Tuzenbach said:
fighting in complete darkness is frightening! The last thing I wanted was an encounter in the dark. We were only first level, very weak, you see. All of a sudden.......
"You hear these echoey clicking noises, almost like horse hooves, entering the 200x200 chamber and coming towards you. Whatever it is, it's going to make contact in about 40 seconds. What do you do?"
"I cast
Magic Missle at the darkness." (Sorry, couldn't resist)
Sometimes reality helps scare the players caught up in the fantasy. Once I ran a campaign in which the PCs were trying to track down the cells of a forbidden murder cult. Most of these cells were hidden out in the wilderness. During one adventure, the PCs were in a forest. This was right after the movie "The Blair Witch Project" had come out, but no one in the group had seen it but me. So I started using some of the stuff from the movie on the players -- the laughing children's voices in the night, the unusual stick figures hanging from the trees, their seeming to walk around in circles, etc. They were getting very frustrated, and creeped out at the same time. Then they found a creepy old ruined house, and inside the bodies of several young children who had been ritually murdered.
Now while we were playing, we were seated at a table in my friends' kitchen. My chair faced the window into the backyard. During one of my descriptions of a room in the in-game house, a small gecko suddenly ran across the screen of the window I was looking at and attacked a moth. This caught my attention; I was fascinated, and stopped talking in mid-description, just looking at the window above and to one side of one of the players. All of the players just sat looking at me in anticipation for a second, then jumped as they suddenly turned to look at the window. The player sitting with her back to the window let out a scream and bolted from the room. She thought something was coming through the window to get her.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
Another time, in a Traveller campaign, I was running a d20 conversion of a classic Traveller adventure set aboard a small research lab in orbit around an isolated planet. In the adventure, the researchers had been testing a new combat drug designed to turn soldiers into killing machines, but so far there had been some troubling side effects. Someone aboard secretly working for a competing drug company had sabotaged one of the labs; the explosion had released the experimental drugs into the life support and everyone had breathed ithe mixture in. The lab animals, too. The combined drugs turned everyone, and the animals, into cannabilistic killers with superhuman STR, DEX and CON part of the time, and into paranoid weaklings with light sensitivity at other times. There were only four people -- out of a crew of about 20 -- left alive when the PCs arrived to check out why radio contact with the lab was lost. Most of the dead bodies were hanging in a meat locker in the galley, with evidence they had been partially eaten.
I made my descriptions of the darkened space station very spooky, like a haunted house in space -- sudden noises and movement, unexplained sounds and happenings, etc. The PCs were attacked several times by freed lab rats and other animals. When the found the bodies in the meat locker, they decided the bite marks on the bodies were from the animals.
The first living person they encountered was in a paranoid phase, and has barracaded himself in one corner of one of the labs. He talked to the PCs; he was obviously very scared of them and the other survivors. He blamed everything on the other survivors. He agreed to leave with the PCs on their ship, but refused to come out until everything was safe. They left with a promise to come back and moved on.
While searching an empty cabin with blood stains on the floor and other signs of a struggle, a dead body falls out of a closet when the door is opened, making the players jump.
They encountered one of the survivors in crazed mode in the engineering compartment. He attacked them when they shined a flashlight on his face, and they were forced to kill him.
They encountered another paranoid survivor, a woman, who was barracaded inside her cabin. She also refused to come out until it was safe, and blamed everthing on one particular survivor, a man named Karl. Said he was the one who had taken to eating the dead bodies. She agrees to come out only when Karl is dealt with; she directs them to Karl's lair, down in the empty fuel tanks.
The PCs go in search of Karl. The fuel tanks are like a dark dungeon. Karl attacks them and they kill him.
They go back to the first paranoid survivor they found. He is gone from his den. One the way to where the paranoid woman survivor was waiting, the pass the galley again. They hear a noise from the meat locker. They investigate, and find the first paranoid survivor -- now in cannabil, superhuman mode -- kneel in the doorway of the locker, eating something. He turns to look at them, his face covered in bloody gore, strips of human flesh dangling from his teeth. Fear and revulsion fight for prominence on the players' faces.
The light of the PCs' flashlights enrages the survivor and he attacks. They kill him with their SMGs, and keep firing into his prone body until they all empty their clips. One even reloads and keeps firing, just to make sure. Then they sit around for quite some time, debating what to do with the female survivor still waiting in her cabin.
They decide what they must do, and return to the cabin. The woman is still in a weakened, paranoid phase. They talk her into coming out, then gun her down before she can turn on them. They then delete all of the research files, corrupt the computer system, and rig up some explosive charges of their own, which they set off from the safety of their own ship.
