Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 144 - Types of Horror

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

Welcome to Horror Month at the Taking 20 Podcast!  All month we will be talking about scary/spooky topics to hopefully make your RPGs even better.  This week, I talk about some of the major types of horror and confess what makes my hackles sit up and turn red. #DungeonsandDragons #DnD #Pathfinder #DMTips Resources None.  Just the ramblings of an old, insane DM.

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. But what if you're not a connoisseur of scary TV shows, movies, but you'd like to run an adventure that's a little scary? Well, my friend, you are in the right place. Thank you everyone for tuning in to episode 144 of the Taking20 Podcast. This week, talking about types of horror you can add to your game. I'd like to thank this week's sponsor, cooking. When it comes to mixing your ingredients, sometimes you just have to take a whisk. Do you like this podcast?

If so, I am so very glad that you do. There's a lot of hard work that goes into each episode, and I don't have a staff. I mean, it's all me, baby. I'm responsible for topic brainstorming, episode research, writing, recording, editing, publishing, and looking this damn good doing it. It takes a lot of time to put out each episode, and as you can hear, I never make mistakes while I'm doing it. If you do have a little bit of money to donate, I would greatly appreciate any donation you'd be

willing to give at ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast. Donations help keep this podcast alive, so please consider giving them if you can. Welcome to Horror Month here at the Taking20 Podcast. I mentioned how much I love running horror adventures back in episode 44, I think. In that episode, I talked about playing on the fear of the unknown and the unexplained, and things only certain characters can see, and generally playing on character fears. Check out that episode for more details for generally how to run a horror adventure. It's now October, when the weather will hopefully start turning colder, and we'll start seeing scary movies in the theater and on streaming

and I start getting my annual itch caused by that one time I went overseas and met... She was really something and I'll never forget her. Well, that's... you know what, never mind. I meant to say that I start getting the desire to run scary adventures every year by October. Yeah, just ignore all that other stuff about how I... Yeah. But what if you're not a connoisseur of scary TV shows, movies, but you'd like to run an adventure that's a little scary? Well, my friend, you are in the right place. This week and for the next four weeks, I'm going to talk about different types of scary topics that

you can bring to the table. And before I get into it, there is a major caveat that I want you to consider. Not all players like scary adventures. There's some players, maybe even most players, that like traditional RPG games. They're playing big damn heroes, and there's nothing they can't face. They like problems with straightforward solutions, like stick the sword in it to make it stop moving so much. By definition, scary adventures and situations can make players feel like their characters are not in control. And players may not like that. Listen, there are a ton of different genres of horror

and entire papers have been written on the subject. Don't think this possibly could be a comprehensive coverage of the topic in only 20 minutes or less. There's a lot of ways you can slice this. Get it? Because, you know, it's horror and sometimes killers wield knives and slicing is involved. Oh, what am I doing with my life? Because certain horror genres and situations can make people uncomfortable, even if they like scary stories, One of the things you need to do before you run out your first ghost, scary sound, or tentacles from beyond reality, is have a very frank conversation with your players about the type of game you want to run and whether they would enjoy being part of

it. So that's my first tip. Have this conversation with your players pre-session zero. That's before the players show up to find out about the campaign, to build characters, get them all mishmashed together, and set the stage for what's to come. Horror or scary adventures, by definition, play on character and maybe even player fears. Whether one-on-one or as a group, you need to have this conversation. Because one of the things you need to figure out is if there are any triggers that the players may have. Now, I know the word triggered has a lot of negative connotation, and that's not what I intended when I talk about triggers. What I mean by that term is that certain player experiences in their lives can make some situations uncomfortable for them. A player who's

experienced sexual trauma may feel uncomfortable with even alluding to a villain whose lieutenants commit rape or sexual assault, even if that happens quote-unquote off-screen. They may not even enjoy situations with sexual undertones like the stereotypical horny bard. Another player may have a phobia or some sort of fear of swarms of bugs. bugs. They're using an X card to let you know that they are uncomfortable, or telling you about it before or during session zero is something you need to absolutely respect as a hard limit. Now let's assume you have a group of players that want to play a scary adventure. I'm going to talk in this episode about five of the major type of horror adventures, and two smaller lesser- used genres that could be fun with the right group. So let's start with horror adventures that focus on paranormal adventures,

like tied to a specific area, for example. The classic example that we probably all know is the haunted house. Okay, it's not even cloudy outside, but all right. How many examples of haunted houses can you think of? Okay, House on Haunted Hill, Poltergeist, The Shining, Amityville Horror, The Conjuring, Beetlejuice, legends about the Winchester House in San Jose, California, and I'm just scratching the surface. But another example of paranormal focus location, if you don't want to have it in a house, would be a corrupted area, like a series of standing stones stones or stelae if you're into really cool words a haunted ship a haunted playground yeah i will admit if you want to watch the hair on the back of my neck stand up

do something involving hauntings and children Yeah, fuck everything about that. But while we're talking about scary places, what about like corrupted and twisted areas of nature where something just doesn't seem quite right or plants don't look right? I recently read about the, and I'm going to mispronounce this, the Hoia Basiu Forest in Romania. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, and I apologize to my Romanian friends out there. The pictures of the forest were full of inspiration for a scary adventure. Twisted trees, fog, stories of people coming out with rashes they can't unexplain, and nausea just by walking through the area.

Of course it's in Transylvania, so that just adds to the spookiness of it all. And finally, if we're talking about paranormal locations, don't forget extra planar creatures leaking into the natural world, like in the series Stranger Things. The world wound in Galarian where the veil is thin between the prime material plane and the abyss. I mean, think about any plane that would be inhospitable to life on the prime material plane, and maybe aspects of that plane are bleeding through. Like there's an old junkyard that's somehow close to the elemental plane of water. When people spend more than a few minutes there, they get the feeling they're drowning, even though they're nowhere near water.

If you want to run an adventure where an area contains some elements of scary stories, you're going to have to find a way to keep the party there. How many times have you been reading a book or watching a movie where someone buys a house or goes to an abandoned factory or decides to sleep overnight in a graveyard and have their first intimate encounter on their mother's grave, like Mary Shelley supposedly did before the latter went on to write Frankenstein? Where the hell is that lightning coming from? That is so weird. You need a reason why the PCs don't just run and get help. It's not a scary story if the PCs can

dial 911 or 999 and have the police and 25 deputies outside within two minutes. It's not scary if the PCs can run out the front door and not look back. It's not scary if the PCs can run out the front door and not look back. It's not scary if the PCs can teleport away to another town or continent or plane of existence and just be safe. And it's not scary if the PCs can send a message to a remote source of help and have people just teleport in to assist. So that's tip number two. If you want a scary adventure, especially one that's based around an area, you need to keep the PCs from leaving immediately. There's a ton of ways to do it, both mundane and magical. The PCs could have a task to complete with a deadline that doesn't allow them to leave and come back later.

For example, spend the night in the haunted house and you get 200 gold or something similar. The area could also be remote with nothing close by that would give the PCs a place to retreat to. It's just this creepy-ass forest for miles and miles and miles around, and no matter how far you seem to walk, you seem to always come back to the same spots. The PCs could walk into the ground floor of a haunted house, and the floor gives way, dropping them a few stories underground, and they have no choice but to adventure their way through the stairs and up the floors to climb back to the exit. You can also limit magical travel as well. The place could seal itself shut for a period of time where the haunted area moves periodically so

it's on another plane of existence for some or all of the adventure. The area could even have a dimensional anchor or ward against magical transportation in or out. The point is, you have to have a way of keeping the PCs in the location, whether through mundane or magical means, and you've got the beginnings of what could be a great scary story. But another type of scary adventure you could run is one that's based on monster or creature horror. This is your classic. Zombies, vampires, werewolves, slimes, spiders, creature from the Black Lagoon, or any of another hundred monsters that are specific to RPGs, like gibbering mouther, morgues, and beholders. These are well-defined monsters with well-defined rules

on how to run them. To be honest, that's where running these types of adventures becomes difficult. There are stats for doppelgangers and beholders and werewolves, and because there are stats, the PCs can kill them. Obviously, you can make the creature so much higher level that the characters have zero shot against them. A vampire against a bunch of level 2 PCs, for example, would likely cause a TPK. Now, you know, scratch that. Vampires are like challenge level 13. It would definitely be a TPK. Now, you know, scratch that. Vampires are like challenge level 13. It would definitely be a TPK.

So you show and tell the players how tough the creature is and then let the chase commence. Try not to let the PCs stand toe-to-toe with a creature that will mop the floor with them and then be picking their innards out of their teeth with their own femurs. But you take that same level 13 vampire in a 5e campaign and drop it against a bunch of, I don't know, level 19 PCs? That vampire will be a speed bump made of dust in about two rounds. So an easily killable monster really isn't scary at all.

That's why you're going to have to make the monster scary, and you're going to need to do one of four things. One, make the monster a much higher level by customizing it or using a different monster. Two, homebrew that monster in some way and change it, like giving it ridiculous regeneration on its home turf, resistances, extra actions, and so forth. Give it the ability to counter the most common PC strength. Three, make it a monster without stats. Make it an undefeatable version of Cthulhu or the Wendigo or the Great Rust monster the size of a three-story building. Or 4. And hardest, make the monster something the players have never heard of before in or out of game.

It is hard to get one over on players and characters with monsters they never have heard of before, so you may need to go to obscure mythology to pull out a monster and then homebrew some stats for it. Now, one of my favorite that I love using is a creature called the Worm that Walks, which from a distance looks like a humanoid creature, but when you get closer, you realize the body is just made entirely of worms, or ants, or cockroaches, or bees, or whatever nightmarish scenario your evil DM mind can conjure. For the PCs to be scared of a monster,

that monster needs to seem like an unstoppable killer. In a long campaign, you can introduce those level 1 PCs to the level 14 baddie, and she looks like an unstoppable killer. But as the PCs advance in level, eventually they will be able to go toe-to-toe with this big bad and maybe even defeat her. But in a one-shot or short adventure, that is hard to do. I mean, scary things like slasher films and home invasion films usually depends on a feeling of helplessness, which goes against almost everything involved in most RPGs.

The characters are strong and capable, so you have to find a way to make them feel small without taking away the fun. It is a careful balance, but if your players buy in, it can be a scary bunch of fun. Now, one thing to play up with powerful monsters is that the PCs are better equipped to deal with these types of threats than your average commoner would be, even town guards. Now, imagine the fear the town would feel when they gear up these soldiers of good to take on the evil and the monsters just too overwhelming even for them. to take on the evil, and the monsters just too overwhelming even for them. They gave the PCs the best that they had, and the PCs went and they got scared anyway. It should be a huge oh shit moment for the entire town when they find out their heroes just ran back to town with their tails tucked between their legs, figuratively or literally. Now another type of horror game that you could run is a psychological horror game. Now these games focus on mental states and unstable, disturbed, maybe even

unexplainable events or even people. These games prey on phobias, like throwing spiders as a character with arachnophobia, or have elements of madness and paranoia where characters' minds may be rejecting reality. Now, these types of games are easier in role-play heavy games, where the players can role-play these phobias, fears, and manias and really buy into the character. A lot of games with psychological aspects will have or add a sanity mechanic. Most of your popular RPGs don't have these mechanics front and center, so either you need to find some sort of obscure optional rule, homebrew something, or find a third-party product that works the way you like. That's why I think this is honestly the hardest

type of horror to replicate at your gaming table. It requires good role-playing by all of your players who are willing to accept penalties for their characters because it makes sense in the moment that they happen to be having a mental break. Otherwise, you have to cobble on some sort of complicated rule set about characters keeping their sanity and they have to make certain roles and so forth, and so it can be very hard to get buy-in around your table. Now, the last type of horror I want to talk about is body horror, where the human or elf or orc or firbolg body undergoes abhorrent modifications that many times are out of the character's control. It's a fear that your body is no longer your own, and it plunges you into this uncanny valley. You're almost a human or a dwarf or a gnome, but something just isn't quite right. It could be caused by

misuse of technology or organic implantation, viruses, demonic or ghostly possessions. A DM friend and I were talking about these types of stories years ago, and I'll never forget the phrase that he used. Truly scary body horror involves aberrant math being done to the body. Now, what the heck am I talking about? The aberrant math is addition of things that shouldn't be there, like eyes on your shoulder or teeth in the middle of your stomach, or subtraction of things that are needed, like the jaw falling off or palms fusing to your forearms to gradually slowly become blades. Now, I'll stop there, but you can imagine how horrific multiplication and division can be as well. The good news is that there are already creatures

and mechanics baked into a lot of RPG systems that take advantage of body horror adventures. Mind flayers, reproduced by implanting tadpoles into your eyes and your own body gradually becomes a new mind flayer. Aboleths change your body physiology with their slime so that you can't breathe air anymore. As long as they keep coating you with that slime, then you will never be able to return to the life that you once had. Even the unlikely event that you were able to escape from these hugely intelligent aberrant monsters, you can't make it home again. Pathfinder 1E has a spell called Excruciating Deformation and a magic item called the Necrograph, which causes the wielder to make modifications to a body by adding undead parts to it.

Now, all of my DMs and players out there, if this sounds neat, it is. But you have to play body horror with a lot of caution. Out of all the types of genres of scary adventures and one-shots I've ever run, and by the way, it has to be more than a dozen at this point, body horror causes the most revulsion by players, so make sure they know what they're signing up for before you start describing villagers whose legs are, I don't know, painfully reversing themselves and their bodies are becoming more insect-like with weird misshapen eyes and painful exoskeletons

starting to extrude from the flesh of their backs. Now those of you that just shuddered at that thought, that's why you get player buy-in before you start. I briefly want to mention two smaller genres of horror that exist, but I don't really recommend running them around an RPG table without the exact right group for it. One, comedy horror. Think Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Shaun of the Dead, Army of Darkness, movies like that. Really need the right group to pull this off, and it is tough to balance comedy and scary around an RPG table. Humor is so subjective that combined with the uneasiness of horror, all I'd recommend is maybe insert a funny or ironic twist to the

adventure. Like the one person denying that people are turning into giant slimes gets turned into a giant slime in the middle of a speech saying there are no such things as giant slimes. That type of thing, that would be a good way to balance it. Anything more complicated than that really requires a lot of careful planning. Second type, gratuitous gore horror stories. Like movies like Saw and Hostel and anything involving cannibalism and that type of thing. I don't run gratuitous gore games at my table because it's not really my cup of tea. Over-the-top and detailed descriptions of torture and mutilation and horrific things done to the human body? Not what I enjoy at all.

My only tip for this genre is do not bring this to the table unless everybody at your table is foaming at the mouth to play a game like this. Then sure, go hog, whatever. But if one person is uncomfortable, you probably ought to back it down. Now my best and last tip for running horror adventures is that at their heart, horror adventures really come down to being able to build tension, and there's a lot of ways you can do that. Some of my favorite are hallucinations and selective revelations, like only one or a subset of characters see something, whether that's because of a mental effect or you split the party. Or maybe give the entire area a sense that something is not right, with evidence of that

slowly building over time. You start with an uneasy feeling before you start doing things like blood running down the walls. Give obvious signs of corruption or infection by a dark and sinister other, whatever that other is. Ghosts, viruses, mutations, turning what was once good into something that's not. mutations, turning what was once good into something that's not. Another thing you can do to build up that tension is a presence of things that should not be there. My favorite cheap gag, and it always works, have a completely empty room that lights are on, you can see every corner, and there's nothing there. But as soon as the lights go off, you see eyes staring back at you from multiple directions.

I mean, that quick snap a lot of time will make characters realize that they're not in Kansas anymore. Scary adventures are, in a lot of ways, the exact opposite of traditional RPG adventures. Whereas in traditional RPGs, the characters are badass killers wielding magic and technology to save the common folk, rescuing those that are lost and righting magic and technology to save the common folk, rescuing those that are lost and righting that which is wrong. Horror adventures a lot of times make the players and characters realize that they're not the biggest, baddest things on the planet, and no matter how powerful your forces of good are, there are other forces of evil out there that can turn you into putty. Communicate with your players before you ever start running a horror campaign,

build the tension right, select the genre right, and I bet you and your players will have fun doing it. If you have an idea for a topic, please send it in to me at feedback at taking20podcast.com. I'm always looking for good topic ideas, and I have some listener suggestions already lined up for November, so I'd love to add yours to the list. Tune in next week when I'll keep the spooky going by talking about the ethereal and astral planes. You know, where ghosts live and sometimes even angels fear to tread. But before I go, I once again want to thank this week's sponsor,

Cooking. If you're a wizard and in charge of making dinner tonight, the spell you probably want is Cast Iron Pan. This has been episode 144, Types of Horror to Add to Your Game. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2022.

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