Pathfinder 1E Designing a Horror Campaign

[Hypername]

Wow, thanks for helping guys! We started the campaign, and my players already seem intrigued and puzzled by what goes on in the town. It is going pretty darn well till now, and I can't wait till they start connecting things! Your help has been invaluable!

 

[Imaculata]

One of the first things I worried about when I started on my modern day Call of Cthulhu campaign, is:

-Cellphones, the players can simply call for help at any time
-Vehicles, why don't they just leave?
-Again, they can just leave if things get too dangerous

This is something that you'll probably run into, regardless of time or setting. You'll want to slowly build up the sense that the players are caught in a web, and now they can no longer escape. An integral part to that is the stakes. If the players have an important reason to see their mission through to the end, then they will not leave. And consequences to their actions are also important. If they call for help, they put more people at risk. You could artificially rob them of any means to escape the threat, but having strong stakes and consequences is better.

Now what I did in my story, was present them with a city that was slowly moving forward in time. There was an invisible field of some sort, created by a time machine, and had displaced the city in time. This displacement slowly got worse and worse. So at first they only felt a shiver as they entered the city, but as the days went on, leaving and entering this field became more dangerous. Making phone calls suddenly became part of the horror, as they first started receiving answers from the future before they had asked the questions... and later they started receiving calls from another world, and they became afraid to answer the phone. They also started seeing figments of future events, and interactions with people from the future (which they believed to be ghosts at first).

The players also had a car, which broke down when the players crashed into their first clue, right at the start of the campaign. The story did not hinge on their vehicle breaking down, but I wanted them to feel vulnerable. I described how the car drove through a puddle, which ended up being a lot deeper that it seemed. The car struck a concrete tube hidden underneath the road, and thus broke down. Right away the players were stuck in town, with a mystery to solve.

 

[Sarac]

3. Don't rely on mechanics (e.g. sanity/dread/whatever) to evoke fear and dread. Instead, rely on descriptive detail and clever foreshadowing. I ran a giant spider which could speak Goblin/Deep Speech and animate a cocooned zombie to speak for itself while the PCs were negotiating in the spider's lair...it was called the Mother of the Hollow. Mechanically, just a giant spider. But its personality and the evocative description I used and tense negotiations absolutely freaked the players out.

Have you played Mass Effect at all sir?

If you want the players to know that something sinister and alien is behind things, and a thing I did with my own group to imply this is that my first quest "boss" had a book in his possession with a strange language printed in it, and the other agents they found of the big bad had one too. It helped show that this was all connected and something larger than just your garden variety insane wizard was moving the pieces.

 

[Micah Watt]

Wow there are some great ideas in this thread.

I'll add - know your audience, and write accordingly. Horror is a big genre, and covers a wide range of experiences. Lovecraftian themes also have a wide range because of the wide author base. The original works were pretty subtle, but as the myths expanded it got more and more 'explicit' in many ways.

If you ensure your players are on the same page as the material you want to present it'll be s better experience for all.