Some really good advice I once picked up from the internet was to write each scene using a Four categories model of:
- DREAD: Dread is anticipation. It is the distant howl in the night, the scratching at the door, the eerie lights, the bloody hand print. Its about atmosphere and feeling, cues that lay in the subtle feeling of wrongness and rising paranoia in players
- HORROR: Horror is a realization. Reading the ‘truth’ in the skin-covered book, walking into the house and seeing that something has brutally dismembered your family pet, discovering the room with the corpses, seeing the creature.
- TERROR: Terror is a confrontation. Its when the thing bursts through the door, chases you down the long narrow corridor and leaps on your back. Terror is the hardest to do with friends sitting around a table rolling dice.
- HOPE: Hope is relief. It's the release valve to prevent players from getting fatigued. Getting into the safe room, seeing the light of the sunrise, Killing the monster and finding your family barricaded in the closet is hope.
Organizing things this way means things can be paces and refreshed so as not to repeat the same kind of scenes and it lends itself to narrative escalation:
Hope -> Dread -> Horror -> Terror -> Hope
Then you can change things up
Terror -> Hope -> Horror (something grabs you in the dark, you manage to kill it, then when the lights go on you see that you've murdered a child.)
Dread -> Hope (You are approaching the spooky hut of the local witch, covered in demonic symbols and grisly trinkets. Inside the Witch is a kind, helpful woman whose trinkets are protective, she wants to stop the antagonist too and is willing to help.)
Hope -> Terror (You are back in the school house, with your teacher Miss Annie patting your hair, you turn and see Miss Annie staring down hungrily with blackened shattered eyes)