Oh The Horror!

[MisterDVD]

Howdy!
In a few short months, I will probably be the next DM in line for my group
Right now, I have a huge interest in trying to run a horror story
By that I mean, I want to out fear into my players, I want them paranoid about whats around the corner, giving the creeps, etc., You know, stuff that a simple will save can not save you ;)
I been looking around online on other sources for information, so i wanted to go here also for some tips and information, like what is a good party level and creatures(I know throwing a dragon at a party is scare… woah but I want more interesting ideas)
Or even brief run downs of your experiences with running these kind of games
Thanks in advance for your time!
(It will be a DnD 3.5 and 3.0)

[Shining Wrath]

This is pretty abstract.

I suggest mining Tropes.

Start with Lovecraft and go from there. Nothing says "horror" quite like ancient eldritch evil that views humans (and elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, dragons, and so on) as cattle.

[Ravens_cry]

Twist the senses, involve them all and create unexpected textures, smells and sounds. Don't involve just the eyes, draw all the senses in, even the sense of balance as the world grows more and more off kilter.
Also, start with normal, and twist from there. Giving a normal base line helps make the increasing horror more potent.
Avoid mechanical horror.
An effect that creates fears in the characters is pretty bleh and are often more frustrating than anything. Being forced to run away from a fight isn't scary. It means you are out of the experience, the immersion broken, the magic lost. Heck, you don't want things to be particularly lethal either, as a player whose character is dead is in a similar position. You want things to feel dangerous and over powering. Get descriptive. Simply saying 'It's an X' allows the players to know what they need to do to fight it. Even if it's so overpowering that they have no chance, it means they can slot it into a particular category, even if that category is 'Run away'. Ambiguity is your friend.

[Gildedragon]

First: what sort of horror you want? Haunted house? Dark secrets? Cultists?
Second: Having a confined space that is hard to escape is a good thing to create paranoia.
Third: instill paranoia, make trustworthy folks have agendas, make them distrust even their gear: give them magic item gear. Looks fine and dandy, but pass notes around. The items are intelligent, maybe parasitic. See: eberron's symbionts
Fourth: Check the Heroes of Horror and Ravenloft books. They have lots of ideas

[Alex12]

Heroes of Horror is the book for you. It's basically "Exactly The Thing You Want To Do: The Book"

[Flickerdart]

There are challenges involved with 3.5 horror. It's an engine built for heroic fantasy and player agency, and structures like no-save no-SR spells and plentiful healing serve to support that feeling. Resist the urge to ham-fistedly curtail these things - finding that your abilities suddenly don't do what they've always done might be scary to the characters, but it's irritating to their players. If you do intend to make houserules, be up-front with all of them. And most important, never lie to your players when they make Knowledge checks or use divination magic. If you're doing your job properly, knowing will always be scarier than not knowing.

[Jeff the Green]

There are challenges involved with 3.5 horror. It's an engine built for heroic fantasy and player agency, and structures like no-save no-SR spells and plentiful healing serve to support that feeling. Resist the urge to ham-fistedly curtail these things - finding that your abilities suddenly don't do what they've always done might be scary to the characters, but it's irritating to their players. If you do intend to make houserules, be up-front with all of them. And most important, never lie to your players when they make Knowledge checks or use divination magic. If you're doing your job properly, knowing will always be scarier than not knowing.

Though not knowing whether they know can be even scarier. My players were recently informed that one of their party has been dominated by a vampire, but the seer who told them that can't tell who. The obvious answer is the NPC who's been bitten and Con-drained, but then I pointed out that she doesn't remember being dominated either, and they'd been keeping single watches.

One thing I've found is really nervewracking both IC and OOC is scrying. If you fail the save, nothing happens until the bad guy gets to use what he learns against you. If you succeed, you're aware of a magical attack, but not where it came from or what it is.

[Kamin_Majere]

Yeah Heroes of Horror works quite well for setting the mood, I also recommend Elder Evils. I particularly like the Atropus adventure hooks that it has as nothing screams horror and terror (mixed well with high fantasy) like an elder evil that is intent on literally killing the whole world with undeath as it slowly and almost unstoppably drifts closer and closer to your world. Add in a bit more great old ones lovecraftian flavor to taste and you can have quite a emotional roller coaster of a horror adventure

[Blackhawk748]

Firstly, tell your players that its gonna be a horror game, helps them get into the proper mindset, second i recommend Heroes of Horror (love this book), Elder Evils (good for ideas), Book of Vile Darkness (so much.....evil) also i recommend pilfering the Pathfinder Bestiary books they have some really creepy stuff.

[Curmudgeon]

You can do funky things with smells via Prestidigitation: adding incongruous smells to objects is one way of getting your players freaked out. Think roses which smell of rotting flesh, and corpses which smell minty fresh. Just don't let the PCs know that magic (Prestidigitation or other) is at work. So one casting of Prestidigitation + Extend Spell is good to add smells to many objects for a couple of hours, but you'll need one casting of Nystul's Magic Aura for each object to make the magical aura go away. If the players think they've got the tools to find out what's going on, but still can't figure things out, that's going to make them doubt themselves: a key element of any good horror scenario.

[Red Fel]

Ah, horror games. This tends to come up (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?346374-Mystery-Campaign&p=17419410&viewfull=1#post17419410) a lot (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?307779-Planning-for-a-Halloween-Horror-Adventure), actually, and there are some good threads to be mined for useful bits.

Echoing my advice in the above threads, I'll say it again - the first step is away from the books.

The books are familiar. The books are a list of comfortable statistics and numbers that let the players divorce their emotions from the game. Don't give your players the familiar. Don't give them comfort. Give them the unknown.

As others have mentioned, D&D is built for larger-than-life heroes, and it's hard to make a character like that frightened, at least in the usual way. You may see a shambling corpse, its mutilated husk of a body leaking through its exposed musculature, its half-detached jaw dripping with the gore of a fresh victim, but your players will see a zombie with a CR less-than-one, and they won't be impressed.

But being a larger-than-life hero with epic power comes with a major handicap that most players don't consider - what do you do when that power is ineffective? I don't mean that you take your players' powers away from them - I mean that their powers simply aren't the right key to the lock that is your session. Fireball won't help you unravel a mystery. Speak With Dead won't work if there's no corpse, or if the body doesn't know what happened. Power Attack is pointless against the unknown. And that's what you hit your players with.

Some basic ground rules: Misdirection creates atmosphere. Give your players coincidences to notice - a cat running down an alleyway, shutters rattling in the wind, voices whispering around a corner. All explicable, all perfectly mundane, but taken as a whole, terrifying. Similarly, call for checks. Listen, Spot, Sense Motive. It doesn't matter if they succeed when there's nothing to see or hear, or when nobody is lying. But the players will assume they're missing something, and it will freak them out. Description, not names. As I mentioned, a zombie is less than CR 1. But use a graphic description, and the players might not even realize what they're dealing with. Attack of the unfamiliar. You're the DM. Your monsters can be different. As long as you're consistent, there's no reason to stick with the usual tropes. To return to the zombie example, you could have a plague afflict the town, that causes those afflicted to black out, and shamble about seeking human flesh. Since they're not undead - not even dead, really - the usual anti-undead methods will have no effect on them. Imagine the Cleric's face when he consistently fails his Turn Undead checks. Periodic pressure release. Don't just ramp up the atmosphere indefinitely - beyond a certain threshold, your players won't be able to keep up. They'll either stop feeling it or tune out or freak out. So give them a little something that reminds them that it's not all in their heads. But minimize combat. Combat is familiar. Combat, paradoxically, is safe. Yes, they need combat - it's a combat-oriented game - but it should be limited, and the exception rather than the rule.

Remember, as the DM you can create new stuff to torment your players. As long as you don't do it to unbalance the game or straight-up murder them, confronting them with the unknown is a great way to keep them on their toes - and that's how you get them to feel fear.

One last note: A horror session in D&D is much easier than a horror campaign. It's very difficult to maintain that atmosphere of powerlessness for more than a couple of sessions without breaking some people. Consider this more as a one- or two-shot rather than a major story arc.

[MisterDVD]

Thank you so much for your replies and feed back, this place has always been a good source for me on any questions I have, I've always go here first when researching
I just think the horror story an interesting idea, and someone asked what was I aiming for with my story
To be honest, I was not 100% sure, I wanted a game where, yes, players are scared/creeped/have a thrill and of course, plant some seeds of doubt, I'll definitely check out the "Heroes Of Horror" and "Elder Evil", I've looked through stuff like the book of the dead and lords of madness, and of course, book of vile darkness (I'm always attracted to the "evil side" of things in every kind of rpg… BSD, Fomori and the Wyrm anyone? lol :p), There is only one other guy who runs stories in my group, but I'm the go-to guy on rules and the d-bag who has to drop his knowledge when a monster walks in the room and be his character(which I'm good at) because I have an idea haha, so I'll definitely use that knowledge to my advantage
I thought about stealing a few ideas from other games, I played a little of Dead Lands and Savage Worlds
So I thought about doing an idea with playing cards, Ever session every character gets 3 playing cards, and they get a bonus equal to the card amount to any none damage roll, I (DM) get a card for every player, and I get to add a bonus to my rolls or lower there rolls :P, to add the "luck" factor (Sort of the idea of Action Points)
I want to try to run it more then a few sessions, make a campaign of it, but I know every night grows bored of… oh… another scary night… wow…snore, so I plan on sprinkling it in here and there, like in dungeons, events, boss hunts and maybe keep an idea in the back of there minds
Our group really cares about our characters and each other characters, we "laugh and cry" about past stories and characters, so I also want to make us "think against" the other characters, we never… raise a hand against each other so I want to try to force a hand sometimes
This kind of story is new for our group and I want to try all sorts of new things with us
I havent nailed down an idea yet, I got many just need to put them down, but when I do, I'll put some up here and if anyone still read this, I love feed back :P

[zeek0]

We were all level 5, and we encountered a phase spider on the road. It was more terrifying because it used hit-and-run tactics, and the DM played it intelligently. It pursued us at night, during the day. It was basically waiting for us to drop from exhastion.

The worst bit is that I could see it (I'm a beguiler) but I could do little to hurt it. And no one could get it to go into the material plane. That poison hurts.

[VoxRationis]

I once designed a tomb with an illusory image of a grassy field on it, to make the area more pleasant-seeming to its original builders. Since the place was built thousands upon thousands of years ago, I ruled that a lot of "permanent" spells were starting to fail, and the illusion flickered on occasion to show the dark, bone-filled hall it was. It freaked the heck out of the players. Simply knowing that what was being shown to them at first was not what the place actually was, and that someone had hidden it intentionally, made them absolutely positive that the place was a deathtrap. And I didn't even intend the room to be scary when I made it.

[MisterDVD]

I love it! the illusion idea with the tomb! BA, and the phase spider sounds like fun :D

This is what i got so far, the party level is 6, these are my personal notes, so sorry for the misspellings and incomplete ideas/phrases, just reminders for me

~On A Boat
Ship: Manta's Howl
Capt: Harvey The Pale
Its late as you sail up to (The Capitol)
The sea licking the sides of the ship
Its a relatively smooth ride for being on a ship
Water black with no reflection
Cloudy, No Moon, No Stars, a Calm before the Storm that you went through
You are traveling with (Character Describe Looks)
A man that looks like an Half/Orc dressed in Leathers, Smells and looks roughed with long black stringy hair, light grey skin, long braided black beard and armed, Named Zavosk Gnaugash, He has mostly kept to himself
As the group is traveling in a public bunk area, the captain yells for the group to come to deck
On the background of the night, you seem fires outside of the town and on shore, you look down at the water and see bodies floating in the water
PS: Captain has not enough supplies to get to another location and the possible storm
The only choice is to press on to the city
As you get closer,(spot check)you can see guard tossing bodies on the fires, burning them and there are still piles left covered by white sheets, You can see that these fires are also Inside the city
You smell the smell of burring flesh, its sickening
As you float closer, You hear bodies hit against the ship, making *clunk* noises like hitting sticks or wood causally floating

~One Foot In the Grave
You dock, and some guards come to meet the ship
Dressed In light metal armor, and Cloth tied around the nose and mouth
Guards say:
Why'd you come here?
Do Know whats happening
King has ordered us to send any traveller to the dungeon, Not because your in trouble, Just to inform you better and to question you, you will be fed and giving comforts
Your ship will be safe here, we'll inform the dock guard to post watch
You may keep your belongings on person, we will not take those unless you give a reason to do so
So, please gather your things and come with us
This city is still beautiful, looks like they had the gold to pay master builders to construct such hardy and eye pleasing structures, if it only wasn't for the smell of decay, blood and sick, it would be a place to make a life
You walk by a few body fires again, you see people, some dead, those still clinging to life look deathly ill as there skin blackens, some have oozing cracks seeping already congealed blood, and they Howl, Hum and Shriek, on a few you see bones sticking through the withered skin and fragments laying on the ground (Listen Check) Pass: You swear you hear between the screams, the sound of bones breaking inside of these poor souls.
The guard instructs you not to touch the sick
You see clerics, dressed in white with a gold sun print, trying to heal the sick, chanting and calling upon the sun god's light in these darkest of nights
A few clerics you see join the weak on the streets, shrieking and calling for Pelor's Mercy
After what felt like hours of walking (really only 15 minutes) you arrive at the Mansion
A large beautiful Mans, Made of the finest wood and white stone, Surrounded by tall iron bar fences, allowing for you to look, but not touch
(Spot) Pass: You notice large spots on the ground, color range from reds to browns along the fence and a few citizens laying by the gates, a low hum comes from them
The guard makes a hand motion toward another on top of a small tower near the gate, and the gate starts to open



News In Country (Characters will learn over time)
Starts with a goblin attack, Seems front the tribe known as the Io-Tak
Disease is running high, wiping out small towns
The ones the survive are taken by giant hook handed monsters
Some remember a small kid or gnome covered in rags travel through the town before the attacks
The strong that survive or those that hide see a small raiding party, dressed in black lead by a two headed giant plunder the land and collect the dead, and flay those that where missed
During this ordeal, reports of a black blurred figure stalks just out of the corner of citizen's eyes but can never be found

Seems to follow an old Children's saying
Feel The Breaking Of Bones
Hear Their Ravenous Moans
See The Flaying Of The Strong
Death Will Soon Be Along

King Trannyth's forces are now too spread out, search parties for these groups that seem to be myth yield nothing, mostly because no one returns
This pattern has been seen before in other countries, so reduced to nothing but barren lands
Trannyth can not gain assist because of his bastardized throne
Trannyth is trying to keep it in secret as recently a few countries seem to have taken an aggressive approach after years of friendship
Plague has moved to The Capitol

[atemu1234]

First I need to know the players. What're they like? Good roleplayers? Easily scared? Something?

[Flickerdart]

Though not knowing whether they know can be even scarier. My players were recently informed that one of their party has been dominated by a vampire, but the seer who told them that can't tell who. The obvious answer is the NPC who's been bitten and Con-drained, but then I pointed out that she doesn't remember being dominated either, and they'd been keeping single watches.
It's a DC15 Sense Motive check to determine the answer to that question. This is precisely why horror in 3.5 is tricky.

[MisterDVD]

Our group, each is different
We have 7 members
1: They are really story and roleplaying based, he will short his character for the per pose of making his character more real, and he gets happy when the group is getting maimed, likes the challenge, he will get into any story, he seems kinda easy to creep or gross out
Playing Dread Necromancer that is realizing his body is dying, and is trying to hide it from the world, but is confused rather to relish these new powers or be scared of them
2: Another is a thinking kind of person, he thinks a lot into the situation and will do things for story sake, and tries to keep in a character, he is a rational kind of guy, scare level, i think i can get him with describing things, swashbuckler/rogue
3: Another is still new to the game, she will be easy to give the creep uneasy feeling, playing a bard
4: Another person is still sort of new to the game, they try to give that Im not scared of anything feel, but i think i can creep them and keep him wondering, Cleric
5: I mentioned before of not revieling classes or characters, to keep it interesting when we start and paranoia starts, learn each other through rp'n , this person kept to it, there playing a rogue, she's a bit tougher to scare straight off, better for the lasting effect when its over, but so easy to keep on edge and paranoid
6: idk if he's playing, will be playing a fighter (thank gods some meat!), he's a max kind of player, but loves the story of the game he's playing, i don't know anything on his scare level
7: Me :p

this is something our group has never done before, i will creep them, sent paranoia in them, gross them out and try to send them home with a little uneasiness, thats what I'm aiming for, I know watching a 6 hour long horror movie loses its pizazz, so i am keeping a tone of the horror but will lay it on thick when its time, like when stuff is going down or building up to an event
I love the the fact i don't have really any big axe to the face characters, this is going to be an interesting feel, unless my fighter plays, and I always encourage make what u want to play, don't fill a role (which some would disagree but i hate seeing someone painfully play a character they really didn't want to build because the party needed that role)

[weckar]

Let them know you're playing a horror game. Have nothing horrific, or even interesting, happen. It'll make them completely paranoid, I promise.

[MisterDVD]

Hi!
I just wanted to give an update and thank all of you who threw in ideas
The story is in its nearing its end, and it has been successful in making my players make hard choices, deal with "fun" things, and has put a feel of despair BUT is fun :)
People have died, players has changed, some have gone to the point of changing their outlook on life (character wise)
Soon, if the community would like, I'll share some things the group and I has done and things they were put through and how they turned out
Anything to help with other people doing horror :)
It has been a blast to play and they have made it challenging for me, because as we all know… players never go the way you want them ;)

[Jeff the Green]

It's a DC15 Sense Motive check to determine the answer to that question. This is precisely why horror in 3.5 is tricky.

A) At the moment she's not actually controlled. Dominate's in effect, but no orders have been given.

Once you have given a dominated creature a command, it continues to attempt to carry out that command to the exclusion of all other activities except those necessary for day-to-day survival (such as sleeping, eating, and so forth). Because of this limited range of activity, a Sense Motive check against DC 15 (rather than DC 25) can determine that the subject’s behavior is being influenced by an enchantment effect (see the Sense Motive skill description).
B) This is not one of the cases where you get to automatically make a Sense Motive check; you have to be deliberately looking.
C) There's a feat in DrC that bumps this up to 20 or 25.
D) All that notwithstanding, the chance that any of my players' characters would make that check is small. :smallsigh:

[ThisIsZen]

While I know the OP has already run the sessions and is fairly happy with the turn-out, I figured I'd drop in and throw in my 2 coppers wrt horror gaming in general. Mostly just to repeat some advice I heard from other sources which I think holds true.

The easiest and most authentic way to create terrifying material in a game session is to include stuff that scares you. If you're afraid of skeletons, for instance, then you know all the exact visceral details that take skeletons from cheap mooks to something wholly disconcerting. You can describe all of those weird sounds at night in the dark that you can never put your finger on but make you hurry down hallways or through streets rather than sticking around. The things that scare you are the best resource you could ask for, since you already know what's scary about them and can describe that perfectly well.

It's not the be-all end-all and you should obviously not make a dungeon designed PURELY to terrify yourself into submission, but it's the easiest way to pull for material that is authentically unsettling.

[Nibbens]

This (http://ragea.net/pathfinder/Pathfinder%20Adventure%20Path/PF01-06%20Rise%20of%20the%20Runelords/PZO9002%20The%20Skinsaw%20Murders.pdf)!

It may be PF, but you could easily convert it and make adjustments for any platform. Plus the story is phenomenal.

[MisterDVD]

The tactics I used was

Horror Music:
sometimes helped, sometimes didn't haha, but it seemed to hit the right song at the right time being on shuffle, mostly went with suspense horror style

Notes And Side Groups:
I typed up notes to give players special pieces of information so the rest of the group didn't know what was going on (and to prevent metagaming) this worked pretty well, and its hilarious as a DM when you know the player knows something that could help the group and they keep it to them selves, or a player reveals something and now the other players have to question that characters motives or how they knew that
I gave notes on
~Search checks (one was great, one dungeon was made to mess with the players minds, so, (someone in another forum suggested this or might be this one… i cannot remember what everyone said at this moments, props to you 0.~) but the players where knocked out and I took each player aside, each player woke up in a featureless room with a lever, I allowed them to figure out something to go, but the end result, was pulling the lever. then they all walked out of the same door (like a video game respawn) and they were in a room with a few doors and a stand in the middle, the evil kenku rogue character went up to the stand and got a note saying "One of you have been replaced" and then the paranoia set in as she shared this info with the
cleric of the group… later I put them in situations were they were split up and their choices effect the other group that could have caused death.)
~Certain events for certain characters

Decisions Decisions….
I made them make choices that were rough, the "lesser of the two evils" kind of stuff, and having to do things that were morally grey for the greater good… or was it?… which i loved doing this! player never go the way expected… sometimes it made it worse haha

Describing the scene
I would take them from Nice country side and whatnot to horrible places, I did "pocket planes" so it was easier to describe the place because then i could say anything i wanted there easier. I messed with time there too haha, They were on a time limit and some of the planes have a "slower time" so outside time was sped up, so when they got out, events may have happened

By the end… (still got one session left) I have had
3 character deaths
2 in the same place, on a pocket plane, The characters did a hard battle, and two died (6 in the group) they found a scroll of rez off of a group of gnolls early in the game… well, it wasn't, do when it was use, one character came back as a bone creature, and when they "shifted back" the other character came back from the shift as something terrible, in which they had to put down
(Player played a hired muscle after that)
the last was the cleric, was going to narc on the group as the group made a deal with something powerful to release the town from its power… well, the cleric didn't like that choice and went to the town leader to let him know… the kenku rogue (now a bone creature) assassinated him for before he could get there..

It has been a great time, and thanks for all your ideas, if anyone has more, feel free to throw them in, maybe even your own xp with horror stories, i have have a great time with this and probably will run another in the future, after a long pause haha, been running this game for 4 months + and don't feel like we lost steam (For a horror story)

[Val666]

Use the Doppleganger Apocalypse Dx Let them met lots of friendly npcs and then replace every npc with dopplegangers. You can fluff it as an alien invasion which have Lovecraftian (Aberrations) horrors as bosses. Throw some pseudonatural templates and voidmind creatures. You can even make bosses with classes like: Binder/Sorcerer/Anima Mage binding Zceryll! and a lot more of Binders binding Zceryll .-.