Star Wars Halloween Special

[pukunui]

Hi folks,

I run a fortnightly Star Wars Saga Edition game, and as it happens, it's my turn to run my game this coming Friday ... which happens to be two days before Halloween. And since we just finished one adventure last session, I thought I'd go off on a Halloween-themed tangent before starting the next one.

What I thought I'd do is send the PCs to a now-derelict space station overrun by Half-Life 2-inspired headcrabs and zombies (including the zombine from the HL2 episodes). There will be some survivors on the station, including a friend of the PCs whom they will have to find and rescue.

However, my players are all in their 30s and 40s and, as such, are rather jaded when it comes to this sort of thing. A bunch of zombies and headhumpers isn't going to be enough to freak them out.

I'm not so much looking for horror-themed game mechanics. What I want is some ideas on how to make a Star Wars game creepy and spooky. I want some psychology I can use to freak my players out as well as their PCs.

The thing is: two of them have darkvision, and the rest have low-light vision, so darkness isn't really going to help. I need narrow corridors, blind corners, ducts that the headcrabs can drop out of, and so on. I can have several set pieces involving areas with no gravity/life support, areas with highly flammable/explosive materials (like an engineering room) and such. I was also thinking that at least one group of survivors might have set up some traps that the PCs will either fall into themselves or be able to use on the zombies as intended.

The other issue is the Force: it can be used to shortchange a lot of the mystery, and there happen to be two Force-sensitives in the party. Someone suggested to me on a separate thread that I make it so the Force is "screaming" from the awful things that have happened on the station, so when the Force-sensitives try to use their ESP abilities, they'll potentially get overwhelmed with "feedback".

If anyone has any ideas, please post them ASAP as I'll be running this horror-themed Star Wars scenario this coming Friday, the 29th of October.


Thanks in advance!

Regards,
Jonathan

 

[Leatherhead]

My initial response is to not use zombies.

I mean, zombies, really? They are so played out right now. Everyone is trying to make fast zombies or brute zombies, or zombies set on fire, or unlimited zombies, or whatever gimmick they decided was hot this season. But they forget the horror from zombies is that your friends and relatives are coming back from the dead as mindless beasts who are trying to eat you, and potentially turn you into one of their ilk so you too will be chowing down on the innards of people you once loved.

Now with that out of the way, the fun thing about the force is that it can be used against people. Lets say that there is an old sith ghost who is haunting an artifact. Of course the sensitives will notice it, but what good will that do them when their friend thinks they are the enemy? Or when the sith notices them? I can assure you that an old sith lord has more mind-hax than a jedi apprentice.

And then suddenly everyone on the ship can be trying to kill you, and not just like a hungry beast. This thing has sapience and malevolence. Heck, you could be the one under the influence of this horror and not know it. (In fact make sure the PC's kill someone unjustly and they find out about it)

The rest of the game practically rights itself. Firstly, the artifact turns up missing, then weird stuff happens to make the ship lost with no way off, and finally people start getting murdered. The session ends when the Pc's cleanse the artifact(unlikely), get off the ship (to bad the escape pods are broken with essential parts hidden), or throw the artifact off the ship (preferably into a star).

Well there goes my 2AM ramblings, someone will undoubtedly show up with a better idea.

 

[pukunui]

Thanks for the quick response. I have to say, though, that a Sith Lord in Star Wars is probably about as 'overdone' as zombies are.

Fortunately for me, I don't know that any of my players have played Half-Life 2, so I don't think any of them are familiar with the headcrabs and their zombie victims. And these zombies do have a few surprises. For one thing, they're mostly not actually dead ... they've been taken over by the headcrabs. So there's probably a lot of psychic pain and anguish going on that any Force-sensitives would pick up on. And it means that the "zombies" can do things that ordinary zombies might not do ... like pull out a grenade and become a suicide bomber.

Plus, there's the added bonus of being able to use the HL2 sound effects ... which may help creep the players out.

The thing is, though, that the PCs will be encountering plenty of Sith and Dark Jedi throughout the campaign, so I'm not so keen on throwing yet another one at them at this point.

For the record, the PCs are all 5th level at the moment.

Also, I am running the Dawn of Defiance campaign. The 4th module, Echoes of the Jedi, is pretty much one long horror-themed dungeon crawl, but we're not up to that one yet (we only just finished the 2nd module, A Wretched Hive).


I'm mostly just looking for ways to creep out my players to build up the tension and suspense ... I found some nice threads on Halloweeny creepiness, but they're pretty much all D&D/fantasy-centered. I need some sci-fi stuff, specifically stuff that fits in a Star Wars game. Malfunctioning blast doors, weird noises, snippets of horrific scenes in video logs ... that sort of thing.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

Zombie kids. Always creepy, and especially horrifying if anybody is a parent. Just let them find the day care center.

Whatever your "zombies" are, set it up so that they can be mistaken for non-zombies from a distance, or from behind. It ratchets up the tension if you can never be sure if the people in the next room are survivors or victims.

If they start helping survivors, set it up so that some of them are picked off quietly...then let the players discover they're missing later.

Force sensitives might be especially confused by the zombies -- make their perceptions WORSE for once, than that of other characters. Particularly bad areas of the station might make them zone out into a force vision at the worst moment.

What if a force sensitive who becomes a zombie turns into a kind of ringleader, who directs other zombies nearby, but also horribly tries to instinctively "fix" some of them, resulting in mutilations or mutations?

Power should fluctuate randomly, so that gravity and lighting flicker on and off, sometimes in the middle of combat. Set it up so that sometimes one goes out or gets weaker, and sometimes they both cut out. Suddenly finding yourself floating in the dark in a room full of zombies is probably disorienting, even if you have darkvision.

 

[SiderisAnon]

Have a little girl with a cute party dress and curly blond hair. Ribbons too. White stockings and little polished shoes. Have her carrying a doll or teddy bear.

Don't have her DO anything. Just have her seen now and then, but always turn around a corner and disappear before they get to her, no matter what they do.

Never explain her. Never offer any details. When afterward asked about her, say, "What little girl?"


Because as everybody knows, you see a pretty little girl surrounded by monsters, she's by far the most dangerous thing there.

 

[Negflar2099]

I suggest using Dark Side spirits. It's very in keeping with the setting and having an enemy that a blaster won't work against can be very frightening. This works especially if the spirits are of non-force users but some event, like a detonation of a powerful Force Bomb, shunted them into the spirit realm. Now they are just scared, frightened people who lash out at the first living thing they come across, ie the players.

 

[pukunui]

Zombie kids. Always creepy, and especially horrifying if anybody is a parent. Just let them find the day care center.

Heh heh. I got that impression from that old 18-page thread on creepiness (which, as I said, was pretty much all fantasy-oriented but still nevertheless a worthwhile read). Thanks.

Whatever your "zombies" are, set it up so that they can be mistaken for non-zombies from a distance, or from behind. It ratchets up the tension if you can never be sure if the people in the next room are survivors or victims.

Hmm. Obviously a good idea, but kinda hard to pull off when your zombies all look like this: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091109110904/half-life/en/images/e/e5/Zombies.jpg

FYI: for anyone unfamiliar with Half-Life 2, the zombies aren't undead in the traditional sense. They're still technically 'alive' (at least, some of them are). They've just had their body's motor functions usurped by the weird alien sitting on their head.

If they start helping survivors, set it up so that some of them are picked off quietly...then let the players discover they're missing later.

I'm thinking of doing something along these lines.

Force sensitives might be especially confused by the zombies -- make their perceptions WORSE for once, than that of other characters. Particularly bad areas of the station might make them zone out into a force vision at the worst moment.

I like it.

What if a force sensitive who becomes a zombie turns into a kind of ringleader, who directs other zombies nearby, but also horribly tries to instinctively "fix" some of them, resulting in mutilations or mutations?[/quote]Interesting ideas. I was focused on converting the existing HL2 zombies and headcrabs to the SWSE game, so it hadn't occurred to me to make a Force-sensitive "zombie". That's an interesting idea.

Power should fluctuate randomly, so that gravity and lighting flicker on and off, sometimes in the middle of combat. Set it up so that sometimes one goes out or gets weaker, and sometimes they both cut out. Suddenly finding yourself floating in the dark in a room full of zombies is probably disorienting, even if you have darkvision.

Agreed.

Have a little girl with a cute party dress and curly blond hair. Ribbons too. White stockings and little polished shoes. Have her carrying a doll or teddy bear.

Don't have her DO anything. Just have her seen now and then, but always turn around a corner and disappear before they get to her, no matter what they do.

Never explain her. Never offer any details. When afterward asked about her, say, "What little girl?"


Because as everybody knows, you see a pretty little girl surrounded by monsters, she's by far the most dangerous thing there.

I like it. Reminds me of those ghostly twin girls on tricycles in the movie version of The Shining.

 

[lin_fusan]

And oldie (by internet standards) but a goodie is to start the session relatively normal, have a simple encounter, and quickly have a strange, unexplained event. After the PCs react to this, have them make some for of save. Regardless of the outcome, hand each of them a handout.

The handout will say something like you are sure one of the other characters is possessed/doppleganger/alien but you aren't sure which one. The handout will also say that you have talked to the player in question and he/she was willing to trade their character in for the session to try out this Halloween special.

Of course, the trick is that each of the players have received the exact same handout. No one is possessed/doppleganger/alien.

If the players themselves buy this lie, then they'll spend the rest of the session suspicious of each other, which heightens the tension and makes some of the scary more scary.

Of course, YMMV, because some groups don't like this manipulation, or others don't care, and still others might already know the trick.

Monte Cook wrote a neat 3.0 one-shot adventure that takes this kind of trickery into account.

 

[pukunui]

Ooooh, I like that. Thanks Monte!

So with the handout, I'm guessing it's best to keep the supposed conspirator unnamed, right? So like not saying "So-and-so has agreed ..." but rather "One of you has agreed ..."

I don't know if my players know this trick already or not. I think they'd be more inclined to buy into it than feel hard done by though, which is good for me.

So now I wonder what would be the best sort of thing for a Star Wars game. Some of them are already aliens, but I was thinking of having the NPC they're going to rescue actually be a Clawdite (shapeshifter) bounty hunter who's usurped her place ... so going with the doppelganger thing might help/hinder that encounter. Not too sure.

Possessed could work too.

Thoughts?

 

[NMC]

Discussing possession makes me think of the brain worms from a few recent episodes of The Clone Wars; these might be a good fit. I can see a scenario in which somebody tried to smuggle them out of Geonosis, but they escaped confinement and are now running amok on the ship.

A variant on the mysterious little girl could be a cute youngling who's already been taken over by one of the critters; this character could serve as a foil, running off in the middle of a fight and thus forcing the heroes to decide whether to split up or leave her to her fate.

-Nate