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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rechan" data-source="post: 5673996" data-attributes="member: 54846">Some of this stuff is in the game and no one bats an eye until there's a  spotlight put on it. Violence is all over D&D; players kill enemies, it's nothing new. For the longest  time, Half-Orcs came from rape. That's just all there was to it -  everyone accepted that was the origin of the majority of half-orcs.  However when you drag it out into the light of day "Oh yes this ghost  killed herself after being abused", that's not going to scare people,  it's going to make them sad and uncomfortable. Gore/body horror isn't so much "Horror" as it is "disgusting and gross". One of the reasons I find J Horror more tedious than not. Horror (at least to me) comes from the anticipation that something bad is about to happen, even if you're not sure what. It's hard to pull that off in a written adventure since it's very atmospheric. Two important quotes by Stephen King on this: ""The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head  tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and  something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the  unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking  around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you  by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and  notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact  substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind  you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you  turn around, there's nothing there..."      " "I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize  the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify,  and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not  proud." IMO it's better to be more subtle about those dark elements, rather than paint the walls with them. Also in terms of horror I agree with the above poster about 'tainted food/parasites'. There are certain elemental, instinctive vulnerabilities that we all have and something that threatens us during those times really gets at us (the movie Paranormal Activity is a good example, because it's about things happening when you're at your most vulnerable: asleep). Zombie children is nothing new though.Also agreed about knowing your players. I once had an insane female NPC, so I decided that hey, it would be interesting if she was insane because she had a miscarriage and couldn't handle the loss. This was mentioned Briefly in a diary the PCs found. After the session was over, a female player told me that she was upset, that I was immature and had no idea what I was talking about. She came back the next game session, but it really bothered me; I never thought it would be a problem for anyone, and I wasn't just hanging it out there, it was a bit of background.</blockquote>

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