Gaslighting in Tabletop Games.
- This trope is frequently recommended for DMs trying to run a Mind Screw type of horror game, via Painting the Medium.DM: You seem to be in someone's study, half-lit by what sunlight can pass through the smudged panes of a small window. There's a bulky desk covered in papers, a rickety-looking wheeled chair, a girl, a bookcase full of dusty tomes, and a yellowed map framed on the wall.
Players: Describe the girl.
DM: What girl? - Arguably, any time you Slipshank (reach under, behind, or into a convenient object and grab something that shouldn't be there) something in Continuum, this happens, only instead of you thinking you are insane until you go back in time and put it there to begin with, you acquire a small amount of Frag (your memories and the universe disagree, therefore you start fading out).
- In The Dark Eye, one long term experiment at the School Of Pains involved putting drugs into the subjects dinner and letting undead bodyparts wander into his room at night, while at day convincing him that all experiences were hallucinations and nightmares, offering joyful companionship and walks in the park. Goal was to find out if the troubled mind would decide for one of the realities while negating the other or ultimately break apart."Despite heavy fear attacks, general mental instability, and explicit suicidal tendencies, the experiment will continue as planned."
- The Demon: The Descent sourcebook "Night Horrors: Enemy Action" features a demon with an increasingly fractured mentality who not only gaslights the people around her, fragments of her personality may have started gaslighting other fragments. Just to drive the point home, she even has an Interlock actually called Gaslight, which allows her to edit people's memories.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Ravenloft features actual mechanics for gaslighting, as madness, fear and horror checks are the three primary unique mechanics of the setting, which is based around Dark Fantasy via horror, especially Gothic Horror. Basically, this is altering circumstances to force another character to take a Madness check. Naturally, this is an Act of Ultimate Darkness, and doing this to anyone for any reason always attracts the attention of the Dark Powers.
- One 3rd Edition Ravenloft creature, the "backward man," prefers to toy with its victim at first, abusing its invisibility spell-like ability to steal small items, move furniture, make eerie noises, and allow its target to get brief glimpses of it scuttling about crabwise with its belly upward and its head twisted around. Then it starts attacking animals and destroying food, before finally coming to kill its victim.
- Dragon once published a Monster Ecology article about the kenku (humanoid crows whose hat is being thieves) that mentions this trope as a possible use of their vocal mimicry. Tie up and blindfold someone, make a bunch of horrific noises (sharpening blades, snarling monsters, screams of agony, etc.), and let their minds fill the blanks...
- The infamous homebrewed monster, the "false hydra," is an aberration built on this trope. Its subliminal singing prevents people from noticing it, as well as forget anyone it's eaten. Most parties need a cleric or other healer to help them clear dungeons, but it sure is lucky your group found all those potions of cure wounds... though why is there an extra horse waiting with yours in the stable?
- Interstitial: Our Hearts Intertwined has The Linksmith, a playbook all about manipulating people's memories in order to control them and gain their trust. As such, the playbook has a trigger warning right at the top to ensure everyone playing is comfortable with it.
- Pathfinder has the Mesmerist archetype called the Gaslighter. Its favored trick is making people perceive their own reflection as somehow corrupted, and can cause fear, hallucinations, and sanity damage. Unlike most effects of this nature, for which the culprit tends to be fairly obvious once the effect has expired (it was that guy who was pointing at me saying magic words right before), due to the nature of their hypnotic stare and psychic magic, they can do this without the victim being aware they're doing any of it. You have to be evil to take it.
- Unknown Armies role-playing game Big Bad, the Mystery Man, has this as his actual superpower.
- Vampires infected with Malkavia, and the Malkovian Bloodline from Vampire: The Requiem can do this with illusions via the Dementation power called, what else, Gaslighting. It IS possible to use this for non-destructive and benign purposes, but keep in mind you're dealing with insane walking corpses fueled by magic blood in the World of Darkness.
