What Makes A Horror Campaign Scary?

[Hypersmurf]

There was another thread recently... it seemed, from that, that all the creepiest game experiences involved babies or maggots.

Zombie babies, ghost babies, babies with glowing eyes, talking babies...

Writhing maggots, maggots in food, maggots in bodies, giant maggots, slimy maggots, people eating maggots...

-Hyp.

 

[Crothian]

Zombie babies, ghost babies, babies with glowing eyes, talking babies...

Writhing maggots, maggots in food, maggots in bodies, giant maggots, slimy maggots, people eating maggots...

-Hyp.

darn you!! now I'm hungry.....

 

[Drowbane]

Everybody else covered most things... leaving me with just this tidbit...


DO NOT USE MECHANICS TO EQUAL FEAR!

There is nothing lamer than horror or insanity checks. Use suspense and fear of the unknown, never reduce "horror" to a die check. Thats the biggest mistake Ravenloft ever made.

 

[ThoughtBubble]

I always like to look to the silent hill games. I belive that the designer once said that the first time a zombie dog jumps through a window at you, the fear is shock value. The real fear comes from passing every window after that.

The greatest part of fear is in the anticipation. Sure, fighting zombies is freaky, but hearing zombies and being unsure of where they are? That's torment. Make sure you hit their senses with things, and don't feel any need to explain more. The silent hill games have this radio, and it starts playing static whenever monsters are near. In the first game, I'd hear it and just freeze, waiting for something to attack until I snapped and ran for cover.

 

[Zephrin the Lost]

I've had good luck with frightening/creeping out players by creating several reoccurring NPC's that the team grows to know and feel comfortable around, murdering them and having them return as undead or other horror. Skulking cyst is nice; an unwilling half-golem who kept screaming 'kill me!' even as he raged against the PC's also worked.

So, I guess you can add 'the known gone completely mad' to the unknown for getting a response from players.

 

[Andor]

And remember you can't maintain horror and fear 100% of the time. Allow some levity to break the tension when you want it, or it will break on it's own at the wrong time. You see it all the time in horror movies. You can also use it to freak the players out.

EG: There is scratching coming from the closet door , The PCs enter full combat mode and open the door with guns pointed to discover... a cat, who bolts out of the room. Classic horror movie joke. If you want to freak them out afterwords, they notice the cat left bloody paw prints, or looks exactly like the cat in the victorian photo on the mantlepiece, or left a half eaten human corpse in the closet when it left, or pauses in the doorway, looks back at them and clearly says 'Fools' before disappearing.

 

[Jupp]

I know Alien 1 almost made me crawl under my sofa when I saw it the first time It was even more disturbing when I later made a visit to the Giger museum here in Switzerland. He absolutely knows what it needs to frighten people just by looking at a painting

Alien works because of:

Darkness, almost all the time
Reptilians ripping people apart
Something gets inserted into people that later crawls back out
The fact that the monster is shown very, very rarely, if at all
Something that is much faster than you, and it hunts you
Something that can crawl on ceilings, it can come from all sides
The Aliens looks so strange, but on the other hand they are clearly humanoid

Edit: Just for completeness: http://www.hrgiger.com/frame.htm

 

[Tinner]

Make the familiar horrible.
Take normal everyday innocent things and turn them into terrors.
No one is afraid of grandmas. Grandmas have cookies and hugs.
But if grandma tears your cheek off and eats it the next time she pinches your cheeks, there's going to be some serious shock there.
Make it worse by having grandma and everyone else around her act like nothing happened.
I've terrorized gamers with boy scouts and choirgirls, Puppies & ice cream. Anything can be horrifying if you twist it enough. Turning something safe and pretty into an object of horror is far more frightening than the standard tentacled monster from the far realm.

The other thing that freaks people out is a loss of control.
Obviously, this has to be used carefully or the players will cry "railroad".
But doors that lock & unlock when they shouldn't, and police who remain unsympathetic, (or worse) when shown evidence of supernatural activity can really give pc's a feeling of being all alone against the unknown.
Put the pc's in positions where they have no time to prepare, and their hard-earned equipment can't be used. Anything that reduces the player's level of control and forces them to react on the spur of the moment will heighten the fear factor.

 

[Crothian]

If you can find it, there is a book called Nightmares of Mine that is brilliant. It is a book that tells you how to run a hoorror game, a horror campaign, any system. It was published by ICE in the 90's and if you can get a copy, I cannot recomend it enough.

 

[Tinner]

Come to think of it, there was an excellent section on this in the "Beyond the Supernatural" game by Palladium.