Horror for dummies, or a horror guide by any other name.

[YPU]

I am working on a long lined horror campaign. (no idea if I actually might finish this project, but who knows.) anyhow, are there any good guide to writing horror adventures or horror in general. what would you advice me to use, what would you advice against? I’ve started by reading a lot of horror stories and seeing what makes them scary.
Ps, I think I will be running this game in iron heroes, allowing only the new spellcaster class as PC class, after they started to encounter the strange thingies. (perhaps make them go just a little bit insane, in trade for the spells.)

[Sstoopidtallkid]

Someone posted a story about a reduced Kobold sorcerer whose lair they had to invade a couple weeks back, but I can't find it. That was pretty good.

[Illiterate Scribe]

Look up Silver Claw Shift's description of her horror campaign (it had 'army of commoners' in the title, after the first bit of help she asked for). That was one of the best-run and described campaigns I've seen.

[XiaoTie]

Heroes of Horror has quite a few nice advices for running a horror campaign, but I don't have my copy with me now

But I guess that surprise is one of your main weapons when running a horror campaign.

Also, there was an awesome thread here where a Playground'eer told us her awesome horror campaign. I think her name was SilverClawShift, or something like that. That thread would help you, a lot.

Someone else might remember her correct name and help you even more


edit: Ninja'ed

[Illiterate Scribe]

My search skills are inhuman.

Anyway, the whole thing = excellent.

[YPU]

you are my hero, i screwd up my first search and then the 300 seconds thing.
so, is only the first post important or are there any others two? (just making sure i dont mis out on any of the awsome.)

[Illiterate Scribe]

I'm compiling the relevant details now. Damn, the campaign's good.

Here's some reading material to be getting on with -

The battle.

Help from an unexpected source.

The big reveal.

Claustrophobia.

Creepy idiosyncracies, from the Paladin no less.

Discontent.

Woah.

Fighting in the dark.

The Tome of Magic is really creepy.

The epic conclusion.

[YPU]

wow, you hereby have been declared my hero for the week.

[Metal Head]

I can't have much advice for you, because making up horror is something that comes naturally to me. However, I do have a little to tell you.

• Make things truly bizzare. What's going to scare your players more, a regular guy with an axe, or a guy with an axe that fires blood like a absurdly strong hose?
• Let something completely normal change without notice. Maybe the sun doesn't rise? Or people suddenly have 3 eyes. Yet have no one but the PCs notices the change. To the rest of the world it's just normal.
• Undead. Seriously, what has been around in horror stories longer than the dead rising up and killing people? Just don't have your regular zombies. Find the stats for some truly ****ed up undead.
• Let all hell break loose.

[The_Werebear]

The key to horror is feeling overwhelmed. I recently participated in a great horror game, a zombie apocalypse scenario. The PC's were all NPC classes. We started off with none of our supplies at a dinner party. We were always outnumbered at least 5 to 1, usually much worse. On top of that, we had to take care of civilians who wound up wandering in.

To make it worse, the zombie sickness was disease based, meaning you would catch it if you got bitten. It dealt crippling amounts of CON and INT damage, and anyone falling to it was as much a threat to anyone else. We had only one person who could fix it, an old healer who discovered the disease could be cut out with a knife, leading to truly horrible scenes where unsedated amputations and near guttings were the only way to save someone's life. The part where he had to operate on the innkeeper was the worst. The poor SOB had already had 4 of his 10 fingers bitten off at various points, and had taken multiple other bites to the torso and arms while off rescuing the druid and some of her wards. When he was opperated on, the DM described as the rest of us holding him down while the healer practically filleted him.


So, overwhelming odds against a terrifying monster, and make sure to give very good descriptions. Sound effects help too; the DM had a zombie moan track.

[Illiterate Scribe]

YPU:No big deal. It's as much in my interest to re-read it.

I'd personally go low-key horror, not constant splattery murder. Ages back, I ran an Inquisitor campaign, which really was horror - mostly of the Lynchian, psychological kind.

Vidya game analogy tiem!

There are two main type of horror - psychological, and visceral (no pun intended).

The latter is what most horror aims at - blood, gore, murder, zombies, horrendously immoral acts. It's surprisingly hard to use effectively; either you go overboard with it, or it seems out of place. Bioshock, for example, was viscerally horrific - when you are in Fort Frolic

Spoiler

Show

there are plaster statues everywhere, life size. Look closer and you'll see that there's blood leaking out of the joints - they're human corpses . This isn't helped by the fact that you're at the mercy of a mad artist, who wants you to brutally murder and then photograph the last three people that he employed in the same manner as you.

It comes from the gut, basically - staple horror fare.

The former type though, is possibly more effective, but even harder to pull off. Psychology, twisting with the players' heads, making them distrustful of things that they should trust and trusting of things that they shouldn't, and then evilly, agonisingly, revealing the depth of their folly to them.

Case in point - Portal.

Spoiler

Show

GLaDoS starts out as a lovely helper, and it's only gradually that you begin to realise that she's in fact been manipulating you the whole time - into incinerating possibly your only true ally - but you have to rely on her nonetheless.

However, the person who I think is best at horror is the film-maker David Lynch. If you're interested in running a psychological horror campaign, I recommend watching Inland Empire first. Involve your PCs in a theatrical production, but jar their certainty about what's real and what's just drama; never show your full hand; keep everything oppressively claustrophobic.



I now have an urge to re-watch eraserhead.

[Metal Head]

After thinking a bit, I decided that horror comes in to many forms to be fully described in a day, so I'm going to give short summaries of different types of horror that happened to pop into my head. No doubt theres many more.

Confusion: No one can tell what the hell is happening. Nothing makes sense. Everything is a seemingly unsolvable mystery.

Desperation: The odds against the players are great, and they're having a tough time winning. As Werebear showed, absolute desperation against things like overwhelming odds can be truly terrifying.

Bizzare: Anything that is just plain weird, bizzare, creepy, or unnerving can be horrific. Maybe arms are suddenly sprouting out of peoples' heads. You can't run out of ideas for this, because anything truly random or insane can be used.

Absolute Chaos: Everything has gone out of control. Any attempts to take control of the situation fails. All attempts to affect anything almost completely fail.

Disease: Think of how horrific the plague was in Europe. People would flee cities in hordes. Catching the plague was a terrible fate. You would bleed from many orifices, strange green puss filled blisters would rise on your skin. Make a disease with just as horrifying symptoms and that will horrify most

The Numbers: This involves more of a game mechanics method of instilling horror than just details. Have them fight a monster that is far more powerful, or even better, make a monster appear much stronger than they are, or just have an inferior monster appear as something that's much stronger. I once ran a game where the level 1 PCs encountered a series of murders where the victims had their brains eaten out. Naturally the players though that they were fighting a mindflayer, when it was actually a regular guy who liked brains.

For any of these to work, vivid descriptions are required. If you just say "The dead man has little black spots all over his skin that ooze." then you won't instill as much horror as you would when saying "The dead man appears to be normal, but suddenly you notice that his skin is covered in small black spots. It looks like hundreds of little ants are crawling all over him. A disgusting greenish ooze seeps slowly from the black spots. It smells truly foul, as if someone had mixed death, feces, and burning flesh all into one terrible mixture."

[YPU]

The former type though, is possibly more effective, but even harder to pull off. Psychology, twisting with the players' heads, making them distrustful of things that they should trust and trusting of things that they shouldn't, and then evilly, agonisingly, revealing the depth of their folly to them.

*pulls out over two thousand pages of psychology school books* now you see that is something I can do. Actually, I might just ask a few of my teachers for advice on this one.

[Paragon Badger]

Make the players weak. Helpless, even.

As someone said before, fighting in the dark. The party melee-masher won't enjoy that, especially if he succedes a listen against another member of the party (but that might be too mean. )

Some of those skill rolls take a bit longer than 6 seconds. If it's an especcially crucial activity, you could heighten the anxiety by forcing the party to fight off a horde of undefeatable enemies while the rogue is forced to spend two or three rounds picking a lock or somesuch. I'm thinking zombeez for that particular trick. :-P

Resident Evil 4 has a system where you get ammo only when you need it. In some parts of the game, I've had to fight enemies with only half-a-clip, and that half-a-clip supply is replenished only once every 1 or 2 enemies. If you're terrible at the game, (Like me. ) there might also be extended periods of time where you are in critical health. Very nerve-wracking.

If the players seem to grow accustomed to something, change it quickly. RE4 did that, too. After the first few levels, the 'standard' enemy would randomly sprout a vicious parasite every once in awhile.

Gwah, I just remembered playing Eternal Darkness... I never got over the fact that occasionally you'd hear a LOUD banging on the door you just came from. Eeep.

[hewhosaysfish]

Resident Evil 4 has a system where you get ammo only when you need it. In some parts of the game, I've had to fight enemies with only half-a-clip, and that half-a-clip supply is replenished only once every 1 or 2 enemies. If you're terrible at the game, (Like me. ) there might also be extended periods of time where you are in critical health. Very nerve-wracking.

A clever gimmick when implemented a computer game but it may seem contrived when a GM does it (not the fact that you're running out but the fact that you find more supplies just when you need them).

If the players seem to grow accustomed to something, change it quickly. RE4 did that, too. After the first few levels, the 'standard' enemy would randomly sprout a vicious parasite every once in awhile.

Apart from the thing they ran-like-blazes from the last time they encountered it. That should remain exactly the way it is.

Gwah, I just remembered playing Eternal Darkness... I never got over the fact that occasionally you'd hear a LOUD banging on the door you just came from. Eeep.

This is an important point. Not every bump on the should be a machete-killer, not every shadow in the cellar should be a tentacled demon. That turns suspense to nonsense. Sometimes it should just be nothing. Cat scares don't necessarily work outside of a visual medium, so don't go for sudden shock ; rather use something suspicious that the players will feel obliged/compelled to investigate but will turn out to be perfectly innocent (or unexplained but "probably perfectly innocent" is good too).

[YPU]

You know, to improve the visual effect of being overwhelmed I was planning on using warhammer 40K minis tyranids for some sort of creepy griply creature. Only I did not know what stats I should use for them. and now I read this campaign description illiterate linked, reed something about ‘kythons’ look up their stats and find out that they are axaclty what I need to stat tyranids, down to strange bio weapons and all. Wow, this is coming together greatly.

[Illiterate Scribe]

OK, they're from the BoVD, and I can tell you that they are, physical-score wise, a lot above humans, and mental score wise, slightly above them. They have shed-loads of natural armour, and a lot of attacks.

They have a chance of receiving one of the following -

• acid spitter
• bone shard cross bow (as used by that awesome archivist)
• boneblade
• extra armour
• mucus pod
• phase organ

So yeah, they're intelligent, independent, tyranids.

[YPU]

jup, i hapen to have BoVD at home right now, lend it from a friend. and indeed it would seem almost like the stats are the result of 'write up stats for this create' of nids. not entirely sure what models to use for what, but this is going to be great anyway.

[nerulean]

The scariest thing in the world is the unknown. Things that happen in the darkness, things that the PCs don't see, things that the PCs don't understand or only get pieces of: these are the things that terrify the average person. The most gruesome monster in a horror film will not scare anyone over the age of eight if you see it in full illumination and have enough time to see the whole thing, but if you see a sudden flash of it, barely lit so you can hardly see what it's made of, that is really creepy.

The familiar made unpredictable and dangerous is another real winner. The easiest way to do this in a non-visual thing like a game is through unexpected behaviour in a familiar thing, so maybe a trusted advisor betrays them, a gold dragon suddenly becomes a bloodthirsty savage, or the stone angels in the cemetery suddenly come to life and try to suck the life out of you. That last example comes from the Doctor Who episode Blink. That's very good use of scary. Watch it, if you can find it.

Do some research on Edmund Burke's idea of the sublime. Don't bother reading the whole thing because it is really heavy going, but find a decent summary. He mentions a lot of the really fundamental parts of invoking fear.