and getting into the RP flow of a new character, that was driving me absolutely nuts.
Suggestion: Some kind of indicator for which characters are NPCs would be a huge help. Given that there’s already an automatic flag when NPCs are being puppeted by staff, there clearly isn’t a immersion thing going on where we’re trying to pretend NPCs should be indistinguishable from PCs, they’re just indistinguishable when in actual NPC mode. Making NPCs more easily identifiable will also encourage new players to be more proactive exploring their scripted dialogue, and there’s a lot of fantastic dialogue.
- Issue: The game taking the first character of any unknown command and trying to use it as a direction (what’s
where? surely you must meanwest) leads to me constantly smacking into walls or walking where I don’t intend to when I forget commands.
Having the game automatically try to parse unknown commands as directions also makes experimenting with commands feel a lot riskier. I saw this was also a major part of @DrQuinn new-character-immediately-gets-organs-harvested-when-offline ordeal, because they typed a command starting with
dthat the game didn’t recognize and interpreted asdown, taking the character out of the safety of the hotel room.Suggestion: Limit the number of unknown commands the game will try to parse as directions. Logic like
if command in ['s', 'so', 'sou', 'sout', 'south'], go south(handwavey placeholder code, I don’t know the codebase) would still allow for half-typed directional commands but not try to fling characters southward whenever the player forgets thatscanor whatever isn’t a command used in the game. This would make experimenting with commands less risky and prevent inadvertent IC movement due to OOC mistakes.I’m looking forward to exploring the systems and getting into the lore of town!
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@Clarion Thanks a ton for the feedback!
#2 is already on my to-do list, and your solution for #1 is such a smart idea that I’m going to add it as well!
I really appreciate new faces trying out everything. Sometimes there’s an easy improvement that we haven’t thought about yet, and then someone new comes along and suggests a great quality of life improvement. Thanks again!
