WARNING: This thread, and the subject matter it may end up discussing, may be offensive to some readers. This is not my intention; my only intent is to discuss ways to bring these subjects into the game in a serious, meaningful, tasteful way. That said if subjects like genocide, rape, child sacrifice, animal abuse and worse disturbs or offends you, please navigate away. This first post is a bit long winded and I apologize in advance.
So I finally got a group together and I'm running them through Jade Regent (which I'm going to have to take up the power level a bit as they killed the Soggy River Monster in three rounds, and the faceless stalker in the halfling's house in two.) But the entire group cant always get together as one of our players works nights and sometimes cant always get our gaming night off. So I'm prepping a secondary campaign for just the other players. It was going to be a standard epic fantasy campaign, starting with The Godsmouth Heresy and running to The Moonscar, with servants of Nocticula tying it all together, ending with a climactic showdown with an avatar of Nocticula. But then I was made aware of a game by Black Dog Games Factory called Charnel Houses of Europe, a modern fantasy epic putting players in the roles of holocaust victims.
Still with me?
So, with that work (and other Black Dog games) in mind, I'd like to run a Pathfinder game that delves into the deepest, darkest parts of the human psyche. Something that makes games like Call of Cthulhu and Amnesia: the Dark Descent look like Candy Land. My players have agreed that, if I do it right, it'll be an interesting break from our standard light hearted fantasy games. But I need some help, both crunchy and fluffy.
First, I dont even know where to start. I'd like to stick with daemons as the major antagonists but some eldritch horrors would be good too; I really wanna play up that hateful, careless evil. Is there a World Wound-like area with a heavy daemon presence? Or can someone recomend a good region for a setting?
I'm going to ban a normally common race and kick off by explaining that something horrible has happened; That race was driven into extinction by the peresecution of other mortal races in an event that (true to the inspiration) draws on the horrors of the Holocaust. The first few games will likely take place in areas where these tragedies occured, and will be rife with hauntings. Can anyone recomend a race that would be perfect for this? It should be something sort of unexpected; niot tieflings, for example, because Blood of Fiends makes a show of how even good tieflings are persecuted. Im thinking like elves or something. Can anyone recomend some appropriate foes for this part of the game?
Players will be 5th level and I'm going to be taking liberties with their backstories (with player permission); the memories they have now are fabrications, and their true history is linked to this holocaust event, probably as perpetrators. This is something they wont learn for some time, so the (hopefully) good deeds they've accomplished since will keep them from being crushed by the weight of the horrors they visited upon their fellow beings.
Have them level really slowly.
Also, check out the Wendigo. Hell, check out mythology and folk tales in general, you'll find all sorts of crazy stuff.
Also-also...don't have them fight everything. A monster is much less scary if you can stab it in the face and kill it, and it's not scary at all if you've been stabbing hundreds of them in the face.
Humans. It's worse when it's from within.
I want to harp on a point I just made.
Have every monster, whether a grunt or a zombie or a friggin' Deathgod, give out like five exp. Killing them shouldn't be rewarding, it should be better to run away and figure out some way around what's happening.
Alternatively, they shouldn't actually see a badass monster until it's far, far too late. Until they're crawling, blood from their eyes, wasting away and helpless.
Yeah.
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The most frightening things are the things we CAN'T see; the worst horrors are those we're POWERLESS to stop. If you want to sicken, horrify and burn the brains of your players, deliver these.
I don't mean cheaply either. It's not horrifying at all if the party walks into a bar and there's a daemon there sating her appetite with the blood of a dozen nameless mortals. Instead have the party meet the woman as a mortal, have a good time with her. They go to take their third drink; THAT'S when they notice it tastes like hot saltwater and copper. Glancing up, their hostess is unchanged, save for an odd sag in the flesh on her arm they hadn't seen before. They also notice that the waitress has been robotically going to an old drunk in the corner before returning with every round.
Perception checks at that point help them make out that the chatter from the other tables seems artificial. A better than average one shows the waitress has kept her eyes fairly well-hidden through the evening with good reason; they're sewn shut. There's an undercurrent of sound in the bar, like swarms of flies. Just then one of the rotting corpses propped in the chairs around them finally oozes to the floor.
The hostess, obviously aware she's been found out peels the "skin suit" from her body. The woman she'd been infesting was still alive. Regardless of any action the party takes at this point the Coup De Gras she inflicts on the Commoner 1 she was "wearing" is an instant kill. Meanwhile the barmaid flops to the ground, tearing at her eyes in obvious agony. Finally the fetid dead begin to rise and shamble, bearing down on the hapless victim on the floor. Now, 4 5th level PCs could easily tear up the hostess daemon, but they're faced with a dilemma - leaving an innocent to the tender mercies of a dozen ravenous zombies is truly monstrous, but if they don't do something about the hostess, she's gone by the end of round 2.
As a cherry on top, after the PCs save the barmaid, she thanks them, then immediately doubles over in pain, clutching at her eyes (now freed by PC intervention hopefully). Eating their way out from inside her brain come thousands of maggots, erupting from her eyes. They form a swarm but rather than attack the swarm becomes the daemon's face. She congratulates them for showing off their powers to her so she's better prepared for next time. She then proceeds to give them exact, graphic details of where her next strike will be, but leaves out one crucial detail in the timing so the party has the chance to be wrong.
As for mechanics, I'd suggest that a lot of the fights actually be some uber-powered baddie supported by dozens if not hundreds of mindless -2CR minions. Imagine a dozen CR1 zombies, each falling to a single hit but moving in waves toward the PCs. Meanwhile the walls of the fight's setting (cabin, dungeon, castle, etc) shudder with the pounding of a dozen more and then some. Amid it all there's a main villain preparing to remove the favored NPC's spleen as he lies helpless, alive and awake on a table.
I remember Black Dog Games. I liked them:)
Perhaps instead of a race, you might consider it to have been a holocaust of all arcane magic users? Then you set it in Earth's past so that they know that the bad guys win, at least to some degree, since magic is no longer around in our time? Should also allow for an interesting element of dis-empowerment by allowing you to cut them off from magic, either from the beginning or at plot critical times.
I had been toying with adding some elements of that to my third campaign(in a series of three) as a potential direct result of the players' actions in the second campaign.
Have you actually picked up Charnel Houses of Europe? I've been thinking of trying to get a copy ever since I saw it on EC.
Most groups in D&D are used to having the power to stop evil stuff before it happens and stabbing enemies in the face. Call of Cthulhu's assumption is that fighting is a very bad idea, as you're very likely to go insane or get eaten by some alien horror. Which kind of players does your group have? I'm asking this because if they're the former, you'd only frustrate them if you go with Mark's idea or anything of that sort. "You saved her! ...oh wait, no you didn't. She's dead. Good job, guys, failing to save innocents and letting fiends run rampant on the streets." - If they never, EVER, actually succeed at saving anyone (or beating back the dark to any degree), I can assume they'll just turn apathetic and drop the notion of adventure by that part. Why bother even trying if it's always an automatic win for the bad guys?
Either way, I'd say that using elves and drow would be a good idea. Nocticula ties in with the latter especially well.
Also, being jewish, I can't help but feel weird about this whole Charnel Houses of Europe thing. Anyone want to tell me more about it?
D&D is a game about killing monsters. Combat is a huge part of the system. That makes the whole horror thing slightly more challenging to pull off well.
Actually, it's why I prefer GURPS when we want to make dark, low fantasy or horror games. The rules cater to that kind of settings much better than the D&D ones.
Sean, GURPS and Call of Cthulhu, like D&D, are cooperative games.
I wouldn't have suggested them if they weren't table-top RPGs in the first place.
Maybe, but I'm just on the side that believes that D&D does not work well outside the thing that it does really well.
High fantasy with magic, plenty of chances to fight and odds shifting from favouring the players to being slightly against them.
From my own experiences and the analyses made by others, D&D / Pathfinder does not do low-magic nor non-combat too well in most cases.
Wouldn't overdoing it make them apathetic in the long run? Again, if nothing ever goes right, there's no reason to care.
The outcome is always the same, after all. Seems to me that this is the real challenge in making a good horror campaign in D&D.
You need to invoke feelings in your players. Doing too little makes them not care, while doing too much will force them to a state of apathy.
You're quoting the part that can be problematic for many reasons, and that worries me greatly.
@ Icyshadow: you are right. I should amend my previous post to state: this should NOT be the norm of the game. By that I mean to IS's point, this shouldn't be allowed to go stale and turn the party apathetic. I still support having lots of zombies or whatever, but the barmaid encounter should be used sparingly.
Think of your fave horror movie. The protagonists encounter the bad, then they get away. They learn some stuff about the bad, then try to encounter the bad again, only to lose once more. Each time they encounter the whatever, they learn a bit more giving them the hope that, if they can JUST: put together the clues; find the bad's weakness; stop the rite; salt and burn the corpse...etc, THEN the nightmare will be over.
Unfortunately the nightmare is never over.
The thing that makes horror horrible, IMO (and those of you who've really studied the genre please chime in) is this idea that you might win some battles, but you'll never win the war. The nature of the human spirit is to keep striving so long as there's hope, so to avoid apathy you must give them that hope. But in order to maintain good horror you must be prepared to crush that hope. You'll just have to give them more later to begin the cycle again, but you get the point.
It is a delicate balance, and one I've not been able to hold for very long. Such games are taxing not just on the players, but on the GM as well. When you GM such a game you'll be fighting every natural instinct you have. Such instincts are things like tossing in some goblins just to get some combat on the table; TPKing your party for being foolish ("no, I think it's a GREAT idea to split up and look for clues..."); or follow other gaming tropes to avoid mental fatigue.
This is why I can't keep one of these going for very long. My current game has horror "elements" but ultimately is just high fantasy. True horror takes endurance, brains and resources I haven't had since college.
But seriously; if you're interested in these things go and watch some GOOD horror (whatever you feel that is - I'm not here to be the horror-police or judge anyone. Some of my favorite horror has rubber monsters or one of the Raimi's attached to the project :) ) and pick out some of the tropes and pacing there.
