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Second Lamp Post Players do not read this thread.
I am starting to write a gothic horror campaign in Ustalav. I have some ideas already but I am having a hard time fleshing things out. I want to avoid too much undead and werewolves. I would love some help from other GMs.
I am thinking by starting by having the party tasked to escort a young man from Town A to Town B. He is betrothed to the youngest of a noble line. He has never met her but her family has paid his a significant sum. The twist is that once the young noble woman becomes pregnant the husband is sacrificed. The whole family is under a curse. If the husband isn’t burnt alive on a full moon before the child is born the child get born as a hideous monster. This is my starter quest for the party. But I need help building the concept into a level 1 to 3 or so campaign. Any ideas or tips?
My other idea is a fire/death cult lead by a Skeletal Champion with the Burning Skeleton template. I was thinking about giving him bard levels up to whatever level I need to when the PCs encounter him. I want the cult to be a big threat. Ideally set it up as a Xanatos villain where even when the party beats it, it still wins a little. But I have no idea how to use them. They big confrontation would be around level 7 I think.
Also general Gothic Horror tips and ideas would be great it isn’t my genre.
I have never run an entire campaign based on gothic horror, but I have definitely used elements of horror in previous campaigns of mine.
In one instance, the PCs came across a mostly-abandoned house that contained a sick elderly woman and her collection of creepy dolls. You know the type. White porcelain heads painted with bright colors. Real hair used to make their hair. Dressed in frilly outfits. Always seeming to be looking in your direction...
And then later on in the session they animated and attacked the party. Nobody was surprised that the dolls attacked them. But they were surprised, and freaked out a little, when I described how the things' jaws distended, growing impossibly large and revealing needle sharp fangs inside, and how they latched onto them and bit into them, sucking out their blood...
They were reskinned stirges, but scarier than stirges have any right to be.
In another instance, I had a different group of players encounter a haunted house in which the inhabitants had died long ago. Most of the session involved them exploring the house and coming across various ghosts, all of them locked into repeating various atrocities that had occurred in the house. Depending on the age/maturity of the players, you can get as graphic and horrible as you need to. This really freaked out my players.
The final encounter and only combat encounter of the session involved them reaching the master bedroom, where they found a seemingly still-fresh body lying askew on the master bed, and a huge pool of blood in the middle of the room. When they entered the blood animated into a "blood elemental" (I do not recall what it really was, perhaps a water elemental) that they were forced to defeat to break the curse on the house.
The first 80 or so pages of the Dungeons and Dragons 3.x book "Heroes of Horror" has some excellent advice on writing and running horror campaigns. You might want to have a squiz at that if you can find it. Unfortunately, it also has one of the worst core classes ever designed for D&D; the disgustingly overpowered Dread Necromancer, banned at more tables the world over than probably any other class.
If I could give you some general advice, it's to focus on the little things, like the wolves howling in the distance, lanterns inexplicably blowing out in the dark, portaits on the walls subtly changing their expressions, or the gentle sobbing of a child from behind a bricked up wall. Be careful of doing anything too overtly horrible too quickly. That burning skeleton sounds cool, but might lack the suspense required of a gothic villain. A truly horrific villain is meticulous, intelligent, unsettling but still familiar.
If I could give you some general advice, it's to focus on the little things, like the wolves howling in the distance, lanterns inexplicably blowing out in the dark, portaits on the walls subtly changing their expressions, or the gentle sobbing of a child from behind a bricked up wall. Be careful of doing anything too overtly horrible too quickly. That burning skeleton sounds cool, but might lack the suspense required of a gothic villain. A truly horrific villain is meticulous, intelligent, unsettling but still familiar.
This is very good advice. One of the little things I used was mood music. I brought an iPod speaker setup and played a looping 5-minute stretch of music from Dracula during the session. That really started to get under my players' skin. :)
I like your first idea that you had, with the monster offspring.
In part 1, the PCs have to learn about the plot to sacrifice the husband and must prevent the bride's family from succeeding at this deed. At the end of part 1, the bride gives birth to the monster, killing her in the process, and the monster runs off into the woods.
In part 2, the PCs must go hunt the monster to quell the pandemonium of the local populace. They must contend with (and confront) numerous other groups who are also attempting to hunt the monster for their own reasons. Bounty hunters, fanatical religious zealots, but in the end, it is the cultists who end up capturing the monster. The cultists are the reason for the curse. Generations ago, it was contracted that the monster child born from this family would fulfill a prophecy; a prophecy that has been prevented until now. Part of the prophecy was that the monster child would consume the father; sacrificing the fathers was preventing the prophecy. The cultists are trying to capture the father, capture the monster, and put them together to get the prophecy rolling. The PCs must attempt to stop this by killing the cultists. However, this proves pointless, as by the end, the monster locates its' father on its' own, and kills and consumes him, regardless of cultist/PC intervention. Among the cultists, they find a big bad book they can't read.
In part 3, they take the book to the local arcanist who can read such big bad books, and gives them a fetch quest to go get a dagger. The PCs are told that this is the magic mcguffin that can kill the monster; however, in actuality, the arcanist is allied with the husband's family (possibly even related himself) and the dagger is a soul-trapping device with a powerful demon lord soul in it. Stabbing the monster with the dagger will deposit the soul into the monster, which is the monster's true prophecy purpose: being the divine vessel for a demon lord. The PCs must go on the perilous fetch quest to acquire the dagger, and when the try to kill the monster, they unleash the demon.
Part 4 has the demon buggering off after its' manifestation, and the PCs have to clean up its' path of destruction, figure out what the REAL killer mcguffin is, go on the proper fetch quest to acquire that item, and then confront the demon.
What Lord Pendragon said about reskinning stirges is essential. The biggest source of fear is uncertainty, so you won't get anywhere using monsters from the bestiary as written, no matter how scary they may seem. Because the players will know what they are, what they do, what their good saves are and how their special powers work.
At the same time, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just change things so the players don't recognize them.
Also, I highly recommend that there be innocents. The players can't just run around killing everything or it's a standard dungeon crawl in haunted house drag. The innocents serve to make the players hesitant and cautious, so there have to be consequences for killing them.
Make the BBEG friendly. When the time comes to confront him, have him still be friendly. The players should be confused enough by this time that he can get the drop on them. Using a burning skeleton for a BBEG isn't going to work. Have the skeleton appear to be holding the BBEG prisoner, and when the players "rescue" him he shows his true colors. Bonus points if he offers to heal and then casts Inflict...
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I would use the Church of Pharasma as a party ally.
Pharasma worship is big in Ustalav, and their neutral nature makes them work for every party.
Also, with undead as a common enemy, they have reasons to ally with the party, and provide them resources at times.
For enemy NPCs, consider Dhampir and Lychanthropes as good thematic choices.
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So I made a few decisions on the campaign. The PCs are going to wake up in the clutches of the cult, kinda at the end of another party’s grand adventure. All hell is breaking loose. They get to fight their way out while the other party is dealing with the big scarries in the back ground. The other party dies in the escape and the PCs end up with a Pathfinder’s satchel that they are asked to deliver to a Pathfinder Lodge. In the satchel is a book that writes the life of its owner. When you open it, it opens to a random page in that person’s life. It will basically be traveling plot hook.
They will see some scary stuff on their way out and once they escape the cult I won’t do anything overt with them for a while so when they come back it will have punch.
I love reskinning. I am thinking of having a lot (but far from all) of my undead be alchemical instead of supernatural so they are reskinned constructs.
