Horror campaign help - Downloaded from the Wizards Community, all coding removed by Solauren

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 k4z00p4 Jun 07, 2009 23:08:20	Hello! I'm in the midst of trying to get ideas for a horror campaign. It will be 4e, and probably will start at levels 1-5. I have a couple questions I'd like some help with. First, (not so much a question as a request I suppose) I've got serious writers block at the moment, and can't think of a thing for this story. Litteraly...no ideas or starting point at the moment. So any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Any basic idea that I can run with, and expand would be awesome. I'm open to a lot of suggestions. Next, anyone try a horror campaign in 4e yet? I'm sure someone has. How'd it turn out? I've run one in 3.5 and had a lot of fun with it. I'm gonna mix and match some stuff to compensate for no Heroes of Horror book for 4e. Thanks a bunch, -k4z00p4-
#2 nil_athelion Jun 08, 2009 6:26:09	As it happens, I'm building a zombie apocalypse adventure. The main avenues I'm using to make it horror, not just fighting: Show Plague is caused by parasites that burrow under skin to get to your central nervous system. (Stuff moving under skin is known to be horrific.) Plague causes infected PC's and NPC's to not be able to distinguish between zombies and normal people. (Suspicion abounds.) Plague reanimates the dead, whether dead by the disease, or dead by other causes with parasites in them. The zombies only die to critical hits - bringing them below 0 HP causes them to be unconscious for 1d6 rounds, giving players an uncertain timeframe to coup de grace before they stand up with half health. The zombies have strong grabbing and dragging powers, used to mess with coup de grace planning, and isolate and team up on PCs. The zombies improve themselves by ripping body parts off of corpses with unusable spines, and either grafting it to themselves or consuming it to provide fuel for internal improvements (up to 26 augmentations now). (People tend not to like zombies that defile corpses, much less zombies that defile corpses to get stronger and have a diversity of abilities.) The zombies are spreading across the countryside, with few safe shelters (which all have problems of varying kinds - starvation, desperate people, overcrowding, militaristic rule, zombie attacks, cultists). Mystery - the PCs don't know any of this, and I don't think I'll ever tell them, just let them make theories on their own. (Once I get the first draft together, it will be cropping up on the campaign feedback forum.)
#3 k4z00p4 Jun 08, 2009 14:48:40	Nil sir, you rock. All great ideas. I decided to go a little bit with your route of a corruption in the woods idea, along with an idea I had for a campaign last year, that I think came from Heroes of Horror. It will work really nice with the way my player's characters are shaping up. Cultists of Tharizdun have finally opened a hole to their god's prison. Now the corruption leaks over the area, slowly spreading, corrupting animals, monsters, villages. The longer the hole is open the less time the earth has. The pc's are sent to find out what's causing the corruption. I like the idea of night time everything feeling more corrupted. It shows that the light has some strength over the corrupted areas early on, but soon it will be too powerful. Thanks a lot. Also I'd like to get some more ideas. If i hear a better one I might switch things around or use it for some other session.
#4 bone_naga Jun 08, 2009 15:15:22	I just started a 4e dark fantasy/horror campaign. I'm using some homebrew sanity rules (each character has sanity points similar to HP, and when they reach 0 SP they go temporarily insane, and start making saving throws, on 3 failed saves they go permanently insane instead of dying). In addition to psychic attacks, characters lose sanity for seeing horrific creatures (aberrants, demons, devils, undead, pretty much anything from another plane), horrific sights (mutilated corpses, rivers of blood, watching a friend get butchered), traumatic experiences (undergoing torture), or by committing acts which aren't generally considered "sane" (like murdering innocent people). The general assumption is magic is rare, and all arcane magic users are considered to have warlock pacts (no mechanical changes, just an additional RP aspect, although characters may lose sanity if they choose to meet with their patron). As such, magic items are also rare. Many low level items are refluffed as mundane masterwork items (so the sword isnt +1 because its magical, but because a master dwarven smith forged it out of the finest steel). Items that are actually magical (the higher level ones), often carry a curse or other drawback (like having to draw on the strength of the wielder, thus causing the character to lose 1 Healing Surge at the start of each day, or a flaming weapon that immolates the wielder on a natural 1). I'm borrowing lots of ideas from Lovecraft and other Cthulhu mythos writers, Robert E. Howard, and Stephen King. I recommend checking out Darkness & Dread (a 3pp 3e supplement) and the Call of Cthulhu game. Its D&D, so the players will probably still expect a fair amount of combat, but give them threats that can't always be overcome directly through combat. Use lots of skill challenges and puzzles. Even when they do win, make sure they see what a small victory it is. For every cult that they put down, a new one springs up. The eternal evils that the cultists are attempting to summon cannot be killed, only banished, and they can wait as long as they need to for another opportunity. The party disrupts a ritual to unleash a fearsome plague that will cleanse the entire world. They succeed, but the ritual was too near completion for all that energy to simply dissipate. Instead of a zombie apocalypse, you get "only" the Black Death. To add the icing to the cake, the PCs (who are immunized by exposure to the ritual), become the first carriers and introduce the disease to an unsuspecting world.
#5 nil_athelion Jun 09, 2009 9:03:06	One of my worries is whether people will want to play if they guess that their victories are either going to be small, or are going to be perverted. My initial plan for the zombie apocalypse was that they PCs were going to put down the beginning of it, but then bring the disease back to the city they were based out of, to give them responsiblity for the whole mess. I decided against this, as I was worried it would drive them away. Where is the line on between making the game solidly horror, and yet not making the game depressing and unfun? I don't think I can work cursed items into the campaign I am building, but they certainly seem interesting. I can see them working well with a variety of the normal weapons. On thing I'm annoyed at with DnD is that you really can't mess with player perceptions enough to have them attack each other. One character might see the others as zombies, due to the disease, but to the player it is pretty obvious. The limits of messing with their minds is very annoying. Since you were asking for more ideas, here is one: The PCs are in a village, and every night, very strange things are happening. Toy-like monsters appear out of thin air, attacks by tall shadowy figures, darkness is strongly increased (limiting PC sight is oh-so-fun), monsters are always lurking in the shadows (permanent total concealment, melee out of shadow, but as long as the shadow is lit, the monster isn't there), etc. Eventually, the PCs track it down to be the nightmares of a psychic girl, and have to solve why she is having nightmares (or kill her, I suppose - I'm pretty sure my group would do that, and justify it as good, too). I'm using toy-like monsters (based on toys seen in the shadows, tall shadowy figures (adults), and un-see-able monsters in the darkness (fear of the unseen) as generic childhood fears, but throw in whatever ones you think are appropriate. Clues leading them to suspect the child could include seeing illusionary mirrors attached to walls where the PCs can see the child in a dark room, repeating "I'm a monster, I'm a monster, I'm a monster" in the dark - perhaps with another figure behind. This is working the child abuse angle, of course - perhaps a parent who thinks the child's powers are unnatural, and turns their fear of the child into hate for the child. But clues are probably easily disturbing bits, particularly when bringing light near them (or taking an active perception check on them - looking too closely) makes them disappear. Big bad is... adult abuser, the angry child (in the fully real world)? Perhaps if they kill the abusive person (parent?) the next night they fight the child's horrible perceptions of the people who killed her abuser - twisted NPC version of themselves. (This assumes that the child is very much attached and dependent on the person who was abusing them, and/or had been brainwashed to fear strangers/outsiders.) Perhaps the fact that ending the abuse still left an extremely dangerous unhinged psychic will cause the PCs to kill the child? I would hope most groups would recognize that it is a choice, and don't feel the justification that "I was just carrying out the plot, killing the enemies." Actually, I hope they go outside the gamer's box to heal the child, however difficult that might be. That might lead to them protecting the child from authorities that want to destroy--or use--the child. I kinda like the whole idea...
#6 bone_naga Jun 09, 2009 11:36:45	Victories can be small without being meaningless. However, I agree that not all players are interested in that sort of thing. Talk to your players and find out if they are ok with this. You should do that anyway before starting a horror campaign, because it just won't feel right if they try to approach it the same way as a hack n slash campaign. As for messing with their minds, I actually had the entire party fighting each other one time and none of them knew it. It was a complex illusion that not only made all of them appear as orcs, but when the PCs looked around, they saw illusory allies battling other illusory orcs. You could do the same thing. In fact, its even easier if its all in their minds, since theres no risk of one of them seeing an illusory duplicate of himself.
#7 nil_athelion Jun 09, 2009 12:57:21	As for messing with their minds, I actually had the entire party fighting each other one time and none of them knew it. It was a complex illusion that not only made all of them appear as orcs, but when the PCs looked around, they saw illusory allies battling other illusory orcs. You could do the same thing. In fact, its even easier if its all in their minds, since theres no risk of one of them seeing an illusory duplicate of himself. How did you pull of the positioning and power usage? I would see someone using some power that, say, slows, and having to tell the person who got hit by it that "some random monster manages to slow you." Not sure how board state and positioning works at all. I'm used to this from a (FF)RPG perspective, by the way. I write stories, and I play RPs, but I've never actually DMed for DnD. What do you define as the defining traits of Horror?
#8 k4z00p4 Jun 09, 2009 15:43:29	As a gm of a horror campaign one of my favorite things to do is mess with the players. Just throw them into this completely unbelievable thing, and see what they do. The best way I can see doing this is through dreams. Dreams can be a way of conveying messages as well, which is what I used it for, but at the same time totally screwed with the pc's/players. Here's what happened: The party was traveling through a cursed forest. The warning they received before entering was to stay on the path and not stray in the woods, or they would become lost forever. Once in the woods, I had them magically become separated, and split in two groups. They were trying to find each other, but the problem was that they were going backwards from each other. (Now remember this is all a dream segment, but they didn't know this). Each of the pc's were with another, so 2 groups of 2. One was separated further, and was chased down by a werewolf. (The lost pc was a lycanthrope, though even he didn't know this). So pc1 (lycanthrope) chased pc2. Now the other 2 came across a swirling vortex/portal on their path. One of them decided they'd put their arm in. As they did, another arm came out. One of them decided to cut off that arm, and they watched it fall, squirming. While I thought it'd be fun to have that character lose his arm as well I thought it'd be even crazier if he had that arm still in the portal intact as well as this newly lobbed off limb. After a little longer of watching the players struggle, I told them that after a long restless night's sleep, they awoke to find themselves in a camp they don't remember making, all gathered around a burned out fire. It was a lot of fun, and it seemed my players enjoyed the confusion and the things I put them through and probably relieved none of it really happened. Moral of the story, use dreams and nightmares to mess with the pc's, it's fun! Also the character had an exrtra arm in his bag after waking up = P What defines horror. Jeez, I'm not sure where to even start with that one. I feel one the defining roles of horror campaigns would be the unknown. The characters should never know what is going on completely. If they know what to expect then it's not going to be effective. This is where meta-gaming ruins the story. Which to counteract meta-gaming, toss in a new attribute to a monster. This will confuse the players and not know what to expect. I hope that kind of answers your question. Also thanks for the help guys.
#9 malphaeus Jun 09, 2009 16:30:45	Hey, kudos to you for trying a horror 4e campaign. It seems like it might be a bit trickier than previous editions, as there is a lot less room to manipulate familiar powers and rituals to cause unintended consequences (ala how Ravenloft changed things up in previous editions). Horror can be done in a number of ways. There is the horror of subversion, the horror of the abject/abjection, the horror of the insurmountable/unending/bleak. This largely revolves around narrative style, and how you communicate to your players what is going on. Alot of what horror is boils down to familiarity, significance, and agency of the protagonist. Keeping things mysterious to players (such as a sanity mechanic, or a corruption mechanic) is important in Horror games. Don't tell your players that he takes a -2 to attack rolls because he cannot get the image of a poor farmer failing to save his family from being slain and risen as zombies out of his mind. Instead describe to him why he misses. "You move to swing, but as you draw back your mind reels from an unexpected image of...[whatever horrifying experiience they just went through]. You'll want to render decision points ambiguous. Does a player set a weak hobgoblin free only to find out later that he kills and devours an innocent family that a PC knows? What does such a thing do to the character's notion of Mercy? Does the horror of the world change him? or does he rail against it at every turn in the futile hope that his resistance may, somehow, make a difference in the grand scheme of things? Horror of Subversion: This is the type of horror that takes something familiar and transmutes into something terrible. The body snatcher idea posted above is a kind of horror of subversion. The film 'village of the damned' is another, wherein children (usually venerated and considered pure) are the vehicles of damnation. the horror of subversion can also be related to motives. Lord Soth in the Dragonlance and (later) Ravenloft settings of earlier editions is a persona of Horror because his motivations are so close to what a number of people experience in their day to day lives, only Lord Soth takes it to an extreme. This a good means of making BBEG/Villians sympathetic yet terrible. Horror of Subversion threatens what we know. It preverts our basic assumptions into something terrible and it taints our other assumptions about the world. The Horror of The Abject: This horror relies on things which are marginalized in our every day experience. This kind of horror can be a lot harder to pull off, and depends a lot more on the willingness of your group to participate/role-play along. The nature of combat in D&D can help bring this to the fore. Killing a goblin is one thing, right? They are just monsters, and they are evil, and they attacked you and deserved to die. You can take the marginilization of Goblins and use that as a means to horrify the players. What if, among the possessions of the Goblins you're PCs just killed, there is a diary that describes one Goblin's struggled with having to feed his starving family, or how his most recent child was stillborn, and that, though he knows he will likely die, he will help these other goblins do raids so he can help support his family. This horror takes something that we are familiar with, but prefer to ignore, and brings it our attention in a way that cannot be ignored. What will the PCs think about just killing Goblins whenever they come across them? Will such a story incline them to be more merciful? What is the price of that Mercy? Do they just harden themselves to their denial of common ground? If so, isn't that horrifying in and of itself (you can use contrast, and similar circumstances to highlight such character's callousness, to make the player see that the character is almost [or completely] a monster). Horror of the Insurmountable/Bleak This is the horror of Lovecraft and Ligotti. This is the horror of the far realm and of an alien order to the universe that impinges itself upon the reality we know. This is the horror of the unexplained, uncurable zombie apocolypse. This is probably the easiest horror to pull off in an explicit way, but serves best as a subtle theme. This kind of horror especially plays on the notion of small victories. Small victories are the -only- source of hope for the character's, and hope is their only salvation. To lose hope, or to become as the monsterous things they face is to lose overall. Important Things to Remember: The thing that is compelling about horror is the struggle of the protagonists (your PCs in this case). You want to hit them where it hurts, but not too often. Small victories are often the only victories in a horror campaign, but if pulled off well, they will feel like massive victories. If your players become innured to the hoplessness of it all, then you run the risk of having a game of bleak fantasy. Ambiguity and uncertainty are your allies, however (in 4e especially) don't do too much to cripple the players mechanically. That will lend itself to a situation where they feel like you are being arbitrary. I highly recommend not subverting powers. Rituals, however, are another story (though don't do this too often). For example, Maybe a raise dead ritual performed on a member of your group goes terribly wrong and renders the character a revenant (featured in an upcoming Dragon Article). Maybe a character ends up being haunted by that Goblin that was just trying to feed his kids, and the only way to stop the nightmares and weird occurances is to provide for his family. Be choosey about who you do this to and why. Actor players will love this kind of thing, Slayer and Powergaming players will hate to have this happen to them. Alot of the terror and horror of a situation will rely on you, the DM using evocative narrative and knowing your players -and- their character's. The art of a successful horror campaign (versus a horror one shot) is walking the line between hope and despair, salvation and damnation, the familiar and the unfamiliar, etc. and making that line blurry to your group. Hope this helps. Edit: The types of horror listed above are by no means exhaustive or even authoritative, these are just the types of horror that i tend to use in my campaigns, and that I tend to admire most in literature. I figured that broad themes would be best. I can give you specific examples of things from previous games, if that would help.
#10 bone_naga Jun 10, 2009 11:22:17	How did you pull of the positioning and power usage? I would see someone using some power that, say, slows, and having to tell the person who got hit by it that "some random monster manages to slow you." Not sure how board state and positioning works at all. I'm used to this from a (FF)RPG perspective, by the way. I write stories, and I play RPs, but I've never actually DMed for DnD. What do you define as the defining traits of Horror? Well admittedly this was 2e not 4e, but I had similar issues with combat maneuvers and critical hits (we were using combat and tactics). I had the turns spread out far enough so that when one character tripped an orc at the beginning of the round, the other character didn't fall prone until several other people's turns had passed, at which point they were no longer thinking about what happened at the top of the round. And the beauty of making this something in the character's mind (like a hallucination instead of an illusion) is that you can justify inconsistencies as being part of the hallucination. If character A pushes character B, character A sees that as a Bull Rush, but character B might see it as the monster moving and then using a power that pushes him. Board positioning would be a little more difficult in 4e than 2e, but on the plus side, with so much movement going on, and movement being expected, the players might be less likely to notice any inconsistencies, and even if they are paying attention, the random orc moving away from the ranger might not seem any stranger than the rogue moving away from the random orc. And again, if you make any mistakes (ranger moves away, but you forget to move his orc double), the players probably won't notice, and even if they do, it was all in their heads anyway, hallucinations aren't perfect. It also works better if the players expect that these are custom monsters, and thus will not have the same powers as standard orcs. As for the defining traits of horror. I think the biggest thing is information. The less the players know, the scarier it is. Take creatures from the MM, and give them vague lovecraftian descriptions instead of saying "3 sahuagin climb out of the water". At completely random times ask for their passive perception scores, or start rolling dice behind the screen for no reason. Describe feelings of being watched or tell them they see a flicker of movement in their peripheral vision until the players are just as paranoid as their characters.
#11 nil_athelion Jun 10, 2009 12:01:42	This horror takes something that we are familiar with, but prefer to ignore, and brings it our attention in a way that cannot be ignored. What will the PCs think about just killing Goblins whenever they come across them? Will such a story incline them to be more merciful? What is the price of that Mercy? Do they just harden themselves to their denial of common ground? If so, isn't that horrifying in and of itself (you can use contrast, and similar circumstances to highlight such character's callousness, to make the player see that the character is almost [or completely] a monster). See, in our current campaign, my character has a very pacifistic view on life. This comes from being kidnapped as a youth and trained to be an elite (expendable) slave soldier. My previous fighter, a town guard, questioned the ethicality of the group's actions, as he is used to bringing people to court, etc. Selnar (my current fighter), would rather do anything than fight. However, he is very ill-equipped at it, being a con-based fighter, as he is - but him finding what he can do with what he has is part of his story. But you know what? If this is anything but an internal monologue (my first fighter kept a diary, too), the other players will complain about me whining, and justify their actions with everything from "well, my character thinks they are evil, so we are killing them" to "It's just a game - we go kill bad guys, and they die." ...which really disappoints me. I would love to see them questioning what is the appropriate action (right now they just take the simplest one), but I think that the current group of players would be highly unsatisfied (with the exception of one actor, and myself). For the zombie thing, I've been trying to work in a way that Slayers and Powergamers can have fun at the same time as actors and storytellers can enjoy figuring out the moral questions that apocalypse generally brings to the fore. Of course, I'm not designing it for the players I play with. Looking at your categories, I have a strong love of abject horror and of subversion. I'll see if I could build some plot ideas around the ones where I haven't already covered. And the beauty of making this something in the character's mind (like a hallucination instead of an illusion) is that you can justify inconsistencies as being part of the hallucination. If character A pushes character B, character A sees that as a Bull Rush, but character B might see it as the monster moving and then using a power that pushes him. I fear that hallucinations don't have the sort of meaningfulness as illusion - same reason why "Then he woke up, and realized it was all a dream" is such a bad ending. An adequate subversion would be waking up with wounds from the dream. As for the defining traits of horror. I think the biggest thing is information. The less the players know, the scarier it is. Take creatures from the MM, and give them vague lovecraftian descriptions instead of saying "3 sahuagin climb out of the water". At completely random times ask for their passive perception scores, or start rolling dice behind the screen for no reason. Describe feelings of being watched or tell them they see a flicker of movement in their peripheral vision until the players are just as paranoid as their characters. I also think that information is the biggest thing. It is for me, anyway. I feel that asking for passive perception scores is a bit staged - again, I have never DMed in DnD, but it's one number, and it would be more than a bit easy to write down. Dice rolls I can see being unsettling. In 4E can you roll people's active perception for them? That way they don't know if they rolled high and can trust what they see or rolled low, and should assume they are being fooled. (I actually think this should be the case in active perception all the time, but that's just me.) You see, one of the first effects of the zombie disease is making it hard to distinguish between zombies and humans, with a 1/2 chance to initially see one as the other, and needing an active perception check to be sure. But if they know who did well on their perception, then they just follow what that character thinks. I would like to roll all the dice for them, and tell them each what they think they see.
#12 yellowdingo Jun 12, 2009 3:38:00	Hello! I'm in the midst of trying to get ideas for a horror campaign. It will be 4e, and probably will start at levels 1-5. I have a couple questions I'd like some help with. First, (not so much a question as a request I suppose) I've got serious writers block at the moment, and can't think of a thing for this story. Litteraly...no ideas or starting point at the moment. So any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Any basic idea that I can run with, and expand would be awesome. I'm open to a lot of suggestions. Next, anyone try a horror campaign in 4e yet? I'm sure someone has. How'd it turn out? I've run one in 3.5 and had a lot of fun with it. I'm gonna mix and match some stuff to compensate for no Heroes of Horror book for 4e. Thanks a bunch, -k4z00p4- I'd have to say: H.P. Lovecraft's 'Mountains of Madness' It provides an intense fear of the unknown in the moment when the dig team having reported some discovery of a 'plant' in a fifty million year old cave and describe their intention to do a plant disection, are soon proven contrary when a second team sent to investigate why communication was cut off, discover that instead of the disection of a plant it is a dog and one of the men...and the madman has vanished. If it were not for the snowy five sided pyramid graves with 'plants' you would think that they just went nuts... link

Post/Author/DateTime

Post

k4z00p4

Jun 07, 2009 23:08:20

Hello! I'm in the midst of trying to get ideas for a horror campaign. It will be 4e, and probably will start at levels 1-5.

I have a couple questions I'd like some help with.
First, (not so much a question as a request I suppose) I've got serious writers block at the moment, and can't think of a thing for this story. Litteraly...no ideas or starting point at the moment. So any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Any basic idea that I can run with, and expand would be awesome. I'm open to a lot of suggestions.

Next, anyone try a horror campaign in 4e yet? I'm sure someone has. How'd it turn out? I've run one in 3.5 and had a lot of fun with it. I'm gonna mix and match some stuff to compensate for no Heroes of Horror book for 4e.

Thanks a bunch,
-k4z00p4-

nil_athelion

Jun 08, 2009 6:26:09

As it happens, I'm building a zombie apocalypse adventure.

The main avenues I'm using to make it horror, not just fighting:

Show

Plague is caused by parasites that burrow under skin to get to your central nervous system. (Stuff moving under skin is known to be horrific.)
Plague causes infected PC's and NPC's to not be able to distinguish between zombies and normal people. (Suspicion abounds.)
Plague reanimates the dead, whether dead by the disease, or dead by other causes with parasites in them.

The zombies only die to critical hits - bringing them below 0 HP causes them to be unconscious for 1d6 rounds, giving players an uncertain timeframe to coup de grace before they stand up with half health.
The zombies have strong grabbing and dragging powers, used to mess with coup de grace planning, and isolate and team up on PCs.

The zombies improve themselves by ripping body parts off of corpses with unusable spines, and either grafting it to themselves or consuming it to provide fuel for internal improvements (up to 26 augmentations now). (People tend not to like zombies that defile corpses, much less zombies that defile corpses to get stronger and have a diversity of abilities.)

The zombies are spreading across the countryside, with few safe shelters (which all have problems of varying kinds - starvation, desperate people, overcrowding, militaristic rule, zombie attacks, cultists).

Mystery - the PCs don't know any of this, and I don't think I'll ever tell them, just let them make theories on their own.

(Once I get the first draft together, it will be cropping up on the campaign feedback forum.)

k4z00p4

Jun 08, 2009 14:48:40

Nil sir, you rock. All great ideas. I decided to go a little bit with your route of a corruption in the woods idea, along with an idea I had for a campaign last year, that I think came from Heroes of Horror. It will work really nice with the way my player's characters are shaping up.

Cultists of Tharizdun have finally opened a hole to their god's prison. Now the corruption leaks over the area, slowly spreading, corrupting animals, monsters, villages. The longer the hole is open the less time the earth has. The pc's are sent to find out what's causing the corruption.

I like the idea of night time everything feeling more corrupted. It shows that the light has some strength over the corrupted areas early on, but soon it will be too powerful.

Thanks a lot.

Also I'd like to get some more ideas. If i hear a better one I might switch things around or use it for some other session.

bone_naga

Jun 08, 2009 15:15:22

I just started a 4e dark fantasy/horror campaign. I'm using some homebrew sanity rules (each character has sanity points similar to HP, and when they reach 0 SP they go temporarily insane, and start making saving throws, on 3 failed saves they go permanently insane instead of dying). In addition to psychic attacks, characters lose sanity for seeing horrific creatures (aberrants, demons, devils, undead, pretty much anything from another plane), horrific sights (mutilated corpses, rivers of blood, watching a friend get butchered), traumatic experiences (undergoing torture), or by committing acts which aren't generally considered "sane" (like murdering innocent people).

The general assumption is magic is rare, and all arcane magic users are considered to have warlock pacts (no mechanical changes, just an additional RP aspect, although characters may lose sanity if they choose to meet with their patron). As such, magic items are also rare. Many low level items are refluffed as mundane masterwork items (so the sword isnt +1 because its magical, but because a master dwarven smith forged it out of the finest steel). Items that are actually magical (the higher level ones), often carry a curse or other drawback (like having to draw on the strength of the wielder, thus causing the character to lose 1 Healing Surge at the start of each day, or a flaming weapon that immolates the wielder on a natural 1).

I'm borrowing lots of ideas from Lovecraft and other Cthulhu mythos writers, Robert E. Howard, and Stephen King. I recommend checking out Darkness & Dread (a 3pp 3e supplement) and the Call of Cthulhu game.

Its D&D, so the players will probably still expect a fair amount of combat, but give them threats that can't always be overcome directly through combat. Use lots of skill challenges and puzzles. Even when they do win, make sure they see what a small victory it is. For every cult that they put down, a new one springs up. The eternal evils that the cultists are attempting to summon cannot be killed, only banished, and they can wait as long as they need to for another opportunity. The party disrupts a ritual to unleash a fearsome plague that will cleanse the entire world. They succeed, but the ritual was too near completion for all that energy to simply dissipate. Instead of a zombie apocalypse, you get "only" the Black Death. To add the icing to the cake, the PCs (who are immunized by exposure to the ritual), become the first carriers and introduce the disease to an unsuspecting world.

nil_athelion

Jun 09, 2009 9:03:06

One of my worries is whether people will want to play if they guess that their victories are either going to be small, or are going to be perverted. My initial plan for the zombie apocalypse was that they PCs were going to put down the beginning of it, but then bring the disease back to the city they were based out of, to give them responsiblity for the whole mess. I decided against this, as I was worried it would drive them away.

Where is the line on between making the game solidly horror, and yet not making the game depressing and unfun?

I don't think I can work cursed items into the campaign I am building, but they certainly seem interesting. I can see them working well with a variety of the normal weapons.

On thing I'm annoyed at with DnD is that you really can't mess with player perceptions enough to have them attack each other. One character might see the others as zombies, due to the disease, but to the player it is pretty obvious. The limits of messing with their minds is very annoying.

Since you were asking for more ideas, here is one: The PCs are in a village, and every night, very strange things are happening. Toy-like monsters appear out of thin air, attacks by tall shadowy figures, darkness is strongly increased (limiting PC sight is oh-so-fun), monsters are always lurking in the shadows (permanent total concealment, melee out of shadow, but as long as the shadow is lit, the monster isn't there), etc. Eventually, the PCs track it down to be the nightmares of a psychic girl, and have to solve why she is having nightmares (or kill her, I suppose - I'm pretty sure my group would do that, and justify it as good, too).

I'm using toy-like monsters (based on toys seen in the shadows, tall shadowy figures (adults), and un-see-able monsters in the darkness (fear of the unseen) as generic childhood fears, but throw in whatever ones you think are appropriate. Clues leading them to suspect the child could include seeing illusionary mirrors attached to walls where the PCs can see the child in a dark room, repeating "I'm a monster, I'm a monster, I'm a monster" in the dark - perhaps with another figure behind. This is working the child abuse angle, of course - perhaps a parent who thinks the child's powers are unnatural, and turns their fear of the child into hate for the child. But clues are probably easily disturbing bits, particularly when bringing light near them (or taking an active perception check on them - looking too closely) makes them disappear.

Big bad is... adult abuser, the angry child (in the fully real world)? Perhaps if they kill the abusive person (parent?) the next night they fight the child's horrible perceptions of the people who killed her abuser - twisted NPC version of themselves. (This assumes that the child is very much attached and dependent on the person who was abusing them, and/or had been brainwashed to fear strangers/outsiders.)

Perhaps the fact that ending the abuse still left an extremely dangerous unhinged psychic will cause the PCs to kill the child? I would hope most groups would recognize that it is a choice, and don't feel the justification that "I was just carrying out the plot, killing the enemies."

Actually, I hope they go outside the gamer's box to heal the child, however difficult that might be. That might lead to them protecting the child from authorities that want to destroy--or use--the child.

I kinda like the whole idea...

bone_naga

Jun 09, 2009 11:36:45

Victories can be small without being meaningless. However, I agree that not all players are interested in that sort of thing. Talk to your players and find out if they are ok with this. You should do that anyway before starting a horror campaign, because it just won't feel right if they try to approach it the same way as a hack n slash campaign.

As for messing with their minds, I actually had the entire party fighting each other one time and none of them knew it. It was a complex illusion that not only made all of them appear as orcs, but when the PCs looked around, they saw illusory allies battling other illusory orcs. You could do the same thing. In fact, its even easier if its all in their minds, since theres no risk of one of them seeing an illusory duplicate of himself.

nil_athelion

Jun 09, 2009 12:57:21

As for messing with their minds, I actually had the entire party fighting each other one time and none of them knew it. It was a complex illusion that not only made all of them appear as orcs, but when the PCs looked around, they saw illusory allies battling other illusory orcs. You could do the same thing. In fact, its even easier if its all in their minds, since theres no risk of one of them seeing an illusory duplicate of himself.

How did you pull of the positioning and power usage? I would see someone using some power that, say, slows, and having to tell the person who got hit by it that "some random monster manages to slow you." Not sure how board state and positioning works at all.

I'm used to this from a (FF)RPG perspective, by the way. I write stories, and I play RPs, but I've never actually DMed for DnD.

What do you define as the defining traits of Horror?

k4z00p4

Jun 09, 2009 15:43:29

As a gm of a horror campaign one of my favorite things to do is mess with the players. Just throw them into this completely unbelievable thing, and see what they do. The best way I can see doing this is through dreams. Dreams can be a way of conveying messages as well, which is what I used it for, but at the same time totally screwed with the pc's/players.

Here's what happened:
The party was traveling through a cursed forest. The warning they received before entering was to stay on the path and not stray in the woods, or they would become lost forever. Once in the woods, I had them magically become separated, and split in two groups. They were trying to find each other, but the problem was that they were going backwards from each other. (Now remember this is all a dream segment, but they didn't know this). Each of the pc's were with another, so 2 groups of 2. One was separated further, and was chased down by a werewolf. (The lost pc was a lycanthrope, though even he didn't know this). So pc1 (lycanthrope) chased pc2.
Now the other 2 came across a swirling vortex/portal on their path. One of them decided they'd put their arm in. As they did, another arm came out. One of them decided to cut off that arm, and they watched it fall, squirming. While I thought it'd be fun to have that character lose his arm as well I thought it'd be even crazier if he had that arm still in the portal intact as well as this newly lobbed off limb. After a little longer of watching the players struggle, I told them that after a long restless night's sleep, they awoke to find themselves in a camp they don't remember making, all gathered around a burned out fire.

It was a lot of fun, and it seemed my players enjoyed the confusion and the things I put them through and probably relieved none of it really happened. Moral of the story, use dreams and nightmares to mess with the pc's, it's fun!

Also the character had an exrtra arm in his bag after waking up = P

What defines horror. Jeez, I'm not sure where to even start with that one. I feel one the defining roles of horror campaigns would be the unknown. The characters should never know what is going on completely. If they know what to expect then it's not going to be effective. This is where meta-gaming ruins the story. Which to counteract meta-gaming, toss in a new attribute to a monster. This will confuse the players and not know what to expect.

I hope that kind of answers your question. Also thanks for the help guys.

malphaeus

Jun 09, 2009 16:30:45

Hey, kudos to you for trying a horror 4e campaign. It seems like it might be a bit trickier than previous editions, as there is a lot less room to manipulate familiar powers and rituals to cause unintended consequences (ala how Ravenloft changed things up in previous editions).

Horror can be done in a number of ways. There is the horror of subversion, the horror of the abject/abjection, the horror of the insurmountable/unending/bleak. This largely revolves around narrative style, and how you communicate to your players what is going on.

Alot of what horror is boils down to familiarity, significance, and agency of the protagonist. Keeping things mysterious to players (such as a sanity mechanic, or a corruption mechanic) is important in Horror games. Don't tell your players that he takes a -2 to attack rolls because he cannot get the image of a poor farmer failing to save his family from being slain and risen as zombies out of his mind. Instead describe to him why he misses. "You move to swing, but as you draw back your mind reels from an unexpected image of...[whatever horrifying experiience they just went through].

You'll want to render decision points ambiguous. Does a player set a weak hobgoblin free only to find out later that he kills and devours an innocent family that a PC knows? What does such a thing do to the character's notion of Mercy? Does the horror of the world change him? or does he rail against it at every turn in the futile hope that his resistance may, somehow, make a difference in the grand scheme of things?

Horror of Subversion:
This is the type of horror that takes something familiar and transmutes into something terrible. The body snatcher idea posted above is a kind of horror of subversion. The film 'village of the damned' is another, wherein children (usually venerated and considered pure) are the vehicles of damnation.

the horror of subversion can also be related to motives. Lord Soth in the Dragonlance and (later) Ravenloft settings of earlier editions is a persona of Horror because his motivations are so close to what a number of people experience in their day to day lives, only Lord Soth takes it to an extreme. This a good means of making BBEG/Villians sympathetic yet terrible.

Horror of Subversion threatens what we know. It preverts our basic assumptions into something terrible and it taints our other assumptions about the world.

The Horror of The Abject:
This horror relies on things which are marginalized in our every day experience. This kind of horror can be a lot harder to pull off, and depends a lot more on the willingness of your group to participate/role-play along.

The nature of combat in D&D can help bring this to the fore. Killing a goblin is one thing, right? They are just monsters, and they are evil, and they attacked you and deserved to die. You can take the marginilization of Goblins and use that as a means to horrify the players. What if, among the possessions of the Goblins you're PCs just killed, there is a diary that describes one Goblin's struggled with having to feed his starving family, or how his most recent child was stillborn, and that, though he knows he will likely die, he will help these other goblins do raids so he can help support his family.

This horror takes something that we are familiar with, but prefer to ignore, and brings it our attention in a way that cannot be ignored. What will the PCs think about just killing Goblins whenever they come across them? Will such a story incline them to be more merciful? What is the price of that Mercy? Do they just harden themselves to their denial of common ground? If so, isn't that horrifying in and of itself (you can use contrast, and similar circumstances to highlight such character's callousness, to make the player see that the character is almost [or completely] a monster).

Horror of the Insurmountable/Bleak
This is the horror of Lovecraft and Ligotti. This is the horror of the far realm and of an alien order to the universe that impinges itself upon the reality we know. This is the horror of the unexplained, uncurable zombie apocolypse. This is probably the easiest horror to pull off in an explicit way, but serves best as a subtle theme.

This kind of horror especially plays on the notion of small victories. Small victories are the -only- source of hope for the character's, and hope is their only salvation. To lose hope, or to become as the monsterous things they face is to lose overall.

Important Things to Remember:
The thing that is compelling about horror is the struggle of the protagonists (your PCs in this case). You want to hit them where it hurts, but not too often. Small victories are often the only victories in a horror campaign, but if pulled off well, they will feel like massive victories. If your players become innured to the hoplessness of it all, then you run the risk of having a game of bleak fantasy.

Ambiguity and uncertainty are your allies, however (in 4e especially) don't do too much to cripple the players mechanically. That will lend itself to a situation where they feel like you are being arbitrary. I highly recommend not subverting powers. Rituals, however, are another story (though don't do this too often). For example, Maybe a raise dead ritual performed on a member of your group goes terribly wrong and renders the character a revenant (featured in an upcoming Dragon Article). Maybe a character ends up being haunted by that Goblin that was just trying to feed his kids, and the only way to stop the nightmares and weird occurances is to provide for his family.

Be choosey about who you do this to and why. Actor players will love this kind of thing, Slayer and Powergaming players will hate to have this happen to them.

Alot of the terror and horror of a situation will rely on you, the DM using evocative narrative and knowing your players -and- their character's. The art of a successful horror campaign (versus a horror one shot) is walking the line between hope and despair, salvation and damnation, the familiar and the unfamiliar, etc. and making that line blurry to your group.

Hope this helps.

Edit:
The types of horror listed above are by no means exhaustive or even authoritative, these are just the types of horror that i tend to use in my campaigns, and that I tend to admire most in literature. I figured that broad themes would be best. I can give you specific examples of things from previous games, if that would help.

#10

bone_naga

Jun 10, 2009 11:22:17

How did you pull of the positioning and power usage? I would see someone using some power that, say, slows, and having to tell the person who got hit by it that "some random monster manages to slow you." Not sure how board state and positioning works at all.

I'm used to this from a (FF)RPG perspective, by the way. I write stories, and I play RPs, but I've never actually DMed for DnD.

What do you define as the defining traits of Horror?

Well admittedly this was 2e not 4e, but I had similar issues with combat maneuvers and critical hits (we were using combat and tactics). I had the turns spread out far enough so that when one character tripped an orc at the beginning of the round, the other character didn't fall prone until several other people's turns had passed, at which point they were no longer thinking about what happened at the top of the round.

And the beauty of making this something in the character's mind (like a hallucination instead of an illusion) is that you can justify inconsistencies as being part of the hallucination. If character A pushes character B, character A sees that as a Bull Rush, but character B might see it as the monster moving and then using a power that pushes him.

Board positioning would be a little more difficult in 4e than 2e, but on the plus side, with so much movement going on, and movement being expected, the players might be less likely to notice any inconsistencies, and even if they are paying attention, the random orc moving away from the ranger might not seem any stranger than the rogue moving away from the random orc. And again, if you make any mistakes (ranger moves away, but you forget to move his orc double), the players probably won't notice, and even if they do, it was all in their heads anyway, hallucinations aren't perfect.

It also works better if the players expect that these are custom monsters, and thus will not have the same powers as standard orcs.

As for the defining traits of horror. I think the biggest thing is information. The less the players know, the scarier it is. Take creatures from the MM, and give them vague lovecraftian descriptions instead of saying "3 sahuagin climb out of the water". At completely random times ask for their passive perception scores, or start rolling dice behind the screen for no reason. Describe feelings of being watched or tell them they see a flicker of movement in their peripheral vision until the players are just as paranoid as their characters.

#11

nil_athelion

Jun 10, 2009 12:01:42

This horror takes something that we are familiar with, but prefer to ignore, and brings it our attention in a way that cannot be ignored. What will the PCs think about just killing Goblins whenever they come across them? Will such a story incline them to be more merciful? What is the price of that Mercy? Do they just harden themselves to their denial of common ground? If so, isn't that horrifying in and of itself (you can use contrast, and similar circumstances to highlight such character's callousness, to make the player see that the character is almost [or completely] a monster).

See, in our current campaign, my character has a very pacifistic view on life. This comes from being kidnapped as a youth and trained to be an elite (expendable) slave soldier. My previous fighter, a town guard, questioned the ethicality of the group's actions, as he is used to bringing people to court, etc. Selnar (my current fighter), would rather do anything than fight. However, he is very ill-equipped at it, being a con-based fighter, as he is - but him finding what he can do with what he has is part of his story.

But you know what? If this is anything but an internal monologue (my first fighter kept a diary, too), the other players will complain about me whining, and justify their actions with everything from "well, my character thinks they are evil, so we are killing them" to "It's just a game - we go kill bad guys, and they die." ...which really disappoints me.

I would love to see them questioning what is the appropriate action (right now they just take the simplest one), but I think that the current group of players would be highly unsatisfied (with the exception of one actor, and myself).

For the zombie thing, I've been trying to work in a way that Slayers and Powergamers can have fun at the same time as actors and storytellers can enjoy figuring out the moral questions that apocalypse generally brings to the fore. Of course, I'm not designing it for the players I play with.

Looking at your categories, I have a strong love of abject horror and of subversion. I'll see if I could build some plot ideas around the ones where I haven't already covered.

And the beauty of making this something in the character's mind (like a hallucination instead of an illusion) is that you can justify inconsistencies as being part of the hallucination. If character A pushes character B, character A sees that as a Bull Rush, but character B might see it as the monster moving and then using a power that pushes him.

I fear that hallucinations don't have the sort of meaningfulness as illusion - same reason why "Then he woke up, and realized it was all a dream" is such a bad ending. An adequate subversion would be waking up with wounds from the dream.

As for the defining traits of horror. I think the biggest thing is information. The less the players know, the scarier it is. Take creatures from the MM, and give them vague lovecraftian descriptions instead of saying "3 sahuagin climb out of the water". At completely random times ask for their passive perception scores, or start rolling dice behind the screen for no reason. Describe feelings of being watched or tell them they see a flicker of movement in their peripheral vision until the players are just as paranoid as their characters.

I also think that information is the biggest thing. It is for me, anyway.

I feel that asking for passive perception scores is a bit staged - again, I have never DMed in DnD, but it's one number, and it would be more than a bit easy to write down. Dice rolls I can see being unsettling.

In 4E can you roll people's active perception for them? That way they don't know if they rolled high and can trust what they see or rolled low, and should assume they are being fooled. (I actually think this should be the case in active perception all the time, but that's just me.)

You see, one of the first effects of the zombie disease is making it hard to distinguish between zombies and humans, with a 1/2 chance to initially see one as the other, and needing an active perception check to be sure. But if they know who did well on their perception, then they just follow what that character thinks. I would like to roll all the dice for them, and tell them each what they think they see.

#12

yellowdingo

Jun 12, 2009 3:38:00

Hello! I'm in the midst of trying to get ideas for a horror campaign. It will be 4e, and probably will start at levels 1-5.

I have a couple questions I'd like some help with.
First, (not so much a question as a request I suppose) I've got serious writers block at the moment, and can't think of a thing for this story. Litteraly...no ideas or starting point at the moment. So any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Any basic idea that I can run with, and expand would be awesome. I'm open to a lot of suggestions.

Next, anyone try a horror campaign in 4e yet? I'm sure someone has. How'd it turn out? I've run one in 3.5 and had a lot of fun with it. I'm gonna mix and match some stuff to compensate for no Heroes of Horror book for 4e.

Thanks a bunch,
-k4z00p4-

I'd have to say:

H.P. Lovecraft's 'Mountains of Madness'

It provides an intense fear of the unknown in the moment when the dig team having reported some discovery of a 'plant' in a fifty million year old cave and describe their intention to do a plant disection, are soon proven contrary when a second team sent to investigate why communication was cut off, discover that instead of the disection of a plant it is a dog and one of the men...and the madman has vanished. If it were not for the snowy five sided pyramid graves with 'plants' you would think that they just went nuts...

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