D&D General Horror is hard

[touc]

Once everyone has bought in, horror is most effective against the story they care about, not necessarily their characters. In Strahd, the party became invested in saving Ireena.

Spoiler

When they met the Abbott, he originally wanted Ireena dead so she wouldn't be competition for the Bride he was making for Strahd that the Abbott believed would heal this land and soothe Strahd's curse. The party convinced him murder was wrong, and the Abbott took this advice to heart. When they left Ireena alone to go adventuring, the Abbott came along and took her face, literally, and healed her so she wouldn't die, leaving her permanently disfigured. In his deranged mind, he could use her face on the Bride (since Strahd seemed infatuated with Ireena), not kill anyone, and everyone wins. This pushed Ireena to the brink when Strahd later whispered to her that he alone could fix her, restore her beauty, make her not a monster, if she would just willingly come to him. And, she did...

You can't horrify a player character in 5E, there just isn't a good way. But you can horrify the players when their actions cause something like this to happen. Ravenloft is a great setting because the Land doesn't want you dead. Dead is easy. It wants you to give in to despair, to see things so hopeless that you dig your own grave and crawl in. That's delicious to it.

 

[AlViking]

I think horror with any game system is going to be difficult because it requires so much buy-in from the players; the right mood and setting also help. While I rarely do horror, I try to get at least horror-adjacent occasionally.

One thing to try is to set the mood. I sometimes do Halloween sessions in a basement room with lowered lights, decorations and even makeup to make myself look undead. Put the spooky music on in the background at a low volume can all help. During the session I've picked done things like asking a player to join me, leave the room with me but bring their dice. Later in the session I'd send them a private note and ask them to roll a D20 and give me the result. Trick is, absolutely nothing happened to them it was all just to make the rest of the group paranoid. The more the player explained nothing had happened, the better it was. Maybe I'll try it again sometime except this time they really are possessed.

Another thing I rely on is description. Telling someone that a zombie is attacking is boring, describing the smell (relate it to something they may have experienced - dead animal, old hamburger, etc.) and feel of rotting flesh if they hit or are hit, the sound of something they can't see scrabbling to try to get to them. Sight, sound, smell, touch can all come into play. Have a zombie horde and have the PCs walking over the rotting corpses and describe how it's impossible not to step on something that used to be a person and as they put their foot down a skull bursts like an overripe melon.

If I throw something like zombies at first it's going to be a corpse crawling their way but soon it's going to be an almost solid wave of undead flesh. People that are surrounded by the horde are knocked prone first than then potentially restrained, even suffocating. Inflicting levels of exhaustion is one of my preferred penalties because it's easier.

Take away their ability to see, or at least see far. A hand reaching out from the heavy fog, the screams of agony coming from behind the tangle of vines and brush that not only restricts movement but also obscures vision. Have the vines grab people and split up the party is another fun option - having one PC dragged away when they fail that strength save and claw at the ground to try to resist sets up a fun image.

It's all about getting the players to imagine that these encounters are dangerous in a way that they aren't accustomed to, which leads to my last point. I don't think horror is sustainable in the long run, it's best used sparingly. You also need to know your group of course, for some people body horror or truly gruesome imagery is going to add to the sense of dread you're trying to build, others will want to keep it PG-13.

Anyway, I don't think PC power level automatically means you can't do horror. You just have to get a bit creative about it.

 

[Byrd]

Yeap. Also, a fallen PC turning into a zombie or a wraith was pretty terrifying. Modern D&D has really pushed away from that.

Or the race to find a high enough level Cleric to cure a BECMI elf of lycanthropy.

Generally, avoiding things that would turn your PC into an NPC.

That magic mirror that cranks out a copy of the party that has to be fought...

 

[Mephista]

Vampire, the whole of the World of Darkness, and its various sister games, are made to be "horror."

I have yet to see these games actually be scary. IME, it often comes off more as playing the part of Mean Girls or otherwise Evil-games.

I just feel like horror isn't an easy thing to pull off with TTRPGs, and really isn't something to aim for. You can go for cheap shocks, but those lose value fast.

 

[Remathilis]

Two elements I used in my last Ravenloft game helped bring horror to the game without changing the rules much:

* Flawed Heroes: each of my PCs were a freak in a different way: a monster hunter who is surrounded by the dead begging for assistance in righting their wrongs (including his own dead family and mentor), a dhampir who was partially transformed by a lover and now cannot touch another living creature without absorbing their life force, a hexblood cleric who fled from the hag who "birthed" him and joined the church of Ezra and constantly trying to outrun the hags minions, a reborn returned with no memory and bound to the service of Baron Samedi, a reanimator haunted by the "spirit" of his dead lover trying to build her a new body so she may live again, and a sentient cat infused with the soul of a wizard made as a terrible science experiment until he was freed.

Each of them is a monster in some form or another. Each cannot live a normal life. They were all created that way. Part of Ravenloft's pitch is the "stranger from another world" style of horror: outlanders stuck in the Mists is one way to create that horror, but the "people who can no longer fit in with their society" is another.

* Home Sweet Home?: the group came across a mysterious benefactor who called them all to a noble cause: investigate horrors and recover relics of evil. As they wandered the Mists, they found people who needed help and items unsafe in the wrong hands. They brought them back to the Archive they called their home base, only to find they were being manipulated by a powerful sentient artifact in the archive to bring it the tools it needed to escape. Those people they thought they were saving became victims or adversaries, the relics collected used against them.

The advantage to this was to use the PCs better nature against them. Every person they offered shelter to became a pawn, every evil item became a weapon they handed their enemy. They created their own worst threat with every good deed that they did.

Both of those tools: characters who are flawed trying to do good and creating their own worst nightmare brought a sense of Gothic horror to the game, even if the adventures on a micro level were built like regular D&D type adventures.

 

[Special Unicorn]

I think that best way to make horror truly scary is to run non heroic PC's. That is, all characters should be a level 0 commoners.

 

[Remathilis]

I think that best way to make horror truly scary is to run non heroic PC's. That is, all characters should be a level 0 commoners.

I mean, if you want to do slasher horror, yeah.

 

[Byrd]

I think that best way to make horror truly scary is to run non heroic PC's. That is, all characters should be a level 0 commoners.

That fits well with my thoughts about how often part of the horror is about restricting player agency.
(0-level PC's would certainly reduce the possibility of hard feelings from the players)

I guess another thing to be considered is fear vs. horror.

 

[Remathilis]

That fits well with my thoughts about how often part of the horror is about restricting player agency.

That's not horror, that's railroading. Although I guess you can say most horror does have an element of that.

 

[Deset Gled]

That's not horror, that's railroading. Although I guess you can say most horror does have an element of that.

There's restricting agency, then there's railroading. But I can't help but feel like the suggestion that everyone is forced to be a level-0 commoner is basically the equivalent of saying "change systems". Which isn't necessarily a bad idea, of course. But it's definitely a different thread. And makes you question: What's the point of all of these horror themed D&D releases?

Any setting that isn't a gonzo "anything goes" world has some restrictions on agency. And I think it's fair to say that part of the "everyone must buy in" part of horror translates to it being more restrictive than default D&D. And most classic horror plots are definitely a bit on the linear side. All that being said, I think a more sandbox style horror is theoretically possible. But also not something I've ever managed to pull off in D&D.