Halloween's coming up, and my group is interested in some quick horror. What do you recommend? I hear Doom Comes to Dustpawn might be suitable.
For me, it's The Skinsaw Murders. Especially the haunted house section.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The original Ravenloft adventure was pretty awesome.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
For some creepy and authentic Japanese horror, check out Rite Publishing Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG) one-shots:
Frozen Wind (survivalist horror - FREE PDF).
Up from Darkness (probably the creepiest).
Haiku of Horror: Autumn Moon Bath House, I wrote this one - its more an extended encounter and map product, though. Inspired by The Grudge movie.
Full module, and very creepy, The Gift - Curse of the Golden Spear: Part 1 - and great intro to Kaidan.
With included, unique undead monsters, there's #30 Haunts for Kaidan - haunt encounters with lots of creepy backstory, and easy to cobble together side quests or full modules.
Read the reviews.
There are lots of great ravenloft adventures, as blope said. The challenging part will be converting the older 2nd edition rules to pathfinder.
I've actually done this, and it isn't as difficult as it may seem at first.
First off, monsters are simple - just use the stats straight out of the pathfinder bestiary. Sometimes you'll find monsters in the older books that were never transfered over to the newer systems. That's ok, you can either redesign it for PF or just replace it with another monster from the bestiaries. I recommend the latter because it's less work, and you'll need to reduce your work load for...
#2: transferring stats of people. There may be a lot of soldiers, classed NPCs, etc... These you'll have to rebuild yourself. I recommend hero lab for its quick character creation and printable character sheets. Make easy templates for mooks and other baddies that are similar, such as bandits, soldiers, etc... If they're low enough CR or level, then grab stats straight from Paizo's NPC codex (available online for free on PRD). Named characters will be more difficult - again hero lab is your best bet. I actually use sCoreForge, but the most recent editions have proven the excel based program to be too buggy and renders it useless, but if you grab an older version (older than v6), you'll be good to go. It is slower, but it is free.
Lastly, horror settings are all about atmosphere. How you spin the story and weave the setting can make or break the feel. Don't let your players tell jokes, lee the lights dim, and remember that humans have a primal fear of the unknown, so keep the mystery up!
Also, check out my recommendations for how to maintain atmosphere: Link!
|
For some creepy and authentic Japanese horror, check out Rite Publishing Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG) one-shots:
Frozen Wind (survivalist horror - FREE PDF).
Up from Darkness (probably the creepiest).
Haiku of Horror: Autumn Moon Bath House, I wrote this one - its more an extended encounter and map product, though. Inspired by The Grudge movie.
Full module, and very creepy, The Gift - Curse of the Golden Spear: Part 1 - and great intro to Kaidan.
With included, unique undead monsters, there's #30 Haunts for Kaidan - haunt encounters with lots of creepy backstory, and easy to cobble together side quests or full modules.
Read the reviews.
Most of those links come back to this thread.
Most of those links come back to this thread.
Then let's try it again.
Here's a link to #30 Haunts of Kaidan (which is on a separate area than the rest of the Kaidan products.)
Most of my other Kaidan products are Here.
Red Eye of Azathoth
Has he been smoking dope again?
"The Styes"
"Shut In"
A lot of the Paizo-era Dungeon adventures were pretty creepy, come to think of it.
|
|
Horror adventures abound in Rise of the Runelords.
Haunted house portion of Skinsaw Murders
Mama Graul section of Hook Mountain Massacre
I think the absolutely creepiest portion of RotRL was just a simple encounter that my players were most freaked out by, which was the scarecrow encounter from Book 2. I added some rat swarms, but I think the idea of not knowing which scarecrows were real or not and not being to see where things were coming from (but hearing them) among the corn upset my PCs the most. To be fair I tripled the number of scarecrows (adding fake ones), and I had the scary ones swapping places with fake ones after the party had checked out and determined which ones were "safe" which really disturbed them.
I think if you added a few of these type encounters to something like Feast of Ravenmoor, you would have a truly Hallowe'en worthy adventure.
There are lots of great ravenloft adventures, as blope said. The challenging part will be converting the older 2nd edition rules to pathfinder.
There is also Return to Castle Ravenloft, which is already OGL compliant (if I remember right). It is quite a good module, though certainly not a one night'er.
Red Eye of Azathoth is probably a great (series of) Call of Cthulhu one shot(s) for Halloween. Esp if you stretch it across several years with the same players and don't tell them that they are connected...
Also Snows of an Early Winter.
Hangman's Noose works perfectly as a one-shot. Just ran it last week for my Runelords group. Ran it a couple years back for my other group too. Two thumbs up.