Creepy...

Mustrum_Ridcully · Sep 12, 2008

An idea I head this morning, after remembering a Doctor Who episode:

How about a mysterious person (maybe a child) appearing in mirrors and mirroring surfaces? Always behind the character(s). Possibly only one of them can see it, or all of them. Anyway, it appears only in the mirror. It starts in a "Haunted House", but later, the character will find it everywhere.

Admittedly, this is harder to do in a Fantasy setting where mirrors (or mirroring surfaces) might not be as common as in the modern world.

And of course, the kid in the mirror needs to be resolved eventually as some kind of mystery... Or has it? What if the PCs solve the mystery, and the kid is free - of a kind. It can now leave the haunted house, but where should it go? Best thing to do is following the PCs that rescued it.

Jürgen Hubert · Sep 12, 2008

Not exactly something out of a game, but my small but growing list of Nightmare Fuel on the Arcana Wiki might help.

Feel free to tell me of any other real life material you found disturbing.

CleverNickName · Sep 12, 2008

Once, I ran a spider-themed adventure (don't laugh, every DM has done this at least once.) Anyhoo, the BBEG was a modified black dragon: instead of breating acid, it vomited swarms of living, crawling, poisonous spiders.

That was at least six years ago, and my players still twitch involuntarily whenever I mention it.

evilgamer13 · Sep 12, 2008

OK I'm going to have to keep the tong eating bug from nightmare fuel in mind for next time I want to scare the pants off my PC's... you cant quite understand what he's saying... no he just mumbling.

Lord Xtheth · Sep 13, 2008

From the campaign I'm trying to write/publish:

Children who had hung themselves desending from the ceiling into a group of their own (animated) toys and attacking the PCs with the ropes they had hung themselves with.

.....

A door leading to the "Last room" of the necromancer's house is composed of a living human turned inside out and kept alive through magic, whose own unprotected and still beating heart is the doorknob.

evilgamer13 · Sep 13, 2008

I like the door idea Lord Xtheth, so how about fighting Zombies that are a skeleton encased in a mass of multicolored worms with some kind of large trilobite for the heart (removing or destroying it puts the things down).

ProfessorCirno · Sep 13, 2008

...Man, people here really hate kids.

Rechan · Sep 13, 2008

ProfessorCirno said:
...Man, people here really hate kids.

Not really. It's just that children are an easy thing to make "creepy" because it effects most people on an emotional, if not primitive level.

This is why a lot of horror movies in the past few years (especially ghost movies) have creepy kids in them.

evilgamer13 · Sep 14, 2008

Rechan said:
Not really. It's just that children are an easy thing to make "creepy" because it effects most people on an emotional, if not primitive level.

This is why a lot of horror movies in the past few years (especially ghost movies) have creepy kids in them.

I think that's because we (as reasonably well adjusted adult humans) are programed to care for and protect young children, thus turning them into an object of fear or an enemy to be destroyed causes an inherent conflict.

Whitemouse · Sep 14, 2008

I ran a horror game using the BRP system last year.

The players were trying to survive a night of the living dead kind of game. They eventually came upon a half ruined house and made their way inside. They barricaded it shut. In a closet was a weeping girl. They let her out. The girl then sprang out and ran out the front door without opening it. The players then used scrap bits of wood to fix up the little girl shape in the door.

As if that wasn't bad enough there was a small underground passage that linked the house to an excavated subterranean basement that they didn't know about.. The players then kept their eyes out on the undead and found their numbers dwindling. Overly perplexed by this they still kept watch. Eventually there was only one zombie left wandering around outside that they could see. The rest had dug into the earth and found the 'basement'.

The zombies burst through the floorboards and completely took the players by surprise. They fought it out and eventually only one character was left standing. He had failed his sanity check at went berserk, fleeing the house and climbed up a tree and fell asleep there. He woke up two hours later to find the remaining zombie from outside starting to feast on him.

All the players told me that I gave them nightmares for a couple of days afterwards with that one.