I commented on this thread that I would like to do a thread centred on creating and running a horror adventure. Since my PCs have indicated they are following up on the plot hook that leads to my horror themed adventure I'm going to try that out.
My plans are to outline my trials and tribulations in this endeavor on this thread. So I'm going to cover my attempts to create this adventure and then cover what happens when I throw my players at this – however in the part where my players go through this the emphasis will be on where my adventure works and where it falls down and not really on what the PCs did in chronological order.
Being Part I or Hmm...I think I tied my Hands in This Thing
So I sit down to start writing this up using an outline I've pretty much distilled from Paizo's Writer Guidelines for Dungeon Magazine. This is a great source for the mechanics of putting together an adventure in a step by step manner. I'd link it but I can no longer find it on the Paizo site anywhere. If they have guidelines for Game Mastery or Pathfinder material that amount to the same thing I'm unable to find this either. This is unfortunate as it really is a good resource and I'm glad I downloaded the Dungeon Guidelines to my home system.
However it quickly becomes apparent that I'm not even at the introduction stage to doing this adventure yet. Fortunately for me some of the players are on holiday and when they come back they still have at least one session of other adventuring before they come back to this hook and Christmas will probably have come and gone before I actually need to unveil this adventure. Hence I've got prep time to spare.
So my first issue is that I need to get myself into a horror frame of mind. My players are pretty much hack and slash players who like a bit of a plot to their adventuring. As a DM I like to mostly give them what they want but I also want to try and improve them as players and I want to improve myself as a DM. Hence the campaign mostly focuses on what they want to play (and what I want to DM) which is hack heavy but I threw in a (not so successful) Urban Intrigue adventure and here I'm throwing in a Horror Adventure.
Instead of starting with the writing I decide to grab some horror related gaming material and bone up on this whole horror thing. Well it does not take long before I realize that I've tied my hands from the get go in this.
What I realize is that I've already committed some mistakes in writing horror just with the set up. Here I better cover the set up. Basically speaking the PCs have spent the first 10 levels of the campaign dealing with the fact that the Empire they are citizens of is under attack by Goblinoids and worse and cities are falling on a weekly basis, If this keeps up the whole Empire will collapse and be overrun by Goblinoids. The PCs have been on adventures meant to help combat this. One of the problems is that the Emperor is lawful good but unfit to rule. From the PCs perspective their might be an answer however. He once had a heir. She died in a terrible cataclysm five or so years ago when the city she was the princess of (basically training wheels for Empresses – start with a city and move up to the Empire) was engulfed in something called The Curse of Night. Think Ravenloft Demi-Plane and your basically there.
So everyone who is anyone is pretty sure she's dead. But the PCs have been hearing rumours from peasants and such that she still lives from the start of the campaign. During their Urban Adventure they managed to talk with the Emperor and get some of the details on this. Mainly they learned that divination spells don't work in The Curse of Night so no one actually knows what happened to the Princess but several expeditions to find her have failed and the Curse of Night is an extremely hostile environment which should make getting in an getting out somewhat difficult. The main adventure will take place in The Princesses fortified manor in the middle of a necropolis and I need to make this feel like a horror adventure. Basically the PCs know where her last know location (her manor) was before the Curse of Night hit because divination spells work right up to the triggering of The Curse of Night. They don't know what happened to her afterword. Of course I know what happened to her, in general anyway. Her loyal servants and guards held off the hordes of undead long enough for the Princess to retreat to a secret 'panic' room protected by spells and what not where she awaited a rescue. The rescue never came and all alone she slowly starved to death as her supplies dwindled away. Since there is no resurrection in my game death is final – for the PCs and the NPCs. The players can find her emancipated corpse but that's the end of it. The peasants are wrong she's dead and will never have a chance to save the Empire.
Now I don't usually do adventures that are ultimately futile. The players have lost before they even begin in this one. But this is horror and as a 'once a campaign' type thing I don't think this is really a problem.
So to get into the right frame of mind for this I consider rereading I6: Ravenloft but one of my players has already done Ravenloft and I've read it several times though not in a few years now. Still if I'm looking for an example of a horror adventure I seem to be in luck. I've just gotten to Foxglove Manor in Pathfinder 2: The Skinsaw Murders. So it looks like I've got a ready made example of of horror in my bedtime reading. Not sure how far I can take this example. The surrounding circumstances are far apart but at least its a neat example. I especially like the idea of a time line fore the building. I think I'll do a detailed one of what happened when the Princesses Manor was overrun – that should provide me with lots of ideas on detailing this event.
I pick up Liber Mortis and go through it but in skimming through this I basically come away with nothing. I mean maybe I'll use the evolved template and the skeleton rat swarm but otherwise I did not really find anything in this. I never was to impressed with this book and the fact that I can't make it really work for me when I'm doing a horror adventure does not raise its esteem in my eyes.
Hero's of Horror is next and actually this ones so far proving more interesting. Well the fluff at the beginning is anyway. I've yet to get to the crunch but I don't expect that much from the crunch as I won't be using taint and IIRC the crunch is so taint related its pretty useless when your not using taint.
The fluff from Hero's of Horror is making me nervous however. From what I'm reading I may have set myself up for a fall. A lot of what is being talked about in this book I've already failed on. The most blatant example is the villain. The book talks a lot about the villain. I don't even have a solid villain here. The demi-plane itself is the 'mastermind' and I think I'll use a powerful mummy for the biggest undead critter in the Princesses manor but these are not really villains per se.
The advice also emphasizes having the horror make sense in retrospect. I can't do that – I'm not going to explain to the players why the Curse of Night erupted and undead overran the place. That's a whole campaign unto itself not revelations for some PCs that are just passing through. Plus I've never really hammered this answer down myself and I don't intend to tie my hands for future campaigns by actually working out the answer. That's a secret for another day. OK so this seems to be strike two.
My third conundrum is trying to make the adventure styles work. My experience, in the distant past of my youth, in horror is that its the unknown that is frightening. Once I tell the players to roll for initiative I've pretty much lost the fear factor. But I've already set myself up with a plot line that says that the Demi-Plane will sense the PCs and send undead after them. This means that, while they explore the manor looking for clues Undead are going to start entering the manor looking for them. On the surface that seems like a neat idea but I'm not sure if I'll just break the mood. I'm hoping it will work great but I just don't know.
Creative Director
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My personal favorite place to go to see how horror can be done well and effectively in an RPG is to Chaosium's excellent Call of Cthulhu game. Not all of the supplements and adventures are equally great, but most of them are. And there's quite a few of them that do a great job on the horror. Checking out the main rulebook for how to design and write horror adventures is a great place to start.
My personal favorite place to go to see how horror can be done well and effectively in an RPG is to Chaosium's excellent Call of Cthulhu game. Not all of the supplements and adventures are equally great, but most of them are. And there's quite a few of them that do a great job on the horror. Checking out the main rulebook for how to design and write horror adventures is a great place to start.
Sounds like a good idea but I can't really justify spending the money for the rule book in order to read one section just to enhance a single adventure. I'd generally want to stay away from their modules and such because I know I'm not going to DM them anytime soon but would probably jump at the chance to play in them. No point in possibly spoiling things for me.
to the OP:
Do you listen to music when you work on your game or play? The right music can definitely help. especially movie instrumental scores. I would suggest the following: the Crow, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Interview With a Vampire, and Ravenous. It isn't a movie score, but I would highly recommend Glen Danzig's orchestral work "Black Aria". My favorite D&D DM used to play it in the background when we had Ravenloft games. Music cna really help you write. Also a good "rainstorm" cd can help as well.
Horror is very hard to achieve with a jaded audience. Because your audience (the players) have seen numerous scary, aweful and gorey movies and TV shows, their potential appreciate was already numbed. Plus you're playing a game where they are expected to win, and horror is all about the method of your failure.
So, the easy answer is to write a normal adventure where you build suspense slowly, until you get to a horrific end. For example: I once created an adventure with a barbarian tribe making sacrifices to evil gods. The PCs found them to kill them, and realized that they were sacrificing their own women and children. Once they got to the room with the final confrontation and it's door alarm made of the intestines of a living prisoner (he screamed when they opened it), it worked out okay.
However, don't expect them to get actual fright at the table. At best a little frisson of appreciation will happen.
Horror is very hard to achieve with a jaded audience. Because your audience (the players) have seen numerous scary, aweful and gorey movies and TV shows, their potential appreciate was already numbed. Plus you're playing a game where they are expected to win, and horror is all about the method of your failure.
So, the easy answer is to write a normal adventure where you build suspense slowly, until you get to a horrific end. For example: I once created an adventure with a barbarian tribe making sacrifices to evil gods. The PCs found them to kill them, and realized that they were sacrificing their own women and children. Once they got to the room with the final confrontation and it's door alarm made of the intestines of a living prisoner (he screamed when they opened it), it worked out okay.
However, don't expect them to get actual fright at the table. At best a little frisson of appreciation will happen.
I agree and disagree at the same time. I think its true that a lot of the time your in luck just to get some appreciation from the players. But I 'once' ran a Sci-Fi game that was fantastic horror. Hell I was DMing and I was scared. I've also played in a modern game, Shadow Run of all the systems, and it was freaky. About a million players have said that they were truly freaked out at one point or another in a Call of Cuthulu game. My point is its possible to actually scare the players - but I have no real idea on how to do that consistently or if its even possible for this to be consistent.
So as you've noted, Heroes of Horror has some good advice but also some not so good patches. Also, Nightmares of Mine, a rules-neutral horror supplement from ICE that's for sale on the various print/PDF RPG store sites, is really good.
Also, if you don't mind me pimping myself, I have an essay on my Web site about horror in roleplaying, especially in D&D. See http://www.mindspring.com/~ernestm/horror/horror.html.
So there's nothing wrong with tossing in a horror adventure in an otherwise non-horror campaign. And in terms of the "strikes" I think you're OK.
1. The "has to make sense in retrospect" advice in HoH is horrible; you're ahead there. In fact, not telling keeps the sense of the unknown that is more conducive to horror.
2. It's perfectly fine to have a villain that's not an individual but more of an overall thing - like many a horror movie. Some do (Dracula, Halloween) but many do not (Night of the Living Dead, Uzumaki).
The Foxglove house from Skinsaw is a good example to follow for sure, it reminded me a lot of my "haunted house" adventure (from the examples in the essay on my site). The D&D group I play with just went through it and the group's pretty "casual" players and tend to joke around the whole time, but they were taken aback by some of that manor! And Ravenloft. You don't have to steal from them piece by piece; it's easy enough to change some things where the guy who's played Ravenloft will never notice...
So far it sounds like the sources you're looking at and your instincts are good, trust yourself to run with it!
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2nd edition Ravenloft boxed set; Techniques of Terror I believe is what the chapter was called is an excellent read. You can probably get the pdf of it for pretty cheap on here.
Re the jaded audience factor with horror. I think the main thing in horror adventures for rpgs isn't blood and guts but the unknown and the element of suspense. A little gore is always good but when the adventurers are seperated from each other and they feel something is lurking in the shadows then fear can take hold.
I would also second Call of Cthulhu and Pagan Publishing's The Unspeakable Oath for resources and examples of great horror adventures.
You need to consider what will really generate fear and a sense of dread in your players. In his column in The Unspeakable Oath (Issue Eleven), Mark Morrison summarized some ways to really make your players squirm:
You may simply prefer to make combat and injury the least of your players' worries. The body is easily broken, but the mind is a fortress; go ahead and lay siege. Sticks and stones may break their bones, but these things will really hurt them: madness (there is no peace within the sealed tomb of the unbalanced mind), infestation (there is no escape form the rank garden of the corrupting body), immortality (there is no rest in the mummified shrine of the cursed and undying), dehumanization (there is no creature lower than the cultist, save for the obsessed cult killer), loss (there is no comfort for those who achieve victory at the cost of friends, family, and home), and similar hammer blows to heart, soul, and sanity. Soon enough, your players must realize that there are worse fates than death.
Throw in a few "redshirt" NPCs that can suffer horribly to illustrate the fate that awaits the brash and unwary. Better yet, use an NPC that the party has cause to care about (pets, steeds, and animal companions also work well for this). When they find their ally lying on the ground, a withered, undying husk, then hear the unfortunate's whispered words begging them to join him because, "it feels soooo good!" they'll take it seriously when you ask them to roll a mysterious saving throw, then advise them that they notice small circles of necrotic, grayish tissue flaking from their arms. (You may want to reassure them that the spots don't hurt; in fact, they feel rather pleasant...)
Keep the players wondering. Within the realm of death, the dead may appear alive, and the living may seem to be slowly rotting. The undead need to be spooky; remember that some of the undead inhabiting the place may be acquainted with the PCs. "Lance, little brother! You have come to aid me? You are too late!" You can use characters like these to give a "human face" to the devastation the PCs encounter.
I wouldn't have the princess be dead, not when she could be hopelessly deranged or undead. Give the players an unpalatable choice: Do they attempt to bring forth the princess and cause as many problems as they solve, or do they call the mission a failure? "My heroes! The entire realm is in your debt! I will need you to bring this coffin with you, for I can no longer abide the sunlight!" I once ran a "find the lost princess" scenario myself, in which the princess had hidden herself within a magical "Fairy Castle" originally intended as a refuge. From what you have said, that might be a bit too "high magic" for your tastes.
There are some "cheap" ways to increase the horror effect. Play by candlelight, with a few red lights (red light tends to be unnerving). Play spooky background music. Record some "special effects" and play them during the game, telling the players, "this is what you hear." If your players aren't used to these things they can be really alarming.
So mulling over this a little more - depending on how brazenly you're willing to steal from other sources you may not have too much work to do :-).
The Foxglove Manor in the Skinsaw Murders is a good template for a haunted house adventure. The princess could be dead but haunting the place - not as a "ghost" in the prosaic monster sense, but as in a general haunting. Maybe she went crazy and has reverted to being/appearing childlike, mabe she blames her father, maybe... any number of things. Perhaps she tries to drive the PCs off (because she hates them/knows they're good and doesn't want them hurt), or helps them (like the computer girl in Resident Evil).
As you noted, the house's pre-takeover timeline is important as it provides a hook for conflict. Maybe she was betrayed by someone in the house with her. (Heck, maybe some court mage or whatnot in the house triggered the whole event, or was ambiguously in league with whatever did, or "converted" to it once the crap went down). Complexity is good here - sure, undead from the region can siege the house - but maybe the defenders of the house rise up in undead form too, fighting against the intruders (undead and PCs both!).
If you think your party needs some crunch to back up the horror, you could inflict something on them while in the region - taint, disease, whatnot. In Skinsaw it's the everpresent fungus and the disease it causes.
Pick a couple themes you're going to work with throughout - in Skinsaw it was infidelity (conceptual), fungus (physical), spirals (visual). Bring through the theme consistently. In my haunted house adventure it was subversion of the innocent (conceptual), [dripping] water (physical), reversed time (visual). Choose some yourself, it really helps to have some thematic ideas to design around (you can of course sprinkle a lot of just garden variety scares/spooky stuff in).
Also, you may consider not making the adventure a *total* wash. Sure, she's dead, but maybe the PCs get some item, or information, or something that can help them with their quest. Or just freeing her spirit could be, if not a reward, an achieved goal.
to the OP:
Do you listen to music when you work on your game or play? The right music can definitely help. especially movie instrumental scores. I would suggest the following: the Crow, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Interview With a Vampire, and Ravenous. It isn't a movie score, but I would highly recommend Glen Danzig's orchestral work "Black Aria". My favorite D&D DM used to play it in the background when we had Ravenloft games. Music cna really help you write. Also a good "rainstorm" cd can help as well.
I listen to music when I work on an adventure though I never felt that the music per se really influenced my adventure design.
We don't listen to music while we play. Its always just caused complaints. I've got very little control over the actual game environment as we play at a friends house and she rules her roost with an iron fist. Also in terms of light we really are stuck with the setup as is. Not a lot of control in this department. No turning the lights off in other parts of the house etc. Anything for atmosphere is going to have to come through descriptions and player handouts that I bring along.
Horror is very hard to achieve with a jaded audience. Because your audience (the players) have seen numerous scary, aweful and gorey movies and TV shows, their potential appreciate was already numbed. Plus you're playing a game where they are expected to win, and horror is all about the method of your failure.
So, the easy answer is to write a normal adventure where you build suspense slowly, until you get to a horrific end. For example: I once created an adventure with a barbarian tribe making sacrifices to evil gods. The PCs found them to kill them, and realized that they were sacrificing their own women and children. Once they got to the room with the final confrontation and it's door alarm made of the intestines of a living prisoner (he screamed when they opened it), it worked out okay.
However, don't expect them to get actual fright at the table. At best a little frisson of appreciation will happen.
Well I know its possible. Decades ago when I was all of sixteen I ran a space horror game that managed to be so scary that I even scared myself. By the time I ended the session we had a bunch of sixteen year old guys all sleeping on the floor in the rec room because we were to scared to go to the guest rooms. We had a girl in the game - not sure if she believed that all five of us where sleeping in the rec room to protect her...
I've played in a really scary game as well with a good GM. Was not Call of Cuthulu but In retrospect I think thats were the GM was getting his material from. So its possible but I'm not really sure how possible.
So as you've noted, Heroes of Horror has some good advice but also some not so good patches. Also, Nightmares of Mine, a rules-neutral horror supplement from ICE that's for sale on the various print/PDF RPG store sites, is really good.
Also, if you don't mind me pimping myself, I have an essay on my Web site about horror in roleplaying, especially in D&D. See http://www.mindspring.com/~ernestm/horror/horror.html.
Wow and I thought my posts where long...this runs 21 pages. Anyway I'll definitely check it out. One suggestion though is you should probably up the font here. This is excessively small. I've downloaded your richtext version and increased the font to 16 which is more readable but I think you'll get a better response if you make this easier to read on the web.
You should probably break this up into 'pages'. Its generally to long for people to go at in one sitting and 'pages' makes it easier to jump back in after a break.
You need to consider what will really generate fear and a sense of dread in your players. In his column in The Unspeakable Oath (Issue Eleven), Mark Morrison summarized some ways to really make your players squirm:
You may simply prefer to make combat and injury the least of your players' worries. The body is easily broken, but the mind is a fortress; go ahead and lay siege. Sticks and stones may break their bones, but these things will really hurt them: madness (there is no peace within the sealed tomb of the unbalanced mind), infestation (there is no escape form the rank garden of the corrupting body), immortality (there is no rest in the mummified shrine of the cursed and undying), dehumanization (there is no creature lower than the cultist, save for the obsessed cult killer), loss (there is no comfort for those who achieve victory at the cost of friends, family, and home), and similar hammer blows to heart, soul, and sanity. Soon enough, your players must realize that there are worse fates than death.
Throw in a few "redshirt" NPCs that can suffer horribly to illustrate the fate that awaits the brash and unwary. Better yet, use an NPC that the party has cause to care about (pets, steeds, and animal companions also work well for this). When they find their ally lying on the ground, a withered, undying husk, then hear the unfortunate's whispered words begging them to join him because, "it feels soooo good!" they'll take it seriously when you ask them to roll a mysterious saving throw, then advise them that they notice small circles of necrotic, grayish tissue flaking from their arms. (You may want to reassure them that the spots don't hurt; in fact, they feel rather pleasant...)
Keep the players wondering. Within the realm of death, the dead may appear alive, and the living may seem to be slowly rotting. The undead need to be spooky; remember that some of the undead inhabiting the place may be acquainted with the PCs. [i]"Lance, little brother! You...
I think your advice is good but not sure how applicable it is to me. For one thing I am constrained by the plotline. I have a cursed demi-plane festering in my campaign world but its pretty much self contained. Its not going to stop being self contained - this horror adventure is a change of pace - not the campaign. The campaign is about a goblinoid invasion and thats not going to change. So demi-plane of dread is not coming for them except when they are coming for it.
They won't bring red shirts with them for this and I'm not really going to be able to introduce their long lost cousin here since the campaign material just won't allow it. This place was infected 5 or so years ago and the exodus from the dying city has ripples through out the campaign. Their family and allies won't have wandered into the necropolis. Not believably anyway. Not that I can't do anything for horror here. One thing about places of the dead - their static in a lot of ways. They actually exist somewhat outside of the flow of time. The horror story here is what happened on the day this place fell 5 years ago. The story of the maid and her teenage son and the gruesome way they died in the guest bedroom - that sort of thing. This was a charnel house straight out of the blue five years ago. The main story may be the princess but their are other shiver inducing tales to be told of all the good people who died here.
I've also got to face the fact that this is D&D and their going to be 11th heading for 12th when they take this thing. Thats 6th level spells for the wizard. In game terms they stand on the cusp of true power in D&D. that limits my ability to control them - they can't easily be railroaded considering the kind of power at their disposal. I'm not going to try to hard to force them apart or most other tricks involving hammering the PCs. Their too strong for that. Plus killing them is not as fear inducing in my game as it is in some games. I kill them pretty regularly. They can take that - I can't scare them much with attacking their characters, I think I need to aim squarely at the players behind the characters and see if I can shake my actual players. I think my players are the weak link here not their butt kicking characters. If I can spook the players with the environment and by keeping the main antagonistic always around the next bend but never where they can actually roll for init I think I might freak them out.
Their power is one reason I won't let her live...I've already established that dead is dead in my game but if she is insane they might be able to crack that. Thats an obstacle that limitless wealth might be able to overcome in D&D. Saying she is nuts will distract them for all of 30 seconds before they all start cracking books to check through the spell and magic item lists to crack this.
Even if I can beat everything from these lists I've lost the ball. They're in 'research mode' not freak out mode. They won't bother with the books if she is dead - they know the house rule that dead is dead can't be busted I've long ago made it clear that I'll nerf anything that busts it out of hand. they won't bother going for the books if she's dead and that means they'll absorb her horrible demise and confront the fact that they failed and had best get out of dodge.
Is there a reason in your campaign fluff for why 'dead is dead'? If so, you can use that. Throw them a complete curve ball. She's dead, but they find something (in the vein of one of Lovecraft's books of forbidden, blasphemous knowledge) that indicates that maybe your rule isn't that ironclad after all. Maybe they can bring her back. In fact, the method of doing so seems easy, though not too easy, and it breaks every universal, cosmic law in your campaign.
When they do though, it's not her spirit returning to her body from the afterlife, but something else. You can tie the nature of the princess-thing to this demiplane business. She may now be the corrupted agent of the its evil powers. The party will unwittingly unleash something even more horrible than a horde of goblinoids upon the empire.
This works even better if you draw it out. When she's first 'resurrected', everything seems all peachy keen. She's reunited with the emperor, assumes her station as if she were never gone, and unites the armies of the land to repel the goblin invaders. She is seen as the savior of the land, and the party is acclaimed as heroes for their part in her return. Only then does her true nature begin to shine through the cracks of her beatific facade. By the time your players realize what their characters have done, it may be 'too late'. Now, they've got to work against her, as she puts into motion plans that will make the goblins look like teletubbies.
The players will obviously want to stop her. It's personal now. However, a head-on assault is not going to be feasible. She's an empress now. She's got an adoring empire of loyal servants who don't know what the players know. If they try to speak out against her, people react very negatively. They'll be the ones branded as villains.
It's not stereotypical Hollywood horror, true, but good horror isn't about deranged templates or monsters from a horror supplement. It's about getting your players to react to what's happening to their characters in a certain way. Personally, I find adding game mechanics to represent horror as kind of cheesy. As soon as you turn something into a numbers game, it takes your players out of the psychology of the moment and puts them into 'gaming' mode. Make the horror the natural reaction of what happens during the game, not something that happens during the game that provokes a reaction.
Is there a reason in your campaign fluff for why 'dead is dead'?
I use a 'distant' Gods type cosmology so there is not exactly anything in the fluff on why Dead is Dead. Its more that nobody knows what happens to the dead. Some people maintain that good souls go to paradise and bad souls go to Hell or the Abyss but no one really knows, whole cultures maintain other views of what happens to souls and no one can prove them right or wrong. No one has ever verifiably spoken to a God. Angels sure, Devils and Demons yes, but not an actual God. Clerics have spells and they seem to work but if the Church splinters in two neither side seems to loose their spells so its more that this whole thing is is just a big question mark. Thus people have souls - they can be captured in magic jars and such and presumably when you die your soul goes somewhere, probably.
If so, you can use that. Throw them a complete curve ball. She's dead, but they find something (in the vein of one of Lovecraft's books of forbidden, blasphemous knowledge) that indicates that maybe your rule isn't that ironclad after all. Maybe they can bring her back. In fact, the method of doing so seems easy, though not too easy, and it breaks every universal, cosmic law in your campaign.When they do though, it's not her spirit returning to her body from the afterlife, but something else. You can tie the nature of the princess-thing to this demiplane business. She may now be the corrupted agent of the its evil powers. The party will unwittingly unleash something even more horrible than a horde of goblinoids upon the empire.
The Goblinoid invasion thing is something I've not gone into detail about because its not critical to the current posts but its a very big deal in the campaign. For some of my players, those that have adventured in this campaign world for many years, this can really hit them at a visceral level. Cities where they ran entire multi-year campaigns and established friends and started families are being wiped off the map. I've literally spent 20 real life years dropping hints in every campaign that I've run that the goblinoid situation was growing ever worse and that something has been stirring them up. Its been a subplot in every game I've ever run. Now its the main plot.
Hence I would really like to run a good horror adventure but it absolutely takes second place to the Goblinoid invasion unfolding on the worlds campaign maps and there is nothing that I'm going to come up with thats got more impact for at least half my player group. First thing they do after every adventure is find someone who knows whats going on with the war and get and update their campaign map with a red marker denoting old adventuring haunts that have now wiped off the map.
This is one of the advantages of using a persistent world if your player rotation is not to high. For a couple of my players this campaign world is home. They've 'lived' here since they were 13 in real life and their in their mid thirties now and one of them has played here for a good 10 years. True half my players are pretty new to this world but they are picking up the vibes from the old hands to some extent.
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I'm not really much cop at this but I'll give you my pearls of wisdom, such as they are.
Don't try too hard to "improve" your players too much. You run the danger of boring them if they don't get what they expect. So you need to manage their expectations. So if you simply dump horror on them, they might not notice or get irritated. So....
How much prefiguring have you done? Are they already frightened to go to the evil demiplane-type place you have designed? Are the PCs bothered about it, or just see it as another place to loot? You might want to build the place up as a hell-hole of festering horror and dread.
And I'd try to go a bit psychological with them. On a meta-level, it might be an idea to hint that this isn't going to be an ordinary session or two, but a bit different. Maybe confound their expectations a bit - cut back on the combat, rack up the roleplaying. Interactions with dead people, interactions with mediums who shriek with horror at what they have seen in the spirit world.
I don't think you have a big problem with no definate baddie as such, if you can give the place a malign intelligence that will attack them (though it might be an idea that it manifests in a way they can interact with on a RP and, ultimately, combat level - maybe the shade of the princess, or the head of her guards). I think you have a problem because the adventure is a bit of a waste of time - they go all through that, and the princess is dead. That doesn't make me think "horror", that makes me think "irritation", and you hack-and-slashers might feel the same way. I would try to think up something that makes the trip vaguely worthwhile - not that the princess is alive, but maybe her soul is in torment and needs to be free, or the Emperor would like a keepsake or something to remember her by. Or is there a cunning plot hook that lurks therein to draw the PCs on to the next part of the campaign?
But horror is about atmospherics. The above is more about D&D and plotting and meta-gaming your PCs to have a good time. Try and think of some nasty set-piece events for the PCs to stumble across (and they may just be something they see, not necessarily combat encounters) and try and set the tone you want to impart. That, in my view, is the key to horror.
Don't know if that was helpful, but it's all I've got.
The background and rules that you have established can really work for you this time. You can't mess with the environment? I'd talk to the queen of the roost and see if she'll make an exception. Alternatively, move the game somewhere else for that day. In either case, you will establish that something unusual is going on and throw the players off balance.
Dead is dead, with no going back, so if the princess "comes back", something is REALLY WRONG. In Call of Cthulhu, the available resurrection magic comes at a cost...
There aren't any convenient "redshirts"? Toss some into the party's path. Perhaps a rival band hopes to steal their thunder, trying to rescue the princess before the heroes can get there. Perhaps the dead have called to their kin, drawing someone to them who otherwise would know to flee that place of ill-omen. I understand your desire not to tamper with long-established background in your game, but you need to make the players concerned that there are things they don't understand. Confound their expectations about what the "rules" are.
You will want to have a definite payoff, if the princess is simply dead; otherwise, the PCs are likely to be frustrated. What heroic accomplishment will they achieve?
Being Part 2 or making Adventures is Like Playing with Lego
I continue with my work on trying to get this thing together. I finish off with much of the research part of making this adventure. I zip through the rest of Heros of Horror but, while I found some good fluff in the first half of the book, I found the second half pretty much useless. I'm still plodding through Foxglove Manor as my bed time reading.
Foxglove Manor is light on the descriptive text considering that its, presumably, horror. I'd love to know the philosophical underpinnings in this. Richard Prett is supposed to be the real deal in horror adventure writing. Here he seems to have gone against the advice of all the game material on the topic. Why? What does he know that the game material writers don't and is it of use to me in my own endeavours? How come the read aloud text in Foxglove manor is so small?
Ernest Mueller, above, links a sizable essay on horror gaming full of hints and philosophies. I go through that. To try and get the most out of it I create a Horror Gaming Dos and Don'ts appendix for my adventure and start jotting down notes to myself both for running this and for writing this. This is a good article but it seems to make different contentions, much of the time, then Heros of Horror. Now I'm not the kind of person who is in total awe of game designers and feel their necessarily more correct then other informed people and on balance (I've disagreed with James Jacobs over, just about everything except actual adventure design) I think Ernest Mueller seems to know more of what he's talking about then the writers of Hero's of Horror so when something clashes I'll probably follow his advice. When I'm not otherwise constrained anyway.
OK so I feel I've done my research and I had best get to the hard bit where I actually sit down and start writing this up. With me that means doing the first three sections, Introduction, Background and Adventure Synopsis, before turning to the maps.
I get these three sections out. I was thinking of putting in a time line that covers the events that have taken place in Silistine Manor from the moment the Curse of Night overtook the city to the point where the PCs show up into the background section. However it would seem I'm not ready for that part yet. When I go to add this I quickly realize that, outside of the big picture, I don't really know what happened to this place. The biggest issue here really was what was this place like? I think I need to detail what Silistine Manor was like on a normal summers day prior to the Curse of Night before I can really envision what took place here on that fateful day and in the time since.
This has left my adventure background and adventure synopsis kind of sparse. It reads a lot like 'and then the PCs will discover that bad stuff happened in the manor and they will quake in their booties'. Well not quite that bad but I hope to come back to these sections when I've hammered down more details.
So I need to write out a whole section on what the manor was like before anything icky took place. Wow, seems like quite a bit of work considering that I'll probably be detailing a whole setting that will end up in my final product only in bits and pieces as a kind of perverse shadow of of what the manor once was like. Still no help for it. I can't see another way forward.
To write about this manor I think I need to know what the manor looked like. Here I think I need a map. No surprise to me that I start thinking about making a map the moment I bump into any kind of road block in writing an adventure. Its an old solution for me – having trouble writing something? Make a map! I've always found that making a map of something tells a story without words and that story can inform on the very necessary one that involves words. Thus, for me, map making is a way of overcoming even a hint of writers block.
So where to get a map from? Actually I'd already gotten a good idea of what I was going to do in this regards when I did the initial research. Foxglove Manor looks good and I like the Vampire Lords Keep in Heros of Horror. I toss my copy of Pathfinder 2 on the scanner and scan the page with Foxglove Manor. The Vampire Lords Keep map happens to be on the Wizards site and I grab a hi-res scan from there. I convert both to Gimp files and import them into a single file. Now I just need to figure a way of getting them together. That takes a bit of work 'cause initially I put them side by side in such a way that I could not make them fit at all – but when I swapped their relative locations things just kind of fell into place. I can add a arched covered walkway between the third level on each of them. I can throw in a couple of ground floor doors and make a well beaten path between the two buildings and it should be no trouble hooking them together in a couple of places underground.
I figure Foxglove manor is the original building and the keep part got added with the rise in power and prestige of the Silistine's.
That's my initial mock up. I'm going to now sit down and do this in full blown style. I map environments using a perspective system similar to what one sees in I6: Ravenloft – except Ravenloft is not at an easy to work with angle and I have no real talent so I have to map stuff at exactly a 45 degree angle or it stops being possible to do absolutely everything by counting squares and using the 'Straight line' tool in Gimp. Essentially the 1st edition Dungeoniers Survival Guide outlined how to do perspective mapping and once I learned from there I've just done perspective mapping ever since. I'm pretty excited by this map however – I've never tried merging two buildings to make one before but it should make for some neat architecture and will hopefully spur my imagination on what life was like in this place and what happened when undead attacked.
My personal favorite place to go to see how horror can be done well and effectively in an RPG is to Chaosium's excellent Call of Cthulhu game. Not all of the supplements and adventures are equally great, but most of them are. And there's quite a few of them that do a great job on the horror. Checking out the main rulebook for how to design and write horror adventures is a great place to start.Sounds like a good idea but I can't really justify spending the money for the rule book in order to read one section just to enhance a single adventure. I'd generally want to stay away from their modules and such because I know I'm not going to DM them anytime soon but would probably jump at the chance to play in them. No point in possibly spoiling things for me.
Unlike D&D's current version you don't loose much by not having the system's core book. The stories are generally horrific in and of themselves no stats needed.
On that note Mr Jacob's "Not for the Living" article (Dragon 336) is filled with horrible goodness if you want to make the curse the "bad guy." James ask Sutter or Jeremy how many times I tried sneaking one of your hauntings past the render.
Triple G
I'm not really much cop at this but I'll give you my pearls of wisdom, such as they are.
Don't try too hard to "improve" your players too much. You run the danger of boring them if they don't get what they expect. So you need to manage their expectations. So if you simply dump horror on them, they might not notice or get irritated. So....
I won't try to hard. If this turns into more of a undead beat down I'll deal. Hopefully we'll get good horror but I recognize that I need to provide a good adventure first and foremost. I figure even if they refuse to get frightened I'm not going to really ruin anything with a well thought out environment. Worst case scenario is that its a 'dungeon' with slightly longer then normal descriptive text.
How much prefiguring have you done? Are they already frightened to go to the evil demiplane-type place you have designed? Are the PCs bothered about it, or just see it as another place to loot? You might want to build the place up as a hell-hole of festering horror and dread.
I'd say their just taken aback by all the mechanical stuff that does not seem to work. No teleporting in and out? What kind of messed up place is this? That sort of thing. So far their not buying my doom and gloom act.
And I'd try to go a bit psychological with them. On a meta-level, it might be an idea to hint that this isn't going to be an ordinary session or two, but a bit different. Maybe confound their expectations a bit - cut back on the combat, rack up the roleplaying. Interactions with dead people, interactions with mediums who shriek with horror at what they have seen in the spirit world.
Hmm...I don't know. I see where your coming from in the sense that the players need to agree to be scared but on the other hand I think I have some kind of a psychological advantage if they walk in expecting an undead rumble and get horror instead. I've shaken them at that moment and I might have a better chance of getting what I'm looking for if I can get them a little off balance. I think I've got to get them outside of their comfort zone and they may be too comfortable if they walk in knowing what to expect.
I don't think you have a big problem with no definate baddie as such, if you can give the place a malign intelligence that will attack them (though it might be an idea that it manifests in a way they can interact with on a RP and, ultimately, combat level - maybe the shade of the princess, or the head of her guards). I think you have a problem because the adventure is a bit of a waste of time - they go all through that, and the princess is dead. That doesn't make me think "horror", that makes me think "irritation", and you hack-and-slashers might feel the same way. I would try to think up something that makes the trip vaguely worthwhile - not that the princess is alive, but maybe her soul is in torment and needs to be free, or the Emperor would like a keepsake or something to remember her by. Or is there a cunning plot hook that lurks therein to draw the PCs on to the next part of the campaign?But horror is about atmospherics. The above is more about D&D and plotting and meta-gaming your PCs to...
Well there is a plot point to all of this though I'm not sure my players will play ball. They are here in the first place because their looking to avoid making a Faustian choice about getting involved in a coup to remove the good but incompetent Emperor and replace him a more competent but not good Emperor. More particularly they hate the idea of having to strike down his Paladin advisor as the guy is a living legend who's credentials for of courage and bravery (if not intelligence) are unquestioned. The fact that this is not a viable option leaves them back at making this hard choice. That said I have a feeling my players will go with a third option and wash their hands of this affair and see if they can stop the tide of evil without having to make this choice - which is an option. Replacing the Emperor would help mainly by buying them time (less cities fall if the armies of the Empire are more actively and competently utilized) but they can ultimately 'win' even if they avoid this choice. There is more then one road to Rome so to speak.
The background and rules that you have established can really work for you this time. You can't mess with the environment? I'd talk to the queen of the roost and see if she'll make an exception. Alternatively, move the game somewhere else for that day. In either case, you will establish that something unusual is going on and throw the players off balance.
Dead is dead, with no going back, so if the princess "comes back", something is REALLY WRONG. In Call of Cthulhu, the available resurrection magic comes at a cost...
There aren't any convenient "redshirts"? Toss some into the party's path. Perhaps a rival band hopes to steal their thunder, trying to rescue the princess before the heroes can get there. Perhaps the dead have called to their kin, drawing someone to them who otherwise would know to flee that place of ill-omen. I understand your desire not to tamper with long-established background in your game, but you need to make the players concerned that there are things they don't understand. Confound their expectations about what the "rules" are.
You will want to have a definite payoff, if the princess is simply dead; otherwise, the PCs are likely to be frustrated. What heroic accomplishment will they achieve?
Still they won't be less frustrated if she comes back as an evil abomination either. Perpetuating that on the world does not mean they have accomplished something heroic. It means they have caused a catastrophe.
Plus I've already got a plot line for a dead Empress scenario. Now they have to consider the moral implications of initiating a coup against a good but incompetent Emperor which in some ways is a tougher more interesting choice then launching a coup against an evil lich Queen - and if they do go for it I can have some fun by pitting them against good hero's like a Paladin Advisor, summoned angels etc. which is not something that good parties face everyday.
Making her an evil whatever gets hard - I need to explain why she is not struck down by the Paladin advisor, not found out by the rest of the court, what she is doing that is evil and why the people go along with this and I have to do all this without disrupting my goblinoid invasion plot line to much. It seems like a lot of work and it messes with the PCs priorities in ways I'd rather not screw up. Essentially their 11th level know. I've got to get the PCs at least into the ball park of the end game for this campaign right around the point they get to 17th level (because 9th level spells really start messing with the game). From a campaign design standpoint I can't afford to add a major sub plot like this of any real scale. If I went this way I don't think it'd work if it was a quick cheap throw away type event.
I think your advice is good but not sure how applicable it is to me. For one thing I am constrained by the plotline. I have a cursed demi-plane festering in my campaign world but its pretty much self contained. Its not going to stop being self contained - this horror adventure is a change of pace - not the campaign. The campaign is about a goblinoid invasion and thats not going to change. So demi-plane of dread is not coming for them except when they are coming for it.
They won't bring red shirts with them for this and I'm not really going to be able to introduce their long lost cousin here since the campaign material just won't allow it. This place was infected 5 or so years ago and the exodus from the dying city has ripples through out the campaign. Their family and allies won't have wandered into the necropolis. Not believably anyway. Not that I can't do anything for horror here. One thing about places of the dead - their static in a lot of ways. They actually exist somewhat outside of the flow of time. The horror story here is what happened on the day this place fell 5 years ago. The story of the maid and her teenage son and the gruesome way they died in the guest bedroom - that sort of thing. This was a charnel house straight out of the blue five years ago. The main story may be the princess but their are other shiver inducing tales to be told of all the good people who died here.
I've also got to face the fact that this is D&D and their going to be 11th heading for 12th when they take this thing. Thats 6th level spells for the wizard. In game terms they stand on the cusp of true power in D&D. that limits my ability to control them - they can't easily be railroaded considering the kind of power at their disposal. I'm not going to try to hard to force them apart or most other tricks involving hammering the PCs. Their too strong for that. Plus killing them is not as fear inducing in my game as it is in some games. I kill them pretty regularly. They can take that - I can't scare them much with attacking their characters, I think I need to aim squarely at the players behind the characters and see if I can shake my actual players. I think my players are the weak link here not their butt kicking characters. If I can spook the players with the environment and by keeping the main antagonistic always around the next bend but never where they can actually roll for init I think I might freak them out.
Their power is one reason I won't let her live...I've already established that dead is dead in my game but if she is insane they might be able to crack that. Thats an obstacle that limitless wealth might be able to overcome in D&D. Saying she is nuts will distract them for all of 30 seconds before they all start cracking books to check through the spell and magic item lists to crack this.
Even if I can beat everything from these lists I've lost the ball. They're in 'research mode' not freak out mode. They won't bother with the books if she is dead - they know the house rule that dead is dead can't be busted I've long ago made it clear that I'll nerf anything that busts it out of hand. they won't bother going for the books if she's dead and that means they'll absorb her horrible demise and confront the fact that they failed and had best get out of dodge.
I once ran a game set in a mix of the Call of Cthulhu universe and that of the World of Darkness by White Wolf. The characters all played elder more powerful versions of the characters commonly played in the World of Darkness (including a 4th ranked werewolf, elder vampire, master (virtual adept) mage, and an un-killable mummy). They had powers, and abilites far far outstriping normal investigators and I ran them (pretty much verbatium) through a mini-chronicle capped off by the classic "At Your Door" Call of Cthulhu campaign book. Whie their powers helped during most combat situations that was really the least of their problems. The slow loss of sanity, the realization that the twisted enemies they fought were only part of an unknowable wave of cosmic horror that in some respects they themselves were a part of, was more than enough to send shivers down their spines and make them cautious. Really horror isn't about combat. Combat is hit points, and probablity. It's about that icky repulsive feeling you get when you find a cannibal in your midst. He's a monster - like a goblin - sure but he's human also. The what-makes-a-person-do-that thought stuck snuggly in the back of your brain is where the real horror comes from. The idea that human civilization and all it's more are just so much icing on a festering canker filled with thoughts of genocide, cannibalism, sexual deviance, hatred, self-loathing, unquenchable lusts, and misgeony. That's horror.
Some other points of interest that might help (these might be repeats of stuff said above but...)
1. Kick them where they are weakest (or at least look like you are) - I get the feeling your crew are all wandering orphans brought up on a heavy gravity world where the native flora and fauna was deadly to most humanoid life thereby making them superhuman on this world. I'm probably exagerating, but the point is that they probably don't have a lot of weaknesses so look for the less obvious ones. Hubris comes to mind. As well as any pre-documented fears. PC get his ass kisked by a dragon once use that fear again. One of the great things about the main characters in books is that they change over time try to be the catalyst for that change in the characters at your table. Probe them and find their limits. And then push a little.
2. Disorient them - "Roll Initiative!" everyone rattles their dice (you roll some behind a screen) and then do something unexpected. It could be that a lone, weak monster runs at them and dies horribly as a result. Problem is the monster thanks them as it dies, or maybe it's body dissolves into green slime, or maybe it only looked like a monster covered in a disguise of sort, or compelled to attack by something else, basically make them rethink the stuff they do all the time. Do it once and there will always be a bit of hesitation later. Are you tired of door drills? I know I am.
3. Choice of evils - The princess is alive, and can leave and claims to even know a way to stop the war - only problem is her leaving comes at a cost.... Perhaps she is dangerously insane (Hannibal Lechter-style) and incurably so, having been made mad by the gods or some such. Perhaps her shell is being used by something inhuman.
4. Overwelming destructive power or evil - Sometimes the 4th level party runs into the Great Wyrm. There are no choices except to run or die or maybe try to run faster than your fellows. Hmmm. This room has forbiddance cast on it. They don't have to see Cthulhu they just have to see the death toll and know how it happened. The Nemisis Mass Extinction Theory, Global Nuclear War, and the (already happened) 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami (that killed over two hundred thousand people and affected millions of others) are all examples of overwhelming destructive power that no one - not even the PCs can stop.
On a side note: I have yet to find a 3.x D&D source that is as good at explaining the theory of horror as any one good Call of Cthulhu compliation.
GGG
Hey, a comment on Foxglove Manor since I just ran through it. I guess it didn't seem light on the flavor text to us as players; in fact we all got very vivid images of what was going on. I think some of it is that they don't overwhelm you with "boxed text" just when you enter a room, but so many of the rooms are interactive in some way or have other gruesome stuff in them once you start digging, and the nature of this scenario is that PCs end up searching about every room in detail (except the ones they refuse to go into!). Those descriptions aren't always written out in depth for the DM. That's more effective really, because when input comes in response to player actions they feel more invested in it. Also, all of the pieces of the whole are contributing to telling the story of what happened there - there were only a couple "throwaway" rooms in the entire place.
Plus, published adventures have page count limits that you don't have when rolling your own. I get the impression our DM added a bit of his own to Foxglove as written.
But that's also the beauty of a horror adventure - the players' imagination gets to work and fills in the gaps appropriately for you. So I guess this is all just to say even the level of detail in Foxglove sufficed to freak out our intrepid band of adventurers!
Oh, and yeah, on Heroes of Horror - some good stuff, some not so good - there's a long review on rpg.net (http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/12/12796.phtml) that can give some insight into that. "Nightmares of Mine" (Ken Hite) is the gold standard.
But that's also the beauty of a horror adventure - the players' imagination gets to work and fills in the gaps appropriately for you. So I guess this is all just to say even the level of detail in Foxglove sufficed to freak out our intrepid band of adventurers!
This is important part of horror game in my opinion...don't give out too much information, keep the players guessing...misinformation works well too, throw in red herrings which do have their inner logic, but the important part is to make players wonder what on earth is happening here.
Taking an existing campaign and transforming it into a horror campaign has its problems, mainly that the players more or less can trust each other. A player writing a secret note to DM for no apparent reason can be scarier than any undead you throw their way.
How about the princess being dead (you have stated so many times) but that she appears alive when they find her?
Her corpse in fact being inhabited by a colony of rot grubs or worms of kyuss. Being a colony it has a higher effective intelligence.
Once they find her the resistance of the monsters/building lessens towards the exit but pushes just as hard from behind and from the sides. Thus the house appears to be "trying" to stop her escape. Then the party gets some clue as to her true self right before the front door. (A worm falls out of her hair, bulging movement under her skin/clothing, hairline fracture in her dried out skin, etc.) Thus they have a chance to realize the awful truth.
Oh and if you need to include some sort of point pull a CoC. Have her desperately clutching a book to her chest when they find her. Let her claim it is the dead court mages research book, where he had found a cure just alittle to late. (Or any thing else really. "My journal" or "I don't know they said guard it with my life, that is before they pushed me into the safe room. Oh god their cries of agony. And then those sounds. It was terrible" *sob*.)
Finally you could have the book say something, be gibberish, have more conciquences (good or bad) or even just appear to be gibberish. Remember tongues and other spells only help if it is in another language not if it is (also) in code.
Thus you get the expected, unexpected and terrible.
Bering Part 3 or It looks so pretty...and, umm, kind of like Ravenloft
I've finished the map more or less. I still need to add furniture but experience has taught me to do the furniture around the same time that I write the descriptions for the rooms. Otherwise I don't get the rooms looking like what I'm envisioning. Also furniture is really, for me, place holders that are supposed to make sense with the description. Its meant to show me where the piano or whatever is on the grid just in case it comes to a fight in this room. I can't draw really good furniture. One we are getting down to this kind of detail we are beyond my talents. I can make furniture that roughly approximates what its supposed to represent and that has to suffice. So a piano is a funny box shape with legs thats a chestnut colour.
I describe most of what I did in the last part. I don't really stray far from the plan. I line the two maps up on a separate layer and have them invisible most of the time. just bringing them up when I need to see how the architecture was laid out.
Sticking the two buildings together worked 90% as advertised. I realized afterward that the amount of space one needs to leave between two different levels depends on the amount of 'real estate' each level takes. However, because I did Foxglove Manor in its entirety, before doing the 'Vampire Keep'. lined up beside it, I slightly messed this up. Foxglove Manor is not really very wide while the 'Vampire Keep', due to outlying towers, is. I managed to fudge things and essentially change the map around to make it work. Mainly just filling some attached passageways on the lower level of the 'Vampire Keep' so that they would not interfere with the stuff on the second level.
In the end I actually kind of like that effect as now its necessary to go to the 2nd floor in this part of the map in order to get to the outlying towers and from here the easiest route to the basement from this part of the building. I kind of like the idea of making the PCs go up in order to go down.
This, however, highlights something of a problem with the map. I know that the ultimate objective of the PCs is down in the Catacombs below the basement but Foxglove Manor is a pretty standard straight up and down building. I'm concerned that the PCs will just walk in the front door and take the stairs to the basement. I thought of hiding the stairs down using a secret door but I think there is a good chance they'll take 20 on the room. If they do they'll find the secret door and will then almost certainly choose to explore it first - its a secret after all.
Better I think to make going down an obvious option no better or worse then any other but then try and entice them to start their exploration off in the wrong direction. I can probably get them to head upstairs with some kind of noises hence I'll have to remember to make sure that they hear something interesting coming from the upstairs when they first show up. I might also stick some kind of a light on the top tower. My guess is PCs are like insects - their drawn to the light.
I did a few changes from the original maps I was using. Foxglove Manor hooks to the Vampire keep at the third level via a steep arched stairway. One travels up to the 4th level at the apex of the arch and then heads down the stairs back to the third level. I like the imagery here and I have left it open so that I can have heavy snow and high winds claw at players while crossing.
The Vampire Keep has a couple of towers that rise moderately high and I raise two of them by another level. The largest tower in the combined building now climbs 5 stories up.
In part I do this becuase I think its cool and I like towers, in part becuase I'm probably unconsciously paying tribute to Ravenloft (which had a lot of towers that really clawed at the sky above) and finally I'm doing this to celebrate the fact that I finally figured out how to do good circles. I've been doing bad freehand versions or making rooms that are supposed to be circles into octagons. Here I finally figure out that if I use the ink tool and make an ellipse it works out perfectly. I figured this out becuase I new how big these round towers where from my source material and once I put the extremes in it was just a matter of playing with the circle feature of the ink tool until I got something that was circler and would hit all these extremes, well and then there was the smacking myself in the forehead for not figuring out the obvious a long time ago.
Finally here are a couple of trivia facts for those familiar with Foxglove Manor.
The stairway that starts off south of B3 and rises to B10 does not line up perfectly. Though the fact that the stairs end one space further west on the upper floor can be explained away as a long staircase. But its not how staircases on the rest of the map are portrayed. Anyway don't use this stair as your 'key' space if your PCs are trying to line up their maps.
At first glance the attic level of Foxglove Manor should rest in the center of the building. The concave part of the attic implies that it lines up with similar rooms below on the first and second floor.
Thats not actually how it lines up. The 'L' stairway at B16 can't move. Thats the nature of an 'L' shaped staircase. We can't explain its eccentricities away as one could with the stair case at B10.
So this staircase is 'pulling' the entire attic one space north of centre. Basically follow the bottom of the stair case east to the curved room overlooking the ocean and you will see that on the 2nd floor its 1 space north of the curved room while in the attic level it lines up with the top of the curve. So if your looking at the building from the ocean you don't get the curves lines up symmetrically - the curve at the to starts and ends 5' north of the others. Its not totally busted or anything but its certainly eccentric.
Being Part 4 or I think I need to see a shrink as I'm disturbingly good at thinking up gruesome fates for children.
I've finally gotten back to summing up how this went. When I last did an update on this I was just finishing off the maps. While at the time I had a lot of prep time due to Christmas approaching it turned out the fact that my players would be to busy to play applied to me as well and I had a hellish time finding time to sit down and work on this thing.
I also found it difficult to get the ball rolling in terms of writing this. I mentioned above that I was going to do an outline of what Silistine Manor was like before it became the scene of a horror adventure. In practice, however, I find that writing the details of the normal day to day lives of the castle inhabitants is at least as difficult as starting with the horror premise and then working backward to figure who might have been effected by whatever horror lurks in this part of the manor. Maybe more importantly its much more fun to detail the horrific events then it is to write out mundane info about daily life in a manor and that is important because it is a lot easier to actually sit down and write if you like what your writing about. Hence I abandon the angle of detailing who was here before the horror story took place. The closest I get to this is to work out what each room was for before writing the rest of the adventure. This helps with deciding what might have happened in this room and who might have been effected.
What I eventually find that does motivate me to write this material is thinking up disturbing scenes and then incorporating them into the adventure. This turns into a lot of fun as I come up with various ideas I think are cool. Hence to entice my players to go upstairs instead of heading straight into the catacombs (and toward the adventures climax) I stick a minor noble in the second floor guest room. She's been transformed into a Living Skeleton from the Book of Vile Darkness but all she does is cry over here 'hurt' baby. The baby is now just a tiny dead corpse but she's been driven insane – does not realize that she is no longer a living noble but undead. Does not recognize that her baby is dead and believes its just hurt in some undefinable manner. She cries a lot which the PCs will hear and probably investigate. Once they show up she'll beg them to heal her baby (which they can't do – its dead) by shoving its corpse at them and saying “Please sir cleric, won't you help me? My baby is hurt. Please won't you heal him?� She'll follow them around after this – making comments like “Why won't anyone help me?� etc. to make the players uncomfortable.
Thinking up horror encounters is kind of gruesome but lots of fun. I stick a Crimson Death in the playroom to suck all the little tykes dry. I have some female servants turn into Spectres, their bodies horribly mutilated to reflect how they died (face smashed in, throat slit etc.) and have them vainly trying to clean up the mess in their room – a mess that was caused by their own demise (blood on the bedspreads etc.).
Occasionally I try and lighten the mood – I have a basket with undead skeletal kittens in it. When the PCs enter the room the kittens pop their heads out of the basket and come teetering toward the PCs making mewling noises. A thread from the blanket in the basket gets caught on the rib bone of one of the kittens and it drags the thread behind it – the other undead kittens notice and begin batting at the thread.
I try and make the place seem a little more active through a couple of means. One is that I have encounters that cause noises and events to take place in other parts of the complex. If the PCs enter room X then a vase is knocked down the stairs several rooms behind them and shatters. That sort of thing. The goal is to make the place seem haunted and to have it so that there are mysterious things happening around the PCs that they don't directly cause.
One neat idea I find in Hero's of Horror (or possibly this is from Liber Mortis) is the idea of giving the players haunted traits while their here. One player will lose her shadow, another can't say the name of his Goddess while here. A third keeps finding dead mice in his belongings.
I also add this sort of thing to a few parts of the complex. So there is a drawing room with paintings – if the PCs search it they find that one of the portraits is of one of the players.
Mostly I have a lot of fun with this but I'm still surprised at how long it takes and I definitely find that sometimes I sit down to write and just can't think of anything cool and horrific to add. At which point I abandon writing anything for a few hours. An interesting aspect of this that I notice is that the music I'm listening to while writing has a big impact. Dark moody music makes for dark moody encounters – fast upbeat music is only good for doing the monsters stat blocks etc.
Strange - the thread has not registered my most recent post and even stranger I suddenly have the ability to edit a post I did 3 months ago.
EDIT:
Strange - this post has now shown up but not the one I originally did. I guess I'll post my update again.
Being Part 4 or I think I need to see a shrink as I'm disturbingly good at thinking up gruesome fates for children.
I've finally gotten back to summing up how this went. When I last did an update on this I was just finishing off the maps. While at the time I had a lot of prep time due to Christmas approaching it turned out the fact that my players would be to busy to play applied to me as well and I had a hellish time finding time to sit down and work on this thing.
I also found it difficult to get the ball rolling in terms of writing this. I mentioned above that I was going to do an outline of what Silistine Manor was like before it became the scene of a horror adventure. In practice, however, I find that writing the details of the normal day to day lives of the castle inhabitants is at least as difficult as starting with the horror premise and then working backward to figure who might have been effected by whatever horror lurks in this part of the manor. Maybe more importantly its much more fun to detail the horrific events then it is to write out mundane info about daily life in a manor and that is important because it is a lot easier to actually sit down and write if you like what your writing about. Hence I abandon the angle of detailing who was here before the horror story took place. The closest I get to this is to work out what each room was for before writing the rest of the adventure. This helps with deciding what might have happened in this room and who might have been effected.
What I eventually find that does motivate me to write this material is thinking up disturbing scenes and then incorporating them into the adventure. This turns into a lot of fun as I come up with various ideas I think are cool. Hence to entice my players to go upstairs instead of heading straight into the catacombs (and toward the adventures climax) I stick a minor noble in the second floor guest room. She's been transformed into a Living Skeleton from the Book of Vile Darkness but all she does is cry over here 'hurt' baby. The baby is now just a tiny dead corpse but she's been driven insane – does not realize that she is no longer a living noble but undead. Does not recognize that her baby is dead and believes its just hurt in some undefinable manner. She cries a lot which the PCs will hear and probably investigate. Once they show up she'll beg them to heal her baby (which they can't do – its dead) by shoving its corpse at them and saying “Please sir cleric, won't you help me? My baby is hurt. Please won't you heal him?� She'll follow them around after this – making comments like “Why won't anyone help me?� etc. to make the players uncomfortable.
Thinking up horror encounters is kind of gruesome but lots of fun. I stick a Crimson Death in the playroom to suck all the little tykes dry. I have some female servants turn into Spectres, their bodies horribly mutilated to reflect how they died (face smashed in, throat slit etc.) and have them vainly trying to clean up the mess in their room – a mess that was caused by their own demise (blood on the bedspreads etc.).
Occasionally I try and lighten the mood – I have a basket with undead skeletal kittens in it. When the PCs enter the room the kittens pop their heads out of the basket and come teetering toward the PCs making mewling noises. A thread from the blanket in the basket gets caught on the rib bone of one of the kittens and it drags the thread behind it – the other undead kittens notice and begin batting at the thread.
I try and make the place seem a little more active through a couple of means. One is that I have encounters that cause noises and events to take place in other parts of the complex. If the PCs enter room X then a vase is knocked down the stairs several rooms behind them and shatters. That sort of thing. The goal is to make the place seem haunted and to have it so that there are mysterious things happening around the PCs that they don't directly cause.
One neat idea I find in Hero's of Horror (or possibly this is from Liber Mortis) is the idea of giving the players haunted traits while their here. One player will lose her shadow, another can't say the name of his Goddess while here. A third keeps finding dead mice in his belongings.
I also add this sort of thing to a few parts of the complex. So there is a drawing room with paintings – if the PCs search it they find that one of the portraits is of one of the players.
Mostly I have a lot of fun with this but I'm still surprised at how long it takes and I definitely find that sometimes I sit down to write and just can't think of anything cool and horrific to add. At which point I abandon writing anything for a few hours. An interesting aspect of this that I notice is that the music I'm listening to while writing has a big impact. Dark moody music makes for dark moody encounters – fast upbeat music is only good for doing the monsters stat blocks etc.
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One thing I can think of to increase tension during a horror adventure is to randomly have the players perform spot or listen checks. Not all the time, but just every now and then, when its unimportant.
Another is that when doing this, pick only two or three out of the group to give the spot checks to. Do not explain why these players get to attempt the spot check as opposed to the others.
Half the time you have them do this, or if any of them have a particularly high roll, tell them that they caught a glimpse of something in the corner of their eye, or heard a faint sound.
It can keep them on their toes. Makes them keep thinking "Something's gonna jump out at me, something's gonna jump out at me..." as they play.
If you want the PCs to be really scared, throw a pit fiend (or any really BBEG) at them as soon as they walk in the door. after one or two rounds of combat, the pit fiend's burning aura lights the floor on fire and makes it fall through, giving the party the chance to run. (anything that renders it unable to follow will do.) Knowing that there's a CR 20 stalking them will have the party jumping at every shadow and pointless listen check.
"you see a red glow from around the corner and a dark bat-winged shadow looms in front of it."
"AAAAH!!! Oh god run!!!!!!! Its back again!!"
*DM chuckles at how they just ran from a magmin and imp.*
One thing I can think of to increase tension during a horror adventure is to randomly have the players perform spot or listen checks. Not all the time, but just every now and then, when its unimportant.
The idea of having events triggered so that players enter room X and a vase in room Y falls down the main staircase to shatter at its foot is sort of meant to do this sort of thing. Essentially get them jumpy.
Another is that when doing this, pick only two or three out of the group to give the spot checks to. Do not explain why these players get to attempt the spot check as opposed to the others.Half the time you have them do this, or if any of them have a particularly high roll, tell them that they caught a glimpse of something in the corner of their eye, or heard a faint sound.
It can keep them on their toes. Makes them keep thinking "Something's gonna jump out at me, something's gonna jump out at me..." as they play.
I sort of do this with the haunted traits. Many of the PCs have weird stuff afflicting them such as loosing their shadow or having dead mice keep turning up in their clothes. That said this is more about freaking out the players then making them jumpy.
I find actually making them jumpy is very difficult in 3.5. If I tell them to set up the battle matt they know there is an encounter but the time between me saying 'Boo' and the set up for the fight weakens the impact of this considerably.
If you want the PCs to be really scared, throw a pit fiend (or any really BBEG) at them as soon as they walk in the door. after one or two rounds of combat, the pit fiend's burning aura lights the floor on fire and makes it fall through, giving the party the chance to run. (anything that renders it unable to follow will do.) Knowing that there's a CR 20 stalking them will have the party jumping at every shadow and pointless listen check.
"you see a red glow from around the corner and a dark bat-winged shadow looms in front of it."
"AAAAH!!! Oh god run!!!!!!! Its back again!!"
*DM chuckles at how they just ran from a magmin and imp.*
They'd just leave and not come back - the adventure is obvously beyond their means.
In any case hitting my players with obvously overwhelmingly powerful enemies does not really frighten them so much as put them in total tactical mode. Obviously they need to book and they'll stop and start reviewing the tactical situation in extreme detail to insure that they execute the optimum moves on the battle mat in order to maximize their chance of survival.
If I want chaos I need to hit with an encounter that turns bad partway through. They have to start at 'we are going to kick ass and take names' and transit to' we are so f#&%ed!'. Thats when its most likely that the groups team work cracks and they revert to every man (or woman) for them self. Last time I really pulled this off I managed to kill two thirds of the party - it was great! I hadn't bagged that many PCs in one encounter in years.
Being Part 5 or You Can't Scare Us!
So my players finally enter the adventure. I realize early on that haunted houses work better if your players don't know that they are going into one. In my case they have stocked themselves through the roof with anti-undead equipment. 3.5 is pretty extreme in regards to undead, they are powerful but there is a lot of equipment and spells that work exceptionally well against them. Most annoying from my perspective is the Shirt of Wraith Stalking. This is a powerful magic item against undead as it acts as a hide from undead spell except that its at will (though a standard action to activate) permanent (until they attack) and the item is more powerful then the spell in that it does not allow a save of any kind. Hide from undead is already more powerful them most invisibility effects as it nerfs all undead senses for detecting the players. They don't actually have to be quite or anything while under the effects of the spell. They can talk – jump up and down or anything else and the undead can't detect them. The undead can still detect the effects they have on their environment (notice doors opening etc.). This is still fairly potent and will have a very significant impact on the adventure but its not totally devastating. I recognized that they might use the spell and one player has had this cloak for some time. I did not expect every one of them to be using this but I intentionally threw in a fair number of constructs into this adventure and the biggest baddies mostly have some kind of a counter. The Mummy has permanent true seeing and the Bone Naga will summon Devils using summoning spells and then target PCs that attack the Devils (since that will eliminate their invisibility).
I also manage to fluster the rotten miscreants when they first show up on the scene as they had paid for a wind walk and planned to explore the haunted house in mist form. They must have not read this spell very well as its only when they arrive that they realize that their not impervious mist but simply get DR 10/magic, oh and they can't hit back. So at least I get some satisfaction by throwing a monkey wrench into their plans.
First session is some pretty good gaming. Their invisibility cuts both ways in this case as they by pass a very powerful monster without detecting it (kind of a shambling mound but made out of skeletal bones that forms when it detects living creatures). They have a pretty basic tactic for moving through the adventure – they move up to a doorway and then the Paladin uses detect evil . Sine its impossible for the undead to detect them until they do something like open a door they have all the time they need to see if anything evil is in the room beyond. The place is small enough that there is no real way to foil this. Still they ambush an Abyssal Goul only to have its partner in crime come in from another room. Then – over confident due to invisibility they move to flank the second Abyssal Goul (I'm using Foxglove Manor for half the Haunted Manor so space is tight). The flanking player does not take an action to hide and that triggers the Bone Haunt which gets within a hairs breadth of killing one of the players and is only stopped when one of the player gets sickening lucky with a disruption weapon and I roll a 1 on the Bone Haunts save (it'd have beat the DC 14 Will Save if I had rolled a 2) .
First Session is pretty fun. There are a couple of fights but mostly they are just exploring the manor. Hilarity ensues when the very pretty and vain Sorceress realizes she has lost her shadow. She kind of freaks out and runs around looking for it insisting that the other players help her find it and demanding that they be careful not to step on it - 'there will be hell to pay if you damage my shadow!'
As the other haunted traits become apparent the impact actually gets a lot less. Which is kind of unfortunate and not something I had really foreseen. The players actually get much less concerned when many of them have 'haunted quirks'. When just one player had lost her shadow it was weird and kind of spooky but when lots of players have odd things associated with them its no biggie.
While I have an easy time with giving the place some atmosphere I'm unable to really scare my players. Basically I gross out my, very pregnant, newbie with the undead noble and her dead baby at which point one of my veteran players pretty much laughs at her and phrases the whole premise of being scared in this adventure as being something that only rank novices would let happen to them in a RPG. After that pretty much every player in the group 'rises to the challenge' of working very hard to insure that nothing in this adventure phases them. That pretty much blows the idea of actually scaring them out of the water – if ones players are adamant that they will never let themselves be so immersed that they become frightened they can pretty much insure that they never are scared. I try tricks like trying to get them to engage in 1st person communication (by addressing them and their characters by name and in first person) but they must see through this because they switch to always talking about their characters in 3rd person and they stop referring to their characters by name and start referring to them by class. So instead of Gwinfimbly (the gnome mage) the players refer to him simply as 'The Mage'.
The scene with the Noble and her baby starts off kind of grim but soon degenerates into annoying. The players really just want her to tell them about what is here (she does not really know as she's loopy). They soon become frustrated with her and annoyed at my high pitched renditions of 'Why won't anyone help me?' as she follows them around. I eventually let them talk her into going back to her room just because the fun seems to have worn off and annoyance among the players has become too high. They can't kill her as the Paladin player won't allow it but some of the players really wanted to after 10 minutes of dealing with her.
The session goes surprisingly fast and my players clear out about 40% of the complex in that first session. Essentially quick combats in this case and only a few of them really draws a stark contrast regarding what takes time in playing. I'm actually pretty shocked at how many rooms the PCs can go through in a couple of hours compared to how long it takes if there is any kind of a complex fight. The whole session pretty much reinforces my feeling that combat takes a long time in 3.5 compared to almost any other activity.