How do you scare your players?

[Gregor]

Hey all,

With Halloween approaching ever closer, I would love to run my players through an adventure that is dark, scary and dangerous - something to really set the Halloween mood.

I am looking for suggestions, examples, stories, etc. of how you DMs out there have scared your players in the past. Do you lay the descriptions on really thick, like bloated zombies with wriggling maggots filling their eye sockets and soggy, slopping trenchfoot zombie feet slapping on the stone floor? Do you play music? Do you put the PCs somewhere dark where they cant see properly (even with magic) and tell them they hear all sorts of scary things echoing through the catacombs?

Give me your worst, because I want to scare my players! Plus, this thread can be an excellent source of inspiration for everyone - if we band together, no player will be safe this Halloween!

 

[Crothian]

Get rid of the distractions. Play in a place without other people around and hopefully relatively quiet. You have to keep the players focuses and involved.

Mood music can work, but so can silence. I also perfer to control the light and the enviroment.

 

[Voadam]

Describing things in depth but without D&D or mechanical terms.

A group of hulking brutish figures with tree trunk thick arms that tower over mortal men are a bit more intimidating than "a half-dozen ogres."

Half describing things:

"After the stairs flip up to reveal blade edges and spikes, you hear gears and mechanisms engaging in the walls." I had a 16th level pc paladin shout "GEARS! Teleport us out of here now!" in response to the sound of gears in a trapped stairwell. When he saw the scything blades emerge from the walls at the top of the stairs and begin a pattern slowly cutting through each space heading down to the bottom of the stairs he he was relieved "Oh good, its only laser razor blades, I was worried for a minute there." I had just meant to describe the sound of the trap engaging, not to freak him out, but it did.

 

[Ceresco]

Kill NPCs. Lots of them killed by a serial killer in brutal and gruesome ways. Nothing gets a Halloween game going like dead bodies popping up, prefereably when the PCs can be implicated.

 

[Bardsandsages]

The key is to know what scares them in real life. For example, I have a friend with arachnophobia. So simply introducing spiders to the game gets his skin crawling. One friend is easily creeped out by squishing sounds, like the sound of something dragging itself out of muck. I happen to have developed a sound I can make to describe such, and it makes her shiver when I do it.

Fake scares are always good, particularly when it comes at a point they aren't expecting. For example, a decomposing body will sometimes seem to move, and even sit up, due to the build up of cases during the decomposition process. So the party comes across a few dead monsters or adventurers. They seem to have been dead for a couple of days. What is the natural instict of a gamer? Loot! As they start to loot, the body sits up.

Borrow a line for Hollywood horror movies. The party is camping for the night. The person on watch sees a pair of shiny eyes watching through the bushes, but it darts off. Upon investigating, it's a wolf cub (or something obviously cute to tug at the heartstrings). Not far from the camp, the mother wolf is dead, torn to shreads by something. Maybe the cub cautiously starts to approach the PC. Particularly if it is a ranger or soft-hearted type, the instinct will be to focus on the cub and try to get it to approach. Suddenly the cub runs off the other direction...and the PC hears heavy breathing behind him...

 

[Mallus]

I scare my players by feigning ignorance of how the rules actually work, except in the cases where I scare them with my actual ignorance of how the rules work.

 

[Anti-Sean]

I take my clothes off.

Works *every* time!

 

[jollyninja]

I tend to model my scarier adventures after japanese horror movies. Throw in effects that do not fall under standard spell lists, have things be just a little bit off, not quite right. My players hate it. they get all creeped out it's great. just tossing undead at them does not do it. or i go over the top with "what the hell just happened?!" type stuff

the last horror based adventure I ran, I used two main creatures. a two legged six foot tall humanoid creature that looked like it's upper body was encased in a pvc sack. at the beginning of an encounter all it could do was slam them with it's upper body, it walked kinda like the silent hill shuffling monsters. Each time it was struck with a bladed weapon it would sprout a human like but decomposing arm and try to grapple the pc who hit it and pull them into the sack. I believe when asked my description of what was inside the sack was something akin to "you can't really get a good look in but it smells like burning garbage and you can feel the air pressure pulling you inward" when one of these ended up having eight arms and pulling one halfway inside they saw a huge cavern with what looked like a massive fire at the bottom and a bunch of small semi reptilian creatures crawling up the sides of the cavern toward him. the other players pulled him out by his feet just as he was about to find out what they were going to do when they got to him.

the other was a nine foot tall humanoid that looked like it was wearing a black leather full body siut and faceless hood that was all riveted onto it's skin, black fluid dripped from the rivets. they moved as if they were navigating by smell and sound alone and i gave them the pounce ability as well as an unlimited use of the invisibility spell. It's fingers were replaced with gore covered 9 inch blades that looked like they had been welded onto the flesh of it's hands.

they would only get attacked when one of them got more then 30 feet into the fog that had rolled in while they were sleeping the night before or when they deviated from the walking path in front of them.

they also got attacked by the revenant of a logger who had been wronged in some horrible way by "vincent" which he kept screaming as he attacked the pc's

I had a good time watching my veteran players try to figure out what the hell had just happened in the "low magic" iron heroes game they had signed up for.

 

[Crothian]

The key is to know what scares them in real life. For example, I have a friend with arachnophobia.

Be careful with that, I had a friend get up and leave because his arachnophobia was much worse then I thought.

 

[ZSutherland]

It can be in what you say, but it's most often in what you don't say. The one universal fear is fear of the unknown, so play it up. A paragraph detailing the appearance of a monstrous spider, if well written, will terrify my wife because she's terrified of all insects/arachnids, but it won't scare the rest of my players. Telling them that something strong and hairy (the spider's leg) is brushing the back of their necks will freak them all out. Also, don't forget to go for the delayed scare and the sucker punch. To keep with the spider example, the delayed scare happens before they encounter the spider or know that it's there. They enter a room criss-crossed with incredibly strong webbing. In the center of one of the webs is the dessicated corpse of an ogre, troll, carrion crawler (anything they've had an encounter with in the recent past that gave them a tough time). At some point, one of them will start to wonder what sort of hideous creature can string up a troll and drain its blood. That's a delayed scare. The sucker punch requires a flair for the dramatic on the part of the DM. Done poorly, it will cause laughter and break the mood. Basically, it involves standing up and yelling to scare the bejeezus out of your players at the exactly proper moment (generally when something vile and murderous jumps out at them). Build up to it by describing the room and focus on non-visual senses. Explain what it smells like to be in a room full of silk and bloodless corpses. Tell one of the players what it feels like to have an errant piece of webbing brush lightly across their cheek. Lower your voice slightly, phrase by phrase, to force the players to listen hard to hear you. When you've got them leaning in, suddenly announce the arrival of the spider in a dramatic way and simultaneously bring your voice back to normal volume.