Horror ideas:

posted February 24, 2003 04:29 AM to WotC board "What's a DM to do?" by Mole
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Building up fear is not something you can do with game mechanics alone. It
requires subtle DMing and metagaming. Usually as DM your efforts are
orientated towards the characters, for a horror campaign, you want to make
the players nervous.

The idea is to give the players enough information to feed their
imaginations, but not enough to understand the threat.


Have them make scry checks periodically.
Avoid straight fights.NPCs/monsters should flee, prefereably without
revealing what they are, rather than face the party.
Rumours of foes beyond their capabilities (e.g. if the real villain is a
mindflayer, have rumours of a powerful sorceror that also has hideous
tentacles instead of a face).
Require regular spot and listen rolls with very high DCs and if a player
makes one, describe something meaningless and mundane (the players will
generally spend time trying to work out the significance of it and often
come up with some excellent ideas that you can use later).
A solitary poisoned (high DC) arrow from the dark.
A tentacle through an arrow slit attacking the last PC to pass it, once and
then withdrawing (mindflayer, grell, chaosbeast etc?.
A friendly NPC could be magic jarred and used to spy on the party. A skilled
bunch of players should detect this trick, but they will be unsettled that
someone is watching them so closely.
Arcane and/or divine casters could experience nightmares that relate to the
matter at hand, exaggerating the threat they face without revealing much of
use.
Break the tension with a fight that appears to be an easy victory and the
players relax, then bring in the reinforcements that really stretch the
party.
If there are humerous/light-hearted moments, break them up with a request
for a spot check, or even a brief combat.
A very, very occaisional gross out scene e.g. an NPC they liked being found
flayed alive but not quite dead yet.
Out of game comments can unsettle players. E.g. before play commences, if
they are chatting about something powerful in the book of vile darkness,
smile knowingly and make a straight face as soon as someone spots your
smile. Or say "Oh yeah, I was reading that the other night, it ain't that
tough, you could handle it" and if they protest say "oops, sorry" and refuse
to comment further.

The key is subtly.
Whatever you do must be done sparingly.

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"You've had hours to discuss it, so what's the plan ?"
"Run in and react accordingly."