How disturbing are your games?

[sniffles]

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.

That's pretty amusing - or irritating, depending on your point of view.

I play occasionally with a group including a pediatrician. He was the first player to eagerly taste some roast hobbit when we found the ogres cooking up the little folk in the dungeon.


We don't usually do much horror in our games, partly because we have a couple of squeamish players. But when some horror or dark element does intrude, it usually doesn't take much description to make us all say "Eeeww!". We have pretty vivid imaginations, I guess. About the most "horrific" thing I can think of recently was finding a prisoner chained to a really disgusting idol who was, how shall I say it, 'multiply endowed' with masculine attributes. We had a hard time getting close enough to free the prisoner.

 

[Ghostwind]

Harpies choosing one of the male characters as "fine breeding material"
or killing a wizard to return a kidnapped child to the mother, just to learn that the wizard was the father and had custody

Consider these stolen.

I tend to mix a little horror into every game in some fashion. So far the best reaction has been the look on the players' faces when I described the burnt out remains of a church where the townspeople had fled and were burned alive in.

Of course, another form of horror is having a 15 yr. old NPC ruler propose marriage to a PC.

 

[Templeton580]

*

 

[The Grackle]

Truthfully, it's more silly to me than gross (and I do have a 1-year-old at home). If you have the power to possess someone, why possess them at their weakest, most helpless moment in life?

That's when they have the lowest Will Save.

 

[Steel_Wind]

I tend to run horror as horror.

But after reading Nightmares of Mine, a little guide to horror, I intend to make every game have elements of horror somewhere. It by it's nature means investment in character, which I like.

Nice one.

Nightmares of Mine, by Call of Cthulhu veteran author Kenneth Hite, was a very cool little book put out by ICE in or around 1998/99. Despite the fact it bore the Rolemaster logo, it had nothing to do with RM as a system - or any other. (3 or 4 pages out of 120+ of system mechanics? If that.) It was all about running a horror genre game and focussed on setting and practical advice to GMs.

It was a GMing book that didn't try to be anything other than a GMing book.

It was a brilliant piece of writing and is 100% applicable to all d20 DMs. I recommend it highly. The RPG shop still has copies in print and ICE's online store sells it as well.

If the forthcoming horror genre book by WotC is half as good as Nightmares of Mine, it will be worth the money.

 

[Nareau]

If you have the power to possess someone, why possess them at their weakest, most helpless moment in life?

Well, I certainly wouldn't possess a weak little baby. I'd possess someone rich/beautiful/strong/powerful. But then again, I'm not a demon-lord of corruption.

The idea was that this demon represented the worst kind of corruption there is, and he had to possess a totally innocent vessel. Who's more innocent than a newborn?

Oh, and I feel I should mention--once the demon was defeated, the baby was fine. As far as realism goes with screaming babies...I decided to use stats for a Vrock (fudging the size and stuff). Paralyzing scream, horrible clouds of stench--sounds like a baby to me!

Spider

 

[Pielorinho]

Paralyzing scream, horrible clouds of stench--sounds like a baby to me!

As one of the players in the game wherein a PC went demon-pacty, I'll agree with those who said "formerly good." My own PC died in the battle during which he betrayed us; and had he later not betrayed the demon and freed the surviving PCs, there would've been a TPK.

So how did we respond to his freeing the survivors and arranging for my reincarnation?

We bound him, interrogated him, and offered him a chance to explain why he shouldn't be executed. He convinced us that he would be redeemable by speaking aloud his defiance of the demon, which triggered the pact and caused him to fill with lava and burn to death. When he was reincarnated, we kept him on a verrrrry short leash.

Yeah, we game with grimness (I was very disappointed once when I didn't manage to turn the PCs into cannibals--dang, that woulda been fun!) but it's a playstyle that works for us.

Daniel

 

[Buttercup]

Consider these stolen.

I saw that!

I tend to mix a little horror into every game in some fashion. So far the best reaction has been the look on the players' faces when I described the burnt out remains of a church where the townspeople had fled and were burned alive in.

Of course that one was made worse when one of the party, in an attempt to find an escape, ended up blowing up the only person left alive, thus becoming a priest killer.

Of course, another form of horror is having a 15 yr. old NPC ruler propose marriage to a PC.

You don't have to gloat about it, you SOB! Now if you can just find someone *suitable* for her to fall for, maybe the other party members will stop hitting on her.

 

[der_kluge]

I was going to suggest, based on the thread title, that the poster should have played in some of the Round-Robin games I played in at Gen Con - and then I saw who the poster was!


I think if I'm running games that I've prepared, they tend to be fairly well subdued, it's when I start pulling stuff out of my ass that they tend to get a little weird.


One of the weirdest things that I think ever happened was in the last campaign that I ran. The party was 9th level, and delving into this ancient sunken temple. One of the quadrants of this dungeon was submerged. The sorcerer boldly ventured forth to investigate what was ahead. An aboleth charmed him, and he drowned underwater. Later, the rest of the party went in after him, where they fought the aboleth. Nasty, nasty creatures those aboleths. Well, they also fought some eels from ToH which had a mummy-rot affect.

The party emerged victorious, but everyone had some sort of affliction from either the eels or the aboleth. The cleric only had so many spells to go around, and the poor spellsword who was afflicted with the aboleth's "leprosy" disease (for lack of a better word) had to remain in the water or else his skin would rot off in the open air. But underwater breathing didn't last for 8 hours, so he had to hang out on the steps leading into the water for 8 hours while the cleric regained enough spells to get the party back to full health. So, he found a femur bone of a lizardman mummy, and used it as a snorkel to breath through for 8 hours.

I should have given him a sanity check.

 

[Ghostwind]

You don't have to gloat about it, you SOB! Now if you can just find someone *suitable* for her to fall for, maybe the other party members will stop hitting on her.

Hmmm, maybe a dashing Arcani NPC with a taste for powerful women...