How to start a horror campaign
Posted by Yax on July 26, 2007
I was browsing the D&D forums recently and someone was looking for hints on how to start a horror campaign.
How I would plan for the first game of a horror campaign
I guess the point of running a horror campaign is to scare the players. The atmosphere - where you play in RL, and the descriptions of the scenes in the game - and the kind of creatures they face will have an efffect on the success of the campaign.
This article could come in handy: How to run a successful first D&D game.
Create a bond between player and character
But what are the players scared of? Nothing - at least when you start the game they fear nothing. So what do you want them to be afraid of? You want them to fear for their characters well-being. But for them to feel and fear for their characters, they need to love them first.
So the first part of the plan is to make them love their characters. Dungeons & Dragons is all about the characters - especially the PCs, not the NPCs. To scare the players and their characters I’d introduce the setting and the mood smoothly and throw in encounters that are tailor-made to make the PCs feel powerful. I’d plan the encounter so they get to see the full potential of their new characters. Maybe you can have one or 2 more of these perfect for the PCs encounters so they really see how great they are and they might even start planning long-term for the character.
Unleash your arsenal
And then you hit them. You hit them with something more than the possibility of just seeing their PC die. You introduce an X factor in the game - a undead sickness that would maul a character’s body and crush his soul, or flesh-eating monsters that could maim a character with one bite. Make sure they understand that they are not safe, that they understimated the opposition, that they are stuck in hell, and that the price for any mistake or letdown will be to see their character wither slowly before dying painfully.
Easier said than done. Anyhow. That would be my plan. Hope that helps someone out there.
Have you ever run a horror campaign?
If you’ve played in one let me know what worked for you or what you liked about it.
Killing PC is never fun. You think of all the time that it took to create the character sheet and all those rolls of dice and you just want to kill one.
From my point of view you should never kill PC unless they are trying to get themselves killed ex: taking on a bulette when you are lvl 3. Other than that if the dice are rolling badly for the players and the DM is rolling crits all the time then if anybody die you should have a way to get that character back to live. The loss of a level will already be bad enough for the players.
But I really would like a full horror campaign. Torture and everything. No more pg13 game where no one ever goes to the bathroom and shit in full plate.
I know that Wizards had a book called heroes of horror that had a couple of rules in it to create an horror campaign.
I learned the hard way that killing PCs is not fun for anyone. The players are bummed and lose interest in the game which makes the DM bummed. I guess the DM’s role is to educate and help so that the players understand that the characters are not immortal and act accordingly.
I love giving characters a good beating though.
The devil of course is in the details. The trick is to get the right balance of mechanics to atmosphere. Poison and disease are all well and good, but unless you can describe the effects in vivid detail they’re just ability score damage and not much else. The Call of Cthulhu rulebook is particularly helpful, since it’s all about atmosphere. It spends more time describing the source of poisons and its effects than actually looking at its game-mechanical potency — something from which D&D could benefit. Burnt othur fumes, for example. What the Hell’s an othur? How do you burn one? Why should you not? What’s so bad about it that it can kill a person with its secondary damage?
What else can you do? Obviously wholesale slaughter isn’t an option, but there are plenty of other things. Commit the information about abilities and conditions to memory. Learn about sickening, nausea, fear (especially fear!). If you have fiends, let them really wreak havoc by possessing people rather than just wading through armies with venom-dripping fangs and claws. Make sure menace lurks in every shadow? If you’re feeling particularly manipulative, you might also try to find out what scares the players and work that into the game.
The Call of Chtulhu book is a great idea. Reading novels by Lovecraft should also improve one’s horrifying descriptions skills.
Provided your descriptions don’t get too longwinded. HPL did like to fill up his pages. When he wasn’t resorting to referring to stuff as indescribable.
Quick writing exercise for anyone who cares to read this: look at one of your more vivid monster descriptions. Now cut it in half. The longer the DM spends reading stuff out, the more likely the players are to fall asleep.
I hate reading stuff to the players. I don’t think I’ve done this in the last 5 years. I’m over it. I’d rather forget details than read them to the party.
haha, when i first looked at this i thought it said “horrable campains” not “horror campains”
i thought, why on earth would anyone want to make a horrable campain??
then when i was reading the artical i thought, this dont sound horrable! Just making it painful for PC’s to see there charactors in such hard situations… then i reread it :P
anyway, i think you got to make that bond from player to charactor no matter what you throw at them! but making them attached to an NPC and then throwing a disease or something at them is even worce.
expecaly if the NPC isnt worried about the disease and so wont flee the area or they get it and turm mutent (or something) and the PC is faced with killing the NPC that they loved or finding the cure before it takes an unrevercable hold on the NPC (or it coudl be another PC)
You needn’t focus on damage or cruelty to pc’s/npc’s. Describe something horrible or demented in the Pc’s dreams, or when they look out the window they see a face but when they blink it dissapears.
You need to make it feel like it’s happening in real life. Like their the ones looking through the window. It also helps to have some horror music going in the background, for atmosphere.
a horror campaign must be personal. The PCs personal connections can be very useful in sealing a sense of dread. Let them know that there is much more at risk than death. Friends, family, and their own will are at risk. Much scarier than threatening a paladin with imminent demise is finding himself stranded from his divine spark just when he feels he needs it most. The trick to a horror campaign is letting the characters know that nothing is certain, then luring them back into something that seems almost so.
I agree. Inner horror is more effective than outer horror.
Horror is tough.
You really need to have a focused group to pull something like that off. A GM can spend a goodly amount of time setting up and the first person to crack a joke or do a movie quote can completely spoil the mood.
I ran a horror campaign once, that actually affected my players on psychological level. I tried the same thing with another group sometime later, and used the same trick.
To really connect your players to their characters, it helps if you know something about their own personal history. You take those details and reinterpret them into the backstory for the characters - not in a really obvious way. It’s a tricky thing but for instance one of my players had a sick father. So her character had a brother who was part of the catalyst for the ‘hook’ - “Why do the characters absolutely have to be involved in the adventure in the first place?” - he was the victim of a cult worshipping a plague deity. Build up those connections however you want - a little opening dialogue helps I find, have the npc or whatever be involved somehow in such a way that the relationship between the character or the place comes in to play somehow, then over the first chapter somehow blight that connection. Gets ‘em every time.
Of course to do that you need to know something about the players, and with the first group I played this game on I already knew them. With the second group I had some planning time, and had a third party have a few casual talks. He turned out to be one of the players as well, which leads to another trick in the horror campaign arsenal - or for that matter any game - which is to have a plant. Secretly discuss a specific role with one of the players to play the betrayer part, and have that player’s character gain the trust and loyalty of the others. Then have that character twist those relationships, or even lead the characters into making disturbing decisions. I had this player lead the characters to sacrifice a family of people in a most horrible manner - sacrifice as in allow to be taken for horrible purposes - to save a village. Then, I gave them the chance to ‘make it better’ later, when they saved the family, who then begged to die.
Hit ‘em where it hurts. Give psychologically disturbing situations and decisions - the monsters, the traps, even diseases and poisons and whatnot, that’s never going to really hit them hard; they’re just characters, and it’s just a game, after all. To mess with their minds on a deeper level you have to make the players, through the characters, be forced to do things that would mess them up in real life, and justify it to themselves somehow. Just a few of these in the midst of an awful situation will make that situation seem more real by association.
peace