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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zad" data-source="post: 2277713" data-attributes="member: 90">The answer to this question is easily found in several of the Story Hours - Piratecat and Sepulchrave and Wizardru leap to mind for starters.The actual *thing* that scares players will vary but there is one common element - the unknown."You look into a cave. You see an orc. He's guarding a pie."Not scary"You look into a cave. Shadows play across the walls cast by the flickering, dying torches. It takes a moment for you to make out a shadowy figure lurking against the back wall, protectively hunched over something..."Better. Sure there's reason to be scared of a big dragon, but better and more sustained fear comes from facing players with things they just don't understand immediately. Then their fears get a chance to come out and whisper in their ears and they're usually worse than the poor orc you have actually there. Piratecat took his players to the underdark - that very different environment put a tension into things and they were never sure what was going on when they ran into something. It could be a threat; it could be the garbage man. Wizardru just took his players into the Far Realms and the bizzare landscape was enough to make everyone edgy, not to mention any given fight was full of the unknown. Another example comes from a few years ago when they fought a psionic githyanki and it so happened that none of the players were familiar enough with psionics to have a good sense of what they were being hit with. Fireballs are scary if you know nothing about magic because you don't know the limits.Use the unknown to give the familiar a sense of mystery, and you will make your players very nervous.</blockquote>

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