Horror

[buddy]

I'll start with my usual honesty: RPPR CoC games don't scare me.

That's no direct diss on Ross, Caleb, & crew - but, I didn't see the true horror as it crept towards the heroes.

I got into a debate with a player in my offline games about what Horror is. He thought certain Horror movies were Action films.

Like "Predator". Clearly, it's a Horror film (I said) & touched off a war. But, it is Horror;

1. A small group is required to investigate an entirely new terrain.

2. The group, or most of them, consider the investigation "routine" (begin PC Gloat).

3. Things go well, but unknown to the PCs, there's something else going on (bodies hanging from trees, Infrared stalking, ect.)

4. Once the investigation is done, the PCs just want to go home (aint happening).

5. Intro "monster".

That part in "Predator", when 'Billy' says ".... we're all gonna die." That's CLASSIC horror! Because they did (except Dutch).

Like Ripley, from the "Alien" series, 'Dutch' is the lone survivor from meeting the Great Horror who lives to tell the tale. Even Ripley can't escape the true horror of the aliens and dies in the last installment (Aliens 4 = nope).

I guess I just don't see that sequence in RPPR APs - the usual cinematic flow where the PCs are sent, handle a lesser foe, then have to face an unearthly monster. Maybe I'm caught in cycles.

This site has a strong grasp of Horror. What elements can I add to my game to make it truly horrific?

[Leviathan]

Did you listen to the Candle Cove and Slender man games? Different system, but Ross nailed the setting and pacing perfectly. Also, some games of Eclipse Phase have been very scary. Caleb's Preemptive Revenge scared the hell out of me during most of its playtime. Tom's amazing Divine Fire had me holding my breath a few times. The now kick-started Bryson Springs had me freaking out as well.

Listening to and role-playing horror is quite different from watching a horror film/series. You have to concentrate harder on putting yourself in the characters' places. You can get taken out of the atmosphere by the talking by the players out of the scene as well. For some people, table top horror just doesn't click. I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know, but whatever.

As far as adding to your games: Are your group's horror games bad? You didn't give an example, so it's hard to advice blindly. I guess I'll say this: Some groups aren't made for horror role-playing. You have to make sure that the players are aware that the game is supposed to be scary (srs role-playing, etc), and they are meant to role-play people who are afraid, and not the cool guys who can handle any situation we all love to dig out at times. Because I assume by your question, that your intention is to have a truly scary game for your players.

A lot of horror is about not knowing the intentions of whatever ass hole monster is coming after you, or at least not its full intentions. You can tell at times that the guys in the RPPR crew get what's going on if they are supplied with sufficient data, or at times just a peek at the monster, which could take them out of it for a bit. But like I said, its a bit hard to give advice when I don't know what you want advice on.

Also, Predator is totally an action film.

[QuickreleasePersonalitY]

i like clive barker's usage of horror:  you discover an alien reality impinging upon yours and the moment of horror is when you find out that your world is never, ever going to change back to normal

one of my favourite horror movies (even though it wasn't marketed as such) was the Last King of Scotland

my favourite radio play that still scares me is I Love a Mystery's "The Temple of the Vampires"

as to scaring your players:  find out what scares them :3

[Teapot]

Monster horror does not work as well in RPGs to me because I've played a bunch of D&D and it's full of monsters.

I think that cruelty and overreaching things work better for me. Know Evil is pretty good for that.

[Tim]

I honestly think it is hard to do horror with a group of players. You can hit creepy and unsettling but I am not sure you can get to horror and true scares. This is especially true as people will fall back on humor to break the tension. If you look at a movie like The Shining or Prince of Darkness (very different movies but both good examples of horror, at least I think so) the tension never really lets up. There maybe some comic moments but there is always the underlying tension that it is all heading to a terrible conclusion. So much of good horror requires isolation and/or alienation and when you are at a table with a group of your friends those two things are hard to get to even with committed role players.

For me I want to touch some buttons and see if I can disturb some people but it is as far as I end up going. I also personally shoot for very small scale horror in my games. The cosmic world ending horror does not interest me because I think it has no connection to peoples lives. If you can take something people have some knowledge or connection to I think you have a shot at hitting home.

Perhaps it is because I am not a great GM (I am a OK GM at best) or I have players who are not wanting to do that in our games but it is not something I have been able to pull off in the past.

[Teapot]

I've never gotten full on horror going. I can do good scares though.
Best one:
Phenomenon-X game, Thanksgiving day, most of the investigators have gone home for dinner with family (and a free SAN point). Except the Talent who's family is far away. She's at home drinking and cleaning her deagle (yay for PCs). They live in a haunted house (because the rent was real cheap) and the ghost there shot himself on Thanksgiving back in the 70s. However he was left handed so when he possess her, she breaks her nose by trying to drink the deagle, slams it down on the table making it go off blowing a hole in the far wall then calmly pours the vodka into her ear and breaking the glass when trying to pull a trigger.
Got the player real good.

Otherwise the game was full of jokes and such and even monsters didn't get the players to squirm at all.

[beowuuf]

I think helplessness is be a key component of horror, and gaming is all about player choice. Computer games can be nasty in terms of putting the character in nasty situations, because you can reload. RPGs require a more delicate touch because if you railroad a player or drop them in to a nasty unwinnable situation then it will detach the player.

So an RPG session needs to put the players in a dangerous situation, but either has to rely on only doing that if they make bad choices - which feels punishing for a recreational activity - or needs to always give them an out. Whereas any other horror fiction can have a single character or the entire group doomed from the start. Obviously if you can get players to buy in to the story, cool, but I doubt many want to have their ultimate choices negated right from the start.

Cthulhu manages to have it realised that monsters are simply beyond most people's ability to deal with them, and with the sanity mechanic has a method of slowly robbing a player of options in a controlled and agreed way. So a player can still be given the option for survival, while there is something valuable on the line to be slowly robbed in arbitrary ways

Still, even when a horror can get player buy in well, I think part of that is through metagame concerns, and it's hard for those to translate to listening to them. Amnd as said before, players can also seek to ease tensions with jokes, etc. Which is fine if they still have real concerns for their character underneath, but to listen to it does rob atmosphere to an external listener (or of course a player not under threat yet).


Interesting about predator, I suppose in a way it is a horror film mascquerading as an action film. The only trouble is that the action parts disguise it too well at the start, and at the end the horrific mystery resolves itself in to an understandable and beatable entity. The predator is simply a big game hunter and alien. And vulnerable. While tough to beat, it is beatable, but worse is very understandable and actual size. Indeed, it is so relateable we can recognise the 'code of honour; or idea of a challange when the predator strips the weapons off.

Consider The Thing, where the alien can actually speak and interact with the group for the bulk of the time. It manages to be truly horrific by becoming unimaginably grotesque and twisted on the reveal, and being something that you cannot communicate with nor bargain with nor understand the true purpose of when revealed. It is a death that is very difficult to avoid. Indeed, the film ends - even with the heros 'winning' - with the unsettling fear that they haven't. Simply because the entity is not easy to quantify, identify, and relate to. The predator is either dead or not dead

[Ezechiel357]

Creating a truly unsettling atmosphere is hard to do. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.
I had several experience with the same group and depending on the overall mood, it can works very well or goes more into the direction of slasher-comedy instead of really horror.

What worked so far:
- Unstoppable plague affecting the players. They have a countdown ticking inside themself. They were in Africa - Nairobi. They find out that a cult situated in some suburbs of Nairobi was summoning some powerful entity (a form of Death's avatar) and at the same time, it was spreading a plague around the center of summoning. So the PCs were thorn between trying to stop the summoning, hoping to find the nexus of the summoning before the plague killed them or they going far away to heal. As long as they were within the influence of the plague, it was incurable. Mechanically, everyday, they were loosing one hit point (in my game they only have 4 to 6). Getting the plague was not systematic, so there was still plenty of healthy people around them and it was not yet identified as an epidemic, but because they met the herald of death, they were all contaminated.

- Slow creepiness creeping. The story start when the PCs arrived in an abandonned town, with some traces of zombies presence (but weak). Then as they spent more time investigating, they discover some very disturbing things: a wall with a patch of flesh blister - small, but spreading. As night comes, strange howlings, shambling shapes in the dark, cars and vehicles not working anymore (we are trapped !). And somewhere quite far, a beam of light from the sky to a small location. The race is on to reach this place, a old, but peaceful cemetery, void of any undead and creepy things: it is under the protection and the blessing of the three Moirai, Atropos more specifically. This is were they discovered that they have been selected as agents of the Moirai to stop the Zombicalypse.... and they wake up when there car hit a bump on the road. They felt asleep in the back of their car and were pulled in a prophetic dreams by the Moirai.

What worked well in the second example was that the strange things appeared really slowly - a bit like in a lot of Stephen King book - everythings seems normal, but strange, alien elements are introduced one at a time until it becomes clearly a place of horrible corruption and decay - a vision of what the future could be if they were not acting.
Until the "bump on the road", my players really believed that they stumble on a place of complete corruption and decay, which was spreading.

[Boyos]

@buddy, have you had a chance to listen to dig to victory,  always my fave coc game to listen too. And of course the 3versions of divine fire are great. The night shift is more of the action style horror if that's what your looking for.

[Boyos]

So yeah as I listen to the long island game you can just feel the true horror poor Caleb is put threw! 

[Tim]

There is no greater horror than that experienced by the GM as the psychopath horde of PCs interact with his carefully constructed world.


"Wait you want to do what now? Burn down the orange grove."