Creepy...

Rechan · Sep 21, 2007

TheAuldGrump said:
Well, now that DungeonCrafter has a website again you can find it Here.

Took me forever to find the damn thing.

Interesting! Though I am curious - what did you use to BRING the PCs into the Shambles in the first place? If the Master has not left his slaughterhouse, what would draw their attention?

TheAuldGrump · Sep 21, 2007

While the PCs were hesitant to make use of his services others are not. In one of the games he appeared in he ran a city-wide informant ring. One of their contacts put them in touch with the Master, but then they were too nervous to actually find anything else. His contacts include rats, beggars, and a neutrally aligned nest of were rats. Sometimes he kills and feeds from one of the rats, burrowing into its soft belly with his ragged teeth.

He is dangerous, and scary, but not exactly evil. (Those who use Detect Evil pick him up as 'flickering' evil and not evil, if they make a rather high Listen (or Notice, depending on the game) they will realize that the flicker is in time with their own heart beats.... Those with Detect Good would notice the exact same thing.

The Auld Grump

Simm · Sep 22, 2007

So usually I play a pretty hack and slash fantasy adventure but I've always tried to acurately describe things, surroundings, monsters, the effects of attacks. I'm putting the party through an updated keep on the borderlands and the party, level 3 by this point, just discovered the hidden chamber between the orc lairs. They searched the room and found the treasure pulling the sack out of its alcove. I must have hit just the right tone discribing the results because the next thing I knew the party was seriously creeped out and considering retreating from a pair oof monstrous centipedes. Apparantly several of my players are creeped out by them.

tombshroud · Sep 24, 2007

Stephen King's Silver Bullet

This week I managed to snag 'Stephen King's Silver Bullet' DVD in the $5 bin at a local Wal-mart. When I was watching it this weekend I came to the part where the kid gets stuck in an old covered bridge and the bad guy is approaching but gets scared away by the presence of a by-stander. Great tense moment, brush w/ the bad guy when the character knows they stand no chance.

Foreshadowing can be tough to pull off right, some glimpses of the BBEG before the big show down. In horror campaigns where many of the monsters wear a human form, werewolf, vampire, etc. this can be fun by giving them hints w/ some of the common folklore attributed to such creatures, hairy palms, uni-brow, pale, etc.

Anyone have any particularly spectactular ways of creeping out PCs w/ some foreshadowing?

Brazeku · Sep 24, 2007

One way to be effectively creepy is to use inversion. That's why little girls are creepy - you're taking something that is otherwise cute and associated with purity, and turning it on its head.

Another method you can use is to take a commonplace event or item, and attach a strange event to it. Use this to make players search for meaning. Say the party finds an old maypole, streaked with corrosion. As they approach it, the sky grows darker and the wind catches in the tattered banners.

Another method is reversion. Use this to erode feelings of control. This is basically undoing what the players have done. An example: say the party has found an old dagger on an altar, and pick it up. The next time they look back at the altar, the dagger is still there, the altar undisturbed.

There is progression. Progression is used to build a sense of forboding. An example would be an old, faded tapestry hanging on a wall. In the torchlight, it appears normal, but when viewed from shadowy illumination, faint traces of silver can be seen. By dimming the lights, the players can see these silver lines growing brighter and sharper. The process is reversed once light is applied, but starts up again when darkness falls. If they watch it in the darkness, the lines shift and flow, forming an archway - and a figure seems to loom within, head bowed in shadow. The figure slowly looks up.

Messages work very well, especially connected with the unknown. An old favorite involves a locked door in the back wall of an old, abandoned cellar. The door is warped wood, and covered with flaking paint. As the party works to open it, the pain slowly flakes away, revealing a scrawled word: "No". Will the party still try to open the door?

Use all their senses. Half heard voices, fleeting images, the smell of flowers wafting, the smell of deep earth and rain on stone. A wall slick with fat. Use their associations, and turn those assocations around.

You get the picture.

Rechan · Sep 24, 2007

Running horror scenarios came up on the Wizards boards, and there were some useful suggestions. This is my favorite:

Mandarbgrim said:
From my horror game last year, the only method that worked in provoking horror in characters was introducing "Unknown" elements. I consistently had things occur that I myself didn't even have an explanation for and where outside of the rules. The players couldn't get a clear grasp of what was actually occuring to ever gauge the difficulty of a situation.

I used a "Black Mist" to have a variety of effects occur that had little connection to each other & no real connection to their immediate enemies. Divination spells gave off odd readings from it. Sometimes magical, sometimes not. Random will saves with fear & fatique effects that didn't mean anything and never had a bearing on combat. Animals where periodically turned undead by it <But didn't attack, just continued to go through their normal motions.>. An Enemy NPC ran into it and started screaming...found later with all his flesh removed. Another began stabbing himself rather than be consumed by it. Staying in a mist infested keep resulted in the players making continual will saves & nightmares. I alluded to their pre-selected phobias becoming relevant throughout their guard duty. Anytime they were in a tavern I had made up a list of different rumors that made the players paranoid about who was the actual "Bad Guy", such as their own lord.

Uncertainty, confusion, misdirection, & paranoi seem to be the most important elements. Heroes of Horror is a pretty solid book, but doesn't contain that much new information.

Edit: Also, status effects and ability score damage create far more actual concern over a character than HP damage. Any method of degrading a characters abilities that can't be cured with resting for 8 hours and they start worrying about their competency to deal with future threats. Methods that are in flavor and within the rules are a bit vague on this... Sundering is the only other thing that I can think of.

Another method, make the person themselves confused and not just through their characters. Take a player on guard duty to another room to roleplay out Guard duty or when seperated from the group.

Another:

Goon_for_Hire said:
In fantasy, encounters are best when there is some complication, a dangerous location, for example, difficult weather, precarious ledges, rough terrain, bottlenecks, traps, weird devices PCs can take advantage of, etc.

In Horror, on the other hand, the best encounters are the ones where one or more of the abilities that the character have come to rely on are rendered useless. Fear, entanglement, being disarmed, dealing with incorporeal creatures, mind control, anti-magic (or better yet wild magic) zones.

Don't do this every encounter, of course, and certainly don;t target a single PC more than once, the trick is not so much that you are trying to 'beat' the PCs by taking their power away, as putting them on unpredictable, confusing, or uncertain ground in a battle. When they are stuck in an alien environment or where the 'rules' (rules of reality, not the rules of the game) seem to have changed.

Also, make sure to destroy any sense of security they might have: the safe sealable rooms in the dungeon they might arcane lock to get some sleep should be the ones with secret doors in the back of them. They should have 'presents' or messages delivered to them by unseen hands despite all attempts at security.

There are other good tips in there (Robbypants, Colmarr).

Rechan · Sep 24, 2007

tombshroud said:
Anyone have any particularly spectactular ways of creeping out PCs w/ some foreshadowing?

I know it's obvious, but let the PCs find the aftermath of something they will face, but don't immediately follow up on it.

For instance, the PCs find the corpse of something really big (a bullete, whale washed ashore, dragon), and the body shows signs of something having burst outside of it from within. And they'll face the monster that burst out, but maybe after they've all ready taken the next adventure hook, or when they return back after their last adventure.

Rechan · Sep 24, 2007

Here's my question: How do you know when you've done Too Much? Is there a rule of thumb that "Okay, I've done x creepy events, if I keep doing this, it's going to break the suspension of belief because Too Much has happened".

I plan on sending my PCs into an abandoned city much like Roanoke, which is going to have a lot of twisted things in there. And thus I don't want to overdo it, but I want the place filled to the brim.

Brazeku · Sep 24, 2007

Rechan said:
Here's my question: How do you know when you've done Too Much? Is there a rule of thumb that "Okay, I've done x creepy events, if I keep doing this, it's going to break the suspension of belief because Too Much has happened".

I think that this is part of what separates a decent DM from a good one. Knowing when to avoid oversaturating with any game element is the mark of experience and skill. I don't believe there is a rule of thumb for it, but if players seem to be getting a bit listless and fear shifts over towards helplessness (and then, inevitably, boredom) then you've gone too far.

Maintaining balance is individual and based around watching for feedback.

Drakmor · Sep 24, 2007

Breaking my lurking for once:

The PCs enter into a room/cavern/etc. and find a fountain feed by a waterfall or something similar, or even just a stream that they are heading up, the water has a slightly red tinge, yet does not register as anything if they choose to detect (evil/magic/etc.) Hopefully one of the PCs drinks from it, because it makes the revelation that much better.

The PCs continue on in whatever area they are moving through, using the waterfall feed fountain and placing it in a recently destroyed temple for this example, they continue through it. Eventually they come out to the top of the waterfall with pathways on either side of the stream heading deeper into the temple. (They may notice that the waterline used to be higher than it is now.)

As they follow that they see uphead something in the middle of the hall, where the stream is. Getting closer they see what it is and why the water had that tinge, it is a pile of about five cut-down priests, bloating in the water.