Horror Advice

[Meanlucario]

Any advice for a horror campaign? I already have an idea for each town/city/port town, so there's that.

[lord pringle]

I'll probably type up a bigger post in the morning, but step one is to avoid using fear effects unless absolutely necessary. Nothing is less scary than your DM saying "you are scared" You want to actually show being frightened, not tell it.

[Meanlucario]

I'll probably type up a bigger post in the morning, but step one is to avoid using fear effects unless absolutely necessary. Nothing is less scary than your DM saying "you are scared" You want to actually show being frightened, not tell it.

Show don't Tell. I'll try to remember that.

[S@tanicoaldo]

Use a lot of primal fears (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PrimalFear) in case you don't know the players well, in case youdo, well you know what they fear so just use it. :smallamused:

[Drakevarg]

Very simple one, learned from experience:

The threat of death is scary. Actually dying is not. Think of it akin to tension building vs. jumpscares. Jumpscares produce a sudden jolt of adrenaline, but as a consequence kill all previously-built tension, because the threat has presented itself, been identified, and reacted to. And if the jumpscare was just a harmless "boo," you're just left annoyed and frustrated at the involuntary response. Similarly, character death may produce an emotional response, but once that's over all that's left is frustration.

I've tried in the past to produce a tense atmosphere by drilling into the players that they can die horribly at any moment, and proven as much by causing several TPKs. It doesn't work. All you get is players with no attachment to their characters willing to make ever-dumber decisions because they can be arbitrarily axed off around any given corner. Don't do this. Instead, build up scenarios that very easily could kill them, but will only do so as a consequence of their responses or lack thereof, not because the dice were rolling poorly that evening. Fear lives in the mind, not the flesh. Pain makes a poor conjurer.

In other words, it's much like any other campaign, but the emphasis is shifted. Instead of "how do we overcome?" it becomes "how do we survive?"

[zlefin]

Make sure a turning optimized cleric, or anything of that ilk; isn't going to just trivially massacre a lot of the threats.

[paperarmor]

Use the myriad of ways to build tension in the players. Slowly racheting up the tension works best. Also, try to keep phones/laptops to a minimum.

[Meanlucario]

Use the myriad of ways to build tension in the players. Slowly racheting up the tension works best. Also, try to keep phones/laptops to a minimum.

We are doing this online, so I don't have a choice.

[AlanBruce]

I just had a scenario that veered towards Horror a bit.

the party had participated in a major gang war, helping different factions against one that had accessed a large weapon to take over. It was your typical hack and slash portion of the fight, with spells being slung all over the place and in the end, the party was victorious...

What happened was later.

You see, to ensure civilian safety, the party suggested that a helpful and well loved NPC who had a school house, keep everyone possible inside, including close fiends and allies to the party who would not fare well in such a big gang war. They even provided the people and the NPC with nails and boards to make sure everyone was safe inside. No harm at all from the ongoing war a few blocks away...

Unbeknownst to the party IC and OOC, that friendly NPC? She was infected.

They don't know what she was infected with, but it had been going on for a long time. Something inside incubating for weeks or months, most likely.

And with the PCs away fighting and a boarded up house filled with harmless unarmed civilians? It struck.

When the party uses its last teleport to go back to the school, they find that many have died, apparently killed by their peers or committed suicide. The NPC is reciting poetry for some reason and not responding to them...

And then it turned into a hideous monster.

The party has faced monsters before, so they weren't afraid of yet another one, but then the dead rose as zombies (I gave them the ravenous and fast traits).

Those that weren't turned, found the NPC released a gas that not only killed them, but gave the Pcs 4 rounds to save them before transformation took place. This gas was released whenever she was struck with a slashing or piercing weapon.

Only one had a hammer in the party.

So they are fighting their trusted friend, now turned monster, as it contaminates the very much boarded house with dozens of undead running around, eating those not infected and attacking the party. To make matters worse, the local authorities had realized there was an Outbreak of sorts and the party had 1 minute to deal with the problem before the school house was sanitized from the outside with fire.

It wasn't pretty for them watching their friends turn and not respond to their words as many PCs were bitten and possibly infected.

Basically, the premise was: their safe haven is not safe anymore. And once the crisis was averted (no allies survived the purge), they had a bittersweet victory as they watched their base of operations burnt down to the ground and all their friends in it.

And now they are learning that more like that NPC may be infected somewhere in the city they live. Able to do the same thing.

Problem is... they don't know who and where they are.

[Florian]

Any advice for a horror campaign?

Roleplaying, especially online, will never be scary or carry the appropriate horror. Something I learned from gm´ing Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Fantasy is the necessity of talking to the players that this is going to be a horror game and that it´s up to them to act and play the fear, they have to participate at creating the mood.
This is doubly important when using a "heroic" system like D&D/PF where immunity to fear is a thing, as is Remove Fear and some primal dreads, like, fear of disease, can be handled by simple spells or having a Paladin along.

[Glorthindel]

The threat of death is scary. Actually dying is not. Think of it akin to tension building vs. jumpscares. Jumpscares produce a sudden jolt of adrenaline, but as a consequence kill all previously-built tension, because the threat has presented itself, been identified, and reacted to. And if the jumpscare was just a harmless "boo," you're just left annoyed and frustrated at the involuntary response.

That said, jump scares do have a place (usually as a means to cause players to drop their guard before the real hit). The hard bit is actually pulling it off at a table setting. The absolutely best one I have ever witnessed was in a Call of Cthulu campaign. The DM often ran his sessions by candlelight, and this naturally made checking your character sheet a bit more difficult (as well as getting it covered in melted wax, but I digress). At one point, the DM made us make a perception check, and we all rolled dice, and squinted at our sheet. With all our eyes averted, the DM slipped a mask out from behind his screen and placed it over his face, and then spoke - we all looked up and most of us jumped out of our seats (the candlelight making the fairly basic mask really eerie!). Good as a one-off play, but you couldn't pull that off every session.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Any advice for a horror campaign? I already have an idea for each town/city/port town, so there's that.

Can we get a bit more info than this? I can't tell from the blurb whether you're going for existential semi-Lovecraftian dread, a slasher, a monster movie, philosophy based science fiction horror, suspence, a thriller with supernatural elements, a creepy murder mystery, a ghost story or a bunch of characters in a "box" (a hounted house, an extradimensional maze, a supermarket under attack by aliens, a tank in enemy territory) they need to get out of together, to name a few semi-subgenres. It's really hard to give general tips that work in every single thing connected to horror. The more you're willing to summarize, the better the tips you can get from people.

[unseenmage]

Decide early on if you're doing horror or heroic horror.

I'll explain, the hingepin of horror in roleplaying is that the supernatural WILL GET YOU.
In roleplaying terms this can translate to loss of player agency. This is fine so long as the players are ojay with the supernatural occasionally being unstoppable for the sake of horror.

Compared to regular D&D, player agency reigns supreme and that scary monster better watch out cuz if it has stats the bigdarnheroes are gonna kill it.

Think Hellraiser ve Ghostbusters. Both have scary moments but in one the supernatural is not to be trifled with, in the other the supernatural is so defeatable that our heroes get to make clever quips between combat rounds.

[Nibbens]

Been dealing with this quite a bit in my games. My 2 cents:

Players and characters are two different things, but they both share the same resource, the mind. Perhaps your biggest hurdle is to actually make your PCs get attached to the setting. The have to be able to look beyond the NPCs and actually see interesting people that they've interacted with before, and liked. See or hear places mentioned and get excited about going there.

Players have different tells too, in a recent game of mine, a player was concerned about blowing a giant hole in the street of a town to get to the sewer below, so he opted to take a longer route because the people might be inconvenienced or get hurt because of his actions. This is normally a careless player, so when he did this I knew I had him attached to the city.

Finally, threaten the thing they're attached to. The BBEG of that game, was one that notorious for not getting revenge of the people who wronged her, but targeted the family of the people who wronged her. Family, friends, places of concern.

They genuinely feared her, because they knew that what she was like and what she was capable of. So, my PCs would tread lightly when indirectly opposing her, and only revealed themselves when they directly opposed her to avoid getting their friends killed.

Of course, you can tighten the noose by having the villain scry and learn the PCs names and watch them scramble to deal with a potential threat. How do you protect several cities at once? How do you protect the minds and hearts of the ones you love without causing them undue stress of imminent death?

At this point, your PCs will be making decisions, but they will be doing so out of a sense of fear, rather than logical and perhaps "more appropriate" sense of logic.

This is what fear looks like at the table. You will never get your players actually scared, but make them truly concerned for the people they care about and you will see them going out of their way to make sure their friends aren't hurt, and when they do cut corners and sacrifice NPC friends for necessity, it makes it that much more impactful.

And yes, for the love of everything. Don't use fear.

[Meanlucario]

http://i.imgur.com/5J3gXOj.jpg

Here's the map I have, and below the idea I have for each town/city. Still working on the smaller islands between the two main islands.


Tamiel (Holy City): Large city. City that is protected from the monsters. Cult in the city. Mix of White Knights and Knight Templars.

Castle Summit: Large city. Castle in it is full of constructs.

Cursed Lands: Mass of land. Full of taint and monsters.

Oxholde: Town. Serial Killer, Doppelganger (MM, 67, CR 3).

Rustbay: Harbor. Water zombie invasion.

Pearlwick: Harbor. Cult plans on birthing their god.

Steepvault: Town. Bone Rat (Libris, 88, CR 3) or Ephemeral Swarm (MM3, 50, CR 5).

Baypond: Harbor. Ghoul invasion.

Boulderhollow: City. Flesh Golem factory (Frankenstein's Monster).

Neverhorn: Town. Moonrat problem (MM2, 151, CR 1/4th).

Thornkeep: Town. Killer plants.

Grimwell: Town. Abandoned building near by that lures travelers here. Town sacrifices them to Nerull for protection.

Caveholde: Harbor. Cavern invaded by a group of Koprus (MM2, 134, CR 6, nerf)(It’s full of their dead), group set to kill them, they’re already injured, townfolk turn on party.

Deeprest:Town. Spirit Tree in the town preventing the dead to rise, even tainted.

Mosscross: Town. Killer plants.

Purewitch: Town. Townfolk sacrifices orphans to please a Mind Flayer (MM, CR 8).

Brittlegate:Town. Dream/Nightmare realm.

Slywatch: City. Serial killers.

Duskspell: Harbor. Nothing special.

Curseborn: Town. Starting town for the party.

Demonbreak: Harbor. Drider (MM, 89, CR 7) kidnappings.

Stillgate: Harbor. Fihyr (MM2, 100, CR 3) invasion.

Crystalwich: City. Structures are made of hard crystal. Crystal themed enemies (MM2, 77. MM2, 116. Faerun, 53).

Fallport: Harbor. Serial Killer, Sea Hag (MM, 144, CR 4)

Wildhill: Harbor. Hook Horror (MM2, 126, CR 6) threat, later kill off the town after the part leaves.

Saltland: Harbor. Lurking Strangler (MM3) are pets that uprise later on.

Timbermoor: Town. Forest has evil fey (MM3).

Baypond: Harbor. Meenlock (MM2, 146) are in the caverns under the port.

Ironmeadow: City. Buildings made of iron/steel, metal constructs are a common place.

Ghostmeadow: Town. Abandoned town filled of ghost and other undead.

Dirtshire: Town. Brain in a Jar (Libris, 90, CR 4).

Glimmer Harbor: Harbor. Hidden Yuan-Ti MM and MM4) cult.

Boneden: Harbor. Giant herd.

Bonehelm: City. Filled of undead.

Ragewick: Town. Git races (MM, 127/MM4) are under a spell. They kill each other once they’re free.

Fallshade: Town. Town full of were bears and other non-evil were-beasts.

Basihrale: Town. Cannibal tribe.

Shadowport: Harbor. Nothing special.

Sunmoor: Harbor. Townsfolk are under the control of an Aboleth.

Islands:

1: Demonhive (MM4).

2: Howler Wasp (MM4).

3: Old necromancer that is tired.

4:

5:

6:

7:

[Meanlucario]

I also have a few things in mind:

Night last for 36 hours, instead of the usual 12, and day the usual 12.

Taint is a thing, but just affects your physical appearance and body, and will cause you to raise as an undead. It doesn't stop people from fearing taint, or making things up about it out of fear, though.

I'm making them start as NPC/Generic classes from the DM Guide/Unearthed Arcana.

Encounters a far too powerful monster early on, and said monster (Greater Barghest, P.23 Monster Manual) will leave, finding them “boring.” Barghst goes to destroy their village.

[The Eye]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSKtTBjSBg0

[ExLibrisMortis]

Night last for 36 hours, instead of the usual 12, and day the usual 12.
You could make this the sign of an elder evil (plus the taint). Start the campaign up nice and friendly-like, and slowly ramp up the duration of the night. The party goes into the wild for a week or two, comes back to the city, and finds the local clock chiming noon in the morning (I don't think many adventurers have watches, so they wouldn't notice a slow drift). Clerics preparing spells find that something feels a off--clerics usually prepare spells every 24h at dawn or dusk, and there is a mismatch. Maybe the elder evil interferes with divine casting at the same time, making clerics worry all over the place. The party doesn't know what's going on, really, but without cleric heals/buffs, those undead are getting nastier, and... well, that's where your taint comes in.

Elder Evils in general is pretty nice for horror, I think, because it has the slow crescendo to the apocalyptic final as basic assumption. By manipulating the trend, and especially the ending (happy/world saved, happy/world destroyed, sad/world saved, sad/world destroyed) you can get different types of horror. Or maybe you bypass the final entirely, and let NPCs handle the high-level encounters, with the PCs only occasionally hearing rumours about the fate of the world while they deal with the fallout at a smaller scale.

[Rising Phoenix]

The 'problem' with most of your encounters is that they have stats. AKA they can be killed. True horror cannot be killed and I have found that these to be the most effective when rping in a tabletop.

The PCs can fight mundane horrors with stats, but ultimately their actions are insignificant, for they are mere specs against the majesty of the cosmos which they cannot hope to understand.

Lastly, humans are the most terrible monsters of the lot.

[ZamielVanWeber]

Night last for 36 hours, instead of the usual 12, and day the usual 12.
This is not really scary TBH. DnD has a ton of races that have ways of dealing with darkness. What do you hope to accomplish?


Taint is a thing, but just affects your physical appearance and body, and will cause you to raise as an undead. It doesn't stop people from fearing taint, or making things up about it out of fear, though.
This is better. Battles having hard to negate downsides means that your players will be more nervous about them.


I'm making them start as NPC/Generic classes from the DM Guide/Unearthed Arcana.
Why NPC classes? Weakness is not scare it is frustrating. Failing because you are a warrior with literally no class features does not engender fear because you had no options anyways. As long as you can deal with divination and knowledge checks you should be alright (the unknown is scary after all)


Encounters a far too powerful monster early on, and said monster (Greater Barghest, P.23 Monster Manual) will leave, finding them “boring.” Barghst goes to destroy their village.
Seen monster tend to be less scary no matter how powerful they are. Terrifying enemies are the ones that rarely show themselves and are poorly seen when they do. An vinisible stalker/belker combo (like a belker with natural invisibiltiy). It kills only at night using its smoke claws ability. The PCS survive through sheer dumb luck.

[Meanlucario]

You could make this the sign of an elder evil (plus the taint). Start the campaign up nice and friendly-like, and slowly ramp up the duration of the night. The party goes into the wild for a week or two, comes back to the city, and finds the local clock chiming noon in the morning (I don't think many adventurers have watches, so they wouldn't notice a slow drift). Clerics preparing spells find that something feels a off--clerics usually prepare spells every 24h at dawn or dusk, and there is a mismatch. Maybe the elder evil interferes with divine casting at the same time, making clerics worry all over the place. The party doesn't know what's going on, really, but without cleric heals/buffs, those undead are getting nastier, and... well, that's where your taint comes in.

Elder Evils in general is pretty nice for horror, I think, because it has the slow crescendo to the apocalyptic final as basic assumption. By manipulating the trend, and especially the ending (happy/world saved, happy/world destroyed, sad/world saved, sad/world destroyed) you can get different types of horror. Or maybe you bypass the final entirely, and let NPCs handle the high-level encounters, with the PCs only occasionally hearing rumours about the fate of the world while they deal with the fallout at a smaller scale.

I plan on the day-night thing being a thing for centuries, to the point of everyone having low-light vision to a degree (some races better than others), so I likely won't go that route. I didn't know about Elder Evils, though. I'll look into that for ideas of what lurks in the tainted lands.

[Meanlucario]

This is not really scary TBH. DnD has a ton of races that have ways of dealing with darkness. What do you hope to accomplish?


This is better. Battles having hard to negate downsides means that your players will be more nervous about them.


Why NPC classes? Weakness is not scare it is frustrating. Failing because you are a warrior with literally no class features does not engender fear because you had no options anyways. As long as you can deal with divination and knowledge checks you should be alright (the unknown is scary after all)


Seen monster tend to be less scary no matter how powerful they are. Terrifying enemies are the ones that rarely show themselves and are poorly seen when they do. An vinisible stalker/belker combo (like a belker with natural invisibiltiy). It kills only at night using its smoke claws ability. The PCS survive through sheer dumb luck.

1. It gives me more of an opportunity to use the dark to my advantage. low-light isn't perfect, and it doesn't work in situations where there is no light, giving me an opertunity for them to become nervous.

2. I have plans to have them be mislead about taint, as well as NPCs to also be tainted, plus a town that can prevent the undead part of it, but isn't safe if that's removed for some reason...

3. They're starting out as normal villagers that lose their home. Once they level up, I'll have them replace their current class with a class of their choice, so a 1st level Warrior becomes a 2rd level Fighter, for example. It would be weird for a small town to have bards and monks, especially in a world where the roads are less save than normal campaigns.

[Blackhawk748]

Lastly, humans are the most terrible monsters of the lot.

Please don't do this. That trope is so over played and stale at this point that I yawn instead of feel any tension. You have monsters, make them monstrous.

To that end, take a read through Heroes of Horror (they nail the atmospherics) and Lord's off Madness (for a look into a monsters mind)

[Thelonius monk]

Heroes of Horror is an amazing resource, use all of it. You can also use Book of Vile Darkness & Lords of Madness. I love aberrations in this style of campaign, but undead can work as well if you want a slightly more traditional horror.

[Meanlucario]

Looking into Elder Evils, I think that, while not have them appear (the party will never to the point where they can face them, and it's too easy to use Cthulhu as a monster and lose the power he had by giving him hit points), I do plan on using them. Leviathan will have a temple/shrine on the 4th small island, and it will have worshipper on it, even though that Leviathan itself is dead. The snake people will keep on trying to summon Sertrous, but never learn that he's near dead, tormented by the very beings he planned to overthrow and rule. Ragnorra and The Worm, while alive, are fighting in another plane unaware (and not caring) that their temples in the world of Doz are spreading taint (both their temples are in the tainted land, and are what's causing it) I'm more interested in having people do these things by choice instead of being controlled, since it's not as fun when a will save is all you need to not be evil.


Please don't do this. That trope is so over played and stale at this point that I yawn instead of feel any tension. You have monsters, make them monstrous.

To that end, take a read through Heroes of Horror (they nail the atmospherics) and Lord's off Madness (for a look into a monsters mind)


Heroes of Horror is an amazing resource, use all of it. You can also use Book of Vile Darkness & Lords of Madness. I love aberrations in this style of campaign, but undead can work as well if you want a slightly more traditional horror.

I do plan on dabbling into humans as monstrous, though it will mostly be one village and knight templar, the latter doing what they think is right to free the world from. Heroes of Horror is what inspired me to do this, so I'm using it as well as I can. Vile Darkness and Madness I've heard before, but never looked into, nor have a physical or digital copy of. I also plan on using aberrations, though undead are my favorite, so there will likely a lot of them. Can't beat the classics.