Out of all the Ravenloft fiction, there was a short story anthology, most of which weren't scary, except one. The House of One Hundred Windows was the only truly gothic horror story in the entire anthology.
I just wanted to second that: that was an amazingly good and effective story hidden among the others. One of my favorite horror short stories of all time.
A good way to creep characters out is to make some of their tried-and-true powers, abilities, etc. start to malfunction without any explanation.
The paladin's ability to detect evil gives him conflicting reports-- for a moment, that villager seemed to radiate overwhelming evil, but then it stops. A small grove of trees radiates evil so strong that it stuns the paladin, but a search of the area yields nothing.
Mess with the ranger's ability to track or keep her bearings in the woods--
Ranger: I use knowledge (nature) to follow the path... (rolls die)... great! a nat 20 for a 32 total!
DM: You get bewildered after only a few minutes of tracking. Nothing seems familiar. You've lost track of what direction you are facing, and the mountain range that should be to the west isn't where you think it ought to be. The imprints in the soft earth in front of you don't look like tracks of any creature you've ever seen, and may not even be a track at all. Looking behind you, your own tracks don't look recognizable, either.
The cleric casts cure light wounds on an ally and the ally suddenly experiences a burning pain radiating through his body, shrieking "Stop! Stop! What are you doing to me?" as he takes an additional 4 points of damage.
The thing about this kind of horror is that the players don't know what to expect anymore. They don't know if they're up to the challenge of facing a couple of orcs at this point, because they don't know what's going to malfunction next. Also, they don't know the source of the problems. Is it the environment? Is it an evil being thwarting them? Are they going mad? Have they been cursed?
Anyway, just kick a few of their old-faithful spells or abilities out from under them, and the self-confidence seeps out of them pretty quickly.
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I've run a number of games with the spooky in them, and am pleased to say that I've given players the occasional nightmare based on my games. Some things I've noticed in my years that worked very well:
The Innocent As has been mentioned, creepy little kids are a bit of a cliche at this point, but they've reached that stage because they work. One of the simultaneously most beloved and feared NPCs of my long running Eberron detective game was Annika, a little girl whom the Freelance Police rescued from her hag mother's ritual to turn her into a hag. From that point on, Annika was still a human girl, but she thought... haggishly. She was calm and ruthless when they expected her to be scared and innocent, and were far more freaked out by her than by the hag. They knew how to fight the hag, for one thing.
Another encounter that blends this trope with the next one were the Stuffies. The PCs were in a haunted house in the far reaches of Acheron (hooray for Planescape!) and triggered a pit trap, falling into a child's bedroom filled with stuffed animals. Which animated with jerky movements and began to tear into the PCs with vigor. Upon killing the swarm, the characters cut open the stuffed animals to find that each one was filled with the skeleton of a rat, or a cat, or similar tiny beast.
The Unexpected Those Stuffies? That was a shadow rat swarm from ToH 3. The PCs never found that out. Reskinning an existing monster, or just putting your own flavorful spin on it, can easily be enough to change something from ho-hum to fear-inducing. Take for example the splinterwaif, from Dragon Magazine and MMIII. I've used them in a number of times, and the only time they met with any reaction other than "oh, it's an evil fey. Let's kill it" was when the PCs had heard the story from a panicked child about the Crazy Thorn Man, who hides in the alleyways and turns bad children into thorn bushes before eating them. And they had laughed it off as some crazy kid and moved on. And then this being of legend was upon them.
Also related to this trope is when something that should be a threat isn't. The climax of that haunted house was finding its previous owner, a tiefling whose attempt to use the McGuffin artifact ended up turning him into an angel of decay (from Libris Mortis). So I describe, hanging from the ceiling, a skeletal creature that looks stretched beyond its natural proportions, ragged wings hanging from it, its body weeping liquid corruption that collects in a pool created by centuries of erosion. And instead of attacking, or threatening them, it calmly asks them what year it is and thanks them when they kill it. Much more worrisome than a common fight.
The Relentless If a monster keeps attacking beyond all reason, it gets scary very quickly. Two sub-sets of this one include when something is so willing to kill that it ignores its own impending death or a foe that prefers ambush and hit and run tactics, returning time and time again to harry and weaken the party. The best example of the former I can think of was the peryton in the Dungeon adventure "Tammeraut's Fate". After it ate one of the PCs, the rest were too terrified to set foot outside, for fear of it descending on them. But the PCs were smart, and had a plan. They lured the great beast inside, tricking it into charging at them through a room covered in green slime. The looks on their faces as I described the thing bashing through doors to get to them, even as its flesh was being dissolved to the bone, are ones I will always savor.
For the latter type, the hit-and-run monster, my favorite example was Rawhead and Bloody Bones. Same Planescape game mentioned earlier, that boogeyman had been summoned to kill the PCs, and enjoyed playing games with them. Creeping through windows at night to kill only one of them as a warning to others. Hiding on their roof in order to grab one PC and bounce him into the elaborate traps they had set, that he had easily avoided. Once they actually cornered Rawhead and Bloody Bones, he went down pretty fast. But the terror he'd inflicted on them up to that point gave even that seemingly anticlimactic fight a sense of catharsis.
Use New Monsters - Seasoned players tend to recognize the traditional tropes used in horror settings, so change them up.
This. The best way to put a mood of suspense and fear into the characters is to make the players sweat :). Use the monster stats right out of the book, but completely change around the physical description. Don't give them the ability to act on any kind of metagame information. Make them work hard to discover any and kind of vulnerability; use IC rumors and half-truths so they can never be quite sure that the tactics they chose will actually work when they confront the monster.
The main thing that separates 'standard' adventures from 'horror' adventures is one thing: powerlessness. Knowledge, in D&D as well as anywhere else, is power. Take away as much knowledge as you can without making the game unfair, and your players will feel as their characters are 'supposed' to.
The Innocent
Ooofda. We had a real problem with that here for a while. There was a span early on in the PF Modules line where it seemed like every other module had a picture of a 10-year-old trussed up or covered in blood or something else unseemly. Once: okay. Twice: Um... again? Three times: someone's house is getting marked with a little blue box. This isn't so much a problem for home game, but when it behooves a publisher to be able to say they're a "Family Game Company (that only occasionally illustrates naked, obese, incestuous, necrophiliac ogres and tumor-blind rodents)" one shys away from over-imperiling children. So there's that concern on our front.
On the home game side of things, I'm not saying it doesn't work, but I wonder if this is a cheap shot. I mean, the equation seems to go as follows: Vampire encounter = questionably scary. Vampire encounter + shrieking baby = totally scary. In such a case is it the creature and the situation that makes the encounter scary, or is it just that it touches on some primal, mammal imperative to protect the young? And does it even matter I guess? Can you have a cheap shot when it comes to horror. When Dracula throws his brides off Harker, tossing them instead a shrieking bag of baby, it makes for one of most unsettling scenes of the novel. Though honestly, what drove this home even farther for me was a following scene typically absent from film adaptation, where the child's harried mother comes shrieking into the courtyard of Castle Dracula, demanding her child's return, only to be torn apart by the vampire's wolf pack. That, to me, makes the villain even more terrifying. Sure, feeding a baby to monsters shows that he's heartless, but the latter proves that he's both heartless and powerful.
I'm not trying to prove or disprove anything here really, rather just trying to track the source of things.
I wonder if it's the innocent factor of this that sets off folks' creepy meter, or if its just the act of slaying. To be totally crass, it's not like it's hard to hurt a child (I'm not advocating trying: don't hurt babies. Or anyone else.). So what makes that creepier than the wolfman running down the shrieking virgin in the woods? Or for that matter, the flesh golem from ripping apart an entire mob of his would-be hunters? It seems like seeing a creature capably dispatch an armed knight makes him appear like more of a threat then it would be seeing him dispatch the mightiest of kindergartners. Though, I suppose there is the factor in there where you simply have more sympathy for the non-combatant than the soldier - one's just there, the other has willingly ventured into danger.
In my mind this question is kind of turning into what makes an innocent victim. Discounting the knight in armor and other career warriors and adventures, you've got the kidnapped kid standing out as perfect fantasy victim numero uno. No one wants to see a child harmed, he's got bawling parents crying of his return, he's got the young age all the potential for life and its possibilities bit going, he's probably also working the cute kid angle. That's a pretty strong resume for victimhood. But what about another classic: the kidnapped royal scion. She's got the looks, typically the innocent virgin bit, the love of a nation or at least very influential family, and probably a better reward spurring her rescuers onward. Again, pretty strong resume here, but I don't know if her untimely death feels as much like a tragedy. And to throw one more quick stereotype on here, what about, say, and innocent oldster. For some reason, save the 90-year-old from the dragon doesn't sound like the dashing princes are going to be lining up for this quest - which is likely an unfortunate social comment and another good reason to avoid having birthdays.
Okay. I've got to cut this off as I'm SUPPOSED to be here in the office at 9:00 on a Sunday to do work work and not to wax pseudo-philosophical on the virtues of victimhood in horror gaming.
In short, though. I don't like the idea of having children serve as a special ingredient in horror stories that instantly turns bland into terrifying. I know that's not what Demiurge was even suggesting, but it's the route my thinking has come around to. Like any horror element, using this rarely would work well, and despite my general distaste for the idea, there's something about the childish victim that, for better or worse, does seem like it strikes a cord with an audience...
I wonder if it's the act of watching that does it. The scene with Harker and the brides was in part unsettling because the Englishman was paralyzed, having to watch the whole thing play out. In Interview with the Vampire one of the most chilling parts of the story is the play at Théâtre des Vampires, where vampires feast upon screaming victims in a live snuff-performance the audience convinces themselves into believing is all a show. Harker's experience is teamed with his own helplessness, making it scary. The experience in the theater comes from being the only one in a crowd who knows there's an atrocity playing out and being essentially powerless to stop it - even if Louis wanted to. There's something here too.
Okay okay okay, really this time. I've gotta run. But I'd love to hear more on what victims GMs have found especially resonant in their games - especially those who weren't still in elementary school and who wouldn't fit in with Belle and Ariel in a singalong.
I'll come back and hit on some of these other topics when I have another week to kill. :P
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<Wesley's Post>
I think it all depends on your definition of Horror. If it's the physical harm to an innocent that is horrifying - which it certainly is, then this is one take. If on the other hand we define Horror in gaming by an overall "not rightness" about something then that's another.
Personally the first horror is a visceral revulsion horror of an innocent or weakened person being victim of a sadistic creature. To me this invokes feelings of sickness and/or great anger. The sickness that we feel comes partly from our horror that our own suppressed base urges are inflamed by it kind of like by a very sick pornography. The fact that these urges are inflamed at all in us causes us horror because we all have destructive feelings and preying on the weak is a kind of sick power play that we do not want to admit to ourselves. The anger comes from the fact that we are faced with it in all its foul glory and what we do not like to admit is that we are all of us capable of terrible evils, when instead we like to think of ourselves as nice chaps or chapesses. I watched the "Hills have Eyes" movie and had to turn it off, not so much because of the gore, but because I couldn't stomach the drawn out rape scene. It was gratuitous and made me want to yak. I turned it off. I was also horrified by the number of people who'd told me it was a *great* film! It spoke a lot about certain people.
Now I am not a prude, I have been a first aider for many years and I've seen a lot of things IRL that many wouldn't wish to encounter, Severed body parts, blood, corpses and the like. I've also seen car wrecks where people's brains are hanging out of their skulls. Horrified I was certainly, but not sick. When your job is to try to save lives, you can't allow yourself to faint at the mere sight of blood. So why was I so disgusted by the film. I think because it gratuitously used common human revulsion to entertain. The violence was the film, it was not in context and imagination is quite capable of filling in gaps. It was violence for the sake of violence. A HP Lovecraft story "The Book in the House" illustrates this kind of horror, but HPL being the master writer himself didn't need to go into graphic details. He gave you just enough to be horrified, but not too much to be disgusted.
Then there is the second type of Horror which Lovecraft believed and I agree with: "The greatest fear is the fear of the unknown". Here normal situations are changed, things become tense when little things you barely notice start building upon themselves until eventually you are forced to accept that something is very wrong. But you have clues but no real idea. The tension builds and so does the horror (and that horror needs to be transmitted to the players) for PCs to really act with verisimilitude. Then you throw in the red herring conclusions where everyone breathes a sigh of relief believing they have now figured everything out. Only really they haven't. The conclusion then hits when the worse they thought a situation was in their minds was far far worse, and is moving inevitably toward them. Then PCs are wondering whether they flee or stand firm.
Its difficult in games like PF because there are no mechanics built in that truly frighten PCs (except spells and stuff) but that is illusory and unreal in the minds of the players and therefore is viewed with inconvenience rather than horror. This second kind of Horror relies on good storytelling and excellent timing by the GM. The trick is to reveal little pieces but not enough. Once again it's difficult in PF because players have encountered numerous monsters before and are not common people, so they are grizzled and inured to those things that would make the average peasant run screaming in terror.
PF and all incarnations of the great game have never been geared towards horror. That was more built into Chaosium's CoC and other mystery RPG games.
The first kind of Horror I will not entertain in my games, and PCs who engage in torture and sadism towards innocents in my game would end up rolling new characters because the offending PC would be tracked down and captured by higher level law men who would arrest, try and put to death the offender. This doesn't happen in my games because I prefer to discourage evil-aligned PCs in my games, and my players prefer it that way too.
I've run one effective horror scenario in my time as a DM - I wouldn't aim for a whole campaign, but the occasional scenario is good for fun. I was inspired by some HP Lovecraft, and the party found themselves in an out of the way town that was being plagued by an encroaching horror. There were lots of little things - nothing too terribly frightening, but also nothing that was just normal. I really wigged out one of the PCs when some strangely froglike thing climbed along the window outside the inn he was staying at, looked in through the window, and had his face. It crawled away and did nothing, and the party had no idea what it was (truthfully, neither did I), but it was just so very odd that it worked.
For me, though, children are better used to horrific effect when they're not the victims, but the monsters. The horrible zombie baby things from the first Silent Hill game, as well as child vampires and the like, are very disconcerting because it creates conflict between our desire to kill a monster and to protect children, and it leads to just uncomfortable encounters. Best to avoid heavy use, of course, but it's still an alternative to the "werewolf eats the child" scene that may or may not be more common.
<Wesley's Post>
No fair! You can always say that! :P
To clarify, the purpose of this thread is largely to discuss elements of what RPGs typically term - right or wrong - gothic horror. In truth, though, "suspense" might be a better term.
A lot of what you're talking about seems to be on the side of witnessing physical gore. Encountering this bodily or on film can totally be shocking, but draws its effectiveness from visuals, not description. I've seen folks throw up in a theater, but never saw anyone vomit at the library (because of a book). To that same end, I can't imagine a mid-game description of gore being so utterly revolting as to leave an impression on players. I'm not saying that it can't be done by a storyteller - see Clive Barker - but I don't believe RPGs give you room for the same buildup and details you'd need to make out and out gore unnerving. Can you make something gross? Sure. But making gore an effective part of your horror narrative and not just over detailing something disgusting to the point where your group starts chuckling or making gross-out noises, I'm not convinced its possible or useful.
There's also a distinction here in much the same way I would distinguish Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Nightmare on Elm Street from Alien or The Ring. In one you've got a shocking, in your face, unrelenting force, in the other the source of terror is more evasive, building, and might come from anywhere. There's not a building dread with Jason. There is with the cenobites. While I think you can do both in the medium of an RPG, I think it's more difficult to connect the actual player (not the character) with the fear of death by an unrelenting force. While you might not want your PC to die, you're rarely scared as a player. A building dread, though, I find is more difficult to pull off but resonates more, as the players feel it just as their characters would. Were you to run Night of the Living Dead as an RPG adventure, you'd have to be a pretty sharp storyteller to keep the PCs afraid of zombies - especially when the game itself and their characters' powers predispose them to hacking their way through such foes. Running a growing mystery, like Prince of Darkness, where you see traces of your foe and have evidence of its power building on you long before it ever takes shape, both presents a greater challenge for the GM, but I also think a greater payoff in terms of player reaction.
I really like to play up the weird in horror games. Gore and baby-eating is all well and good, but I find that making reference to strange bits of real-world, non-horror elements in casual, unexplained ways can easily put the players in an unsettling mindset. I find that the things that creep me out most in real life are people's individual, and often benign, eccentricities, such as things they might collect, prominently display, or a nervous habit. Something that draws my attention away from the mundane and makes me question what strange things the subject might not make so obvious.
I think that even in a loud, distracting convention environment, players can be led to fear just about anything. Hitchcock and Lovecraft mastered the art of leaving the true horror to the imagination of the viewer/reader. What you choose not to show can be more terrifying than what you do. In a game in which everything is imagined in the players' heads, it's even easier to let them scare themselves by providing the opportunity for them to insert their own deep-seated phobias or paranoias into the story you're crafting.
Lovecraft's name gets bandied about a lot in discussions of horror RPGs, which makes sense considering one of the most popular games around is titled after one of his short stories. But know what I don't see a lot in Lovecraft's work? Swords.
That's a major distinction here. In Pathfinder, your reaction to seeing a tentacled horror isn't to let your mind join with the bleak, black gulfs of universal madness - it's to decide whether you want to charge or move around to set up a flank for the rogue. Pathfinder, like the games before it, is a storytelling game attached to a tactic strategy game (where Call of Cthulhu is a straight storytelling game). But is that to say you simply CAN'T do horror in Pathfinder? Of course not. But with all the abilities and firepower ever character gets its way more difficult to make them afraid (way more, then in CoC, where' even the hardest core characters are little tougher or more adept than those sitting around the table playing them).
Thus, while I definitely think there's something to be learned from the storytelling of H.P. Lovecraft and films like Hitchcock's, stories like The Birds get WAY less frightening when you've got blade barrier (and way messier).
Honestly I think the stories of Howard offer a far more apt analog to the types of horror you might encounter in a Pathfinder game. When Conan runs, the reader has NO DOUBT that s#** is bad, or when his Texan ranch hand encounters a vampire he's way more likely to throw a punch then run gibbering into the night. Short of getting real grim with your adventures and dicing through characters to prove your villains' ferocity, this is why I think the setup is so important, the gradual build that transforms the typical, knee-jerk call to CHARGE! into a choice between running and fighting that seriously needs to be considered.
Only once the PCs start questioning their invincibility can you have a legitimately moody game.
Yeah, real fear is hard to do without making the players feel it too. How many times is horror reduced to cliches and a will save against fear? I think ultimately, you're right that PCs will kill whatever is causing the horror, but making them question what they should and shouldn't attack from moment one by setting up weird and offputting situations that can be interpreted a number of ways makes it harder to auto-roll initiative whenever they see or hear something move.
Additionally, low level horror and high level horror should draw on different inspiration. I think Lovecraftian cosmic horror is the only way to challenge someone who wields their own eldritch powers of magic and might, but a low level party is understandably freaked out by a town covered in still, staring birds who threaten to swarm them and destroy civilization as they know it.
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The Freeport Trilogy started out with a fun nod to the Shadow Out of Time, but it affected an NPC, instead of a PC. (In my game, Lucius' possessor came from the distant past, and was a Valossan diviner, seeking a way to restore his people's civilization, which he had already foreseen the fall of.)
Dreams that come true, omens and portents, or even flashbacks of horrors past, can be fun to play around with.
One of my Freeport games, which ended up tied into several NPCs from Denizens of Freeport and the modules (Lexi, Captain Scarbelly and Bill Sangapulatele), started with a dream (I rolled randomly, it happened to the Druid);
In the dream, you are in a classroom with a bunch of other students. Some are talking in accented voices about coming from a far-away land and how their own countrymen seem strange to them now, as if they have changed so much that they can never come back. You end up talking with one girl who is playing some word game with another girl that also involves the name of a country she can’t seem to figure out. The teacher is a tall woman with long black hair, who doesn’t seem to do any teaching so much as lean back and ignore you while various discussions take forth, rarely interjecting some comment or correction, although she seems a bit bored, and even dismissive at times.
At the end of class, you are looking a picture that someone has made with chalk in one of the desks, of a young boy with hair forward in a mop over his eyes and a white mask covering his lower face, along with another girl, a half-elf with amber colored eyes, who is wondering who drew that, since it’s been there forever. You leave class together, only instead of a hallway, you are in a damp tunnel, leading up to the sunlight. The girl you are with walks out into the sunlight, but you stay behind.
The next session, the Druid ran into an adult half-elven women with amber eyes (Lexi), who seemed to recognize him. But she said he couldn't be the boy she remembered, because he died forty years ago, long before he was born... Her recollections of the 'school' in the dream led them to a slavery ring, which had just restarted, after being shut down for decades, in the place where Lexi (and the boy in the dream) had been kept.
While not 'horror' in the sense of a slasher movie (although it got that way when the party caught up with Captain Scarbelly, the new head of the slavers, and cut their way through his entire orcish crew!), it was meant to create a sort of creepy ambience, with the dream-imagery and the suggestion of a haunting (even if no ghost appeared in the adventure). The presence of cannibal cultists, file-toothed, in honor of their shark-goddess, only added to the fun (as the Fighter's mentor, Bill Sangalapulatele, was a member of that culture, with teeth filed and everything, even if he wasn't a cannibal and had no part of the slave trade, making him a red herring at first, and then a source of valuable information on those cultists after apologies were made).
I preferred that sort of 'horror,' events past leaving 'stains' being that could influence people in the future (both in the case of Lucius' possession by a long-dead arcanist and the Druid PC's dreams of an event that happened decades ago, and was starting up again).
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<Wesley's Post>No fair! You can always say that! :P
To clarify, the purpose of this thread is largely to discuss elements of what RPGs typically term - right or wrong - gothic horror. In truth, though, "suspense" might be a better term.
A lot of what you're talking about seems to be on the side of witnessing physical gore. Encountering this bodily or on film can totally be shocking, but draws its effectiveness from visuals, not description. I've seen folks throw up in a theater, but never saw anyone vomit at the library (because of a book). To that same end, I can't imagine a mid-game description of gore being so utterly revolting as to leave an impression on players. I'm not saying that it can't be done by a storyteller - see Clive Barker - but I don't believe RPGs give you room for the same buildup and details you'd need to make out and out gore unnerving. Can you make something gross? Sure. But making gore an effective part of your horror narrative and not just over detailing something disgusting to the point where your group starts chuckling or making gross-out noises, I'm not convinced its possible or useful.
There's also a distinction here in much the same way I would distinguish Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Nightmare on Elm Street from Alien or The Ring. In one you've got a shocking, in your face, unrelenting force, in the other the source of terror is more evasive, building, and might come from anywhere. There's not a building dread with Jason. There is with the cenobites. While I think you can do both in the medium of an RPG, I think it's more difficult to connect the actual player (not the character) with the fear of death by an unrelenting force. While you might not want your PC to die, you're rarely scared as a player. A building dread, though, I find is more difficult to pull off but resonates more, as the players feel it just as their characters would. Were you to run Night of the Living Dead as an RPG adventure,...
Wesley. I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here, because the essence of your post is not actually contradicting any of what I just said. I went into detail about building dread, and being a good story teller provides the perfect situation to engage players, which will in turn be transmitted to their PCs. But to produce satisfying horror requires a DM who knows the tricks. I think for the most part though Slasher movies and many horror movies make the mistake of using my first example to get a visceral reaction from its audience by indulging sado-masochistic themes gratuitously in the name of horror. That is not my understanding of Horror, and to be quite honest any party of adventurers in the Fantasy setting are going to used to seeing a lot of gorey things. But then again so do soldiers, forensic scientists, police officers and medics IRL. But all these things are quantifiable in the psche. If its murder,however ghastly, there is someone out there who is a danger to the public and needs to be caught. If its a bad car accident then we know that vehicles travelling at velocity can easily destroy people if it crashes into something hard. Sure the people who have to deal with these things require an iron stomach, but most of them gain it after a time by being exposed to it.
If your complaining that I hinted PF or 1-3.5 D&D doesn't provide the mechanics in game for horror, and you think it does then fine, but even then game mechanics alone are not going to be enough. Even in CoC you need to be a darn good storyteller.
Though a player and their PC are separate entities like an actor and his particular role, neither player nor actor feel horrified by the events of the parts their characters play because it doesn't directly affect them. The advantage of the RPG though is that the players themselves don't know what's going to happen at the end whereas the actor often does (unless it's a TV series where the actor only gets the script a few days before each episode, but even then, before he plays his part he knows what the endpoint of the episode will be.)
So the DM with a clever use of plot twists and atmosphere and a good deal of excellent description can make players feel particularly uncomfortable. But I have found this device makes a very successful game and makes the players on tenterhooks for the next session. I know because I've run such games.
My original post to you made the distinction between unacceptable gratuitous violence over violence in context and mystery, intangible threats and strange inexplicable occurrences. It's hard in a fantasy game because of all the magic available and the known existence of other-worldly, ghostly or dangerous monsters commonplace in the setting. Horror can still be achieved but it just requires a lot more work and thought by the GM. I think event based adventures are more suitable to this. BTW The Carnival of Tears Paizo module is certainly a very unnerving horror based adventure. I doubt I'd play it with youngsters but for adults it certainly has a style that one can work with.
So I am at a bit of loss as why you cried "no fair" to my post. Please could you explain to me what I specifically said that resulted in your response.
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One thing I did recently to build tension/dread was to have a hallway lined with doors leading to trapped room, each door had a one word clue to beat the trap and only one pc could enter any given room. When a player chose a room everyone else had to leave, I gave the player the discription of their suroundings and started a timer stating "you estitmate you have 3 minutes to live" and let the sweat begin to pour....
I'm creeped out by the kid thing as much as the next person, but I don't really like to use it that much. The same with "Pretty Woman #6" syndrome. They both have their merits, but so does using non-traditional characters in such roles.
For example, I was running a GURPS Horror game back in the mid-90s that used a psychic college student as the "central character" (and main PC, there were others as well, but everyone was of the understanding that she was special). During the course of the game, more men were victimized than anyone else, leading the players to feel less comfortable while playing in the game environment.
In fantasy, the same thing can be achieved, but it takes a bit more work. Look at Predator 2. Anyone who's seen it will remember seeing the skulls at the end of the movie and thinking "whoa" when that one particular skull is seen. It gives the Predators a bit of sci-fi/horror cred when everyone starts wondering "Is that an Alien/Aliens skull?!" This same sort of cred can be used in horror games. Instead of describing a scene like this:
"You walk into the Necromancer's lair and see several remains and bones lying on the ground. Before you lies a large door that you can faintly hear muttering behind ..."
Allow players to recognize things, especially if they've confronted some big-nasties in the past. Maybe set the same scene up like:
"You step into the Necromancer's lair and see the sorted remains of humanoid creatures strewn about the room. Among them, you notice what appears to be a troll skeleton with it's let leg shattered, and some odd combination of man and spider pinned against the wall like a butterfly in a collector's book. To your right is a large, ornate door decorated with various skulls and black lacquer, which shines an eerie red. You think you hear deep chanting from within ... only you don't recognize the language ..."
This not only sets the scene, but also brings a bit of cred to the main villain and giving it a sense of foreboding.
Another option, instead of using children, is to use toys and childhood fears as a means of terror. Is that a kid coming near us with a knife? No ... it's a doll dressed as a clown. One of the reasons movies like Child's Play does so well is because it takes a harmless, safe toy and makes it into a menacing creature bent on murder (not to mention it has the "creepy doll factor" as well). We've all had that moment as a child that we've heard tapping on the window or a shadow was cast wrong against the wall of our rooms that caused us to start screaming because "something" was there to get us. It's that fear of the unknown, of the creature that might be there that scares us more than the actual troll that people are used to.
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I'm creeped out by the kid thing as much as the next person, but I don't really like to use it that much. The same with "Pretty Woman #6" syndrome. They both have their merits, but so does using non-traditional characters in such roles.
For example, I was running a GURPS Horror game back in the mid-90s that used a psychic college student as the "central character" (and main PC, there were others as well, but everyone was of the understanding that she was special). During the course of the game, more men were victimized than anyone else, leading the players to feel less comfortable while playing in the game environment.
In fantasy, the same thing can be achieved, but it takes a bit more work. Look at Predator 2. Anyone who's seen it will remember seeing the skulls at the end of the movie and thinking "whoa" when that one particular skull is seen. It gives the Predators a bit of sci-fi/horror cred when everyone starts wondering "Is that an Alien/Aliens skull?!" This same sort of cred can be used in horror games. Instead of describing a scene like this:
"You walk into the Necromancer's lair and see several remains and bones lying on the ground. Before you lies a large door that you can faintly hear muttering behind ..."
Allow players to recognize things, especially if they've confronted some big-nasties in the past. Maybe set the same scene up like:
"You step into the Necromancer's lair and see the sorted remains of humanoid creatures strewn about the room. Among them, you notice what appears to be a troll skeleton with it's let leg shattered, and some odd combination of man and spider pinned against the wall like a butterfly in a collector's book. To your right is a large, ornate door decorated with various skulls and black lacquer, which shines an eerie red. You think you hear deep chanting from within ... only you don't recognize the language ..."
This not only sets the scene, but also brings a bit of cred to the main villain and giving it a sense of foreboding.
Another...
Excellent analysis Sketch. Thanks for sharing. It's the description that's always king in Horror. Things out of the ordinary, little things building up. For a horror based campaign, keep rare monsters rare. Have situations that seem one thing but are really another (not talking about illusion magic here). Make things happen at intervals and in stages. Work on player imagination and fears. Without player imagination the PCs are automatons built for fighting BBEGs and that's all it is.
Have a vampire, an intelligent undead creature, whose normal bloodlust has been superceded by fear. Not fear of the PCs but something else, and whatever it says is incoherent, but scattered with clues, none of which don't make a lot of sense but are imperative to the eventual plotline.
One of the biggest shifts in today's writing is that writers have left out scene setting prose for soundbites and dialogue. This is probably a reflection of the age we live in now. A two sentence descriptive paragraph is considered excessive!! But the best horror spinners such as HPL didn't neglect that motif where it was required. Good description puts us there, and not on the sidelines. We feel as the character feels because we can envisage our surroundings and the subtle nuances of the written word can portray a fantastic amount of verisimilitude.
Remember that PCs are the avatars of the players and cannot be completely separated from each other, and any average dungeon crawl becomes formulaic when the GM stops being the storyteller and just plays with the rules. Even monsters have fears (those with intelligence and imagination even more so). Those monsters of low-animal intelligence sense something not right in any situation and can sense by instinct when things are not right. If a large pack of wolves in a dark forest, quietly steal past some low level adventurers and avoid contact with them, one asks the question why they have no interest in them as a potential meal. Why because any with intelligence can see that they are running from something else and have no time to waste eating something they don't feel threatened by. Run from some danger first, eat later - or they may not be eating later at all. Animals have instinct to keep them alive.
But in all this, description is king, allow players to see the panting and wide-eyed fear in their eyes.
Don't make every encounter an attack encounter. Devise encounters that give clues to dangers, but don't reveal your hand. Tension is another thing to use. PCs investigating empty rooms each bearing little clues and yet they haven't encountered anything hostile. But the clues themselves if described well and with tension can be more frightening.
I urge people who have not read it to read the HPL mini-novel At the Mountains of Madness. I won't describe it here because it would spoil the tension. What I will say is that it starts out very mundane and normal, and ends with abject horror. This is arguably one of Howard Philip's greatest works.
What Lovecraft taught me is that description, and good description at that is the most powerful tool open to the GM and for those people who hate playing with floorplans and miniatures is essential.
The other talent required by the GM is that he has the ability to recite well to keep his audience enthralled. Learn to read with passion, listen to books on tapes and the way the reader infuses the story by nuances of his voice. These skills can be learned, and as an ex repertory actor I have a little advantage here. But pointers are here.
Read something out loud slower than you would normally. It's an acting tip. When most people read or recite aloud they tend to rush it. It's a common problem. Slow your speaking to half its speed and it will feel normal to the hearer who, not having heard the description, will be able to digest facts easily and gives time for their brains to conjure up in his/her imagination the things you are saying. Use subtle nuance of speech where required, but don't overact.
Finally make sure that you make players know that you might from time to time put in encounters higher than the CR/APL of the characters (but they need a chance to flee if you do). The players know that they cannot rely on you always matching their strengths against the encounters you give them, and instead they will be more careful in any encounter to assess whether it is survivable. Most of the time it will, but on occasion it will not.
Players who always know their characters will pull through become complacent and stop role playing and think in stats alone. Don't do this, it defeats the purpose in all types of game but especially in Horror settings.
Plus its incredibly amusing when the party get to such a strength of terror shared by their players that they turn tail and run believing a demented goblin playing a flute badly, behind the next door, is some evil alien being that they could not hope to overcome ;) Just my thoughts.
EDIT: Grammar
Tonight: On when jokes go wrong!
Let me parse this.
<Wesley's Post>
No fair! You can always say that! :P
So I am at a bit of loss as why you cried "no fair" to my post. Please could you explain to me what I specifically said that resulted in your response.
I was making the joke that your quote of my post just said: "Wesley's Post," which appeared as "F. Wesley Schneider wrote Wesley's Post," which I was saying you could say about any of my posts. You know. Since F. Wesley Schneider writes all of "Wesley's Posts". Ha... ha ha... ohhhh...
So that failed.
Beyond that, I pretty much just spring boarded from your mention about gore into a only semi-related digression on the place of gore in horror gaming.
All that you followed that up with, though, I'm totally on board with. Sorry if it sounded like I was contradicting you or having a verbal seizure.
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I personally have never been a big fan of gore as tool to horrify players. In fantasy gaming I tend to stick with a few tools to create a sense of horror/fear or dread in my players:
Control- lack of: This has been addressed many times, the big issue in a numbers crunch combat game vs. a game better suited to horror (physically weaker characters) is that fantasy combat based PCs will have much more power to openly fight a monster than you would say with a modern day P.I.
So the trick would be to not limit the powers players may have (built into their characters, spells, weapons, abilities) but to affect their sense of effectiveness and thus their confidence in their ability to easily or reasonably defeat the threat. So you are not taking anything away from the characters but creating some kind of exceptionalism with the creatures. This introduces a sense of fear, unknown, loss of control and power – and all without taking anything away from how THEY operate.
Some of the pro-pc side players will hate this as they will see it as an affront to some gamest precepts – game must be fair, characters abilities not neutralized, breaking the rules, game is about me, etc. In many cases the horror game requires more trust than your normal fantasy or Sci-Fi type game. It tells the player –all your stuff, all your tricks –abilities, they may not work as you built your guy to make to make them work. That’s ok, it’s worth it for the ride.
In my D&D games the classic monsters (werewolves, demons, devils, some golems and all undead) follow almost a different set of rules. Always more powerful on one level, with a whole slew of supernatural style SLAs, while also gaining some weaknesses which would allow most any kind of character defeat them, ex: as an action, not a specific spell or weapon, reading from a book written in common, something similar.
So super-team of adventures with all their abilities and skills intact, can still kick ass on orcs and ogres, etc - but they cannot run roughshod over some of my darkside beasties. People fear orcs, as you would any raider - ogres and giants have a very Grimm style sense of horror to them, but my creature exceptionalism is reserved for the classics.
They know that a simple fireball while it may slow the thing down, is not going to kill it. It may just make it more angry.
Ex: Werewolf - DR 10/Silver or fire (ONLY) regen 5 (or more) + SLAs.
Magic weapons, spells, nothing gets past this DR. On top of that unless wholly immolated by fire (and not just killed by an FB) they will come back to life after X many rounds. You need silver to kill it - simple, or you need to capture it (some how, stronger than the +2 weak template in the PF Bestiary) and hang it, burn it at the stake, cut his head off. Malleus Maleficium witch style execution. I can up the CR to make it up to the players, in the end it's a wash.
Maybe it was too much Price or too many Hammer films, I don’t know. Any other kind of werewolf death is weak – imo, of course.
Does this break the rules for creatures - sure it does, I don't mind. I think one of the problems with 3.5 (and consequently PF) is the over-codification of creature building rules, equivalence towards players, etc, sort of nonsense was binding you to a VERY restricting in the building of monsters. Why did they go down this road, could have been monster PCs, or simply having a "fair" mechanic for everything.
Doesn’t work for making strong mini-darklord type threats. At least without class levels.
My players see an orc, ogre, whatever they have a pretty good idea of what to expect (always some surprises), when they encounter some weird aberration they are very leery and get ready for the unexpected. Anything goes.
When they see a pack of ancient ghouls (HPL) or a vampire they know at their basic operating level they will not be able to beat the threat. At least not by mashing the X or B key over and over. They need to take some data in and maybe run until they can handle the threat.
That is my take on the "control" aspect of horror gaming (not just weirdness or other rule breakers). There are tons of other things; power control is just one part.
Yeah, I remember the bad ol' days of early Paizo, when you had to put explicit guidelines to prospective authors not to kill off kids. Which really gets to Rule Zero of horror gaming.
Know Your Audience: Not all groups are going to like all things, and there's plenty of stuff that falls into horror that some people would take offense to. Since Paizo's mass market, they need to be more conservative in how far they go than some people's home games would be (and they've been both called on being too violent and congratulated for it for the same product).
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Some of HPL's horror relied on things that don't work too well for D&D.
Many of the "things" therein are "things that should not be."
Some of these things exist in D&D; they don't really challenge or rebel against the natural order of things, because, for the player characters, they ultimately represent the natural order of things.
Spells follow a codified regimen.
Magic items (generally) do what they are expected to.
Ogres, trolls, dragons, otyughs....though horrible in their own right, are expected to exist. Their mere existence doesn't threaten madness and oblivion. Their mere existence doesn't challenge the natural order of things. It's hard to freak out a jaded 6th level axeman with a byakhee.
What I've found can work, though, is a subtle invocation or allusion to deep-seeded fears, using the implied realities of the game.
We've all had the dream of the fearsome stalker. It's vaguely humanoid, it's coming for you....you try to run but you can't. You're paralyzed with fear. Whatever this means in Freudian analysis I don't know, but we can all agree on what it feels like. Maybe it's Jungian worldmind stuff. We've all had that dream.
Now......mohrgs paralyze.
Not too too scary. Your barbarian rolls a 1 but the rest of the group'll probably jack this mohrg.
But, while you're supine where you fell, paralyzed,....a hastendeath spider from Richard Pett's adventure the Weavers is slowly crawling toward your mouth. It will crawl into your mouth, down into your esophagus, and lay it's eggs. They will eat their way out of you like Alien babies.
And your friends have to endure a potential aoo from the mohrg who's standing over you to get the spider away from your mouth before it's too late.
Maybe they'll be paralyzed too.
Paralyzed for the hastendeaths.....
Figure out the primal fears. Make use of the rules to invoke them.
You know, I think the best "horror" sessions I've ever run haven't intentionally been "horror" sessions. Some nights, the creepy descriptions just seem to hit the right cord, and you push it a little farther than you normally would, and one player buys in, and that helps another buy in, and suddenly, your players are as creeped out as their characters are suppose to be.
I'm not sure I can really elaborate any more than to just pay attention to how the players are reacting and knowing what switches to flip once the players start to buy in.
I remember one session that wasn't even remotely suppose to be a horror session, with PCs in a mine where they ran into a huge spider. I was more or less just trying to evoke a "Shelob" kind of vibe, but when I started to describe the shinny black carapace of the spider and its skittering, clattering legs, and its dripping, sharp mandibles, one of my players had to get up and walk away from the table.
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Tonight: On when jokes go wrong!
Let me parse this.
<Wesley's Post>No fair! You can always say that! :PSo I am at a bit of loss as why you cried "no fair" to my post. Please could you explain to me what I specifically said that resulted in your response.I was making the joke that your quote of my post just said: "Wesley's Post," which appeared as "F. Wesley Schneider wrote Wesley's Post," which I was saying you could say about any of my posts. You know. Since F. Wesley Schneider writes all of "Wesley's Posts". Ha... ha ha... ohhhh...
So that failed.
Beyond that, I pretty much just spring boarded from your mention about gore into a only semi-related digression on the place of gore in horror gaming.
All that you followed that up with, though, I'm totally on board with. Sorry if it sounded like I was contradicting you or having a verbal seizure.
Sorry for being stupid and obtuse. I just didn't want to make my post any longer than was necessary. No need to be sorry, I can sometimes miss humor when it stares me in the face. ;)
CEO
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I tend to run the occasional modern horror game and set it right here in my hometown. Everyone knows the landmarks here when we play, so it allows me a chance to work in someplace the players know
One of my favorite gaming stories was a game Mark Rein•Hagen ran for us in the early playtest days of Vampire: The Masquerade. We had made new characters and Mark was trying to get us into the World of Darkness. The group had just watched Near Dark and we were in the mood to do some killin'! :) We were on the run going through the countryside and we come upon a house. Breaking through the front door, with blood lust clouding our minds, we ended up going from room to room on a bloody rampage. Mark looked ashen and in shock. And then it dawned on us that we had just rampaged through Mark's own house and brutally murdered his own family. You could have heard a pin drop as we all came to this realization. I actually felt sick to my stomach. It brought the reality home about what our characters had just done. These weren't nameless people. These were people whom we had dined with, laughed with, and whom we cared for, and our characters had just brutally ended their lives out of sport. I don't think I ever thought of my Vampire characters in the same vein again.
-Lisa
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I've run a couple of good horrific games, and sometimes I find horror finds its way into the game without me even meaning to.
I was running Hollow's Last Hope for the third time. (Such a great adventure).
The party reached the room with the Worg, bear in mind 3 of the 4 players were entirely new to Tabletop RPGs.
Warning: Spoiler for Hollow's Last Hope ahead.
"You see an unusually large wolf, with midnight black fur lazily resting on a pile of rubble. It yawns widely, revealing a mouth wide enough to crush a man's skull and teeth long enough to pierce a lung.
It spots the sorceress in the door way."
*I lean back confidently, and put on an air of confidence.*
"Hello little girl, what brings you to the big, bad wolf's house?"
(She tanked her stealth check, the rest of the party did great so she was all alone in the doorway).
I described him slowly circling her as he spoke, sniffing her occasionally. He smelled elf on her (there was indeed an elf in the party), he told her: "If you clear out the monsters around the monastery or bring me back a delicious elf to eat then you may have your mushrooms."
Her terror at being the only person in the room with a big mean wolf, was... delicious.
The issue with D&D is familarity and that is the problem with trying to instil fear and panic into the players. So the best answer for this is to lie.
Several years ago I was running a dungeon a run of the mill orc bash from Dungeon Mag. Instead of saying five orcs attack I had lumbering creatures consisting of no more than "fleshy cylindical limbs attached to a bloated corpulant body. Where the head should be is a knot of cancerous tissue bisected vertically with a thin slavering mouth filled with shark like teeth champing at the air." I described the sloshing noise as they advanced and the slimy trails left in their wake.
The players paniced. Big time. The unknown was coming at them. They didn't know they were orcs in funny suits effectivly and because it wasn't familiar they totally altered their approach to the scenario.
When one died I asked for a save against death magic (yep that long ago!) and described the blackish blood spray getting on the PC. Didn't care what the save was really but if the roll was low just said "Can you write on your character sheet DD+1." More panic ensued as the PCs suddenly developed a hygine regime never before seen.
Cruel and unfair?
Probably.
Do the players still remember it?
Yep.
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An idea I've always wanted to do was a monster's ball.
While investigating a missing band of adventuerers in the region, the PCs are invited to a masquerade at a local villa/mansion/brooding castle. During the night they make small talk with the various guests befriending some, flirting with others. Learning snippets about the previous adventurers:
"Oh, they asked to hunt in my forest, and I thought that would be such fun so I joined them."
"I drank the dwarf under the table, didn't hear much from him after that."
Etc..
Various courses of food are served throughout the night. Most of it 'tastes like pork'.
At midnight, the masks are removed, and the PCs suddenly realise they are the only humanoids there. Everyone else comes out as a werewolf/mummy/ghoul. The PCs are surrounded and unarmed.
Prepare for bowel evacuating fear.
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Lovecraft's name gets bandied about a lot in discussions of horror RPGs, which makes sense considering one of the most popular games around is titled after one of his short stories. But know what I don't see a lot in Lovecraft's work? Swords.
That's a major distinction here. In Pathfinder, your reaction to seeing a tentacled horror isn't to let your mind join with the bleak, black gulfs of universal madness - it's to decide whether you want to charge or move around to set up a flank for the rogue. Pathfinder, like the games before it, is a storytelling game attached to a tactic strategy game (where Call of Cthulhu is a straight storytelling game). But is that to say you simply CAN'T do horror in Pathfinder? Of course not. But with all the abilities and firepower ever character gets its way more difficult to make them afraid (way more, then in CoC, where' even the hardest core characters are little tougher or more adept than those sitting around the table playing them).
Thus, while I definitely think there's something to be learned from the storytelling of H.P. Lovecraft and films like Hitchcock's, stories like The Birds get WAY less frightening when you've got blade barrier (and way messier).
Honestly I think the stories of Howard offer a far more apt analog to the types of horror you might encounter in a Pathfinder game. When Conan runs, the reader has NO DOUBT that s@#& is bad, or when his Texan ranch hand encounters a vampire he's way more likely to throw a punch then run gibbering into the night. Short of getting real grim with your adventures and dicing through characters to prove your villains' ferocity, this is why I think the setup is so important, the gradual build that transforms the typical, knee-jerk call to CHARGE! into a choice between running and fighting that seriously needs to be considered.
Only once the PCs start questioning their invincibility can you have a legitimately moody game.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Mood. It is the feeling that you build up during play. For myself, mood is always the important factor. If you simply want a game about fighting bad guys then you can have a great deal of fun playing computer games like Unreal Tournament. It's fun and exhilarating, and after a hard days work, imagining that the enemies are your irritating incompetent boss is rather rewarding ;) I jest a little here, but these games are fun in they allow people to let off a bit of steam, but I could never play them 24/7 - which if it wasn't for other aspects of life (like the bathroom, eating sleeping, working and not have your spouse divorce you) I could play a well GMd Pathfinder game 24/7.
So why does a great game of PF have such an appeal? If it's GMd well you can be an active part of a great story. I read a lot and when I don't have a book nearby I actually get rather uncomfortable. I love good storytelling because it conjures up new vistas and new experiences (the experiences of others who have led different lives than our own, and the thing that anchors a good story from a bad one is how well an author can create mood.
So when we want to GM a horror style game we can (though I love your use of suspense). When you are thrown into a situation that you cannot be certain about, or the old certainties have somehow gone awry, you are left in a place where you have to live by your basic wits and resources. Horror scenarios thrive on you being "helpless", for want of a better word. You may be a grizzled dwarf with a trusty battle-axe, and armor that would hold back a tank, but you are also out of your element. The normal things you can understand (like a band of charging orcs), have disappeared. One might remember Gimli's fears in LOTR when he enters Fangorn for the first time. He is carrying an axe causing strange sussurations of irritation from amongst the trees that surround him on every side. Gimli has gone beyond his normal experiences, and ventured into a place where his certainties are being challenged. They are trees, he is thinking and yet they seem to be alive, almost hostile. So Gimli even though physically he is not defenseless, his mind is overshadowed by things he cannot easily comprehend.
Now some people don't think Tolkien a great author, I do and as a caveat I would say that in some places in LOTR things got a little bogged down (The Council of Elrond for example). Nonetheless his descriptive use of words conjured up images in the mind's eye that helped to create tension, relief, emotion and outright terror. He was a master of mood setting, and this I believe was the reason that the book was so popular. He could make real a fantasy world that the reader could almost believe existed.
So with PF and any of the other incarnations of our great game, we need to be able to create verisimilitude. I've been a player in countless games and the most memorable to me were the ones where I felt like I was inhabiting a real world. Any GM needs to be a master storyteller to make a game stand out. We need game rules as they are the mechanic to ensure story consistency and to some degree fairness. Yet despite everything, mood must always be present. In horror/suspense, mood is perhaps even more important.
Why do we enjoy suspense/horror, perhaps because we all like to be a little frightened from time to time? We go on roller coasters at theme parks to be a little scared. We know that we are going to be safe, but there's always that possibility that we might end up in the "Final Destination 3" situation where the ride breaks. Horror is a primal thing in us all. In game terms we can feel afraid, though ultimately we are safe, though our PCs might not be.
So to end this long winded missive I believe that as you say mood and setting along with great storytelling can provoke a suspense/horror that can be transmitted to players. It can be achieved by any GM who puts his mind to it and prepares well beforehand. Preparation and storyline are key.
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So to end this long winded missive I believe that as you say mood and setting along with great storytelling can provoke a suspense/horror that can be transmitted to players.
I think that's perfectly fine, the problem is the game as its written does alot of work to undermine horror or suspense.
Various divination or detection abilities mean you are either going to break the rules when dealing with these player powers or you are going to frontload npcs with non-detection, abilities to avoid giving away their nature (cannot detect lies) and so on. That or put so many hurdles in front of players that their detection powers are useless – which goes back to undermining their character concepts.
Part of the problem I see with PF (and D&D) is that many people are trying to get the game mechanics/system to do alot of things, maybe more than they can realistically support in a fruitful fashion. Do I think you can achieve horror in fantasy sword and sorcerer gaming, sure if you apply some gamest tricks - trick the players (as mentioned above) with an unknown function/mechanic or power or do things in a way which can create some situational horror (hastendeath/mohrg) that will get players to cringe, but the game as written is very anti-horror. Just as it is anti-mystery, again all with out changing the way mechanics work or needing to set up huge builds to counter detection, etc. As it stands right now 3.5/PF is not even close to being a good system to reach those goals. If you have a good murder mystery story from a piece of fiction you need to add 10-20 things to get it to work in 3.5/PF, you need to maim or remove the head of the body to stop some forms of communication/raise dead, hide the evil which killed the victim with a ton of other magical fixes just to get the story to work for mid-level characters.
Mood is important, but mood and mystery can easily be broken and unveiled by characters whose basic powers are designed to net them info (pally, Wiz, cleric). The more powers available – the less mystery, suspense, dread and then horror you are going to get in your game. Again, not saying it’s impossible – you can easily set up mood via pacing, situation, environment, etc, you CAN run a horror game in 3.5/PF, it won’t resemble traditional horror from lit or cinema or even be something you could easily translate to someone who does not understand D&D. It can be done.
What I am saying the game rules are very ANTI to the mystery/suspense/underpowered mode of play which is a common feature of lower powered horror game systems.
Everyone in my group thinks children are scary, so I usually have some boy's choir music in the background. Only in minor though, this isn't a Disney movie.
Oh, and being forced by a narrow passage to move in single file is always scary. Yeah, it may be more of a tactical disadvantage than anything else, but it almost always gets the players sweating.
On a final note, one of the only times that I've been ever truly scared as a player was when I once played a wizard who used a spell he wrote up in the game to perform a sort of "object reading" for places. As my party and I watched the ghost image of a particular location's past events unfold, the main antagonist was just finished murdering a now centuries-dead victim only to look up directly at the players (from the past) and greet the members of the party by name before leaving the scene. Perhaps a bit cliche, but being aware of an enemy's intimate knowledge of your party can be pretty frightening.
how would animated objects in the shape of small children work for horror??
The easiest way is to look at movies like Magic and Child's Play. Perhaps there are rumors about a gang of kids that have been seen at various brutal crimes. As the PCs investigate and finally catch up with them, they find that these monstrosities aren't actually children, but abandoned objects that look like children ...
OrPerhaps the objects are old toys that were abandoned toys and want nothing more than to have revenge against the kids that left them. Now they wander the country-side looking to destroy any living being they find and frame the children in the process ...
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And then it dawned on us that we had just rampaged through Mark's own house and brutally murdered his own family.
That is so, so, so utterly cold. I think I love it...
Not really something as easily do-able in a fantasy motif, or with college-age players who might not have spouses and kids quite yet, but still, wow.
I tend to run the occasional modern horror game and set it right here in my hometown. Everyone knows the landmarks here when we play, so it allows me a chance to work in someplace the players knowOne of my favorite gaming stories was a game Mark Rein•Hagen ran for us in the early playtest days of Vampire: The Masquerade. We had made new characters and Mark was trying to get us into the World of Darkness. The group had just watched Near Dark and we were in the mood to do some killin'! :) We were on the run going through the countryside and we come upon a house. Breaking through the front door, with blood lust clouding our minds, we ended up going from room to room on a bloody rampage. Mark looked ashen and in shock. And then it dawned on us that we had just rampaged through Mark's own house and brutally murdered his own family. You could have heard a pin drop as we all came to this realization. I actually felt sick to my stomach. It brought the reality home about what our characters had just done. These weren't nameless people. These were people whom we had dined with, laughed with, and whom we cared for, and our characters had just brutally ended their lives out of sport. I don't think I ever thought of my Vampire characters in the same vein again.
-Lisa
That's really surreal, Lisa, but exactly why I run games in familiar places for my group ;) I still have players, past and present, that come up to me and tell me they can't go into certain areas in town without thinking back to a game and getting the creeps ;)
I've seen folks throw up in a theater, but never saw anyone vomit at the library (because of a book).Actually I have. I saw someone vomiting after reading one of Ann Coulter's books ;)
Oh sorry. That was me. I didn't realize anyone else was in the room with me, at the time.
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Oh sorry. That was me. I didn't realize anyone else was in the room with me, at the time.I've seen folks throw up in a theater, but never saw anyone vomit at the library (because of a book).Actually I have. I saw someone vomiting after reading one of Ann Coulter's books ;)
Small world! Sorry about the book dude! :(
One of my proudest moments as a game master came from a horror session I ran in a long-running 3.5 game. The party was exploring a haunted manor that I had been building up to for months. For that night's session, I turned out all the lights, lit candles, and had some creepy music playing. They went from room to room experiencing all manner of unnerving phenomena -- most of it pre-scripted weirdness similar to the haunting mechanic that would later be introduced in Pathfinder.
My favorite scene from that night: They opened the door to a parlor and looked inside. What they saw in the flickering torchlight was the moldering remains of a hunter's trophies. Animals like bears, foxes, and stags were stuffed and mounted, both full-bodied and just heads on the walls. The long years had decayed them to where patches of fur had fallen off, revealing the metal skeletons propping their forms, glinting in the torchlight. But their glass eyes, teeth and claws were still very intact.
Everybody at the table announced they were closing the door and leaving that room alone.
That's it. They looked in a room, and shut the door after seeing what was inside. They had no idea if the stuffed and mounted animals were going to come to life and attack. I wasn't actually planning on it, either.
I'm proud of this because the players were scared. It was the classic "Don't go in there!" moment in the scary movie... and they didn't! They stopped thinking about XP, loot, and challenge ratings, and just got the heck out of there.
I've mulled over the reasons why it worked out so well. I controlled the environment -- I dressed in black, covered the game table with a black tablecloth, and used blood-red candles for light. I didn't use miniatures for that particular session and I kept the dice-rolling to a minimum. I think all those things were effective to set that all-important mood. Therefore, by the time the players got to that room, the disconnect between player and character faded.
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One of my proudest moments as a game master came from a horror session I ran in a long-running 3.5 game. The party was exploring a haunted manor that I had been building up to for months. For that night's session, I turned out all the lights, lit candles, and had some creepy music playing. They went from room to room experiencing all manner of unnerving phenomena -- most of it pre-scripted weirdness similar to the haunting mechanic that would later be introduced in Pathfinder...
Great story, thanks for sharing. Good horror is so difficult to get right, pity I don't know any locations like that ;)
Great story, thanks for sharing. Good horror is so difficult to get right, pity I don't know any locations like that ;)One of my proudest moments as a game master came from a horror session I ran in a long-running 3.5 game. The party was exploring a haunted manor that I had been building up to for months. For that night's session, I turned out all the lights, lit candles, and had some creepy music playing. They went from room to room experiencing all manner of unnerving phenomena -- most of it pre-scripted weirdness similar to the haunting mechanic that would later be introduced in Pathfinder...
Whoops. Didn't mean to mislead anyone. The entire experience was strictly at the table in the kitchen. "They" -- meaning the characters -- went from room to room. The players experienced it only in their imagination. It would have been fantastic to mock up an entire house for the game, but sadly, such a task is beyond me.
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Whoops. Didn't mean to mislead anyone. The entire experience was strictly at the table in the kitchen. "They" -- meaning the characters -- went from room to room. The players experienced it only in their imagination. It would have been fantastic to mock up an entire house for the game, but sadly, such a task is beyond me.
Great story, thanks for sharing. Good horror is so difficult to get right, pity I don't know any locations like that ;)
The fact you did it without the location and instead used description just tells me what an awesome Horror GM you were.
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You know, I think the best "horror" sessions I've ever run haven't intentionally been "horror" sessions. Some nights, the creepy descriptions just seem to hit the right cord, and you push it a little farther than you normally would, and one player buys in, and that helps another buy in, and suddenly, your players are as creeped out as their characters are suppose to be.
I'm not sure I can really elaborate any more than to just pay attention to how the players are reacting and knowing what switches to flip once the players start to buy in.
Indeed. That's pretty much how most horror sessions go in my games. The horror genre is a very tricky one in D&D/Pathfinder RPG, I think, and I came to the realization a long time ago that prepping for horror sessions was a waste of time for me. Doing what KEJR mentioned seems much more effective. When one of my players start saying "man, that's creepy" or when I feel there's a sense of tension, or horror, rising in my group, that's a good indication that the mood's there and I have something to work with horrorwise. So yeah, for me the best horror sessions have been the ones that weren't supposed to be horror sessions.
From what I've found, the best way to induce horror is to take away their combat, alter it heavily, then give it back to them little by little.
I prefer Silent Hill over Resident Evil.
Put the PCs in a city that's empty. COMPLETELY empty. Have them explore it, get the game going, and have it keep going - without a single fight. Finally, introduce a monster, something hideous and unnatural and still vaguely human shaped...and have it be completely ineffective. Throw a bunch of them at the PCs. Let the PCs slaughter them.
Wait. Let them explore more.
Use different monsters. More human looking. These ones don't even fight back. They just, let's say, scream at each other, and at the PCs. Maybe they find them and the more inhuman monsters fighting. They key thing is that they aren't a DANGEROUS threat.
Then, make them run away. They FIND an enemy to kill - and it's a big one. An enemy with a CR that's flat out massively too difficult to defeat. It's slow, doesn't do a lot of damage, but the PCs can't kill it. Try to hint without outright saying it that the PCs can and should run away. Cheat if you need to (Half the fun of a horror game is ignoring the mechanics, in my opinion)
At this point you can do almost anything to them. As they run away, they turn a corner and slam into the screamers which, true to their name, start screaming. Or maybe the more inhuman ones, that attack them, and are now a it more effective - they can still be cut down easily enough, but this time they do some damage to your players.
The best thing about this is how easy it is to fluff it however you want. Make the screamers look like children, or like adults, or like animals - whatever. The important thing is making the players panic. Move them out of their comfort zone and out of their expectations. When they see fog and monsters, they're ready for a big fight - don't give it to them. Make them really, really want that big epic fight, and then make them run from it.
Another thing that helps is drastically limiting the effect of their magic - both their spells and their items. Extradiminsional spaces just don't work right here - you open your handy haversack and it's just a normal bag. Open it a second time and it's filled with muck and mud. Spells don't seem to work right either - most of the spells just fizzle as if you were in an Anti-magic zone, but every now and then one DOES work right...and every now and then one works WRONG. Fireball does nothing more then cause hundreds of fish to spontaniously appear in the area. Summoning spells create the monsters, but they die almost instantly, vomiting blood. Also, don't let them leave, at least not at first. Make sure they get the sense that they can't just back away or come back some other time.
As far as the fluff goes, like I said, you can make it almost anything, though I do recommend picking a theme or reason. Going along with it being Silent Hill -esque, maybe choose something from their collective backgrounds and use that. Or make up your own mini-story for some disaster that happened in the city that still haunts it - for the examples I gave, someone drowned in a nearby lake, maybe on accident or maybe murdered, and something about it has set the village off. All the monsters seem bloated and their skin is oily.
Lastly, don't explain things. Don't give a big epic fight to finish things off. Maybe at the end of this, they need to find something in the lake where the person drowned. They go down, expecting something horrible to snap out that them, and...nothing does. They get the item without problem, slowly row themselves back into the city, and use that item to escape the city.
Other, more meta ideas - just roll the dice. For no reason. Roll it, look at it a bit, nod, and then move on. If they ask you why, be honest - smile and say "Oh, it's nothing." And then to counteract that, do something without rolling the dice. Set up a few ideas in advance and just set them off at random, with no seeming reason or pattern to it.
d20 Silent Hill stuff. Enjoy...Your players will love you...
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d20 Silent Hill stuff. Enjoy...Your players will love you...
Along the same lines, some d20 Resident Evil stuff.