I've been running a campaign for a little while now (getting towards the end of the second "season") and I'm struggling with the "horror" aspect of the setting. Its not that I don't find the setting horrific (given the similarities between the setting and Peter Watts' "Blindsight", I can't help but be scared), but rather I have a hard time inject that sense of tension, futility and impending doom into my campaign (which, given my overarching plot, it really needs).
It doesn't help that I'm a bit of a joker, and can't help inserting things like an early 21st century American Christian conservative themed honeymoon suite complete with American flag bedspread, portraits of Ronald Reagan and Jesus on the wall, religiously-themed sex toys, and a Sarah Palin sex bot into the story.
So I was wondering, how do you create a climate of impending doom in your games?
Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.
Long-leggity beasties required (how do I create a scary campaign?)
Wed, 2012-04-25 22:33
#1
Kayne0X1
Long-leggity beasties required (how do I create a scary campaign?)
Thu, 2012-04-26 00:16
#2
nerdnumber1
Re: Long-leggity beasties required (how do I create a scary ...
Really, the trick is probably to keep the players in the dark about the full scope of the threat (fear of the unknown), create an atmosphere of unease through smaller creepy events/revelations, and build up to the horrifying reveal near the end.
Sometimes the more personal psychological horrors can be scarier than the extinction-level physical threats. Try to mix your threats to humanity with some curveballs. Try giving them a suspiciously useful plot device, like an obedient seed AI (look at the adventure "Think before Asking") or a alien communication device like the Giza Black Boxes (Gatecrashing), but place them in a situation where such a powerful device is a significant advantage against a looming threat. Stress checks are helpful when combined with vivid descriptions.
You seem to be quite... creative. Make an insane fork-napping enemy (lost generation async perhaps). You know what you can do with psychosurgery, a spare ego, and a pleasure pod or two. Now what if they get a hold of a PC ego (I wouldn't railroad the players into this, but engineer a scenario where this is a posibility if a player is careless or too trusting). Granted this is more creepy and disturbing than climate of impending doom, but it is a start.
Thu, 2012-04-26 01:08
#3
Aeroz
Re: Long-leggity beasties required (how do I create a scary ...
I found alot of success with making the player question whats really going on. Not just the character, but get into the players head. Think before you say something, wording can drastically change reactions. Try throwing in inconsistencies, subtle ones, but multiple examples, and ideally you want characters to separate or even just look in different directions. Uncertainty terrifies humans, use that. Here is one trick I used as an example
A player separated from the group "You enter the room and in the flickering lights you see a dead man's body propped up against the wall and another laying down in its own blood" he gets the others and they return to see what he found "The group enters the room and finds a dead body laying face down in a pool of its own blood" If they ask, and especially if you can play it up, insist there is no other body if you can pull it off act like you have no idea what he is talking about. Have them do a roll "you find no evidence there was one". Ideally you want THE PLAYER questioning whats going on. Did he misremember, is someone there messing with him, is he going crazy. With any luck the other players will start questioning the player too and reinforce his worries.
Sprinkle things like this around. Make it so its things they could explain away. A possible danger is scarier than a definite known danger. Be careful to not overuse it though, Remember pacing, and to have there be times things seem ok, and they are.
As for the humor, you can twist it into something thats far darker,. Humor can put them off balance. Make them think its a time to be relaxed. then let them find something unsettling. Using your example of the joke room, first set up some foreshadowing like when they first get inside they see a sign saying something like "Everlasting Happiness". Let them get a laugh off, and as they are coming off it and relaxing, casually, half jokingly, "look the sex bot was a virgin, she's even bleeding". then if a player investigates, it is blood. Opening up to find mangled human parts inside. Finally they start looking around the room finding dogma scrawled over the walls talking about punishing the sinful so they can find atonement, and find "Everlasting happiness".
Faintly you hear "now, till the hour of our death, amen" and the lights cut out
Thu, 2012-04-26 02:02
#4
King Shere
Re: Long-leggity beasties required (how do I create a scary ...
1. Ambiguous is the key word & Tools for Horror. Be ambiguous in descriptions to cause player paranoia. Describe what is happening, instead of speaking the results of roll.
Crude Examples
Dont say "The room is empty" instead say "The room seems empty"
Dont say "the water is clean & drinkable" instead say "It looks murky, but the instruments still claim the water is within tolerance levels, "
Dont say "The monster hit your Character, and did 8 damage" instead say ""The monster hisses from the darkness, and you feel one of its pseudopods squeeze painfully tight around your left leg ..." (quotes ripped from from 7th lord)
2. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NothingIsScarier
3. Scary music. But in normal situations play it with moderation, so its doesn't becomes overused or a spoiler.
http://www.eclipsephase.com/uncomfortable-topics
http://www.eclipsephase.com/terror-and-horror
—
[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/tc_userbar.jpg[/img]
[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/exh_userbar.jpg[/img]
[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/argo_userbar.jpg[/img]
[i]"To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult."[/i]
Plutarch
Thu, 2012-04-26 04:59
#5
Arenamontanus
Re: Long-leggity beasties required (how do I create a scary ...
I love the "everlasting happiness" example. It is all about slowly twisting things.
I also like adding a bit of humour to my games. But humour also means you relax and let your guard down. That means when you realize something bad is happening it will feel much more.
Oh, the cleaning bot has been programmed to be a really obsequious boot-licker. Literally, it keeps trying to clean the footwear of the characters. It follows them around, calling them masters. It occasionally says things that are a bit odd, like referring to someone named Pete or mentioning safewords. On investigation it is running a full ego on someone - an ego that has been broken and then forked to run all the cleaning bots of the house. In fact, all the slightly silly equipment in the mansion is running remnants of people who have been turned *mentally* into equipment. They are all fully conscious, in fear and incurably mad...
Uncertainty is good. Not knowing what is really happening is at the core of good horror. As soon as you know what is going on you can be proactive and start fixing it (or fleeing). But if there is no rhyme or reason, just creepy pieces of the big picture, then there is nothing you can *do* against it - you are essentially helpless. You can of course investigate further, but that moves you closer to whatever it is...
—
Thu, 2012-04-26 05:33
#6
Xagroth
Re: Long-leggity beasties required (how do I create a scary ...
I suggest as the first step to talk with the players if you don't know them well enough. The point here is to keep them anxious, in tension, and with some adrenaline rush derived from fear... but it is important to avoid making them hate the game! I just hit my head hard the first time I tried to GM Eclipse Phase to my regular group because they felt really bad about forking (and I had been throwing forks here and there for menial tasks, indenturees, etc...), and because of that they are really reticent to play the game... and I wasn't even trying to get to their nerves! XD
I think the best way to scare somebody is to make him doubt everything... specially himself. However, you need to keep in mind Hitchcock's motto: emotions need to go like a roller coaster. You cannot keep somebody high all the time, nor can you keep him down, without forcing that person to dissociate himself from the source (for example, the second and third Matrix movies had this effect on me hard... after a few minutes I was bored and distracted because all the time I was seeing combat with fast musics and all the time everything was a race against the clock).
If you really want to scare them, you need to keep adding small things to the mix, turning familiar everyday stuff into something strange, terrifying or even alien, and this is easy to keep inside the game because there is a difference between what is familiar to an AF10 ego and to the player controlling the character. During breakfast, tell the player that the food tastes strange, and when he checks the stuff (rolling), let him know that everything seems in order. Then wait. Then tell the player that he has a new email... but when he asks you what is written into it, tell him that the muse is unable to find any new mail. Let him roll and find that there is a new mail, ok, but it was spam and all the programming is working... For extra weirdness, make that mail a legit one that was marked as "spam" by the system (happens nowadays, after all)... but of course, why did he go the notification of new mail if it was spam?
Then, after a while, let the player talk to a "ghost". He will be contacted by somebody that asks to see him somewhere public (maybe using that mail he got before), and have the conversation. Then make another player, or maybe an NPC, to stumble on him and ask why is he sitting there alone. Watch the reaction of the player after hearing that he has an untouched drink in the other seat (but he saw the person he was talking with drinking!) and that nobody saw him with anybody... or talking, so he can assume it was some sort of infomorph that managed to be seen only by him.
Then let him check the mail and see it is a penis enlargement add... and enjoy his frantic efforts to check if his ego, mesh or morph (or all!) have been hacked.
Of course, this is all compressed, but you can see everything grows from siple coincidence to big trouble. And then you can let things run normally... only to start the weirdness again after a while. Then stop. Then restart... so he won't know what is going to happen next. And be careful not to let the player dissociate himself from this!