Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 44 - Running a Horror Themed Game

Episode Date: October 25, 2020

It's almost Halloween in the U.S. and maybe you'd like to run a scary One Shot or Adventure.  How do you bring scary elements into your game?  What types of horror are there?  Jeremy waxes poetic about one of his favorite adventure types.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning into episode 44 of the Taking 20 podcast, how to run a horror-themed one-shot or adventure. This week's sponsor, the Transport Workers and Transportation Services. When you need to get there, quickly. A couple of announcements before we begin. Thank you to those of you who sent in questions for the episode with John 4. I'm really pleased about how it turned out. To those of you whose questions I didn't use, don't fear. I plan on having more of these types of episodes with more DMs in the future, so you'll likely hear your questions then. Second announcement, we're on the

YouTube now. You can tell I'm old because I called it the YouTube. Search for the Taking 20 podcast on YouTube and subscribe to us there. Don't forget to click that little notification bell. Episodes should come out every Sunday, just like the podcast. So far, I only have episodes 30 and later uploaded, but I'll gradually copy the backlog up to the site. I also want to give a major shout-out to another podcast I highly recommend. I've mentioned them before, but when I mentioned them,

I had a bad sinus infection, so I wanted to give them a shout-out they deserve. The Three Wise DMs. www.thenumber3wisedms.com They offer great advice from three different dungeon masters in a single podcast. Each episode is about an hour and a half long and covers a lot of the same topics that we cover here, but they cover it a lot more thoroughly. Big shout-out to Thorin, Tony, and Dave. I love your work. Please keep it up. Check them out. 3WiseDMs, wherever fine podcasts are sold. So on to the episode. It's almost Halloween here in the United States, and this is the time of year

when I get the urge to run a scary one-shot adventure. I didn't get to this month because of, well, COVID and all this other stuff, but I have big plans for next year's adventure and I'm already starting to design it. Horror adventures, or scary adventures in a lot of ways, are the opposite of traditional adventures. In most adventures, characters are badass heroes. They show up to save the day. They right every wrong. They save everyone who needs saving. They're a force for good that beats the evil into submission. They're exemplary for good that beats the evil into submission. Their exemplary heroes demonstrate to the NPCs that good does win in the end, and evil is dumb.

Horror adventures, however, that's horror, not horror adventures, that would be something different. Horror adventures are the exact opposite. The PCs are a force for good, but in a truly scary adventure, they realize just how big and bad evil can get. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take a step back. Horror or scary adventures is not just a single type of adventure or movie or story or genre or what have you. It's made up of many subgenres. There's the slasher slash gore subgenre, where you use blood, high body count, defilement of bodies to scare the protagonists. Think of movies like Saw. Really, the gore was there to surprise, shock, and effectively scare the audience that way. There's psychological horror,

where you build tension through atmosphere and exploitation of protagonists' fears. Believe it or not, going all the way back to something like Vertigo and North by Northwest plays on protagonist fears that way. There's a monster horror where it's a monster or series of monsters, a hive, a blob, the creature from the Black Lagoon, where the protagonists don't really know what it is and how to fight it. There are more examples of these than I can possibly name. Pick a monster feature and go with it. Another subgenre is the paranormal. Fear created by entities who aren't of this world.

Think of things like paranormal activity. The protagonists don't understand what they've really gotten themselves into, and it pulls back the curtain that the world isn't what they think it is. And there's another sub-genre, basically the horror comedy, where fear mixed with laughter to kind of break the tension. One of my favorite examples of this is Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. It's a great movie. It's partially comedy, partially scary. Love it. So how do you add horror and fear elements to an adventure? How do you run an adventure with a horror theme? Well, let's talk about some tips that I could give you. Number one,

adventuring parties tend to have certain strengths and consistently play to them. If you have a party with a really good ranger that does tremendous amount of damage with a bow, they're going to tend to fight from a distance. But if you want to give the players a sense of dread, if you want them to really fear what's around the corner, counter their strengths. Have them fight something where their favorite tactic doesn't work anymore. Bonus points if you don't take away the ability all at once. If you just snatch it away from them, the PCs sometimes get upset and they'll feel like you're cheating. Instead, slowly build up to countering the PC's abilities. Don't just say, oh, your light

spell doesn't work. Have it sputter and give off a weak light for a time without obvious explanation. Then as they get further into this haunted house, further into this mausoleum, further into this mummy's tomb, the light spell that they use begins to dim and fade and then goes out and won't recast. It won't reappear no matter how many times they cast the spell. Tie this buildup, tie this countering of the ability, tie this failure of a PC's ability to some sort of auditory clue of monster proximity or something similar, and now you're cooking with gas. Every time that the tentacle blob monster is close to the PCs, suddenly their light spells don't work.

Suddenly their healing spells fade and so forth. Another tip for running an adventure with a horror theme is fear of the unknown and unexplained. Add creepy effects that the PCs don't know what it is. Lights, sounds, clues left behind that hint at something worse. Far worse. Things one PC sees that the others don't, that will get their blood moving. It doesn't have to be ghosts or monsters or even

combat. Something as simple as a hole in the wall that only one PC can see really sets the PCs on edge. You roll a dice behind the screen and you say, Valar, you see a hole in the kitchen wall with light pouring through it. It illuminates the black and white tile floor of the darkened hallway. And Valar's player says, well, okay, I go look through it. Rest of the party, Valar just walked up to a blank dark wall and put his face against it. That makes them automatically start to question what they observe and what they see. A third thing that can make an adventure scary is the fear that things that they know to be true aren't. Gravity always points down. Light always chases away darkness.

Valar's mother was always a sweet pacifist who taught the cleric that helping others should be their first priority. So Valar looks through that hole in the wall that only he can see, and he sees his parents eating breakfast together. His father contentedly eats a bowl of cereal. Curiously, his mother is just sitting at the table watching his father eat. Suddenly, Velar's father clutches at his throat and obviously can't breathe. He looks wide-eyed at his bowl in front of him and then at his wife as he collapses to the floor, convulsing. The father hits the floor and you'd swear he's looking right at you, Valar. Suddenly, Valar's mother's face elongates into this misshapen gray snout. Multiple eyes appear all over the head of this vaguely humanoid mass. A long proboscis emerges where her mouth used to be

and attaches to your father's neck, draining him of something. Your long-lost mother's voice peels like a bell inside your head, Valar. Come feed my son. You need your strength. Fourth thing that you could do in a horror theme. Give the PCs a fear of running afoul of dark forces. It can be simple, like things moving with no obvious thing around it that actually caused it to move. Don't be afraid to use terrifying abilities and happenings that aren't defined in the rulebook that you have. Baddies can have forbidden or undocumented knowledge when they swear fealty to the creatures from beyond the veil, or the king in yellow, or the faceless demons of Zahn Toothag, or whatever serves as the dark and sinister forces in your universe.

This can manifest as new spells, abilities, mutations, or even advanced technology. If you can get one of your PCs to say, wait, what the hell was that? You're going down the right path. Dark forces need to appear to have powers that the PCs don't have and maybe have never even heard of. Think of horror scenes where things happen with no rational way of explaining it. The movie Sixth Sense, for example, there's a scene where the camera looks inside the kitchen and the kitchen looks normal. The camera turns into the hallway for two seconds and then spins back to the kitchen and every cabinet and every drawer is open with no noise or indication how it happened. So how do you bring stuff like that into play?

Well, the recently slain cultist dissolves into thousands of tiny spiders, which scurry away into cracks in the floor and walls. I've used that before and had one of my PCs go, Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, this is bad, I'm out. And the door slams behind them. So what should you do in a horror adventure? Tip number five, give PCs a fear of what they cannot see. Some monster movies capitalize on this, like The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, Bird Box, etc.

So if you never see the scary thing, why does this work? You see the aftermath, you see the tangential effects, but you never actually see the monster. Why would this be scary? Because the monster our mind comes up with is probably far worse than what could be put to film or what could be shown to players. The brain fills in details with whatever would be most scary for you.

So sometimes when you're showing off scary monsters, less is more. So another thing you could do in horror adventures. Number six, PCs fear the loss of power. And I'm not talking about electricity. I'm talking about the loss of being the big, strong heroes. Role-playing games and playing their characters are a power fantasy for a lot of players. Most campaigns exist to make PCs feel big, so you make them feel small. Have something really powerful attack them, and the PCs realize they're a no match and they are forced to run from it,

but then have something else destroy that creature like it's nothing. So the PCs are running from this giant insect-like thing that just devoured the head of one of the NPCs, and as they're running from it, a monster steps in behind it and squashes that big insect like a bug. Pardon the term. That will make the PCs say, oh shit, if anything will. Make the bad guys resistant or maybe even immune to their biggest weapons that they have in the arsenal. But if you do this, make sure you have an alternate method of disabling, distracting, or destroying the big bad creature. Otherwise, you're just throwing the PCs into an unwinnable situation. If you want to make PCs fear the loss of their own power, take away their

healing magic or make it work at half strength. Even lower level monsters become a real threat if the PCs can't just wash their wounds away with a couple of spells. Now the seventh thing I would mention is if you want to embrace the horror, if you want to make the PCs really feel fear, isolation is absolutely critical. Take away the PC's ability to leave, teleport home, fly away from trouble. Why do so many horror movies take place in remote cabins, faraway summer camps, remote islands, and other nightmare realms? Because it's not damn scary if the PCs can go to the neighbor's house and call for backup. In any horror adventure, you're going to have tension. There's the tension of PCs feeling nervous.

There's a tension of PCs worried that they are in unwinnable situations. Tension should be used in stages and steps. You ratchet it up slowly. You don't go too high or too hard too quickly when it comes to tension. There's an old fable, and I'll admit this is a horrible example, but stick with me for a minute. There's an old fable about boiling I'll admit this is a horrible example, but stick with me for a minute. There's an old fable about boiling a frog in tepid water. If you just drop a frog into boiling water, it just jumps out.

However, if you put the frog in tepid water and very slowly increase the heat, it won't know it's boiling until it's too late. The same should be true for tension. Crank it up slowly, give little hints and just suggestions that there may be something bad around the corner, but they always make it through. They're okay, and then you crank it up a little bit higher, and the threat's a little more real. Then you crank it up a little higher, and the threat is even higher than they expect. It's more than they may even be able to handle, and then you crank it up again. My advice in scary stories or scary adventures is to use gore sparingly.

It should be a shock. If you just throw gory scene after gory scene after gory scene, number one, the players will tune out. They will stop listening. They won't pay attention to the gore anymore or they may even be grossed out and leave your table. Even if you're running a gore horror game,

be judicious in your use of gory scenes. Don't make them random. Give them a reason for being there. The example I always think of is the movie Aliens. It's a Ridley Scott film that was a sequel to the original Alien movie. In Aliens, they go and they find all the colonists on this remote planet called, I think, LV-426, they find all the colonists from LV-426 attached to the walls in one area. And they find one of them alive who's begging them to kill her. And they're trying to save her, and they're basically trying to convince her that everything is going to be okay until the true horror of the situation reveals itself with an alien coming out of her chest.

horror of the situation reveals itself with an alien coming out of her chest. If they had done that over and over and over again within the Aliens movie, the gore would lose its shock value. It would lose its purpose. So gore should be used very judiciously, very carefully, even if you're doing gory scenes. Don't make it random. Give them a reason. That person was still alive attached to the wall to show the, in this case, the protagonist, just how deeply they were in over their head.

If you want it to make an impact, have the gore be a person who hired the PCs, someone that they know. Maybe it's a prominent NPC tied to a PC's backstory. If you want to have a horror adventure, set the mood. Use sound effects, but use them sparingly. Scary music is great, but use it less often than you think you need to. Now isn't the time to pull out that library of 143 eerie sound effects and just drop them all into the game. Now use the sound effects and use scary music when something new is introduced.

Shocking moments. Use them to help crank up the tension. Combat and dice can be used to remove the tension or add to it, either one. Dice can be used to remove the tension, because if players can fight it using their attack rolls and spells, in their minds, they have a chance of winning, right or wrong. It's the nature of the way RPGs work, and it's built into us as a species. Dice are rolling. That means there's a chance we can win. But combat and dice can be used to add to the tension as well. If you want to make your PCs a little bit paranoid and buy in a little bit to the tension,

crank up that fear just a little bit, ask them to make a saving throw outside of combat with no obvious cause. They're just walking down a hallway. I need you guys to make me a wisdom saving throw, a will saving throw, whatever your game system uses. What? Why? Just roll me some dice, please. It could even be nothing.

You could be making it up as you go, or it could be a slow insanity effect, some sort of weird mental effect that comes from being in this scary place. The most important thing, and this is what you need to communicate to your players before you ever run a scary or horror one-shot, the players have to buy in. Let them know you're running a scary adventure or campaign or one-shot or whatever you're running and ask them to get into character. Ask them to enjoy it. Immerse themselves in the situation.

Certain game systems are better built for horror campaigns, let's be honest. Call of Cthulhu built for horror adventures, built for this faceless existential dread that slowly creeps in until your character inevitably has to shoot herself. The World of Darkness game system is built for scary and horror events, to a lesser extent like Vampire the Masquerade is. But that doesn't mean you can't run a good scary adventure using other systems. In the past few years, I've used Pathfinder, Pathfinder 2E last year, and then 5E to run a good scary adventure. Scares and horror and dread and the ability to feel like you're a small thing in a much larger evil place

can be run regardless of what gaming system that you use. So whatever you use, take advantage of stress mechanics that may exist. And if they're not there, make them up. A Pathfinder 2 campaign that I'm in right now, we're going against a really powerful mummy lord, and the DM has created this very creative custom insanity subsystem. His logic was that this mummy lord, she's raised and undead of varying abilities and appearances, and this is stuff you've never seen before, and it's meant to prey upon your weak mortal mind.

I love it. It's great because all of our characters are slowly going batshit insane. I'm not going to say any more about it because I think the DM is eventually going to publish this adventure. We get saving throws, but it's, oh, it's so good. I cannot wait to see where this adventure ends and just how crazy my character is by the end of it. If your players are interested in placing their characters in a scary environment, if you'd like to try out some of those mental stress mechanics from your rule book, or you just want to try placing their characters in a scary environment, if you'd like to try out some of those mental stress mechanics from your rulebook, or you just want to try something different, run a scary one-shot. Throw some horror into the mix.

Done right, they can make the players feel like they're kids again. It's spooky movie night, and the parents aren't home, and all the lights are out. Done wrong? Well, hell, it still feels like an episode of Scooby-Doo, and those can be loads of fun as well. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening. Please check us out at www.taking20podcast.com to listen to some of our other episodes. I'd love to get your feedback. Please send that to me at feedback at taking20podcast.com. One last shout out to our sponsor, the Transport Workers and Transportation Services. When you're taking care of your own business and you don't know how to get to the finish line, think of TWATS. This has been Jeremy Shelley, and this has been episode 44, running a horror-themed

one-shotter adventure, and I hope that your next game is your scariest game.