How do you make demons really scary?

[tomBitonti]

Something to keep in mind is dramatic presentation: Comparing movies with what is possible in-game is not entirely fair.

First, movies have far more tools for dramatic presentation: Music and sound effects, control over lighting, control over focus, and unsettling special effects. Movies will naturally be able to create on-the-edge-of-your-seat suspense much better than what is possible in game.

Second, movies are much more free flow, and much less concretely defined and limited. Players will often know to a close margin a foes abilities, where-as, movie foes have only gradually revealed abilities, which are almost entirely devoid of a mathematical description.

Third, movies have almost complete narrative control. One simply must absorb the story as it is presented. Players expect to have control over at a lot of the narration of their characters.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I read somewhere that the essence of horror is being changed against one's will. I think that applies here. To make a demon scary, give it the ability to make a permanent change that the player won't like. 1E style level drain works for this. Think also permanent stat damage, permanent alignment change enforced by occasional DM takeover. Of course check with your players first. I've seen players throw tantrums when such ideas are even discussed on forums; don't invite such players into a horror game unless you like OOC drama.

The other way is to connect with real life experience and media memes that scare people. A haunt that aligned with one of the products of my childhood imagination would probably freak me out thoroughly.

 

[Janx]

I read somewhere that the essence of horror is being changed against one's will. I think that applies here. To make a demon scary, give it the ability to make a permanent change that the player won't like. 1E style level drain works for this. Think also permanent stat damage, permanent alignment change enforced by occasional DM takeover. Of course check with your players first. I've seen players throw tantrums when such ideas are even discussed on forums; don't invite such players into a horror game unless you like OOC drama.

The other way is to connect with real life experience and media memes that scare people. A haunt that aligned with one of the products of my childhood imagination would probably freak me out thoroughly.

this idea has potential. I think to make it fair, you need clues and foreshadowing, etc. it's the threat of having something bad happen that should induce fear. At the simplest, it should induce cautious player behavior.

It's probably worth noting that this is probably a different kind of fear than movie theatre fear about the dark thing you haven't seen on screen yet.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

Something to keep in mind is dramatic presentation: Comparing movies with what is possible in-game is not entirely fair.

That's true, but things can be borrowed from movies that help to generate fear in a game. Lighting and sounds (even if only the GMs voice) can easily be implemented, at least to a certain degree.

Players will often know to a close margin a foes abilities, where-as, movie foes have only gradually revealed abilities, which are almost entirely devoid of a mathematical description.

Players can easily be kept completely in the dark about those things. Keep rolls behind a GM screen. Don't use a stock monster from a rulebook they may have read. Guessing at the mathematics or trait/skill/power list of a foe is only possible if they know you are playing a highly mechanistic game which is tightly tied to a rulebook. You can give the foe powers that aren't listed in any of the rulebooks, stats that don't follow any preconceived pattern, and even open-ended powers. You're the GM - you can design things any way you want.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Every time a demon appears in game, play an episode of Roseanne in the background.

 

[Stormonu]

Once anything has a stat block, it stops becoming frightening because its capacity is known.

The trick is to introduce the demon as unbound to stats. If the characters want to defeat it, they have to force it into a quantity of a known state. This is pretty much mimics possession.

While the demon is unbound to a corporeal form, it has abilities that are not bound to any given template. It cannot be defeated. The game master has constraints on how to play the demon, but these should not be stat-aligned abilities; they should be more guidelines, be unique to each demon (class) and NEVER be learned by the players. Each demon has one static rule and only one: the method by which it can be bound to a stat-based form and thereby defeated, influenced or otherwise manipulated.

Give some notes for the game master how to effectively set a mood

And I believe the Hellraiser movies give the best depictions of demons and making them something uncomfortable to encounter. Also, I feel that Poltergeist and Amityville Horror also have some good spots for introducing demons in a way to make them creepy.

 

[Campbell]

this all depends if you mean scary as in suspense or scary as in horror. Suspense depends on not knowing what is about to happen. What makes horror work is that you have a very good sense of what is about to happen and you very much don't want it to. It's an implied threat. The dread or apprehension is useless unless you actually make good with the gruesome dread. The trick is to hint at what the demon is capable of - grisly strewn corpses, a woman who murders her loving husband of 30+ years, etc. Then spring it into action right in front of the players.

 

[Li Shenron]

Somewhat vaguely related with the uncanny valley concept, personally I find that the movies which scare me most are those where I can actually related to the characters featured. A sci-fi horror almost never scares me, I don't even remember if I was scared at all by Alien(s) and I was underage when I watched it. I simply can't relate well to a character in a spaceship or another planet, but set the movie in contemporary times and places, and it can scare the willies out of me if I feel like I could be there among the characters. For instance, The Ring and the old Dawn of the Dead scared me because they were set in very familiar times and places.

In a RPG it never happened that something scared me. That could be because all RPG I've ever played were set in a fantasy world. No way I can truly see myself in a world of elves and dragons (maybe this is a fault in my roleplaying abilities ). But maybe a RPG in historical medieval Europe with all supernatural stuff tied to religion, and perhaps it starts having an unsettling effect.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

A DM really freaked us once, by accident. This was Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy.

Our ship had been boarded and we were rushing to attack the invaders. At one point we heard a weird metallic scuttling sound, and we looked around and couldn't spot it. We believed we had been flanked, but we couldn't locate it and went to fight the bad guys.

Finally we saw what it was. It was our captain. He'd been crippled in our first mission and been given a "wheelchair", except he was given segmented legs that carried him around. He had tried to sneak up on the bad guys too but rolled so well he beat all our checks (and didn't respond when we started talking blasting whatever was sneaking up on us). The DM only rolled well for that NPC, who wasn't supposed to be "carrying the team". As for us, we all rolled badly, as WH40K insists on starting PCs being incompetent. (On average, you have a 30.5% chance of succeeding on a task you are trained in.)

A DM on the WotC boards did something creepy in Eberron. A monster with very little combat power but great stealth sneaked into the PCs' alarm-warded room and wrote nasty messages on the inside of their door. The PCs freaked out because they had assumed they were safe.

So I guess "stealth" is it.