Non-supernatural horror

[Dannyalcatraz]

And back to foes: let's not forget man-eating bipedal sentients, especially the subsurface kind. They worked for H.G. Wells, C.H.U.D.s, The Descent, and so forth. Combining cannibalism and claustrophobia is a pretty good recipe.

But even surface dwellers can get in on the act. Whether by being an isolated and inbred populace or ones twisted by chemicals, thrill-killing hillbilly mutants are fun, too! See The Hills Have Eyes, X-Files, and many, many more.

 

[Wystan]

I would recommend looking into "FRINGE" as a source of pseudo-scientific plot lines and horrors, it almost sounded like Somebloke has done this as his campaign themes sound familiar but different...

 

[The Shaman]

Remember kids, supernatural doesn't just mean ghosties and vamsparklies - animal men, zombie stormtroopers, and mutant troglodytes are definitely supernatural.

The Houdoun stuff is good - in fact, there's a Flashing Blades adventure about voodoo zombies which is written so that the Gamemaster can decided if magic is real or not in the campaign world.

I don´t think the "who" really matters in the horror context, mostly because I think it´s next to impossible to create either fear or horror at a game table.
Come on, most of us will be lounging around in confort, having a drink and some snacks, chatting amiably with friends, how should fear work there?

One of the adventurers in my FB game is a really good swordsman - in a roll-under 1d20 system, his basic to-hit is 21, which means he can hit every time he attacks, subject to modifiers.

Last game someone took a pistol shot at the adventurers. The player's eyes went wide and he sat back in his seat, because his character's just as vulnerable as the next guy to firearms.

Instilling fear in a player may involve nothing more than creating a credible threat to his character; the horror element is in how that threat is presented.

So instead of asking what a good natural Enemy would be, I´d instead ask how to make natural things really scarry, how to set the mood, how to create that involvement. The enemy itself then doesn´t matter.

I have no problem with that side of it, or rather, to be more precise, establishing the mood and describing horrific things totally squicks me out, but I'm pretty good at it nonetheless.

And I disagree that the enemy doesn't matter - the nature of the enemy may contribute to the sense of uncertainty and unease that a good horror encounter creates.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Remember kids, supernatural doesn't just mean ghosties and vamsparklies - animal men, zombie stormtroopers, and mutant troglodytes are definitely supernatural.

I disagree: those are weird science. To me, supernatural implies something outside of or seems to violate natural forces.

We can make muscle tissue contract with application of electricity, even after death of the being of the tissue's origin- animating a corpse with tech to make a zombie is probably not possible, but it is within the realm of the conceivable.

Besides, "zombies" being undead is an artifice- a cover story- created by those who may have used tetrodotoxin to create will-sapped slaves of living humans who were THOUGHT dead. All a zombie really is, then, is a human whose will and independence are supressed or destroyed in such a way as to make them puppets of another...achievable via chemistry, possibly. And since certain diseases or parasites (toxoplasmosis) can verifiably pull off this stunt with lower creatures, it is, again, something conceivable. Lobotomies with RC parts replacements? Voodoo powders? Genemod parasites? Not supernatural.

Likewise, viable mutations are highly improbable, but are not violative of natural forces.

And animal men are a forseeable consequence of genetic (super)science: not so much a melding of animal and human DNA, but in manipulating animal DNA to make them smarter and bipedal. IOW, accelerated evolution.

 

[Umbran]

Besides, "zombies" being undead is an artifice- a cover story- created by those who may have used tetrodotoxin to create will-sapped slaves of living humans who were THOUGHT dead.

I half-wished one of the players in my Deadlands game decided that was the case. Aside from it being a good role-playing hook of conflict with the voodoo priestess in the party, it would be great to see such a PC squirm around trying to explain how this living, will-sapped human didn't need to breathe, and didn't bleed when shot.

His growing horror in realizing his error and the implications would have been great to play through...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well, when real undead zombies exist, eventually the hardest minded rationalist is going to realize there is something else going on.

Frex, Batman famously took a loooooong time to wrap his head around the existence of the truly supernatural. I remember reading such stories in the 1970s, nearly 40 years after the first published Batman stories.

Many things he encountered he dismissed as trickery or unknown scientific principles...until he started seeing things he simply had to admit were NOT possible according to science...even superhero-world science.

 

[Coldwyn]

[MENTION=26473]The Shaman[/MENTION]

To give an anecdotal answer myself:
There was one compaign I partook as a player the really got all involved on edge. Wo got stranded in a city that was run by an tyranny that used extreme punishment to keep the population in line and the city walls served more or less to keep the serfs from escaping.
We weren´t told this in a blunt description but had to wok it out on our own, only working with subtle clues. The city guard was omnipresent and posed a serious thread, meaning we, typical heroes behaviour, challanged the first patrol that found us to mortal combat and barely escaped befoe their reinforcements arrived. We spent the next sessions dodging the city watch, camping in potatoe cellars and scrounging for food.
The mood build up on three legs: The constant danger of combat, the bleak description of the city and the inhabitants, our contact with other people like merchants and another adevnturing party that were as trapped as us.
I think the moment that really drew us into the horror and emotional part was when we discovered that a party of elves we used to camp with, was slaughtered by the city watch because they followed us to the camp.

 

[Umbran]

Well, when real undead zombies exist, eventually the hardest minded rationalist is going to realize there is something else going on.

That seems to fly in the face of what you said above - supernatural implies something beyond natural forces.

How is the hardest-minded rationalist going to know the difference between science he doesn't understand and something that defies natural law? You were willing to say zombie stormtroopers were a sci-fi thing, just because we today can make some muscle fibers twitch. If you're willing to posit sufficiently advanced science, you can always say it isn't beyond natural forces. Clarke's Third Law, and all that.

In Deadlands, there's metaphysical and game-mechanical stuff that resolves the issue, but not all games include such. So, in a game that doesn't have those underpinnings, how is a character to know?

 

[Nadaka]

War. War never changes.

One thing I don't see here is probably the horrific thing that someone has a reasonable chance of experiencing.

Serial killers? Cannibal cults? Man eating lions? One in a million.

In any given town, maybe 1 or two detectives have ever even come close to seeing something like that after the fact, much less have been there for the event.

War.

Thousands fight in war every day at this very moment. Hundreds of thousands stormed the beaches of Normandy. Millions died in Stalingrad. Every town probably has dozens or more current or former soldiers who have fought in wars from WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

War is horrific, not just because of the threat of death and dismemberment. Not just because of the sights and sounds. But because you as a soldier have to actively participate in all of that.

A game of storming the beaches at Normandy might require the player to show up with 7 or more premade characters. If I was running that game, I would let them settle into the character on the ride over, then kill them all as the door on the DUCK opened up and machine gun fire ripped them all apart. Next characters get mutilated by mortar fire. Next characters might make it to cover, only to fight against panic to keep it together long enough to fight to survive. etc.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

How is the hardest-minded rationalist going to know the difference between science he doesn't understand and something that defies natural law? You were willing to say zombie stormtroopers were a sci-fi thing, just because we today can make some muscle fibers twitch. If you're willing to posit sufficiently advanced science, you can always say it isn't beyond natural forces. Clarke's Third Law, and all that.

I was going to bring up Clarke's Third Law.

Knowing the difference between supernatural and super science is a meta thing we readers/viewers have the luxury of perceiving. Suspecting the difference between supernatural and super science is about the best someone in the situation can do.

And Hatian zombies Provide a perfect example. For the hundreds of years that they've been around, Hatian zombies were assumed to be supernatural, and why not? The people they were made from were declared dead by the best methods available, then buried. We now know that- assuming the stories of their existence are true- it's really just a case of sophisticated and unsuspected pharmacology. IOW, technology instead of magic.

If today some normal-looking Average Joe showed up and was able to increase their size proportionately to 40' tall, sprout skeletal bat wings and fly, and then walk through a wall as if it were mist with no detectable apparatus, most of us would probably conclude it had to be magic. Even James Randi.

And 30,000 years in the future, when all that is possible via the latest Apple lifestyle gadget, they'd mock us for not understanding simple physics.