Assistance making a horror campaign

[Jabberwocky12]

Hey guys,

This is my first campaign that I'm DM'ing in about 6 years (4th one total.) I'm looking to make a horror/serious campaign for my players.

Here is what I have so far:

All books are open, but no magazines or anything. All players start out as 4th level, 3k starting gold Gold.

The players are all a part of the church of Heironeous, as like the "X-files" team. They handle all of the weird stuff that the church wants handled on an unofficial basis. This is a good way to handle it because basically I can tie in all classes and alignments as the church looking the other way due to the services provided.

The party lives in a large city that is like Johannesburg/Vegas/Sin city in terms of morality, things bought and sold, and things like that. A good place to put the church members though they don't do anything really about it or muddle over the morality or things. However, a large city like this means supernatural things are bound to happen and leaves a nice place to do some things that are close to home.

Some of the things the party has done in the past to get their reputation (or will be responsible for handling sometime in the campaign, not sure which yet):

-Helping with an exorcism of a city official that stopped a small war/battle
-Killing a priest that was blackmailing a town to force them to worship another deity like Vecna or Hextor.
-Killing some hextor clerics that were working on a plague to spread across a city
-Setting free an archon that was captured by a wizard for dubious reasons
-Blackmailing a duke to stop expansion of his territory because there was thought to be religious artifiacts/locations in that area.

The hook: I was thinking about was getting the group to another city because some officials were acting funny, only to find out a vampire is trying to turn them to stop sending aid to a large island with a settlement of people. This is going to be where the real fun happens: the island.

I was looking to see if anyone had any ideas for some nice quests or things to integrate that you had from other horror campaigns. I was thinking of including a serial killer in the town that liked to torture victims or include a necromancer in a cave outside of town practicing with different otherworldly beings.

Any suggestions would be nice. I'd like to get the players into the idea that stuff is serious here and that things are a little darker. I have too many ideas though and don't really have a central theme with the campaign, though. Any plots, mechanisms, enemies, NPCs, side-quests, etc. that you liked or thought was really nice?

And TBH I'll probably steal a few elements of the horror campaign from Sapphire as well since it fits in well with the island idea that I had.

[Sturmcrow]

-Offer them choices where either decision has a real bad downside.

-Make sure everything isn't always dark and gloomy, they will need interludes in the horror.

-Have the town be real Stepfordish. Everything is perfect and shiny and wonderful, to hide the sinister things that go on in the background.

-The Necromancer isn't a bad guy, he just wants to bring his dead love back, to bad those things never work out.

-Make them worry about loss of control, they wake up with blood on their lips and they have no visible wounds or loss of HP. Things like that.

- The Serial Killer is a doppelganger, the real guy would never be like that... oh wait tricked no the real guy is that disturbed and thinks that skinning his townsfolk will let him disguise himself as them (maybe he is right)


For Horror you want feelings of loss, hopelessness, powerlessness, cramped dark spaces, threatened by the unknown. bad things happen to good people etc

[Toy Killer]

I have been dying to use this in a campaign:

Have a flavor character, a homeless man that warrants a fair bit of respect as he is just a good man to know. Play him as something of a level 1 bard, who happens to be homeless, despite his wide expansive knowledge. With a back story of something like a sailor who used to go out adventuring till he took an arrow to the knee or whatever. most importantly gloss over the fact that he is around to make the story feel as if it were a real setting. He happens to be at the tavern trading stories with Earl the barkeep, He's haggling a selling price for a dagger he 'found', He's telling the stable hand about the women of Mordist Port. He just happens to be around often.

Then late in the campaign, reveal that he's been behind Everything.

Every single time the players asked him about info for this or that item, every time they asked him for directions to some location of the city, every time they talked about the hush-hush topics, he's been right under their nose and manipulating the strings across the city. Perhaps Moonlighting as a cult leader and hiding that he's actually a powerful sorcerer, maybe even causing some monstrous event in the past that the PC's are desperately trying to stop.

If you decide to use this, lemme know how it works in the end.

[dantiesilva]

Well im sing something similar to the undead vampire thing. Mine is a fallen paladin. I am using gestalt but it can easily be worked in other ways, if you want to take a look at him it is in the thread can someone make any suggestions for my villain. I haven't added the vampire template to him yet though so you will have to mod his abilities but other then that hes all set to go. If you use him let me know how it works for you. If you need skill point placement and all his companions and everything just let me know or pm me and ill take care of it.

[Averis Vol]

me and some friends created something called the house of horror (original, right?) where everything you do has a reaction to something else in the house. say you kick open a locked door, the dresser down the hallway gets knocked over. you turn on the lights and you hear a door shut somewhere else in the house. the whole house is also full of hidden mirrors, so when you turn a corner you catch a reflection of yourself rounding a corner down the hall, etc. etc. all this stuff starts to get your PC's paranoid, ohh and don't forget to make sure you ask them what they're doing constantly. "ohh your searching the room? where exactly are you looking?" stuff like that, make sure you roll some dice every once in a while and always smile....smiling DM's creep the **** out of PC's :smallbiggrin:

[limejuicepowder]

A large part of making a successfully scary scene is your own descriptions. How skilled are you at painting a picture in the player's minds? This is getting in to a lengthy homework assignment, but read some horror stories, especially books of short stories (assuming you don't already). Learn from the masters.

While plot points are great and malevolent characters are always awesome, I think a real-McCoy horror plot should be, well, scary.

[Averis Vol]

kind of obvious but Edgar Allen Poe is a great one to read up on, his stuffs scary in a black and white sort of way compared to the pop out horror we have these days, as well as H.P. Lovecraft. both amazing authors with an astounding style of writing that evoke fear and paranoia.