The biggest problem that can come up when trying to run a horror game is that what may scare part of your group may not even phase another. Big picture, there is fear of the unknown and fear of the twisted known. It is my experience that most people are affect by one, but not the other. For some, the strange and unknown is a great way to scare them. Other people view the unknown as something to be explored. For these people, fear is the last thing they will feel. To scare them, you need to twist the known so that it is still recognizable, but is definitely off. Thus, to really scare your player, you often need to make sure that all of your players can be scare by similar things.
Playing a genre where feeling overwhelmed and out of control is the point... may be very much against the desires of a heroic fantasy crowd. Many of my heroic fantasy characters would be very disruptive to a Horror atmosphere adventure. We solve problems or we die, we do not...
Kind of like William Katt in House, turned a perfectly good horror story into action/comedy.
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I don't start horror campaigns -I shift the mood into survival horror gradually through the encounters and narrative. The lack of anticipation from the PCs and their Players adds gravitas when the nature of threats/environment transforms into creepy or grotesque.
It takes me some subtlety, but I know my Players have been immersed when PC paranoia is amped and the Players themselves are conspiring amongst each other whilst I await their next course of action as I develop the spiral into madness the magical fantasy adventure just devolved into.
The apex of this approach came when I simply began reading out the prompt for the next door they opened.
DM: "You hear fluttering-"
Players: "Eff no! Slam shut and double back to safe point now!"
DM: "Do you want to know wh-"
Players: "We know you're trying to kill us! We'll take our chances with what's behind us. We know we can damage it."
Fluttering. I love people's imagination and what they concoct given the right parameters.
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Pathfinder doesn't work well with horror.
Horror works best when you have a certain level of helplessness, and Pathfinder characters have too many cool powers.
That's why Call of Cthulhu works. Really, the mechanics are pretty awkward, but the vibe fits. Stuff is scary. You can (kind of) fight cultists, but any sort of monstrous outsider is freakin' terrifying and will probably kill you horribly if it doesn't drive you insane first.
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Oh, you can do good Horror in Pathfinder, you just have to ignore the silly Gamemastery notion that you must leave the character weaknesses alone. This works best with the hyper-optimals. When they eventually realize that their best moves are just digging them deeper, the panicked flailing begins. They sometimes get seriously ticked off about it.
Subtle corruption is even easier. In to one game I ran one of the plot lines I ran was the slow seduction of a morally ambivalent character into evil. Little things, little rewards, gradually getting more serious. Epic fail on my part on this one though. The character was always played as a flawed hero. I was getting ready to start his hard road to redemption. I was more surprised than anyone that he did not balk at sacrificing his daughter's favorite character to the Dark Ones. That game ended UGLY. His ex-wife and I still talk, she and her daughter find too much humor in how badly I was caught flat footed.
Oh, you can do good Horror in Pathfinder, you just have to ignore the silly Gamemastery notion that you must leave the character weaknesses alone. This works best with the hyper-optimals. When they eventually realize that their best moves are just digging them deeper, the panicked flailing begins. They sometimes get seriously ticked off about it.
Subtle corruption is even easier. In to one game I ran one of the plot lines I ran was the slow seduction of a morally ambivalent character into evil. Little things, little rewards, gradually getting more serious. Epic fail on my part on this one though. The character was always played as a flawed hero. I was getting ready to start his hard road to redemption. I was more surprised than anyone that he did not balk at sacrificing his daughter's favorite character to the Dark Ones. That game ended UGLY. His ex-wife and I still talk, she and her daughter find too much humor in how badly I was caught flat footed.
Well, that is....interesting. Could you share the rest of the story? Do not want to have the same thing happen in the one I'm planning.
For helplessness, I think a good way to help a little would be through the E6 rules.
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Saithor,
Quicksand Horror works best against higher level parties. E6 characters just don't develop the power that they can habitually force encounters into their own practiced idioms. An E6 character would recognize that things are going wrong too early. At around level 12 the characters have the power and arrogance to fall into this kind of "Trap." It is easy for a level 12 character to believe they really are that good, not so much for a level 6.
A for the Disaster, the event brought out stuff no one had been talking about with no preparation, guidance or anything. The rest of us were booted out, and "Things Were Said". I haven't taken that plotline anywhere serious since though.
Regarding E6, I'd rather not give Players the illusion that they are being nerfed -DMs have plenty in the arsenal of the imagination to methodically reduce your proud adventurers into meek & beaten gimps (really the ultimate temptation).
I do enjoy it when one or two Players deliberately go the bad seed route because I can incorporate that into my narrative. It can galvanize the rest of the group (redemption or lynching) and its fun coming up with challenges/goals that would vex and drive an Evil PC.
You both have good pints, I'll leave E6 off the table then. The main issue though is that there will just be some creatures that are intended to be the true horrors, but they lose all tension and value when you blast/slash them into oblivion. Implacable Stalker Template helps, but applying it to each of them feels very gimmicky.
Implacable Stalker is OK. Any concept you put together that lets the party slowly come to realize that killing everything that comes near them somehow is not making a difference, maybe it is even making things worse. "We've killed them with weapons, with magic, we have banished them to the nether hells, heck, the bard even tried to charm them and talk their ears off, at least until they ate his face. What are we doing wrong?"
Shoot, I almost forgot the most important thing, make the iterations of the monsters wax and wane, randomly. They will drive themselves crazy for a while trying to work out what the are doing that is actually working.
Oh if you have access to music, put a sweet little melody on a permanent loop, time your resurgence announcements to coincide with the loop restarts.
PbP unfortunately. With college I don't have the time for a RL group unfortunately, whereas PbP doesn't require that huge of a time investment.
I wonder if you could imbed it in your updates?
That's a good idea that would work, thank you.