The nature of creepiness

[gustavo iglesias]

I found this interesting article about the nature of creepiness, and I thought it could be a good read for GMs in this AP.

I'm eager to read more about theory of horror, the nature of fear, and similar things, so if others have found other takes on the issue, feel free to post them

[John Compton]

Pathfinder RPG Horror Adventures has a fun chapter on running horror games, which explores sundry ideas of what is creepy and how one can translate that into the game. The foreword I wrote for Pathfinder #113: What Grows Within also explores how to take the fundamentally non-creepy (anything to which you can assign clinical stats and values) and present it as something creepy.

[darrenan]

That article really highlights one of the main problems with trying to instill horror in a fantasy RPG. So many of the stereotypical foes that players face during the course of the game fall into the transgressive realm, but in this particular context, we the players have largely become desensitized to this transgressiveness. We are literally "ready for anything" and nothing surprises us.

[gustavo iglesias]

That's why the article is so good. Zombies are unnatural because they are of dual nature, living and dead. But they have been with us so long, that they have their own class. Zombies are zombies, which are different class than, say, vampires or ghosts. You don't see a zombie and think "oh, he is 50% human, 50% corpse". You see him and think "he is 100% zombie"

So to make zombies creepy again, you have to mix them with other things that belong to different classes, with unnexpected and unnatural descriptors for a zombie.

A zombie isn't creepy anymore. But what about a zombie rocking a cradle? What about a zombie reading a book? What about a zombie cooking? Or painting a scene of when he was alive? What about a zombie playing with a doll?

[cdkc]

I feel a big part of the game's fear factor is taken away when a player uses a knowlege skill. A haunt becomes a simple obstacle , an enemy becomes a stat block with a name. It's easy to take that information about a new enemy and put it as something categorized. When you define the fear it is a lot less scary. One of the parts my PC's got scared of the most was

in search of sanity :

when the players found the attic whisperer in the dark room. It called out unseen weeping and the players had no idea what it was and were a bit scared

[cdkc]

Definitely make sure that your players in search for sanity don't

Spoiler:

find out that the tatterman is a doppelganger. That completely makes him not scary

[William-Scott Hathaway]

gustavo iglesias wrote:

That's why the article is so good. Zombies are unnatural because they are of dual nature, living and dead. But they have been with us so long, that they have their own class. Zombies are zombies, which are different class than, say, vampires or ghosts. You don't see a zombie and think "oh, he is 50% human, 50% corpse". You see him and think "he is 100% zombie"

So to make zombies creepy again, you have to mix them with other things that belong to different classes, with unnexpected and unnatural descriptors for a zombie.

A zombie isn't creepy anymore. But what about a zombie rocking a cradle? What about a zombie reading a book? What about a zombie cooking? Or painting a scene of when he was alive? What about a zombie playing with a doll?

Curse of the Crimson Throne Spoilers:

In Curse of the Crimson Throne, there is a scene where the party enters a fancy manor house in search of a young musician who performed at a masquerade at the manor a few days ago. When the party arrives, the place seems to be abandoned from the outside. However, when they enter the main hall, the are met by the gruesome scene of 3 pairs of clearly dead and diseased nobles dancing a clumsy waltz in the middle of the entrance hall amid the corpses of other party goers. I recently ran this encounter and my party was thoroughly creeped out by the scene. As they traversed the manor, they discovered other such scenes. Two zombies arguing about "politics" in gruff grumbles and moans while being waited upon by a third. Another plucking at a harp for the entertainment of a row of corpses lined up in the audience chairs.A group of four eating dinner, the butchered remains of several other corpses, in the dinning room with poorly managed knives and forks. My party loved it, I loved it, and the manor has gone down as one of our favorite encounters in any game I've run.

I believe the reason for this is because of what you said above. By locking certain creatures into certain behaviors, actions and roles, you make them predictable and quantifiable. Every so often, mixing things up and subverting a player's expectations of how a creature should act can do wonders for setting a mood, especially when it comes to creatures that are "supposed" to be scary. The example I provided above is one, but the vampire that hunts in broad daylight, the werewolf that is more sane during the full moon, or the flesh golem that acts and talks like a living child are also excellent examples, at least one of which has actually been used by Paizo.