Thriller is a genre of fiction with numerous, often overlapping, subgenres, including crime, horror and detective fiction. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. This genre is well-suited to film and television.
Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror and psychological fiction with a particular focus on mental, emotional, and psychological states to frighten, disturb, or unsettle its audience. The subgenre frequently overlaps with the related subgenre of psychological thriller, and often uses mystery elements and characters with unstable, unreliable, or disturbed psychological states to enhance the suspense, drama, action, and paranoia of the setting and plot and to provide an overall creepy, unpleasant, unsettling, or distressing atmosphere.
A campaign setting is usually a fictional world which serves as a setting for a role-playing game or wargame campaign. A campaign is a series of individual adventures, and a campaign setting is the world in which such adventures and campaigns take place. Usually a campaign setting is designed for a specific game or a specific genre of game. There are numerous campaign settings available both in print and online. In addition to published campaign settings available for purchase, many game masters create their own settings, often referred to as "homebrew" settings or worlds.
Player versus player (PvP) is a type of multiplayer interactive conflict within a game between human players. This is often compared to player versus environment (PvE), in which the game itself controls its players' opponents. The terms are most often used in games where both activities exist, particularly MMORPGs, MUDs, and other role-playing video games, to distinguish between gamemodes. PvP can be broadly used to describe any game, or aspect of a game, where players compete against each other. PvP is often controversial when used in role-playing games. In most cases, there are vast differences in abilities between players. PvP can even encourage experienced players to immediately attack and kill inexperienced players. PvP is often referred to as player killing in the cases of games which contain, but do not focus on, such interaction.
Magic or mana is an attribute assigned to characters within a role-playing or video game that indicates their power to use special magical abilities or "spells". Magic is usually measured in magic points or mana points, shortened as MP. Different abilities will use up different amounts of MP. When the MP of a character reaches zero, the character will not be able to use special abilities until some of their MP is recovered.
Fantasy tropes are a specific type of literary tropes that occur in fantasy fiction. Worldbuilding, plot, and characterization have many common conventions, many of them having ultimately originated in myth and folklore. J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium for example, was inspired from a variety of different sources including Germanic, Finnish, Greek, Celtic and Slavic myths. Literary fantasy works operate using these tropes, while others use them in a revisionist manner, making the tropes over for various reasons such as for comic effect, and to create something fresh.
Dark fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy literary, artistic, and cinematic works that incorporate disturbing and frightening themes of fantasy. It often combines fantasy with elements of horror or has a gloomy dark tone or a sense of horror and dread.
Alone in the Dark is a 1992 survival horror video game designed by Frédérick Raynal and developed and published by Infogrames. The game was developed and published for MS-DOS in 1992, and ported to MacOS and the 3DO in 1994. Set in 1920s Louisiana, the game challenges the player to guide the player character out of a haunted mansion, advancing by solving puzzles while either banishing, slaying, or eluding various ghosts and monsters. The player can collect and use weapons, manage a weight-based inventory system, and explore a partially nonlinear map.
The Ranger is one of the standard playable character classes in most editions of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Rangers are skilled bushcraftsmen/woodcraftsmen, and often lived reclusive lives as hermits.
Dark Ages: Inquisitor is a supplement published by White Wolf, Inc. in 2002 for the horror role-playing game Dark Ages: Vampire
Eldritch Wizardry is a supplementary rulebook by Gary Gygax and Brian Blume, written for the original edition of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game, which included a number of significant additions to the core game. Its product designation is TSR 2005.
Lego Batman: The Videogame is a 2008 action-adventure video game developed by Traveller's Tales and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, released for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Wii, Nintendo DS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X. The game is based on the DC Comics character Batman, as well as the eponymous LEGO Batman toyline.
CthulhuTech is a science-fiction and horror roleplaying game created by Wildfire LLC and published by Sandstorm that combines elements of the Cthulhu Mythos with anime-style mecha, horror, magic and futuristic action. The setting is Earth in 2085 during a worldwide conflict known as the Aeon War, wherein the planet has been invaded twice: once by a black-skinned manufactured alien race known as the Nazzadi who are derived from humans and who join forces with them, and then a second time by the Mi-Go, an advanced alien civilization seemingly bent on the enslavement of humanity. Aside from these conflicts, the game focuses on other factions, such as ancient cults like the Esoteric Order of Dagon that are running amok across the planet and the eldritch horrors that are rising to destroy the world as, according to the prophecies of the Cthulhu Mythos, the "stars are right" and the Great Old Ones and their servitors are returning/reawakening to reclaim the Earth. The game uses a proprietary ten-sided die (d10) system titled "Framewerk."
The Gumshoe System is a role-playing game system created in 2007 by Robin Laws, designed for running investigative scenarios. The premise is that investigative games are not about finding clues, they are about interpreting the clues that are found. The Gumshoe System is used in various games published by Pelgrane Press. As a result of the Hillfolk kickstarter, the SRD for the Gumshoe System has been made available for use under two open licenses: the Open Game License (OGL) and Creative Commons Attribution.
Trail of Cthulhu is an investigative horror role-playing game published by Pelgrane Press in 2008 in which the players' characters investigate mysterious events related to the Cthulhu Mythos. The game is a licensed product based on the horror role playing game Call of Cthulhu published by Chaosium, which is itself based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.
Outlaws Of The Lost Dynasty, known in Japan as Suiko Enbu (水滸演武), is a 1995 fighting arcade game developed and published by Data East. It was one of the first games developed for Sega's ST-V arcade board.
The Darkness II is a 2012 first-person shooter video game developed by Digital Extremes and published by 2K. The game is the sequel to The Darkness (2007) and based on the comic book series published by Top Cow Productions. The player controls Jackie Estacado, a mafia hitman who possesses a mysterious power called "the Darkness" that grants him supernatural abilities and a pair of Demon Arms. The game features elements found in role-playing video games such as skill trees, experience, and a four-player cooperative mode. The player must rescue the soul of Jackie's dead girlfriend, which was trapped by the Darkness in Hell, and confront the Brotherhood, a group of armed cultists trying to take the Darkness away from Jackie.
Kameo: Elements of Power is a 2005 action-adventure video game developed by Rare and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360. The player controls Kameo, a 16-year-old elf, who must travel across the land, rescuing her family while collecting Elemental Sprites and Warriors in a Beat 'Em Up style combat against the trolls that stand in her way. Kameo's ten elemental powers let her transform into creatures and use their varied abilities to solve combat-oriented puzzles and progress through the game's levels.
A horror game is a video game genre centered on horror fiction and typically designed to scare the player. The term may also be used to describe tabletop games with horror fiction elements.
