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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2536218" data-attributes="member: 2205">It's a tricky one, too, unless the player's buy into it and want to be scared.  Otherwise, I find that they find the entire prospect utterly hilarious, most of the time.I don't claim to be any kind of real expert on it, but here's some stuff that's worked for me.  Obviously, it won't all work for you in an online type game (and hey, consider me officially volunteered as a player in a Pbp horror game of any type).<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Mood music.  I get a lot of use out of my movie soundtrack CDs during horror games.  I've ripped Van Helsing, Sleepy Hollow, Signs, and a dozen others into mp3, stuck them all on a CD-R, and I throw it in the stereo when we play.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I play in a fairly dim room at night.  There's a few lamps, but I purposefully leave off the overhead light.  Oh, there's plenty of light to play by, but it's not bright by any means.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">You'd be amazed at what you can do with tone of voice if you're not too shy to employ it as a method.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Be extremely descriptive of stuff.  Especially weird stuff, but all stuff.  You want to paint a really vivid picture.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Monsters are an expected part of an RPG experience and therefore aren't really scary unless you put some effort into them.  Make sure you have proper buildup of tension before you unleash one.  Don't let them be too predictable.  A monster that slaps the PC group around really good and only lets (some of) them live to tell about it because it simply isn't interested in them, or they got lucky, or whatever, tends to put the players in the right frame of mind regarding them too.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Creepy stuff with no explanation.  Just really weird, weird stuff that happens, but doesn't have any effect other than to creep out players works well.  Here's a few examples of things that were successful from my hybrid fantasy/horror campaign.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Sudden visions of strange things--one player suddenly could see through the eyes of someone that clearly wasn't himself, as he was performing a human sacrifice.  He later saw the victim of that sacrifice, mutated and demonized, when it attacked them.  He instantly made the connection.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">At the very beginning of the campaign I handed out pre-gen PCs that were more or less the same level (3rd) as the starting PCs and had them run through a little scenario.  Within about half an hour, I had TPKed them, primarily with one NPC who had strange, unexplainable abilities.  When the real PCs later met this same person, the reaction was pretty nifty.</li> </ul>There used to be a thread around on rpg.net full of creepy events, most appropriate for a Modern setting.  Throwing a few of those around without explanation will be sure to creep folks out.  <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=27565" target="_blank">http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=27565</a></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I also advocate keeping blood and guts to a bit of a minimum.  They're especially useless in my group where one member is a surgeon, and in any group too much of them means they have no impact.  But very occasionally extremely gruesome details are just really important.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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