Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Firimar Elerrino 03-01-06, 09:28 AM	I just got the book in the mail yesterday, and I think that I'd like to make a heavy use of horror in my upcoming Eberron campaign. It seems that the two would go hand in hand together. I read the small section about how one can use horror in the setting, but it was nothing that I hadn't come up with on my own and I'd like more input. Quori seem the obvious choice for implementing horror with Eberron..but psionics are entirely out of the picture for my group since I have no clue how they work and I don't much feel like buying the book. Help me out here.
Belabras 03-01-06, 11:12 AM	If you don't want to use psionics it's probably better to stay away from the Dreaming Dark. In that case, go with Cults of the Dragon below/Xoriat influence and the Daelkyr, or go the undead route and use the Blood of Vol/Emerald Claw. You've got lots of options for creepy nastiness in Eberron.
Orion Polaris 03-01-06, 11:53 AM	The Mournland is a really good place if you want to do a horror campaign. All kinds of creepiness and stuff there. As previously mentioned the Demon Wastes/Cults of the Dragon Below/Lords of madness are other excellent ways to use horror in your campaign. Lycanthropy is a big part of Eberron and in my opinion there are few movies less scary then a good Werewolf one...
Syltorian 03-01-06, 11:57 AM	The Mournland seems another obvious choice. There has been a thread around here about the Horrors of the Mournland. I suggest you read it, it will be a great inspiration if you want to run a horror campaign. You could send your players into the Mournland, or have parts of the Mournland sweep out into neighbouring places. Perhaps it is expanding all of a sudden, due to whatever caused it, an influence of a coterminous plane, or some other reason. You could also use some of the druidic sects. HoH itself suggests that druids might drive animals mad, like Hitchcock's birds. This sounds something the Ashbound might try. Imagine this happening in one of the towns held by House Vadalis; though any normal town would be bad enough. Similarily, a rabies-like plague that drives people mad and slashing at each other could originate with the Children of Winter. Both can strike without a warning, then cease, only to return again later that day or week. There is also Xen'drik. For example, the Exorcist starts with images of a statue of Pazuzu from a mesopotamian excavation. Maybe someone brought an artifact back from Xen'drik (or the Demon Wastes, Q'Barra, or somewhere else) that suddenly starts having horrific side-effects. The museum of Morgrave University or the Wayfinders Foundation in Fairhaven could work here, or any smaller museum you'd like. The Dark Six could also be interesting, and they seem to be forgotten often. Though there has been a recent adventure in the Dungeon magazines set during Wildnight, the festival of the Fury. Also, more localised, the lost clan of the Mror Holds could return, a subtle Rajah try to escape from it's prison... and depending on how far you want to go, maybe the Whispering Flame cultists, who believe the Keeper of the Flame speaks for the Fiend in the Flame are right! Hope any of this helps :) Edit: Okay, someone else got the Mournland first.
Rechan 03-01-06, 01:12 PM	To note, you don't have to buy the Psionics book to learn it; it's in the SRD right here (http://www.d20srd.org/). As an additional sidenote, remember that the Cults of the Dragon Below don't have to worship the Daelkyr; they could worship a Rajah, or Khyber itself (Remember, Khyber spawned creatures all on its own, thus it has its own powers). However, the Daelkyr cults are certainly f-ing creepy, I'll give you that. Someone's all ready mentioned the Demon Wastes, and I'll throw my weight to this: I once had an entire campaign planned out where the PCs, on an airship, would crash in the middle of the Wastes, and the entire campaign would be "get out of the Wastes". Also, the abandoned town of Desolate makes an awesome stage for an adventure, especially if you use the adventure seed on page 163 of the ECS with it. Droaam. Seriously, if you fall behind enemy lines inside a nation of MONSTERS, you'll be paranoid to say the least. Q'Barra and Xen'Drik also make excellent places. Primarily because you have the Jungle. Imagine being on an expedition and your crew are being hunted, one by one. It could be by a fiend. Or a band of lycanthropes that fled during the Purge. Sharn. Nothing like a good ol' fashioned Serial Killer to get your blood flowing. Karnath. To me, Karnath feels like Romania. Misty mountains, foggy moors, supersticious, shut-in townsfolk. More isolated ideas: House Jorasco could be using an insane asylum to run experiments on the patients, or to milk them of Liquid Pain (BoVD). Something could have gone wrong; they might have unleashed something like an Id (See Psionics book, or Hyperconcious). Alternatively, they could be a front for a Mindflayer/DD experimenting with sanity. Again, House Jorasco could have created an Eldrich Machine to try and prevent death itself. However, it backfires and (Que Resident Evil-like play; the zombies aren't "Undead", and they mutate after being defeated, etc).
igotsmeakabob!! 03-01-06, 01:23 PM	yeah I have the book as well. One word. Mournland. It has been said before on this thread but MOURNLAND. Oh, and look for the 1001 Horrors of the Mournland thread in the people & places forum, could be on page 1 or 2. Great stuff there.
Cloud Divider 03-01-06, 05:09 PM	I just got the book in the mail yesterday, and I think that I'd like to make a heavy use of horror in my upcoming Eberron campaign. It seems that the two would go hand in hand together. Eberron is absolutely FULL of potential when it comes to horror. Largely, it's a matter of delivery. Sure, there's the usual suspects - the Quori, the Mournland, the Daelkyr. The Demon Wastes, Q'barra. Xen'drik. And yeah, there's a lot of things you could do there. Then, there's the plethora of other options. There's your relatively "mundane" non-supernatural horror: How about a Blood of Vol splinter-sect? How about a ritual murderer in Sharn? A big scary...something crashing around in the deep woods (maybe as simple as a Displacer Beast). I always wanted to run a low-level "horror" scenario where the monster was a largish amphibious octopus (they're exceptionally intelligent for animals, they can squeeze through spaces much smaller than their body would suggest, climb up walls, move relatively silently, the whole active camouflage thing, etc). Nevermind what you could do with an intelligent (let alone supernatural) octopus! If you dip into the magical or supernatural, again, you've got tons of options. A rogue Cannith construct. How about some evil spirit things that date back to the Age of Demons, or the Age of (whatever - corresponding to the Daelkyr war)? Or something that was brought back from Xen'drik that shouldn't have been. Some spooky something or other that's managed to find it's way out of the deeper Dhakaani bits of Sharn. Heck, just imagine if you had something relatively simple, like a small hive of Chokers that managed to get themselves situated in Undersharn. Maybe nobody's actually seen who's been responsible for these disappearances. The core of horror is the fear of the unknown. Play to that. Keep up the tension, the wierd, and you should be in good shape. I mean, ultimately, the delivery is what turns the adventure from "horror" to the "let's beat up the Monster of the Week." The last session we left off with was a rough adaptation (maybe "inspired by" is better) of the Delta Green adventure "Darkest Calling." And really, it didn't take all that much adapting. I've got about a half-dozen adventure seeds I've come up with for my campaign, some are more fleshed out than others...but probably 75% of them have a pretty high horror content. I'll try to post them into this thread later (though I don't know how much detail I want to go into - I know some of my players read this board and know my username).
jonthegm 03-01-06, 06:49 PM	The mournland is a TERRIBLE place to do horror. Let me lay it on you, thick like. Sure, the mournland is home to WIERD ****, that's good... we know that. Rah rah! I'm not saying that you couldn't do horror there, but I'm here to tell you why you shouldn't. 1) The Best Horror is Unexpected As soon as they pass through the Ravenloftesque mist curtain and head into the blasted terrain of the mournland, the players are going to expect you to try something scary and wierd and probably disgusting. 2) As soon as you mess with mechanics, it's no longer scary Taking away a party's healing abilities isn't scary. It's annoying. A good horror adventure focuses on characters and atmosphere over how many dice get rolled. 3) It needs to be personal. The mournland is scary to everyone. It's abstract terror, not real and personal. Good horror needs an emotional hook in the players to get them to buy in. So there you go, my simple tips for running horror... let's go over them again outside of my DON'T RUN A HORROR CAMPAIGN IN THE MOURNLAND bit. 1) Subtlety. Don't jump out at the PCs going boogety boogety boogety! Let it creep up with them, and then wait for them to realize what's going on. Then BAM. Jump out of the closet. 2) Story. Use standard D&D fare, and let the players try to guess where you're going. Use your writing as a guide to draw them down the right path, but let them do the walking. 3) Personal Impact. Superhero horror (which is what D&D ultimately has to be) is more about the loss of one's self. Monsters aren't scary; the PCs are there to kick ass and take names of anything that looks at them crossways. What's scary is the Paladin having to make a choice between saving the town or slaughtering innocents, or having the chaotic good mage's impulsive action to free something from opression be the key that opens pandora's box.
Rechan 03-01-06, 07:02 PM	1) The Best Horror is Unexpected As soon as they pass through the Ravenloftesque mist curtain and head into the blasted terrain of the mournland, the players are going to expect you to try something scary and wierd and probably disgusting. Actually, I think part of the horror from the Mournlands comes from the bleakness of it. For instance, Metrol would be a ghost town, eerily silent. The battlefields of the dead would be solemn, especially with all of the unrotting corpses. It's an atmospheric thing of "This is not natural" that you can build tension with. Sure, the PCs can expect it, but that can also add an element - they're just Waiting for something to jump out at them. And if you let lots of time stretch, they're going to start getting paranoid. 2) As soon as you mess with mechanics, it's no longer scary Taking away a party's healing abilities isn't scary. It's annoying. A good horror adventure focuses on characters and atmosphere over how many dice get rolled. Well, I would contest that it comes from a lack of resources. Think of it this way: In Normal D&D, if you die, you can just get raised. In Eberron, that's not an option. So that creates tension - death is Serious. In D&D and Eberron, death is less a threat because you have healing magic - there is less of an overall threat. With no healing magic, there's more tension because Every Hitpoint Counts. It no longer becomes "It's hit the fan when the cleric/wizard's ran out of spells" It's now "every moment is on the edge". What's scary is the Paladin having to make a choice between saving the town or slaughtering innocents, or having the chaotic good mage's impulsive action to free something from opression be the key that opens pandora's box. ... You think it's a hard decision for a paladin between saving down and killing innocent people?
maollelujah 03-01-06, 08:47 PM	If the Quori (Inspired) remain NPCs then you can just make them sorcerors and say it is Psionics. On spellchecks just tell the players that the Psionic power's effects resemble whatever spell you used, but it seems to be different than magic.
Euangelion 03-01-06, 08:59 PM	Having HoH myself, I'd suggest thinking about a Rosemary's Baby situation using a Radiant Idol cult and the unholy scion template. In other words, a Radiant Idol breeds with a female cultist, and the result is an Unholy Scion that takes control of the mother, causing her to do seriously bad things. Frame a merchant from Karnnath, setting clues that would indicate that the merchant is either hiding vampires and/or is one himself. Or put them on the trail of a serial murderer who himself then gets killed by the unholy scion-controlled mom. One key is to give them chances to feel safe. They find the vamp the merchant is actually hiding, and kill it. Yay! Then another body shows up, killed in a way that only the real murderer would know. Then the serial murderer dies. Yay! And yet again another body. And so on. Remember that another key to Eberron and horror is the possibility that the party only achieves a partial victory, that the radiant idol himself actually escapes, or perhaps the unholy scion, or even both, with only a dead female cultist to show for their efforts.
Edymnion 03-01-06, 09:44 PM	I'm not saying that you couldn't do horror there, but I'm here to tell you why you shouldn't.Actually, the Mournlands really are a great place to put a horror stretch. 1) The Best Horror is Unexpected As soon as they pass through the Ravenloftesque mist curtain and head into the blasted terrain of the mournland, the players are going to expect you to try something scary and wierd and probably disgusting.Well, this flies out the window pretty much the instant you tell your players that you're going to do a horror stint. And no, its generally not a good idea to blindside your players with a horror campaign if they don't want that sort of thing. That said, the idea that something could be out there and you just don't know it is a great way to start setting up the atmosphere. You know its coming, you just don't know when... 2) As soon as you mess with mechanics, it's no longer scary Taking away a party's healing abilities isn't scary. It's annoying. A good horror adventure focuses on characters and atmosphere over how many dice get rolled.Now this one I flat out dissagree with. One of the biggest ways to get a horror game going is to give it some pressure. The very fact that they can't heal will have them jumping at everything because they know they can't just heal up after a fight. Suddenly even "easy" encounters become very threatening. It ties into your next one pretty well too. 3) It needs to be personal. The mournland is scary to everyone. It's abstract terror, not real and personal. Good horror needs an emotional hook in the players to get them to buy in.The fact that they can't heal makes it *INSTANTLY* personal. Its not just abstract anymore, its their butts on the line, and each passing encounter just makes it more and more personal as they get weaker and weaker. Nothing gets a player involved like knowing their character is about to die, and STAY dead!
jonthegm 03-02-06, 02:17 AM	Nope, sorry, I'm an experienced Call of Cthulhu/Unknown Armies GM and I reject your mistaken notion. The Mournland is bleak and wierd and possibly scary, but it doesn't make for a good horror campaign. Maybe a good horror side-adventure in an epic genre-spanning campaign, but not an extended campaign. I said it in my last post, and I'll say it again: Anything that relies on the manipulation of game mechanics is NOT scary. Horror is about false climaxes. You've got to build the PCs up, only to let them breathe a sigh of relief as the menace evaporates. Then, once they let their guard down, you blindside them. Eventually, they get used to that, though, so you need to intersperse the false climaxes with red herrings. Buildups of suspense that don't ever pay off. Be careful with these, though, as the PCs get REALLY tired of them REALLY quickly. So, you eventually go for the full-on confrontation... dealing with the horror at its source. This lets the PCs blow off steam before they get angry and allows you to "resolve" things and move the plot along. Anyway, though, the main thing to keep in mind is that the PCs are lean-mean deathbringing machines. The primary purpose of the D&D rules is to simulate combat, and therefore D&D characters are best at combat. Big giant monsters aren't scary; they're just big numbers. Horror in a D&D campaign needs to stem primarily from RP, and not from mechanics, as the mechanics favor combat (which is what the PCs are best at).
Beleriphon 03-02-06, 05:09 AM	Horror in a D&D campaign needs to stem primarily from RP, and not from mechanics, as the mechanics favor combat (which is what the PCs are best at). In the same vein, horror is also about taking the comfortable, the norm, and twisting it or removing it entirely. The Mournlands does this well, but only in the sense of a horror style adventure. The Mournlands gives the DM and excuse to use creeping terror, nothing is scarier than knowing you could die at any second, at least for the players. As for a campaign, jonthegm is right. The Mournlands is not the place to set the game, a normal village, or Sharn, any place that isn't inherently otherworldly would work. Its adding the otherworldly, the fear, into someplace that should be safe that makes it scary. Lovecraft isn't scary because he put character into other dimesions where there is no universal constant, he wrote scary stories because they were about the warping of normalacy into something else. Edit: There is also something else you want to go with. Do you want psychological horror, or boogey-monster-slasher-movie horror? Lovecraftian horror tends towards the psychological horror in that it play to fairly basic human fears and instincts. Slasher movie horror tends to work through suspense, and gore, lots of gore. My best advice is do what you can to make the players feel as safe as possible to start off with, be completely mundane. Heck, start with a tavern. From there you need to move onto building up to something, anything. Make sure its a complete let down for the players, not lame, but not as big as they imagined it would be. From there its easy to do build ups and really scare the players. Also note horror games must be played with only enough light to see, and preferably at night. Nothing ruins a good scary movie like a cheery Sunday afternoon and fluffy bunnies.
nastynate 03-02-06, 05:50 AM	Slasher movie horror tends to work through suspense, and gore, lots of gore.Which doesn't work so well in D&D which is all about gore anyway. A 20th level paladin has killed more people than Jason and Michael Myers combined...You can go for gross out factor, or evil factor, or even shocking heinousness, but none of those things are that horrific. Think about what PCs do in D&D; they wander the world killing things and taking their stuff. The PCs are horrific serial killers, and thieves who somehow justify their own actions! Horror needs to be subtle in D&D or it comes up short. Hannibal style serial killers, children of the corn style cults, and xenophobic superstitious townfolk...those things work. You have to seperate the PCs from what they are accustomed to and surprise them with something that seems terribly awful. You have to make the idea of who their enemy actually is horrific. I'm running a story right now where the BBEG is a paladin, and the PCs are lawful good. The guy's so darn heroic and virtuous, they don't want to fight him. I've made the players feel like the bad guys, and most of their enemies are very human. They feel guilty, like things are spiraling beyond their control, and they are forced to choose between the lesser of many evils. Despair, Hopelessness, paranoia, these are the things I'm gunning for. Zombies and vampires just aren't that scary, because they are too easy to define as evil, but a misguided priest who thinks he's doing good...that's different. :D
Siran Dunmorgan 03-02-06, 04:32 PM	My horror scenario—one that I worked up for the Terrifying Turf contest at Halloween, before getting sidetracked with end-of-month reports for my day job—was a "Stepford Wives" scenario written as a series of encounters at a whistle stop on the lightning rail. It works like this: there's a town somewhere on a rail line that your players regularly use. The first time they stop there, they meet some iconic characters: the greedy station agent, the loveable street urchin, the flirty waitress, et al. The next time they stop, it's the same station agent, the same loveable street urchin, but this time the waitress is just serving the food. Next time they stop, the station agent is… efficient, orderly, and neither embezzeling nor taking bribes. Next time they stop, the whole town is a model of efficiency. Even the stevedores who load and unload the lightning rail carts are the quiet and efficient, working tirelessly without the casual profanity common to their trade. Oh—and the loveable street urchin is wild-eyed with fear, and doesn't know who he can talk to because everyone is… different. He's taken to sleeping in a different loft every night, lest whatever it is come for him. He's seen… it, once, in the night, in the fog, a thing that walked on many legs, a soft clicking-tapping its only sound. And it's been replacing people with things: it comes for you, and then the next morning, you're… different. The clues in the full write-up of this scenario are much more detailed than this: it's important to note, for example, that it's a cattle-ranching town, with beef cattle the primary export. It's important to note that there was once a shrine to Aureon on the hill overlooking the town, and that it was devastated early in the Last War. The horror of it comes from the powerlessness of the adventurers: they can't move against the "zombies" or "replacements" because there's nothing about them that's provably monstrous, or even wrong. Even if you're a Sentinel Marshal of House Deneith, you're not going to arrest the station agent on suspicion of not taking bribes. The local nobility is more than happy to see the tremendously increased tax revenues pouring into their coffers. Notifying House Orien that their agent has been "replaced" yields a curt note commending the improvements in the man's efficiency over the past year: the House is happy that their agent is taking the trouble to improve his effectiveness, and where they once had him assigned to a backwater, now they're thinking of promoting him in the House. Calling upon the Church of the Silver Flame will get a response—a pair of Templars might be sent to investigate, but they find no sign of supernatural evil. Certainly, there's an aura of enchantment magic about the place, but that's normal for a ranching town: they all hire Vadalis handlers and their foci to control cattle these days. There's definitely no evil here. Set a bug-eyed thing from darkest Khyber in front of your players, and they can deal with it the old fashioned way, with sword and with spell. But set them a scenario where the life of the townsfolk got better when the thing appeared… that'll set them on edge for the whole play session. —Siran Dunmorgan P. S. Remember the restrictions on the Terrifying Turf contest? Anyone want to venture a guess at the nature of the thing?
Wrathamon 03-02-06, 05:24 PM	I ran the mournland very scary and the Players loved it. They were so freaked out by it and the sense of dread that they are too scared to go back. so yes the mournland works for a horror setting... but, just like any campaign you dont want to stick around in the same place for too long. I dont want to be stuck in the scary manor for the entire campaign either.
Edymnion 03-02-06, 06:58 PM	I'll agree, the Mournlands make for a good horror encounter, but setting an entire campaign there would just be a pain in the butt, both for the players and the DM. But for a side trip, its excellent.