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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 67522" data-attributes="member: 812">There's a fine line between creepy and ridiculous. Just ask Sam Raimi.I find that suggestion always works better than revelation. Having live people who have gone mad and can only tell the party limited things is really effective -- let them use their imagination. What they are picturing in their own heads will scare them far more than what you describe.You only need enough details to get your point across -- if you keep ladling on the gore and grue eventually your players will cease to be impressed. Small details, scattered about a sea of emptiness, will work much more effectively than a Grand Guignol extravaganza. Nothing scares my party more than finding one gruesome detail at first and then travelling through empty spaces, jumping at shadows and looking for more clues as to what's going on -- and not finding any.What will really scare your players is the sense that they don't know what's going on, but whatever it is, it's bad.Think of most horror films. Usually they start out pretty good -- something creepy happens and for the next hour you're all jumpy. But eventually they pull out the big bad and it's never as scary as what you'd been worrying about. It's very hard to follow through on suspense without disappointing your audience. I think that overdoing it at the start is just setting yourself up for failure half-way through.</blockquote>