What Makes A Horror Campaign Scary?

[DragonLancer]

Give the players the heebie geebies and the characters will have them too. Play on player phobias and dislikes. Don't go for the blood and gore when theres no need. Don't play in a well lit room - uses candles (though be careful). And has been said, try your damnest not to describe the creature.

Ever wonder why you can't get a decent Cthulhu/Lovecraft film? Reading about the amorphous, blashepmous and undulating toadish form is one thing, showing a tentacle and a lump of gel on screen is something completely un-scary. Don't describe, skirt around the description where you can.

Good luck.

 

[Crothian]

However, with all the preperation and good music and proper descriptions the players have to want to be scared. If you have one person cracking jokes or not taking it seriously it will ruin it. If you have distractions like the wife coming in erver now and agian it will make it harder. It takes a lot to scare people through gaming and it takes very little to take it away.

 

[ShrooMofDooM]

I could not ask for better advice. Great stuff here, guys. Seriously, thanks. This will help A LOT.

 

[Chaldfont]

One of the coolest scare tactics I've seen used is to kill the entire party in the first ten minutes in a ruthless battle. Then, hand out pre-gen PCs at half the level of the dead guys.

"These are the guys that have to hunt down the BBEG."

Make up all the monsters. Give them abilties never before seen by your players.

Every so often, take a player off to another room where the others can't see or hear. You don't really have to RP with him. The other players will go nuts with suspense. Secret notes like, "Read this, then look at Brian with a big smile" are fun too.

Speak very quietly, so the players have to lean in to hear you. Then, when something is about to happen, slam a big book down on the table.

 

[MarkAHart]

The boxed set of CHILL (Pacesetter games) was mentioned previously -- it had some good ideas for invoking fear in players. One of the best suggestions involves playing with player/character perceptions. The example given describes how the characters hear something clawing and scratching at the door through the night. When dawn arrives and the characters can once again see, they see that the claw marks are on the *inside* of the door. When a situation isn't "right," people get edgy and they lose their bearings.

Also, there is a fine line between characters being helpless and players frustrated. Standard characters in most games (outside of CoC, for example) tend to be pretty tough, and they can handle most encounters. Strip a party of their magic items or M60 machine guns, and people stop being quite so confident...but go too far, and the players get frustrated.

When a situation becomes hopeless for the characters, expect the players to stop being afraid and start doing insane, highly explosive things. Once the players believe they have no chance to win, the fear is gone and characters become suicidal. As long as the characters have some hope of success to hold onto, the potential for fear remains.

 

[Felon]

Well, players generally need to feel like they can't just walk away from the situation. It can be hard to trap players in a modern setting (though admittedly, nowhere near as hard as in D&D).

When a situation becomes hopeless for the characters, expect the players to stop being afraid and start doing insane, highly explosive things. Once the players believe they have no chance to win, the fear is gone and characters become suicidal. As long as the characters have some hope of success to hold onto, the potential for fear remains.

Very good point. Character have to believe there's a chance to win or at least escape.

 

[Desdichado]

A very good question. Scaring the characters is much easier than scaring the players. You can just throw horrow and insanity checks and the characters to represent their fear. Making the players believe it is a whole other challenge (one I'm still trying to figure out myself).

It's a tricky one, too, unless the player's buy into it and want to be scared. Otherwise, I find that they find the entire prospect utterly hilarious, most of the time.

I don't claim to be any kind of real expert on it, but here's some stuff that's worked for me. Obviously, it won't all work for you in an online type game (and hey, consider me officially volunteered as a player in a Pbp horror game of any type).

• Mood music. I get a lot of use out of my movie soundtrack CDs during horror games. I've ripped Van Helsing, Sleepy Hollow, Signs, and a dozen others into mp3, stuck them all on a CD-R, and I throw it in the stereo when we play.
• I play in a fairly dim room at night. There's a few lamps, but I purposefully leave off the overhead light. Oh, there's plenty of light to play by, but it's not bright by any means.
• You'd be amazed at what you can do with tone of voice if you're not too shy to employ it as a method.
• Be extremely descriptive of stuff. Especially weird stuff, but all stuff. You want to paint a really vivid picture.
• Monsters are an expected part of an RPG experience and therefore aren't really scary unless you put some effort into them. Make sure you have proper buildup of tension before you unleash one. Don't let them be too predictable. A monster that slaps the PC group around really good and only lets (some of) them live to tell about it because it simply isn't interested in them, or they got lucky, or whatever, tends to put the players in the right frame of mind regarding them too.
• Creepy stuff with no explanation. Just really weird, weird stuff that happens, but doesn't have any effect other than to creep out players works well. Here's a few examples of things that were successful from my hybrid fantasy/horror campaign.
  • Sudden visions of strange things--one player suddenly could see through the eyes of someone that clearly wasn't himself, as he was performing a human sacrifice. He later saw the victim of that sacrifice, mutated and demonized, when it attacked them. He instantly made the connection.
  • One PC was the victim of a maggot "breath weapon" and ever since, bugs, worms, and other things seemed to have an interest in him.
  • A guy the PCs had rescued was resting in a locked room overnight to recover. He was stark, raving insane, but he was the only witness they had. The next morning, he was not only dead in his room, he was shrunken and mummified as if he'd been buried in the sand for decades.
  • At the very beginning of the campaign I handed out pre-gen PCs that were more or less the same level (3rd) as the starting PCs and had them run through a little scenario. Within about half an hour, I had TPKed them, primarily with one NPC who had strange, unexplainable abilities. When the real PCs later met this same person, the reaction was pretty nifty.
  There used to be a thread around on rpg.net full of creepy events, most appropriate for a Modern setting. Throwing a few of those around without explanation will be sure to creep folks out. http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=27565
• I also advocate keeping blood and guts to a bit of a minimum. They're especially useless in my group where one member is a surgeon, and in any group too much of them means they have no impact. But very occasionally extremely gruesome details are just really important.

 

[IamTheTest]

I got the willies just reading this thread. I cant imagine playing in a game like this...I think Id drag it down through lack of experience.

 

[Qualidar]

Use the other senses. If a crime scene where someone was murdered through fell magic stinks of spoiled mayonaise, or if there is the lingering taste of burned plastic tickling the back of the character's throats for no discernable reason, it's freaky.

~Qualidar~

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I once ran a haunted castle adventure (AD&D 2E) in which I really didn't intend to creep out the players, but did anyway. I think the key was using things that could not be explained by the rules. It was fear of the unknown, but in a meta-game sense. Some of the elements of the adventure were

1) Throughout the castle there were people and things that you see but only in your peripheral vision and only in a ghostly fashion. If you looked right at them they weren't there. Later in the adventure these things became clear and real-world objects faded. Part of the point of the adventure was to return to the real world.

2) A room full of very realistic statues of people, apparently arranged as if in a dinner party. They never moved while anyone was looking, but statues that no one was observing were frequently in different positions when the characters looked at them again. The longer the characters stayed in the room the closer the statues got, the angrier their faces looked, and several of them became armed with (stone) knives. There was a growing impression that they were being observed by something filled with malice. The statues detected as totally non-magical.

3) A room full of crates. In the second round in the room a crowbar levitated and attacked the PCs. It had a THAC0 of about 10 and did 1d6 damage per hit. If struck it fell to the ground but rose again in 1 round. This one seemed like no big deal to me, but the players were thoroughly freaked.

One of the hazards of this technique is that it really irritates gamist players who want everything by the rules so that they can use optimal tactics. Know your players before using it.