Creepiest creature or setting from your game?

[Dire Panda]

I'd like to hear about the most subtly frightening or disturbing moments of your games. Horror adventures, even in a non-horror setting, can easily be the most memorable moments in a campaign if your DM/GM/Storyteller is up to the task of properly pacing events and controlling access to information. Given that I'm about to start writing a post-apocalyptic fantasy/horror campaign, I figured I'd ask the Playground about its favorite nightmare fuel. What's the creepiest creature, setting, or character you've designed or encountered?

My personal best, based on player feedback, was an entity from a 3.5 campaign simply known as "the Friend." That was the name it gave itself, at least, and the players quickly began referring to it as such in order to avoid its notice. You see, the Friend was no ordinary companion...

The Friend was invisible and intangible, and didn't seem to be confined to one location. You could tell when it was nearby without magic, though - your skin became cold, clammy, and itchy, and objects' outlines distorted into threatening shapes. The players became very quick about picking up these cues, and never tried to use magic to see the Friend - in fact, they'd dismiss their True Seeing and the like when it drew near. You'll learn why soon enough. The Friend stays as long as it feels like staying. It could be mere moments, or it could be days.
Always smile when the Friend is near. Always. The Friend gets what it wants, and if you break this rule you will grow pulpy tumors that twist your face into a constant smile. Sure, the tumors can be removed via magical healing, but the temporary disfigurement is the least of your problems. You see, the tumors contain substantial nervous tissue that melds with your own brain, and they have memories of their own which are forcibly incorporated into you. In fact, they are memories of the most terrible events which have happened nearby. If you don't smile, you'll end up reliving a dozen murders by the time you realize your mistake. (The players ended up doing this intentionally to track a cannibal cult, but that's another story)
Keep mirrors away from the Friend. The Friend can be seen in mirrors. You don't want to see the Friend.
You must call the Friend by its desired name. Calling it anything else makes it notice and approach you. Your skin will get colder, clammier, and itchier as it comes closer, and you only have a very short period to move away. Should the Friend actually touch you, you will slowly begin to pupate. Each organ will develop nerve-filled tumors, wither, die, and reanimate as an undead mockery of itself. They will each have twisted, fragmented personalities and seldom get along. This is generally undesirable, as it will lead to your body tearing itself limb from limb and the component pieces running off to stalk some poor traveler in the night.
Do not look at the Friend, with magic or otherwise. The fact that it resembles a grossly deformed, necrotic fetus is not why this rule exists. Most people in the world are not followed by the Friend; seeing it once causes it to follow you for the rest of your life. Seeing it while it is already following you causes it to either talk to you (below) or actively pursue you, as above. Either will continue for the rest of your (very short) life.
On those rare occasions when the Friend desires to communicate directly with mortals, it does so by selectively erasing their happiest memories. The remains of those memories form the thoughts it wished to communicate.
Do not sleep when the Friend is nearby. You will not awaken. Yes, your body will rise, but the Friend will be inhabiting it. Do not attempt to remove the Friend. Do not attempt to kill the possessed victim. Do not let them touch you. Seal them somewhere deep where they will not be disturbed, and never speak their name again.
Do not write down anything about the Friend. When you are not looking, the words will be replaced by your darkest secrets or the final sin mankind will commit at the end of the world.
Finally, do not die around the Friend. Dying while the Friend is near prevents any form of afterlife or resurrection. That would be bad enough, but your name is also burned out from every book, and only your three closest friends or lovers remember your existence. They are cursed to endure in a world where all your deeds are remembered as coincidences or attributed to others... and if the Friend wasn't already following them, it is now.


The Friend haunted the party for most of the campaign, but it only ever actually killed one PC (the players learned the rule list above by observing its effect on hapless NPCs), and that death was his fault. To make a long story short, the Friend was a variant on the Atropal, an epic undead which spontaneously rises from the corpse of a stillborn god. Long ago it was prophesied that a certain goddess would give birth on a certain date and that the resulting infant would be a terrible blight on the world, so a wizard-king developed an epic spell to ensure it was stillborn... accidentally fulfilling the prophecy.

All the Friend's underdeveloped mind had ever wanted was companionship and affection, hence the name, and it was destroyed when a PC - who was fully aware of the consequences of dying around the Friend - willingly gave her life to save her lover. That act of perfect selflessness allowed the Friend to finally rest in peace, and it dissipated from existence without consuming her soul.

Your turn. Make me shiver!

[Amaril]

Wow...no way I can possibly top that...that's freaking terrifying, and the ending almost made me cry :smalleek:

Seriously, if you came up with this and got that story to happen the way it did, I want to play in one of your games.

[A Tad Insane]

That's... really freaking creepy...

Mine would be a homebrew monster I call corpse spiders.

It is a creature with five appendages, each about two feet long, with a knot of flesh in the middle. They get there name from their feeding method. They look for a corpse, enter through the first hole they can find, and cause the body to start convulsing as if it's dying all over again, sucking out all innards, and incorporating the corpse's skin onto them self. This causes the older ones to be rather large. They are a swarm creature, often going to battlefields, numbering in the thousands, and generally traumatizing anyone who so happened to be watching. Do not play dead next to one. It will get into you, and feed. The worst part, you will be alive for the rest of the corpse spider's life, with all your nerve endings screaming in pain.

Once started a session in the middle of a battlefield, and now those players will always shudder if you say the phrase "A cascade of stretched bodies and limbs charges at you, the monsters grasping at you like so many disfigured hands."

Just did the the creepiest thing with them a ray ago. There was rumors of a grave robber, so the players prepare and start tracking it. Eventually, they find a massive cave system, almost literally filled with corpses of nearly every thing. Humans, dwarfs, cows, giant spiders, rats even dragons, you name it, it was probably there. They continue on for a very long time, when the party notices some strange carvings on the walls. After a whole lot of skill checks and some various revealing spells, they learn that these are images of things dying, only all the carvings are scratched to hell and back. They start hearing cries down the caves, althouh each one is different. The sobs of a child, the angry yell of an insect, a roar of something a bit too big for comfort. Then the see slight movemnts. Nothing major, but it seemed like some of the bodies twitched just then. This goes on for about two hours, with no combat or npc, so naturally the players start freaking out. Eventually they reach the end, were they see the grave robber dropping some bodies on the floor. It notices the party, and walks over to a rope, which is connected to a MASSIVE bucket attached to the ceiling. And, just before the grave robber pulls the rope, a can-you-guess clumbs over the lip. I will never forget the parties irl expressions

[ArcturusV]

Well, there's two I can think of that I've run. I base their "Creepy" factor based off the fact that, well, they skeeved out players so much no one wanted to touch him, not even with a 10' pole. I usually was asked to take the NPCs out of the game after a couple of appearances by them.

First up with had "Marg". Marg was someone who had the appearance of being a comedic madman. He would preach the gospel of "Marfa", a "Goddess" he worshiped that no one else had ever heard of. Because it was a plush Cat doll wrapped in linen bandages. He'd make "offerings" to it by trying to feed the doll little bits of roasted fish and sprinkling catnip over it.

So everyone just went kind "ha ha, kooky crazy guy!" at first. Then they'd get to know him. Used to be a person respected in his village, not a "hero" in the RPG sense of Dragon Slaying and slaughtering orcs by the hundreds, etc. But a guy who was always around, helping out, doing little things, good guy, etc. Local fisherman of some renown and skill. His daughter gets sick one month. No one can cure her. Eventually he gets desperate and gets someone highly suspicious to help him because no one else can.

Place gets boarded up. Reeks of strange "unnatural" scents, odd noises and lights, etc. All the normal stuff to get peasants riled up. Marg would stop people outside the door saying what was going on was the only chance his daughter had, etc. After about 2 months of this getting worse, and a decaying smell coming from the place, some of the villagers break in. They find Marg's wife butchered in an obscene ritual. The kid covered in foul ichor and ritual markings, the "Witch" performing a ritual over the kid. They rush the witch and take her out in an orgy of righteous fury. Find Marg curled up in the back room clutching "Marfa", catatonic.

Most everyone figures the Witch cursed the kid, as the kid recovers fully soon after the witch is killed. But Marg never really recovers. Becomes a crazy cultist. The daughter is forced to grow up fast to take care of the Father. Marg swears that his daughter is in fact dead, and died the night the witch died, no matter how anyone tries to convince him that his daughter is standing right in front of him. He seems to think his daughter is actually his wife, or the witch, it varies.

Marg ends up becoming this figure who is feared and pitied. People put up with him because they knew he was a good man before, and what he is, is blamed upon the machinations of the Witch. He's also something of the town boogeyman, people tell stories about how he'll sneak in and take away misbehaving children, etc. It's well known his neighbor's pets constantly go missing and there's a common belief that he does break into people's houses and kill animals (or worse).

He was driven to try and recreate his "lost" daughter, by practicing necromancy, religious rites, and a bit of Flesh Golem style crafting. He harvests body parts of strangers, drifters, etc, that won't be missed that fit the memory of his daughter. He's NOT a master wizard or anything so his efforts are crude and ineffective, like you see him going "Oh, that right eye looks just like Julia's..." and go at it with a spoon. Which probably explains why it's taken him 11 years and he's nowhere near done.

But his behavior is "creepy" enough, that combined with players finding out his backstory usually caused them to visibly shudder at the table and ask me not to play out his plot. So I never did get to finish it.

The other was a Demonic Outsider I called "Slight". He was the first outsider to appear in this particular campaign, so as such he kind of set the mood for what outsiders were. He wasn't particularly powerful, but he was... for lack of a better word... "Alien". I would describe and act out his movements in this wholly unnatural fashion. When he jumped planes and appeared it was never just "pop, I'm here!" but always some slow, gruesome display which often gave a hint at the tormented, twisted realm he came from in added effects. His features were based so that he was humanoid, but cored down. Like if you took all the distinguishing physical features of the various PC races off... took what was left, wrapped it up in ashen, wrinkled, burnt skin. Unnatural eyes, deformed hands/feet, and small bony protrusions not quite Horns but more than just calcified bumps.

He was focused on being as far from "human" as possible. He didn't talk like any NPC they ran into. He didn't care about normal things that most people cared about. He wasn't even in the usual "Cackling Evil" category where he inflicted evil just for the sake of evil. None of the PCs could quite figure out why he was showing up, and I think that added to the creep factor. It was close enough to humanoid that it rankled the senses, rather than being a total abstract aberration type thing like some Demons. Nor was he just "A human with red skin" or something like other demons. They didn't quite know how to handle him.

... and everyone knew by his name "Slight" that he was the bottom rung of the Demons. No one really wanted to see what the higher ups would be like.

[Kane0]

:smalleek: Cant sleep... friend will get me...

Mine isn't really creepy as is. I guess it's more the way he acts. It's my character, Ivar.

The dude himself is rather normal, 10s in all stats except Cha which is 14, but at a young age he became able to speak to the dead.

As a young teenager he frequented the local graveyard of his little trading village quite often and could occasionally be found speaking with the local hedge mage or priest on topics that he should have no knowledge of. A little concerning to the locals, but in a world where adventurers frequently stop by with grand tales and grander loot nothing much was thought of it.

As he neared the end of his teenage years he became unsatisfied with his lot in life, longing for more than a simple life of a farmer. One night amongst the gravestones his conversations with the dead took a different route. Some of the spirits that dwelt there and could not leave offered a deal. They would share Ivar's body, granting him powers and abilities beyond the norm, and he would do what it took to give them the peace they needed to rest.

He accepted, but he was deceived on multiple fronts.
Firstly, the four spirits that took up the deal did not like each other, fighting bitter wars for dominance within Ivar's tortured mind.
Secondly, two of the spirits have no intention of passing peacefully to their afterlives. They want to come back to life, and since they cannot return through normal means are attempting to take over the Ivar completely and use him as a proxy.
Thirdly, when he acts against their wishes and goals he gets both physically and mentally hurt. He has become a slave within his own body.

The end result was the local Priest coming to exorcise the poor young man, and getting splattered all over the wall of his home for trying (essentially a critical hit using an ability much like a warlock's eldritch blast). Ivar retained enough control of himself to flee the village and now travels with a band of misfits that are both understanding of his plight (or at least indifferent to it) and capable of ending him should he lose control completely.

In game, Ivar rolls a will save each day to determine control (pretty tough DC too). If he fails, he rolls a d4 to determine which spirit influences him, much like a Binder's pact. The four spirits all have different alignments, personalities and goals that he must balance or risk more internal struggle than normal.

Being inhabited by restless spirits has it's benefits though, and he can do a number of fairly creepy things common to undead like turn incorporeal for short periods, rot organic substances with a touch, never needing to sleep (or for that matter be able to), intimidate people without moving or even looking at them, pit the immediate area in darkness and impersonate four different people perfectly.

I could elaborate on the things that he has done in game, but the sheer pain and conflict that his psyche is in is what creeps the other players out, and OOC they love him to bits. :smallbiggrin:

[drew2u]

My DM had an iron golem that appeared to be a giant clown playing an organ grinder. It would then grapple you and toss it into the top of the instrument (I think), and gnashing gears would, well, grind your extremities.
It was by far the most brilliant and most awful thing I remember facing.

[kieza]

My setting has the Outside, which is sort of like the Far Realm--except instead of being an alternate plane, it's a sentient force that exists on the material plane.

It lives in sentient minds, which by thinking about it give it power over the world around them. As they try to understand it, its influence grows: first the mind goes, as the thinker develops an obsession with the incomprehensible things that it's seeing. Then the body goes, as the thinker's entire form warps and becomes, in itself, an extension of the Outside. Finally, the world around the thinker goes, becoming a new node of the Outside. Eventually the region of Outside grows to encompass the entire solar system, and the sun grows cold and blue, and nothing comprehensible to the mortal mind grows under its baleful light.

The Outside spreads through astronomers; anyone who looks at a cold star with sufficiently detailed optics sees the truth and becomes enthralled by the Outside. (On worlds that have had an encounter with Outside and survived, astronomers are considered worse than necromancers.) Then the astronomers publish their findings, and anyone who reads them is enthralled. Then the cults start up, and the world starts to warp, and at that point, it's highly unlikely that the world will recover because anyone who sees the warping is infected as well. This is where the gods step in and extinguish the sun to prevent Outside from further spreading.

In play, the nature of Outside terrifies my players. They can't ask for help or warn anybody, because that's enough to infect anyone they talk to. In order to stay sane, they have to routinely wipe their own memories of information about what they're fighting. They have draconian security measures on the information that they allow themselves to keep--not to keep it secret, but to make sure that it's not enough to drive them mad. Before wiping their memories, they record what they think is safe to remember, and then after the wipe, one member of the party reads the newest notes and the rest keep him under 24-hour surveillance for weeks to watch for signs of insanity. If he gets unstable, they then KILL HIM and destroy the notes that drove him mad--and these are all their own precautions, not mine.

[Frozen_Feet]

The creepiest setting was probably in my maritime campaign. It was an ancient merfolk temple on the character's home island. Hilariously, it had very few actual monsters in it, but the gelatinous cubes stationed in few of the first, seemingly empty rooms made my players very paranoid of every nook and cranny. There was also a tight encounter with spectral undead at the first pedestal for sacred emeralds (see below) that put the players on their toes.

The reasons why it creeped out my players were fairly simple: first, it was dark. Second, it was almost completely devoid of life. Third, there were several doors that could only be opened by arranging specifically made emeralds on a pedestal. Fourth, it was full of bones, sarcophags, altars, reliefs, all kinds of mysterious religious nonsense that usually serves to prime dungeon-dwellers for the inevitable undead or fiend attack.

Fifth, there were a lot of stuck doors the players didn't manage to open. They couldn't help but keep glancing over their shoulders, afraid that someone or thing would come out of them to block their way back.

Sixth, I made the whole temple ping green under detect evil and detect magic, save for few key tombs blocked with iron bars that were impenetrably black. This simple detail convinced the players that the whole temple was somehow extremely dangerous, even when nothing was happening.

Seventh, there was a perfectly circular, smooth room with a swirling light in the middle of it, with only a really narrow path leading to it. After the gelatinous cubes, my players were extremely hesitant to interact with it in any way. Eighth, opposite to this room, there was a peek hole into another, identical room... except its south wall was smashed and it was empty. Cue players anticipating deadly ooze attack every second.

Ninth, there was mermaid statues crying tears of unindentifiable blue liquid.

Tenth, there was a huge mausoleum devoted to "Queen of the sea", presumably buried under the giant marble altar/sarcophage in the west end of the hall. In the middle of the hall, there was a statue of a nine-handed demon with three faces. The small alcoves at the edges of the mausoleum were filled with bones.

Eleventh, there was a giant, adamantine door in the mausoleum, barred from this side.

Twelth, near the first emerald pedestal, there were a few small rooms that the players (correctly) deduced to be prison cells. One of them had a... small, bald little girl with a rat's tail in it. I succeeded in making her huggably adorable, and one of the PCs adopted her. All was fine...

... until I had one NPC point out that the temple must be ancient and all the other inmates had long ago rotten away. Fridge logic promptly set in. Hilariously, the PCs didn't try anything to get rid of the girl. They were too afraid to try.

Thirteenth, the temple had an inexclicable water level control mechanism attached to a large brass tank and a pump, and research showed it had to be connected to the sea somehow.

So, lots and lots of things to build up athmosphere of intense paranoia, with very little actually happening. Until the PCs opened up one of the graves.

They found perfectly intact, icy cold bodies of two mermen, floating in salt water. My players were visibly unnerved just by my description of their wide open, deep black and lifeless eyes. As the bodies didn't seem alive, the PCs moved on.

Cue wet, flapping footsteps echoing through the previously empty temple. Cue strange, mishapen shadow lurking right at the limits of the PCs visions. Cue someone displacing one of the sacred emeralds keeping the temple entrance open, trapping the PCs inside. Cue the mysterious light going amiss. Cue the mermaid statue starting to cry blood. As the PCs went to check, they found both of the mermen bodies missing.

And boy did they lose their collective excrements. :smallbiggrin:

The situation was made all the funnier (to me), because the only unexplored paths (at that point) were deeper in the temple, but it took quite a lot of convincing to make my players do anything but camp at the closed entrance, because they were too scared to venture further. (Cue one of the players repeating "we all gonna die!" over and over...) If they'd kept sitting on their arses, they would've have died... eventually... from starvation, because they had too few rations to wait for the rescue party to come.

And it just got more delicious. The only alternatives to going further into the temple were, at that point, scroll of Aerial Servant (essentially a deal with the Devil in that system), scroll of Astral Spell (become a ghost in a likely haunted location? Eh...) and the telepathic, poisonous jellyfish they'd found swimming in a pool inside the temple.

Oh wait, I forgot the jellyfish, didn't I? Well, those were pretty straightforward - docile, floating blobs of goop, until you poke them & get stung, ending up paralyzed but hearing the thoughts of those present as well as the restless spirits inside the temple.

The terror started to abate somewhat as they got back into the mausoleum and apologized to the spirit of the Queen of the Sea. But up to that point, they were hilariously jumpy. Also, convinved that the demon statue would slaughter them all.

I continued the trend by making all other temples they ended up visiting similarly full of unexplained details, lovecraftian architechture, creatures that logically shouldn't be there, and intricate puzzle mechanisms to get past doors. Eventually, my players went "screw temples" and started a life of piracy instead. I wonder why...

[Krazzman]

-snip-

*slow clap* This is pure distilled awesome that I would've liked to be in that campaign. My most horror thing is atm... an atm deactivated animated stuffed teddy bear (in pink with carebareemblem) that messed with the Barbarian on their way through a House of horror and well let's just say they killed, burned, sliced, etc this thing. But as they finally came home... what awaited the Barbarian on his bed? Right. That damned bear. He seems to like it.... if I remember it correctly he even snuggled with it the last time...

[Lord_Gareth]

Clutch Crawlers are my big achievement - and that is a plural name for a reason, as they're a species.

Clutch Crawlers inhabit the underground places of Shatterholm, and the first sign of them are large, nearly invisible webs that have been covered in what looks like human hands, which hang and sway in whatever breeze is available. Touching the hands is not advised; they spring into action, swarming over their prey and using the web to tie it up so that they can bring the struggling fool back to the Crawler, and trying to sneak through them just lands you in the web.

And then there's the mother.

The Crawler itself is a massive, spider-like being easily the size of an ogre, who makes its home at the center of its network of web-traps. Confronted with intruders, it sheds a massive swarm of hands at them, screeching like a banshee the entire time, before entering melee with hellish agility, attacking with blade-like legs and streams of acidic venom that rip away at steel and metal, flaying away armor. It is intelligent, patient, and willing to alter the arrangement of its territory to entrap large groups. It doesn't really care what it eats.

[JoshuaZ]

My setting has the Outside, which is sort of like the Far Realm--except instead of being an alternate plane, it's a sentient force that exists on the material plane.

It lives in sentient minds, which by thinking about it give it power over the world around them. As they try to understand it, its influence grows: first the mind goes, as the thinker develops an obsession with the incomprehensible things that it's seeing. Then the body goes, as the thinker's entire form warps and becomes, in itself, an extension of the Outside. Finally, the world around the thinker goes, becoming a new node of the Outside. Eventually the region of Outside grows to encompass the entire solar system, and the sun grows cold and blue, and nothing comprehensible to the mortal mind grows under its baleful light.

The Outside spreads through astronomers; anyone who looks at a cold star with sufficiently detailed optics sees the truth and becomes enthralled by the Outside. (On worlds that have had an encounter with Outside and survived, astronomers are considered worse than necromancers.) Then the astronomers publish their findings, and anyone who reads them is enthralled. Then the cults start up, and the world starts to warp, and at that point, it's highly unlikely that the world will recover because anyone who sees the warping is infected as well. This is where the gods step in and extinguish the sun to prevent Outside from further spreading.

In play, the nature of Outside terrifies my players. They can't ask for help or warn anybody, because that's enough to infect anyone they talk to. In order to stay sane, they have to routinely wipe their own memories of information about what they're fighting. They have draconian security measures on the information that they allow themselves to keep--not to keep it secret, but to make sure that it's not enough to drive them mad. Before wiping their memories, they record what they think is safe to remember, and then after the wipe, one member of the party reads the newest notes and the rest keep him under 24-hour surveillance for weeks to watch for signs of insanity. If he gets unstable, they then KILL HIM and destroy the notes that drove him mad--and these are all their own precautions, not mine.

In the campaign I'm currently running there's a similar effect with Far Realm stuff but this is more extreme and more creepy than what I've done (and not surprisingly the PCs have acted less paranoid about it).

[Ozfer]

The Fog Man is my creepiest monster. He comes with the fog, and leaves with it. Fog he is in is always thick, never allowing you to see any more than his silhouette.

If you enter the fog, the silhouette vanishes, and he is revealed to you, as crusty humanoid form with soulless eyes and scabbed, scarred skin. This is moments before this seemingly frail creature rips you limb from limb.

Sometimes, The Fog Man throws your head back out at any bystanders. Once the fog passes, only bones are left.

The Fog Man is beatable. But the fog needs a guardian, and you are most likely the most eligible candidate. It happens slowly. You are gradually overcome by crippling paranoia, and you begin to hunch over. Your skin grows ruddy and twisted, you begin losing your vision.

Until eventually, the Fog comes and claims you, so you can claim it.

[EccentricCircle]

Players in my wednesday night game: DO NOT READ! you'll find out in due course...

Once long ago the world was ruled by the Eldarin, their civilisation was ancient and terrible and fey, but in their hubris they burnt the world beneath their feet until the forces of magic themselves were worn away. but without magic they could not survive and so one dark day they died.

All except those who had been sleeping when their world came crashing down. They lingered on amidst the terrors of the plane of dreams. Without their mortal shells they couldn't wake, and so they lingered on, trapped within a nightmare that could never end.

And the world turned and magic flowed back from the planes above, and slowly new races rose to take their place. And in time they too began to dream...

And then the fey saw their chance, for if they could trap a sleeping mind within a nightmare then its body was theirs to command and they could walk the waking world again...

[Dire Panda]

Some very scary suggestions all around. Keep 'em coming!

One other thing I'd like to ask is what outside material, if any, inspired your best nasties? I'd tell you the story of how the Friend came to be, but it definitely falls under the category of "prohibited substances." >_>

The clutch crawlers in particular remind me of a critter from my current campaign. The tribes who dwell in the jungles of Chalon Zur call it the Ya-mek-vero, translating to "waiting maw of the jungle", and it's actually two separate creatures. The first (and much larger) creature is completely immobile once it leaves its burrowing larval phase - it's essentially a giant stomach that lives inside a hill, with a few tentacles for snaring nearby prey. It wouldn't be able to catch enough food if left to its own devices, though, and so it has developed a symbiotic relationship with a species of parasitic worm immune to its acids. Hundreds of worms are released from its mouth into the jungle to seek prey - most die, but a few are able to ambush unwary or sleeping creatures and burrow into their spines. The worms secrete local anesthetics, and it's entirely possible to be unaware you've been infected. Creatures with a worm clinging to their spine find themselves losing control of their body and eventually walking in a jerky, zombie-like gait towards the Ya-mek-vero, following its pheromone trails, and step right into its maw. The worm in the victim's spine absorbs nutrients as the larger creature digests the victim, and releases hundreds of eggs that will continue the grisly cycle...

It certainly made for some juicy paranoia, and when one of the PCs actually got attacked by the worm the rest of the group had to track her through the jungle and hit her with a Remove Disease before she found the main creature.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

NOPE I CAN'T EVEN DEAL WITH THIS OR FRIEND WILL GET ME

Ok so I stopped after reading this.

There is no way anyone could have possibly topped this! This was actually one of the best horror monster concepts I've heard in a while, just what it DOES to you.

[TechnoScrabble]

I have several stories.

The fish man.
My players were exploring a swampy valley they had been told very clearly by some villagers not to enter. They enter anyways. Traveling there, they find a cliff with a waterfall. They explore behind the waterfall and find a nest full of little gimmicks and bones and whatnot, and a torn painting and waterlogged notes in an old language. They take the journal.

The next morning, one of them wakes up with a fishbone in his sleeping bag. Thinks nothing of it, tosses it away. He wakes up the morning after that with a scratch on his face and two fish bones. The morning after that, two more scratches on him and three fishbones. This continues onward for about ten evenings, until one night he stays awake and sees what looks like a ragged old man in the shadows plucking bones from a fish. The man's eyes are nothing more than wide black orbs. The party drives the man away with rocks.

The next day, they all wake up with about thirty fish bones each and blood soaked sleeping bags from all their shallow wounds. They decide to let the fish man have the journal that night. For about a week, all is well. Then one of them notices the fish man following them during a foraging trip and kills him out of fear.

The next day, the grass around their camp is crushed as if by dozens of people walking all over it, and there is a veritable mountain of fish skeletons in their camp. They made it to town that day and never left the city's walls again.

Organ donor
The players were investigating a series of disappearances and mutilated corpses showing up in a seaside town. They managed to track down a death cult, but they had a heavy suspicion after catching them that they weren't the right murderers, and that the town guard was in on something. After being jumped by some Frankenstein's monster looking fellows dressed in guard uniforms, they are pretty beat up and visit the town healer, who manages to fix them up with some strange old magic that the party cleric immediately wants to learn. The healer says he'll teach them some day.

Over a few weeks, they start to narrow down clues. It's a martyrdom based death cult, they think, that wants to summon some old god into the world and suck its magic dry to power some artefact that would 'change what it means to be human' (evil villain speak for body horrors for everybody, of course). The ritual to summon the god requires a bunch of human organs.

They get ****ed up again and again. and have to visit the healer over and over and over. This and the cult become a bit of dark humour between them and the healer, "You're an organ donor, right?". Eventually they realize someone so involved in the campaign and who uses odd magicks must be part of the bad guys, right? So they kill him, but get screwed up in the fight and have to visit the town wizard, who's super expensive. He says it's fine, they can cover the cost another way?

"How?

"Well," says the wizard, casting hold person on the lot of them and grinning, "You're organ doners, ain'tcha?"

The tree
In another campaign, a player went off on his own in a dark forest and got assaulted by a grove of acacia trees. They cut him and prod him for days and had him on the edge of death when he escaped. He gets back to the camp screaming and hollering and having bit his tongue almost in half from pain, but there's not a scratch on him and he'd been gone for all of about five minutes.

Ever since then, any time he took a left turn, I found a way to hide a thorny tree behind him. In a town park, a root in a dungeon, a sapling growing through a crack in a wall, a tiny brass model of a tree, a druid who had one as her symbol, etc.

[Frozen_Feet]

One other thing I'd like to ask is what outside material, if any, inspired your best nasties?

Well, haunted temples have been a staple of roleplaying games since day 1. :smallbiggrin: But, more specifically for this temple, it was equal parts of Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, H.P. Lovecraft and Legend of Zelda.

From Eternal Darkness, I borrowed the athmosphere. Especially inspired I was by the game's sanity effects. Some of the game's freakiest parts are when nothing is really happening, but your character is freaking out from all the scary stuff and is, for example, hallucinating footsteps behind him/her, or seeing things. The reliefs were also inspired by those in Mantorok's temple.

From H.P. Lovecraft, I borrowed the creepy connotations about the relations between humans and the Deep Ones, and the general feel that the players were in way above their heads and barely scratching the surface of some ineffable phenomenom that threatens to doom them all.

From Zelda, I borrowed the "temples for temples' sake" nature of the adventure and the bizarre, inexclicable death-trap architechture. Seriously, Zelda is a great resource for seeing how to do dungeons well. Also, zoras.

Yes, zoras. It is a really funny thing when you realize that the only difference between Zelda's zoras and Lovecraft's Deep Ones is that in Zelda, the protagonist doesn't fear the zoras.

[Windy]

I admit that this one relies as much on the delivery as the setting, but it was by far the most memorable experience for me in our campaign, to date. Maybe because I enjoyed scaring the crap out of my players for once, but it ended up being creepier than anything I had tried to cook up before.

The Preserved Tomb

In the game I run the party had to infiltrate a ruined keep that had been taken over by a gang of bandits. While looking for a good way in, the party stumbled upon a secret passage that led to an underground chamber. A door in the far wall looked like a normal metal door from this side, but once they walked through it they saw that the other side was disguised to match the stone walls of the crypt beyond. While looking around, the party accidentally let the hidden door slam shut. In a panic, they tried to open the door again. None of them was able to find the secret latch. Since my players are pretty new to D&D, only one of them had a torch to supplement Wizard's mage light. Wizard made an Arcana check to see if anything magical was nearby, and I relay that everything around him seemed suffused with a dim glow, as if everything were faintly magic, or had been touched by magic. It had them pretty worried, but since the crypts had to connect to the keep, which was their target anyway, they decided to press on.

I described for them in great detail how the skeletons and cloth-wrapped bodies lay in hollows carved into the walls. Spider webs covered the alcoves, and a fine gray dust covered everything. As they walked, I described how their feet kicked up swirls of powder and disturbed the perfect coating that had lain on the floor. At every step my players expected the corpses to rise and attack. But they didn't. I did, however, ask them to roll perception checks. To the player with the highest roll I passed a note saying he thought he heard a distant sound of wind... or was it moaning?

They got to the end of the chamber and found a statue, carvings, and candelabra-style candle holders with half-consumed candles. The statue was a knight with an engraving on the shield in a language none of them recognized. They expected it to animate and attack, but despite being prodded by Wizard's staff it never moved. I told them that everything was dead, unchanging, unmoving down here. Even the air hardly stirred with their passing, which explained why the fine, gray dust coated everything perfectly and uniformly. Another note to the same player. Did something move at the far end of the room, just beyond the torch light?

There were two sets of stairs leading down. The players chose the ones to the right of the statue. They were getting fairly paranoid now. One player volunteered to scout ahead with his torch. I described how the rank air assaulted his nostrils as he descended. The torch light took an ever-so-faintly green tinge. I watched the player's breathing speed up as I described the PC's heartbeat becoming more rapid. More fine, gray dust. He stepped off the bottom stair... and felt a tug on his cape!

The PC failed to hold onto the torch as he wheeled around, and it snuffed itself out on the ground when it fell top-down. The PC cried for help and flailed his sword around, hoping for at least a chance to blindly strike his assailant. The rest of the party charged down the stairs at the cry, but when they got there all they found was the volunteer breathing heavily with a fresh, self-inflicted sword wound.

With no immediate crisis, the group investigated the room. It was a small Hall (like in a castle, not a suburban home). A rectangular stone container/basin ran down the center of the hall from the end with the door to a dais at the opposite end. It must have been a fountain or pool of some kind. It was mostly dry, but there was some foul-smelling green ooze in the bottom of it in patches. Wizard burned the ooze. Just in case.

The dais held two sarcophagi - the paired lids had carved images of a Lord and Lady in repose. The party wizard, thinking the Lord might have been buried with sweet magic items, convinced the barbarian to help him slide the lid back. It opened just enough for the freshly-relit torch to spill light onto the withered husk of the Lord depicted on the lid of the sarcophagus. Wizard poked the face and waited for a reaction. Nothing. So he said he reached inside.

I had been purposefully talking quieter and quieter as they went toward the coffin end of the room. It helped that the room we were playing in was dark except for the light over the table, and there were no sounds but those of the gaming group. I described Wizard reaching his hand in, myself leaning toward the player. Everyone is leaning toward me. Then I ask how exactly he is reaching in. The player holds his hand up to gesture, but instead of letting him talk I suddenly reach out and grab his hand! Something is grabbing his hand! Make a Strength check to pull away! He rolls... it's enough (anything but 1, actually).

This is it! The monster fight! But no monsters climb out of the coffins. They look inside again, and the dried husk is still resting peacefully. Wizard gets a nice dagger for his trouble.

The party has had enough, and since this is a dead end (heh heh), they walk back through the fine, gray dust that coats the floor. They climb the stairs and actually huddle around the knight statue and candle holders (which they have lit--a childish gesture to ward off the evils of the dark) while they debate whether to go back and look for the hidden door release or try the second stairway. Another note to the perceptive player. A fine, gray dust coats the floor of this room...

The player sits up straight in his chair and says, "Guys... the dust." After a moment they realize what he means. The dust is perfect--not disturbed by their passing in the slightest. Paranoia takes its full grip. They huddle together and inch back toward the secret door. More attempts to locate the latch... failed. Barbarian loses his cool and starts smashing the skeletons where they lie. A few of the others join in. Soon all the skeletons are smashed, they are all catching their breath, and the door remains closed. There is nothing to do but head into the second stairwell.

As they reach the Knight end of the room again, the last player in the marching order turns around and holds the torch up to survey the room. The crypt is still and quiet. Skeletons and cloth-wrapped bodies lie in hollows carved into the walls. Spider webs cover the alcoves, and everything is coated in a uniform layer of fine, gray dust...

He turned and quickly followed his companions.

At this point we ended the session due to time, and because that was really the extent of this part of the crypt (I had planned for them to just use it as a shortcut into the keep--the creepy stuff just arose from room descriptions and my own desire to introduce small mysteries that would just go unsolved). I would have loved to keep going, since I knew the mood would be gone next time, but life is life. We all had work the next day. I did feel a real sense of accomplishment as a DM, though, for having sent the players into brown-pants mode without a single monster showing its face for the entire session.

And for those of you who want the "real explanation" behind the tomb:

The crypt really was the burial place of the noble family who owned the keep. The lord who had it built, however, added some extra touches: a secret passage in case he ever needed to escape the keep, an enchantment to re-set the bones and dust to hide the evidence of his passing, and a few minor tricks to keep enemies paranoid about going into the tomb in the first place. The sarcophagus of the noble lady was a secret passage shortcut into the keep, but the party never risked finding out.

[ArcturusV]

Well, Marg actually was inspired by a weird NPC from Chrono Cross. I don't remember TOO much about the game. But still, Spoiler Alert.

You are born in a "False" alternate world where things have spun out of control due to FATE intervening and preventing your main character from dying. In this Alternate World you come from a fishing village and there is this fisherman who was something of a local legend for catching some famed Lion Toothed Shark of immense size, family man, etc.

In the "Real" world, where you died... things are different. And this guy in particular gave up being a fisherman. He was worshiping some strange cult that no one else had ever heard of, and his shrine room had a faux Egyptian motif. I can't remember what actually happened to make him give up his life in the Real world... but it was something, I vaguely think due to losing his wife or daughter. Something tragic.

So I wanted to play up this idea. But I kept twisting it to crazier, creepier, crazier... etc. He has little to do with the original source that inspired me, beyond obvious connections like "Comes from a Fishing Village" and "Crazy Cult" and "Was a highly respected fisherman."

Slight was just a desire to make Demons, well... scary. Demons had been in other campaigns I had DMed, and ones I had Played in... and there was something in common where I noticed just demons weren't really considered scary. Players were more leery about trying to tackle a high level mortal, than a demon. In fact they'd want to go to Hell and kick some Demon God/Prince's ass. Some of this is just because Demons got described as really good looking people who just happened to have something like Red Skin and small horns. Or they are described as something that isn't necessarily creepy or scary, like a giant _____ from hell (Slug... ooze... bull... whatever).

I mean something seems... wrong... to me when you have PCs meet a Demon and instead of being Scared, or Creeped out, or instantly wanting to be rid of it however possible... you'll have guys that routinely go like, "Neat... hot demon chick... I'mma seduce her! NEGATIVE LEVEL TOUCH ATTACKS BE DAMNED!" Or they WANT to cut a deal with the Demon, trick it into giving it power because they "know" that they can just kill the demon right off after they get whatever they want, etc. I mean people were more cautious and afraid of Djinns (Due to Wish Twisting Shenanigans) than the Demons.

... so I said screw it. I'm going to make a Demon who DOES creep people out. He doesn't have to be powerful (Slight was basically something that would have struggled to take on any of the characters in a one on one fight. He had NO chance against the party)... but he behaved in a way that no one could stand him. He inspired that instinctual revulsion and hatred that I was looking for. His hellborn Toxin he used (Not on PCs but the PCs often saw the aftermath of it) just made all of them afraid of Slight, because it wasn't a pretty death (And due to plans he was able to kill people that the PCs knew were more powerful than the PCs, leading them to believe Slight was faaaaar more powerful than them as well).

[Averis Vol]

Man, some of you guys are just ****ed up in the head :smalltongue:

......

Bravo!


Mine isn't as bad as some, and part of it is lead credence by my groups over active paranoia; so without further adieu:

The Crowley Farmstead
It was a dark and stormy night, and our group of adventurers were preparing to set up camp for the night in the torrenting rain, when the party scout notices a light in the distance, and not an open fire, like the flames from lanterns in a building. Theres some discussion in the group, and eventually a votes called, and at 3:2 they go to check on the building. Seeing as it was his idea, the scout took to the fore, and was the first to be stopped abruptly by a loud "halt!" at once they notice these to be normal men holding normal crossbows, and after they state that they're soldiers in the military theres an audibly exasperated sigh among the guards and after a moment one disappears behind the small battlements.

after four or five minutes the gates open up and an elderly man, appearing maybe fifty to sixty years of age, wearing nothing but a nightrobe and walking on a cane as black as night, with a strangely out of place cast iron head. As he gets into easy speaking distance he says, in a devilish southern accent, "why hello there soldiers, what brings you to my edge of the woods?" He gives a grin and his teeth are immaculate, not a yellow spot or imperfection, only a sheet of white against the black backdrop of night. After the tell them why they are here and what they want he nearly jumps with joy as he leads them into the sitting room of his ancient looking manor.

He leads them through a short hallway, the walls are clean, yet the beautifully framed pictures seem to have collected quite a bit of dust, and it takes quite some effort to make out the form of people standing in the various parts of the building inside of them. After they notice that they are staring, they continue on and take a seat in the finely made and cushioned chairs, and their patron rings a bell that sends an elven serving maid running in. He tells her to bring a bottle of wine, and I put emphasis on the "deep red one" in the description. After all is squared away and the maid leaves he makes a point to ask about their forays; the battles they fought, the enemies they bested and the plans they executed, and he was more then enthralled by their tales of conquest.

After maybe an hour a bell chimed and he looked wholly surprised as he looked out the window, and even though the night was pitch black he said, "My, my would you look at the time, bout time for the old man to get himself some sleep, Heh heh heh heh....." he then twirled his cane and stood quite fluidly from his seat and walked to the stairs, giving a brief look over his shoulder to just ring the bell and a maid would set up their rooms. they had free reign of his home, with the distinct and express exception of his personal study. Now by this time, for some reason, maybe the perfect white teeth, maybe the throwback pictures of another time, maybe because the rogue found a picture of this mister crowley dated over a hundred years ago but was too scared **** to say anything; who knows? none of these things are terribly uncommon in DnD, but my players showed a bit of suspicion into the mans chamber, but were too afraid he might catch them.

so they eventually ring the bell after their glass of wine, the one they roshambo'd to determine who would try it first (fighter lost), and feeling no adverse side effects they were led to their room and given clean clothes to sleep in, they were also told to leave their dirty clothing on the night stand for cleaning. Tentatively they closed their eyes to sleep and, due to the age of the building, they heard every creaky footstep, every rat in the wall, and every laugh coming from the room at the end of the hallway.

They each had nightmares that night; they were little things in no way having to do anything with their patron, and even though many locked their doors they wake up the next morning their old grimy clothing and armor is cleaned, pressed and/or polished.

Barbarian OOC: "nah no way man, game over; the servants could have cut our throats in the night. not cool man, not cool."

theres more belly achin' and eventually they smell something delicious, and theres a knock on their door and a call for breakfast. Remembering that it had been 5 months since they ate anything besides trail rations, I had to force balance checks down the stairs as they ran off in a hurry. When they turned the corner into the room they found a long table with plush leather chairs, sitting at the head is Mr. Crowley; dressed head to toe in expensive looking black clothing, with a top hat and a long black trench coat. He welcomes them to eat and they attack the food ravenously, steering clear of the meat naturally, and they continue the conversation from last night.

When they inform him that they have to leave he sighs, and the shadows themselves seem to roil in displeasure, though this is slight and none of them make the spot check, but before they leave, he gives them a final parting gift. Underneath a cloth there lay a table full of worn old weaponry, and he tells each person to take a piece as a humble civilians gift to the military heros. they choose tentatively as some of them are made of strange materials they can't identify and the old man has a story for each piece, and once finished he personally sees them out a good fifteen minutes away from his home. They say their goodbyes, and the fighter turns back and says, "we're in your debt sir." to which he gave a cheshire-like smile and said, "I'll take it, Heh heh heh heh..." as they rode away.

after that they all group up and give a collective "WTF was that guy?" and as they turn back to look for him, he's gone; leaving only the "Heh heh heh...." of his laugh on the wind. To this day they have had the chance to go back or risk catching a cold in the rain, and they figured those chances were better then paying up on the owed debt they had to whatever the hell..... that guy was.

In actuality this guy is a modified shadow demon from pathfinder, and modeled to be the crossroads demon (I forget what folk legend hes from). He is strong personally, and he has a distinct fascination of war, though he doesn't want to participate in it, and he holds a small black book made completely of shadows with every notable favor he has obtained over the years written in a crimson so deep only a demon could read it. He saw potential in the PC's, and he intends to call upon it one day when they are stronger......

[Lost Demiurge]

You know how, back in 2nd edition D&D, the planar cosmology had dead gods drifting in the astral when they died? Just great divine corpses, big enough to hold a city in their rotting frames?

The PC's in one of my games visited the dead form of The Architect, god of crafts and magitech. They found a city in his skull, a prison colony run by a lich bound in metal, with the sole purpose of mining the rest of the guy's body of marrow and bones and selling them offplane. They managed to stay under the radar, fight through the slums (which were full of mad, rusted constructs of all sorts, manifestations of the god's plans and dreams...), and eventually found out that they needed to speak with a local mover and shaker called "The Glutton."

The Glutton was a mind flayer.

Long ago, he'd found his way to the Architect's brain.

And he'd been eating, and growing, ever since. Bloated head on a tiny, withered body, slowly working its way through the bounty of a dead god's brain.

We were using miniatures at that time. I hauled out a large plush Cthulhu puppet to show them the scale of the thing. I expected laughter, but they turned white...

Not a single one laughed, as it spoke to them in words that they heard not with their ears... They gave it nothing but fearful respect. Which was good, because approaching this one with violence would've probably have been a TPK.

They made IT laugh at one point. Three of them made the save to remain conscious, as the others fell, blood spurting from their eyes, as its the slightest loss of mindspeech volume control on the Glutton's part hammered their brains...

[Lemmy]

*reads thread*

Pfff... I didn't even like sleeping anyway... :smalleek:

[Yora]

In the world I am working on, the stars and planets formed pretty much as in our universe, and mortal creatures are the result of natural evolution. The only difference is that there is also a spiritworld that mirrors the material world.
Time and space work differently there and there aren't any planets in the way there are in the material world, but different sections of the spirtiworld mirror different regions of the material world.
The spirits of any region are highly influenced by the environment to which the region responds in the material world. So when people from the surface of a material world planet travel to the corresponding region of the Spiritworld, there are still the plants and animals they are familiar with, as well as dryads, treants, pixies, and so on. As the environment changes over centuries and millenia, so the spiritworld and the spirits change to conform to it.

However, deep below the surface of a planet, the environment barely changes at all over billions of years. And as a result, the regions of the spiritworld that corespond to it are still inhabited by spirits that are basically the same as when the whole world was still rock, lava, smoke, and toxic water. And to a humanoid creature of the present day, these ancient spirits make no sense at all.
Now in the material world, you can't go very deep underground before you hit groundwater and there is no air, and eventually you run into lava. But not in the Spiritworld. This section of the Spiritworld is called the Underworld and it's a seemingly endless system of caves and tunnels. And if you go to the spiritworld while in caves deep between the surface of the material world, that's where you end up.
It's the Underdark from hell, but not strictly speaking evil.

Now the point where I was getting at is, that some people consider the Ancients to be truly immortal and the lesser creatures they spawned and are crawling through the Underworld to have perfect forms, that were perfectly adapted to their environment billions of years ago and will still be so billions of years in the future. Instead of worshiping the regular spirits of nature, they worship the Ancients as gods. These cults are not always exactly evil, but most are still quite a bit mad. And sometimes they attempt to travel to the Underworld to seek out their alien gods.
Grimlocks, derro, skum, and cave giants are believed to be the descandants of some that apparently succeeded, or miraculously survived in the Underworld after getting lost. And quite often they are ruled by alien spirits of the Underworld, occasionally making their way to caves in the material world for incomprehensible tasks for their masters.
The only people who are going to the underworld on somewhat regular basis without changing are goblins, and even with them it's usually only the bravest scouts and hunters who actually go through the portals. So if for whatever reason you want to go to the Underworld, you will have to find a goblin guide. For which you might have to get approval from a goblin chief. And then hope he won't betray you once you're down there, because normal survival skills aren't worth anything in the Underworld.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

Hmm. I did once play an insane clown beguiler who actually jammed a severed cat head onto his wand of Cat's grace.

Creepiest creature I invented was the resurrection thief. Normally, the thief looks like a large but spindly praying mantis, and isn't all that impressive in a fight - it won't attack, though, but will just try to follow an adventuring party around until one of them dies.

Unless the dead is raised at once, the thief will try to sneak to the body, cut a hole in it, and insert itself inside. If any Raise Dead or Resurrection spell is then cast on the body, the thief absorbs all of the power of spell, immediately growing , causing sharp appendages to burst out of the body of the (still dead) PC. The thief will then attack the rest of the party, starting with the cleric, while still using the dead party member's body as a sort of armor.

[SamBurke]

The weirdest thing I ever did was in one of my favorite EVER campaign settings. It was 1984-Steampunk-Cyberpunk-Zombie-Cthulu. Epic win, in short.

In the very first session, the two main characters were trying to meet up in a prison, and had just walked into the largest room of the entire place, a sort of killing-grounds. Sadly, they didn't know that.

Anyway, they're both in this massive, completely dark room, when they hear a voice. It starts talking to them, about how they're going to die, how they're powerless, so on, so forth.

The weird part is that it moves without effort. In mid sentence, it's coming from a different place. Then, it goes behind one of them. He lashes out wildly, but there's nothing there. Suddenly, it's IN FRONT of the other PC.

The two of them run around the room, stabbing everything. Actually, they were so scared, the first nearly killed the second, thinking he'd found the villain.

They both said it was the creepiest thing they'd ever gotten in an RPG, but I thought they were being Wusses. :smallbiggrin:

Also, Subscribed.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

Oh, wait, just remember something creepier.

In a WoD game I was planning, there was a demon the characters needed to get information from, at one point. That demon was currently inhabiting the body of a man who owed him a debt, in the form of a tattoo. Noe that the demon was not "Possessing" the man - the man was still in full control, he just had a tattoo of the demon's face (looked like the Home Alone kid) on his back.

The tattoo moved and reacted like a human face, and printed text across his back whenever he spoke; the man actually felt all of the pain of this as if he was getting inked again.

In order to communicate with the demon, the party actually had to carve words into the guy's back; the wounds would instantly heal, but the demon would be able to read the writing.