Horror RPGs

[mythago]

Well, people who like classic Ravenloft (and Universal Horror and Hammer Horror) will be cool with Ravenloft, but people accustomed to horror as defined by movies since 2000 will not think it qualifies as horror until someone is butt-raped by a running chainsaw. If it does not strike that note, then many will say it is not horror.

Not sure why, given that slasher and gore flicks were at their most popular well before 2000. Even the Saw films, at least the early ones, had a veneer of psychological horror, and I would guess that the young'uns are more likely to have watched The Blair Witch Project than Friday the 13th or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not to say that there isn't gore out there, but personally doubt it's as simple as Kids Today preferring gore over subtlety.

That aside, I suspect the problem is that many of the tropes of classic horror, like ghosts, vampires and werewolves, have been used far out of their original context as horror - it's hard to make Strahd quite as scary in a culture where vampires and werewolves are sexy brooding guys who fight with their shirts off, or are noble antiheroes.

 

[VelvetViolet]

That aside, I suspect the problem is that many of the tropes of classic horror, like ghosts, vampires and werewolves, have been used far out of their original context as horror - it's hard to make Strahd quite as scary in a culture where vampires and werewolves are sexy brooding guys who fight with their shirts off, or are noble antiheroes.

(emphasis mine)
Name any recent movie where ghosts have been used for anything other than terrorizing/killing people. Because I can pretty much name the number of movies where ghosts have been protagonists on the fingers of one hand (The Frighteners, Beetlejuice, Casper, Ghost), and absolutely none where they've been sexy brooding antiheroes (despite them, if go through every ghost story and list the abilities they've displayed, potentially having all the superpowers of vamps and werewolves combined and more besides).

For some reason, ghosts and wizards seem to lack "teh sexy" that makes vamps and werewolves so interesting. Every Harry Potter clone (all 2 or 3 of them) has flopped and there are zero recent movies actually starring ghosts. Being Human only dedicates 1/3 of the plot to ghosts, with the other 2/3 dedicated to vamps and werewolves.

 

[mythago]

(emphasis mine)
Name any recent movie where ghosts have been used for anything other than terrorizing/killing people.

The Harry Potter movies, where the ghosts are a non-scary part of the home scenery for the Hogwarts students, and are not only used for things other than terrorizing/killing people, but range for the most part from "harmless" to "comic relief" to "plot McGuffin".

Certainly ghosts haven't gotten the full Twilight treatment - yet. But my point was less that we can expect Sexy Teen Casper than that a lot of 'classic' horror tropes have been made, well, less horrific, and it's harder to use them effectively.

 

[VelvetViolet]

The Harry Potter movies, where the ghosts are a non-scary part of the home scenery for the Hogwarts students, and are not only used for things other than terrorizing/killing people, but range for the most part from "harmless" to "comic relief" to "plot McGuffin".

Certainly ghosts haven't gotten the full Twilight treatment - yet. But my point was less that we can expect Sexy Teen Casper than that a lot of 'classic' horror tropes have been made, well, less horrific, and it's harder to use them effectively.

You're example is one franchise in a market that is oversaturated with scary ghost stories. A horror movie about ghosts is like an MMOG about fantasy: they make up 99% percent of the market and they all suck.

I'd to, just once, see a movie that explores what ghosts do in their off-time when they aren't haunting the living, and doesn't pad things out with vampires and werewolves.
Seriously, death is the most frightening, mysterious concept in human experience and yet there are no ghost movies that explore what ghosts actually do when they aren't haunting. Do they have jobs? Religions? Seriously, you could get a lot of mileage out of this.

 

[Abstruse]

Is Ravenloft still relevant? Seriously, this Thursday's episode of the podcast we talk about this for a good 10-15 minutes. But I'm going to list some names for you and see if they immediately pull an image to your mind. As an experience, you can do the same for random people you meet on the street as well.

Dracula
Frankenstein
Wolfman
Mummy
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Invisible Man

I bet you they're going to get every single one, and all of those have some sort of expy in the Ravenloft universe to the point that the most iconic character from the setting, Count Strahd von Zarovich, could be renamed Totally Not Dracula Please Don't Sue Us Universal. Those classic horror books and films are deeply ingrained in our culture where, if you say "vampire" to most people even in an age of True Blood and Vampire Diaries, people are still going to flap an imaginary cape and say "I vant to suck your bluud!" General Mills is making a killing right now with their monster cereals, and not only is a new Frankenstein movie coming out soon, they just launched the pilot for a Dracula TV series this week (and it's not too bad really).

So yeah, Ravenloft still works. Listen to the podcast to get more details so I don't spoil everything.

 

[mythago]

Those classic horror books and films are deeply ingrained in our culture where, if you say "vampire" to most people even in an age of True Blood and Vampire Diaries, people are still going to flap an imaginary cape and say "I vant to suck your bluud!"

But isn't that the problem? These things are familiar. They're not scary. Hence the goofy cereals and the bad accent with the cape-flapping. Mummies are bad guys in lame adventure movies, etcetera.

I'm not saying that Ravenloft is irrelevant or that the monsters you mention are irrelevant - only that it's tougher to make Strahd scary when people are used to thinking of vampires as sexy brooding immortal teenagers, or even good guys. Dr. Jekyll has a lot less punch in an era where people are not afraid of the Beast Within. And so on. It can be done! Just, oy.

(Though, hm, you know, The Invisible Man could still mess with people even in an era of IR goggles and heat sensors. The idea of somebody you can't see who can see you just fine may well be a perfect monster in our own paranoid security-state age...)

 

[Bedrockgames]

But isn't that the problem? These things are familiar. They're not scary. Hence the goofy cereals and the bad accent with the cape-flapping. Mummies are bad guys in lame adventure movies, etcetera.

I'm not saying that Ravenloft is irrelevant or that the monsters you mention are irrelevant - only that it's tougher to make Strahd scary when people are used to thinking of vampires as sexy brooding immortal teenagers, or even good guys. Dr. Jekyll has a lot less punch in an era where people are not afraid of the Beast Within. And so on. It can be done! Just, oy.

(Though, hm, you know, The Invisible Man could still mess with people even in an era of IR goggles and heat sensors. The idea of somebody you can't see who can see you just fine may well be a perfect monster in our own paranoid security-state age...)

One of the major features of the Ravenloft line though is to make the familiar less so and use that to throw the PCs off guard. So the Van Richten books are all about taking familiar monsters (werewolves, golems, vampires, etc) and making them less predictable. One of the things that enabled Ravenloft to horrify players on the first go, was that many of the monsters functioned differently, and many of the class powers functioned, differently, in the demi-plane of dread. The rules of the game shift and this creates a strong sense of the unknown.

 

[Abstruse]

Dracula - Let the Right One In
Frankenstein - Reanimator (there's a more recent one, but I can't think of it off the top of my head)
Wolfman - Netflix series Hemlock Grove
Mummy - The Mummy (which is also getting a remake soon)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - the BBC series Jekyll (from Steven Moffat)
Invisible Man - Hollow Man

If you can't play in the pool of tropes that is gothic horror and not manage to scare your players, that's your own fault. Also had to do any sort of horror in a heroic fantasy RPG because the players are almost always going to be strong enough to kill the monster. They can fight back. Hate to keep plugging the podcast, but our last episode literally talked about how to run a horror game.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But isn't that the problem? These things are familiar. They're not scary. Hence the goofy cereals and the bad accent with the cape-flapping. Mummies are bad guys in lame adventure movies, etcetera.

The more I think about this point, which is generally taken to be true in horror, so it is a fair criticism, the less I am sure it is accurate. I am not sure things become less scary because they are familiar. For me, zombies are just as scary as they were the first time I saw them. No matter how many zombie movies come out, I still get the creeps watching them and they are one of the few sub genres in horror that consistently get me on the edge of my seat (even after four seasons of walking dead, I am still creeped out when zombies show up). I think the reason zombies scare me so much, is because they are a physical manifestation of of how fragile humans really are. They are a reminder that everyone dies and that the body breaks down. So while I think the unfamiliar and the unkown can be scary, I think there are lots of other things going on, and a monster that is familiar can still be quite frightening. Every once in a while I see a horror writer or an rpg declare that vampires and ghosts are too well known now, so we have to find new monsters to scare a new age (and I am all for finding new monsters). But almost invariably, the deliberately bizarre and unusual monsters they create toward that end, fail to give me the willies. So I just find myself being less and less convinced by this position the more I encounter it (even if I've advocated myself from time to time).

 

[Abstruse]

Here's something I really wanted to go into on both episodes of the podcast (the last one and the next one on Thursday) but didn't have time to go into - One of the best ways to get horror in your game is through the unknown. Ravenloft literally has it baked into the core of the setting in every edition that exact thing in the Dark Powers.

What are the Dark Powers? Depends on what writer and what DM you ask. I run them as a combination of the writing staff of the Twilight Zone and a cat. They love ironic echo punishments and they love playing with their toys to aaaaalmost the point they die buy still keeping them alive and giving them hope they can escape before pulling them back in to play some more.

How do they work in the rules? They are literally an in-game justification for DM fiat. You cast a cleric spell? Only works if the Dark Powers want it to. Fight a monster and it doesn't have the same weakness it used to? Dark Powers twisted them when they went through the Mists. Cast an arcane spell? Might work right, might not. Why? Dark Powers. Also, you can force a Powers Check on pretty much any but the most benign arcane spells.

Want to put the fear into your players? Don't worry about the monsters, make them fear the Dark Powers.