Wilderness (and other non-gothic) Horror

[Yora]

I am quite a fan of horror stories and adventures, but even more than that I like settings that are set in medieval worlds, antiquity, or even prehistory. And unfortunately, most horror material for RPGs is set in haunted prisons, haunted asylums, or revolves around mad scientists creating monsters in their attempts to overcome death with science. All things that really don't work in a world based on societies from before the 19th century.
Some Conan stories go into that direction, but Conans reaction almost always comes down to burrying a sword in its brain and "screw this, I get the hell out of here". You could do that once or twice as a GM, but even then there is a very good chance the players want to hang around or at least come back to get a full explaination for what just happened.

But in principle, there should be almost endless potential for horror stories in pre-enlightenment societies. But with very few precedents to draw upon, I find it hard to really get something good made.

The classic "River into Darkness" setup is usually set in the 1920s, but there isn't really anything specific to the time period in that plot, only what the characters in the story consider "normal" and "civilized". But you could have the very same story with ancient Greek heroes traveling up the river Nile encountering all kinds of monsters and isolated natives worshipping foreign idols.
Another good one is the Beast in the Jungle. The protagonists, usually expert hunters or soldiers, are in a remote and isolated location, hunting an elusive creature that at the same time also makes hunt on them, stretching over several days. "Predator" is set somewhere in the 80s and does it really well, and it could take place anywhere else either. But I am really not sure how to make this suspenseful in an RPG, as I don't think I've ever seen it done in any adventures.
A slight variant of that is "Trapped with a Monster". It's the formula of "The Thing" and "Alien", which are both kind of Sci-Fi movies and horror movies at the same time. However, players will almost certainly want to kill the monster and regard escaping as abandoning the adventure. And you can't really have the monster pick them off one by one, since you have to have all the players be part of the game the whole time.
I guess "Cultist attempt to open a portal to summon their terrible master" is something that also works in really all imaginable settings. But here I am particularly uncertain how to pull this off well. This is pretty much the most generic adventure plot ever, only second to "explore a dungeon for treasures". Since the GM is unlikely to have the world be devoured by darkness, success for the PCs is pretty much a given as far as the players are concerned and the whole thing is just a plot justification to fight their way through increasingly more powerful cells and high priests of the cult until they defeat the leader. I see a huge amount of potential here, but how to make it fresh and actually unsettling?
What always works is "You find an ancient tomb inhabited by the evil undead warlord and his minions". I think this one actually works better in a setting based on Antiquity and Prehistory, as such tombs would still be build by the contemporary societies but settlements are still small enough and far away from each other, that the tombs could belivably have been undisturbed for centuries. But that's just a location and not really a plot yet. For suspense, you need some kind of story to go with the dungeon crawl.

And that's about as far as I've got by myself. Does anyone have ideas to expand on this, or even hints on good source material to use as inspirations for more?

[TheThan]

For horror stories, look to old fairy tales and old wives tales.

A lot of those fey like creatures are downright frightening. Study up on the myths and traditions of any given place; your location says Germany, that’s a great place to start.

Study up on them then start converting the stories to dnd adventures. This is a good way to start out. There’s always an enchanted woods or a haunted woods where a troupe of fairies live, or an evil witch lives. Maybe the players stumble across the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow; they take his gold only to find that the gold has some curse on it. Maybe a troll has stolen someone’s wife, or a succubus is visiting the men in the village at night.
A lot of these things (leprechauns for instance) have been toned way down and become cartoony kid friendly things, but the original or semi-original stories about them totally fit into the horror genre.

[Yora]

A problem with those is that they rarely revolve around groups of battle hardened warriors and mages but usually just a commoner alone on a road.
But I think that's a different issue altogether, since horror in general is really difficult of the protagonists are capable and experienced enough to be expected to be able to deal with whatever they are running into.

"Something will ambush you and try to eat you" obviously doesn't work. That's daily routine for the average RPG character. If it's a bear or a demon doesn't really make much of a difference.
Whatever it is they are facing, they must not be protected against it by their armor, and they must not be able to defeat it with their weapons. That also includes common protection and attack spells. I think that's one really important fact to always remember when attempting to create suspense.

But obviously, you can't just arbitrarily instant kill PCs, which is always a danger for the protagonist in all other types of horror stories. And the players know that.
And that pretty much means going for the PCs is out of the question. You can't confront them with enemies they can handle, and you can't face them with overwhelming enemies either.

[headwarpage]

If you need inspiration, wait for a windy night. Go to a nearby forest - a real forest, not a city park. Walk at least a quarter mile into the woods to a spot with nobody else around (make sure you know how to get back out, though). Turn off your light. Sit for a while and listen. Allow your imagination to tell you what's making all the noises around you - be creative. Fight the urge to turn your light back on. Figure out a way to convey that atmosphere to your players.

I'm serious; if you've never spent any time alone in the dark in the wilderness, you should do that (pick an area not known for murders or bear attacks). It's hard to convey that feeling if you've never been there, but forests at night are inherently scary. There's a reason folklore around the world has put scary stuff in the woods. To use that in an adventure, I would start by giving the PCs a reason to spend an indeterminate amount of time in a wilderness area. For instance, they're looking for a lost traveler, or the MacGuffin plant to cure a villager. Then you run what you call the Beast in the Jungle scenario, but the important thing is that the beast never comes into the light. It won't attack the group, just kill any NPCs or animals that it can catch away from the campsite (If you feel bad about insta-killing PCs, have it attack and do massive damage - enough that it would kill them with the next hit if they give it the chance). It's an ambush predator; it gets a surprise round, and it's going to hit and run rather than stand and fight. They can scare it away with fire, and if they keep a fire going all night and never leave it (ask them where the latrine is), they'll be relatively safe. If they want to, they can do that, get whatever they came for, and leave without ever facing the beast. That's their choice. But if they want to fight it, they'll have to face it in the darkness (or come up with a really clever plan to trap it in the light).

There are a couple of mechanical things that you need to do to make this work, I think. First, none of your PCs can have darkvision. I would also suggest giving it some sort of sneak attack ability to justify the ability to do massive damage to anybody it catches in the darkness; that will also reward the PCs with a relatively easy fight if they do manage to trap it. But if they just go blundering into the darkness after it, a TPK should be a real possibility.

[Yora]

To use that in an adventure, I would start by giving the PCs a reason to spend an indeterminate amount of time in a wilderness area. For instance, they're looking for a lost traveler, or the MacGuffin plant to cure a villager. Then you run what you call the Beast in the Jungle scenario, but the important thing is that the beast never comes into the light.
Okay, that's actually quite cool. Fighting the monster is not the goal, and not even part of what the players are trying to do. It's just giving them a hard time in accomplishing another thing they are trying to do. The only objective is to survive, but they can't just run away because they have stuff to do!

I think this might actually be a rather profound realization:
If the monster can't be easily defeatable, but also can't be overwhelmingly powerful because it's an RPG campaign, it can still be a huge problem by getting in the way of other important things. Failure does not mean getting eaten but failing at another very important task.

I have to think some more about it, but I think this might also be something useful to keep in mind for other types of horror stories. Like going into haunted places or a monsters lair.

[Kol Korran]

Hmmm... perhaps a source of inspiration- The Twilight Zone. The show deal with strange and weird stories of things that are just... wrong. Psychological terror of dealing with an unknown place, time, people and so on that don't respong to the normal rules or expectations you may have. The "logic" (more like patterns) of the abnormality can be deducted with some difficulty after some time, but usually with some price or sacrifice to pay. Victims in this horror story don't often die, but they are otherwise terrified, traumetized, or feel a great sense of loss/ go crazy at the end of the ordeal.

The movie has some fairly simple examples, but the show is just... damn creepy (The black and white at least. Most of it's chapters anyway. never seen the color show).

Good luck!

[Yora]

Things like that work when the author defines what the characters are doing and thinking.
But in an RPG, the audience is also the characters. And the players are already expecting weird things to happen and strange creatures to appear, and you can't force any reactions on the characters. You have to find ways to get the players to want their characters to be scared and terrified.

The key ingredient of horror is not being in control of the situation. If you can achieve that, the actual threat doesn't even have to be that weird an eldritch horror. But if the person you want to frighten is in complete control of the situation, nothing will ever be creepy. To make a situation appear as if the characters should be frigtened and helpless, you also have to make the players helpless in regard to what options they have in playing their characters. Which brings me back to the previous point, that in an RPG, you can't really set them up with the choice "flee or die". If they die there is no game, if they always run from everything, there isn't really much of a game either.

[headwarpage]

Okay, that's actually quite cool. Fighting the monster is not the goal, and not even part of what the players are trying to do. It's just giving them a hard time in accomplishing another thing they are trying to do. The only objective is to survive, but they can't just run away because they have stuff to do!

I think this might actually be a rather profound realization:
If the monster can't be easily defeatable, but also can't be overwhelmingly powerful because it's an RPG campaign, it can still be a huge problem by getting in the way of other important things. Failure does not mean getting eaten but failing at another very important task.

I have to think some more about it, but I think this might also be something useful to keep in mind for other types of horror stories. Like going into haunted places or a monsters lair.

Depending on your players, and what system you're using, they may assume that killing the monster is the point of the whole thing anyway. Which may lead to really poorly-thought-out plans to ambush it, based on the assumption that it won't be overwhelmingly powerful because it's an RPG campaign. Which may force your hand on either killing them or revealing that the monster isn't really a threat.

[Rhynn]

The key ingredient of horror is not being in control of the situation. If you can achieve that, the actual threat doesn't even have to be that weird an eldritch horror. But if the person you want to frighten is in complete control of the situation, nothing will ever be creepy. To make a situation appear as if the characters should be frigtened and helpless, you also have to make the players helpless in regard to what options they have in playing their characters. Which brings me back to the previous point, that in an RPG, you can't really set them up with the choice "flee or die". If they die there is no game, if they always run from everything, there isn't really much of a game either.

Horror in a RPG, regardless of the setting, requires two things:
1. Unfairness, lack of agency/control.
2. Willingness.

You may be able to overcome a lack of the second with the first done well. What is death to fear is being able to act against the source of it - to fight it, etc.

There's many ways to work it, usually relating to how the monster is handled: invulnerability (unmatched combat ability), invisibility (unsurpassed stealth), movement (can't be caught, can't be escaped from), etc. These come in countless variations.

A wilderness setting is great for this sort of thing, and depending on the specifics of your game, a lot of things can work. A particularly vicious jaguar might be enough to serve as a horror monster for poorly armed Call of Cthulhu investigators or RuneQuest noob PCs. Endless hordes of vicious little monsters that move in the trees. Something underground that rustles the undergrowth as it comes to snatch you up.

Starting with killing some tag-along NPCs can work well, if you make it clear that the monster cannot be effectively fought by the PCs.

Heck, I've got a D&D module in the works intended for 1st-3rd levels with a medusa in it, and I'm pretty confident the players will be pretty horror-struck. (You have to defeat it with chemistry!)

I actually think old-school D&D is horror fantasy. OD&D / BECMI PCs aren't combat monsters, and if you run 1E or 2E using those older sensibilities (3d6 for stats, etc.), neither are those PCs. Combat is to be avoided with cleverness whenever possible. Crawling around dark dungeons is scary when you know you might encounter something that kills you all at any moment (and your character has a few levels under his belt, so you actually care). And undead, for instance, are absolutely horrifying - energy drain is terrifying and deadly. If your cleric can't turn them, you should probably run.

Filling foreboding wildernesses with dark, crumbling ruins and setting the PCs loose in them is what D&D is, for me.

As to "flee or die" - you can avoid that by giving the PCs a specific goal they need to fulfill, or a promise of finding a way to defend themselves. For instance, in my medusa example, at some point the players or the PCs should figure out that they've seen a lot of silver mirrors around, but all stained useless by [a natural process taking place in the castle basements], but they could be cleaned by [a substance possibly found in the wizard's laboratory], and then it's going to be a race to get both and confront the medusa. And they certainly can't abandon the dungeon because treasure! Horror always requires an unwinding of the tension created; a confrontation, a climax, where the protagonists finally do get to act against the source of their terror (and the audience gets to vicariously experience it). Every scene in which the PCs get to have agency is such an unwinding, which is why you can't have a lot of them (one at the end is enough, IMO), and need to rebuild the tension in between them.

[Matticussama]

The key ingredient of horror is not being in control of the situation. If you can achieve that, the actual threat doesn't even have to be that weird an eldritch horror. But if the person you want to frighten is in complete control of the situation, nothing will ever be creepy.

Creatures that can cancel out certain abilities are good for removing control and creating fear. If you want to emphasize the Fey's association with chaos, for example, maybe a particularly powerful Fey creates a temporary Wild Magic Zone merely by being in a location for long enough; their chaotic nature literally warps reality around them, twisting the fabric of magic.

Thus, the classes that are used to solving every situation with a standard action - Clerics, Wizards, Druids - suddenly find their magic being twisted. If they're lucky it might be a relatively harmless twisting, but if they're not lucky their spells might actually harm them. After a few spells gone awry and harming them or their party members, the spellcasters should be very wary of casting anymore. They can still contribute by trying to use knowledge and logic (i.e. skills), but they can't just cast any spells willy nilly to "solve" the encounter.

[tbok1992]

Funnily enough, when I first read the topic title, I thought of the idea for an adventure called The Greyhawk Fleshgrinder Massacre, with a D&D-ised version of the Leatherface clan, with not-Leatherface's chainsaw as a Fleshgridner weapon, his masks as several unique magic items and the clan "Patriarch" as a horrible type of undead.

[Blightedmarsh]

What I would do is have the horror a background event at first. For example they are exploring you typical pseudo medieval setting and at first everything seems just fine. As time progresses drop more and more subtle hints of some undefined something is wrong with the world and its people and its getting progressively worse.

[Yora]

That certainly is true. To make something appear wrong or strange, you first have to establish "normal". If you start with "We're going to play an undead hunting campaign" it gets a lot more difficult.

[Craft (Cheese)]

"Something will ambush you and try to eat you" obviously doesn't work. That's daily routine for the average RPG character. If it's a bear or a demon doesn't really make much of a difference.
Whatever it is they are facing, they must not be protected against it by their armor, and they must not be able to defeat it with their weapons. That also includes common protection and attack spells. I think that's one really important fact to always remember when attempting to create suspense.

But obviously, you can't just arbitrarily instant kill PCs, which is always a danger for the protagonist in all other types of horror stories. And the players know that.
And that pretty much means going for the PCs is out of the question. You can't confront them with enemies they can handle, and you can't face them with overwhelming enemies either.

Actually, I've been working on a setting idea that might fit the bill for what you're looking for:

The entire world is covered in a thick, black mist. If you go into it, it kills in seconds. Magic can't protect you from the effects, nor can most magic work on clearing the mist away. The only thing that works is burning a magic oil that clears the mist in a 30-foot radius around you, but only until it runs out.

So long as your players don't break the economy and acquire enough magic oil to set themselves up for life, you could create a good amount of tension and atmosphere just by making the players worry about how long their fuel supply is going to last and where they're going to get their next batch. Not being able to see any further ahead than 30 feet also helps: Focus on describing vague, moving shapes just barely outside the radius of the lantern, where the characters can't see what's going on.

[Rhynn]

That certainly is true. To make something appear wrong or strange, you first have to establish "normal". If you start with "We're going to play an undead hunting campaign" it gets a lot more difficult.

This is so very true. I ran a modern Call of Cthulhu game set in a university, and the constant contrasting of normal life with the unnatural worked well.

You can do it simultaneously, though - you see this in some Stephen King stories, for instance, where he's simultaneously presenting the normal world and life and shattering it. (Pet Sematary, while more a book about death than a horror story, does this great.) Making the players feel like their PCs are part of a normal, living, breathing world that makes sense, while simultaneously creating tension by showing the cracks appearing in that world...

I absolutely think that you must, at the very least, be very vague about what is to come when you want to run a horror game. Half-decent players will pick up on the clues that something horrible is up - if you're a great GM, they'll do it without wanting to - and will fall into the right frame of mind for it. (NB: When your players start cracking jokes during a horror game, they may not be bored; it's a defense mechanism, they're trying to reduce the tension and pressure they feel. Don't let them succeed!)

[Yora]

I think the best way to do it is to make a few horror adventures in a larger regular campaign. Because in these cases, you have an established "normal" that the players have actually gotten used to.

Know Ravenholm from Half-Life 2? As one hilarious review/LP put it. "Ravenholm sucks, but in a good way. I don't feel the need to play through it again, though. Bad memories all around. But in a good way."

[Blightedmarsh]

A fisher kingdom ruled by a fisher king. Their is something deeply disturbing about events and changes that have been ushered in in the wake of the coronation.

[Bogardan_Mage]

How about the Small Town With A Big Secret? Might fall under the cliche category, but the Secret can be pretty much anything which keeps it fresh. Seems like it would tick the "contrast with normal" box, how many small towns and villages does the average party go through without a second thought?

[Dr Bwaa]

I've always thought this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74859) had some good horror themes/ideas to it. My personal favorite way to create horror in a game, though, is (as others have said): establish normal. Set the game up like a normal game. Slowly, start hitting the players with subtle, unexplained events that are simply unnerving. They don't even need a mechanical effect; in fact in my experience it's better when they don't (because players will search for explanations as to why you're telling them this stuff, etc, and psyche themselves out). Then by the time your actual "horror" events start happening, they're in the right mindset already. A couple of brief thoughts/examples (assume none of these have any in-game mechanical effect):

When the PCs wake in the morning, their campsite is covered in dead insects.
For that matter, swarms of mechanically-harmless bugs are a good starter ingredient for anything you want to be unnerving.
Bats attack the party in the middle of the day. They fly off after 1d3 rounds.
All children the party encounters stare at them until they leave.
All children the party encounters run from them.
Pass out a private note to each player at some point during the session after they've rolled perception (or whatever). The note describes a short, kind-of-worrisome song that they just barely hear. The songs are all different.
Alternately, they songs are all the same, or the whole party hears their different songs all at once, or the songs are at extremely high volume.

[Kyberwulf]

I had a campaign in woods one time. The entire forest was enchanted. I never gave out in ideas as to who or what did the enchantment. As soon as the characters entered the forest and started setting up camp for the night. They where attacked by the forest. Roots and plants grappled them and took away their Magical weapons, armor and items. They where left with just normal items. All forms of magic and psionics where rendered almost useless. By that I mean the forest absorbed the energy of the spell before they could be cast. Up to a certain spell level. It worked pretty well. The group started feeling powerless and helpless. They didn't leave the forest either. They traveled far enough into the woods to hear a rumor, that they could get their gear back. The forest took the items and deposited them in some secluded spot. Also monsters suddenly seemed more dangerous, because they couldn't just one shot them.

[Cerlis]

One thing is to not dial it up to eleven. You dont need to kill anybody or mind rape anyone to do horror. In fact its fairly lame i'd say. I'd have the PCs worry about more than their lives. Their state of being. And body horror.

Look at pitch black. They knew the creatures where there the whole time and that they could kill them. It didnt make it uncreepy though. to have them constantly following you, yipping and cooing, just waiting for you to make a mistake. And every now and then one was brave enough to jump into the light and try to fly away with someone. Better yet if they are smart enough to try it when the team is at a disadvantage (see someone's homebrewn modification to the styrge here on the forum).

better yet if their claws release spores which turn into eggs.

Thats how they breed.