Building Horror

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Just three short weeks until Horror Adventures emerges from the shadows! This week, I'm going to focus on the material in the book that helps GMs enrich horror games, from rules to advice.

New rules for a more nuanced fear track with seven levels, as well as for sanity and madness, allow your group to play around with the psychological consequences of the terrible events that are all too common in a horror game. The fear track has a split between lesser fear (which can cause increasing weakness but doesn't make you lose control of your character) and greater fear (where your character is so frightened that they can't help but act on it). Sanity is a sort of mental pool of hit points, and losing too much at once exposes you to a new madness (of increasing severity if your current sanity is below half your maximum). Of course, even if you lose sanity a little at a time, losing all your sanity causes you to completely lose your grip on reality.

The environments section contains 30 different creepy locations and hazards, each with their own rules. Locations include pools where a creature's reflection shows their true self (though sometimes, after you trust them, the pool will show your friend to have been replaced by a horrific creature even if she wasn't) and godless voids where divine power can't reach. Hazards range from weak threats witch lights that lead you into a trap and grasping undergrowth that actively impedes you, to major dangers like an honest-to-Desna bottomless pit and the dread apocalypse fog, which animates all corpses within into zombies. Environments also includes rules for domains of evil, dark pockets of supernatural activity embedded in a plane, plus a few horrific traps and a brief look at nightmare dreamscapes.

We also have sections for you on curses and horrific diseases, providing a variety of new twists on both topics, including curse templates like death curse and generational curse, disease templates like incurable, magic-resistant, plague, and virulent, tips on creating your own curses. There's even new diseases that all follow their own tracks of progression, like Unchained diseases, but much more personalized and gruesome; for instance bloody end causes blood to seep through your skin as you become prone to fits of rage.

The fleshwarping rules are the most PC-friendly of the bunch, at least if the PCs are evil enough to use them. They allow for three sorts of neat fleshwarps: true fleshwarping, where you make a new creature from several old creatures, fleshcrafting, where you graft tentacles, antennae, tails, and more onto a creature, and fleshwarp mutations, which are usually unintentional results of failed experiments, radiation, or other mutagenic experiences.

Illustration by Kent Hamilton

The haunts section is one of the true gems of the entire book. First of all, it contain delightfully twisted haunts from CR 1/4 all the way to the incredibly deadly CR 20 twisted wish haunt (pictured here, as Valeros wishes for more ale). It also has new haunt elements like elusive and latent. But the coolest part is probably the variant haunts, which shows how to use the haunt rules to create experiences other than hauntings from dead souls that are dealt with in ways other than positive energy. The variant haunt types are dimensional instabilities (places where the veil between the Material Plane and another plane is thin), maddening influences (tied to the reality-warping influence of eldritch beings and defeated with dangerous Knowledge), magical scars (places where dozens of powerful spells were hurled together), and psychic haunts (gatherings of emotional energy that can be defeated by calming them down with Diplomacy). Each variant also comes with an example haunt.

Illustration by Dave Allsop

In terms of monsters, we have a template for dread lords who rule evil domains, three hive creatures to go with the hive corruption, the Jason-like implacable stalker template (Vorhees, not Bulmahn) that can appear behind you and resurrect itself in your nightmares, the apostle kyton template for those transfigured by kytons, the trompe l'oeil (a creature that emerges from a painting), unknown (a fey that feeds off mental energies and erodes others' psyches until they too become unknown), and the waxwork creature template for creatures made of wax. There's simple templates associated with the theme of each corruption, in case you need to quickly and efficiently create a chimera whose dragon head is a construct, a dragon that turns into a tyrannosaurus rex every full moon, a vampiric unicorn, or a vegepygmy possessed by the spirit of the creature it once was. There's also two variant types of werewolves and the familial lich, which uses its own family line as a phylactery.

The "Running Horror Adventures" chapter, by master of horror Wes Schneider, is another of the books gems, particularly for me, as I've always wanted advice on how to make my horror games work out better. The chapter highlights the challenges of running horror games in Pathfinder before leading out with a preface about out-of-character consent to run horror games. It then explores subgenres of horror (body horror, cosmic horror, dark fantasy, ghost story, gothic horror, psychological horror, and slasher horror), explaining in each case how to tell those sorts of stories (and whether they are particularly easy or hard to tell in Pathfinder) and what sorts of threats and plots work best in a Pathfinder game themed around that subgenre. Afterwards, there's plenty of storytelling and atmospheric tips, tricks, and techniques, both in-character and out-of-character, that can keep both players and their characters on their toes. Finally, there's some suggestions on how to improvise rules for unusual horrific situations, with examples including being buried alive or burned at the stake.

With all these new rules at the GM's fingertips, I'm actually a little frightened to play in Developer Linda Zayas-Palmer's next game (she wrote the haunt section, so soon you might be too!). And of course, the book is a perfect companion for those of you looking to check out the Strange Aeons Adventure Path. Next week, we'll be back with a very special composite preview where a bunch of us share our favorite new toys from Horror Adventures!

Mark Seifter
Designer