How to make Ravenloft and similar mystery games work?

[Yora]

The Ravenloft setting does have a lot of charm, no doubt about that, but I don't really see how to actually make it work as a spooky game. Today, you can't even slightly scare anyone with vampires and werewolves anymore, they are just entirely mundane fantasy creatures like elves or orcs. Players will recognize any subtle hints from the very beginning and then there will be no mystery left what's going on and everyone knows exactly what they have to do against it. That's not even pseudo-horror, that's just Ghostbusters.

How would you make such adventures work, in which the players are faced with a strange supernatural evil and have to uncover its mystery?

[The New Bruceski]

One thing Ravenloft tries to do is to put the players completely out of their league. "Getting home alive" is a successful adventure and running away is solid tactics. Small victories against the darkness, building a wall to keep the zombies out rather than stopping the plague for example. If you manage to set that up as the overall tone players will be more willing to jump at shadows.

Other than that, try to hang onto details as long as possible. Rather than sending the party to stop a couple of werewolves, anyone who heads into the woods recently doesn't come back. Don't leave bodies for clues, maybe a dropped pack or sign of passage to let the players know they're going the right way, but I guarantee that anything the players imagine will be worse than anything you reveal.

You can also change the rules, but be careful with this. If the werewolves drink blood it can add a creepy "what else has changed" element to the adventure, but if you leave them clues that purposefully point to vampires before they find the enemy it will feel like cheating.

[Grinner]

I think you've kind of answered your own question. Fear is often based in doubt and indecision, the result of a dearth of usable information. If the players don't know how to deal with something but are placed in a position where they must, then you're halfway there.

The system is also something to consider. High-level D&D, for instance, is obviously a poor choice. I suspect that rules-intensive games are also unsuitable, since the focus on numbers and procedure would mire the atmosphere for most.

[huttj509]

You also need to make sure the players are (generally) onboard.

If you have someone expecting a kick in the door slugfest, and you throw him in a mystery horror out of the blue, there will probably be friction. This can be fine, with the right people involved, or it can be horrible to throw unexpected genre expectations at people.

[ArcturusV]

Well, one thing I can count on? No matter what warnings, hints, or speech I give before I start a Ravenloft style game... if I have a group of at least 4 people, someone is not going to pay attention to the warnings. They WILL do the silly things you should never do like go off alone to check out a noise. And it will probably happen about 10-30 minutes into the campaign.

I say make an example out of it. Don't even give them a Combat Encounter or Scene. Just tell the guy to hand in his paper and say "He's not coming back..." and leave it up to the player's imaginations just what exactly will have happened to them.

Not pulling punches, and preying on the "Genre Blindness" that players have (Even if they think they don't or you explicitly warned them about it), does a lot more to put the right mind set into horror and mystery than any particular concrete detail.

EDIT: Of course screwing with Metagaming players is always good too, like the Blood Drinking Werewolf mentioned or a feral vampire that eats people's hearts. It can go a long way to unsettling players. For example, the Dragon based campaign I had where the first combat/scene they were involved in had a Black Dragon using Lightning Breath. Once all the guys got over the "But black dragons can't...!" complaints with a simple "This world is different" or so explanation it put them instantly on edge because they didn't know what else might have been altered from book standard and they never just went "Oh, it's a ____."

[Vorr]

How would you make such adventures work, in which the players are faced with a strange supernatural evil and have to uncover its mystery?

Well, is not the obvous to simply not use the ''common monsters''? Just to take Vampires, there are a good 100 types of them worldwide. Not all vampires are the common type. Even in modern fiction, the vampires of True Blood, Buffy/Angel, The Vampire Diarys and so forth are all not the same.

And word mythology is full of hundreds of evil, supernatural creatures too....

But even better is to just use new made up horrors. Just make up scarry stuff. Have the players encounter a hocontax, an evil supernatural eater of souls(just made that up).

[Joe the Rat]

It's the mystery that sets the tone. The unknown is what players fear, or what they will learn to fear. What spells to prepare, what equipment to take, what vulnerabilities to exploit - not knowing this can put stalwarts on edge.

Which NPCs are innocent bystanders, and which are villains?

Appropriate Challenge Rating not guaranteed.

Nothing is what you expect. I love the blood-sucking werewolfs. Oh, and they're fae-cursed, so you need cold iron, not silver. Once enough clues have accumulated to ID your monster, Mr. Meta needs a knowledge check - and what he can't prove as character knowledge gets shuffled to make the player knowledge wrong.

If you've got a bunch of high-level characters acting like newbies on an old-school dungeon crawl, you're getting the right sort of apprehension. Now all you need is setting the mood - but not too cheesy. Overt horror-theme is about as scary as game mechanics for fear and terror.

[Ravens_cry]

It helps to keep things low level and/or to get devious. You can't raise someone or even use speak with dead if their head is missing, for example.:smallamused:

[Kelb_Panthera]

Go eastern. Asian cultures have all sorts of creepies and crawlies your players have probably never heard of. Also use deceptive creatures; things that can produce illusory effects or creatures that can screw with your mind directly via pattern and phantasm style effects.

Make the predictable unpredictable. In D&D magic is exceedingly reliable. Take that away by giving the whole setting impeded or wild-magic traits in various locations for example. Only hint at this before play by saying something like, "don't count on magic always working like you expect," or even let them figure it out the hard way if you think they won't react too poorly.

[Fable Wright]

One way to reintroduce horror elements is to make weaknesses that you can't really exploit in combat. Thinking of things like the Slender game, or Supernatural episodes where they hunt ghosts, the objective is always clear: obtain the objects you need, and the experience is over. The only problem is, if you run into the thing you're trying to escape/destroy, you're in serious trouble. For example, in trying to exorcise a haunted house: you just need to drill a hole in the north/east/south/west walls on each floor and pour dirt from crossroads in them. It's a simple enough goal... but when the spirit finds out, everything gets harder. Every piece of furnature can pin you down, the kitchen becomes an arsenal pointed at you, and so on. I guess the point I'm making is that you can get quality horror from pitting the players against an obstacle they can only fend off with extreme effort until they can complete a ritual/unrelated goal to stop it. Something like finding out what's haunting the woods by going in at night, and actually coming back out to tell the townsfolk what the problem is so they can actually use the right weapons. Rather than werewolves in a forest, it's were-murders of crows headed by a shadowcaster specialized in misdirecting and confounding people in a forest with wild magic, blocked teleportation and divination magic, when the PCs have almost no clue what to expect. They don't have the right tools to stop it; weapons are useless against the swarm subtype, including hybrid form murders, spellcasting is stopped by the nature of the woods or the shadowcaster, and their efforts to escape are harried by environmental effects, shadowcast abilities, and opponents they are unequipped to harm. When they come back properly prepared in the daytime, they know what to look for and how to fight back. In the frantic chase scene in the pitch dark forest with invulnerable, deformed abominations of nature using incredibly bizarre magic that had a lot of atmosphere built up beforehand? Less so.

[Gnomish Wanderer]

Don't be afraid to use gore. Sure, it's the cheapest form of horror, but it's also downright reliable. A walking corpse is boring. A walking corpse whose mouth looks like it has been through a shredder and blood continually drips from the broken and bent teeth and the meaty mesh you think was a tongue that just flaps and flaps... that can help make things intense. After that players start scaring themselves when you use 'less is more' hints like "you hear a sick gurgling right outside the door."

[Kelb_Panthera]

Don't be afraid to use gore. Sure, it's the cheapest form of horror, but it's also downright reliable. A walking corpse is boring. A walking corpse whose mouth looks like it has been through a shredder and blood continually drips from the broken and bent teeth and the meaty mesh you think was a tongue that just flaps and flaps... that can help make things intense. After that players start scaring themselves when you use 'less is more' hints like "you hear a sick gurgling right outside the door."

Just don't overdo it. There's a line to be crossed between horrific and just plain gross.

In a discussion I had with a fellow the other day I made this comment, "finding a severed head in a cooler is much more horrific and disturbing than watching someone get turned to hamburger on screen." While we were talking about movies, it's just as true for gaming.

[hamlet]

Don't be afraid to use gore. Sure, it's the cheapest form of horror, but it's also downright reliable. A walking corpse is boring. A walking corpse whose mouth looks like it has been through a shredder and blood continually drips from the broken and bent teeth and the meaty mesh you think was a tongue that just flaps and flaps... that can help make things intense. After that players start scaring themselves when you use 'less is more' hints like "you hear a sick gurgling right outside the door."

I disagree. Gore is overdone now and 99% of people are completely inured to it after movies the likes of Saw and just about any slasher flick made in the last 10 years.

It's actually easier to frighten the players with a complete lack of gore, with betrayed expectations. Ratchet up the tension to the breaking point, get them expecting a knock down drag out brawl, but the fight never quite materializes and the tension just keeps humming along tighter and tighter until somebody snaps.

[Yora]

Blood and guts work best to hint at horrible things, not be the horrible thing.
The question what could have created such slaughter and for what purpose are what makes things scary.

Finding the corpse of a werewolf hunter in the woods isn't scary, no matter how much it was brutalized and eaten. A guy sitting in his chair at a table with his head gone is much more creepy.

[Ravens_cry]

Just don't overdo it. There's a line to be crossed between horrific and just plain gross.

In a discussion I had with a fellow the other day I made this comment, "finding a severed head in a cooler is much more horrific and disturbing than watching someone get turned to hamburger on screen." While we were talking about movies, it's just as true for gaming.
There is also the fact that it can be awfully funny, especially through the distance of description. There is also a satiation point for pretty much any emotion. Horror can easily become Narm.

[ArcturusV]

Well Yora, I wouldn't count that as "Gore" so much but as an ideal that I run with keyed off that Uncanny Valley idea. That if something SEEMS almost natural, but obviously isn't, it creates an adverse reaction in people.

If you have a guy who's sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth, but is Sans Head, only a bloody neck stump, that's different than finding a corpse in the middle of the woods without it's head.

Similarly it's why I have had some great success with Demons in games. The way I describe them, have them act, etc, creeps people out a lot. They don't see it as just a humanoid monster with unusual powers/damage resistance. It becomes something wholly alien and unknowable, a mockery of life that's just familiar enough it rankles all their sensibilities.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

You could also pull a slick trick on them. They're told that they're on their way to Ravenloft (I don't know the specifics of the setting here), and you plop them in a nice, typical fantasy adventuring setting. Then you horrendously and unexpectedly twist something around. They go to save the princess, and she disintegrates into dust.

They've already crossed into Ravenloft, but they were being affected by an illusion.