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Spacebatsy
2017-09-01, 03:50 AM
Hi guys!

I need inspiration for creepy adventures! My players have requested more horror and scary stuff and I really enjoy those type of sessions, but I need an inspirational push!

Couldn’t you tell me some of your creepiest adventures, plot-hooks, characters, items and/or themes?
I’m looking for disturbing and unnerving rather than gore and danger, but I’ve also gotten the constructive criticism of keeping my adventures less PG13, so go crazy!



I run Dark heresy (e.g. supernatural sci-fi investigation when it comes to setting) but fantasy elements are welcome too!

The things that’s worked really well in the past have been a conversion of H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Shadow over Innsmouth' with Genestealers instead of fishmen (they really enjoyed the “Lovecraftian feel” they said before knowing how right they were), a couple of haunted house settings and another literature homage where they entered the aftermath of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (though it most closely resembled the 1964 Vincent Price movie, one I recommend strongly if you too are looking for inspiration).


Thanks guys!

NRSASD
2017-09-01, 07:27 AM
If you haven't already, take a look at SilverClawShift's first campaign, which is stickied under the Notable Threads tag. it's D&D, but her DM did horror really well. Also, it's a really good read.

Strigon
2017-09-01, 08:00 AM
If you haven't already, take a look at SilverClawShift's first campaign, which is stickied under the Notable Threads tag. it's D&D, but her DM did horror really well. Also, it's a really good read.

I came here just to suggest that!
Other than that, I don't have any specific campaign, but one scene stuck with me.

We were in a cave, and we'd seen quite a variety of nasty things, when we came to a pond. The pond had an underwater tunnel, so we naturally investigated it. When we came out, our torches were wet, and we seemed to be in an antimagic field - so both our mundane and magical lighting were down. All but one of our party was blind without Darkvision.
So, when the inevitable listen checks came rolling, we were plenty paranoid. The ensuing attacks, despite coming from a fairly standard source, were terrifying. We couldn't retreat, as most of us couldn't find the entrance again. So we had to swim, while under attack from underwater, to the shoreline where we could regroup.

Hope that gives you a bit of inspiration!

GravityEmblem
2017-09-01, 09:35 AM
My DM seems to like creepy campaigns.

First campaign I ever played, there was a big plague, with lots of people dying. At the beginning, our characters were in a sewer, and immediately our INTERNAL ORGANS were SUCKED OUT OF OUR BODY. There were rivers filled with blood, corpses everywhere, and my character was only 15! Needless to say, I really wanted to do something else.

This is our current campaign: We were sent into the Underdark to investigate an abandoned fort. We came across mutant creatures that were not-so-subtly implied to be the physically and mentally warped former inhabitants of the fort. Not to mention the ominous alchemy journal, the strange haunting songs, and the monsters that look like human skeletons with a cheap imitation of skin around it. Yikes.

sengmeng
2017-09-01, 04:17 PM
My D&D campaign that just ended featured a country that was ripped from the planet and hurled through time and space and ended up as a second moon. In its isolation and close exposure to the insane goddess that lived on the primary moon, plus tens of thousands of years, the inhabitants went from human to two different types of loathsome mutants. The rulers were mind flayers (human sized Chthulhu spawn if you don't know) and they preyed on grimlocks (basically a CHUD). The grimlocks in turn were fed by consuming parts of zombified grimlocks that were chained to rows of pillars in a grotesque parody of farming. The pillars would send out a strong pulse of negative energy once per day, restoring the zombie grimlocks to full hitpoints, therefore regrowing whatever parts were chewed off. The entire mind flayer society was powered by negative energy, including keeping their "moon" in orbit, so the players teleported there, learned where the source of the negative energy was, and destroyed it, killing everyone.

Absol197
2017-09-01, 08:40 PM
I've got a couple! From the same campaign, even!

Both require a bit of setup, although the first not quite as much. So, the important thing to know regarding the first example is the character involved. Her name was Caeyre (Caeye, pronounced like "sigh," for short), and she was a Halfling ranger. This game was based in the arctic, and her animal companion was a huskie named Caina.

In Caeye's backstory, her small nomadic tribe encountered a strange medallion that was predicted to bring doom to the tribe. Caeye and her fellow tribesman, Jaetin, volunteered to try and dispose of it. In her backstory, the two fell into a river with their riding dogs. Jaetin actually died, but Caeye didn't know that.

It's also important to understand that Caeye and Caina LOVED each other. In our games, each character gets one "GM save," or one death by mechanics that is turned into a near-death. In a battle with a remhoraz, Caeye's player used her GM save to save her dog, and the two characters were well-developed and incredible friends.

Okay, setup complete! So, the horror part. The MacGuffin turned out to be an artifact for a certain religion, the evil priests found out that Caeye had it, and were after her. So they sent a night hag to haunt her, break her will, and try and lure her to their stronghold where they could kill her and take it back. Now, I could have just said, "Caeye, tonight when you're asleep you have horrible nightmares, and you take such-and-such ability damage and can't recover your daily abilities." But I didn't. Instead, when the party broke for camp, and they set their watches and hunkered down by the fire, I handed Caeye's player a piece of paper, and then just continued to GM the rest of the party as if nothing was going on.

What was on this paper? This was, including the nature of the damage she had taken:
In the dark of sleep, the dream begins. It begins slowly. A voice, one you recognize but can’t quite place, calls out of the darkness, desperate, pleading. “Caeye! Caeye!” The voice is weak, gasping, but the urgency and desperation is readily apparent. You feel yourself moving towards the voice, slowly and sluggishly. Soon, a cold blue light seems to grow, enveloping you as you approach.

You arrive at the voice just as it screams in terror and pain. A scene unfolds in front of you, a scene you watch as an ethereal presence, unable to move or interfere, unable to turn away. Only able to watch.

A large room, formed of ice, that is littered with machines whose only function could possibly be torture. Figures shrouded in dark cloaks huddle around a small halfling figure, implementing horrors upon him. As the scene crystalizes yet even more, you can see Jaetin, pinned to the icy wall by spears of black ice that emerge from the wall and pierce through his wrist. He struggles against his captors, calling you name over and over; “Caeye! Caeye!” Soon, poor Jaetin’s body is reduced to a mere skeleton with withered and frostbitten flesh hanging off in rags. But then, held by some unknown master, a thin rod of black ice moves towards him, and his body rejuvenates before your vision, and once again Jaetin is alive, sobbing, his tears freezing to his cheeks as the black robed figures begin again.

Suddenly, the dream shifts, and you are no longer just observing. You feel yourself staked to the icy wall, your clothes and protections stripped away and revealing you to the blistering cold. The dark cloaked figures surround you, plying steel and dark magics on you as well. You hear your screams mixing with Jaetin’s and those of other unseen figures in the hidden midsts of the chamber. The pain is unbearable, and soon you feel yourself fading away from this life, into one of blissful peace. However, you are dragged back, suddenly and violently, and the last thing you see before the torture begins again is that black icy rod drawing back from you, having brought you back, denying you your escape.

This scene repeats, the story the same but the details different, too many time for you to count. By the end, you can only feel absolute and utter defeat. But then things change again. You see an arena, a pit dug into the ice with high walls. Figures encircle the top, watching with eager bloodlust. Once again you are bound, a powerless observer. Kaina is in the arena, scared and trembling, his pleading whines filling the air, his tail tucked between his legs. A monster, something from your deepest nightmares, emerges into the arena and lunges towards Kaina. Your companion tries to make himself small, unobtrusive, hiding against the side of the wall. He is eviscerated by the creature, consumed almost whole. And then the icy rod appears, and Kaina is whole once again.

The scene changes, and Kaina is in a cage, a miserable kennel, being beaten, starved, and prodded. He recoils from his tormenters, whining and pleading for mercy that doesn’t come. The arena again, and another horrifying beast, one against which he has no hope of winning, assaults him. The kennel. The arena.

Then, you are back, pierced on the wall, being tortured yourself. Afterwards, you see Jaetin, bloody, bruised. He is hanging next to you. He is tired, weak, but he whispers to you. “Please Caeye, just give them what they want. They’ll let us go. It’ll all stop. Just give them what they want. Just give them what they want…” His words ring clearly. They are desperate, pleading, but the way he says it, it sounds like what he wants you to do is truly the simplest thing in the world…

Back to the arena. A change has overcome Kaina. He still is afraid, but now he fights. Desperately, hopelessly, but he fights. Then the dream returns to the kennel. The change is more profound, and now Kaina is growling and snarling at any approach, grown feral and wild, sinister after who knows how long of this desperate life. Back in the arena, a feral Kaina leaps at his monstrous foe, attacking savagely, but dying no less swiftly. But what you would recognize as your friend is no longer there. He is a monster himself, now, a snarling beast like so many you have slain without second thought on the snowy plains.

And then back to the wall, the torture. And every time you die, that sinister, black rod of ice is there, bringing you back. Interspersed in these grisly scenes, you see Jaetin, begging, pleading, “Just give them what they want, Caeye. They’ll let us go. Just give them what they want…”

Then, the arena again. But this time, you’re inside it. Kaina, rabid and feral, stalks the other side, luging at you with his teeth bared, and you are defenseless against him as he tears you apart. The black rod, whose wielder you never see, returns you again. Again, Jaetin, staked to the wall beside you, pleads, “Just give them what they want…”

Finally, a bleak, windswept peak appears, standing alone on a massive field of ice, a powerful blizzard whipping around it. You are traveling away from the mountain, and Jaetin’s desperate, simple plea fades into the distance…

You wake, drenched in sweat and heaving for breath…


A night hag is a creature of deepest horror, it knows what will scare you, it knows what would hurt you the most. It's the classic haunting spirit, don't make its nightmares a simply mechanical process, find the thing that the character afflicted would fear the most, and force them to live that dream every. Single. Night. Then, to put an end to the haunting, the characters need to go to the Ethereal Plane to kill the hag, and so make the ethereal plane spooky. Everything beyond 30 feet is obscured with thick, roiling fog. The things you can see are color-bleached, sounds on the Material are dulled and deadened, you need to strain to hear them. Sounds the characters make are also deadened, but the strained, half-hear cries of the dead are heard, echoing through the bizarre thought-scape. Make the alternate dimension, the land of ghosts, actually alternate, so the characters can't rely on their traditional tactics or even senses.


The second example was an entire "dungeon" that the party encountered later. And the dungeon had very few actual fights, it was a dungeon for the mind.
The major MacGuffin of this campaign was a cubic puzzle box that was a major artifact capable of controlling fear on a planet-wide scale. The party was collecting the pieces so it could finally be destroyed, but one of those pieces was deep in a forest, and the box's essence had leaked out over the millennia, making the forest infected with primal fear, and giving it an active malevolence all its own.

There were two main things going on in this forest. The first was that, occasionally, the party would come across...things. They started small, but became bigger, more frequent, and more dangerous as they ventured deeper into the forest. The things they encountered were objects, places, and events from their past, replayed or arranged such that the were forced to re-live or re-experience the things they were most afraid of, or most embarrassed of, or most preferred to keep secret.

For instance, the druid in the party had to re-live the death of his shambling mound companion to a tribe of fire-wielding goblins, still unable to save it despite having what appeared to be a second chance. Caeye, mentioned above, began to hear the strains of a childhood rhyme she was taught being sung through the trees (and then the rest of the party started to hear it, too; I even had the actual song on my computer, so I played it and slowly turned up the volume). The rhyme was about a group of children who are approached by a stranger in the snow, who asks them to take her back to the village, and turns out to be a snow monster who slaughters the entire tribe once inside the defenses. When the rhyme they were hearing reached its peak and suddenly cut out, a monster manifested straight from Caeye's childhood fear of that rhyme emerged. Caeye was the only one able to damage it, but she also experienced massive penalties because it was something MADE to scare her.

The party gnome, on the other hand, was immune to fear, so his biggest manifestation was the operating room where he and his mentor performed the mental reprogramming that the snow elf party member was slowly learning she had been the victim of, something he had desperately wanted to keep secret.


And, while these manifestations of the party's subconscious were going on, there was another mechanic I'd introduced. I had an IM open with each party member, and before the session started I'd come up with a chart of how much the rest of the party trusted the other members. As time passed, I rolled Will saves behind the screen for everybody (I used a program to do mass rolling for me). The DC started low, but increased every hour. As people started failing saves, they started to slowly and slowly get more fearful, more distrusting, more paranoid of their party members. I'd send them IMs telling them, "What do you REALLY know about Yenhand?" "Kalira is a thief, and a murderer. Don't turn you back, you never know when she'll snap..."

The messages got more and more extreme as the party got more distrustful, and their bonuses to the recurring saves got lower and lower the fewer party members they had to trust. By the time they got the center of the forest and fought the boss (a Colour out of Space), helped along by somme AMAZING roleplaying, they were at each other's throats, barely able to function as a party. They only got out because the wizard (the aforementioned fear mage who was immune to fear) and the druid had been able to mostly keep their center, and was able to nearly tie the rest of them up and drag them out. But the scars from that forest, both the secrets that had been uncovered, the traumas relived, and the paranoia and the things it had influenced the characters to say, linger and was a lasting impact on many of them for the rest of the game.

Which was entirely the point :smallsmile: .

Aneurin
2017-09-02, 03:23 PM
I ran Shattered Hope for my Only War group. It's an introductory module to DH1e, and it's not actually very good in terms of game-play (or internal logic, but never mind that for the moment).

What it is pretty good at is atmosphere. It's very horror-oriented, from creepy stuff oozing out of the walls, weird rooms full of corpses and so on. I managed to spook the players badly enough that they flat out refused to walk through a puddle, they were that certain that some sort of xeno-daemonic-thing was lurking in it to eat them.


I made a few changes, for a start the veteran guard regiment who'd faced down genestealers became a wussy PDF force with the morale of damp tissue paper, and dropped the random 14km deep hole the PCs could kill themselves in (I also recommend dropping a lot of the Fear tests it inflicts, since they're more frustrating than anything). And some context changes to make things work narratively, of course.

As far as the players are concerned, it all went off the rails when a happy-sounding person asked their characters if they were with the Inquisitor at the start of the session...



Of course, since you're running an actual Inquisitorial team of Acolytes just having someone be happy to see them should start getting your players twitching. It's never a good sign when people are pleased to see the Inquisition.

Spacebatsy
2017-09-05, 04:32 PM
If you haven't already, take a look at SilverClawShift's first campaign, which is stickied under the Notable Threads tag. it's D&D, but her DM did horror really well. Also, it's a really good read.

I'll definitely look into that!

Thanks mate



I came here just to suggest that!
Other than that, I don't have any specific campaign, but one scene stuck with me.

We were in a cave, and we'd seen quite a variety of nasty things, when we came to a pond. The pond had an underwater tunnel, so we naturally investigated it. When we came out, our torches were wet, and we seemed to be in an antimagic field - so both our mundane and magical lighting were down. All but one of our party was blind without Darkvision.
So, when the inevitable listen checks came rolling, we were plenty paranoid. The ensuing attacks, despite coming from a fairly standard source, were terrifying. We couldn't retreat, as most of us couldn't find the entrance again. So we had to swim, while under attack from underwater, to the shoreline where we could regroup.

Hope that gives you a bit of inspiration!


Never underestimate the power of blindness
Simple but effective!

My players have requested an adventure where they will be sort of stripped of their power (if I read between the lines) but just having it in an instance is rather genius, then they won’t be prepared :smallbiggrin:


My DM seems to like creepy campaigns.

First campaign I ever played, there was a big plague, with lots of people dying. At the beginning, our characters were in a sewer, and immediately our INTERNAL ORGANS were SUCKED OUT OF OUR BODY. There were rivers filled with blood, corpses everywhere, and my character was only 15! Needless to say, I really wanted to do something else.


Wait what? How did you survive that? XD



This is our current campaign: We were sent into the Underdark to investigate an abandoned fort. We came across mutant creatures that were not-so-subtly implied to be the physically and mentally warped former inhabitants of the fort. Not to mention the ominous alchemy journal, the strange haunting songs, and the monsters that look like human skeletons with a cheap imitation of skin around it. Yikes.

I've done something similar, but that about skeletons "pretending poorly" to look like humans, I like that, and it raises a lot of questions! :smallsmile:
Thanks for sharing



I've got a couple! From the same campaign, even!


This is awesome!
I like the time and effort you seem to put into making the characters background and personality influence the story!
I love the nightmare, and I love how you both implement ambience alongside game-mechanic tricks to achieve the sense of exposure in the players!
I’m not sure if there is such a thing as night hag explicitly, but I’m definitely adding something similar! And I love the focus you chose when describing the Ethereal Plane
Bravo sir/siress, and thank you for sharing!



I ran Shattered Hope for my Only War group. It's an introductory module to DH1e, and it's not actually very good in terms of game-play (or internal logic, but never mind that for the moment).

What it is pretty good at is atmosphere. It's very horror-oriented, from creepy stuff oozing out of the walls, weird rooms full of corpses and so on. I managed to spook the players badly enough that they flat out refused to walk through a puddle, they were that certain that some sort of xeno-daemonic-thing was lurking in it to eat them.


Oh! I did that one as one of my first sessions aswell! I had a nice soundmixer for all manners of creepy sounds, and it was rather effective :smallsmile:


As far as the players are concerned, it all went off the rails when a happy-sounding person asked their characters if they were with the Inquisitor at the start of the session...

Hahaha! Something similar happened when they decided out of nowhere to put their trust in the one guy controlling the whole thing! Even going so far as to offer an unarmed one-on-one meeting with him after coming clean... so he wouldent feel too "intimitated".




Of course, since you're running an actual Inquisitorial team of Acolytes just having someone be happy to see them should start getting your players twitching. It's never a good sign when people are pleased to see the Inquisition.

That is actually true! Good point

GravityEmblem
2017-09-05, 08:40 PM
The idea was that with no internal organs, we couldn't become infected. (I would rather have been a Paladin)

Chijinda
2017-09-06, 06:13 PM
So I have two examples, both from Dark Heresy.


Early on in one of my campaigns, our party had gained the backing of a minor noble family who allowed us to use their family grounds as a home base of sorts. One family member in particular was noted as picking up archaeology as a hobby, and we'd been using him to help us in our investigation. After we returned from an investigation one day, we found the home eerily silent. Nobody was there at all. We called, and looked around, but found nothing. Right up until we got to the study, where we found our archaeologist friend's internal organs decorating the walls, his body a shrivelled, screaming husk. We later found the rest of the family had been shoved into the kitchen oven. And on the security footage, we saw... nothing. More specifically, at the point the massacre happened the cameras glitched out. After this point, our party began to be hounded by an unseen force. A shadow, constantly lurking in the corners of our eyes, usually preceded by my Psyker suffering a feeling of extreme dread moments before it would appear (my GM soon determined Psyniscience would be his favorite PC Skill). We never knew what it was, where it came from, or how it found us, but it did, and whenever it did, the GM made it clear to us that our only option was to run.

The worst part about this "shadow" was that until near the end of that major arc, we couldn't link it to anything. It was just this nameless force terrorizing us as we attempted to solve what appeared to be a completely unrelated investigation, and it got to the point that every time our characters would be sitting in the dark, and the GM told me to roll a psyniscience test, we all got that sinking feeling in our guts.

--------

Although not as long term, the second example cropped up while our party was investigating a Space Hulk that had crashed on the planet. Our group had gotten separated by a fight with some scavengers earlier, and we were attempting to navigate the Hulk's labyrinthine passages to reunite. Around this time, one of the party members thought he might have taken a wrong turn and went to double back, only to discover that the completely lit corridor he had previously walked down had gone black. All the lights had gone out. As he stood there a moment, pondering what was going on, another set of lights in the hall behind him also went out, creeping towards him, and prompting him to GTFO of there. By the time we reunited, all of us had seen or experienced some weird ****, not just the lights, but the Psyker couldn't shake the feeling that we were being watched, and the Guardsman swore she'd seen something moving in the distance. We decided to get out of that Space Hulk, and come back with a better team, but found all of the passages we had previously used, had been sealed. Then we started finding the bodies, proving we were not the first to come here. The corpses of entire crews of Imperial Guardsmen started showing up as we delved deeper, and not merely their dead bodies, but their dead bodies strung up on display, in all manner of grotesque poses. We started hearing footsteps in the distance, and continued to find sealed doors as though we were being herded somewhere. Then we found a working vox communicator. My Psyker was pretty good with technology, so he tried to boost the signal to call in for help. He got static initially, followed by silence. And then followed by an otherworldly shriek of pure animalistic hatred on the other end, before the line went dead. FINALLY we found some surviving Guardsmen who told us that their experiences were similar. And THEN, they started getting picked off one by one, sometimes right behind us. One notable moment was when something tore through the floor and grabbed one of them by the legs, and wrenched him to his doom.

Ultimately, turned out the reason for the Space Hulk's crash was that it had been attacked and invaded by Night Lord Chaos Space Marines, and they'd been intentionally tormenting us to heighten our fear before killing us. Was probably among the tensest sessions we've ever run, especially after we managed to force them to reveal themselves, and then spent the remaining session running for our lives.

----

TL;DR: Our GM took the "Nothing is Scarier" trope and turned it up to 11. And then in the latter case STILL managed to make us freak out when we finally saw what was hunting us.

King of Nowhere
2017-09-07, 02:13 PM
Well, I sometimes run horror themes, even if I always mix them with a generous helping of surrealism and parody. Still, you could take inspiration from this, and you can easily remove the surreal/parody elements and make it work anyway

I had the players go to the infernal planes, a place so full of wild magic that it was twisted in a way that defies euclidean geometry. Going straight from one place to the other will never get you there, while the shortest route between two points consists of making a large detour while going in a sort of sinusoid. Sometimes you can just walk up a cliff, and sometimes it looks like you're on flat ground but you need to climb to go ahead. Because of how warped is the dimension, teleportation spells do not work, and planeshifting only works in a handful of places. This already removed most of the character's safety nets, and made them somewhat nervous. Then they reached the fields of killer watermelons.

They made a few steps into those fields of watermelons, then one of them flew upwards to see where they were going, and he saw only watermelons all the way around. He flew higher and higher, and he saw watermelons upwards too; he saw like he was inside a hollow sphere completely covered with watermelonss. They tried to dig into the ground, but after a few meters the ground caved in, revealing a perfectly identical hollow sphere filled with watermelons. The watermelons looked perfectly normal, but they moved when not looked at. They chopped down some watermelons, then they turned around, and the watermelons were still there. They chopped down a large area, they blinked, the watermelons were still there, as if they were never chopped. And whenever they turned around, they got closer and closer. Then they found a large watermelon with human arms and legs sprouting from it. They opened it, and it revealed a full human skeleton. They found more of those, and it became clear that watermelons could envolope a person and gradually turn his flesh into watermelon pulp. At this point the plakyers were getting pretty nervous. The only ways to get out of there were to make a very high knowledge check, or to make proper research before going to the lower planes, or to hire an npc with the skillset to find the direction. The party had managed to do all three, so they were never in real danger, but if they hadn't they would have really had no way out. I would have sent some npc to rescue them and they would have lost the quest reward.

I also got them through the fields of assassin zucchini, which were quite similar to the watermelons, except that their method of execution was to grow inside a victim's rectus and keep growing until the victim was ripped apart. Those fields were also stalked by the malevolent homicidal pineapple (of which I published the stats (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22267094&postcount=1227)), a gargantuan-sized pineapple plant who loves to capture humans, cut them into slices, and put them into cans, just like humans do to normal pineapples. It throws explosive pineapples that release a shrapnel of seeds that start growing into the wounds, ripping from the inside those unlucky enough to survive the initial blast. Furthermore, the malevolent homicidal pineapple is invisible from afar, it is protected against divination, and it can teleport at will on short distances. So there is no warning, it just pops into the middle of the party and starts the slaughter, as it is too strong for the party. To pass this threat, the party had to gather many damned souls (if souls get killed, they respawn. they still feel pain, though), so they could use them as decoys while they escaped the pineapple.

Now, some of the assassin zucchini found a way to reach the prime material plane. They grow cursed zucchini that cause people who eat them to want to eat more zucchini, and each one you eat gives you a -2 to future will saves against this effect. When you eat enough, you become a thrall under their control. They set up into a farming community specialized in zucchini, so they will not be noticed, and eventually turned most of the population. When they turned someone, the unfortunate victim was killed by a zucchini plant growing inside of him, using the human body as camouflage. Those horrid human-plant hybrids were near indistinguishable from regular humans, except that a spot check could reveal they had a slightly greener tinge. They sproted roots from their feet, and had to plant them into the ground eight hours a day to feed, but they could just pull them into their shoes otherwise. When exposed, they turned on the party, trying to kill everyone. There was also a boss monster - with zucchini sticking out from where its eyes should be - who had the whole plant-zucchini-in-your-butt-it-grows-you-explode ability. That one seriously threatened to kill two party members even after the fight was over, as it kept growing and dealing increasingly greater damage every round, and there were no ways to remove it without further hurting the victim, and the party was low in hp. Oh, and the assassin zucchini brought their planar warping with them, so the whole towm was dimensionally locked.

The players are still making exclamations of woe every time someone proposes them to eat zucchini.

Potatomade
2017-09-07, 06:42 PM
I ran a campaign a while back where the players were part of an arctic expedition. They got lost somewhere on the way, and started having disturbing dreams. At night, a rip in space time (we "creatively" called it the Dark Star, think of a solar eclipse) appeared overhead, making some of them lose time and start to act erratically. I intentionally didn't describe any particulars about the Dark Star's nature, and gave vague hints that it was semi-conscious, or that there was some conscious entity on the other side acting upon the party. Eventually they came across a hidden valley with a small collection of settlements, whose inhabitants were plagued by the Star. Lots of stuff culled from Ravenloft, all flavored as "corruption" from the Star. The party found out it was the result of a Wild Mage's experiment on negative energy gone horribly wrong.

Really, the only good idea was of an ever-present threat that the party can't directly fight. At best, the party could hide indoors, where they weren't directly exposed. And there was a clearly defined warning, kind of like a leitmotif for a serial killer. Tt would only come out at night, and whenever it did, there was an ominous low tone that would rise whenever it was "looking" directly at a party member. It had the effect of giving me a go-to phrase that would creep my players out: "You faintly hear a low, droning tone."

We were using 2e Ravenloft's horror checks. Good stuff there. Horror check every time they were directly exposed to the Dark Star, and a 5% chance of becoming an undead, with the Requiem rules for playing an undead and suffering alignment decay over time. Less good stuff there, but hey, we had fun.

Strangely enough, you can find some excellent horror-themed inspiration from some episodes of Jonny Quest (the 60's one). "The Invisible Monster," "Sea Haunt," and "Monster in the Monastery" are easily the best, if you can stomach the 60's era cultural insensitivity.

Lacco
2017-09-11, 06:30 AM
Long, long ago...

The party of 3 spent the night at local small village, and ventured into wilds. They find a barrow, enter it. Find few looters, kill the looters, enter the inner sanctum - the tomb.

A stone door, covered in runes. They open it.

The circular room, whose floor is also covered in runes, has only one specific feature. Throne, with a decaying, skeletal body - and large, golden medallion on its neck.

They enter the room, cut the head of the body and take the medallion.

And they spend the night at the village again.

They wake up as someone else. First one stands on a high tower, looking towards a storm that approaches. Second one enters, telling him it's time to leave.

OOC: I hand them their lines, and point at them when to speak the next line. It goes rather smoothly.

Third one awaits them already at the coach, urging them to go as fast as possible. The storm approaches - and it can be seen it's not natural storm. There is no wind, yet the clouds approach fast. Dark clouds, almost black.

Over the road they talk about if the first one is sure this is the only way, etc.

They enter the barrow, just in time - the first one sits on the throne, asks the others to leave immediately.

But the darkness is here, and it pours inside - and it's alive. They close the door in last moment...

...the PCs wake up in the tavern.

They talk about the shared dream, and decide to return the medallion. As they leave their room and go downstairs, the tavernkeeper - a chatty fellow they met when they stayed last time - is turned back to them. When he hears them, he turns around and... stares. But he has no face.

They leave the tavern quickly. Everybody they meet lacks face, but turns towards them and stares.

Soon, whole town just stands and glares, faceless.

They run towards the horses, and the mass of faceless people just follows, forming a (yes, you guessed it) storm cloud...

...they enter the barrow, and as they stand in front of it, they discuss who will stay there and if they should just close it.

One of them stays, to ensure everything is in order.

They close the door just as darkness pours inside...

...and they wake up in the tavern. The medallion is with them still.

They go downstairs, the tavernkeeper greets them with smile, asks if they slept well (he heard them scream)...

...the whole town is normal.

They quickly put the medallion back into the barrow. And stopped playing kickball with corpse heads.