Running Horror

[Belteshazzar]

I am trying to run a horror campaign (it also happens to be my first campaign as GM I know I should have chosen a simple dungeon crawl but my world fits horror better) I have already managed to kill the ninja and at least scare the others with a Darktentecles. He ran in front to check the pulse of a body I had already absent-mindedly declared dead. The poor sucker died in the surprise round as he was actually in the same space as creature with twelve slams. The monster then proceeded to separate the monk and fighter from their shaman with an invisible wall ( I removed the creatures other spell-likes in exchange for the full use of it's tentacles) The others managed to survive but I feel I need to add more fear than a few above CR abberations and slimes. The players suggested I speak less with fewer pauses and try to resolve combat faster but it is hard being a newbie DM not fully knowing my way around all the apropriate monsters (It helps that I am using a custom world and can simply ad hoc my monsters but I still have pauses in combat so can anyone give any suggestions on how to help the fealing of danger and fear of combat?

[Thomas]

A fast pace in combat is essential to a scary atmosphere, I feel. Action scenes are all about unwinding the suspense and tension all at once, but you should make them pulse-raising affairs, with quick descriptions and a feeling of hurried panic.

My best experience GMing Call of Cthulhu was when, after a long period of winding up my players with spooky red herrings and creepy descriptions, one of them came across somebody in the park, at night. They approached the dark shape, which was actually a ghoul. The fight took about 5 seconds and two rolls (the ghoul bit the PC's shoulder, the PC critically stabbed a knife into its brain), but it was a very tense moment - everybody's heart was thumping afterwards. The play-by-play was pretty much this...

"You approach, and SUDDENLY IT LEAPS AT YOU, SNARLING! What do you do?!"
"AAH! I stab it!"
"Roll dice!"
"AAH!" *roll*
"The thing worries your shoulder with its teeth, but you stab your knife through its jaw! It collapses on you, dead!"
"AAHH! I get the hell out of here!"

Detailed combat mechanics will and do get in the way of this, so I suggest glossing over them. If your players are getting scared witless by the fights, I doubt they'll miss the combat options and detailed rules one bit.

Don't have pauses.
Don't look things up. (Have pertinent monster stats on a cue card or in a txt/rtf/doc file on your computer, if you use one to DM.)
Don't give too much detail.
Make the players feel rushed. ("Roll this! Roll that! Your weapons do nothing!" * )

* The goggles, either.


Edit:
I neglected to spell out the "obvious" - it's not so obvious to anyone who's not put a lot of thought into running scary games.

Tension. Suspense. If you want your players scared, you have to build these two. Confrontations and combat are for unwinding, like I said - first you need to get your players all wound up, with a good, tense knot of fear in their stomachs.

How?

Fear of the unknown. Ignorance is fear. Once the players know what they're up against, they will invariably be less afraid. They might be more worried ("We can't handle that!"), but they will feel less fear and terror. Hint at the monster (without giving away what it is), at something being wrong, at a presence of some sort in the area... maybe let them catch glimpses of something moving. "Ripples across the surface of the pond; maybe a fish." "A shape darts between the bushes up ahead. Maybe it was a deer." "You hear something howling in the distance." "The birds have stopped singing. When you stop to listen, everything is dead silent."

There's a lot of other tricks for creating fear (unfairness is an essential element in games like Call of Cthulhu; mostly, you can not hope to survive an encounter with the monsters), but this is the most universal element.

[codexgigas]

I'm also running a horror campaign right now, so here are some things that have worked for me.

1. Put some "mood music" on low in the background. It shouldn't be anything the players recognize, since that will take them right out of the game. A lot of people recommend atmospheric music, but I'm using mostly classical stuff, and it's worked well. Look for songs with discordance or that don't quite resolve musically. Jay Greenburg's "Symphony No. 5" has worked very well.
2. Limit the time the players have to plan their characters' actions. I give my players six second time limits to determine their combat actions. If they don't come up with anything, they pass the round. It helps to speed combat up, and it creates a lot of tension.
3. Use monsters the players don't know. Your group is going to metagame, so use that against them. If they don't know what a grey ooze is, use a grey ooze. You said that you've been customizing mosters, which is also a good way to go.
4. Focus on the stuff outside of combat. That's where you'll be building tension. At least in my game, combat has tended to relieve some of the tension that builds prior to the encounters. A horror campaign should probably focus less on combat than usual (which might be hard, seeing as you have a dungeon crawl). Combat doesn't need to be the answer to defeat every monster, either. Check out folklore to find out about monsters defeated by mundane things such as lilacs. The players won't see that coming.

[oriong]

Use your fellow humans (or human like creatures), they can be a powerful horror story tool. Here's some does and don'ts

*Don't overdo it. Law of diminishing returns, there is such a thing as too much, especially when it comes to blood and guts. This is not to say that death or even gruesome details should be left out, subtlety is not always the best way to go, but be cautious with it and avoid turning the dungeon into a stinking corpse-pile.

*Don't go the 'redshirt' route. When an NPC dies it's best if it's a signficant thing. Seeing your faithful companion Claude snatched away by some horror lurking beyond the edge of the campfire is a lot more effective than simply losing 'henchman #4'. Overuse of redshirts can also result in the PCs feeling like they're invincible, the feeling of vulnerability is essential to horror stories and if PCs feel like they're untouchable it won't work.

*Humans acting inhuman is an excellent horror tool, and it's been a central idea of scary stories for...well pretty much forever. Whether they're mentally inhuman (due to insanity or possession) or physically (disease or mutation or shapechanging). Creatures like undead and were-beasts are both excellent examples.

[Viscount Einstrauss]

Run the Vitality Points variant. It's not much harder then working with HP, but it makes it far easier to die without warping the system much. Dying is scary :D

[Halcyon_Dax]

Some great tips here, lets see if i can post some of mine without repeating anyone.

1. False spooks: In a tense scenario where you are describing EVERY detail, throw in alot of potential dangers and spooky noises. For example "From around the corner comes a thick dank smell accompanied by a hissing and spitting noise" turns out to be just a beaker coming to a boil. Sighs of releif. Then REAL danger strikes, catching them off guard.

2. If at all possible, let them know danger is coming, before it arrives. The sounds of footsteps are extremely scary - when used right, they have proved my absolute most powerful scary tool.

3. Easy enemies. Especially for metagamers, anything TOO easy kinda unnerves them. Ive had them afraid of 1hp commoners who just hissed at them and didnt even manage to do any damage before getting sliced apart.

4. If its a good party, getting them SO SCARED that they start to abandon their goodness. Then once they realize that they are doing that, it is even creepier for them.

Good luck! I love horror campaigns.

[Everyman]

I've found that adequate (or rather, inadequate) lighting helps set the mood. Overall, you want to run a horror game where your group can A) make noise, B) not be interrupted, and C) not be distracted. Otherwise, building tension (the key to a horror campaign) is difficult and frustrating. That's counterproductive to good gaming.

Oh, and keep in mind the universal horror: unknown rolls. Every once in a while, try rolling a few dice at random. Perhaps you simply roll a few d20s and then give a small smile. Maybe you ask the players for their Spot modifiers and roll. These dice shouldn't and won't mean anything. You're just rolling dice for fun, really. However, your players don't know that and will begin to tense up. The trick to this ruse is not pulling it too often. If you do, it not only loses it effectiveness but also becomes annoying.

Otherwise, the suggestions thus far cover a lot of what you need.


Limit the time the players have to plan their characters' actions. I give my players six second time limits to determine their combat actions. If they don't come up with anything, they pass the round. It helps to speed combat up, and it creates a lot of tension.

This is made of awesome and fun. I must try this sometime, though I think I've give my group more than a six seconds to decide what they do. Maybe ten...

[JaronK]

One fun trick is to let the PCs feel safe, then make them realize that something they thought was harmless really wasn't. A favorite is to use a Necromancer with the feat that makes their undead explode with negative energy when killed. Send a swarm of zombies at the PCs, surrounding them. The zombies themselves can be relatively weak, but if killed they'll explode dealing enough damage to be a threat. Surround the party... they could kill the zombies, but they'd die in the process. Now they're scared of most undead, because they don't know if they're going to explode and deal real damage.

Being afraid you can't beat a monster is one thing, but being afraid that even if you do you're dead is a whole other issue.

JaronK

[Thomas]

1. False spooks: In a tense scenario where you are describing EVERY detail, throw in alot of potential dangers and spooky noises. For example "From around the corner comes a thick dank smell accompanied by a hissing and spitting noise" turns out to be just a beaker coming to a boil. Sighs of releif. Then REAL danger strikes, catching them off guard.

That is the worst, most annoying aspect of all bad horror movies (i.e. 95% of them). Well, okay, the "spooky" soundtracks are worse (and when the spooky soundtracks "highlight" the false scares... gahh...).

[Folie]

In the last horror game I was in, the GM kept telling players that they saw some rustling in the bushes, or heard some hiss in the unlit corner, or felt the gaping maw of the cavern pit reaching its dark tendrils into their thoughts...but he would always add, in a matter-of-fact tone, that they were probably just imagining things. I thought it was very effective.

[Jimp]

Has anyone ever tried to run a horror game over PBP? If so, how did you create the right atmosphere and how did it go for you?

[Thomas]

I imagine it could be easier creating the atmosphere, although it may require a lot more from the players. In a tabletop horror game, only the GM needs to be a good teller of horror; in a PBP, everyone probably needs to be good at writing horror to maintain the feel. Yikes!

Essentially, pick a horror author and try to model the style. Do you like Poe's or Lovecraft's gothic? King's you're-in-their-head? Barker's... wait, nobody likes Barker.

A tabletop game is like a horror movie; a PBP game would be like a horror novel.

[Ephraim]

*Humans acting inhuman is an excellent horror tool, and it's been a central idea of scary stories for...well pretty much forever. Whether they're mentally inhuman (due to insanity or possession) or physically (disease or mutation or shapechanging). Creatures like undead and were-beasts are both excellent examples.

This is absolutely true, but don't limit this technique to the abominations plaguing the PC's. If you want to make the game truly horrific (and not just scary) force the PC's into situations where they have to choose between their lives and their humanity. When you can get your PC's to decide to bury one of their comrades alive or something similarly gruesome then you've succeeded in creating genuine horror.

[Thomas]

When you can get your PC's to decide to bury one of their comrades alive or something similarly gruesome then you've succeeded in creating genuine horror.

A-frigging-men.

Lord of the Flies, anybody?

[PnP Fan]

In my (albeit limited) experience doing horror there are a number of things to keep in mind, most of which have been mentioned above.
1. Music: music is both blessing and curse. The right stuff, with the right crowd works wonderfully for any game. I've generally found that in hurts communication (because it's more background noise), but it may not be that way with your group.
2. Your Players have to want to buy in to the atmosphere. If you group is a beer and pretzels group, then doing horror is almost a waste of your time, 'cause they'll just sit there and make jokes the whole time through.
3. Stage presence: If you're the GM, you've probably got some of this already, but to carry a genre specific mood (like horror) you've got to have the right stage presence. One of the reasons I have a hard time with horror games is that I don't look creepy, or spooky. I'm a large jovial, friendly fellow, and I'm not particularly spooky at all. But I can pull off angry, evil, sly, and I can lie like you wouldn't believe, so I do a lot of intrigue and mystery stories. Play to your strengths.
4. Hope: Destroy their hope. In a long term campaign, it should be very clear that no matter what the PC's do, they can't save everything, or everyone. The best that they can hope for is a partial victory (yay, we survived, tooo bad for the village. ... ). Once they've given up hope for total victory, then they're yours. One of the best campaigns I've run basically had the pc's trying to stop the end of the world. Every time they turned around, something that they did to "save the world" wound up furthering it's destruction.
5. Also, don't make it clear to your players what they are dealing with. Telling them that the body rises from the coffin, flesh falling from it's face, as it reaches for them is a lot more effective than tellling them that the zombie gets out of the coffin and attacks. Once youtell them "zombie" well, you've told them HD, AC, DR, etc. . . a rotted body could be anything. bwahahahaha.
6. A lot of my DM's have this tendency to "reward" good rolls with information. Someone who rolls well on spot/listen/search get's to know more information, for example. Don't do this. Reward the high rollers with discomfort and creep factor. Give them "shadows", and "movement" and other vague terms. Then, when they go to investigate, nothing's there.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

[Thomas]

PnP Fan - great stuff all.

Regarding 6., especially - one of the most tried and true methods is fake rolls. "Make Spot rolls. 9, 16, 20, and 23, huh? Okay, nevermind." Maybe pass a note to the player who rolled highest containing a total red herring ("You hear scratching from the next floor up").

[Morty]

5. Also, don't make it clear to your players what they are dealing with. Telling them that the body rises from the coffin, flesh falling from it's face, as it reaches for them is a lot more effective than tellling them that the zombie gets out of the coffin and attacks. Once youtell them "zombie" well, you've told them HD, AC, DR, etc. . . a rotted body could be anything. bwahahahaha.
I'd add something: don't explain players more than you have to. Leave them oblivious to what they may find around the next corner. I've used that in one cthulhu-inspired horror-like adventure and it worked preety well. The players didn't know exactly what was going on even when they resolved whole thing. That, and that they didn't knew what they were getting into when they started adventure

[Brauron]

Here's something I've used (sparingly) to great effect.

Let the PCs think an encounter is coming, and then not have it materialize.

In an instance I used, the PCs were walking through dense forest at night. They began to hear the howling of wolves in the distance. The howling kept getting closer and closer, closer and closer, louder and louder! And then...a large deer came crashing out onto the path, a wolf clinging to its throat and a couple more wolves following close behind. The wolves completely ignored the PCs and went about eating the deer before slinking off into the shadows.

[Golthur]

Regarding 6., especially - one of the most tried and true methods is fake rolls. "Make Spot rolls. 9, 16, 20, and 23, huh? Okay, nevermind." Maybe pass a note to the player who rolled highest containing a total red herring ("You hear scratching from the next floor up").

I'll second the fake rolls. I'll also mention the incredulous "are you sure?", shaking your head sullenly, and rolling some dice behind the screen as an occasional response to an innocent action.

[NecroPaladin]

Taint mechanics are useful, if difficult to manage.

Blur alignments a LOT. Good NPCs have evil goals, Evil NPCs ultimately do the right thing. Likewise, they may act as they're supposed to. It really gets the PCs scared when they don't know who their real friends are. If you're good, you could even have a PC turn evil, which is EXTREMELY good for a horror campaign if you can pull it off.

Likewise, make enemies seem to die in agony (even the lowly orcs), and make some allies creepy or inhuman, but faithful... or when the PCs innapropriately lash out at the character who obviously seemed like an enemy, maybe he was a double agent working for them all along.

Landscape/Townscape design and description is a must. Instead of making things overtly menacing, just make them gloomy, dreary, and, above all, empty. Add weird little similarities between random characters in the town, and see how the PCs handle it.

EDIT: Ah, completely missed this: OMENS AND VISIONS OF DOOM. Have only one PC see something ominous in a dream or horrible in the world, and make sure that it seems totally implausible to the other characters. Then, it's your choice whether it was real...or if it's just the PC's mind slipping away...

EDIT EDIT: The sadistic choice. Do you save [PC Name] from the ravenous undead mob, when you only have a few hours to cure [Town Name] of the plague that caused it all? You can't have both.

[Tor the Fallen]

Make them feel helpless.
Keep their HP low, their number of torches low, their rations low. Make sure they get lost.
Don't show them pictures of what's in the MM, or whatever. Instead, come up with ideas of what my be fearsome, use the stats from the MM, then describe something else differently.

Make unbeatable creatures that are clearly fearsome and not to be messed with. If they attack the lurking horror, which, due to its odd geometry, is impossible for the mortal minds to fathom, well, that's really their fault, isn't it?

What's the German word for no matter what you do, it all goes to splinters? Like the idea of Ragnarok, but on a human scale.