Creepy...

Tetsubo said:

Nebulous (great nick btw) - have you seen the movie Session 9? It's set in the Danvers Asylum. It's not a bad film.

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I have seen it, several times. One of my favorite little underrated films.

There's some really great ideas in this thread. Keep 'em coming! I love the invisible spider threads and the Fulci zombie eating stomach maggots.

My brother ran an adventure once that he was always proud of. There was a locked door in a dungeon with a little girl's voice behind it begging for help. It was very well barricaded, and the PC's had trouble getting in. The little girl's voice eventually turned into a demon screaming "RELEASE MEEEEE!" It helped that the sound fx he used were from real people. He said his players were terrified as they were taken completely off guard.

Then there was an old 2nd ed. adventure where the PC's fought an Inquisitor in the bowels of the Rook's Roost. They had previously summoned a bear to scout ahead. It trots down the stairs to the basement, then comes charging up, terrified and singed from flame!

But what really creeped the players out was the Inquisitor's prisoners. He kept living prisoners trapped in a magical lock in stasis, would pull them out as needed, torture them on a wide variety of racks, pins, iron maidens, etc. heal them in a pool of healing (w/ handcuffs) and put them back into stasis where they could watch others getting tortured until it was their turn again.

Year after year after year.

My 2 coppers

I had many ideas that worked well. One I love was in a Cyberpunk 2020 game. I set it up by haveing the edgerunners get jumped in a hole in the wall Mexican resturant. Later they had an op that required lots of stealth. THey were doing fine...their guts were killing them from the food. Stomach flu is a bitch. One guy couldn't take it anymore. He picked the lock and disarmed the alarm system to the exec washroom and dropped his pants. Now...toilet seats in a commercial and residential komode are different if you ever noticed. Commercial ones are "U" shaped so that your twigs and berries can pass through. Well...he sat down...his stuff pass through...and a pair of blades popped out. Forgot about the keypad next to the toilet paper. From there on out the PC and the players became almost obsessive about resturant cleanliness. In real life the guys check out public toilets out the rare times they HAD to use one.

The second thing that really messed with my players. A necromancer. He was thwarted by the players and hurled into a portal he opened to some evil plane. He became a "boyfriend" to a fiend and finally escaped but after he had pieces of demon flesh grafted to him and had things "growing" in him from insemination. He was so angry and wanting to get revenge he killed the familys of the characters and used them to make a undead general to lead an army of undead against their nation.

Aries

I don't think I've quite gotten to this level. In a HARP game I ran at the MD/VA/DC game day, the PCs are investigating a string of bizarre murders/suicides that they soon learn are the result of magical mind-control.

One the NPCs describes, in vivid detail to them about how "something entered his mind" and made him stare wide-eyed directly into the sun. Well, here it is.

Next thing I know, I’ve lost control of my body, and before I know, it, I’m staring at the sun, all wide-eyed. At first, it felt like I was just dreaming you know, but the sun was bright out, remember, just a couple of days ago? It came out, and there I was just, staring at it. At first, you know it hurt a little. ‘Cause we’ve all looked at the sun just briefly, and you know, it’s really bright, and it kind of hurts, so we turn away. But, I couldn’t. I just kept looking at it. And after a little while, I could feel my eyes burning, like someone’d taken a hot skewer, you know like you stir coals with, and shoved it slowly into my eyeball, and then twisted it a little bit. It felt like that, ‘cept worse. And I could hear a little sizzle, and I could feel the back of my eye burning, just burning like something horrible. And the tears welt up, and they streamed down my face, and I could feel some snot coming outta my nose, and then everything just kind of slowly went dark. I guess I must have screamed, too, pretty bad, because I could hear some people showing up and talking. After that, I fell to my knees, and my eyes, they was bleeding real bad. I couldn’t see anything, just lots of hazy green that eventually just turned black. I felt my face, and I could feel that it was blood.

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Xath was in that game, and she said that she "admired my attention to detail". ha!

I've had one really creepy moment in my game so far.

Early in the game, the PCs "rescued" a 6 year-old girl from a group of hobgoblins. She hadn't been harmed, and the managed to negotiate a peaceful resolution. Then they returned her to her father, a very busy, well-respected member of the Mortician's Guild. They were a little concerned about her well-being, since her father tended to work extremely long hours, and her mother had passed away about four years earlier. To assuage their concerns, they hired a member of one of the local churches to provide some tutoring and supervision to the girl.

A few sessions later, they discovered that the girl's home had burned down (while they were away). There were no bodies in the ruins of the house though, but no one had seen her or her father since the fire. Eventually, they found out that the father was also a necromancer of some skill. When they found his new lair, they found Phoebe locked in a closet. Her father had killed her, raised her body as a zombie, and bound her spirit into the zombie's body.

Phoebe had control of the zombie's voice, but that was it.

Phoebe's dad loved her, but he just couldn't handle his precocious daughter. So he turned to truly Evil daycare.

It was great fun to watch the players' faces as they fought with the little zombie. All the while, Phoebe begged them to kill her (and accused the paladin of welching on his promise to protect her).

Eventually, they killed the zombie, and the girl's spirit ended up bound to one of the PCs.

But that wasn't the creepy part. The creepy part came about four sessions later, when they were talking with the Canon of their church. They discovered that one of the nearby nations was having a succession crisis because the queen was ill and her daughter had run of with some disreputable mortician about seven years previous.

The realization that they'd a) killed the heir to the throne of the largest military power in the region, and b) bound her spirit to the party's rogue, sent them into hiding for a few weeks until they could figure out how to resolve the issue.

They still haven't decided what to do.

--G

My Story Hour

Here's a few highlights...

• I started off the campaign by giving the players some pregen PCs who were doing guard duty on a caravan. After letting them roleplay for a few minutes, they were attacked by a strange-looking woman and her zombies, who promptly murdered the entire group. Then they got their "real" PCs out and went into the campaign proper. When they later met this woman several sessions later, they were properly scared. When she claimed to be nothing more than a tool, and tried to turn them against their patron, they left town to get away from the intrigues that were surrounding them like a net.
• After chasing a guy who had been shadowing the group through the city, they came across a bundle of rags on the rooftop. As they got closer, it stood up; turns out it was a vaguely humanoid mannequin made of stitched together flayed human faces and filled to stuffing with maggots (thank you, Book of Fiends!) If they hit it with a slashing attack, it spewed maggots on them from the wound, which burrowed into their flesh, and it grappled one poor player and vomited maggots in this face and promptly started eating him alive. Turns out the guy wasn't actually too difficult to defeat, but the encounter made a much greater impression on them than it strictly needed to...
• Much later, after fighting off a group of assassins, the world went black for a moment and the PCs saw everyone around them as corpses. One of the PCs, the only one foolish enough to attempt learning and casting spells (hehe...) had a more extended vision; he saw --as if by his own hands-- an "operation" on a homeless beggar in which his torso was cut open, a live mangy and rapid rat was placed inside and sewn up with ragged leather stitches. When, later, swarms of rats erupted from the pipes all around them they were suitably freaked out. When the rats were followed by the attack of a 10-foot rat-featured ogre-like creature, who turned back into the beggar of the vision, with a squirming and writhing rat inside his dying torso, after being defeated, they ran in a hurry.
• The PCs were getting their hineys handed to them quite nicely by an undead construct thingy until they dared to use the weapon that could defeat him. It was a 6 foot or more black sword with leering daemonic faces on it that seemed to shift and mouth obscenities out of the corner of their eyes if they didn't look at it too hard. The character who picked it up started hearing those obscenities in his mind as blasphemous voices (which did Sanity damage every round he held the sword) and when he attacked he could feel the sword biting his hands, slicking them with blood. They dispatched their foe and haven't touched the sword since. That was almost a TPK there.
• I don't know if this is creepy or campy, but after leaving town to escape all the folks trying to use them in the city, they ran away to a small town. I had barely started on the guide telling them about the "queer look" folks from that town all had; like they had been inbred for generations or something, and the PCs were asking if they looked "fishy" at all; they immediately caught the Innesmouth reference. Of course, I was modeling the little town on Innesmouth (but instead of deep ones, the folks were turning into weirdo multiple eye and tentacle monstrosities.) Because my PCs were much more direct than the protagonist of The Shadow Over Innesmouth they ended up being chased out of town by a mob, and worse. Currently the cliffhanger of my last session involves on sorta healthy PC, one PC who's down to 1 STR and 3 WIS, and one PC who stabilized after nearly burning to death. With no magical healing in this campaign, they're in trouble; they barely escaped out of town running on a cart, and now they're going to have to hide in the countryside will angry mobs look for them and they slowly heal naturally.

BelenUmeria said:

d20 Future: I threw an undead USAF crewman at the players. He was unique in that he was found in the medical bay crucified by IV tubing. Later, then he attacked. He had a ranged attack where he used the tubing almost like chains that did piercing damaged and could wither drain blood or pump preservative fluids into the victim.

It freaked everyone out.

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Yup, I was one of them. We were back on our ship going over what we found out and someone suggested going back. I shook my head, "no, we found out what we need to know, we don't need to go back in there!' We agreed that the ship had to be destroyed, even though it had historical interest, yaddayadda. It went boom, we made the bad 'guys' base go boom (in a most excellent space battle) and we made certain that the only thing we reported back was how essential that anything in that area that showed up needed to go boom.

Yup, I'm still creeped out. thanks for bringing back those memories, BU!

Once I had a character who touched an evil altar receive visions of death, oblivian, and writhing tentacles, but informed him that his character "kinda liked it. You feel that you might want to touch the altar again". They left the room very quickly.

What is it that is so despicable about maggots? I can't stand the things, and all the goopiest grossest posts here have spewing wriggling maggots. I'll have to use that, if i can bear to even bring it up in explicit detail.

This thread is giving me such wonderful ideas. I fully expect maggots to show up in my next game session.