Lord Zardoz
Explorer
These are ideas I originally posted in this thread:
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=211943
Rechan suggested I duplicate them here.
If you want to build a sense of Horror, you need to establish early on how things on the island are often just wrong in some way. The easiest way to do that is to describe things that simply 'should not be'.
Encounter 1, a battle site.
For starters, the players ought to come upon the site of a battle of some sort. There should be a couple of bodies of the losers, and they should be in very bad shape. Large gaping wounds, bits of people strewn about that require some sorting out. There ought to be signs that there was something large and powerful near the fight. Broken trees, deep foot prints, and weapons and armour that are twisted into unusable shapes. The prints should be unidentifiable. And the bodies after some examination should be your players.
To make this work, describe the bodies of the players in increasing detail as they make skill and search checks. The gear that is found should be broken and unusable, but recognizable as the same kind of gear that the players have. When the players bust out the divinations, note the following:
- Detect Evil should be off the scale
- Divinations will indicate that these are the bodies of the players
- Speak with Dead should result in nothing but screaming from the deceased
- The wounds on the players should be described in graphic detail. Crawling with maggots, covered in strange ooze, and smell like diseased filth
- Inflicting damage on the body parts should cause harm to the corresponding player.
Encounter 2: The settlement
The players should find a medium sized town, and they should find it around mid day. Everything should be in perfectly working order, and in good repair. It should be very clean, and well maintained. Be sure to mention the lovely flower garden and marvelous fountains. There should be white picket fences, hedge sculptures, reasonably fresh paint, and a generally cheerful atmosphere. There should also, under no circumstances be any living thing in the town. Also no undead or monsters. The town is just completely empty. If they search, let them find all sorts of valuables. Be sure to put in a modest magic shop with some decent goodies. Any given shop ought to have plenty of gold. In the homes and in the market place, and food items to be found should be ripe, wholesome, and nourishing. Any meat should be fresh. There will be garbage, but it will be in the expected places and not particularly noxious or suspcious. Under no circumstances should they find any sign that there is anything wrong with the town other than it being completely empty.
If your players are at all sane, the fact that they can loot the town of useful items and money with impunity should make them extraordinarily suspicious. If someone casts a detect evil, it should be blinding.
If they spend the night in the town, feel free to mess with them. I suggest that sometime late in the evening the players end up hearing the sound of every person in the town screaming in pain, agony, and horror until sunrise. The screaming ought to be audible even in a silence spell, making it impossible to sleep. If they stay a 2nd night, just run with it, amping it up.
I also suggest that once the screaming starts, that they find themselves unable to leave the town. Travel in any direction just lets them see more and more of an unending town.
3) NPC Night Terrors
If the players have any henchmen with them, after the first night, the henchmen should be found to have clawed their own eyes out in their sleep, and bitten off and swallowed their own tongue. Do not under any circumstances explain why this happened.
4) Tension builders
Toss in any of these one off elements to help build tension.
- When a player asks to make a listen check, perform the check as normal, but also tell him that he notices his ears are bleeding. No damage, no explanation.
- At some random point, tell the players that something nearby smells like many recently dead but 'ripe' corpses. Let them search, and find nothing. The smell never goes away
- When the players bed down for the night, tell some of them that they wake up in water. Let them spend a few rounds making Fort saves, and look up the drowning rules. Let them make swim checks and tell them there is no land in sight for a while. After either 1 person fails and drowns, or 1 hour worth of checks, or someone disbelieves and makes a DC XX will save (pick the number to be difficult, but allow infinite retries) they wake up in their bed rolls. They are also wet, and have perhaps taken some ability damage. No restful sleep that night.
- If protection from Evil is ever cast, have the protected character illuminated in a dazzling spray of sparks for the duration.
-- If you go with a Cthulhu-esque cosmic horror theme, consider having protection from evil do nothing, and have protection from Chaos be required instead. Allow a Spellcraft or Knowledge(Religion) or Knowledge(Arcana) to have the players discover this after Protection from Evil fails the first time. The first failure should be dramatic.
5) Bizzarre combat
- Upon any suitable gruesome sight or stench, have them roll DC XX fortitude Saves. Just pick a number that the best fort save only succeeds on an 18 or better. Those who fail start to vomit. What they vomit up are either Insect swarms or oozes. They start the combat Nauseated until they succeed a DC YY Fort save (give the worst save a chance to succeed on a 14 or 16 or so).
- Have a half mad 'survivor' run up to the players and beg to be killed. Go for a lvl 2 commoner of middle age, or even a small child. The opponent cannot be subdued by sleep or held or subdual damage. Make it an obvious non threat, and try to force the players to kill it. If they do not kill the opponent, at the first meal opportunity, have him commit suicide in some gruesome fashion, like cutting out his own small intestine and strangling himself. The next day, have them fight the dead persons ghost, still insisting on being killed.
- If a cleric tries to use a Turn undead, have him suffer the effects of his own turning as he is enveloped in a powerful wave of negative energy. If he would destroy himself on his own turning attempt, just drop him to as many low hit points as you care to.
- Run an encounter with a T-Rex with permanent Improved Invisibility. All you need to tell them is that something very large is bitting them and doing horrible damage, and that they cannot see it. Allow Improved Invisibility to see 'something', but do not describe it as a T-Rex. Add in a template that adds some heavy damage reduction or fast healing or regeneration to amp this up.
- An Ethereal opponent with Telekinesis can really get the players on edge by throwing large objects at them while denying them a direct way to counter attack.
- Run a few encounters using a possession mechanic based on Magic Jar, accompanied by a disembodied demonic voice. Let players who fail a saving throw keep their mind in their body, but dictate their actions. Just roll initiative, and on the 'monsters' turn, roll out the saves / attacks for magic jar as normal as the voice taunts them. Describe a powerful evil will trying to dominate them as you do the attacks. If you succeed, hand notes to a player telling them which player they need to try to kill, and ensure that they use their best attacks to do so. Or just have a character soak himself in oil and set himself on fire. Have fun with it. Just make sure that you allow the players a means to defeat the 'force'. Just make it non obvious, and keep the duration of such attacks low (no more than 4 or 5 rounds). Let the players win if they can work out a way to keep the possessed player from killing himself or others without resorting to murder.
- Have a duplicate of a player show up in camp and start trying to kill everyone. Attacking it does nothing. Attacking the original and 'killing it will cause the duplicate to come to his senses while leaving the original dead. For this to work, you must find a way to clue the players into the idea that killing the original will stop the duplicate, but you must not let them know that killing the original will not result in the death of the player.
- The players encounter a young pregnant woman in distress. She looks to be in rough shape, filthy and very shaky, and very terrified. When asked what is wrong, she will scream "that thing wont stop talking. It wants to kill me. I can't give birth to it. It is not my baby!". She will reach for the nearest sharp object and try to cut out her own fetus, or at least stab the crap out of herself trying to kill it.
- Have the players find A child between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. This child will be undernourished and alone. He will have a very nasty rash on him, and he will be scratching, trying to relieve the itch. The itch will not go away however, and he will have scraped the outer layers of his own flesh off, exposing bone. A remove curse can remove the itching, but it will require a caster check of DC 19.
- The players hear an toddler (2 or 3 years old) crying. If the search for it, they will indeed find the child. The child will be normal in all respects, except very hungry. If the players try to care for it, then later that night, the infant will attempt a Coup-De-Grace with a dagger on someone (at Str 1, it is 1d4-5 dmg). Regardless of what measures the players take to keep watch on the infant, every night it will get loose and try to kill someone. She will escape from any bonds and always obtain some suitably lethal object. This child is not evil (some other force is controling / aiding it), so it will never detect as evil. The force will be under a Caster level 15 non detection spell (so caster check DC 26 to detect the force). The force will only be present when the infant is trying to kill someone.
This will force the players to either abandon the child, murder the child, or have someone stay awake with it all night to make sure it does not try to kill someone. Remember to apply fatigue penalties.
- As they travel on the island, the players discover the bodies of young children and small animals nailed to trees with what ought to be fatal wounds, but the creatures are not dead. They do not die until they are taken down. At some later point in the adventure, they find a man walking down the path with a large sack, which is squirming. He will ignore the players, walk to the nearest wooden wall or tree, and then start to secure the sack to that surface. he will then unlimber a large spike and a hammer, and start to drive a nail through it, at which point the child inside starts to scream. I am sure your players will stop him. The man requires 1d4 rounds to nail the child up. If he is stopped, he begs the players to let him do it, but will not explain. If the man is obstructed for more than 2 rounds, the child escapes. At which point the equivalent of an 8th level sorcerer with 5 Strenght (and thus a crappy grapple score) and lots of blasting spells (or spells from the book of vile darkness) starts attacking them. It should have Regeneration(Law), and be a pain to kill. (Regeneration with a weakness vs Holy is too obvious). Once they do drop it or otherwise render it immobile, the child becomes normal and starts screaming and crying, asking "Why did you hurt me?".
- Let the players find a young teen in the process of extreme self mutilation, but screaming in pain and giving every indication that they do not want to be doing what they are doing. The person should have already cut out one or both ears, one eye, most of one foot, a few fingers, some severe genital mutilation, and be in the process of knocking their own teeth out with a hammer. Between each wet and meaty thwack, they should beg the players to 'please stop me'.
- Why not have some sort of infectious disease that causes the players to grow nasty, large-ish, black and oozing tumors that have faces, and which try to force the players to fight for control of their own bodies? They should first encounter the disease on others. Curing the disease should require a difficult Remove Curse type spell as well as a remove disease, and maybe some sort of McGuffin item. Once the tumor becomes inteligent, it should inflict some sort of opposed rolls to gain control of the players at an inconvenient time
- The sight of a starving person who is eating their own limb while it is still attached never gets old.
- The players hear the sound of an animal yelping and screaming. when they investigate, they find a few 8 year old children around a fire, holding a small dog in the fire. The hands of the children are also being burned. Around them are the charred, smoking, and half eaten remains of several other small animals. They periodically take the animal out of the fire and gnaw on the parts that are burned, and comment on how tasty it is. They see the players and offer to share.
And that is all of them.
END COMMUNICATION
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=211943
Rechan suggested I duplicate them here.
If you want to build a sense of Horror, you need to establish early on how things on the island are often just wrong in some way. The easiest way to do that is to describe things that simply 'should not be'.
Encounter 1, a battle site.
For starters, the players ought to come upon the site of a battle of some sort. There should be a couple of bodies of the losers, and they should be in very bad shape. Large gaping wounds, bits of people strewn about that require some sorting out. There ought to be signs that there was something large and powerful near the fight. Broken trees, deep foot prints, and weapons and armour that are twisted into unusable shapes. The prints should be unidentifiable. And the bodies after some examination should be your players.
To make this work, describe the bodies of the players in increasing detail as they make skill and search checks. The gear that is found should be broken and unusable, but recognizable as the same kind of gear that the players have. When the players bust out the divinations, note the following:
- Detect Evil should be off the scale
- Divinations will indicate that these are the bodies of the players
- Speak with Dead should result in nothing but screaming from the deceased
- The wounds on the players should be described in graphic detail. Crawling with maggots, covered in strange ooze, and smell like diseased filth
- Inflicting damage on the body parts should cause harm to the corresponding player.
Encounter 2: The settlement
The players should find a medium sized town, and they should find it around mid day. Everything should be in perfectly working order, and in good repair. It should be very clean, and well maintained. Be sure to mention the lovely flower garden and marvelous fountains. There should be white picket fences, hedge sculptures, reasonably fresh paint, and a generally cheerful atmosphere. There should also, under no circumstances be any living thing in the town. Also no undead or monsters. The town is just completely empty. If they search, let them find all sorts of valuables. Be sure to put in a modest magic shop with some decent goodies. Any given shop ought to have plenty of gold. In the homes and in the market place, and food items to be found should be ripe, wholesome, and nourishing. Any meat should be fresh. There will be garbage, but it will be in the expected places and not particularly noxious or suspcious. Under no circumstances should they find any sign that there is anything wrong with the town other than it being completely empty.
If your players are at all sane, the fact that they can loot the town of useful items and money with impunity should make them extraordinarily suspicious. If someone casts a detect evil, it should be blinding.
If they spend the night in the town, feel free to mess with them. I suggest that sometime late in the evening the players end up hearing the sound of every person in the town screaming in pain, agony, and horror until sunrise. The screaming ought to be audible even in a silence spell, making it impossible to sleep. If they stay a 2nd night, just run with it, amping it up.
I also suggest that once the screaming starts, that they find themselves unable to leave the town. Travel in any direction just lets them see more and more of an unending town.
3) NPC Night Terrors
If the players have any henchmen with them, after the first night, the henchmen should be found to have clawed their own eyes out in their sleep, and bitten off and swallowed their own tongue. Do not under any circumstances explain why this happened.
4) Tension builders
Toss in any of these one off elements to help build tension.
- When a player asks to make a listen check, perform the check as normal, but also tell him that he notices his ears are bleeding. No damage, no explanation.
- At some random point, tell the players that something nearby smells like many recently dead but 'ripe' corpses. Let them search, and find nothing. The smell never goes away
- When the players bed down for the night, tell some of them that they wake up in water. Let them spend a few rounds making Fort saves, and look up the drowning rules. Let them make swim checks and tell them there is no land in sight for a while. After either 1 person fails and drowns, or 1 hour worth of checks, or someone disbelieves and makes a DC XX will save (pick the number to be difficult, but allow infinite retries) they wake up in their bed rolls. They are also wet, and have perhaps taken some ability damage. No restful sleep that night.
- If protection from Evil is ever cast, have the protected character illuminated in a dazzling spray of sparks for the duration.
-- If you go with a Cthulhu-esque cosmic horror theme, consider having protection from evil do nothing, and have protection from Chaos be required instead. Allow a Spellcraft or Knowledge(Religion) or Knowledge(Arcana) to have the players discover this after Protection from Evil fails the first time. The first failure should be dramatic.
5) Bizzarre combat
- Upon any suitable gruesome sight or stench, have them roll DC XX fortitude Saves. Just pick a number that the best fort save only succeeds on an 18 or better. Those who fail start to vomit. What they vomit up are either Insect swarms or oozes. They start the combat Nauseated until they succeed a DC YY Fort save (give the worst save a chance to succeed on a 14 or 16 or so).
- Have a half mad 'survivor' run up to the players and beg to be killed. Go for a lvl 2 commoner of middle age, or even a small child. The opponent cannot be subdued by sleep or held or subdual damage. Make it an obvious non threat, and try to force the players to kill it. If they do not kill the opponent, at the first meal opportunity, have him commit suicide in some gruesome fashion, like cutting out his own small intestine and strangling himself. The next day, have them fight the dead persons ghost, still insisting on being killed.
- If a cleric tries to use a Turn undead, have him suffer the effects of his own turning as he is enveloped in a powerful wave of negative energy. If he would destroy himself on his own turning attempt, just drop him to as many low hit points as you care to.
- Run an encounter with a T-Rex with permanent Improved Invisibility. All you need to tell them is that something very large is bitting them and doing horrible damage, and that they cannot see it. Allow Improved Invisibility to see 'something', but do not describe it as a T-Rex. Add in a template that adds some heavy damage reduction or fast healing or regeneration to amp this up.
- An Ethereal opponent with Telekinesis can really get the players on edge by throwing large objects at them while denying them a direct way to counter attack.
- Run a few encounters using a possession mechanic based on Magic Jar, accompanied by a disembodied demonic voice. Let players who fail a saving throw keep their mind in their body, but dictate their actions. Just roll initiative, and on the 'monsters' turn, roll out the saves / attacks for magic jar as normal as the voice taunts them. Describe a powerful evil will trying to dominate them as you do the attacks. If you succeed, hand notes to a player telling them which player they need to try to kill, and ensure that they use their best attacks to do so. Or just have a character soak himself in oil and set himself on fire. Have fun with it. Just make sure that you allow the players a means to defeat the 'force'. Just make it non obvious, and keep the duration of such attacks low (no more than 4 or 5 rounds). Let the players win if they can work out a way to keep the possessed player from killing himself or others without resorting to murder.
- Have a duplicate of a player show up in camp and start trying to kill everyone. Attacking it does nothing. Attacking the original and 'killing it will cause the duplicate to come to his senses while leaving the original dead. For this to work, you must find a way to clue the players into the idea that killing the original will stop the duplicate, but you must not let them know that killing the original will not result in the death of the player.
- The players encounter a young pregnant woman in distress. She looks to be in rough shape, filthy and very shaky, and very terrified. When asked what is wrong, she will scream "that thing wont stop talking. It wants to kill me. I can't give birth to it. It is not my baby!". She will reach for the nearest sharp object and try to cut out her own fetus, or at least stab the crap out of herself trying to kill it.
- Have the players find A child between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. This child will be undernourished and alone. He will have a very nasty rash on him, and he will be scratching, trying to relieve the itch. The itch will not go away however, and he will have scraped the outer layers of his own flesh off, exposing bone. A remove curse can remove the itching, but it will require a caster check of DC 19.
- The players hear an toddler (2 or 3 years old) crying. If the search for it, they will indeed find the child. The child will be normal in all respects, except very hungry. If the players try to care for it, then later that night, the infant will attempt a Coup-De-Grace with a dagger on someone (at Str 1, it is 1d4-5 dmg). Regardless of what measures the players take to keep watch on the infant, every night it will get loose and try to kill someone. She will escape from any bonds and always obtain some suitably lethal object. This child is not evil (some other force is controling / aiding it), so it will never detect as evil. The force will be under a Caster level 15 non detection spell (so caster check DC 26 to detect the force). The force will only be present when the infant is trying to kill someone.
This will force the players to either abandon the child, murder the child, or have someone stay awake with it all night to make sure it does not try to kill someone. Remember to apply fatigue penalties.
- As they travel on the island, the players discover the bodies of young children and small animals nailed to trees with what ought to be fatal wounds, but the creatures are not dead. They do not die until they are taken down. At some later point in the adventure, they find a man walking down the path with a large sack, which is squirming. He will ignore the players, walk to the nearest wooden wall or tree, and then start to secure the sack to that surface. he will then unlimber a large spike and a hammer, and start to drive a nail through it, at which point the child inside starts to scream. I am sure your players will stop him. The man requires 1d4 rounds to nail the child up. If he is stopped, he begs the players to let him do it, but will not explain. If the man is obstructed for more than 2 rounds, the child escapes. At which point the equivalent of an 8th level sorcerer with 5 Strenght (and thus a crappy grapple score) and lots of blasting spells (or spells from the book of vile darkness) starts attacking them. It should have Regeneration(Law), and be a pain to kill. (Regeneration with a weakness vs Holy is too obvious). Once they do drop it or otherwise render it immobile, the child becomes normal and starts screaming and crying, asking "Why did you hurt me?".
- Let the players find a young teen in the process of extreme self mutilation, but screaming in pain and giving every indication that they do not want to be doing what they are doing. The person should have already cut out one or both ears, one eye, most of one foot, a few fingers, some severe genital mutilation, and be in the process of knocking their own teeth out with a hammer. Between each wet and meaty thwack, they should beg the players to 'please stop me'.
- Why not have some sort of infectious disease that causes the players to grow nasty, large-ish, black and oozing tumors that have faces, and which try to force the players to fight for control of their own bodies? They should first encounter the disease on others. Curing the disease should require a difficult Remove Curse type spell as well as a remove disease, and maybe some sort of McGuffin item. Once the tumor becomes inteligent, it should inflict some sort of opposed rolls to gain control of the players at an inconvenient time
- The sight of a starving person who is eating their own limb while it is still attached never gets old.
- The players hear the sound of an animal yelping and screaming. when they investigate, they find a few 8 year old children around a fire, holding a small dog in the fire. The hands of the children are also being burned. Around them are the charred, smoking, and half eaten remains of several other small animals. They periodically take the animal out of the fire and gnaw on the parts that are burned, and comment on how tasty it is. They see the players and offer to share.
And that is all of them.
END COMMUNICATION
