What Makes A Horror Campaign Scary?

[Romnipotent]

have cereal slogans written on walls, and have NPC's tell the PC's "Silly rabbit, trix are for kids"

if done just right it will confuse them
have sounds startle them at the same time, in the moment of distraction the NPC disappears.
surreal and strange, makes fear easier to plant. or if in doubt say Tax Audit

 

[Wraith Form]

Take away the character sheets, erase a few things, and write them back onto the sheet EXACTLY as they were. This will cause massive paranioa.

That's cruel.





I LOVE IT!!!!

 

[Wraith Form]

[*]One PC was the victim of a maggot "breath weapon" and ever since, bugs, worms, and other things seemed to have an interest in him.
[*]A guy the PCs had rescued was resting in a locked room overnight to recover. He was stark, raving insane, but he was the only witness they had. The next morning, he was not only dead in his room, he was shrunken and mummified as if he'd been buried in the sand for decades.

Oh. My. God.

You effin' rule. Consider these yoinked in a very big fat way.

 

[Rasyr]

I'm working on a D20 Modern homebrew campaign at the moment, and I want to put in a lot of horror elements in it, but I'm not sure how to make it really, y'know, scary. So, I wanna know what you guys think makes a horror campaign just that; scary.

And in case you care, the campaign will be ready for play on the boards here pretty soon.

If you really want to know, then I might suggest getting yourself a copy of Nightmares of Mine by Ken Hite.

Crothian did a review of it not too long ago - http://www.enworld.org/reviews.php?do=review&reviewid=2187375

This book is available from the ICE website if you are interested.

The best advice I have seen so far though is to keep things "unknown". As long as they are not sure what they are facing, their imaginations will supply all the horror for you. Shadowy glimpses, shifting shadows of the "thing", strange noises with no obvious source, etc...

Also, if this is a live session (as opposed to online), randomly pick up and roll your dice and then go "hmm....." or give an evil little laugh, and jot something down where they cannot see it. It will add to the tension as well, and they will start getting nervous waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Also, if they are walking down a hall or something, let them hear a "click", such as might be heard just before they set off a trap (no trap really needed), or if in a hall with a wooden floor, describe how, at one point, that the floor seems to sag beneath them (old floors will do this hehe), then at the next sag (which is not as bad), describe one section of the sag not going as far as the area around it. Things like this. It will distract them and add to their nervousness, and fear.

 

[DarrenGMiller]

Not only do you keep the room more dimly lit, also keep the in-game settings more dimly lit. Use fog, rain, mist, glare, snow, darkness, etc. to limit field of vision.

Describe the age, weariness, and disrepair of buildings, streets, etc. Highlight soot, puddles, dripping sounds, rust, knocking pipes, etc. In model railroading (my other hobby), purists weather everything with paint or chalks, do the same with your descriptions.

Use unsympathetic authority figures, ambiguously corrupt politicians, apathetic citizens, etc.

One effective way to scare them is to mess with the ordinary, everyday things. Their food tastes slightly metallic, milk is a bit sour, bread is stale, beer and soda are flat or don't make a head, things settle out of solution too quickly, the car doesn't start, or stalls at an inopportune time, in a park at night they see the headlight on a kid's bike dim from top to bottom like it just winked at them. Use little things to mean a lot.

An example of how SLIGHTLY changing the expected, ordinary things throws people: Early in the twentieth century, there were travelling hucksters who would come into town and challenge the best baseball team in town to a game, sell the entire town on it and have their significant other collect admission. The night before the game, he would go out to the field and move the pitching rubber slightly forward or backward from its original position, possibly including (if it could be done without notice ) realigning the basepaths to account for it, moving home plate, etc. Then he would prove to be an unhittable pitcher in the game, because the rhythm of the town's baseball heroes would be off slightly because of the distance change. They would rarely make contact with the ball.

This is what you have to do to the players. Throw off their rhythm. Alter descriptions of normal things slightly. They may not even consciously notice, especially at first, but when their expectations of what things will do or how things will behave are thrown out of rhythm, it will scare them but good.

Also, measure your speaking rhythm. Speak softly and slightly slower than normal. Use lots of little differences in inflection, tempo, timbre and pacing. Several posters have said that the players have to want to be scared, but in addition, the GM has to feel secure enough with himself to do things that may make him or her feel self-conscious.

BTW, I am going to be running a fantasy horror game this winter (after Heroes of Horror is released). This is a great thread.

DM

 

[mr_outsidevoice]

Use what scares you. I am afraid of spiders. In a Deadlands:HOE game, I threw swarms of intelligent spiders hiding inside the bodies of zombies at the group. I freaked people out bad when I described spiders crawling all over them.

Also, Monsters can be scary, but a normal guy acting monstrous can be scarier. In another game, I had a character who had a jilted lover in her background. I had the lover grab her in her room and informed her that there will never be any escape. I tapped into some dark places in my head and terrified the players and characters with just an intensely nuts man.

 

[DarrenGMiller]

I remembered one more: In two campaigns I have run I have destroyed everything the PC's held dear.

First example: This was not a horror campaign, but in the previous campaign, the players were just crunching numbers and not taking the game seriously, it was pure beer and pretzels (but without the beer). So, I got them to come up with detailed backgrounds, families, occupations, etc. Then, I had the PC's gathered up to stop an Orc invasion of their village. While on the front lines, zombies and skeletons rose from the town graveyard and began attacking homes (under the comand of an evil cleric that had snuck into town). Of course, some of the PC's lost family members in the attack and had no idea until the Orcish troops were repulsed. One player gave his PC a fiancee and they were supposed to be married in a week. I had her kidnapped by the evil cleric and brought to his vampiric master. They found her, but not in time. It was a poignant scene when he had to stake her.

Second example: I borrowed this from Stephen King's Insomnia (not the movie, that is a different story, not King's). I again asked for detailed backgrounds and then, using them, gave the PC's a severe emotional trauma. One PC beat his wife and children while drunk and beat his daughter a little to severely one night, his wife left with the kids. Another was a movie star whose girlfriend, another actor, died in his arms when a scene went horribly wrong, another was a paramedic who administered the wrong first aid and killed a patient, etc. This gave them insomnia, accompanied by supernatural abilities to see auras and have minor psychokinetic powers. Of course, the bad guys felt them "awaken" too and came after them (Clothos, Lachesis and Atropos REALLY freaked them out!). This one was a horror campaign built on Stephen King's novels that worked better than any novel based campaign I had ever tried.

In a horror game, anything they hold dear should be stripped away. Though rescuing a loved one can be a great adventure. Finding that the loved one is subtly "changed" is another possibility.

DM

 

[Krafen]

Lots of good ideas here.

In the vein of keeping things unknown, make sure to change the monsters a bit. Experienced players know what to expect from most monsters. Even when the player does a good job of roleplaying his character's ignorance, the player is still facing a known situation. This can be as simple as changing a few abilities or go as far as applying one creature's abilites to another creature's appearance. Also, creatures that cannot be truly defeated add to the feeling of powerlessness. For example, an idea I have always wanted to try was making undead essentially unkillable. Perhaps they can only be destroyed in a very specific way or by a certain item. Zombies or skeletons can be dangerous if you are overwhelmed, but when the skeletons you thought you smashed to bits start to reassemble...

 

[DarrenGMiller]

Lots of good ideas here.

In the vein of keeping things unknown, make sure to change the monsters a bit. Experienced players know what to expect from most monsters. Even when the player does a good job of roleplaying his character's ignorance, the player is still facing a known situation. This can be as simple as changing a few abilities or go as far as applying one creature's abilites to another creature's appearance. Also, creatures that cannot be truly defeated add to the feeling of powerlessness. For example, an idea I have always wanted to try was making undead essentially unkillable. Perhaps they can only be destroyed in a very specific way or by a certain item. Zombies or skeletons can be dangerous if you are overwhelmed, but when the skeletons you thought you smashed to bits start to reassemble...

Excellent idea. Give creatures a specific weakness that PC's must discover to kill them.

DM

 

[Nyeshet]

The Unknown is often frightening. So don't just alter the monsters - keep their actually identity ambiguous if possible.

Instead of saying things like: "An orc wearing poorly fitted leather clothing of various dark colors - obviously taken from the corpses of his prior fallen foes - steps out from behind a boulder some fifty feet up the road."

Say something like: "The road is partially overgrown from lack of use. As the last limb of the blood red orb of the setting sun sinks into the rough horizon of this unforgiving mountainous landscape, you see a shadow move next to a boulder some distance further along the path. It is a creature stepping out onto the path to block your way.

At first it is difficult to tell whether the creature that emerges is even humanoid, but the mishappen figure that hulks out of the shadow of the bolder into the twilit path seems to be of humanoid form. From this distance and in this lighting it cannot be determined whether he is covered in poorly fitted hides and leathers or whether his own coarse and thick flesh hangs upon his large frame like several layers of tattered rags."

The PCs will wonder if the creature is an orc or an ogre, a humanoid or an undead. If it continues to refrain from speech immediately rushes to attack them it may take a round or two for them to realize anything at all beyond what has already been told them. The poor lighting, the vague description that hints at several possibilities, and so forth all contribute.

Also, why stick with silver and cold iron? Perhaps that ancient menace can only be hurt with Flint or Obsidean. Or maybe instead of silver they'll need rare(r) mithril. Or perhaps only arrowheads carved from the bones of sapient creatures the menace has mudered - and taken from their desecrated graves or dipped in the blood of their living relatives - can harm it. In some ancient Japanese stories, some insect monsters can only be harmed by a weapon if the blade has been spit upon just prior to the attack.