How does one run a great horror game?
By making you players believe they are in control.
Then showing them they are most certainly not.
>>43835797
Try reading the heros of horror D&D3.5 splatbook, I thought it was a nice introduction.
>>43835826
This. But you need to be really fucking good at it. It's not easy to make people get creeped out in real life when using their imaginations. You really need to know how to play everything off just right.
Awake
Awake
Awake
>>43835797
make it scary
>>43835797
-Show, don't tell.
-Never give full descriptions or any full information. Known things are less scary.
-Atmosphere. If there is one occasion where backround music and sounds are useful, it's GMing horror.
-Mix physical and psychological horror
-There is a fine line after which the amount of gore and/or tension becomes too much and amuses players instead of scaring them. Do not cross it.
-Horror requires some form of agreement between players and GM. It does not mean players are obliged to act stupid, but it does mean the game will be better if they don't try to be genre savvy in-character
-Keep OOC talks and breaks to minimum. Avoid unrelated chatting. If people crack random jokes or talk about the movie they watched last week when they are not in spotlite - you are not doing horror right.
-Use occasional cliffhangers.
>>43835797
>I blind fold my players
>Undress before them
>And play haunted graffiti
>>43835797
If you have not read the /tg/ Mars Game, then do. Read it at night, listen to the creepy and be scared (You could honestly do this with any scary story/movie but the Mars Game was supposedly played). Over the next few days watch a bunch of scary movies/read scary stories, (ex. Alien, The Thing...). Then use this time to also break down what you think scared you and why. Were you on edge? Was it the music? What fears were being preyed upon.
That's what I've done at least and I agree with everything that >>43836894 said. One thing that I would add is that if your players are around 15-30 yo then likely the best fear to prey on is not just the fear of the unknown, but the feeling when someone has a set in stone belief about what they see/feel and they are shown that it is not the way of things. That's part of the reason why alien and weird radio signals give us chills. This also falls in the uncanny valley, since these things are almost normal and can almost be explained, but something just screams unnatural in the back of our heads.
That's another thing to try and focus on. Everything should be slightly off. Silent Hill 2 does this to a certain extent, whenever you meet another person, they talk to you like everything is normal, but maybe they tell you something like, "I'm heading into town, I'm not sure what's going on," but then saying, "it's dangerous there" with certainty. Having hidden agenda's and leading the players into believing that they did something they didn't, or the opposite, leading the players into believing that the NPC didn't so it.
Another thing to watch out for is waiting a really long time for the first weird stuff to happen. I fell into this trap during my first horror game. Work the uncanny. Lights flicker when they shouldn't, the A.I. took a little longer than usual to open the door, if you want the PC to 'hear something' say, "you hear the sound of glass crushing" (something that could potentially be caused by a human stalking)
>>43837087
Another piece of advice is to make your players look at creepy pictures. I found that after looking at enough 'creepy' pictures that weren't actually creepy to look at, I didn't feel any fear looking at images, but when I would walk past my empty, pitch black garage at night I would suddenly start seeing all those creepy pictures in my mind's eye.
I recommend looking at pictures of dead Mt. Everest climbers, there's something deeply wrong about the idea of leaving bodies next to the trail in western culture.
Culture is a serious resource for finding out what will freak the fuck out of you. For example, there a culture that has a belief that foreigners carry black boxes (cameras) that suck the blood out of children, it is believed that this blood is used to wash out our electronics out. This is their explanation for how their technology always breaks down and how foreigner's technology doesn't. This fear is predicated on a complex colonial history that involved slave raids and tons of abuse. It is a fear specific to that society.
Today, my(American) fear of alien ruins and the 'Mars Game' stems from my cultural belief in science and the explicability of nature. When that is violated by 'things that shouldn't be there,' I am affected by the uncanny valley. When I read stories of serial killers, my confidence in the relative safety that exists in my middle-class neighborhood wavers. This may be very obvious, but thinking of it in this way may lead to new ways of exploiting the comforts of your culture and using that to create the uncanny. Once you thoroughly unsettle your players, you've done the hardest part.
Good luck!
>>43835797
Sound.
Sound is the most important stuff in an horror game and boy it's underestimated.
You need music, and not from some shitty laptop. You need those 50hz to kick in and you need to handle them based on the various situations.
Also, you need a system with fast rules.
Throwing dices and consulting manuals kill the mood.
After that, if you are not a shitty master, your game will be a good one.
Skellingtons
Not giving full information is the best way to go.
wasn't there a guy who made his players wear gas masks the entire time they were playing?
>>43835797
use the plot from a fabio romance novel.
>the players are fabio
>bbeg is the lustful bitch
