Fantastic! Your Awesomeness Knows No Bounds.
Add into that idea the non-euclidean floor plan from the movie, and that's exactly what I'm looking for.
Has anyone tried statting up a location as an NPC before?
I don't know if anyone has statted a location - but most of those ideas were just the difference between the book and the movie. See if you can locate the mini-series - it's much closer to the book (but still leaves out entire sub-plots).
So... The hotel...
It's been a while since I read the book, so I'm basing some of this off of
http://www.shmoop.com/shining-stephen-king/summary.html - which is full of spoilers.
Was the land a place of power to start with? Shrug. The man who built the hotel lost his son (accident) and his wife (flu) during construction, then lost his money and stayed working at the hotel until he was electrocuted - and that sounds maybe like it was a curse on him.
Speaking of curses, let's look at deaths. There have been 40 - 50 deaths (most of them natural) in the hotel over the decades, with the most recent being the suicide in Room 217 (room 237 in the movie). There was gangland shotgun triple murder in the presidential suite. A little girl died in the concrete tunnels in the playground. There are hints that Something Very Bad happened at Harry Derwent's 1945 masquerade in the main ballroom. Then there's Delbert "Killed his wife and daughters then suicided" Grady who haunts the place.
So, maybe we could say that the Genus Loci of the place was twisted by the building of a hotel on a pristine spot and now blindly seeks powers? Call it a small one, a wannabe when compared to Demonreach, but something like that.
And the hints that it could have been some sort of nature spirit are there. Wasps that live in the hotel get used as weapons. Topiary animals come to life and attack. It might have weather control power. Other (non-natural related) powers include being able to control the elevator and having the nozzle of the fire hose on the second floor move on its own.
Whatever it is, the Being is now tied to the hotel and can affect its grounds. It calls itself calls itself 'The Manager' - and it sometimes refers to itself as 'we'. It can project power up to ten miles away, and when talking to vulnerable mortals the hotel implies that the echoes and ghosts that are part of it are "immortal" (so it can offer immortality). Its wants and needs seem simple enough - it wants psyche (or magical) energy to feed on and become stronger.
But the spirit can't do everything itself. For example, it needs a human to work the boiler - without which the hotel's pipes will freeze, causing massive damage to it.
As for powers call it:
- Mental influence and the ability to show shadows of the past.
- Anyone who dies at the hotel can used as a ghost.
- Any event that leaves a "stain" can be replayed.
As the hotel becomes more powerful (i.e. beings with powers linger in it) the ghosts and shadows can become solid. Minor telekinetic stuff with fire hoses, doors, etc start happening. It gains the ability to operate the elevator on its own.
Your best bet might be to stat out the influences (a couple of ghosts, maybe work out some wasps, the power level of the illusions, etc) and have the PCs deal with those. To reflect its feeding, maybe take a step of success off of power use and turn that into FATE chips it can use to do things. You might also want to "cash out" anyone who dies there, with the FATE chips going to the hotel. The more power that gets used inside it, the more it can do. As it gains power it takes a bit more power from people or starts animating hedge beasts.
Damaging the hotel (structural damage, not just smashing doors or flooding sinks) should either remove FATE chips from it or scare it off. Destroying the hotel would send it into hibernation - otherwise it will slowly sink back to sleep.
As for dealing with the hotel magically - that would be hard. Either you'd be doing it at great distance or you'd be doing a ritual inside the Being. Drawing a magic circle would trap a part of it inside the circle with you and the Being wants to feed on power.
Again, just suggestions.
Richard
