Increasing the creepiness in Voice in the Void

[Leg o' Lamb]

I'll be running the above this weekend. Any suggestions on how to amplify the creepiness?

I enjoy making my players sweat a bit, so the creepier the better.

Spoiler:

I plan to use the Weeping Angels from recent Dr. Who as inspiration for the Caryatid Column. Too bad I will only get to throw one at the players since it will be a low tier table.

[Katharan al-Zawree]

Go for it! 100%!

Also remind them of dripping water... for some reason that's very creepy.

JP

[Sir_Wulf]

Spoiler:

While the Doctor's lonely assassins are indeed creepy, the weeping angels are pretty well known: Change things up enough that your players won't immediately get the connection. I would also plan descriptions of several other statues in that chamber, so they don't immediately home in on that one as a threat.

That statue depicts a young woman. It is badly weathered, with odd black stains dribbling down from its mouth and beneath each of its eyes. It holds a basket filled with heads beneath one arm and clutches a sickle with its other hand.

This one is carved of red marble. It depicts a devilish figure in lordly robes. In one hand the figure holds a quill pen; the other holds a lengthy scroll, a contract promising all sorts of earthly delights. The statue's glittering eyes seem to gaze at you wherever you move within the room.

An odd sculpture sits here, a hollow black obelisk with narrow slits on each side. Some sort of movement can be seen within the sculpture's interior. (The obelisk has a strange 'mobile' hanging inside, where it moves and shifts in response to slight air movements.)

[Eric Brittain]

Spoiler:

This scenario is very reminiscent of the Lovecraft mythos. I try to work in as much Dunwich horror and Migo fungal references as I can.
Your mileage may vary. Find the squick factor and pile it on after you have that dialed in.

[MisterSlanky]

I usually have players make will saves as they adventure and if they fail whatever I feel is appropriate (usually 15) they start hearing distant whispers in Aklo (usually describing strange and alien commentary should they speak it).

No game effect, but it keeps players on their toes wondering what is next.

[Lamplighter]

I like to ask a player, "What's you will save?", roll behind the screen, and then whenever perception checks are called for, give that player strange whispers or visions out of the corner of their eye.

I also had my first TPK-unrecoverable in this scenario, so now that word has gotten around, players are scared to start.

[MisterSlanky]

I also don't describe the final gate as static and non-active. I describe it as flickering and occasionally stopping on an image of a landscape with strange rings in the sky. Let them think that whatever they're doing in the last fight has an impact on stopping the gate.

[Eric Brittain]

Spoiler:

As the players spend more and more time in the fungal areas, I describe things starting first to grow on their clothes and then on their skin. There is no mechanical effect of this just pure creep factor. Of course this all wilts and sluffs off when the gate is destroyed/deactivated but I don't let them know that until a little bit after. Just long enough for the "Aw cr#p!" to set in.

[licidy]

I place figures on the map to represent the encounters that *could* have happened at other tiers! Plus other decoys.

Spoiler:

Nothing scares a low level table of players like when you place the Gargantuan T-Rex on the map with the determination and conviction that it belongs there ^_~

[Chris Mortika]

With respect, folks, when players decide to cast spells or use up items to analyze / counter / deal with all the stuff you add in (moving statues, fungus growing on the PCs' skin) do you let them? If so, do you give them extra treasure to compensate?

This sounds like the textbook example of adding stuff to a scenario that exhausts PC resources. I was under the impression we were supposed to avoid that.

[MisterSlanky]

Chris Mortika wrote:

With respect, folks, when players decide to cast spells or use up items to analyze / counter / deal with all the stuff you add in (moving statues, fungus growing on the PCs' skin) do you let them? If so, do you give them extra treasure to compensate?

This sounds like the textbook example of adding stuff to a scenario that exhausts PC resources. I was under the impression we we can help re supposed to avoid that.

Never had it happen..Adding voices, whispers, minor effects with no penalties, images out of the corner of the eye, etc. gives the scenario the feel it deserves and represents where we are supposed to add in our GM flavor. I have not in all the times I've run watched players take it as anything more than that.

P. S. - I too add in minis applicable for all tiers in the first two rooms. It keeps people on their toes and tends to reduce metagaming.

[Chris Mortika]

That sounds all good to me, then.

--+--

Regarding minis and meta-gaming: I usually arrange al the figs I need for a session off to the side of my GM workspace. And I always include a couple of red herrings: trolls or demons or a horde of kobolds. Something that, after thirty minutes of play, the players would find plausible in the scenario.

[Purple Fluffy CatBunnyGnome]

nothing creeps old LG/triad members out more than setting beholder figs on your table ... I didn't have dinosaurs and they were about the right size.

Thought one guy was going to wet himself... it was awesome

[nosig]

Purple Fluffy CatBunnyGnome wrote:

nothing creeps old LG/triad members out more than setting beholder figs on your table ... I didn't have dinosaurs and they were about the right size.

Thought one guy was going to wet himself... it was awesome

there was a creature in old AD&D (1st Ed.) called a Gas Spore, which looked just like a Beholder, but was actually a balloon filled with explosive gases. I put one in a treasure cheast once - the party thief picked the lock, opened the cheast and I flipped the MM to the Beholder page and said, "you see this pop up out of the cheast". Two experienced players went out the door (didn't say anything, just sliding thier figures out of the room), the thief said "I dive into the cheast and close the lid", but the two "new guys" were the best. One looked at the MM in my hand and carefully pronouned the name written at the top of the page, "Be-hol-der", the other looked at the reaction from the other players and said something like, "Dude, we may be in trouble. I swing my sword at it." BOOM!

[Lamplighter]

My maps for the Blakros Museum, main floor and basement, don't have any of the statues or artifacts drawn on - those are *all* done with minis. I got some great dino skeletons out of a "dino dig" toy that are about teh right scale, and the T-Rex and at least one dragon, plus a bunch of humanoids for the statues. Makes for some great looks of horror on the faces of the players!

To Chris' point: I've only ever had players use cantrips to "counter" or investigate said effects... I think if someone immediately cast remove disease or something, I'll tell them it wasn't necessary.

[Sir_Wulf]

Chris Mortika wrote:

With respect, folks, when players decide to cast spells or use up items to analyze / counter / deal with all the stuff you add in (moving statues, fungus growing on the PCs' skin) do you let them? If so, do you give them extra treasure to compensate?

If players start to get out significant resources to deal with a detail I've added/changed/reskinned for some reason, I'll distract or discourage them. I want them challenged and engaged, but don't want to 'hose' them into wasting substantial resources dealing with something that isn't part of the adventure.

[Thod]

This was my original favourite and I build it up several times in 3D using DwarvenForge. I then placed my complete collection of oozes and moulds from Otherworld miniatures - having more or less the whole room full of slimy growth.

The players always are scared when they open the door. Meta gaming they are aware there can't be black pudding next to green slime etc. But they know something is up.

[Leg o' Lamb]

Fun Fun Fun!

Flavor spoilers:

Spoiler:

Voice in the Void was a blast.
I decided to give the scenario a heavy dose of Nyarlahotep. The scenario lends itself very well to this treatment: The Blakros daughter is half-Osiriani, she came back with stuffs from various tombs, The Black Pharaoh had/has an interest in Osirian and the Inner Sea in general. I called for Will saves at various times for each PC at my table. Depending on where they were in the basement, I described some odd malady they experienced, tying it into several images for Nyarlahotep I found online. For example, Nyarlahotep has an aspect called "The Haunter in the Dark." The symbol, or iconography, for this is a bat with one three-globed eye. So when the last PC was about to traverse down the shaft in the back room, I had her experience rushing wind with a far off sounding shriek. As this wind got harder and the shrieking got louder, I told the player she saw this particular image coming toward her. I then handed her the image of the bat-Nyarlahotep.

This was fun, but the instillation of horror I found difficult. Reality has a way of giving a +20 circumstance bonus to Will saves. It added flavor, and really, was all I could ask.

Play spoilers:

Spoiler:

Group composition: Witch 2, Wizard 2, Cleric 1, Pregen Fighter 1

Death visited the Blakros Museum. Or, should have. I was in a unique situation in that one of the players at my table was the son of another player at the table. And this was his first time playing. Keep reading, gentle pathfinders...

They had a moderate challenge with the undead owlbear. I neither confirmed nor denied it was a construct. I gave out little details like, "Your sword cuts through padding and hits bone," or "You hear a satisfying crunch when your hammer strikes home." The wizard hit it with a spell which lit it on fire so when they did eventually kill it, they saw a pile of bones on the floor and knew it was an undead thing. This gave them the unfortunate idea of the place being full of undead. They were wrong, so wrong. As the caryatid column in the second room proved.

When they entered the room, I placed a bunch of minis, all of which were the same, on the map with a one-to-one correspondence to statues on the map. I allowed them to explore the room, investigating the various statues here and there. I had more flavor images that I used to great effect in this room. I let them muck around and do whatever they wanted. I had the caryatid column activate when the group was leaving. I had them move their minis as if they were leaving. There was a five foot, or one square gap between the third and final PCs. It was here I activated the column: 5' step, close the door. The look on the player's face was priceless; even more so when I asked for initiative and told him, "Win."

This fight was horrible. Within three rounds, the fighter's short sword was destroyed (which made no one want to hit it with a weapon) and he was the recipient of a critical hit, bringing him to within two rounds of death. Who was playing the fighter? That's right! The son! Playing for the first time! Dad was playing the wizard. When the cleric was a few hit points from unconsciousness I told the group, "Have you considered running? Grab the fighter and run." They tried, but the column just kept hitting them.The wizard had zero spells memorized that could damage the column. The witch? Even more useless as the column is immune to mind-affecting spells. Finally, it took the Hand of Leg o' Lamb; I "ignored" or "mis-read" the wizard's school specialization feature (Acid arrow, or dart, or something similar) so that they could kill it and move beyond this room. Call me a softee, but if this wasn't the kid's first time playing? TPK. And there goes my weekend.

[GeekGamerGirl]

I know this is an old post, but I just wanted to chime in too. I thought this was a great adventure. Run the week after Mists of Mwangi, my players have no interest in ever visiting the museum and have some rude things to shout at Nigel anytime they walk through the Wise district.

Spoiler:

This is a great adventure, ripe with Cthulian flavor. Really playing-up the other-worldliness of the cerebic fungi, the gibbering mouther, and the flashes of infinite nothingness in the portal made this a great role-playing adventure.

Anytime anyone gets swallowed whole, fun is happening. Nothing makes players freak-out quicker. And, to have mouths on the inside...It's even better to have the mouther spittle on whoever is really giving the "glad it's not me speech" to the swallowed person.

In the first two rooms, I pulled out a TON of minis. When the players went in, they didn't know what the threat would be. So, they end-up tip-toeing around dinosaurs, giant beetles, skeletal Minotaur, etc., not knowing what is about to animate and attack them.

[Brian Darnell]

Thanks for posting GeekGamerGirl. It's an old thread and one that hadn't hit my radar. It was good to read it because I'm always looking for ways to add additional favor to scenarios. Maybe I'll run this on HP Lovecraft's birthday (8/20, he would have been 123) this year.

[JimM47]

I want to give a thanks and shout out to Jon. I just ran this at Tower and had a great time spicing it up based on Jon's suggestions.

I had the players write down a bunch of advance d20 rolls, and asked for their perception modifiers and their will saves. Then whenever they did something significant, like enter a room, or search something, or react to the creepiness of the situation, I would make the person with the lowest Will Save result see, or hear, or imagine something unsettling, or if multiple characters rolled low, give them conflicting effects.

Spoiler:

I had the alien voices start immediately once the characters got to the basement. Often only one or two characters would hear them, and the voices would react in pitch and volume to changes in the lighting level as the characters carrying light sources moved about.

Interspersed with this I would have one of the characters occasionally understand the whispers, which would either be something about the immensity of the "dark tapestry" or would be a voice stating some minor point of the backstory the characters wouldn't otherwise be able to know or some oblique foreshadowing of a future room. My players were very good about selectively sharing the whispers they heard, based on how much a character would really feel comfortable sharing that particular thing said.

I also gave the characters whispers or visions that were an "in-character" comment from one of the monsters. For instance, the brown mold whispers that it loves the fire, the shrieker whispers that it hates the fire, and the innocuous mold whispers that it has found a new home. When the owlbear possessed by Kuburrum knocked a character unconscious, he had a dream symbolic of being trapped as a brain in a jar. When another character read Imrizade's notes, she got a vision of being a helpless being hanging by an umbilical chord. Hodd gives an obviously metaphorical vision of being chomped in half by a beast to symbolize the decay of his lower half.

I was playing with a tier 1-2 tier table, meaning some of the cooler exotic monsters in the higher tiers were missing. So instead I would give the characters visions of some of the unworldly monsters they would have faced in a room as they were entering it, or pondering which route to take. It kept them guessing even if they could positively id the actual monster there.

I also gave characters visions of some of the other statues in the cayatid column room to throw them off: before entering, a character gets a vision of a little girl holding a man's hand and turning him to stone, then when they enter, there is a statue of the same little girl. I had descriptions prepped for every statue in the room, including a few that had been warped by the gate but not come to life. And of course there was a weeping angel just to spook them.

Anyway, it was great fun adding flavor to this scenario (often from the material that normally only the GM sees) and I wouldn't have thought to do it if I hadn't been inspired by this thread.

[Leg o' Lamb]

james.morrison47 wrote:

I want to give a thanks and shout out to Jon. I just ran this at Tower and had a great time spicing it up based on Jon's suggestions.

I had the players write down a bunch of advance d20 rolls, and asked for their perception modifiers and their will saves. Then whenever they did something significant, like enter a room, or search something, or react to the creepiness of the situation, I would make the person with the lowest Will Save result see, or hear, or imagine something unsettling, or if multiple characters rolled low, give them conflicting effects.

** spoiler omitted **...

Hey Jim! I'm glad my old mad ramblings inspired you to bring the horror. If you ever run The Haunting of Hinojai, let me know. I will be more than happy to help you scare the bejeezus out of our local players. I know I did.

I am running this one again at GenCon this year. I am so looking forward to it.

PS: Jim, look for the photos I posted to our meetup site from when I ran this one so many moons ago. I especially like the one of the basement with Nyarlahotep illustration over the gate.

[FLite]

I'm going to be running this (hopefully) in a couple of weeks.

for decorations

Spoiler:

I plan on making a mini for the gate out of card stock, and a plasma globe

Possibly with gummy worms for the connecting tenticals. (may need to experiment with that.)

re metagaming

Spoiler:

I think I will put a weeping angel mini (or two) in the statuary room, as a red herring. (Somewhere where avoiding it moves you closer to the Caryatid column.)

[Sir_Wulf]

You might want to look at Worldworks Games Deadly Encounter Set. It has an impressive-looking gateway that I printed out and used when running this adventure.

[Mike Franke]

I missed this thread originally and I love the ideas. I like combining random save requests of the players with things moving just out of sight (corner of the eye) or sounds that the players can't quite catch or find the origin of. Shadows moving the wrong way (against the light) are also fun.

[Lakesidefantasy]

keep the players in the dark. When I run this one I pay close attention to what's in the light and what's in the darkness, and I don't draw the map any further than the lighting conditions will allow. If a only one Player Character has the ability to see in the dark, I will describe the scenery to them and keep the others "in the dark" as much as possible.

Also, give the gibbering mouther something creepy to say like, "bloodybloodybloodybloody," over and over and over again.

[Eryx_UK]

I'm running this tomorrow night and you've all given me some great ideas. Thank you.

[Leg o' Lamb]

Let us know how it goes!

[Thereus, Silver Crusader]

I have run this several times now online on Roll20. I too like to put in lots of tokens to represent latent statues and exhibits. Also, I can mess with the lighting and coloring so...

Spoiler:

The fungus rooms actually glows bright purple/pink and the final encounter has a creepy green tinge as well. The players literally gasped when they opened the door. It took them a full five minutes to gather the courage to enter.

As a side note, it was great fun wracking my brain for more things for the cerebral fungi to say.

[Eryx_UK]

jon dehning wrote:

Let us know how it goes!

It went really really well. Six players (2 barbarians, an inquisitor, ranger and a cleric) at tier 3-4. Many years of running Call of Cthulhu helped, plus the suggestions above, made it a nice creepy experience that the players really sank their teeth into.

From reading it I figured quite quickly that this was not going to be a lethal scenario so I focused on the descriptives more than anything. Definitely weirded a couple of the players out.

My only grumble was that the final encounter felt and played out a little weak for the tier but we had such fun with the scenario anyway that it didn't matter.

Definitely one of my favourites to run so far.

[Muser]

Man, I loved this thread when prepping for yesterday.

I implemented several things from here, including detect magic hijix, the Haunter of the Dark, etc. Here's my custom stuff:

Spoiler:

1. The skeletons: I took the liberty of having the chimaera animate only after the characters were inside the midway of the room. While this was going on, I made an offhand mention of there being a t-rex skeleton chained to the ceiling. After the first turn of combat, told the players it rattled a bit, just like the chimaera had done upon animating. After two turns, I upped the ante by telling them they could hear the chains rattling in anticipation. Worked decently.

2. Constant noises: The players insisted on listening for enemies(guess I spooked someone!) next to doors so I had the one who rolled the highest hear a hint of what's coming. With a twist: the noises were made by things they'd meet on the tier above. So a distant dino roar and trees breaking, the sound of a moist swamp being trod upon for the ooze, etc.

3. Scriptorium: Earlier on one character had used their class ability to detect unnaturalities(Menhir Druid or something). I told them that they could sense the presence of 6 beings from the scriptorium(the daughter and the zombies), just standing and staring back(hehe). Then, when they entered, had them roll a Will save and waxed poetic about seeing the daughter a) maniacally taking notes from her work then b) turning to face them inquisitively with her eyes all black. Everybody aced on their will roll, so I explained that they could almost feel the rest of the basement disappear into blackness and leave them alone with the black-eyed woman, but "since you rolled so well then she goes poof..." After leaving the basement and returning(see the mouther), I told them that one of the walls briefly showed empty black space before turning normal.

4. The mouther: I'm a horror buff, make no mistake. I felt that the scenario needed some thematic ties to hold it together so the mouther got a visual overhaul. First, instead of the mildly hilarious D&D reject, it was this thing that greeted them by slowly roiling from behind a crate. A mass made out of the daughter's heads and necks, biting and spitting. Secondly, the gibbering was, naturally enough, "ISHME-DAGAN" on repeat. Thirdly, if a PC failed their Will save and the confusion resulted in babbling they would join in the chant. I reckon their only actual fright came from the casualty, a half-orc oracle who died thanks to engulf, whom needed to be raised from the dead, but I'm pretty happy with the outcome anyhow!

5. The vault underneath: We were running on our last legs thanks to the half-orc death fiasco, so I didn't feel like modifying too much, but I wanted to have the organic wall structures resemble human bones, specifically pelvic bones. These would sport odd growths that resembled mixtures of black human hair tangling glowing spheres, like dangling opalescent heads. It didn't come to pass, but the boss match was pretty swell as it is. The umbilicals rule!

PS. no resources were lost to the modifications. Well, maybe a few buff rounds. ;)