I'm something of a horror buff. I like my horror games and movies to instill a sense of dread and paranoia that lingers for days. Amnesia comes to mind.
Back in the day, Ravenloft was the closest D&D came to true horror. From cult classics like ghosts, vampires and werewolves to more disturbing concepts, like a demented woman who guts her guests and turns them into clockwork dolls, it was a campaign setting that had something for everyone.
So, what do YOU do to bring horror to the game? How do you give your players lingering nightmares? From lighting and atmosphere, to music and sound effects to the stories and foes of the game, its self, what techniques do (or WOULD) you employ to terrify your players on the deepest levels?
The tricky part is getting the players to view NPCs as people--to actually care about them, even. Then you have one possessed by an eldritch infection, or pull a Nina Tucker on them. "It hurts, Big Brother..."
Real-world lighting helps, too, as does establishing a less comic atmosphere of play where OOC jokes and the like are kept to a minimum.
pull a Nina Tucker on them. "It hurts, Big Brother...
Chills, bro. Every time I think of that scene, chills.
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In my experience 3.x (and therefore probably also PF) are not very suited for classic horror.
Horror thrives on a lack of knowledge, and difficulty coping with consequences. The monster is far scarier when you don't know much about it, and injuries are scarier if you never seem to be able to fully heal them.
In 3.x/PF, that's not normally the case. As soon as you determine the creature type of the monster you're facing you can start making informed decisions about what saving throws to target, whether it'd be better to fight melee or at range and so forth. And any harm can eventually be used; even things that eat your soul can be fixed with a Wish or Miracle. It's just a matter of how much you're willing to spend.
So if we want to do horror, we start at a big disadvantage. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's a lot harder. It might require minor or major house rules, and it will certainly require a clever GM. I think it also requires to make a mental "switch" to a more horror-ish mindset, rather than the "Die Hard" mindset that's sort of the default state in PF.
I'll think about this today. I don't have solutions yet, although I believe they exist, and I'm interested in other peoples' ideas.
It helps to be very good at describing scenes and situations. Finding out what a player's real life phobias are can be a boon, as you can work those into a game. Another handy trick to keep players nervous is to just occasionally roll a die behind the screen and don't say anything about it. Have them roll Perception checks but no matter what they roll tell them they see nothing, but they have the feeling of being watched.
Practice writing out descriptions of horrific things until you can "see" them, and then just paint the picture for your players. The PF rules don't handle the horror genre well, but these things have worked for me. Just take the creepiness in your head or from your favorite movies and translate it to your GM style. I guarantee your players will have goosebumps.
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Adding detail will help. You can say they enter the dungeon through the door (which is true) but if you discribe the heads on spikes before the door, the blood dripping from the wall and a guy who just had his legs amputated trying to say "kill me, kill me) while throwing up blood and putting his intestines back in his body could suggest a scarier encounter. Also, the books of the damned series (PF) undead /demons revisited and hordes of the abyss (3.5) provide thematically good monsters.
Ohh. The revisited book are also Pathfinder. Little mistake there.
What about external aspects? Do you guys use music, lighting or props to set the mood?
I try to avoid campaign-long horror themes, because many players grow fatalistic and lose the will to survive that is so essential to suspense. Running regular PF, I tend to introduce the occasional creepy adventure between more optimistic, heroic or humorous adventures; that way the PCs have more attachment to their characters' lives...
Thats a great idea. If you don't care if you live or die it isn't horror any more. Then again, if you're supremely confident in the face of otherworldly terror it's not horror, it's a Riddick movie. So, without alienating the players and having them quit, how would we take away the characters' confidence in their own abilities without resorting to villainous Deus ex Machinas? My DM just has a habit of giving the villain's minions magical items, typically rings or amulets of recall and the like, up until what she intends to be the final confrontation.
Speaking of sanity, what are some good ways to bring that aspect into the game. Call of Cthulhu had Sanity Points, as I recall, that were tracked like HP. Run out of SP, you go crazy and its game over. And World of Darkness has Morality; that gets too low and you become a slathering amoral fiend (and, thus, no longer a PC; essentially, game over). How could we go about bringing similar mechanics to Pathfinder?
What about external aspects? Do you guys use music, lighting or props to set the mood?
I try to avoid campaign-long horror themes, because many players grow fatalistic and lose the will to survive that is so essential to suspense. Running regular PF, I tend to introduce the occasional creepy adventure between more optimistic, heroic or humorous adventures; that way the PCs have more attachment to their characters' lives...Thats a great idea. If you don't care if you live or die it isn't horror any more. Then again, if you're supremely confident in the face of otherworldly terror it's not horror, it's a Riddick movie. So, without alienating the players and having them quit, how would we take away the characters' confidence in their own abilities without resorting to villainous Deus ex Machinas? My DM just has a habit of giving the villain's minions magical items, typically rings or amulets of recall and the like, up until what she intends to be the final confrontation.
Speaking of sanity, what are some good ways to bring that aspect into the game. Call of Cthulhu had Sanity Points, as I recall, that were tracked like HP. Run out of SP, you go crazy and its game over. And World of Darkness has Morality; that gets too low and you become a slathering amoral fiend (and, thus, no longer a PC; essentially, game over). How could we go about bringing similar mechanics to Pathfinder?
I think some music and/or low lighting is a plus. But don't go too far. When the GM or host goes to far in trying to set the horror mood it just feels like gaming in a cheesy Halloween-ish little kid scare barn.
I also agree with the occasional horror themed adventure being better than a whole campaign. We are currently in Carrion Crown that the GM has tried to modify up into full Ravenloft horror. It is becoming blasé and we're sometimes kinda of getting the attitude of let's just get this over with so we can move on to something else.
I think the opponent things that up the horror level are unexpected (but still a bit foreshadowed) capabilities or defenses.
You have a blaster sorcerer, well the legends talked about how this thing was not hindered by any weather. Actually it has resistance of 20 vs. all energy types. Note: Since it is a unique monster, I would not let just a normal knowledge check find out everything. It would find out about the base creature and any obvious templates but not all the unique stuff. A really good check would provide them with more legends.
A monster that destroys gear tends to horrify many players. Look how much hate there is for a rust monster. Maybe a creature that drains the magic out of things.
Having to fight a ghost or shadow in a null magic zone.
Curses, diseases, or poisons that are much more difficult to get rid of than normal. So maybe a curse that messes with vision. Take a -1 penalty on perception and ranged attack rolls. But the DC to remove the curse is say 8 points higher than usual. So they may have to live with it for a while before they can find someone high enough level to remove it.
For music I'd suggest nearly anything by Nox Arcana.
The tricky part is getting the players to view NPCs as people--to actually care about them, even. Then you have one possessed by an eldritch infection, or pull a Nina Tucker on them. "It hurts, Big Brother..."
Real-world lighting helps, too, as does establishing a less comic atmosphere of play where OOC jokes and the like are kept to a minimum.
Ah, that example does strike at the heart of the matter: to get the audience to care, you need them to be invested in the characters. If it is all 'dark, gloom, mope' all the time, then people aren't surprised or broken up when things go bad. Great tragedy can't exist without great joy.
I'd also like to reference a post in a different thread to show how even a silly concept can be made horrifying.
The problem with all the little details that makes horror better than "and BOO! there was a ghost behind the bookcase" is that, unlike in a horror movie, the characters in this game will listen when the players scream 'don't go in there!'. Referencing my link, your player will not hesitate to throw a fireball at that thing as soon as you begin describing the scene.
I'm going to reference you to an article by Rich Burlew on Texturing. This should help you not only add verisimilitude to the world, which furthers investment in it, but it also means that the players will not be able to use basic metaknowledge to get around the horror.
On an added note: how about changing how knowledge works? Maybe make it a skill that needs reference books? That way, people won't immediately know what kind of creature they are facing, and as such they have to waste actions trying to find out what works. Imagine the wizard freaking out as he blows 3 rounds trying to find the poor save.
And what if you tried to use monsters specifically designed to throw them for a loop? I mean, I seem to remember that there is at least one type of plant creature that makes 'zombies' that obviously do not work on negative energy, and as such avoid the problem of a cleric's channel. The bestiary is full of creatures designed to play with the players' expectations for your advantage.
A monster that destroys gear tends to horrify many players. Look how much hate there is for a rust monster. Maybe a creature that drains the magic out of things.
That brings to mind a certain 3.5 monster. I cant remember the name but it was a ball of mist out of which mouths and eyes and claws would form and dissolve. I think it was an aberration. It ate magic; taking spells per day and prepared spells, consuming charges from magic items, even temporarily (or maybe it was permanently...) disenchanting non-charged items.
I remember it was in Monsters of Faerun.
Honestly, I am not sure pathfinder is a great system for horror. Its sort of designed for things to be fair. Its a really delicate balancing act if you want them to be unfair but not to simply overwhelm the party and be done with it. Horror by its nature requires an uneven situation. Horror themed games generally have much weaker characters with some kind of resource that gives them a chance.
I'd probably pull some pages from some more thematic games to give me the means I need to get a horror game working in pathfinder.
I would use hero points (bare with me here, i know you dont want to power up characters) and then borrow a concept from fate.
Give them aspects. Except, those aspects are all phobias. Come up with a list of phobias/mental ticks and disorders to choose from. The key here is that you give them a reason to embrace the negative aspects of that aspect.
So something like 'terrified of the dark'. The player doesnt HAVE to flip out at night. But if he plays up the fear in his character and acts in a way that adds to the mood, and theme of the game when you guys enter the creepy poorly lit crypt, you grant him a hero point.
Later on, when the faceless evil puts out everyones sources of light, he can choose to either embrace his fear from a roleplay perspective, OR pay a hero point to ignore it, THIS TIME.
Thats how invoking an aspect works. When the player invokes it, he roleplays up the aspect, gets a reward (hero point). Later on when it would be a very negative situation, the dm invokes it, and the player can either embrace it and gain a hero point or spend a hero point to ignore the aspect for the moment and act normally.
Hero points could also be used for the normal things (save yourself from death, gain inspiration, pop something into the narrative, or boost roles). But the fact that there is a reward for buying into the fear and horror theme means you arent working against your players trying to force them in the mindset of horror they are in there with you.
I think i'd give each player a phobia (something i know will come up) and a mental issue of some kind that I also am confident will come up. Something like fragile sanity, or doesnt play well with others, or traumatic past/post traumatic stress disorder.
The next thing i would do is cut 9 level casters out of the game entirely. Magic offers too many easy solutions to situations. Leave 6 level casters because the game needs magic to function, but they wont have the raw magical umph to have constant ready solutions.
Honestly, I am not sure pathfinder is a great system for horror. Its sort of designed for things to be fair. Its a really delicate balancing act if you want them to be unfair but not to simply overwhelm the party and be done with it. Horror by its nature requires an uneven situation. Horror themed games generally have much weaker characters with some kind of resource that gives them a chance.
It's intersting that the most frequently occuring theme in published Paizo adventures is a cult of some dark god or eldritch horror. Seriously, it's been in almost half of the adventures/modules I've purchased so far (and I got those on subscription or via a blind buy, so there should be little in the way of selection bias here). Clearly someone at Paizo thinks the system works for horror. It isn't going to be Call of Cthulhu, but you can get a good horror feel with a little preparation and a willingness to act it out for the sake of performance without worrying about looking like an idiot.
As for fairness, I find that this is more an expectation of certain kinds of player, especially frequent forum posters and Society players, than of the general public. That is fine; for Society, it's even necessary to the nature of the campaign. But a lot of supposed problems go away when you toss away the idea that every encounter must be within a certain CR range and the PCs should always be able to overcome any obstacle head-on. Plus, it provides epic story-bait when the players charge in anyway and somehow manage to take out a gathering of great wyrms at far below any reasonable level--or get utterly destroyed as an example to the players' next characters on getting in over your head.
I definitely agree that at high levels, horror doesn't really work any more, as the players (especially casters) tend to have reality-bending powers that break typical horror constraints, bypass tropes, and rival those of most staple horror creatures.
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Honestly, I am not sure pathfinder is a great system for horror. Its sort of designed for things to be fair. Its a really delicate balancing act if you want them to be unfair but not to simply overwhelm the party and be done with it. Horror by its nature requires an uneven situation. Horror themed games generally have much weaker characters with some kind of resource that gives them a chance.It's intersting that the most frequently occuring theme in published Paizo adventures is a cult of some dark god or eldritch horror. Seriously, it's been in almost half of the adventures/modules I've purchased so far (and I got those on subscription or via a blind buy, so there should be little in the way of selection bias here). Clearly someone at Paizo thinks the system works for horror. It isn't going to be Call of Cthulhu, but you can get a good horror feel with a little preparation and a willingness to act it out for the sake of performance without worrying about looking like an idiot.
As for fairness, I find that this is more an expectation of certain kinds of player, especially frequent forum posters and Society players, than of the general public. That is fine; for Society, it's even necessary to the nature of the campaign. But a lot of supposed problems go away when you toss away the idea that every encounter must be within a certain CR range and the PCs should always be able to overcome any obstacle head-on. Plus, it provides epic story-bait when the players charge in anyway and somehow manage to take out a gathering of great wyrms at far below any reasonable level--or get utterly destroyed as an example to the players' next characters on getting in over your head.
I definitely agree that at high levels, horror doesn't really work any more, as the players (especially casters) tend to have reality-bending powers that break typical horror constraints, bypass tropes, and rival those of most staple horror creatures.
I am not talking about all encounters being a certain CR. I am talking about the underlying function of the game.
In pathfinder, everything is binary. You dont kind of succeed or kind of fail. You either succeed or fail. If the odds are against you, you generally flat out fail. That isnt an interesting result and generally not a fun result. If an attack isses, a spell is saved, the action does nothing. We move on to the next turn, effectively the player has done nothing, then waits 10 minutes for his turn to come back around, and potentially does nothing again.
Other systems have sorts of degrees of success, or partial posisitive results even in the case of failure. This lends itself more to a horror theme, where say you might risk getting caught by the evil creatures claws, but you get in a hit.
On the flip side, success can often be very severe. Creatures way out of a character's league can often kill them in a single turn. Dieing a heroic death cam be fun. A level 5 player getting full attacked by a CR 11 dragon is not a heroic death, its a fly being swatted. To me a one round death is not fun. Thats a major problem that comes from unbalanced encounters.
Whats more, it is difficult to RUN in pathfinder. One of the the tropes of horror is to flee something too powerful or frightening to take on. This is very very difficult in pathfinder because of the turn based system of actions and the fact that higher level threats often have much more effective methods of movement and persuit then lower level characters. I guess the dm can just let the players run when they are outmatched, but that doesnt make alot of sense most of the time, and you have to come up with some pretty contrived reasons to let the party go. Again, not a great option in my mind.
Pathfinder doesnt lend itself well to a narrative style of play. Horror is very narrative. If everyone acted rationally and intelligently in a horror movie, there'd be no movie. In general pathfinder supports tactical and rational thinking, in which the players often have an easy time of imposing their will on the narrative. Particularly when magic even low level magic is involved. Oh no the druid fell into that pit separating him from the party and puting him in mortal peril in the evil creature's lair. Oh right, he's a bird now and flying away. Huh. Look out the thing from the darkness is going to get you...oh the cleric cast daylight...not so scary now is it. Pathfinder characters are like a group of MIT grad navy seals with the backing of the us military going into a horror movie. They are going to mess with the bad guy's plans.
Right, all good points. I know PF is very adaptable and it's VERY popular right now, but altho it's a nicely built square peg, it still doesnt fit all that well in a round hole.
One other note- do not try and demand that the Players to stop making jokes, etc. "YOU MUST TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!!!!!"= Doesn't work.
Also, My Dad was a WWII Vet from the Pacific Campaign, there were some unutterable real life horrors out there. One way they kept sane was the constant use of black/gallows humor.
So, yes, keep the silliness down, but a few dark witticisms are perfectly fitting.
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I had a lengthy reply typed up, but at the moment I'm having trouble with this part:
Pathfinder doesnt lend itself well to a narrative style of play.
I think we're playing different games.
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Pathfinder does a lot to neatly organize monsters; they have types, they have keyworded abilities, a consistent DR and energy resistance system, BAB related to (the number of!) HD, and so forth.
Consistency is not good for horror; uncertainty and ignorance are good for horror.
It's much scarier if you don't even know for sure what kind of monster you're fighting, and if your attacks will work on it, or why they don't.
For horror, I think an inconsistent game system like 2nd edition actually works better.
Pathfinder does a lot to neatly organize monsters; they have types, they have keyworded abilities, a consistent DR and energy resistance system, BAB related to (the number of!) HD, and so forth.
Consistency is not good for horror; uncertainty and ignorance are good for horror.
It's much scarier if you don't even know for sure what kind of monster you're fighting, and if your attacks will work on it, or why they don't.
For horror, I think an inconsistent game system like 2nd edition actually works better.
Well, I wouldn't say that necessarily. Tigers, bears, and sharks are creatures that are scary in real life because we can fully imagine what they would do to us if we are dragged into their realm (getting stalked through the forest at night by a creature that you cannot see, or being stranded in the middle of the ocean without a boat while the creatures of the depths look up at your helpless form)
They only become less scary when you have the proper tools to deal with them. With guns, nice boats, and cages (both to keep them in and out), you are just a squishy dessert.
Of course, getting that in the game without simply ramping up the CR, throwing enough encounters to drain resources, or severely limiting loot is hard.
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While its certainly true it takes more effort on the GM to make horror work well in D&D/PF, and agreed that there must be extensive amounts of the unknown especially in the setting to work effectively. Still when the setting work has been done for you, and specific mechanics are built-in to elevate the horror feel, its not as hard as you think. I also agree some systems not D&D/PF work better, or at least more easily to arrive at horror - that doesn't mean you cannot get horror to work in PF.
The Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG) by Rite Publishing attests to this completely. The setting is unlike anything you've ever played before - I think is scarier and more horror instilling than Ravenloft, and I'm a long time fan of Ravenloft. Kaidan is dark and gritty - it ain't wuxia, that's for sure.
PC Death in Kaidan is one of the most mysterious and dark concepts in any game of PF, the way the gods work are different, the way the government and all its members are undead, yet want to maintain the status quo since they are in charge. Kaidan is a police state with inquisitor spies (metsuki) looking over your shoulder all the time.
I am biased, but Kaidan is definitely a much darker place than Golarian.
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Asian horror movies are often AWESOME. Horror in oriental settings just gets me...its truly scary stuff.
Kaidan huh? That does sound interesting. I'll have to look into that one. It seems to me that magic in Pathfinder, at least in Golarion, is omnipresent. To the point that your average peasant isnt particularly amazed or even impressed with low-level magic. I feel this is something that blocks horror; if magic has an answer for everything and the cure for death is just a temple and a diamond away, whats left to fear?
How would one go about fixing this situation and setting up a low-magic campaign, something where the truly powerful spells are restricted to Outsiders, Dragons, Liches and the like, entities that have had centuries or millennia to hone and expand their powers?
Removing the 9th level spells is a start, but it still feels like a 5th level wizard's fireball levels the playing field quite a bit, unless the monster is immune to fire.
Also, on a case by case basis, how would YOU guys go about getting your players attached not only to their PCs but to the NPCs they meet? How do I make Nina Tucker being used by her "adoptive father" in a fleshwarping experiment something truly devastating and horrifying?
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The pf rule system is designed for epic heroic fantasy. It's designed to allow players to be superhuman, battling against titanic beasts, dragons, giants, etc. Basically, it's designed the opposite of what you would want for a good horror rule system. Horror stories usually star normal people in extreme circumstances. Pathfinder stars bad ass killing machines. If you just took the normal pf heroes and swapped them with average peasants in your standard dungeon crawl, you would have a horror story. So if you want to do horror with the pf system, you have your work cut out for you.
One way it can work is to have the horror happen to the NPCs. If the PCs had been there they could have stopped it, but the monster just keeps eating its way through everyone else and the heroes arrive to witness the aftermath.. etc. Works for the action horror monster Hunter type stories like van helsing.
While there are far better systems for playing in the horror genre I wouldn't rule out PF. PF can do something like Solomon Kane fairly well from low to 8ish level.
I'm nearly done running CC as we're starting the last book, its been fun had some genuine moments of suspense and horror but PF is not Call of Cthulhu or Kult.
Savage Worlds is another system to look at for horror on the pulpy side.
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Magic in Kaidan, like feudal Japan is the providence of the Ministry of Onmyodo, a branch of the imperial government responsible for training and licensing of arcane spellcasters, called Onmyoji wizard. All other arcane practitioners are outlaws, practicing at risk of their lives in secret. If caught agents of the shogun will arrest and execute them - no exceptions. So the common folk rarely see magic being practiced outside of divine roles, and they too are watched closely. Kaidan like feudal Japan is a police state. Although there are non-humans in Kaidan, they too live in hiding as their existence is not condoned by the state, foreigners (gaijin) are treated even worse.
The setting guides are still in development, though is close to finished. The Curse of the Golden Spear is an introductory trilogy of modules set in Kaidan (for levels 5 thru 7), and like Jade Regent AP, involves a party of non-Asian adventurers visiting the exotic far east. Much setting detail, mechanics and monsters are found in the appendices to those modules. The 3 modules are The Gift, Dim Spirit and Dark Path - be sure to read Endzeitgeist's review for spoilers and insight into what they contain.
There are 3 one-shot adventures: Up from Darkness (somebody mentioned amnesia...), Tolling of Tears, and Frozen Wind (this one is FREE!). There is also a mini-adventure/map product worth checking out called Haiku of Horror: Autumn Moon Bath House (I wrote, designed, illustrated and did the cartography for this one which is inspired by The Grudge.)
There are 2 class/faction guides: Way of the Yakuza and Way of the Samurai, though the latter is more than just the samurai class, rather the samurai social caste which includes rangers, paladins, wizards, gunslingers and samurai (archetypes for each, 4 for samurai).
3 Race Guides: In the Company of Kappa, In the Company of Henge, and In the Company of Tengu (we've got Kitsune and Korobokuru in development).
#30 Haunts for Kaidan is more than just a collection of Haunts, as several of them are associated with each other, and all fall within nine creepy tales for a dark and thorough background story for each.
Frozen Wind sounds interesting. And twas I who mentioned Amnesia; if your implying that Up from Darkness is like it, I HAVE to try it.
Up from Darkness is awesome. The dungeon is kind of weird, but don't let that get in your way. The adventure actually explores the Kaidan death mechanic, and PCs can probably expect to die multiple times in this single very deadly adventure with a shocker of a surprise at the end. And despite being one-shot, its doesn't feel like one - and this one is quite dark.
Frozen Wind was a convention scenario, it was already written and already had a map, when I stepped up by doing all the illustrations and cover design (we saved money by not paying an editor, so there's a few bugs in it) but its also a fun adventure. Its more survival horror, and even if you don't use the pre-gens, notice that there is very little healing available, which is part of what makes this one-shot extra scary. So don't include much healing capability if you run it.
Haiku of Horror: Autumn Moon Bath House is quite good as well - for my first fully designed product. I'm quite proud of that one. The ghost comes pre-stated at CR 6, 10, 14, 18 and 22, so ready to face any level of adventurers.
#30 Haunts for Kaidan is damn good too. With nine stories that could become upgraded to full adventures, making this even more worthwhile.
Kaidan is not just some made up Asian sounding name, it is Japanese for "ghost story". (I am half Japanese and setting authenticity is a big goal of mine).
And note, that while I was working on Way of the Yakuza, Paizo commissioned me to create the City of Kasai original hand-drawn map for The Empty Throne module of the JR AP, and I wrote some of the City of Kasai gazetteer. So I think Paizo, thinks I know what I'm doing as far as Asian fantasy goes... ;)
... The Curse of the Golden Spear is an introductory trilogy of modules set in Kaidan (for levels 5 thru 7), and like Jade Regent AP, involves a party of non-Asian adventurers visiting the exotic far east. Much setting detail, mechanics and monsters are found in the appendices to those modules. The 3 modules are The Gift, Dim Spirit and Dark Path - be sure to read Endzeitgeist's review for spoilers and insight into what they contain.
...
I will try not to spoil anything here.
We just played through the Curse of the Golden Spear and Up From Darkness. They were pretty good examples of horror in the PF rule set. (I did have to up-scale many of the encounters. With a fairly well built party they were just too easy. Certainly little horror if no threat.)
However, they did suffer some from the omnipresent evil. The PC's really quickly learned that basically anything that wasn't a commoner or animal was probably evil or at least in league with evil. So it was 'ok' in their minds to treat basically everything as an enemy. So a lot of the tricks, traps, and ambushes the modules set up weren't much of anything serious.
If I were re-running the series, I would make it a little less dark. there need to be some more good, helpful, allies, neutral, innocent bystanders on the island.
There is one clear group of potential allies that the PC's can make. I had to kinda coax them some because they had gotten to the point of "Just avoid or kill everything because it's all enemies."
Up From Darkness is pretty kool way for the PC's to get freaked out and learn more about Kaiden that otherwise only GM knows from reading the modules. I would suggest you run Up From Darkness after the first module of the Golden Spear trilogy.
It is a good set of adventures just try not to run it too constantly dark. I went too far that direction and it started off well then kinda fell a little bit flat because of it.
The players did all express interest in a follow on to the set. They really wanted to go back and get even with some the enemies that had been persecuting them.
@Kydeem de'Morcaine - when I ran the playtest with my group before publication, I played up the henge in Dim Spirit, and the players latched onto them as friendlies right away. I played up the heroic response of the PCs in defense of Agoya, by all locals (non-officials). So my group wasn't quite as anti-Kaidanese as your group was. In fact by the end of Dark Path, they weren't planning on leaving Kaidan - they stayed and I winged a short campaign of a few more levels there.
Yeah, like I said I put too much emphasis on the oppressive, corrupt, and villainous everything. (I think a lot of us do that when we try to run a horror campaign or adventure because that seems to be the way many of the novels are written.) By the time they encountered the Henge the decision was just whether to try and sneak by or actually attack. Talking wasn't even occurring to them by that point.
I had a lengthy reply typed up, but at the moment I'm having trouble with this part:
Pathfinder doesnt lend itself well to a narrative style of play.I think we're playing different games.
Its possible, or its possible our definition of narrative style game is different. For me, a game like fate, where you have far more loosely defined success and failure, as well as resources and rules explicately for changing and manipulating the narrative, is a narrative game.
Pathfinder on the other hand is quite extensively defined. You cant say, 'the bad guy sneaks off into the night, jumping from roof top to roof top'. He has to make stealth checks, then acrobatics checks, all the while possibly stopped by the pcs who get to act in response to each of those. When I say narrative, I literally mean narration. Where much of the action is described by the players or dm, and the general success or failure is all that is described by the rules.
Pathfinder the rules describe the action, rather extensively. And since dice are involved in almost everything, as well as short, 6 second 'turns' its pretty much not possible to narrate an action scene. Granted the dm can handwave it. But that is a pretty considerable houserule to how the game is designed to function.
A patsy to drive home the danger. Have something horrible happen to an NPC the players know is at least as powerful as them. That lets them know right off the bat that things are dangerous out there.
Horror is about lack of control among other things mentioned above. In Pathfinder players rarely feel out of control because of the CR/EL system they expect challenges they can overcome. So do everything you can to take that control away. Alter the environment to affect movement and vision. Take away expected options by including "corrupted areas" that affect healing and rest. Change up the monsters so that they are not recognizable or do surprising things.
Obviously, you need to make sure ahead of time that your players know what they are getting into and are OK with it. Some players can get pretty bent out of shape if you start modifying rules or affecting the perfect optimization of their characters.
Or just ability or level drain them. That scares the pants off PCs.
...Horror stories usually star normal people in extreme circumstances. Pathfinder stars bad ass killing machines. If you just took the normal pf heroes and swapped them with average peasants in your standard dungeon crawl, you would have a horror story...This is a good point; you have to work on the right kind of horror. The scale of terrible and nasty things happening on a daily basis in a Pathfinder world is pretty high, so there's not a lot of horror to be had in overwhelming force all by itself. Players run away from overwhelming force, but giant monsters are regarded from a cold, out-of-game, tactical angle that doesn't evoke much real emotion...
I have had a GM that every so often we would have to make a horror check to keep from going a little bit more insane because of something we saw.
But mostly we (the players) are like "Why? What's so horrifying about that compared to everything else?"
Several of them have been things that in RL I don't think I would be too horrified by it. Ok, it's gross and disgusting. I might lose my lunch from the smell. But going insane just from seeing a ghoul eating dead bodies? Nah I don't think so.
My adventurer who has spent the last several years fighting undead, necromancers, and various demons?!? I don't think he would hardly even notice.
Horror is about lack of control among other things mentioned above.
That's one sort of "horror'. (And in fact there's few "horror" films I enjoy as watching helpless naifs being butchered by all powerful omnipotent omnicient monster is not fun to me. )
But the "monster hunting" genre of horror is still horror. Penny Dreadful. Bram Stokers Dracula. In fact, by and large CoC is "monster hunting".
As an aside, I know that much of what makes horror is audible description then letting the imaginations of the players see it in their heads. Kind of counter to that, I am currently working on creating a map object set for use with VT apps or using a graphics app to create printed maps that fit the theme: gothic horror.
I hate that you can't post photos in this forum, so if you guys want to see what I'm working on, check out my G+ community, the last dozen or so map objects are all of the gothic horror niche in photo-realistic style.
One thing I forgot to mention in my initial post is my strong dislike of the fact that in Pathfinder, virtually any condition can be undone. I know players hate to ever be at any kind of disadvantage, and for playability reasons means must exist to remove most of them, but spells like remove curse and heal hinder a lot of the horror themes because - honestly - as long as you're rich, bad things that happen to you are only temporary. (And all 2nd+ level PCs are rich.)
Again, I'm not down on healing in and of itself - relying on natural healing is a drag. But easily removed conditions don't help an adventure writer who wants his players to feel like they're risking real dangers...
I was considering adding both caster level checks (or maybe heal checks) as part of condition removals and cure spells.
And the recipient gets the fatigued condition for X period of time. If already fatigued then exhausted or staggered or something like that.That seems to fit with the legends and novels of similar things. In most novels that I have read, the person doing the magical healing still needs to understand what they are doing and the person getting healed does not just instantly jump out of bed ready to fight. They still take time to completely recover.
Just at the "what if" thought stage so far...
...as long as you're rich, bad things that happen to you are only temporary...
Just like in the real world. #social_commentary
I like that idea, Kydeem. I dont know about caster checks, but I can see a heal check. That way your average healer cant just ignore the HEAL skill.
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People keep harping on the system as a detriment to, or prohibitive of, horror. Hogwash. The system you are playing has little bearing on the level of horror you bring to the game. The d20 variant of Call of Cthulhu was every bit as capable a means of framing a horror game as was the original by Chaosium. Pathfinder can be as useful a system for horror as Gumshoe or its variants.
Horror is in the balance of what is controllable and what is not. You don't need to measure every aspect of every game by a mechanic touchable by the players. There is a mindset that too many gamers have, that each and every element of the game must be based on a nameable spell, power, trait, ability score, whatever. But this is no more true in your horror games than it is in your straight-ahead fantasy games. Going back to your favorite published adventures, how many of the best elements were simply things the author wrote in, that had no mechanical explanation? They were situational. You couldn't just dispel them or teleport around them. You had to DEAL WITH THEM.
Those elements can exist outside the mechanic in ANY system, including Pathfinder. It is not the game that is limited or too bound by rules to be horrific. It is the mind of the player.
Now that my rant is over, let's get back to what is controllable and what is not. I have run many, many successful horror campaigns in d20 Modern, d20 CoC, homebrew systems, and others. Horror is my thing, you might say. My mother raised me on horror flicks and novels. There are many tried and true tropes that go into creating atmosphere -- atmospheric music, low lighting and suspending levity for the real world elements; describing noises, smells, blood, oddly placed body parts and sudden jumps and whatnot in the game...
But in a tabletop RPG, the elements that are most going to create tension are going to be recurring things beyond the players' control. I have run many modern campaigns based on the Silent Hill world. (Some here may be sick of me bringing this up.) But there are many recurring elements in those video games that illustrate what I am saying quite well. Here's just one:
In a couple of the games, there is a recurring red light or mist, which kills and must be fled from. You cannot fight it. You must figure out what it represents. Only by figuring it out can you defeat it. In the meantime, you must run from it. You cannot fight it. The dread of this thing reappearing is palpable. You cannot be 100% sure of when it will reappear. But the more you go on, the more sure you are that it is coming. Sometimes, just when you think you've ditched it, it catches up.
This combination of a thing that can only be defeated by the discovery-of and resolution-of, some foul secret, and that may reappear at any time, is a tension builder of high caliber.
The breaking of convention is also always effective. Be imaginative. Stumbling upon the scene of a grisly murder, for instance, is always disturbing. But when there is an element of the unexplainable, and it occurs at a most unexpected time, it's many times more effective. Imagine a group of friends laughing during a night out, opening the door to the pizza place, and everybody inside is sitting upright, at the tables, their hands on beer mugs, forks, holding slices, but each and every person's head has been sliced cleanly off, and they are all missing. It is this sort of combination of the macabre and the bizarre that makes a film like Kubrik's Shining so frightening.
... Going back to your favorite published adventures, how many of the best elements were simply things the author wrote in, that had no mechanical explanation? They were situational. You couldn't just dispel them or teleport around them. You had to DEAL WITH THEM ...
Depending upon what you mean by this, very few of them.
Usually when the author has just written in something that "had no mechanical explanation" it did not feel like horror. It felt like "ah, ok this is one of those things where I have no influence, I'm just watching the author's story unfold again." it is so random and silly that it completely throws me out of the story and all I can think about is "well that doesn't make any sense it doesn't have anything to do with anything," or it is ridiculous that the author/GM expected the characters to come up with the 'only' solution.
A 2nd level group exploring a haunted fortress.
Clear the ground floor without too much problem. Large-ish single room partial collapsed upstairs and known extensive haunted underground. Almost any group goes upstairs next.
Mounted undead bandit kinda ghost-ish kinda wight-ish in the upstairs. Chases us outside. Can't hurt it at all inside. Ride-by attacks with a scythe. Fairly damaging. Enough to be a serious threat but not instant TPK for a level 2 party. Good so far. Party can slightly harm the thing. However, it regenerates almost as fast as we can do damage.
After a few ride-by attacks it starts hooking people with the scythe, galloping through the air to the top of the building, then flinging them off from 20' in the air.
We had a holy sword, it was the only thing we had that could damage it except for 2 lay on hands (or 1 channel) from the paladin. But only because our scout had jumped in a muddy pool to avoid a swarm. If we had fought the swarm (which is normal for a group) we would have had nothing to damage it. No knowledge checks, legends, or information hinted at the swords existence much less its location.
When only 1 guy was still upright, the GM told us what the 'solution' was to avoid a TPK.
The only way to kill the thing (and it is too fast to run away from) was for the person with the holy sword to get it to chase you off the path but then just before it catches you, throw the holy sword on the ground in front of it so it has to jump over it off the path. No knowledge checks, legends, or information gave any hint to this solution. It was a unique monster that no one had survived encountering so you can't find out anything about it.
Who would think of throwing the only weapon we have that is doing it any damage on the ground in front of it? None of us.
Turns out the author expected the party to go down into the dangerous haunted underground without even glancing upstairs first. If you had completely cleared the underground (several days) before the upstairs you would be 4th level and could be expected to survive longer while you experimented to come up with the solution to the CR 9+ rider.
Additionally the 'solution' was supposed to be obvious, because the players would recognize it from the nearly identical description in a particular horror novel.
So the author was counting on the players jumping in a slimy pool without reason, not looking upstairs for several trips into the fortress and having read one particular horror novel (or somehow coming up with throwing your only weapon in the dirt while not on the path).
If the GM hadn't taken pity on us. it would have quite literally TPK'd several parties of level 2 characters before we gave up on the campaign. I don't think any of us would have ever tried that experiment.
That was not horror to us. If real life people were in that situation. Yes, they would have been horrified (for a very short time). But for us as players it was just confusing and disappointing.
One of the players said to the GM, "So the only way to get through this book is 1) GM pity, 2) never look upstairs, 3) to not look upstairs for at least several days, randomly jump in a slimy pool, have read/remembered one particular novel, and then metagame that knowledge into our PC's actions?!?"
"Yes."
Shakes head, "Whatever, let's just move on."
Haunted large cast iron pot bellied coal burning stove. Stumps around the room shooting smoke and sparks at people while beating on the with the twin chimneys. Party level 3.
Weapons, spells, even channels do not appear to harm it.
The only way to kill this one was to shoot at the hinges with Ray of Frost (or other cold attack). Could strike at the stove. You had to specifically say you were aiming at the door hinges. Once the hinges had taken 10 points of damage, the door would fall off. Then you had to poor water into the thing until the fire went out.
Apparently the GM had the option of saying a crital hit struck the hinges. Unfortunately our few critical hit did not get through the DR of 15/-, so we didn't learn about that.
We eventually left, healed up, and tried again still without success. After we finished everything else in the fortress we came back to this at 5th level and still couldn't get past it.
One hole wing of the dungeon did not get cleared (and several plot critical clues were not discovered) because we couldn't get past the stove.
Later the GM told us there were clues available on this one. But you had to ask 1 particular guy on the outskirts of town who had been completely uninformed about anything else and score a 30 on your diplomacy check. We had no one in the group who could get a 30 at level 3. When we got to level 5 we had one guy that could if he rolled a 20.
Again the author/GM had put in something that was not in the mechanics and we had not learned. Again, there was no horror. It was just, "{sigh} Another nonsensical impossible thing. Just skip it and go on."
The author/GM introduced elements with "no mechanical explanation" in the system. In fact they were if anything flat contradictory to the system we as players are familiar with. There might have been a little bit of horror right at the start as we realized it would be a dangerous fight. But it quickly gave way to just frustration, as we learned there was nothing we could do.
If there had been some way to reasonably expect the party to learn or figure out what to do.
If one of the players had been able to say, "Hey maybe this was what the Governor was talking about. Try X on it." Then there might have been some horror when presented with the problem then some satisfaction when we figured it out. There wasn't.
When the rules say you can't do something and/or it will have no effect, why would it even occur to you to try it?
Maybe a more experience GM would have realized that success was impossible without some more clues and found a way to provide them. But as presented it was frustrating not horrifying.
Oh, I don't know. An inescapable event is OK with players if 1) it doesn't result in TPK, 2) it has some recognizable in-game cause, and 3) they recognize that there was something they could have done to avoid it, but didn't. I admit that's a rare trifecta...
Here's something that happened once when I was running 'Against the Giants'...
** spoiler omitted **
I would have had no problem with that if I had been in the party. It made sense, at least sorta fits the known game mechanics, And they could have avoided. Should never expect intelligent opponents to just do nothing while being raided.
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Well, the event wasn't inescapable at the beginning of the game session, it just became so due to the players' actions.
Stuff happens differently due to things the players chose to do. That's making the players' choices matter; that's agency.
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As for "beyond the rules" some ways of doing that are more acceptable than others. Giving a monster a nonstandard ability is fine. Giving a wizard a variant spell that imposes a different condition than normal is fine.
Giving someone a condition that doesn't do what that condition normally does, that's hanky. That's undermining the whole "conveniently standardized" idea of conditions. Best avoided or done only sparingly. Fortunately for horror, there's a lot of precedent for conditions that won't go away until something special is done.
I do think hard-to-remove conditions are a good tool for increasing the sense of being in deep trouble. Note that a condition can be hard-to-remove without any hanky rule modding, just by having the NPC cleric with Restoration prepared die horribly at an appropriate moment....
... Going back to your favorite published adventures, how many of the best elements were simply things the author wrote in, that had no mechanical explanation? They were situational. You couldn't just dispel them or teleport around them. You had to DEAL WITH THEM ...Depending upon what you mean by this, very few of them.
Usually when the author has just written in something that "had no mechanical explanation" it did not feel like horror. It felt like "ah, ok this is one of those things where I have no influence, I'm just watching the author's story unfold again." it is so random and silly that it completely throws me out of the story and all I can think about is "well that doesn't make any sense it doesn't have anything to do with anything," or it is ridiculous that the author/GM expected the characters to come up with the 'only' solution.
** spoiler omitted **...
I don't think you understood what I meant (you probably stopped at that part and did not read the rest). I'm talking about a story element which you must involve yourself to solve a mystery.
Just because you cannot dispel it with dispel magic, does not mean you cannot interact with it, and resolve it through character action and interaction.
You are limiting yourself.
The simplest example I can give of this is that you might have to find a certain key to get through a door. A more complex example might be that you have to investigate the history of a house in order to resolve some issue for a ghost after you find that no amount of fighting or exorcising it otherwise works (it eventually comes back). These elements may go beyond what the Bestiary says about the creature in particular, or what the rulebook says about a particular spell. But that is the point of the thread, isn't it? The OP asked how terror and horror work. Well, they are not dependent on what spell you can cast at X level. They are independent of that. They are more bound in story, which is why you should be able to use any system and make a good horror game.
As I said.
And many, many successful modules since the 1970s bare this out. Story trumps rules. Sorry guys. It just does. At least where horror is concerned.
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Well, Horror is a mood, and in d20 games it is a mood that can be easily broken by someone's phone beeping at the wrong time. Doing the truly scary in a RPG isn't impossible but many of the tools used to shock, frighten, or horrify people, we as GMs just simply lack. What we do have to work with can also be easily shattered.
There is plenty of material on running horror in a RPG. Heroes of Horror from WotC, Ravenloft, OGL Horror, Call of Cthulhu, and Darkness and Dread. Each has little tips to help scare the players and not just the characters.
Depends on the type of horror you are running. You can take a monster the players do know all too well, and put it in a campaign where the players have less resources then normal and that mundane monster can become deadly if the players know they don't have the means to by-pass the DR or to stop the regeneration. (This is a flip on the traditional approach of revealing as little of the monster as possible which is also a valid tactic)
Taking away powers the players normally have access to can also be scary (even if its only temporary). What if something is interfering and the Cleric can no longer gain spells from their god or the wizard is unable to cast spells? Are they losing their powers while in certain places, or while in the presence of certain creatures? Is it consistent or random? Feeling helpless is a cornerstone of terror.
Then throw on top some unusually activity to unnerve them. Perhaps as the weather turns worse it begins to rain eyes. Maybe the next town the players come across, everyone is gone, or the townsfolk seem kinda creepy, both of which leave the players feeling isolated.
What if the players are facing something that not only can see into their minds, but actively speaking to them in the back of their mind. While talking to the town guard, the monster speaks to them, tells them not to trust the watch, the guards are corrupt. While in the library researching the monster, the monster tells them "No not that book, you want the one next to it, consult chapter 5." "No not the silver daggers, you will want cold iron and holy water." The monster could be playing with them to mislead them, if they think its lying they might make the wrong choices by being told the right ones. The monster might be toying with them if it feels they are too weak to actually defeat it.
These are just a few ideas from the many we have to work with. Horror isn't easy in a table set up. But like any problem there are solutions that can be worked through. The goal is to unnerve the players and their characters by what we do in game and outside the game. The primary way to do this is by taking some control of the situation away from the players. Being overwhelmed, isolated, without options, without resources, being in the dark, not knowing what is going on, no escape. By all means mix and match these ideas, though don't us all at once, might be too much then.