Scary demons and super creeps

[Morrus]

How do you go about making demons, devils, and undead really scary in your games? How do you ensure your players don't want to turn the lights out that night? How do you make the embodiment of evil more than just a powerful creature in an opposing faction? How do you evoke The Omen, or The Exorcist?

Balors and Pit Fiends are powerful, sure. Are they scary in a way that any other high level monster isn't?

 

[GMMichael]

Three things:

1) Mystery
2) Anticipation
3) Fear of death.

Sorry. No time to elaborate.

 

[Yora]

I run an AD&D campaign, but I am not using the D&D demons. They are just much too mundane.

In my campaigns, demons are true spirits without physical form and come from an extraplanar realm where time and space really don't have any true meaning, at least not in a way that mortal minds would understand.
Therefore, they can't just open a portal and step into the physical world, but can only interact with it through possession. Possession of the living is rare, but possessing the dead or even unliving material is much easier, as long as these have been heavily corrupted by demonic magic used by sorcerers. Possessed dead animals and fallen warriors are the most common form, but there's also ice demons, shadow demons, ash demons, tar demons, and rock demons.
Mortals can not travel into the demon realm either, as their bodies would simply be annihilated instantly, but can explore it through an astral projection (not the spell). They don't actually have eyes in the demon realms and there isn't anything to see anyway, but the mortal mind creates some kind of visual representation that depends on the thoughts and moods of the most powerful nearby demon.

To possess something in the material world, it must already be highly corrupted, or a sorcerer needs to create a focused connection to the demon realm and prepare the body for a demon to pass over. Which as a result happens very rarely, except for areas with massive degrees of corruption. If a demon just rides along in a body, it can be exorcised, but if it takes over the body, it's impossible to reverse it other than killing the person and forcing the demon back into the demon realm.
Possessed corpses, and maybe individual ice and shadow demons can be defeated by mid-level (4th to 8th) characters, but other than that only high level characters really have any chance to deal with them. Astral visiting the demon realm is just a completely insane idea, and most people don't have any idea why anyone would ever try to do that.

 

[gamerprinter]

Well you mention undead, and with my love of ghosts and haunted encounters, at least with PF I've been building ghost encounters that always include one or several associated haunts. To me, this turns the scary factor up to 11, and with the back story turns a simple ghost encounter into an investigation for a divine caster or paladin.

For example, I recently built an encounter location for a high level adventuring party following a path through a haunted forest. The ghost is a dryad witch. Following the path, the party is led to a small clearing between three twisted trees which triggers the Lost Grove haunt, trapping the PCs inside. A round after the ground covered by mangled raven corpses are triggered. A round after that, the Thorny Sentinel haunt triggers and the dryad witch begins her attack on the party.

Ella was a 16th level witch dryad with the ghost template. Her coven sisters sacrificed her in a dark ritual of power that killed her in a horrible fashion and cursed her grove and herself to undead status. Finding and punishing her still living coven sisters are required to lay her to rest. The following are the haunts I custom built for this encounter.

Field of Mangled Ravens Haunt, CR 5
XP 1600
NE haunt, 15-ft. radius, CL 10
Notice raven corpses begin to writhe as if still alive, Perception DC 15
hp 10, Trigger proximity, Reset 1 hour
Knowledge (religion)/(local) DC check (20) to learn how these ravens were sacrificed to serve a ghost witch's dark rituals.
Description
On either side of the path strewn across the ground are thirteen, broken raven corpses, which begin to writhe, turning their broken beaks and eyeless heads to face the trespassers. They caw in despair. The sound causes all listeners in this wretched field to become nauseated and begin to writhe in pain like the raven corpses, as per the spell Cacophonous Call Mass.
Destruction collect all raven corpses and burn in a pit with Consecrate cast onto the burnt ashes.

Thorny Sentinel Haunt, CR 9
XP 6400
NE haunt, 1 huge tree and 10-ft. radius, CL 10 Persistent
Notice the branches moving by a nonexistent wind,
Perception DC (19 )
hp 10, Trigger proximity, Weakness damaged by fire, Reset 24 hours
Knowledge (religion)/(local) DC check (24) to learn how an unnatural spirit usurped the life and accursed its existence.
Description
A huge thorn tree begins to animate, attacking trespassers with root and limb, as per Animate Plant and all the ground plants in a 10 foot radius surrounding the trunk attempt to grapple anyone nearby preventing passage by it, as per the spell Entangle.
Destruction an overnight prayer vigil under a full moon must be spent, with Holy Word cast at the thorn tree at first light.

Lost Grove Haunt, CR 18
XP 152,600
NE haunt, 15-ft. radius, CL 16, Persistent
Notice eerie lighting absent of color appears between 3 trees, Perception 18
hp 10, Trigger proximity, Reset 1 hour
Knowledge (religion)/(local) DC check (30) to learn that a dryad ghost witch created this cursed spot in the forest to serve as her eternal lair.
Description
An open space between a trinity of trees of thorn, ash and oak measuring 30 ft by 30 ft by 10 ft high, and 20 ft over the center cube. Strangely the light is missing the color spectrum and everything is cast in shades of gray. Spells that depend on colored light do not function. Once you enter this lost grove, trying to leave the area loops you to the opposite side entering it once again. If the ghost Ella is found within the lost grove, you must defeat her in order to escape. The area manifests as per Create Demiplane with the Shape feature.
Destruction Ella the dryad ghost must be laid to rest to destroy this haunt.

---

If I were going to do a devil/daemon/demon encounter, I might include a haunt, hazards and most definitely also include a curse of some kind, used similarly as the above scene with multiple elements used in concert to make a 'scary' encounter, really scary. All my major scary encounters are complex integrations of monster, location, haunts/hazards/traps, and minions.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If I ever run 3.5Ed- or any other version of D&D- again, I plan on doing something like this for Energy Draining undead:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?335683-Brainstorming-Revising-Energy-Drain-for-3-X

 

[Melisende]

Anticipation and suspense are critical. Do not make them known quantities by openly describing their appearance and the key features that allow metagaming to identify them. I like using their influence as a subtle thing, trying to lend indications that build up towards a climax that maybe reveals the demon, but usually has them puppeting or embodying a friend.

 

[Slippery_Chicken]

In a lot of RPG stuff, you can generally replace "lovecraftian horror" with "demon", and you're accomplishing basically the same thing in terms of story. It's a bad evil thing which comes from somewhere else and does awful things to people, and especially mean bad people sometimes ally with them.

I've seen one demon played effectively (emotional effect, not just rules effect), and that was done by playing up the (literally inhuman) malice and brutality which every demon is supposed to embody. It was a demon which could possess people, and we were in a crowd at the time. It could basically pull an Agent Smith and turn any person into an enemy: our party members, our friends, innocent people, etc. It was abundantly clear that this demon didn't give a single **** about who died: my character wound up killing a tiny (innocent!) girl because the demon possessed it and had it attack when my PC was at his last hit point. There was also a sense of helplessness because we had no idea where the demon was or how to defeat it without hurting innocent people.

Anticipation and suspense are critical. Do not make them known quantities by openly describing their appearance and the key features that allow metagaming to identify them.

If you have the demon visible to the PCs and you don't describe what it looks like, that just sounds like bad GMing. If it's not actually visible (or there's concealment and the PCs botch their Spot checks), then it makes sense to only describe bits of it.

 

[Yora]

The key thing is to not tell the players what they need to identify a creature known to them.

Still describe the creature, but make it look different than the monsters from the books.

"Four armed giant with a dogs head and two giant claws" and "gorilla pig with tiny wings" give everything away to experienced D&D players, even if the game is in a setting where people usually never get to see demons.

 

[gamerprinter]

Another option for a PF game where the players don't use Mythic rules is to apply Mythic abilities to your nether beings and undead. A mythic demon in a non-Mythic game would be pretty scary.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

If I really wanted to such things to creep my players out, I'd do a couple of things:

• borrow liberally from horror movies - if you've done the haunted house in Markarth in Skyrim, you know what I'm talking about
• use the corruption theme of such creatures - mental attacks against the PCs will, with successive failures causing permanent changes in personality
• use scarier damage, damage from a melee attack can only be healed in a temple and does not heal naturally, or if a PC is killed the demon takes his soul and he may not be raised/resurrected/reincarnated, etc

Of course I'd want to bounce these ideas off my players first, as some of them impinge on areas generally considered to belong entirely inside of the player's control.