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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4993921" data-attributes="member: 4937">Making evil be suitably monsterous and the terrorifying suitable scary is hard, and particularly hard to do without simply crudely and graphically smashing a sensitive subject button in hopes of getting a viceral reaction.1) Fear of the unknown: Lovecraft has the right of it.  If you want players to respond to your scary monsters, one of the most important things to do is make sure that the players aren't sure what it is that they are facing.  If the monster gets replaced in their minds eye by a list of printed attributes and numbers, most chance of them finding it scary is lost.  Even with a monster that the player 'knows' give it some flourish in the description or tactics they aren't expecting.2) Make sure that you make the monsters existence a non-enviable one:  One of the biggest problems you get into trying to scare people is if you make the monster 'cool', attractive and powerful, people don't fear the monster they instead want to be the monster.  You can play this underhandedly occasionally, where you make the monster cool and attractive at first and then reveal the monster beneath the mask, but for the most part monsters should live loathsome and terrible lives (at least from the perspective of anyone sane).3) Hunt the PC's: One of the problems scaring the players is that they are running very capable individuals who always seem to have the initiative and who are hunting down and destroying their foes.  What do they got to fear?  To scare the players, you have to take away their feelings of being in control of the situation.  You have to knock them back on their heels and make them react rather than leave the monsters always reacting to them.  Put them in nasty tactical situations.4) Throw NPC's to the monsters: Most of the time the PC is secure and will always be secure.  The monster can't get them because they are one bad dude (or lady), so the player doesn't know what to fear.  To heighten the fear, you need to toss a few victims to the monster so that the PC's can observe how it kills/maims/cripples/destroys or the aftermath of such an attack.   The player needs to be thinking, "That could be me."5) Go after primal fears: Everyone is scared of something, and its usually pretty basic.  Instead of going right for something loathsome like rape or torture or gore all over the place, go after the player's fear triggers: snakes, spiders, darkness, heights, being alone, dirt, being upside down, confinement, drowning, being touched, being contaminated, being eaten, betraying oneself, children, aging (or its effects), whatever.  Try to think of every monster as a fear and then supernaturally heighten thing in the monster that is fearful or put the monster in the situation that the player finds fearful.6) Be immersive: Try to force the player to imagine the situation from a first person view, not looking down at the character but through the character's eyes.7) Don't show the monster: You can't do this all the time, because D&D is about combat, but often you get more out of the monster if you set the mood first before the monster jumps out.  Be creepy.  Creepy sounds.  Creepy smells.  Creepy setting.  Sometimes it helps to use misdirection to get them looking at where the monster isn't.  That mummified corpse on the throne in the tomb is just a corpse, not an undead monster and the dead king isn't haunting his tomb but enjoying his afterlife.  The real monster is the immortal snake spirit that gaurds the tomb that gets you from behind will you are worried about undead leaping out of sarcophagi or wraiths rising out of the dust, or mummies lurching from the throne.8) Whatever the PC's expect, make it worse:  The BBEG must not only be dangerous, but more dangerous than they imagined.  You want to provoke the reaction, "You want us to go against that?!??!"  You have to make the PC's question whether they have the chops or the tools to take on the monster at this time, even when you secretly know that its not as bad as the PC's imagine it to be.  You can do this either by playing a metagame where the monster appears to be something with higher stats, or really is a something normally associated with deeper in the dungeon./further in their careers but is a (relatively) weak specimen.  Or you can do it by taking something relatively weak and making it appear relatively invincible by giving it surprising hit dice and abilities.</blockquote>

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