Weekend of horror

[Rechan]

Lord Zardoz, I... I thank you. I'm using some of that stuff next session. Myahaha.

Well, at least the "you vomit a swarm of oozes". Mm, yes. My PCs are in an abandoned, desolate demon-infested town ala Roanoke colony. So, it's appropriate.

Unfortunately, my players are about as jaded as Jack99's, so I'm awaiting any more.

 

[Nyaricus]

Lord Zardoz, I... I thank you. I'm using some of that stuff next session. Myahaha.

Indeed. Lord Zardoz, that was an epic bloody post mate

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Honestly, short of pulling out a live goat and sacrificing it on the gaming table, I don't think there is such a thing as too far. The awesome suggestions you have come up with a certainly not near what my players and myself can handle. What I mean is that it might spook them, but if you have ideas that push it further, it won't be a problem.

To the rest of you, thanks for some awesome suggestions, and thanks for the link Rechan, it has a lot of great ideas in it as well

My question was more in the line of 'avoid dead baby jokes around people that have had a miscarriage'. I should be able to describe some pretty horrible things while staying within the bounds dictated by Eric's Grandmother. Since I am at work at the moment, the nastier ideas I have will again need to wait until this evening. However, I can probably make a few more suggestions here.

Pulling off Horror in D&D is not too difficult, relatively speaking. Gore by its self wont do it, but you can get a visceral reaction with some effort. Terror is much harder to do. You can almost never evoke a 'run and hide' sense of peril that goes beyond a tactical desire not to die. The players first reaction will always be to try to stab it or blast it depending on their character class. Direct threats almost never work.

That is why you need to prey on feelings beyond self preservation. The best reaction I ever got from any group of players was from a group of goblins. There were enough goblins to be a tactical threat, but not overwhelming. But the encounter was set on a family farm with the family tied to posts with flammable wood under their feet. The mother and 3 children were being forced to watch as the goblin leader gouged out the eyes of the father and ate them. The players charged in, and the first action of the goblins was to set the oil soaked kindling on fire. The players were determined to intervene and prevent something horrorific from happening. This worked because the idea of a family being tortured in this manner touched a nerve (harm of children / family) and it forced a hard decision (try to kill the goblins then free the family, or free the family first allowing the goblins unanswered attacks on them).

I will expand on things that might get visceral reactions later.

For now, here are some ways to try to inspire terror in your players.

About the only thing that works for terror in a D&D game is doing things that do not quite fit within the rules as they know them. There are a few ways to do this, but it is a very hard line to walk between scaring them witless and an unfair TPK. The key to such encounters is that you have to make the encounter very dangerous tactically, you have to deny the players the use of their usual means of attacking the opponent, and you must provide a means to survive the encounter that the players can figure out.

- Run an encounter with a T-Rex with permanent Improved Invisibility. All you need to tell them is that something very large is bitting them and doing horrible damage, and that they cannot see it. Allow Improved Invisibility to see 'something', but do not describe it as a T-Rex. Add in a template that adds some heavy damage reduction or fast healing or regeneration to amp this up.

- An Ethereal opponent with Telekinesis can really get the players on edge by throwing large objects at them while denying them a direct way to counter attack.

- Run a few encounters using a possession mechanic based on Magic Jar, accompanied by a disembodied demonic voice. Let players who fail a saving throw keep their mind in their body, but dictate their actions. Just roll initiative, and on the 'monsters' turn, roll out the saves / attacks for magic jar as normal as the voice taunts them. Describe a powerful evil will trying to dominate them as you do the attacks. If you succeed, hand notes to a player telling them which player they need to try to kill, and ensure that they use their best attacks to do so. Or just have a character soak himself in oil and set himself on fire. Have fun with it. Just make sure that you allow the players a means to defeat the 'force'. Just make it non obvious, and keep the duration of such attacks low (no more than 4 or 5 rounds). Let the players win if they can work out a way to keep the possessed player from killing himself or others without resorting to murder.

- Have a duplicate of a player show up in camp and start trying to kill everyone. Attacking it does nothing. Attacking the original and 'killing it will cause the duplicate to come to his senses while leaving the original dead. For this to work, you must find a way to clue the players into the idea that killing the original will stop the duplicate, but you must not let them know that killing the original will not result in the death of the player.

That is all for now.

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[Lord Zardoz]

Here are some more ideas regarding Horror. The easiest way to scare the crap out of people is to threaten something they care about. In D&D, this is next to impossible to do. Tell a player that his characters brother's body is before him, covered in blood with his chest torn open, with his brother screaming in agony, you will get an "Oh, Cool!" kind of response. You get more of a reaction by sundering his +2 Sword. This does not fit with what you are trying to accomplish.

The next approach is to have them encounter various unspeakable things that touch a nerve. The easiest way to do that is to describe graphic scenes of harm being inflicted on the blatently innocent, or to have said innocents inflicting such harm on others. Here are my nastier ideas to that effect.

- The players encounter a young pregnant woman in distress. She looks to be in rough shape, filthy and very shaky, and very terrified. When asked what is wrong, she will scream "that thing wont stop talking. It wants to kill me. I can't give birth to it. It is not my baby!". She will reach for the nearest sharp object and try to cut out her own fetus, or at least stab the crap out of herself trying to kill it.

- Have the players find A child between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. This child will be undernourished and alone. He will have a very nasty rash on him, and he will be scratching, trying to relieve the itch. The itch will not go away however, and he will have scraped the outer layers of his own flesh off, exposing bone. A remove curse can remove the itching, but it will require a caster check of DC 19.

- The players hear an toddler (2 or 3 years old) crying. If the search for it, they will indeed find the child. The child will be normal in all respects, except very hungry. If the players try to care for it, then later that night, the infant will attempt a Coup-De-Grace with a dagger on someone (at Str 1, it is 1d4-5 dmg). Regardless of what measures the players take to keep watch on the infant, every night it will get loose and try to kill someone. She will escape from any bonds and always obtain some suitably lethal object. This child is not evil (some other force is controling / aiding it), so it will never detect as evil. The force will be under a Caster level 15 non detection spell (so caster check DC 26 to detect the force). The force will only be present when the infant is trying to kill someone.

This will force the players to either abandon the child, murder the child, or have someone stay awake with it all night to make sure it does not try to kill someone. Remember to apply fatigue penalties.

- As they travel on the island, the players discover the bodies of young children and small animals nailed to trees with what ought to be fatal wounds, but the creatures are not dead. They do not die until they are taken down. At some later point in the adventure, they find a man walking down the path with a large sack, which is squirming. He will ignore the players, walk to the nearest wooden wall or tree, and then start to secure the sack to that surface. he will then unlimber a large spike and a hammer, and start to drive a nail through it, at which point the child inside starts to scream. I am sure your players will stop him. The man requires 1d4 rounds to nail the child up. If he is stopped, he begs the players to let him do it, but will not explain. If the man is obstructed for more than 2 rounds, the child escapes. At which point the equivalent of an 8th level sorcerer with 5 Strenght (and thus a crappy grapple score) and lots of blasting spells (or spells from the book of vile darkness) starts attacking them. It should have Regeneration(Law), and be a pain to kill. (Regeneration with a weakness vs Holy is too obvious). Once they do drop it or otherwise render it immobile, the child becomes normal and starts screaming and crying, asking "Why did you hurt me?".

- Let the players find a young teen in the process of extreme self mutilation, but screaming in pain and giving every indication that they do not want to be doing what they are doing. The person should have already cut out one or both ears, one eye, most of one foot, a few fingers, some severe genital mutilation, and be in the process of knocking their own teeth out with a hammer. Between each wet and meaty thwack, they should beg the players to 'please stop me'.

- Why not have some sort of infectious disease that causes the players to grow nasty, large-ish, black and oozing tumors that have faces, and which try to force the players to fight for control of their own bodies? They should first encounter the disease on others. Curing the disease should require a difficult Remove Curse type spell as well as a remove disease, and maybe some sort of McGuffin item. Once the tumor becomes inteligent, it should inflict some sort of opposed rolls to gain control of the players at an inconvenient time

- The sight of a starving person who is eating their own limb while it is still attached never gets old.

- The players hear the sound of an animal yelping and screaming. when they investigate, they find a few 8 year old children around a fire, holding a small dog in the fire. The hands of the children are also being burned. Around them are the charred, smoking, and half eaten remains of several other small animals. They periodically take the animal out of the fire and gnaw on the parts that are burned, and comment on how tasty it is. They see the players and offer to share.

That should about do it for suggestions. I think that if I try to take my ideas any further than this, I will get the attention of a moderator.

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[Rechan]

I personally get real tired of the "It's children! THEY'RE CREEPY." After so many movies of children ghosts, I was desensitized.



In tonight's game, I actually used a suggestion by Lord Zardoz. I had the PCs make a fort save. A minute or so later, I had them make another fort. Two PCs started vomiting blackish orange sludge, which resulted in 2 ochre jellies. The fight started with two PCs grappled - the barbarian forced one to split, resulting in 3 grapples in the second turn.

It was a hard fight. The rogue would have bled out had I not put the benevolent ghost of an artificer in the room beforehand, who gave a helpful healing potion, then started alchemist firing the things.

Two rooms later, they find a stairwell with a mucus membrane blocking the way. Listen checks. "You hear whispering upstairs. And your ear is bleeding." The spirit shaman said "No, sorry, I'm leaving this room, we are not fighting this right now, we can come back later." And this was from a fairly jaded player. I was so proud.



Here's two things I'm going to use, which might be helpful.

-The PCs find a doll. Have a PC roll a will save (15-17). If they fail, or if they just walk up to it and investigate it, after several moments they notice that the doll's features are familiar. Everyone else realizes that the PC has no face. The doll has his face. There's no mechanical effect, just that the doll looks like the PC and the PC has lost his features. To get them back, he needs to cast Remove Curse on the doll, and then eat the doll's head.

-Have the PCs encounter a room with blue or violet webbing, or perhaps a fungus covering the ceiling. There are pods/cocoons in the fungus. There's no spider, no monster that pops out. EVENTUALLY they're going to go poke one of the cocoons/pods. If they cut it open, have the cleric make a heal check (Reasonable DC). Inside is a perfectly preserved corpse of someone who, according to the heal check, died of old age.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I suppose the use of children does get a bit repetitive after a while. However, they are also the one thing that horror movies for the most part will not go after. Jaws is the only movie I can think of where a child dies more or less on screen. In any other horror movie, you do not usually see the Axe Murderer of the week stomping on the head of a child and turning into a puddle of Chunky Salsa.

Most of the suggestions I gave would work just as well using an adult though. However, the impact of it may not be as strong.

Rechan does have a point though. Do not overuse the 'child as the victim' trope.

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[Jack99]

We are leaving in an hour or so, and I have gotten everything I need ready, from spooky draining mists, to strange laughings, over finding their own corpses, puking bugs, having to kill possessed players and last but not least, a slightly modified version of Shilsen's story of children shadows.

Instead of playing up the children theme, I am going focus on distrust. Ingame, the monk and the diviner really distrust each other, so I am going to see if I can't amp that up a notch.

Once again, thanks all for the great suggestions, they have been great suggestions both for the weekend, but for all future games.

Cheers,

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Party distrust is a difficult thing to do without metagaming, but it can still be great fun. I suggest playing up that distrust as a diversion.

If A is the Monk, and B is the Diviner, then let C be the source of danger. Also let C be the one to tell A of the dangers of B (or vice versa) by handing C a note telling A that B is up to something.

Also, be sure to have the Diviner get a sense of danger every time he tries to use his powers on the island, and do fun things like have him Save vs a Blindness spell when he tries to get a look at something 'terrible'.

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[Festivus]

Yeah I subscribe, unfortunately it takes forever for Paizo's stuff to reach my country, so nr2 isn't yet here

Just an FYI, if you are a Pathfinder subscriber you can download the PDF for free from Paizo. Check your account there to see it (once their site comes back online that is).

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Encounter 1, a battle site.

For starters, the players ought to come upon the site of a battle of some sort. There should be a couple of bodies of the losers, and they should be in very bad shape. Large gaping wounds, bits of people strewn about that require some sorting out. There ought to be signs that there was something large and powerful near the fight. Broken trees, deep foot prints, and weapons and armour that are twisted into unusable shapes. The prints should be unidentifiable. And the bodies after some examination should be your players.

To make this work, describe the bodies of the players in increasing detail as they make skill and search checks. The gear that is found should be broken and unusable, but recognizable as the same kind of gear that the players have. When the players bust out the divinations, note the following:

- Detect Evil should be off the scale
- Divinations will indicate that these are the bodies of the players
- Speak with Dead should result in nothing but screaming from the deceased
- The wounds on the players should be described in graphic detail. Crawling with maggots, covered in strange ooze, and smell like diseased filth
- Inflicting damage on the body parts should cause harm to the corresponding player.

Hehehe. I know you meant PC rather than player, but I was just imagining the reaction if they came across what looked like the players' bodies. "The arm was apparently ripped off so quickly that the sleeve came with it. It's blue plaid. And there are a couple of oddly shaped dice clenched in its fist."