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Message: <blockquote data-quote="weem" data-source="post: 4452986" data-attributes="member: 9470">I ran a campaign years ago for one player (my brother) who was playing a Mystic (oh yea, old school) that had a moment he always remembers as scary.Basically, he had come across this cabin in the woods that had children playing outside. From the cabin came a very large women - she was about five and a half feet tall but I described her as weighing 'hundreds of pounds' - her name was "Darla" (don't ask me why). The woman and children were simply that, nothing unusual about the place. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but he somehow ended up on the second floor of the cabin snooping about later that night after she left when suddenly he heard a screaming... like, shake the forest loud and angry scream - when he looked out the window, he saw her "charging" (as fast as someone that big can charge) towards the cabin - behind her, the children followed, their eyes glowing red. She was screaming that she was going to kill him. So, this spooked him but he had no where to go but downstairs (or jump out the window) so he basically braced for her to come up the stairs and through a door he tried to block with furniture. I described to him how he heard the front door burst open, and the cabin shudder... the screams, growing louder as she charged to the stairs, and the the horrible slamming of each step as she made her way to his room. The, she burst through the door shattering it and the furniture blocking it - her eyes were now glowing red and she looked "crazed" but otherwise not unlike how he had seen her before. She basically launched into a bloody smash-ing brawl with him (remember he was a Mystic) which just about leveled the whole cabin, while fending off children who were trying to latch onto him and bit him.Anyway, it was great fun and scared the crap out of him at the time.With that said, here are the elements I think help make it scary...1/  My brother was 13 years old at the time2/  It was dark in the room3/  He was alone (like mentioned above about smaller groups)4/  The waiting for her... those moments of waiting where, without seeing her, he could "feel" (based on my descriptions) her coming for him5/  The unknown... this was a large women... but something was driving her that was not natural.This encounter went really well and was a lot of fun, but it was entirely unplanned. She was not a monster with a stat block. She was a women that I added some HP's to that could inflict great damage with her hands -- the biggest advantage she had was the description and warm up to the fight that I gave her.With that said, I think making players wait for impending doom is fun, especially when they have no where to go. And if that seems to make them feel confident since they can wait and prepare, then throw in a new threat, at the last second from another angle - so in the case of my story above, it might have heightened the fear factor if I had children burst through the window behind him as she was storming up the stairs... he was on the second floor after all - how did they get up there so fast (he would have wondered).</blockquote>

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