Just finished watching Alien again...


General Discussion


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Who's ready for some terrifying space adventures?


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Not me. I like heroic fantasy.

Edit: But for those who like it, go for it!


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Space disease is cool. Perhaps something like the Beast from Homeworld Catalyst?


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Dual wielding M41As in power armor while clearing out a xeno infection? K, i'll be there. Oh wait, did you mean terrifying for PCs?


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In my mind it immediately went to an Archer parody. Seriously, the show is a pretty good estimate of how PCs will act in any given genre.


I'm the exact opposite. I'm sick of heroic fantasy but I'd absolutely love to do stuff like Event Horizon or Alien for Starfinder. Of course, horror is a bit tricky to do in RPGs if everyone in the group doesn't meet the GM halfway, but that's another problem I suppose.


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The problem with space horror is that the system is usually built for the opposite. Aliens are scary because they are unknown, in Event Horizon no one knows what happened to the crew, in D&D and by extension Starfinder, there is usually a class at level 1 that gets bonuses to knowledges so they could ID the acid blood or know about demons so a lot of the scare of the unknown isnt there. And that is before the Space Ranger in the party perks up at "xenomorphs? that is my favored enemy! Quick cast acid resist and let me go to town on them" or the Space Paladin gets all smite-y smite-y purge-a-holic on the Event Horizon. Everything i have seen in Starfinder indicates it is going in the same vein of big darned heroes doing big darned things. Alien, or space horror in general, would require something like Epic at level 3; low skills, low HP, little to no gear and very high DCs to do things.


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OTOH, Aliens might be a lot closer to doable. Badass space marines with military hardware up against unknown aliens horrors.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm perfectly happy with ruling that previously uncontacted alien species aren't identifiable by standard Knowledge skills or chooseable as a favored enemy or any other such character feature.

Also, in terms of more horror in general, in games it doesn't necessarily come from weak PCs against impossible to beat monsters. Look at Strange Aeons, which featured standard PCs against CR appropriate encounters.


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i admit i havent seen Strange Aeons played out yet and am curious how they approached it. In my mind there are two things that make horror work, in Space or where ever else, and that is the unknown and vulnerability. Both can be hard to simulate in Pathfinder due to Knowledge and spells or abilities that let you almost guarantee that the PCs will know something. In fact i have more often than not been annoyed rather than scared when i see a player (or myself) roll a 30+ on a knowledge check just to be told, "you havent seen this kind of thing before and are not sure what it is." i get what the GM is trying to do but that is not how this game works. If that is the game you wanted to play than you should have mentioned that to the players ahead of time and maybe gone with a different system. Likewise the feelings of being helpless or vulnerable dont translate well to a game where you have a D12 chassis and mountains of HP/DR and an almost unhittable AC. There are other systems out there that can pull this effect off without a lot of house ruling.

I suppose the default assumption i make in a 'Finder game is that the encounters will scale, there is a way to overcome what you find and PCs are expected to have the tools to handle things. In a horror game i wouldnt assume any of those are true.


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I think the keys to horror in Starfinder are revelation and misdirection. Reveal something horrifying, eg. Dead npc, then misdirect the players from the real threat. A good scenario would be investigating an research outpost that went quiet. When you arrive you find a desiccated corpse ensconced in a large Web. The players assume that giant spiders killed the inhabitants, but as the adventure plays out they don't find any more victims. Eventually you reveal that it was all the work the first corpse they found which is in fact a mummified cultist of Atlach-Nacha.


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i think that works for a mystery but i am not sure it would be especially scary or be a horror adventure. to be honest i had forgotten that Paizo actually did a horror adventures book. I really want to flip through it the next time i am at the FLGS and see how they handled the subject... the system as is doesnt seem well suited to the genre without a lot of houserules and restrictions but maybe i am missing something obvious.


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Torbyne wrote:
i think that works for a mystery but i am not sure it would be especially scary or be a horror adventure. to be honest i had forgotten that Paizo actually did a horror adventures book. I really want to flip through it the next time i am at the FLGS and see how they handled the subject... the system as is doesnt seem well suited to the genre without a lot of houserules and restrictions but maybe i am missing something obvious.

I think the point is that you do horror by making fights harder. It doesn't work. Doesn't even work in things like Call of Cthulhu. Harder fights don't lead to horror, they lead to dead characters, TPKs and likely loss of attachment to easily replaceable characters.

Do take a look at Horror Adventures. Take a look at Strange Aeons too, unless you're planning on playing in it. There was a lot of talk along these lines before it came out and that's very much not the approach they took. I mean, it's still big damn heroes saving the day, but there's a lot of creepy shit along the way - The initial adventure starts the PCs out with amnesia and sets them in an asylum that's been overrun by something. Corrupted and twisted former inmates and staff along with innocent? survivors. And with the whole not knowing who you are or why you're there thing, it looks to me like it would work pretty well. More to it, of course, but that's the spoiler free version.

Even outside of horror, there's a lot about the way PF Knowledges work that wouldn't work well in a lot of fairly straight SF scenarios - First contact with an alien species or planet also shouldn't get handled with a simple Know roll. "Sure I know all about the inhabitants of this unknown world."
Of course, it's quite possible the rules don't work exactly the same way they do in PF.


Strange Aeons sounds neat and that is an interesting way to work in a fear of the unknown, by making the Players themselves in the dark but, and this is probably splitting hairs a bit thin, its more weird fiction than horror. Horror has this sort of fear of failure or death or just fear of being unable to handle whatever is about to happen and being powerless about it and that seems to run counter to the basic assumptions of these games. Not that it wouldnt be fun mind you but it would be hard to pull off something like Alien in the system as we know it. (especially when you end up with a monk that just punches the xenomorph to death with bludgeoning damage)


Well, there's always the "nothing is scarier" trope. The party never finds out what the true adversaries are. Adventurers are good at fighting things, and typically deal with beings of pure evil. They can't fight it if they aren't aware of what it is. Or rather, they can't fight it if it's intangible. I highly recommend the fear and madness rules in horror adventures.

Dark Archive

The best way to do space horror, I've found, is to pit the players against monsters above their CR and arm said monsters with a bunch of things not normally in the stat block.

I know this sounds mean, but the scariest monster I have ever thrown at my players was a Ghast Neh-Thallgu with a bunch of templates stacked on it and decked out with a bunch of high-level cybernetic equipment (total CR 14, the party was level 10). Even with the right knowledge check, the players had no idea what this thing was capable of and barely managed to escape alive. These guys were vetted power gamers, and they were horrified by this thing.

Space Horror can work, but doing it right requires you to be pretty darn mean.


Off-brand xenomorphs are a monster in Horror Adventures.


I have found that atmosphere and storytelling is a big part of Horror so I use narrative tricks, music, and lighting to aid in how I tell a horror story. I imagine I'll be using a lot of sound effects, klaxons, and maybe a smoke machine. I might hang chains from the ceiling.

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