Help me freak out my players!

[Sejs]

I'm (finally) sending a group of my players' characters into a haunted abbey (it's a pbp game, so yeah, I've been working on this for a while). While I don't want this to be so dangerous as to wipe everyone out (they're all level 1-2), I want to scare the crap out of them.

Any suggestions on truly horrifying haunted environments? I'm using the haunting rules from Libris Mortis and last year's Dragon issue that talked about haunted houses (particularly for fun with visions of The Incident that turned this abbey into Hell on Earth), but am eager for more ways to give my players long-term psychiatric problems ...

Wow, heh, I'm actually at the cusp of doing the exact same thing in my game. Haunted abby, including haunting presence from LibMort.

Couple of things I've done so far, that are easily described away as evil influence on the part of the Presence:

Weather: The weather within a certain range of the abby (couple miles) is always dim and depressing. Thickly overcast, colder than it should be, foggy whenever it's even slightly feasable, what light does get thru seems pale and wan. Rains a lot. Thunderstorms, particularly at night. The wind has only three settings - raging howl, persistantly cold and biting, and eerily still.

Flora and Fauna: Twisted and feral. Normal plants, grass, trees, etc all wither and shrink, and other, less pleasant things thrive. Brambles, weeds, saw grass, mold, fungus. Fruit and nuts rot on the vine. Parasites and disease are rampant. The world seems like it's been strangled to death, and the carrion feeders are already eager for their meal. Larger animals starve or are already dead. Swing creatures' tendancies to the extreme - if they're normally docile, make them practically catatonic in how unresponsive they are. If they're normally territorial, playful, or agressive, make them downright rabid. In my game, the PC scout watched a flock of Evil Geese (tm) stalk a large rat, it by scent, pull it from its burrow and then fall on it all at once, ripping it to shreds and eating it.

Mockery of Life: Mindless undead going about a parody of their daily routine. In my game, the first thing the PCs encountered was a zombie shepherd standing under a tree, watching his flock of zombie sheep. The sheep were just slowly milling about in a field long overgrown. Occasionally they'd lower their head to eat the grass.. then forget what they were doing because they wern't hungry anymore, and return to standing around. At sundown, the flock and shepherd would lurch and stagger back off to one of the outbuildings to stand around in a darkened barn waiting for dawn, so they could go back and stand in the field again.

 

[Dagger of Lath]

Make the players want to be horrified. How? Use their greed.
Some player wants to become necromancer/psionicist/slightly weird thing in your world?

Let them, but explain that to cross over into the class there'll be some strange consequences, visions, etc that they need to get through to gain the class. Then you've got free reign and the players are happy because they know the more freaked out things become, the closer they are to getting the class.

Plus, one thing I've found works well. Mention things you wouldn't normally mention. "It's currently 3 in the morning"....later...."It's currently 4 in the morning". You can line things up to be time based, or you could not. But by using descriptions and mentioning boring normal facts that you normally wouldn't mention, players get their weirdometers up. Also you can describe these things in weird ways. "The sun set an hour ago", "it's an hour before moonrise", "the stars are fading from the sky".

In a modern horror game, I was told that the scariest thing was when players realised that the horrific events were always happening at 8:47pm in the game and that I'd given them that information each time in a different way.

 

[Goldmoon]

Have them walk into a room with three Kenders who all utter at the same time: "I'm bored"

 

[Wraith Form]

Have them walk into a room with three Kenders who all utter at the same time: "I'm bored"

LOL

 

[Infernal Teddy]

Have them walk into a room with three Kenders who all utter at the same time: "I'm bored"

THAT is horror! I just read this to my Girlfiend,and she went pale...

 

[Kaodi]

Horrible?

Something you see fairly often in horror films, is an attack by supernatural forces, that overwhelms or kills the person, only to have the scene suddenly return to the moment before they were attacked, but they remember everything from the attack... In this way, you can have deadly combat without actually " killing " the characters... maybe you could associate some bonus or penalty with how they reacted during it. The only thing is, I think you would have to be careful with this one. The attack has to be thematically related to some of the other horrific events, so that the players start looking for the things that they " saw " before it happened.

Another small thing I was thinking of, is having some rooms that have two sources of (dim) lighting, except that only one is functioning (like two candles on the dining table, but only one is lit), except that all of the shadows look like they are being cast by light that would of been coming from the nonfunctioning one, and none by the functioning one.

 

[Agent Oracle]

Terrifying things?

-A burned out room, this one room (small, barely as big as a prison cell), and everything in it, has been completely destroyed long ago by a fire . When the players open the door, a cloud of ash and smoke rolls out, then dissipates. The next time the player who opened the door tries to get any sleep, he will be visited by an apparition in his dreams, a boy of no more than 12 who intones something along the lines of "You were in my room. Don't go into my room. You stay out of my room, and I'll stay out of yours."

Messing with people's dreams is always conductive to terror. I used to have one player dream in 8-bit Nintendo games... which always had some minor involvement with the day ahead. Then, one day, he dreamed of Chrono trigger, which i forgot was a 16 bit game... he was freaked out all day.

-A spider web with a disproportionately large bone in it (Like a selection of chicken bones being held up by the spider webs)

-One room that is immaculately clean. Im-maculate. No dust, no cobwebs, nothing... though a filthy rag sits on a small table at the end of it, it's stained with years of dust, and a large stain the familiar color of dried blood...

-A yellowed, dust and cobweb covered painting hanging on the wall in the first room they enter. It's of some creepy old woman with the piercing eyes that follow you around the room. Three or so rooms later, there is... the same paiting? every couple of rooms they enter has the exact same painting, if they ever decide to backtrack, the painting won't be in the older rooms, but will show up in places that it hadn't previously been...

-a bathroom. This alone should suprise any player, as no place has bathrooms.

 

[Hatchling Dragon]

I'm going to reiterate the oft-overlooked rule of horror: keep it mysterious. The essence of horror is the unknown. Why are people afraid of the dark? Simple, becuase you can't see, and thus don't know what's making those noises. The unknown is uncontrolable, and thus frightening. Let them know what they're acutaly up against and you've just lost the battle. At that point the adventure starts to slide towards a tactical exercise, the party vs the big-bad-beastie. No more 'what are we up against', instead the far less frightening 'what do we do to defeat it?'

As to what to do to scare them? I'm not realy good with this as I just don't care for, and thus don't watch, those types of movies. With that being said, I'd go with the classics. Ichor dripping down walls is good, especialy if they're unsure about the safety of touching it. Mysterious noises are great, but don't over-do it or they become jaded and ignore them. I love the 'disturbingly normal' scenes in an otherwise 'spooky' setting, the seemingly unexplainable is always a good trick. An hourglass (or clocks if you have them) running backwards is a staple, and it doesn't even have to work outside the room it's found in. Footsteps are good, and being accompanied by dust sifting down from the floor above is better, with the ultimate being a witness upstairs that'll swear there's nobody up there walking around.

Keep them guessing and you keep them worried.

 

[Kurotowa]

Scary locations are good, but don't leave out the special effects. Have odd things happen in response to their actions. A chill breeze blows past, in an interior room. A zombie mouse with gleaming red eyes peeks out of a mousehole. The stench of death wafts past, then is gone again. When it's time for a major event, start with all the shadows turning blood red.

 

[Halivar]

Ceramic children's dolls. With butcher knives.

Or, cover the entrance with dried blood and entrails. The walls are covered with messages saying, "The children must feed!" and "The little ones hunger!"