What actually happened there?

House of Fallen Trees is a cursed house in The Sims 2. When you associate a Downtown to your neighborhood, the text says that you'll find all sorts of surprises there - even the spooky ones. Spookiness is not entirely related to vampires - it's also related to this house.

House of Fallen Trees - you'll probably say, "It's a Maxis built house. Wow, it maybe has few graves with glitched Sims - the glitches give this lot it's spookiness, not the deceased Sims!" Well, you're wrong. First off, those Sims aren't really glitched. They have memories, which is really odd for pre-deceased Sims. For that note, I think Maxis was planning on making them playable - but then - it's Maxis. Nuff said. Anyway, let's get back to the point.

The house has a HUGE basement. At the bottom of it (it takes a Sim who walks half a Sim hour to get down there) there are two coffins.

Also, there's this thing that gives the house it's spookiness - the lighting. You'll notice that it's very dimmed. Even if you put infinity amount of lights in a room, it will appear very bright - but the next night, all the objects will be un-lit. And, that's not all - moving the house to another neighborhood does not remove the spooky lighting ambient.

There are three tombstones at the lot. BUT, there are six grave spots in total. If you move a Sim in the house, ghosts will get angry, because they do get angry if,



The two teenagers who rise up second night after you move in, will always think of their parents (or rather complain - since they make "I have to pee!" animation).


If you go to Gothier Green Lawns, you'll see that six members of the Tricou family are buried there. And - another spooky thing - even though it's fake and you can't do this thing in game (or just by using terrain tool) - there's a duggen grave at the top of the lot, and by it two trees which leaves fell off.

Another trivia; John Smith Tricou wears makeup.

So, what are your stories, thoughts, or should I say, the speed of your pulse?

~DJ.

Everyone has to make their own story. If you want them, the Tricous are all resurrectable, using their surviving family, the John Smith Tricou's six teen bastards, who as downtownies go by different names but always have the same faces, aspirations (all Pleasure), and personalities in different incarnations of downtown. Looking at them, I'd be willing to bet that they were a playtest family turned into townies to ship with the game.

I shallowed the hell out of that basement, and no one's gone down there yet. I also grunged the whole house so it would look long-abandoned, and am sprucing it up one room at a time. The ghosts have spawned a couple of times, but the current inhabitants are always throwing parties indoors and haven't seen them. They keep complaining about the light and adding more lamps, for all the good it does them.

My backstory is that John Smith Tricou was a notorious rake and polygamist cult leader, but his wife kicked her co-wives and their children out shortly before the mysterious cult-related mass death. I haven't come up with a story for why some of them are buried on-site; but I think they may be the ones that died first, either accidental casualties of an ill-conceived rite or deliberate human sacrifices, and the others buried them. The ones who made it to Gothier Green Lawns were buried by the city. It's possible Gothier Green Lawns was actually a business run by the Tricou family - which would explain some of the tackier things on-site! - and taken over by the city in lieu of property taxes.

I have no intention of resurrecting any of that unpronounceable lot, but I like my Tricou bastards, who are being used as Greek fodder. The "oldest" (i.e. the one who first made friends with a playable and thereby won entrance to University), Lora Wolosenko, changed her aspiration to Fortune in junior year because Pleasure wasn't working for her. Fortune didn't work either, until I got Freetime and gave her a Pleasure secondary, and now it works great. Lora got it into her head to buy the ancestral home and restore the family good name, even though there aren't any Tricous anymore. There's a lot of soap opera to do with that family. She was saving and saving, and moving her younger siblings in with her as she graduated, but when they absolutely had to move out of the apartment they were in because her sister, "Bad News" Beverly Ku got pregnant by "I dunno, some guy" they didn't have quite enough money until Lora married Jimmy Phoenix, who suddenly manned up for her after a long and complicated off-again-on-again period that started in college. Even so they barely had enough for bare-bones furnishings when they moved in, which is all to the good, really. Don't want to fix it up too fast. Graduated Tricous move in with Lora and may or may not move out again depending on - stuff. The household currently consists of pregnant Lora, Jimmy, Lora's moved-in townie roommate Phoenix McClellan (who is a Romance sim in love with Lora and Beverly and Jimmy's old girlfriend), Jay McCullough "the Asian Tricou," and Jay's girlfriend Dulcie deLeche. Beverly married a former frat brother of Jimmy's who really should have known better and moved in with him, taking her son Tri Ku and her favorite brother Derek, "the black Tricou," who is gay and determined never to work for The Man and doesn't trust Beverly to look after his nephew while his brother-in-law's at work. The final two Tricous, "the goth" and "the skater," are still in the frat.

Jimmy's in the natural history career and entitled to a cow plant, so if Phoenix gets too troublesome they may yet find something strange and terrible in the basement. They tend the graves as and how they can, but the family's so bohemian and chaotic they had to hire a gardener to keep up. Lora is in show business and a prominent leading lady. Her unborn child was conceived in her convertible, but the father is in fact her husband. Phoenix is currently on the outs with everybody. Jay and Dulcie are Pleasure and Popularity, so one way or another there's a party almost every day. The ghosts never seem to come inside, so if I want parties disrupted by ghosts I need to either have a cowplant eat Phoenix in the basement or move the buffet outdoors in the summertime.

Does anyone know how to brighten the house with the help of a cheat, maybe?
In my Megahood I have the problem that the houses in Pleasantview are extremely dimmed too.

@Peni: Your story is awesome :D
I am completely unable to make good Sims stories -.-

Tricou Treat was one of my more successful stories back when I was posting on newsnet all the time. I rezzed the Tricou's and decided they had been dead since the 19th century. Gave me an excuse to use some of those Victorian costumes from AAS. They all live there morbidly except for Gvaudin, who has rebelled, gone off to college and got herself engaged to Edward Crumplebottom - an irony really because it was Edward's brother Alex who was responsible for the botched resurrection and the fact that Gvaudin is alive (as opposed to being undead). I nearly finished a sequel to Tricou Treat - can't remember now what I called it.

I moved my vampire and his wife into the place, changed the lighting back to normal, gave it a makeover, raised the basement up as it’s stupid, cursed at the garage for not being attached to the house when it's a house obviously for vampires and thought nothing more about it. Now I have only played about a week there but haven't noticed the ghosts. I didn't really give the background of it much thought.

Here's another thread about the house:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=331702

How to fix the lighting:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=471846
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=471957

Last edited by Mootilda : 6th Jun 2012 at 10:47 PM.

Julmoo, if you're like most people on here who have in the past thought they sucked at making sim stories, it isn't true. Most people who think that are afflicted by invalid assumptions. One is that they have to be in control of the sims to make a story; another is that there's something rare and esoteric about "good ideas" and they can't come up with any.

There are two main ways to approach storytelling, in general. One is from the plot side; the other is from the character side. These two ways are not incompatible; the characters in a plot-driven story are the People Who Carry Out the Plot, and the plot in a character-driven story is What the Characters Do. Sims necessarily favor character-driven stories, since the medium of storytelling is the individual sim. So, if you loosen up your control a little bit, look at your character's spontaneous behavior, interpret his wants and fears and interactions with others, and ask yourself what these things imply, you'll start to get a grasp of who he is, and then you'll start hearing his voice and then it will all come together. And if you do this for all your sims - not only your active playable, but the sims in his life - you'll find yourself posting what happened and other people will hit the "love" or "funny" button and you'll find you've done it after all.

I had no idea who Lora Wolosenko or Jimmy Phoenix was when I brought them in - my Greek houses were about to empty out and I needed new students, fast. They were on track to be a Couple when junior year came, and Lora was hard to keep happy as a Pleasure sim, so I changed her to my favorite aspiration, Fortune. And her chemistry with Jimmy went down, and he started taking up with Georgette Skirt and being really ambivalent about it. By then I'd found out about the other Tricous and started sending them to school, and I decided, with Beverly, that I was going to experiment with Pleasure and really learn how it worked, so I made it a rule that her wants never locked and she always fulfilled as many of them as she could in a session, and that's how she became Bad News Beverly. And the Tricou house was just sitting there, and Lora needed a roommate, and stuff...happened...and here I am. Nothing difficult on my part there.

Thanks a lot Mootilda!! <3



I don't know whether it's just my game, but the wants they get are pretty much all the same. Leaving my characters on their own results in then standing around like idiots until they go to bed.
My free will is not turned off, I have checked for that.

The last few days I have been rolling a dice for different aspects of their lives, eg how their marriages will work, whether they will have their wants fulfilled or not, etc.
It hasn't improved much though.

You know honestly, I always that the old man had an affair, and his wife found out. Committed a double murder, then realized what she had done, and killed herself. Because whenever I have moved Sims there, they never had my Sims face crossed out in the thought bubble. Its always either a female, that isn't part of the family. OR its the dude. Papa. I mean, I am not sure if that goes for everyone else. And the basement is just way over done, I mean moving a Vampire Couple there once, I had to put two coffins inside, because they didn't get down there in time before the sun came up. So, I dunno. I mean it is a nice house. Just has fallen residents there. I am just not sure.

I guess it truly is a mystery there, I sort of want to know what REALLY happened. And I wouldn't mind resurrecting them, but I dunno. It would be like Frankenstein, I would say out loud:

"ITS ALIVE. ITS ALIVE"

Yeah...Don't need people looking me like I am insane >.<

That's why I shallowed the basement - made the house cheaper, and made it possible to use the basement.

Ah, julmoo, if you're always seeing the same wants you need to shake things up a bit - that's a sign of a player in a rut. Remember that they're trainable. The more they're told to do something, the more they'll do, and the more times you fulfill a want, the more they'll roll it. So be more selective about which wants you fill, use secondaries if you have Free Time, run a family with one more character than you feel you can comfortably handle, run a challenge that's designed to bring out ways you've never played, spend some time fulfilling fears instead of wants, take them on a walk around the neighborhood (wants reroll every time they change wants) - anything to shake things up. And then you'll see.

Okay, that's enough OT from me.

Why, in your scenario, does Nylissit kill the teens, then? And why are you playing where anyone would be looking at you, anyway? Fly your freak flag proudly!

As a game mechanic thing, my major theory is that they were vampires and burned to death in the sun on the way to do something that would help the ones who died of starvation, who were probably trapped in that damn basement or something. Also possible the burned-up ones died trying to cook for the others. This would all be during the playtest for Nightlife. John Smith Tricou was obviously heavily used in playtesting dates.

You have no idea how angry that pun makes me.

I was actually just playing this house. I redid the interior in a more "evil abandoned lair" look with gray panelling on the walls, shallowed the basement to only two "story" levels below ground instead of about 5, and put a bunch of those evil witch lights all over the place. I moved the Grim Reaper (no, not the real one, a CAS look-alike) into the house and made him an evil witch and have him scare all the walkbys with Paladin's Mask of Incontinuity or something like that (they pee themselves). The Tricou siblings show up almost every night but Grim never notices. It is a creepy house, but it is even creepier with the remodeled torture chamber basement that I built. I'm thinking of making it a prison with Inge's prison mod and putting a bunch of zombie-werewolves and vampires down in the basement (because neither zombies nor werewolves are cool by themselves, but they are better combined).

Oh good.

I like the Tricous--the resurrected bunch, I mean. Gvaudoin's a temperamental hormonal teen, gets along excellently with Tybalt Capp in the all over each other sense, Fricorith is much calmer and really very patient. I've paired him with Miranda Capp before. The adults have varied relationships: Jennail hates her sister's husband, half the adults hate Gvaudoin.

I have to ask--who came up with those names?

Maxis. In fact...They have come out with very lovely names take for instance:

Abhijeet <---Have no clue what the hell that even means

Or

Ratna

Rat and na. Reminds me of that Ratatouille when he says:

"Ratatouille. It's like a stew, right? Why do they call it that? If you're gonna name a food, you should give it a name that sounds delicious. Ratatouille doesn't sound delicious. It sounds like "rat" and "patootie." Rat-patootie, which does not sound delicious."

Maxis has some sucky names. And it makes you feel sorry for those townies. I mean can you imagine how they were treated in school? Those years must have sucked.

I figured maybe some EAxoid's cat was napping on their keyboard.

LMAO xD that would explain one name, I can't remember how it was spelt, but it was like:

Ahabajad or something like that...I was like

"Uh...Yeah, nice name there bud"

IIRC, the Tricou names are Roma (gypsy) names.

If you noticed, all townies first names and last names (including the premade townies) by default are drawn from all staff of EA. For example, that Ratna you mentioned was taken from Ratna Jayapalan, the lead designer of The Sims 2. If you check the credits, you might see some familiar names as well, providing you have a lot of generated townies.

The name Abhijeet, 7 720 000 hits on Google.

I think Ratna is a simlish word. My sister is playing sims in the same room and I've been hearing it. It's either Ratna or Gratna

As well as Macarevich, Majekodunmi, and Parmeley, all the last names of the staff, and spoken by witch when crafting on cauldron.

Macarevich actually sounds like it could be a Slavic name...

As for the House of Fallen Trees, it's one of the rare Maxis lots that I actually like. I moved the house over to my custom hood, gave it a little makeover and moved an evil witch in it. She keeps an army of zombie minions in the basement. If you care to know, Gilbert Jacquet (that Maxis dude from Bluewater village) makes a great zombie. Also, I really like the building's dimmed lighting; it makes the plumbbobs look less sunny, which is a refreshing change in my opinion. If I remember correctly, the same dusky lighting is also to be found at the Lucky Shack community lot at Downtown, which is one of the reasons I like playing that lot. Wasn't there some cheat that could add the same effect to any lot?

I didn't know this, thank you. But some I doubt are EA peeps...Like

Upsnott

I am not too sure that is a EA peep's last name, if so. Ahem, just wow. Or maybe Vyhajaker. o.O