/tg/ I would like to request a brainstorming thread. I need scary stuff.
My players are inured to terror, a fifty foot monster made of still living screaming tissue doesn't invoke fear, it instead is to be rendered down into XP.
I want to remind them what fear is and I want to give them something a bit new.
I want weird critters, things that go bump in the night.
I don't need statblocks but I do need creepy premises. I'm trying something a bit unusual, one theme is that apparent mental illnesses, aren't, they're symptoms of a parasitic critter.
As in, got depression? It's not you, it's an elder thing soaking up your happy memories or using you as a dumping ground for his feels.
Just a few little things to give flavour:
>your roommate is out of town for a few weeks. You wake up one morning and he's back a month early. With no memory of having been away. He seems to not be quite all there. Then you get a voicemail saying he's having a great time in Japan.
>a species of critter that preys on the lonely. You're at home, fapping or whatever, and the door you swore was locked swings open. You start getting a feeling of being watched when you do things around the house, it intensifies ten fold if you are distracted, say gaming with a headset on. Always something in the corner of your eye until...well the accident report said you fell, but after six months decomposing on your kitchen floor, who knows.
>every memory you have corrodes as this feeds on it. The more you recall the memory, the quicker it goes.
>>46846067
Tone is more important than content when it comes to horror in PnP. Also, what you can't see is a gajillion times scarier than what you can.
>>46846067
That bunny is adorable.
>>46846067
Disease and infection is a common premise that you could exploit, especially if the characters are in isolation.
>>46846100
A dozen times this. OP's first greentext is a perfect example of unsettling, delivery and build up can turn that into terror.
>>46846067
My player said he was playing as himself so I surprised him by inserting his fiance into the game. He gets so fucking paranoid because he legit worries for her safety.
>>46846067
Do the players play at your house?
The next time you host a game, remove all the chairs from the playing space. Make the players stand up. Make them uncomfortable.
Use music for ambiance. Don't play it loudly. Play it quietly. Barely audible.
https://youtu.be/QprzMD6Xevk
Do not serve snacks.
>>46846891
>Do not serve snacks.
That's too cruel.
If you play in a place where you can have candles, dim the lights and put small candles to illuminate the room. It'll inspire shadows in the room. Note that you can only pull this off with non-retard players.
Sprinkle inocuous details into the description, then suddenly add a disturbing or important one.
Fuck with their in-game senses.
It was just the wind- except when it's not.
Have characters appear and disappear at random.
Ask to see a character sheet, then write something unimportant- or scary.
>>46847070
You can't horrify someone while they are stuffing their face with pizza.
>>46847291
That's not pizza, anon....
>>46847120
I like to separate my game into day and night sequences, so all the lights go off and we light a bunch of candles for extra spoopy. I give the players a rough estimate of how much time certain activities take, but (unless they're specifically pay attention to the time) I don't tell them when night falls. Just turn off the lights and start lighting the candles without a word. There's always at least a little thrill of nervousness at that point.
>>46846067spiders
>>46849821
The healing stealing spiders?
>>46846067
Alright OP, this is probably going to be the most important post in the thread for you to remember so listen up. You want to know the secret to all good horror tabletop? To all good horror in general? Here it is:Tell your players that you're going to be trying to scare them.
Seems a bit of a non-sequitur, doesn't it? After all you're going through all the trouble, so why ruin the surprise? Well let me put it this way, OP. Have you ever been sitting in the cinema during a horror movie and been so engrossed in the film that you were legitimately terrified? The monster closes in - its victim losing all hope - and just as it rears its head to give you a small glimpse into the true face of horror, breathing a horrid mist of God knows what into the face of the victim, some fucking douchebag in the back says "Mentos, the Freshmaker." And the whole thing is ruined because now you just don't care anymore? Same fucking thing.
Everyone likes to be scared now and then, but nobody likes to be unprepared and frightened. So we crack jokes here and there to remind ourselves that we aren't really in danger, and that the tentacle monster can't really rape our soft, virgin bungholes, and that we could "totally survive the horror movie" if we tried. So make sure that your players know that it's going to be a horror game, and that if they want to have fun they need to let themselves be scared. Otherwise you might as well just watch Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
>>46846067
> My players are inured to terror, a fifty foot monster made of still living screaming tissue doesn't invoke fear, it instead is to be rendered down into XP.
If you stat them, they will kill them.
Bumping because interesting
>>46846067
I suggest using adult fears.
Something like : You're all parents in the little town of X, the schoolbus has crashed and there is now one inside. Find your children and bring them home if they're still alive. We'll be running this on real-time. You're in a classroom with the school principal, waiting for more information; what do you do?
>>46846067
Check out the Book of Tigers, it'll put you on the right track in terms of tone. Download link is available here: http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/the-goblin-library.html
>>46846067
Op let me make it simple.
What is the common theme in all horror?
An out of context problem.
Something so far removed from their understanding its existance is unsettling in a primal way.
Your party is a monster rendering machine?
You are the dm, so change the paradigm.
Not a monster, not anything they can relate to things they have faced before and definately not something blatantly unnatural.
Make it simple untill they are hooked, then escalate.
What general setting (sci fi swords n sorc ect) are you playing in?
>>46846067
the classic Wendigo. The party is travelling with other people through some desolate region, and their food all starts spoiling.
No matter what they do, food spoils impossibly quickly, and there's still a long ways to go.
Then, pick a player at random. Tell them, in private, that they have a disturbing dream of running, just running and running faster and faster until they felt their feet burn and they started flying.
You can do this to one or more characters, just make sure that none of them know about each other unless they actually talk about it.
Then have one npc finally go and kill and eat someone during the night. When they stop him/her, he/she starts screaming and sobbing and everybody notices that the npc's feet are bare and burned. the npc can also babble incoherently about shit like "running on the sky" or something, or about how they can't get the blood off.
If possible, have the npc start running. Like, waaaaaaay too fast. As they howl and scream, their feet burst into flames, and they start running on air with burnt stumps instead of feet. The dreams persist.
Now the players have to find some way to kill the wendigo(s) before they suffer the same fate.
>>46850145
So true. You know what was scary about the xenomorph in Alien even despite it being no real horror movie? Most of the time it nobody saw it.
If you want a scary monster make it avoid large groups, let it pick isolated targets, let it keep fleeing again and again just to attack people from another angle. Have enough NPCs handy which can become the monsters next meal, so the monster has something to do if the party sticks together to much. A monster doesn't need to be incredible huge and able to take on whole groups of badass adventurers - it only needs to be able to threaten to kill whatever it selects as target.
And that's only about a "killy" monster, not even the creepy stuff.
>>46846067
Have them fight God.
Only God is completely, utterly, incomprehensibly alien and insane. He/she/it smiles? Save vs. Fear or lose X Con. It spreads its wings? You lose a cherished memory.
Eternal Darkness this shit.
>>46848583
>he thinks I won't eat the flesh of the living or dead
Whatever, queer
>>46853061
Nah thats too heavy handed, it removes the immediacy of true horror.
Instead of being afraid they become afraid their char will lose X con.
So the immersion is broken twice over and they also feel a loss of agency if they cant affet the situation.
One i ran had a dead soldier haunting an old tower, tried to pick em off one by one and killing it seemed to just disperse it a time.
I made them associate its prescence with some hallmarks so they knew when it was fucking with em, and let the tension mount so they knew something bad could happen before they made sure it did. They caused all the misery including dead pcs by making objectively bad decisions. When they finally killed it at the root and put a stop to it?
The signs start again after a while and the killed pc is rocking up in the first ghosties place.
The part that threw them the most was zombies wearing disguises and planning clever ambushes
>>46849821
noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
>>46853094
noice, never read this one
Can I request more like this please:
>>your roommate is out of town for a few weeks. You wake up one morning and he's back a month early. With no memory of having been away. He seems to not be quite all there. Then you get a voicemail saying he's having a great time in Japan.
I really like things like that.
>>46846067
You've got heaps of this stuff in WoD books, which you can conveniently find on 4shared if you take the time to look
Bring a gun to your next session, become very hostile in OOC conversation. Brandish said firearm.
Inform them that they are all hostiages.
Continue playing DND.
>>46854597
I think that's how Ice Cube used to DM for his homies in the 'Hood back in the day.
