Im using a modified version of the taint system. I will be doing a lot of horror situations where I will try to get the characters actually scared and worried with the mood and setting. Among others I will be using undeads and I dont mind using uniqe self-designed monsters spesificly made for freaking out the players.
So, my question is if anyone has got any good horror ideas for this campaign? Im trying to use alot of good eberron flavor. I allow all books and intend for this to be a dangerous campaign for the players and their characters.
Im looking for ideas for missions, run-ins with blood of vol, run-ins with the inspired/dreaming dark, creatures, situations, npc's and so on
With that in mind D&D is very much about dice too. When you do run combat make it a point to describe the effects as they occur. Describing the grave dirt and snapped fingernail thats left in wound just taken, the fact that it will linkely infect, the blood now drizzeling onto the grass at your feet as you fight the ghoul, it's far more disquieting than just letting the PC know he took 8 damage and needs to make a save (though those are important afterthoughts).
Hope that gives some food for thought.
Other than that, rather than gory details, horror is mostly about the unknown. An enemy who seems to know their greatest fears and hopes, and can manipulate them, who attacks their friends just when they turn away, who plays with them (diversion attacks), turns their friends against them.
Perhaps one player against another; try to have one of the PCs be captured when they are alone, or simply side-tracked or for one reason or another not show up the next day... then impersonate them - and let the player himself play the impersonator, so the other players don't catch on. This may depend on what your players are like, and, again, it is an idea I had but not one I have actually tried.
Turn the familiar against them. If using dreams, begin by describing the house they are in as they remember it... with one or two details that are wrong. Then begin to slowly pile those details up. Use unseen dangers. Ghosts, any other kind of etheral or incorporeal enemy, poison, disease. Also use enemies that do not seem like enemies. I've always thought of Vadalis as one of the potentially most dangerous houses out there... because nobody expects all the birds, rats, dogs, cats and other critters in a city to turn on them. Or simply spy (especially if they are awakened): so use seemingly normal creatures, plants, animals, and so forth, with a twist.
Perhaps use some coterminous planes to make some vital spells difficult to cast. Or use some of the 'signs' from Elder Evils... provided that does not feel like denying people their class abilities; it should be a difficulty to overcome, not an outright 'you can't do this!'.
Also, check the Mournland Horrors ideas thread, wherever it has gone to, for ideas.
The Tips, Trick and Advice for Running a Horror Campaign thread might also be useful
Good suggestions so far but I was hoping for more stuff that was eberron spesific, thats kind of the reason of posting it here
Eberron? Horrifying? Aye. There's a lot of that, lad.
Where to begin… where to begin… let's see…
Well, to start with, there's what the others've said, above, about setting things up so the sense of horror is there in your players, as well as in their characters. That's always essential, an' you'd do well not to neglect it. I'll say some more about that in a minute.
Then, there's Eberron. Now, in Eberron, you've got your horrors, and then again, you've got your horrors. Let me explain.
If you're Josef the average Karrn, chances are you're a Last War veteran. You've seen horror. You've seen the war mages call things up to do battle for them. You saw the enchantments that shredded Dulf's mind, when you and your buddies were pulling back across White Arch, just before it all went to Khyber. And now? You're an adventurer. Maybe you've even got a rank or two in dungeoneering, which means you're no stranger either to wizardry or to the creepy-crawlies that wander around in the darker places of the world.
The usual sort of sanity-bending weirdness isn't going to work, for you, because you lived through the worst of it, altogether too few years ago. The Warlord ir'Patan's speech about the puddle of goo that was your best friend's head comes to mind here, as an example. No, you've had gore aplenty, and while you've been afraid for your life—more times than you'n count, most likely—you've not been real and truly horrified.
Horror, now, that's something else. Horror is what comes from thinking there might be something worse than the Last War. Fear is a part of it, aye, there is that, and a good fright is half-way to true horror. Horror is something that happens in the midst of fear, when beyond the fear itself, you come to know that something...that something is different. It takes a lot to horrify an adventurer in Eberron. Most of them have at least a smattering of understanding of the overall history of the world, and an superficial knowledge of the forces that drive it, so there's not much you can do to really horrify them; oh, and mind you, the idea is to get the players to suspend disbelief long enough to be horrified along with their characters.
The problem, of course, is that true horror arises from the contradiction of reality: we can be merely afraid easily enough, but horror... horror is about contact with things that are beyond understanding: not only do we not understand them, but we can't understand them, when we instinctively understand that the mere existence of such contradictions of sanity and reality undermine everything we need, everything we use, to make our world whole and sensible.
Let's try an example: the Church of the Silver Flame. Everyone knows about the Church, aye? More than slightly priggish, more than a little stuck-up? The ones who shredded the western half of Khorvaire with the Lycanthrope Purge? Aye, they're famous for that. Their lives are full of ritual and pious works, but for all that, they still have more than a little corruption in the ranks. Overall, or taken as a whole, a fairly open and honest religion. There aren't any surprises there, surely?
And that's right: there aren't any surprises there, and that's the point:
Show
Horror is what you feel when you finally realize that the Church of the Silver Flame is right: that they've been telling the simple, unvarnished truth about the way the world actually works for centuries, and no one has been paying any attention at all.
The "trick" to running a good horror game in my opinion is knowing your players well, and relying on as little dice rolling as possible. You may throw the most scary monster CR will allow at the party but once you make them start rolling dice the mood becomes dice rolling, not horror. If you keep the environment your storytelling and character interaction then it can become more tense, and more difficult for the players to detach themselves through their dice.
I agree with madninja. Horror is difficult in D&D. Horror is about dealing with the unknown, and everything in our game is very quantifyable.
Take away their hit points, and the players suddenly have a very realistic fear that the next trap could kill them. Make sure you're being descriptive (a lack of hit points indicates that the character is slowing down, and is having more and more trouble dealing with each attack).
To make this a little less lethal (some players might not handle not knowing their hit points as well as others), make sure to hand out plenty of nonlethal damage as well. That should result in plenty of near-misses, which will only heighten the drama.
As far as Eberron-specific advice...well, I don't know where to begin. Eberron is chock-full of horror. Any quori or daelkyr backed plot should be packed with it, as should the Mournlands. I think the trick will be having enough normal stuff around so that the players don't become numb to the abnormal.
Don't have every horror reflect negatively. Again, this goes back to not quantifying everything. Symbionts are a perfect example of this: mechanics-wise, they're like useful magic items. But unexpectedly waking up on a surgical table with a nice new tentacle whip is not a good way to begin the day.
One thing that happened to a character in a game I ran really freaked the player out, and I wasn't even aiming for a horror game. He had been (unknowingly) possessed for quite some time by an ancient, nearly god-like quori spirit, and it was beginning awaken within the PC. I decided it had senses like a rank 5 god (using Deities and Demigods rules) and could use them for a few rounds each day. So at not-so-random moments, this character would suddenly be able to see and hear over 5 miles, focusing on things that the quori found the least bit interesting.
I thought I'd pop this back up on the frontlines, given the new players wondering why all us old-school Eberron folk think of the setting as so versatile and amazing.
Or maybe just why all us old boards folk think Siran Dunmorgan is amazing.
Hey, I'm working on creating an eberron horror campaign.
May I suggest you acquire Nightmares of Mine? I watched little horror movies, but the horror movies I did watch the characters who fought the horror in the first place were not evil.