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Call of Cthulhu as a Horror Game
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<blockquote data-quote="GrahamWills" data-source="post: 7540822" data-attributes="member: 75787"><p>Horror is hard. </p><p></p><p>It is much easier to make players feel noble, angry ... even sad, than it is to make them feel horror. In a one-shot you stand a much better chance because you are able to stack everything in your favor — the premise, the characters, the plot — you have a lot of preparation in terms of writing and experience making that 4 hours of play a great experience.</p><p></p><p>A campaign is much, much harder. In fact, I would go so far as to say that making every session — even most sessions — of a horror campaign actually horrific is not something I believe really possible without godlike GM ability. And I’ve had a lot of great GMs.</p><p></p><p>I’ve run <strong>Dracula Dossier</strong>, <strong>Masks of Nyarlathotep</strong>, <strong>Beyond the Mountains of Madness</strong> and <strong>Eternal Lies</strong> for 2+ years each. Of them, Masks had honestly very few horrific moments; it was nearly all adventure rather than horror being predominant. In the other campaigns, there were moments of horror, and the fact that they existed added continuous tension to the game. So even if the episode seemed mostly adventurous, the players remembered previous horror and so were always on edge. I am happy with the way all these campaigns ran, so I think for me, that’s the goal — a successful horror campaign is not uniformly horrific, but the players know that at any moment it may become so.</p><p></p><p>I do not do a lot of body horror or squickiness in my campaigns. That is a brief flash and doesn’t worry the players in future sessions. I prefer horror that promises a bad, long-lasting effect on their characters. That keeps a state of nervous energy that motivates and scares *players*. Examples:</p><p></p><p>A great Trail of Cthulhu suggestion is on insanity. In traditional CoC a player who gets a permanent insanity gets a phobia or something like that. That’s not really horrific. In TOC one thing they suggest is you change their character. So I sent the player out of the room and we decided as a group that their character actually did not possess one of the skills they thought they did, and were delusional in thinking they did. We acted that out over several sessions until the player figured it out, and from then on players were much more nervous about insanity inducing events — going insane might mean that you lost something you really cared about. </p><p></p><p>A classic I used in Dracula Dossier was to threaten sources of stability. These are objects/people that the characters trust and love, and mechanically ones the players use to recover stability, so threatening them is scary for both the players and the characters (always a win). As the campaign became more intense, one player’s brother was controlled by Dracula into abducting and murdering young children. That was a genuine moment of horror as the players realized that Dracula was now focusing his full attention on them and could transform something they loved into something evil. I would suggest that threatening such a transformation is much more powerful than threats of death (the book Dracula is explicit in this — Dracula transforms pure good women into evil satanic child killers)</p><p></p><p>Another good horror trope that only works in campaigns is the slow burn. Over multiple sesssions, introduce something creepy and keep ratcheting it up without the players being able to address it. Ideally it is something they should address, but they need to do other things more urgently. Maybe one of them is slowly transforming into something awful (e.g. a deep one), maybe they keep receiving fed ex packages with body parts. Anything that builds tension.</p><p></p><p>So my overall goal is tension — something bad is about to happen. Maybe every 6 or 8 episodes I will straight up add a horror scene in and spend significant time and energy planning it. One successful technique I use is to run mini-adventures for solo characters. When you have a character who has to crawl alone into a vampires tomb along a long tunnel, and the GM has told you that he is comfortable with character death at this point, and you really are not sure if you can make the will check to kill the countess in her sleep ... you worry — and you listen intently to details of the tomb. </p><p></p><p>It is also very important to know your group. Your goal is get as close as possible to the line of discomfort for the players without crossing into the area where they want to X card you (and make sure they can do that if they need to!). It’s like eating hot peppers — eveyone’s threshold is different, and you want to be just below it.</p><p></p><p>Long post; the <strong>TLDR</strong> is that I think that for a horror campaign you should aim for tension and an ominous atmosphere. Actually horror should be relatively rare, but always on player minds. That is, for me, an approach that has worked.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="GrahamWills, post: 7540822, member: 75787"] Horror is hard. It is much easier to make players feel noble, angry ... even sad, than it is to make them feel horror. In a one-shot you stand a much better chance because you are able to stack everything in your favor — the premise, the characters, the plot — you have a lot of preparation in terms of writing and experience making that 4 hours of play a great experience. A campaign is much, much harder. In fact, I would go so far as to say that making every session — even most sessions — of a horror campaign actually horrific is not something I believe really possible without godlike GM ability. And I’ve had a lot of great GMs. I’ve run [B]Dracula Dossier[/B], [B]Masks of Nyarlathotep[/B], [B]Beyond the Mountains of Madness[/B] and [B]Eternal Lies[/B] for 2+ years each. Of them, Masks had honestly very few horrific moments; it was nearly all adventure rather than horror being predominant. In the other campaigns, there were moments of horror, and the fact that they existed added continuous tension to the game. So even if the episode seemed mostly adventurous, the players remembered previous horror and so were always on edge. I am happy with the way all these campaigns ran, so I think for me, that’s the goal — a successful horror campaign is not uniformly horrific, but the players know that at any moment it may become so. I do not do a lot of body horror or squickiness in my campaigns. That is a brief flash and doesn’t worry the players in future sessions. I prefer horror that promises a bad, long-lasting effect on their characters. That keeps a state of nervous energy that motivates and scares *players*. Examples: A great Trail of Cthulhu suggestion is on insanity. In traditional CoC a player who gets a permanent insanity gets a phobia or something like that. That’s not really horrific. In TOC one thing they suggest is you change their character. So I sent the player out of the room and we decided as a group that their character actually did not possess one of the skills they thought they did, and were delusional in thinking they did. We acted that out over several sessions until the player figured it out, and from then on players were much more nervous about insanity inducing events — going insane might mean that you lost something you really cared about. A classic I used in Dracula Dossier was to threaten sources of stability. These are objects/people that the characters trust and love, and mechanically ones the players use to recover stability, so threatening them is scary for both the players and the characters (always a win). As the campaign became more intense, one player’s brother was controlled by Dracula into abducting and murdering young children. That was a genuine moment of horror as the players realized that Dracula was now focusing his full attention on them and could transform something they loved into something evil. I would suggest that threatening such a transformation is much more powerful than threats of death (the book Dracula is explicit in this — Dracula transforms pure good women into evil satanic child killers) Another good horror trope that only works in campaigns is the slow burn. Over multiple sesssions, introduce something creepy and keep ratcheting it up without the players being able to address it. Ideally it is something they should address, but they need to do other things more urgently. Maybe one of them is slowly transforming into something awful (e.g. a deep one), maybe they keep receiving fed ex packages with body parts. Anything that builds tension. So my overall goal is tension — something bad is about to happen. Maybe every 6 or 8 episodes I will straight up add a horror scene in and spend significant time and energy planning it. One successful technique I use is to run mini-adventures for solo characters. When you have a character who has to crawl alone into a vampires tomb along a long tunnel, and the GM has told you that he is comfortable with character death at this point, and you really are not sure if you can make the will check to kill the countess in her sleep ... you worry — and you listen intently to details of the tomb. It is also very important to know your group. Your goal is get as close as possible to the line of discomfort for the players without crossing into the area where they want to X card you (and make sure they can do that if they need to!). It’s like eating hot peppers — eveyone’s threshold is different, and you want to be just below it. Long post; the [B]TLDR[/B] is that I think that for a horror campaign you should aim for tension and an ominous atmosphere. Actually horror should be relatively rare, but always on player minds. That is, for me, an approach that has worked. [/QUOTE]
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