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@Whomever is working on Fiddlesticks VGU, you should read this for inspiration

World King·5/31/2019, 5:36:05 PM·33 votes·17,786 views

The King in Yellow

Perhaps one of the best works in American fiction in terms of supernatural horror, the King in Yellow is a public domain book of short stories, where multiple stories are connected by a play called_ The King in Yellow_. Anyone who reads the play is doomed to madness and despair, but more importantly, anyone who reads it becomes aware of the King, and the King becomes aware of the reader. I'll leave a small passage here from the Yellow Sign, a short story in the book:

"The gate below opened and shut, and I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door, and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless ... I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now."

If you want to make Fiddlesticks the scariest guy on the rift, you need to use the strongest and most potent kind of fear there is- fear of the unknown. Before Stephen King, before Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers created the original in eldritch horrors, the Mac Daddy of them all, the King in Yellow. If you want to set the mood for designing new Fiddlesticks, to get some inspiration, I highly suggest reading this book.

29 Comments

RiotCarnival Knights6/1/2019, 12:22:28 AM36 votes

Hah! Love this book. I read The King in Yellow cover-to-cover when I was still in high school, along with most of Lovecraft's library (ironically this is when I realized that Lovecraft was a terrible human being). The kind of horror I gravitate towards these days is many magnitudes more disturbing than "guy with a weird head" or "small yellow goblin man gets mauled to death by cat." Mostly revolving around human psychoses, but also liminal spaces, horrors of the natural world (versus eldritch, outer-space-horror), and plays on religious iconography/ritual that border on exaltation.

Regardless, I have some ideas I'm playing with for Fiddle right now that I hope will surprise you in all the right ways (you pee a little). In my interview five years ago they asked what champion I wanted to write for the most. It was Fiddle then, and remains Fiddle now.

I'm very excited.

Tarcathos5/31/2019, 8:13:26 PM8 votes

The King in Yellow is certainly an interesting way of looking for supernatural fear inspiration. However, worth noting, they had mentioned that they may be hoping to double down on making him "THE iconic ambusher in League. Catching enemies by surprise is the true art of playing Fiddle..."

Fear of the unknown may play well to the idea, but ambush implies a slightly different tone of scare. The jump scare is certainly different than dread. Which is different from feeling creepy.

IF HOWEVER, the designers can find a way to induce multiple forms of fear, perhaps using some of the inspirations you suggest along with embracing a few other methods to allow them to capture the ambusher play style....then that would truly be a frightful rework indeed.....horrible cackling in the distance building into a cadence of cawing sounds

SpecterVonBaren5/31/2019, 10:53:13 PM5 votes

I imagine a story with Fid to be more inspired by SCP stories if they're taking the tone from his original story for the new one. Fiddle fits in well with the mold of anomalous one of a kind thing that sits in a room that "we don't go to anymore".

The Old Cthulhu5/31/2019, 5:45:25 PM3 votes

Make meh boi da spookiest boi

kagepaladin6/1/2019, 4:25:11 AM3 votes

or as a more modern take get some Junji Ito up in this bitch. the one where everyone had there own hole in the side of the mountain is fucked up by a fair bit.

ModRowanstar5/31/2019, 11:40:04 PM1 votes

I have a theoretical question: How can any champion (even undead and demons) be scary to us players? After all we also have powerful champs that decrease the horror of someone like Nocturne, since we can fight them. A normal human with no powers would be terrified but not us.

Zabulus5/31/2019, 10:16:25 PM1 votes

I Imagine fiddle sticks with a nocturne R for one person and then kind of like a kayn passive where he envelopes you into darkness and a special effect called confusion is allowed. to where the enemy can attack their own teammates out of "fear"