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NowhereMan583
2014-07-20, 07:50 AM
So, in my ongoing Pathfinder campaign (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?358929-Campaign-Log-Brothels-Archaeology-Mutants-and-Other-Questionable-Elements-(PF)) I'm about to send my players into a dungeon. They should reach it next session or the one after, depending how distracted they get by the excitement of overland travel.

The dungeon is called "The Circuitous Contrivance of the Worm-Lord", because I was playing around with a dungeon generator several months back, and that name tickled me enough that I decided to use it on the first opportunity. It's a long-abandoned temple ("long-abandoned" = dating to a previous age of the world, a la "At the Mountains of Madness") rumored to have been built by aboleth. (In my campaign, aboleth were the first animals to develop intelligence on their own, and a large portion of the other aberrations were a result of their uplifting or engineering.) The dungeon was not originally underground, but was shoved underground by geological activity at some point in the past; parts have been submerged in an subterranean sea. (Still other parts intentionally connect to said subterranean sea, because... aboleth.)

Over the aeons, other species have discovered the place, even moved in, but mostly didn't survive to the present. Some grell lived there for a while, and even added a few expansions to their section of the dungeon, but they're long gone. A group of kaorti used it as an extraplanar outpost for hundreds of years, but they were wiped out by parties unknown -- though a lot of the places where the floor has broken through to the subterranean sea still have weird kaorti-made resin bridges spanning them. Derro dug their way in at some point, but seem to have killed each other off. Etc., etc. Nowadays, it's mostly just the local wildlife -- i.e., the descendants of aboleth genetic experimentation. I plan on throwing in a few unusual variants on recognizable aberrations, like beholders that are only slightly larger and more dangerous than mosquitoes that swarm into fairly-stupid hive minds. I figure I can also include some degenerate descendants of recognizable humanoids whose ancestors wandered down here millennia ago and never found their way out for whatever reason.

I also want to have some highly-localized temporal anomalies to hammer home the "this is weird crap here" point: insubstantial images of illithids from the place's heyday wandering about; a corridor that dead-ends onto a balcony that looks down on a portion of subterranean sea frozen in time, where a kaiju-scale aberration is trapped; one room where time passes at unbelievable speed, where a species of standard diminutive dungeon fauna have evolved enough to develop intelligence and civilization in their little temporal pocket, a door that leads into last week; etc.

And, of course, stuff that actually relates to their mission. The PCs are being sent in about a month after a standard-issue "rival adventuring parties in a race against time" scenario. Their employers sent one of the groups in, lost contact, and wants to know what happened.

And, finally, in some isolated corner of the dungeon which the PCs may or may not happen across, there is the titular Worm-Lord. It was originally an aboleth god, to whom the temple was built. It has been assumed to be a dead god, but in fact it has just weakened dramatically over time as it lost all of its worshippers. It has just enough power to keep itself alive, albeit in a fairly small & pathetic larvae-like form, and to exert very slight influence over the fate of its home -- which is probably why the place hasn't just been destroyed by geological forces.

Anyway, that's the background. Now I'm coming to the Playground to brainstorm some ideas to fill out the various parts of the dungeon. What I've been working on thus far is attempting to go off of a collection of Lovecraftian adjectives. I picked about fifty of them, on the logic that the dungeon map has about sixty rooms, and I'm trying to think of ways to make a room or area of the dungeon to which each adjective could be applied. Here's the list:
acidic
ashen
baleful
bilious
blasphemous
boiling
bulbous
cackling
cadaverous
cancerous
congealed
corpulent
croaking
crystalline
deathless
debased
endless
dissolved
faceless
fecund
festering
fetid
fibrous
fungous
fractured
gangrenous
gibbering
globular
gnashing
grasping
hallucinatory
hateful
hybrid
ichorous
incongruous
iridescent
jaundiced
jellified
leprous
maggoty
membranous
monumental
oily
pallid
parasitic
pulsating
sanguine
scummy
sepulchral
shrieking
shuffling
stagnant
sulphurous
unmasked
vaporous
viperous
wretched
writhing



Basically, I want some outside ideas. I try to avoid repeating things too much in my games, and an influx of outside thoughts is often extremely helpful. So, as I'm putting this thing together, I was wondering if anyone here might have some suggestions for ways to make it creepier, or just work better in general.

Amidus Drexel
2014-07-20, 03:14 PM
Stagnant: Nothing in the room will move, a la an immoveable rod. The room contains a battlefield, frozen mid-battle, where one side is defending something the players need. If the players stay in the room too long, they too might freeze and join the stuck combatants until a curse is broken. Of course, when the curse is broken, the fight continues as if it had never stopped.

Acidic: A long hallway that is actually the inside of a massive worm or the like. The entire environment is covered in sticky acid that begins to digest you. Add remains of previous meals to taste. Pun intended.

Rabidmuskrat
2014-07-20, 03:34 PM
If you are really going for the horror angle, nothing beats 'horror' like being unable to fight back. Its the main reason its difficult to do in DnD, where anything thats statted can be killed.

Luckily, your players aren't at that level yet. Bring in something that they KNOW is way too powerful for them, like an Illithid or something, that stalks them and is occasionally visible. That could be a nice twist on the whole ghost-thing instead of the ghost being something that is normally harmless, but twisted (little girl), its something that would be seriously dangerous if it was real, but it isn't.

You can either make it a primary component of the dungeon or just some kind of background bit of fun. Could be both, if you make it a red herring.

Segev
2014-07-20, 03:51 PM
Extremely basic horror component, but... have one of the spatial anomalies cause them to lose track of the way back out. Past a certain point/when they encounter the anomaly, put them in the "starting room" of your real dungeon; they have to locate the exit.

Then have there be an aboleth out there, stalking them.

Hide the exit somewhere deep under water in its lair.

Then, when they trigger another event or something, have the dungeon slowly start to flood. Describe, at first, how they find a room that's got water lightly covering the floor. Describe the drip, drip, drip of it. Then don't stop describing the drip, drip, drip of it in any room they come to. Have them go up a level in the dungeon and come to a room you describe as if it were new, with platforms poking out of water of unknown depth. They might pick up on the description showing them something similar to what they've seen before, or their map-keeping might be good enough to figure out they were in this room before...and there wasn't water in it.

The level of the water should slowly rise.

And the aboleth is still stalking them. It is stronger in the water.

But it also has powers that make air-breathing PCs able to breathe the water, and other powers which alter them to depend on the water to keep healthy. The latter are permanent effects; the former require renewal.

Now they have to deal with either drowning horror, or with facing the aboleth in hopes of getting water-breathing without becoming enslaved. And some likely will become trapped in the water by the alteration of their own flesh from the aboleth's touch. So when they find the exit, they still aren't...entirely...free.

NowhereMan583
2014-07-20, 08:53 PM
I like these ideas -- I'm definitely going to use the idea of something ghostly-but-dangerous-looking stalking them. And it would be fun to implement the giant worm thing... maybe an absurdly large purple worm, bloated and twisted into immobility by something else in the dungeon, forced to just try and wait for meals to walk into its mouth.

Other ideas I think I'll throw in:

Incongruous: One room is a rather nice, very clean, bedroom of the style the PCs would expect to see in their local lord's villa. It's completely safe from the denizens of the dungeon outside, but no explanation for its presence is given.

Fungous: A sapient yellow mold colony fills one room, spilling out into the hallways. A member of one of the rival adventuring parties they're looking for has fallen victim to it -- s/he is covered in spores, talks like they've been brainwashed, and cares for nothing but serving the mold.

Unmasked: A few members of a cult with which the PCs are vaguely familiar seem to have wandered in here and died by some unknown hand. It's been previously established that these cultists all wear masks after their initiation, but theirs have been dislodged... and the reason for the masks can, helpfully, be described with faceless and possibly acidic, or dissolved.

Pallid and Leprous: Suffice to say, the degenerate humanoids who still live down here do not have quality health care.

Yora
2014-07-21, 01:36 PM
This calls for the Monolith from beyond Space and Time, though I think at $7 it's a bit overpriced, given that it works best for salvaging parts rather than playing it as it is. You might look around a bit if there's free stuff for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, all that stuff is like this.

Luckily, your players aren't at that level yet. Bring in something that they KNOW is way too powerful for them, like an Illithid or something, that stalks them and is occasionally visible. That could be a nice twist on the whole ghost-thing instead of the ghost being something that is normally harmless, but twisted (little girl), its something that would be seriously dangerous if it was real, but it isn't.
Or take something that is clearly much too powerful, but normally ignores them. Let them encounter three or four giant ants that leave them alone, but guard a door the PCs need to get through. After a hard fight, they run into some lone workers who completely ignore them unless attacked. And eventually the way towards their goal leads them straight through a huge nests crawling with hundreds of them.
If they do anything to accidentally piss one of them off, they will be torn to pieces within seconds. Think of the nest in Aliens.

I also always like the idea that the whole place is aware of the PCs. It doesn't like then running around inside it, but most of the time there isn't much it can do about it. But there are some opportunites, like collapsing ceilings and bridges, or causing doors to get stuck at the worst possible moment. It is as if someone is releasing traps with the intention of killing them, but thre is never any trace of any mechanisms or anyone watching them. In some cases, the PCs may even come through a section several times with everything being perfectly stable, until a moment when the accident would be the most disastrous.

Regarding giant purple worms, look up Cthonians and Dohles. Other people have presented some ideas for that concept.

Other nice creatures are those who look almost normal, but turn into abominations when they are apparently killed.
Or nightmarish abominations that dissolve and leave behind a perfectly normal looking skeleton of a human or animal. I recommend the movie Princess Mononoke. Despite first appearances, it's not like a Disney Princess movie. More like Event Horizon.
Or manga by Ito Junji. That man loves turning an ordinary town into twisted nightmares.

NowhereMan583
2014-07-21, 10:05 PM
Regarding giant purple worms, look up Cthonians and Dohles. Other people have presented some ideas for that concept.

Oh, right -- I always forget that Pathfinder actually has stats for Lovecraftian creatures like Dholes.

vhfforever
2014-07-21, 11:33 PM
One of my favorite methods of putting the players off-balance is the following room. It works best in a system with Sanity Points, but a Will save that results in penalties works just as well.

"Once through the heavy door you find yourself in a perfectly square room. The stone walls are cut perfectly smooth, and the blocks fit together so well the seams are practically invisible. Five vases adorn the space, one in each corner, and a plush rug covers the floor. A second wooden door, identical to the one you came through, stands closed on the wall opposite you."

The moment someone points out 5 corners with vases in the square room, hit them with a Will Save. Failure = Insanity effect, or loss of Sanity Points. After that point, no player I have ever had trusted anything.

NowhereMan583
2014-07-22, 07:25 AM
One of my favorite methods of putting the players off-balance is the following room. It works best in a system with Sanity Points, but a Will save that results in penalties works just as well.

"Once through the heavy door you find yourself in a perfectly square room. The stone walls are cut perfectly smooth, and the blocks fit together so well the seams are practically invisible. Five vases adorn the space, one in each corner, and a plush rug covers the floor. A second wooden door, identical to the one you came through, stands closed on the wall opposite you."

The moment someone points out 5 corners with vases in the square room, hit them with a Will Save. Failure = Insanity effect, or loss of Sanity Points. After that point, no player I have ever had trusted anything.

That is friggin' brilliant, and I am totally stealing it.

Yora
2014-07-22, 07:34 AM
One of my favorite methods of putting the players off-balance is the following room. It works best in a system with Sanity Points, but a Will save that results in penalties works just as well.
Maybe play Antichamber? It's a whole game about impossible geometries and physics. There is at least one puzzle in which you escape from an infinite loop by turning around and walking in the other direction, which leads you to a completely different place.

One of my favorite methods of putting the players off-balance is the following room. It works best in a system with Sanity Points, but a Will save that results in penalties works just as well.

"Once through the heavy door you find yourself in a perfectly square room. The stone walls are cut perfectly smooth, and the blocks fit together so well the seams are practically invisible. Five vases adorn the space, one in each corner, and a plush rug covers the floor. A second wooden door, identical to the one you came through, stands closed on the wall opposite you."
Or make an object that follows around. At first, the PCs might think that there's just lots of those things in the dungeon, but when they do something to it the effect is seen on all the others they encounter. And if they carry it with them, they never get to see any others. Probably the most weird when it's something otherwise ordinary. Some magic crystal box teleporting around is just unusual, but not particularly unexpected. A rusty iron pot would be much more so, especially when it's the only object that displays this trait.

CarpeGuitarrem
2014-07-22, 09:40 AM
Antichamber has some brilliant ideas, also some that don't work so well in a non-physics-based game like D&D.

One great idea I came up with was monodirectional doorways. The door from Room A to Room B corresponds to a doorway in Room B that does not lead back to Room A. Instead, it leads into Room C.

Now plan out a few rooms, throw weird stuff on top of that.

And figure out what happens when players start pushing the bounds, like taking a rope through.

NowhereMan583
2014-07-22, 11:02 AM
One great idea I came up with was monodirectional doorways. The door from Room A to Room B corresponds to a doorway in Room B that does not lead back to Room A. Instead, it leads into Room C.

While I think that sort of thing is fun (in a previous campaign, I mapped out a tower that had a lot of similarly non-intuitive connections between rooms) it'll probably just frustrate my current group.

CarpeGuitarrem
2014-07-22, 11:22 AM
Yeah, that makes sense.

You should've seen the player who was furiously trying to draw a map of the place.

She somehow succeeded after much persistence. I was seriously impressed.

Yora
2014-07-22, 02:08 PM
I like this picture (http://jacquesleyreloup.deviantart.com/art/Glade-382841170). I think I'll be using it as some defect in space or a three-dimensional rift to the Outer Void at a later point of my current campaign.

Right now I am working on a cave that was the lair of a very powerful hag, which has the unique trait that anyone who goes inside can never find the exit again. A hero had slain the hag and taken her amulet to gain the ability to see the exit, and the PCs are looking for a thief who stole it and went to hide inside the cave.

Simply making it impossible to percieve the exit would be the most simple solution, but maybe I add some space warping as well. Since I do dungeons as flowcharts, impossible configurations of rooms won't be a problem. Not quite sure how I am going to make it feel somewhat off without being obviously some kind of hell dimension. Maybe I can add some gravity annomalies that affect large enough areas to not be noticeable while you walk along. Like a cave floor that seems to be flat, but when people with torches spread out it seems like they are sticking to opposite sides of a huge bowl.
Or a small, slow flowing river, that actually flows up a slight slope. Which you likely only notice when someting is floating in it.

Edit: Some refinement. There's a strong gravity pull towards a point a few dozen meters below the hags lair, which increases the closer one gets. At first you have to lean slightly back to stay upright and towards the last meters you pretty much have to slide down a very steep slope, even though there is no visible curve to the corridor.
In the center of the lair still lies the 300 year old corpse of the hag with the severed head right next to it, but it hasn't decayed one bit. Instead of finding the amulet that is somewhere inside the cave now to find the exit, burning the corpse also ends the space warping effect. (Though the gravity well persists.)

FreakyCheeseMan
2014-07-22, 03:53 PM
Horror is mostly about the mood, rather than the mechanics. This is difficult in 3.5, because your players are almost always going to be competent warriors who are used to everything trying to kill them in supernatural ways. You can't really break expectations and put them in a situation they're not expecting, when their expectation is to be hunted by murderous ghosts and demons, you know?

So, here's my advice: Pull things the other way, first. Make this dungeon have some puzzles and intellectual challenges, with no threats at all. Have them be archaeologists for a while. Make there be some reason they can't leave - orcish army outside, something so they're taking refuge here.

Then, start to dial up the eerie. Have them see their own characters looking back at them from the end of passages, or see diagrams of themselves being viciously murdered written on the walls. When you do bring the threats, make sure it's stuff they can avoid, but cnnot destroy; thousand foot falls onto spikes, swarms of creatures that pour endlessly out of the walls, etc.

When the monsters do come out, you need to be careful - the moment the party identifies and understands them, they stop being scary. One possibility might be to punish the players for any attempt at study - make them save vs. wisdom damage or fear on a successful knowledge check, or make even looking at the creatures risky.

Oh, you should probably kill one of your players - or at least a beloved NPC - early on.

EDIT: Reading back over this, I realize I didn't really emphasize the point I wanted to make, which is mood contrast/whiplash. Don't start off trying to create horror, start off trying to create wonder. Aim for beauty, curiosity, fascination and potential; make it seem like the tools to achieve their dreams are just around the next corner. Then, when you start with the blood and horror and unfair deaths, it will actually mean something.

veti
2014-07-22, 05:00 PM
I thought the first step in instilling cosmic horror in players was, call your scenario "Tomb of Horrors"?

Arimadios
2014-07-22, 05:29 PM
Okay. The way I did this (to set up my campaign's story line) was simple.

Children.

Only creepy as sin.

Like, ultra mega super awesome creepy, they play cat gut fiddles with the kitties still alive. they walk around with peircings for clothes and brutally murder things that are alive but laugh like children do while they do it. Bring out the babies with scythe arms form dante's inferno and let them wreack havoc! And they never, ever die. Save or die? They save. Period. Beheaded? They keep moving. Delimbed? Exsanguinated? Dismembered? Their flesh animates ala dead space. And at the very end of the room, have them turn around, and it's not there. None of it. It's all gone. They open the door to the next room? And killable versions come pouring out. (Let's say they're 2 hd outsiders, aaaannnnnd there's 50 of em.) Watch. Them. Run. Screaming.

That, my friend, is horror, mind rape, and it geniuinely spawns a MOOD of horror at the table. Oh. And if someone dies to the hallucination babies? Yeah. They're dead. Like ultra dead. As in Zombify their ass, on the spot, and have it RUN into the next room, and then go around UNLEASHING UNEARTHLY GODAWFUL Horrors on the party - now the party has to redead their ally before they die to the horrifically twisted machinations of mindless horror.

Oh, at the end? Abeloth? Yeah. They're Psionic. It was pulling a jedi mind trick on em. Whole time. They're actually sitting in a lake with the abeloth the whole time, it's all glowy and powerful, and every 'hour' (Of mind rape dungeon) is one round they are in his brain draining grasp. Don't outright kill them when they wake up, but make sure they know, only the creature's love of torture keeps them alive. If they all die? They all wake up, at the beginning of the dungeon, completely unharmed.


If that isn't cosmically scary, nothing is.


Yeah, I totally free-based some Steven King right there, and spiced it with a spritz of Dean Koontz. Also: Feel free to throw in Oozes. They're mean. Clear Gelatinous cubes? In ten by ten corridors? Meaaaaaannnnnn.

Truly good horror isn't "Ohmigawd it's out there and weeeiiirrrrddd" - No. It's simple. It's "Murder Kids." It's "Children of the Corn. Only with guns." It's basically, take something benign, and corrupt it. True horror is a mole, invisible in the tan, until YOU HAVE CANCER AND DIE FROM IT.

Genth
2014-07-22, 05:48 PM
Have a narrator suddenly start talking out of the walls, describing what the characters are doing, in a low, comfortable, monotonous voice. Then have the narrator mention "The Tall Man watches them from a small hole in the ceiling, considering, as a butcher considers a joint, how best to take them apart" - never speaking with particular emotion, just gentle and calm. If the players have backgrounds for the characters, use that. "The Tall Man thinks about the time [PC] disappointed their mother. Her eyes, on the verge of tears, her sweet, sweet, delicious eyes. [PC] should be punished for making those eyes cry, or so the Tall Man thinks."

vhfforever
2014-07-23, 01:58 AM
That is friggin' brilliant, and I am totally stealing it.

I stole it originally and can't remember from where. The circle, it continues on, and on, and on...

Segev
2014-07-23, 09:09 AM
Horror is mostly about the mood, rather than the mechanics. This is difficult in 3.5, because your players are almost always going to be competent warriors who are used to everything trying to kill them in supernatural ways. You can't really break expectations and put them in a situation they're not expecting, when their expectation is to be hunted by murderous ghosts and demons, you know?

Indeed. Mood is hard, and it's doubly hard in an RPG. Not just because D&D is a power-fantasy game (by and large), but because, in an RPG, you know the guy who owns the physics of the setting. He's sitting there across from you. And therefore, if you're helpless, it's hard not to simply assume, "the DM is being a jerk." You want to avoid that situation. Even more than normal, the illusion of it being "out of the DM's hands," of it being somehow fair despite it being utterly unfair, is critical in running a horror game.

That's why I suggested something like the slowly rising water. The solution(s) exist. It's technically just a puzzle with at least two or three ways out for which the DM has plans, and probably myriad others the players could think up. But it's got a creeping time limit and it gets more and more unpleasant as that time limit draws near. And there's Something Lurking.

Aboleths have great potential to be creepy, if used right, even when the players know full well what they are. They fit the bill of "overpowered monster" that is really hard to kill, and yet their tactics and capabilities lend themselves to being horror movie monsters that lurk and skulk and strike and retreat, rather than throw-down toe-to-toe battle-beasts. And they have permanent, debilitating effects that aren't necessarily fatal, which makes them worrisome foes without the tension-killing "and now you're dead." No matter how bad things get, they can always get worse.

Because the aboleth is not designed to have a throw-down with the party, it doesn't feel like a cheat when it doesn't. Because the water is creeping upwards at a steady pace and is not - in theory - unbeatable, it feels "fair." The DM doesn't come off as god-moding the encounters. Horror stops being horrific when the audience loses hope. It's not creepy when you know you're GOING to die. Especially not when that moment is upon you. The need to fight for survival, the hope - however slim - that it's possible, combined with the suspense of WAITING for the danger to become critical...that's where horror comes from.

ReaderAt2046
2014-07-23, 09:31 AM
Take a room and fill it with some kind of undead. Ghouls, zombies, skeletons, whatever fits your party's level. The horror twist is that these undead are invincible. If you destroy them, they simply resurrect on the next round. However, they can't leave the room in which you find them, so the party just has to get through the room and then they'll be OK.

CarpeGuitarrem
2014-07-23, 09:47 AM
I thought the first step in instilling cosmic horror in players was, call your scenario "Tomb of Horrors"?
No, no, no....there's a vast difference between Tomb of Horrors (which is punishingly brutal and patently unfair) and "cosmic horror".

Vereshti
2014-07-23, 05:57 PM
I've come across a few architectural SCP's with related exploration logs that are very effective at instilling a mood of horror.

The Facility (http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1555) just seems weird at first (an autonomous mountain complex that is dedicated to launching missiles filled with mice?), but the mission log (http://www.scp-wiki.net/transcript-epsilon-12-1555) is terrifying. The facility itself may be too modern for your campaign, but it's a great example of architectural horror.

The Architect (http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-184) is an artifact that makes buildings bigger on the inside, and it's a nightmare to explore a place where it has been enshrined and twisting the dimensions for many years, as recounted in this mission log (http://www.scp-wiki.net/personal-log-of-gordon-richards).

The SCP Foundation and the Wanderers' Library are great places to look for inspiration.