How to start a horror campaign
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.
It seems that you have no clue what horror is about. It has nothing to do with the fear of “loosing your character” at all; its about the tentious build up ( normally with few or no encounters at all) where various elements cast a creepy yet subtile shadow. the pcs should never see what they are up against and they should be separated from sure safety (trapped in an old manor to use a clicè). Then as the mood reaches its climax, the players would not be scared to loose their characters but scared to find out what they have been searching for. Google the phenomenon of “Horror” and you should find various essays on the subject…
While I have added elements of horror in my campaigns before, I have never really succeeded in keeping my players from quoting or making jokes that killed the mood. However, one of my friends who has taken up the mantle of DM recently has almost mastered the craft of making horror. One thing he does is put us in places where there is not escape (rocks fall and NPC’s die, dungeon entrance mysteriously is a wall, ect. ect.), and if we somehow do escape (via fighter’s adamantine sword or nystrul’s magic pigments) he plays the, “you can run but you can’t run far enough” and have the campaign change because we ran away. Also, another thing he is a fan of is using the taint mechanic found in oriental adventures or heroes of horror. It is terrifying to a character when they find themselves in an area that is tainted and they don’t know it, and suddenly start having skin sough off or green, oily boils bursting across your body, and worse when they start going insane.
I’ve never DMed a horror campaign, but one of my original DMs was incredibly fond of that kind of campaign, and was good at it too. One of my favorite memories of that campaign involved a special kind of golem, one made from oozes. The magical immunity of golems combined with the multiplying ability of oozes, and we had only one bludgeoning weapon in the entire group. Later in that same campaign my half-orc character was sneak attacked by a half-elf rogue with a special dagger.
It turns out that half-elf was actually a werewolf and coated that dagger with the saliva of her hybrid form, none of us realized it until my character changed for the first time three weeks later.