How do you run your horror games, if you do at all? I find it difficult to set the mood of an overwhelming, everpresent, insurmountable threat, and I'm having a hard time coming up with potential homebrew rules which might give me a way to enforce the idea of dread mechanically.
For reference, I haven't played CoC but I have played a couple of DG games and I dont find the sanity system to really have the effect I'm going for since they tend to lean more towards the idea of madness out of fear of cosmic threats, not necessarily mundane ones (like the tension of a looming Nuclear war, for example)
>inb4 HYTNPD&D
System is Genesys, and before someone suggests the fear rules in the main book they have the same issue as the DG one.
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Idea 1: Make PCs into diabetics, then have the only sources of healing be food but over each game session or when the old God finishes a painting, the options of food start transforming into cupcakes.
The PCs suffer due to diabetes related ailments or suffer because of lost health. Everyone else doesn’t care about their plight, they just eat what’s sweet, maybe the PCs too.
When everything is sugar, everything is poison.
Maybe change some conditions here into things other than diabetes if you like.
>t. overweight autismo on an inhaler
>How do you run your horror games, if you do at all?
I don't. I tried in the past but it was too much of a hassle.
Numbers on a piece of paper aren't going to solve your problem. You need to take sound, lighting, pace, descriptions, setting and your players own fears into account, that will get you 90% of the way there. At that point you could play with no rules and still scare the players. The Alien RPG has the Stress and Panic system if you want some food for thought.
I've never ran a horror game, but I did apparently make a few sessions of a particular campaign really spooky, so this example might be a good lesson:
The moon Kryschal, orbiting a gas giant in the outer reaches of the solar system, had a science facility where people would study the cryovolcanos (liquid nitrogen geisers essentially) and unbeknownst to the players at first, ancient alien ruins beneath the ice. The facility went dark during a strong icestorm, so the players are sent to check up on the scientists and help with repairs if need be. The find the facility partially frozen over with extensive damage from the previous storm, with another swiftly approaching. Being outside when it hits is a 100% chance of death, so they need to find survivors and patch the place up quick to leave. However, they discover no corpses, since the scientists had been infected by alien nanomachines. I call them ferrovamps, since the nanomachines look like ferofluid and the host bodies drink blood to collect genetic samples. Super strong and very cunning hivemind hunting tactics. They liked to tear holes in the infrastructure and climb in the walls, floors, and cielings. Dealing with them cost the party invaluable time, so they had to repair the place the best they could to last the storm. I pulled that classic scene of an npc being pulled up by the head & shoulders into the ceiling while everone else fired their weapons all over in a panic. This demonstrated they weren't safe anywhere since they could just tear through metal walls. Everyone was on edge and got especially spooked when that same dead npc came back as one of them and spoke to the party. I really want to run that game again, it was fun.
Why would you want to play horror games?
More important thing:
Horror and fear are different things.
Study the cinematography of great horror movies, such as Friday the 13th part 2, The Thing 1982, Nightmare on elm street 1, and The Abominable Doctor Phibes. Horror can't be expressed logically, it is a thing that is felt, then thought about later, so try instead to place a vague cue towards unease and general malaise somwhere within 1 out of every 5 to 10 sentences of your storytelling. Study the sets of the expressionist horror film greats of the 1920s. Place very subtle clues throughout all settings that something is most definitely terribly wrong, but be very unclear about what is actually wrong, or if the PC's might simply -believe- something is wrong.
>study visual media for methods to employ in non-visual media
Brilliant!
The description of art is essential, you braindead simp. Get out fatty asthmatty, no one likes you.
You don't play games
It isn't anyone else's fault you lack the skill to describe things based on inspiration taken from visual media, or the ability to set an atmosphere or mood influenced by one you experienced while watching a film. Horror films can be as informative as horror literature for a DM trying to inject that kind of thing into their game, so long as they are able to translate it to spoken or written word as they run the game.
>Horror films can be as informative as horror literature
This is what you get when parents don't read to their kids
>this guy can't visualize the apple
lmao at ur "brain"
All about atmosphere and choice of description. My friend is great at it, Though If your dm is a big Australian bloke like he is, who can produce a scarily accurate little girl giggle on command like he can, you're good.
If your group is a bunch of memesters then not even a good dm who seemingly shot out of the room into a pile of old weird tales magazines can make q game have a sense of dread
So, in general, the basic rules for creating "gothic horror" is to start by creating a situation in which your characters feel trapped and isolated then you introduce a growing threat to their safety then show them faint glimmers of hope to pursue, some of which will fail complete with the implication that they may have made their situation worse. That's the actual magic formula.
You can definitely make it more effective through atmosphere but whether the setting is a haunted house or a disabled space ship or a perfectly normal hospital psyche ward, the formula to employ remains the same.
underrated post. I didn't get the trapped thing until I started watching Dark Shadows and noticed that Liz never left the house.
I don't run horror, I just have horror stuff happen in non horror campaigns.
My players have told me it's a happy fun comedic campaign with occasionally a terrible nightmare circumstance and then it's all fine again.
I also find this the optimally effective overall style
I'm glad other people can use this.
I am actually trying to do an OVERTLY horror game, and I am not at all certain it will go as well as my other ones.
Read Domains of Dread, the 2e Ravenloft hardcover
There's a game called Dread
>How do you run your horror games, if you do at all?
The first and single most important thing about horror RPG games is that your players have to buy it. If they're not into it, the game is doomed to be ruined. Even a single player can derail a session.
Make sure everyone around the table wants to play a horror game or session.
I think I'm in a similar boat. I have an idea for a game where the players are in a hostel/texas chainsaw massacre sort of situation on a farm in the middle of nowhere. My main concerns are the proper tone coming across and visuals, because I mostly play theater of the mind, so I don't know if most other people would be willing to play that or I would have to put something together that I fear may subtract from the experience
I use pre-7th edition CoC.
No advantage dice. No Luck points to help out. No pushing rolls. No fudging rolls.
You got one chance and that's it.
Helps a lot with the mood. When the players have to do something risky, they feel it more.
When they can't find info on a threat, it makes everything more dangerous.
It's very simple, only requires you to do a simple thing mechanically and it works better than anything else to set the mood in my experience as a Keeper.
Since it isn't D&D, it's not the same feel as if you did this in a dungeon. You would just die. It's a horror game where the players decide what risk they will take and why. But even non-risky actions can be risky if the players don't know enough about what is going on. So players doing nothing are as much at risk as the ones acting like the idiots in horror movies.
I always push this character, but I think she represents the feeling you are trying to describe.
The problem with D&D & dread is the certainty of an afterlife. Why would a paladin fear death? He is going to be with his goddess and promised a pleasant afterlife.
This character I specifically designed to combat this comfortability. With her gauntlets, she can either damn your soul to the Lower Planes where you will become a fiend or your soul converted into fiendish quintessence or you will become a ghoul under her command. Either way, your soul and personality (sense of self) itself is fricked.
Utilize monsters which provide gruesome fates: daemons who desire to consume the players souls, spawn-making undead who wish to turn the players into one of them, quintessevores which eat the personality and individuality of their victims' souls bit by bit, drow slavers who wish to turn the players into Fleshwarped abominations, the minds of one of the players slowly wasting away due to the appetite of a Thought Eater, a Wendigo's psychosis which whittles away at the players' sanities. Get creative!
Also check out Pathfinder 1e's Horror Adventures as it also has some interesting ways of going about this: specifically the Corruption mechanics and the diseases sections.
You need the right players and in my experience players would rather jerk themselves off trying to act like badasses all day.
Find things the players don't like irl then add it to the game somehow.