How disturbing are your games?

[WayneLigon]

In one of my previous campaigns, the PCs had one of the best breakfasts of their lives, with the most amazing scrambled eggs...only to discover afterward that the eggs were from the intelligent lizard folk who were being addicted to drugs and enslaved as a source of cheap manual labor.

I must now use this.

One of the Call of Cthulhu games I was in, some of the backwoods people we were interviewing about these strange lights in the woods this missing group of college students and such invited us to a BBQ they were having. We chowed down, and the ribs were fantastic! "That's genuine home-cooking," they said when we asked them if it was pork or beef or whatever... it had a definate pork-like texture and taste, though. Then one of the party went around back looking for some more sauce and saw the fire pit and the rest of the 'pig' that was being grilled. They'd taken the head off and preserved it. It was one of his students, his nephew.

 

[radferth]

Wayne, isn't that kinda like Fried Green Tomatoes (probably my mom's favorite movie featuring canabalism), only it was all for a good cause in that one.

If I want to creep players out, I tend to do it Lovecraft-style, with hints of insanity, impossible age, and imposible enormity. As long as I only spring those elements once in a while, they tend to stay fairly effective.

 

[Desdichado]

Wayne, isn't that kinda like Fried Green Tomatoes (probably my mom's favorite movie featuring canabalism), only it was all for a good cause in that one.

That's exactly the same thought I had. Only somehow, that movie made it seem clever instead of creepy. Weird.

 

[billd91]

My ability to do really nasty horror is limited by the relatively weak stomach of one of my players. She gets nauseated pretty easy. So when she's at the table, I don't push things too far.
But then again, she's not playing in my Call of Cthulhu game...

 

[DonTadow]

I try to make things "wierd" from time to time. My party is currently freaked out by one of their traveling NPC's a little girl named Sahara. She's a pretty little elven girl with ponytails in her hair and a really cute purle dress on that never gets dirty. The only problem is she talks in a deep husky dragon voice. I didn't think much of it when i thought of her, but this really freaks the people in the party out. she was turned into stone 4 sessions ago and no one has really raised much of a finger to try to turn her back. The players comment "I don't want to touch that freaky little girl"

the little girl is the result of one of the former character's actions. He attempted to change the timeline so that his daughter survived a disease she had died from two years earlier, however the artifact he usd to restore her life actually stored the soul of a dragon god inside of her (for those buffy fans thank Ilyrna from the last season).

I think its something about posession and little kids that brings everyone to think back to the exorcist.

 

[diaglo]

That's exactly the same thought I had. Only somehow, that movie made it seem clever instead of creepy. Weird.

i took my sister to the Whistle Stop... we had fried green tomatoes. but we avoided the BBQ...


diaglo "who lives near enough to the place" Ooi

 

[Belen]

As one of the other players in the game Spider is talking about, I wasn't shocked, really. In fact, it brought to mind a couple of fantasy stories which featured demon possessed babies. I had to leave before the after-game conversation, but I did have lunch with Der Kluge (who also played) the next day, and we touched on the subject. His comment was that the round robin games always seemed to head in a dark direction.

That seemed to happen at our round robin game at the previous game day. We went from serious, to summoning a monkey that threw poo, to blood golems and pregnant drow wife of a red dragon....

 

[Crothian]

Not as dark as they should be....I get in trouble when I go dark.....

 

[Tarangil]

My games with adults can get a little dark. But that depends where they are and what they're doing. For example I had a troupe rescue a paladin of Lathander who was imprisioned in hell, and he had a few issues. His issues weren't in hell, that's where he was found, something happened to him on the gray waste that he was never able to deal with and was constantly haunted by what he saw.

He eventually ran off to face his fears without his companions and they took off after to help. What they found out though was the land that had Fuc*ed him up was where all the unborn souls go, and BOY the imagery was a mix of Marilyn Manson & Nirvana (fetuses on trees and such) along with the our deepest fears of our psyche on mortality. By the end the players were pretty green and definelty disturbed on that aspect of the afterlife.

Besides that I made two players puke (no one was drinking) while describing a plague victim they were interviewing....The breaking point for them is when he coughed something up that resembled cottage cheese.

 

[Desdichado]

My ability to do really nasty horror is limited by the relatively weak stomach of one of my players. She gets nauseated pretty easy. So when she's at the table, I don't push things too far.

We have the exact opposite problem; a resident surgeon is one of our group, so when we try to do squeemish stuff, he either corrects or or one-ups us.