Maintaining a sense of horror


Advice


Looking for some GMing tips. I'd like to run a campaign featuring some horror elements for my players. But I'm not sure how to keep it up. I can add some creep factor, but when heroes have defeated enough horrors from beyond the grave and/or stars, wouldn't they be a bit jaded by the next thing that slithered up? How do I make the players feel a sense of dread and fear, even after several game sessions? Making it more difficult: do to time and space constraints, I'm having to run the game on a Saturday afternoon, and my apartment features a fair bit of traffic noise in addition to the daylight coming in, so the play setting won't be conducive to horror either. Any advice would be appreciated!


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You can have the players spend some time telling ghost stories, just to get everyone primed. Have a "creep each other out" contest, telling scary stories.

As far as actual gameplay: Have you looked at the information re: Hauntings? Non-standard ways to defeat/overcome, to keep your party off-balance. Allows for some more creativity beyond the typical "slash & hack" mentality.


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You're mixing your terms.

Piers Anthony once taught me that there are 3 "fear" emotions, and a good horror author (GM?) should know the difference and use all 3, at the right times.

Terror: This is the simplest. A maniac with a bloody machete is chasing a co-ed through the woods. She's terrified and the audience should feel that terror too. Everybody knows what is happening, there's no secret or surprise, it's just a man and a weapon and some blood, mixed with lots of bad intent. It could be a lion, or a forest fire, or a building collapsing in an earthquake. Whatever she's running from, it's a known problem but (for her) it's real and dangerous and terrifying.

Dread: This can be much like terror, but this time, we DON'T know what the co-ed is running from. Something unspeakably evil, but unknown to the audience for sure, and probably unknown to her as well. Is it a Lovecraftian menace? A mutant? A blob from outer space? A ghost? Whatever it is, it's very scary and (for her) very real, but at the same time, also very mysterious.

Sometimes she is not running. Sometimes the dreadful thing is slowly creeping up on the poor unsuspecting co-ed, unbeknownst to her but known to the audience (though they still don't know exactly what it is). And sometimes the roles are reversed; the poor co-ed is nervously exploring an abandoned building, or a derelict space ship, or whatever, peering into dark shadows, looking for something (the way out, or a lost companion, or a phone, or whatever), all the while the audience knows that something bad is about to jump out and get her.

Horror: This is the shocker. The vampire reveals himself, the werewolf leaps out of the shadows, the co-ed finds the mutilated bodies of the victims, etc. The co-ed sees the monster, the audience sees the monster, everyone sees the bloody icky mess. Our minds are shocked by the awfulness of what we're seeing. It's hard to deal with. This is no madman with a machete, no lion in the night. It's shocking. It's gross. It's awful to see and awful to think about.

Yeah, sure, it today's media seeing a vampire is cause for a yawn, not a panic attack; we might even ask him for an autograph, especially if he sparkles... But we're talking about the classics of the genre, especially before we in the audience became so jaded by shock-fests like Saw and by the preponderance of vampires in the media portrayed as just fodder for the heroes to chop down like wheat. Today's horror writers need to take it a little farther, show you something much, much scarier than Dracula. But the idea is still the same - it's inhuman, it's monstrous, maybe even literally devilish, you know what it is but it shocks and overwhelms the mind with its sheer awfulness.

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Now, all that said, it's just about impossible to evoke ANY of these emotions in players at a game table. Hollywood goes to great lengths and greater expense to frighten moviegoers: professional special effects, believably terrified co-eds, and a musical score that is professionally engineered to produce the greatest emotional response.

As a GM, you probably have none of that. Frankly, for most players, if their "toon" dies, they just re-roll another one. With players taking that attitude, how can you terrify the with a machete-wielding maniac? How can you instill a sense of dread when the player will just roll a knowledge check and know everything about your mysterious unseen BBEG? How can you horrify them with a slavering werewolf when they slaughter it two rounds after you roll initiative?

I don't think have a ghost of a chance unless you play your game late at night with sleep-deprived and (if you're over 21) inebriated players, with an appropriate sound-track and maybe even an accomplice who lurks in the shadows and jumps out yelling "Boo!" from time to time. Talk in a quiet voice when you describe the room and then BAM! smack the table and shout the monster's battle cry as it leaps out at them from the shadows - watch your players jump out of their chairs and laugh with glee at their distress.

But, in daylight, with traffic noises, with nothing and no way to set the players on edge, all you have is, possibly, horror. Leave bloody body bits lying around, with bugs crawling out of eye sockets and nasty filthy creepy monsters using body parts as weapons to smack the players around. Have the victims be children. Be as gross and nasty and disgusting as you can stand. At least you might make them squeamish, maybe even mildly horrified.


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Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

+1 to what DM_Blake said.

One of the best ways to get PCs edgy is to use the secret die roll.

GM rolls the dice or asks a player to roll a die, such as when a player says they look around or something - roll the dice - don't say anything about it or you don't see anything.

Ask a player to roll a d20 - don't say why or make a perception check - result is nothing, you don't notice something, or you thought you noticed something.

The elusive "thing out there" is really nothing, they might just catch a glimpse, or a whiff, or a sound of something. But leave NO HARD EVIDENCE, absolutely no tracks, no impressions in the ground, no bent bushes, no hair, or fur, or scales, or torn cloth, PCs will follow the tinest clue to the exclusion of all else, so don't give them any.

Just tug on their imaginations. One PC at a time.

You can even use one PC just for glimpses, one for whiffs, one for noises and one for touch (something brushed against, slight breeze, hot, cold whatever).


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Heh, in addition to the secret die rolls, start making a habit of taking players aside into a different room. Tell them to bring their dice. Then have them make a couple rolls, don't tell them why, then let them come back out. It not only causes them dread of the unknown rolls, but they start to speculate about WHY they had to go to another room - what dreadful things might have happened if they had rolled differently.

Even better, have a few fun things prepared to spring on the player in that side room, at least once in a while. Try to make it creepy. Then swear him to silence; he cannot talk about it back at the game table.

Now they'll all be edgy. I'm not quite sure that would instill any real sense of terror/dread/horror in the players, but they'll all be properly concerned about what's going on beyond their immediate knowledge.


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The best 'trick' I've found to maintain horror is difficult to describe how to do. The GM has to give the players the sense that there is something important he knows that the players don't. It starts with attitude, ignore any concept of the game being a cooperative endevor, the GM needs to think of himself as an impartial observer who is simply watching the players' fate unfold.

Random die rolls, a quick meaningless check of notes, taking one player aside all help during the game but can backfire if overused.

A technique that can help (not just with horror), although it might be tough to get right in a few days, is gradually dropping the volume of your voice. If you start talking in a normal tone and drop it just a hair every so often, the players start to lean in just to hear what you are saying and they assign more importance to it. If a player cannot hear or complains then go back to a normal voice, but if you can pull it off it works well at creating a low level of tension.

[humor] In a similar vein you could get a tape of noises in the 13-14 HZ range and let the traffic noises cover it, good old infrasoundt will keep the players on edge.[/humor]


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DM_Blake has some fantastic advice farther up, and I'll just drop my 2 CP down here.

Don't permit flow, don't let the players get settled.
Allow long enough periods of time that they begin to question why nothing is happening, and frequently have small otherwise innocuous events occur.

Belongings misplaced, people with small quirks that stand out to an already paranoid PC, etc.

Capitalize on the fact that the players know something is up, and allow them to twist normal occurrences into their own horror.

Molehills into mountains and all that.


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One thing to do is to simulate things w/out telling the PCs what's happening. Take for example the simple act of turning into a zombie:

The standard, Pathfinder way is that you either get Animate Dead cast on you or you succumb to a disease and rise as a zombie. Both are very technical and easy for players to identify.

What if there was a third way?

In a dungeon I ran a while ago I warned players that the tomb they were headed into had an active aura of negative energy; it wasn't an identifiable spell effect but rather just a general blight like someone left pinholes between the Material and the Negative planes there. As a result undead spawned from the place with no easy explanation of why or how to shut it down.

They go in on their mission. A few rooms in they come across a kobold on the floor. This isn't a combat encounter; the creature is just laying there, writhing in agony. One of the players says "I use a Heal check to see if I can see what's wrong." triggering a description rather than an explanation:

The kobold turns painfully to face you. The side that had been obscured is horribly rotted and gangrenous. Its eye oozes from the socket even as it's bloated lips utter "Kill... me... PLEASE..." in a hoarse, slurring speech.

They didn't have a reason WHY it was rotting, other than this place. They didn't know what was happening. They ended up killing the thing but I could tell one of the players was a tad unnerved. Later I had them encounter fully undead kobolds and a pixie who'd been trapped in the tomb and due to it's fey nature couldn't be turned into an undead so instead it was completely mad. During this encounter it taunted them with the fact that this was the PCs fate as well, or worse. Then I asked them all for Fort saves despite the fact that the encounter was over.

Suddenly the players realized that this place was slowly killing them. The longer they were there, the worse it would get. For now it was nothing more than risking Fatigued but they didn't know that. All the players knew was that the pixie was here for years and was utterly insane; a group of kobolds had been lured in and trapped for only a couple weeks and already they were rotted, shambling corpses. They had to end this; they had to get OUT!

I guess the point is one thing that robs the scare from things is knowing EXACTLY what's going on. If you're watching a movie or reading a book you can get scared knowing what's coming (the guy with the chainsaw stalking the cheerleader through the abandoned asylum) because as the audience you're powerless to stop it. Once the evil is either unknowable/indescribable to the players (not just the PCs mind you) or it becomes something that cannot be reasonably overcome with normal powers/feats/abilities/attacks, suddenly you have achieved an heightened level of tension.


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Otherwhere wrote:

You can have the players spend some time telling ghost stories, just to get everyone primed. Have a "creep each other out" contest, telling scary stories.

As far as actual gameplay: Have you looked at the information re: Hauntings? Non-standard ways to defeat/overcome, to keep your party off-balance. Allows for some more creativity beyond the typical "slash & hack" mentality.

That's a great idea. I was thinking the way to keep up the sense of horror is to get to know the players and get to know what gives them the creeps, then use those elements in the story. Having occasional icebreakers where players try to scare each other sounds like a great way to find out what scares them.


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So, step 1, does it have to be Pathfinder? The system isn't really made to handle fear that well. It's very...broad in how it paints fear. Not very nuanced.

Step 2, you're going to be cribbing from Ravenloft. Since it's for D&D it's one of the few settings where you can whip around world-altering magic and still feel "fear". It is pretty heavy-handed in how it does this but some guidelines are better than none.

Step 3, you need player buy-in. This is vital. No amount of atmosphere, setting, description, music, anything will stop players from quoting Monty Python and ruining everything you built up. If one person decides they want to crack jokes to lighten the mood short of kicking them out there's nothing you can do. This is also the time to check what fears your players do not want to play out. This is deadly important, do not play out a fear of loneliness scenario with someone with abandonment issues unless they say it's okay. Always check with your players if there's some fear you shouldn't use.

Now for the broad brush strokes.

Fear is simple. Pick a primal fear and play on it. Fear of the unknown, fear of dying, fear of the dark, fear of loneliness, fear of pain, fear of loud noises, fear of tight spaces. Combine them, twist them, morph one into the other, whatever you want, just make sure to explicitly tap that primal fear response to bypass the "thinking" brain and jump right to the amygdala.

Fear is shared. Humans are social creatures. We can feel fear for other members of our group. You don't need to threaten a specific player to make them feel fear, and fear experienced by one person can "bleed" onto others.

Now for implementation. These will usually include at least one "and this works this way because you say it does, there is no way around it". You can make these not invincible but you'll run the risk of players bypassing/stopping/destroying the fear element.

Fear of the dark is simple, use Dark Folk and some kind of permanent undispelable/supressable supernatural darkness. Have the players close their eyes or turn their back on the table, physically tap them when it's their turn. Use a whiteboard or some other way of not speaking as the GM but let the players speak so the other players can hear half of the conversation. Hopefully sprinkled with a few "yes that hit me" and "please make this save". If you want to double down on the dread you can do the slow build up, with the lights already in the room winking out one by one as the room plunges into supernatural darkness.

Fear of the unknown is similarly easy, you just arbitrarily block knowledge checks on monsters with some fancy supernatural ability. Possibly more than one ability, but only reveal them one encounter at a time. So the first time they fight it, it has a paralyzing bite. The next time it has paralyzing claws. The third time it has the stench of death clinging to it. This is just a Ghast, but each time it looks like a different creature or gains new abilities (when you really just chose not to use the abilities before). You can also just describe multiple different monsters the same way, making it seem like the same creature keeps gaining different powers. This is very slightly super heavy-handed though.

I hope that's enough of a starting point to give you some ideas.


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The only thing players really fear is Rust Monsters. Use them :)

The Exchange

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See if you can find 3.5's Heroes of Horror, which dedicated a fair amount of space to means for inducing types of fear; how these methods should differ based on whether it's one encounter, a whole adventure or an entire campaign; suggested rules tweaks; etc.

One thing I can tell you is that slow and steady wins this particular race. Don't plunge the PCs abruptly into a living nightmare: they have to be drawn in, really empathizing with their characters and visualizing the situation. Use tiny, horrible details that slowly unveil the true nature of your horror story.

My Players: We wall up the basement, burn the wayside inn to the ground and make a pact never to speak of this place again.
Me: :3


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I'm running a horror/investigation game now and I've been thinking about this myself.

For me, implication and making it personal seems to work best. Have the PCs interact with people, get to know them, then do terrible things to them. The kobold example above is wonderful. Imagine doing that with a drinking buddy or a friend or lover.

Implied horror works too. The completely empty ship. The scrawled prayers in blood. Corpses that go missing when players return to the room. Items that talk or better yet, whisper. Invoke will saves when people try to analyze objects or detect magic. Don't explain, imply. Then, revelation.

Dunno if any of this is going to work on my players or not but that's what I'm thinking.


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Oh, right, forgot the other important one.

The Expendable
If you want to make a monster the characters can't fight (your own Pyramid Head, Dakaha, whatever) you need to establish it's deadly without actually endangering the players. Enter SUPERNPC, the NPC that's better than them. Stronger, faster, more gear, higher level, all of that. Use the monster to murder SUPERNPC brutally, viciously, in full view of the players. Include some sort of in-built limitation (moves slow, tied to a specific place, can only appear after certain events) to let the players get away but leave the giant monster of doom lingering in the back of their minds for everything they do in that place.

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