GMs: How do you create a feeling of horror (in an heroic fantasy game)?

[Nagol]

Horror requires the protagonists to feel/appear helpless in the face of the opposition. That's harder to do with heroic fantasy, but not impossible.

Early D&D, toss in a creature only hurt by magic weapons before the party has any.

Make the victory theoretically possible, but at a cost the party is unwilling to pay - for example have a powerful demon possessing a innocent child. The party can 'win' by killing the child, but it's a step too far for the party to consider initially. Are the PCs willing to become monsters in order to stop one?

Make the opposition be covert and have a pattern, but a nonsensical/inobvious one. Exactly how are Farmer Bob, Maid Marion, and Jeweller Smith related that they all had an arm ripped off and placed where their heads were. And where are the heads now? Does it have something to do with their relationships? Was it hair colour? Because a PC or loved one has that hair colour...

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I've done this a few times, mostly unintentionally. Two factors seem to contribute:

A feeling of slow, impending doom. The PCs were once in a ruined city where they knew things became very, very dangerous after dark, with threats of a magnitude such that the only possible means of survival was to run as fast as they could, and no guarantee that even that would be successful. It created a tension as they adventured during the day, watching the clock. Things came up and as they started to realize that they weren't going to make it out in time I could see the fear grow in their eyes.

Threats that are not understood. I once had a monster that could only be seen out of the corner of one's eye. If you looked straight at it it wasn't there, and of course our peripheral vision is low on detail compared to central vision. It really freaked the players out. I think that first, it was viscerally creepy: imagining having the same thing happen in real life is pretty awful. Second they could only get very limited information on what it was through their senses. Third it was my first use of an original monster, so none of them had a clue what it could do. Fourth, it created a bit of a feeling of helplessness. In real life if you can't see something it can easily coup de grace you. The D&D rules don't work like that, but a bit of real life expectations leaked over in this case, I think.

 

[amerigoV]

Thanks also for your points but can you elaborate on the third (be obtuse). Also, does horror preclude a sense of inevitable victory?

I meant to say obscure (and edited it). And maybe even that is not the right word. Never directly give an answer. The players should never have a firm conclusion. If the players are speculating on something add that fear. If they think vampires (and its something else) throw in a few red herrings that are plausible. The unknown and unsure creates doubt and fear. The known can be dealt with.

Even simple things like "I open the door". Ask "which hand do you use? Where do you stand when you open the door?" (you later use that information to rend them apart ).

 

[Ahnehnois]

Horror in gaming presents a unique challenge because the players are generally aware they are playing a horror game. Thus, if bad things happen to their characters, they tend to be ready for it.

Thus, I think it's very important to try to set up some kind of goal for the players that they think they can achieve, some kind of positive expectation that you can then undermine. It's best to set up a sense of normalcy for a while before introducing any horror elements. I also think that a sense of mystery and ambiguity is important and that red herrings are extremely useful.

 

[Wicht]

Even simple things like "I open the door". Ask "which hand do you use? Where do you stand when you open the door?" (you later use that information to rend them apart ).

Apart from horror, that's just good DMing in general to ask the players questions and prevent information from their perspective rather than an omniscient third person perspective. Even when you are not setting them up you should take the time to frequently ask questions like, "so you are standing where, exactly in the room?". Done this way, even minis can be helpful in creating a sense of foreboding because you are using it to make them aware or believe that there are spatial consequences to their decisions, even when there are none. Likewise with the way information is presented, it is rather easy to create tension if you just pay attention to how you say things; We have a new player and he's playing a rogue always checking for traps and its bothering him that I say "You do not see any traps," rather than, "there are no traps." My kids have been assuring him that this is how I always operate as DM, but it makes him nervous about what is going on in the game, and it makes me aware that perhaps not enough DMs do this sort of thing (conversely, my children know when I want to speed things along, I just flatly say, there are no traps.)

 

[Wicht]

Horror in gaming presents a unique challenge because the players are generally aware they are playing a horror game. Thus, if bad things happen to their characters, they tend to be ready for it.

Thus, I think it's very important to try to set up some kind of goal for the players that they think they can achieve, some kind of positive expectation that you can then undermine. It's best to set up a sense of normalcy for a while before introducing any horror elements. I also think that a sense of mystery and ambiguity is important and that red herrings are extremely useful.

Would you say that it is important then that the bad things happening to the characters be, ideally, unexpected bad things?

And I agree strongly that a sense of normalcy before the horror helps facilitate horror.

Do you have any examples of how you have done these things, and what sort of goals would you set the players to create a sense of urgency?

 

[Ahnehnois]

Would you say that it is important then that the bad things happening to the characters be, ideally, unexpected bad things?

Often, but not necessarily. In many cases, directing threats towards or from one character and then switching suddenly for surprise is highly effective. Dread is a part of horror as well, so sometimes having the players know what is going to happen and dragging it out and subduing their efforts to avoid it can create a sense of helplessness that is also archetypal to horror.

Do you have any examples of how you have done these things, and what sort of goals would you set the players to create a sense of urgency?

One element I've used successfully is to introduce the veneer of a procedural. I had some CoC players investigating a murder only to become targets themselves. They start to feel like they might get somewhere investigating the murder; so there's a positive expectation to undermine there.

Another example is one that I haven't used yet is about a character getting a terminal medical diagnosis (sets up an expectation of death), going through various healthcare options (still expecting death), and then after a couple of hours, introducing a new PC with magical abilities to try and help (creates a new meta-level expectation that maybe the PC can do something, albeit perhaps at heavy cost), only to ultimately snatch that hope away.

Red herrings are pretty self-explanatory, but I think it's important to make them big ideological ones. For example, I ran a CoC game set during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and in the buildup I introduced some elements of mysticism that suggested there might be witchcraft at work. When the floods came I had them feel a bump underwater or hear a noise that suggested perhaps the Deep Ones were rising up. At the end of the day, however, I had no intention of using any supernatural elements; these elements were all red herrings to divert from the actual plot which was pretty much straight-up historical fiction.

 

[amerigoV]

Do you have any examples of how you have done these things, and what sort of goals would you set the players to create a sense of urgency?

You can take a simple one from Deadspace video game:

Mission - Rescue/Repair mission (the normalcy)
Isolation Factor - target ship is far way. While there, something happens to your ship and you are forced to stay on the ship with the Horror
Urgency Factor - must get life support systems on-line. Ship's orbit is failing.


In a recent game that was more on the monster killing versus pure horror - a cruise ship was a scene of horror. Its course was now to a very populated tourist spot. So not only did you have to deal with the horror itself, you had time-limit to stop the ship from spreading the horror beyond its current confines.


Ravenloft (the traditional adventure)/Vampire/Werewolf adventures has the "don't be out at night" - so while their may not be a time limit overall, tension builds as the sun starts to go down.

 

[Doug McCrae]

1. Weak PCs. In 3e, it's a lot easier to do horror if the PCs are 1st level rather than 20th.
2. PCs are ordinary people. It's better for the PCs to be ordinary people going about their lives and avoiding trouble, than adventurers who seek it out. Adventurers don't scare easily, otherwise they'd never enter dungeons.
3. Restrict information -
a) The horror monster or monsters must be hand crafted, not found in the Monster Manual.
b) Restrict or deny the use of information gathering magic, particularly the paladin's detect evil.
c) Restrict or deny the use of knowledge skills to learn about the horror monster.
4. Rising threat. First there is inexplicable spookiness, then an animal or NPC dies, then the PCs die one by one, until there's only the Final Girl left.
5. Don't permit traditional D&D monster bashing. Every roomful of orcs successfully vanquished helps protagonize the PCs, which is the opposite of what you want.

You may not wish to use many of these techniques, particularly #2, as they go against the notion of heroic fantasy. This shows why it's harder to do horror within the heroic fantasy genre.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Another difficulty in combing heroic fantasy and horror is that players will only feel fear, or the vicarious semblance of it, if they allow themselves to do so. Players that sign up to play an rpg that's explicitly horror, such as Call of Cthulhu, are prepared for that, but typically players who sign up for D&D aren't - they're expecting to kill things and take their stuff. Ravenloft is an exception to this.

Consider telling the players that this game will be in the horror genre before the session starts.