Ruin Explorer
Legend
Apparently so! I'd say that was absolutely a thriller-esque situation - political/crime thriller/intrigue, specifically (it's an assassination/terrorism scene essentially, could fit in a gangster movie or politician/rule-centric one). Horrifying/awful is not the same as horror genre, otherwise, like most films about WW2, especially Saving Private Ryan, would be "horror" (and I'm not saying no-one has ever tried to make that case, I'm sure in all the internet someone has, but... I think when you broaden genre that much it becomes meaningless and unhelpful. Notably it did borrow presentation techniques from horror movies).
One tier down will help, though you'd still be exceeding the Severe Threshold pretty easily (but it would at least be like 40-70% of the time depending on the NPC rather than close to 100% of the time with same tier). Numbers matter as a cap to how much Fear you can spend primarily, and thus how many sequential actions (which, IIRC, are essentially uninterruptible by the players - correct me if I'm wrong - you have to voluntarily stop or run out of NPCs to spotlight), so you could have low numbers or just not spend a lot of Fear. Low numbers will ironically seem more scary I think because then you can be maxing your Fear spend and thus alarming the players!
I like the innkeeper + wife scenario because it's relatively uncontrived, isn't something they're likely to have seen before much/see coming, and is pretty controllable as a DM in that they're probably paid and ruthless civilians, not trained killers so it doesn't have to be "to the death" (and PCs surviving "death" here makes a lot of sense because they probably aren't doing assassin techniques or w/e).
