Creepy...

My players tell me that the creepiest session I ever presented was the one when they had to travel to the prison plane of Carceri, and we're looking for a Mcguffin in the Bastion of Last Hope.
They went into an inn called The Homely Hostel and were certain that the pleasant-looking gnome couple who ran the place just had to be demons in disguise. Several bedraggled, pitiful people were staying at the inn because they had nowhere else to go in this hellish nightmare of a city. Two of them were beggars in once-regal rags, one was a harsh cold elf woman, and one of them was a little boy who had been accidentally abandoned there by his magician master. The party was sure that they needed to rescue these people from this inn.

I'm sure you all see what's coming, but they didn't.

So while gathered at the dinner table, the wizard casts True Seeing so that she can see what the gnomes actually are. She looks at them and sees...gnomes. She turns to the Fighter to whisper this news, and sees that the "little boy" seated next to him is actually a leering bone devil. She manages a bluff check to keep herself composed, and they all managed to sneak out that night. They had been planning to go to the boy's room that night to rescue him. Narrow escape for them.

There were lots of other things like that in the Bastion of Last Hope, and the creepiness was enhanced by the fact that I had the whole room lit with nothing but red light bulbs. I dunno. I didn't think it would be that creepy, but it gave everyone the willies.

ProfessorCirno said:

...Man, people here really hate kids.

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Yes, I realy, realy do.

evilgamer13 said:

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.

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Yes, that was one of the weirder entries...

(In case you are wondering, he was referring to this entry).

There is a species of fish I remember hearing about in college that is all female and parasites the DNA of males of other species; what happens is that they reproduce in a normal sexual manner, but at the next generation none of the fathers DNA makes it into the offspring (only the grandmothers)... this might have been one of my bio prof's yanking my chain but if they are real does anyone know the name (and if there not real they can still be used as a bit of inspiration).

Something I wanted to use, but came up with long after my campaign had proceeded past overland travel:

On a lonely backwoods or frontier trade path, the group notices several sets of wagon tracks that dig up the dirt and damp earth and go off the road. If they follow them, the find themselves in a small dell not easily visible from the road, made of three or four low hills. The earth is churned and trampled by feet, hooves and wheels. One merchant's wagon is smashed and overturned at the base of the far hill. There are no horses, though the wagon's cinches are covered in blood.

About two dozen naked human/humanoid bodies lay scattered across the dell. While most are covered in mud, they don't appear to have any obvious wounds from a distance.

The first one the group approaches is contorted, face down in the mud, but it's nails are broken and it's hands covered in blood as if it was attempting to scratch it's attacker.

When they roll the body over, the body has no face, from forehead to chin, is solid flesh, ripped and torn by fingernails to reveal muscle and smooth bone beneath, with nary a socket or orifice. As if the poor soul, suddenly bereft of sight and breath was desperately clawing at their own head to make a way to breathe.

All the bodies share this faceless death.

Several sets of hoofprints and wagon wheel tracks leave the dell more sedately and return to the road, heading in the same direction the group was heading, and eventually lose distinction from the common ruts in the road about a mile on.

So I was talking with some friends of mine who are going to the upcoming Lovecraft film festival, now they always make a joke about were there going and last year it was the st Hastors day celebration. This year they decided on the jubilee of the black pharaoh. This gave me a neat idea for a CoC adventure, the PC's would go out and come across an odd Egyptian street fair and the celabrants (men with eye makeup) would invite them to come in and celabrate this most momentus of days... as things went along things would get more and more sereal untell everyone was holding up masks on sticks and speaking with odd lisps (as if they had a deformity of the mouth) and perhaps they would be given masks of thier own (that looked like monsters rather then the normal human faced masks of the other celabrents), that is of course when they would be given an audiance with the pharoah a seven foot pluss tall man whose skin is dark and shiney like obsidian with the chin pice and headress whose voice seems to echo oddly in the small tent. Afterwards you can have any standard good guys transformed into monsters bit espeshaly if they are hunting themselves.

Back in the 90's I created a complex time shifting story in Darksun.

I took Ravenloft's Forlorn Castle and placed it on the edge of the Deadlands. I then placed a powerful curse on the place that allowed time to twist. The times shown were- Green age, Cleansing War, Creation of the Deadlands and "current".

What brought the "heroes" here was the attack of a powerful psionic undead spirit that lived here whom had attacked a noble they were paid to protect. While exploring the place they didcovered a twisted and unsettling series of events that forever shaped the woman that would become the nasty hatful undead spirit. The house was full of murder, incest, plots and twisted use of the "new" power- magic.

The group wasn't sure how to deal with it on many levels.

Hope no one minds a little bit of thread necromancy...

I love running horror games - I find that I can improv better when I'm running a horror game, because not everything has to make sense (in fact, it's better that way!). A few of my favourite horror moments:

1) 2e D&D. This happened 15 or so years ago, so I'm foggy on the details, but... The PCs break into the cellar of a ruined castle that is now the home of a cult hoping to summon some monstrous thing. Things are fairly normal at first, with some rather normal scenes. The PCs find a room filled with gunpowder, and a bunch of dead rats. They figure that the rats died eating the gunpowder... odd, but plausible.

They then make their way down a long hallway, filled with gothic imagery that seems to smell of... wax? It's a narrow hallway, and one of the PCs feels very claustrophobic. And everyone seems to hear a slight whispering babble of voices.

Things get haunted from there. They find a room with an empty fountain w/ a cherub, and then explore some jail cells. In the jail cells they find a corpse that ate his cellmate, and then animated to feast on the PCs (kind of creepy, but it was more of a "release" at this point).

They find a mortuary where the bodies are dipped in wax foto make death masks (and find a few death masks!). One of them remembers something about the smell of the hallway coming into the place, and shudders.

They also find the writings of a cellmate on a wall - they wouldn't get near his body, terrified it'd animate. They make their way back to the fountain room, and now the fountain is working... only instead of water, it's blood.

Then there was the encounter with the "Cult" (who had been dead for a very long time, and only brought to life because of the life force of the adventurers who had come to visit - it's nice knowing that you're responsible for bringing evil back into the world!). I don't really recall this encounter, but I remember the fight against the big bad evil thing was a tough one, and the PCs weren't able to stop it. So they ran.

When they got to the main hallway, it had animated into a Living Wall (a nice 2e monster that would pull people in to join it). The group knows they are in a tight spot, as they have to squeeze past this narrow hallway to escape the THING closing in on them. They make a mad run, and one PC gets pulled in - the rest of the group stops to free him, and bloodied, they make their way through the hall while skeletal hands pull and skeletal voices cry out "join us.....".

One PC gets pulled in, and they can't rescue him. The thing is too close. They can hear it in the fountain room (now flooded with blood that is beginning to flow down the wax hallway).

As the remnants of the group make their way out, one of the PCs (A ninja, though we westernized him) knew that this thing had to be stopped. "Go on without me. I can't let [PC caught by the living wall] go like that." He grabs a few kegs of gunpowder, pushes them down the hallway, and then throws one on his back. He lights a wick, and charges the thing, screaming the whole time.

Great finale.

2. In another 2e game, one of the characters (a ranger named Glamdring) got infected with a poison. A "Crystal spider" had bit him on his left hand. He watched as, over the course of a few days, the skin around the bite began to look like a mirror. It felt like skin, and moved like skin, but was in all other ways a mirror. And it began to inch up his arm...

He had no idea what it was, and sages had no clue either. He had nightmares of the disease crawling up his chest and piercing his heart, or of making it's way to his eyes. His hand would animate at times and he'd take swings at his companions. NPCs responded in fear to the character, and he got chased out of town once or twice. He took to covering up his disease. Within a few weeks of game time, the mirror had made it's way up to his elbow. He spent good money trying to find out how to cure this disease, until an Oracle told him who he had to kill.

(yeah, the player wanted to try out being an assassin, so this was his chance!)

The adventure itself was boring, but the disease was a very fun touch. He would wake up in weird places, and occasionally he would lose control and attack his companions. At one point, he couldn't speak common - everything his character said came out in the setting version of Latin... a language none of the PCs could normally speak! It also got weird in that when the disease covered his whole arm, people who looked in did not see their own reflection, but rather a reflection of what they would look like at the time of their death... (one player was very creeped out when I said "your reflection looks much like your normal reflection... only you're missing your eyes and your hair is slightly longer").



3.

Another fun story was in a 2e (or maybe early 3e) game I ran where the PCs were trying to rob some location or another famed for wealth. The funny thing in this adventure was that the location was not haunted in any way, and there were no monstrous guardians. There were a few minor traps and usual tomb protections, but I had set the area up as what a normal noble's tomb would be like.

Unfortunately, the other grave robbers had gotten there first, and knew they were outmatched by the PCs in a straight fight (they were a halfling rogue and a gnomish illusionist). So, they did everything in their power to scare the PCs off.

I thought it was going to be a simple night's gaming (I had designed the adventure as an easy way to give them treasure, to make up for my recent stinginess, and as a way of throwing an "easy" adventure at them for campaign believability). Instead, I had that gnome throw everything at the party - crying ghosts, whispers on the wind, distant screams... and the rogue would reset traps the PCs had already disarmed, which made things very scary for the group.

The part I remember most, though, was the actual setting of the game. It was in my parent's living room, and I had the lights turned low - the dimmer switch on the overhead light even flickered like a candle. I had a fire going, and it was a dark night outside. And my parents have one of those houses that is quiet. I spoke in a slight voice, so they had to lean forward to hear me. We had a long, oaken table, with high-backed chairs, and I paced around the table, so they would have to follow me with their eyes as I spoke.

The best part? One of the PCs was making his way down a hallway, when he was hit by a wind on the back of his neck. That's it. In real life, when I described this, I was right behind him, so I blew gently onto the back of his neck.

He literally jumped, flailed his hands about, and started hyperventilating. He had a near anxiety attack (this was before he knew he suffered from an anxiety condition, and before he was taking meds to keep it under control!), though he was laughing at his own response. Later, he said it was the scariest game he had ever played, and also his favourite.

(P.S. The party got only half the treasure when they ran screaming out of the tomb... then they luckily bumped into the gnome, knifed him, and returned into the tomb to steal the rest; "It was only a gnome illusionist all that time!". And then, when the rogue kept up to his tricks, they really freaked out and ran. I never did tell them the full story)

They did dig too deep

So one of the things that has always creeped me out the most in the lord of the rings trilogy is the origin... or lack there of of the watcher in Moria. The simple explanation of they dug to deep for the origin of this unique and horrible (though mostly unseen beast) was always so powerful to me because it implyed that there were other such preadimit horrors lying entomed within the land perhaps primordial forces or simply the enhabitants of a preavious epoch.