Well, since this is the CoC boards replacement (in a fashion) then obviously it needs its own creepy events thread.
Ill get the ball rolling of course.
1. The PC wakes up in the middle of the night to see his/her bedroom door open and a little girl standing in the hallway, holding a stuffed animal. The girl stares for a few seconds, then walks away, she is gone when the PC's investigate.
2. When the PC's turn on the TV, they see themselves on it, staring back at them. The tv version smiles at them, says "Im in your house." then the screen goes blank. (Brownie points if you can figure out where this is from.
well, its a start, lets get some more in here.
I went to all the trouble of reviving this thread, AND putting it in my sig, so could we please start the posting?
The PCs are seperated and then meet clones/simularcua of other PCs. the best part comes when they meet a real one of the characters and the party members draw swords on one another.
The PCs find a seemingly occupied iron maiden. it opens, and the body inside is subjective to the viewer. depending on what effect you wnat, they either see themselves or the person they care most about.
[ background on the next one : in one of my games I ran, a player wanted to run a "romance" angle with a npc..despite my objections,he insisted and now I present to you.... payback ]
a member of the opposite sex begins courting a pc, this should go on for a bit..having the pc meet him/her at public places,etc.
[take time building this into something that would seriously "hamper" a pc's psyche when you spring the next part on him/her].. when the pc and the npc decide to take the next step, have the npc say that his/her parents would like to meet the npc and has invited the pc to dinner. The npc gives the pc a address to meet him/her at. When the pc gets to the address [ in my game it was to a cemetary plot ] they will be in for a surprise,the love interest is a creature of the shadow and his/her parents are corpses placed around a dinner table in a mock fashion [ I had the creature dressed in a white wedding dress ala "mary jane's last dance"...the pc barely escaped ]
a man in black approaches the pc and asks them to kill the mailman
DM: The table stares back at you."
"PC: I wink at the table *chuckles*
DM: It winks back at you. "
The character walks into a room, and finds a gleaming metal rack of weapons. On closer inspection, they all appear to be children's toys: waterguns, paintball weapons, et cetera. If the character picks one up, they feel a horrendous burning sensation and it "melts" half an inch into the PC's flesh, making removal impossible. If the PC tries the door, it is locked. About five minutes after the PC enters the room, the plastic toys fly in all directions, then vanish...except for the half-inch of plastic that's replaced the PC's skin in the places they got hit by the toys. Will require painful surgery and many, many fruitless explanations to your HMO fix.
When he opened the large walk-in closet, he deeper in the closet a flickering candle on a little girl's tea table. A very old doll sat there, with no hair & its face full of cracks. After seeing the creepy sight, the player was very freaked when it opened its eyes. His character then proceeded to smash that doll into bits against the wall, then grab the little chair it was sitting on & smash all the other dolls. The dolls bled as they died, and another Listen roll heard the sound of babies crying as he smashed them.
It was funny to see the other chracters' reactions to him--streaked in gore and really freaked out.
The part of her skin that was touching the object also changes slightly to resemble the object's color and texture. She needs a completely new wardrobe every week, but doesn't seem to need food in the normal way.
Living stuff, however, is absorbed even faster and more thurougly; in a few minutes, that freindly cat will be nothing more than a furry spot on her ankle.
The problem, of course, is how she maintains such a humanlike appearance…
My personal favorite was when I was still running my CoC Campaign. The PCs chased a cultist down into a hidden basement in this bar/nightclub. They slew the cultist, and headed back upstairs, only to find that the place had emptied out, and the front door had been covered with black paper, and was locked. As the PCs searched the area, someone stumbled over a very old projector on a table, which started playing a scene with a bunch of men, wearing faceless masks, just standing there.
Freaked out, one of the players picked the projector up, and tossed it out the door. When he ran out the door, the city was now filled with a heavy mist, and thousands of those men in the faceless masks. Not moving, not attacking, just standing there, slightly swaying. When the PC lost his sanity, he screamed. The faceless masks turned to a face of pure pain, and screamed with him.
I killed the party in one fell swoop with that.
My own bit of creepiness is soemthing that happened to a party playing in a wild west game (based off of Deadlands, but we were using the Mage: The Ascension system)
One of the players sat down to his favorite chair in the local saloon. There had been a brawl there the night before, when the party tangled with a mean gang of "stock inspectors" hired bythe local cattle baron. Some windows had been broken.
Now, some odd things had happened before, so when I had the player roll a perception check, then told him something was amiss, he looked all around, confused. I kept describing how nothing seemed to be worng...just beyond the window, everything seemed normal. People passed along the streets, passing by the window, all going about their business...eventually, he realized that there was only one odd thing about the entire scene...
The window.
It had been broken the night before. No way it could have been fixed in such a short time.
and he wasn't reflecting in it.
And when he brought it to the attention of the barkeep, the man said, "Hmm. Isn't that odd?"...and went back to cleaing the cups...
The fact that the guy didn't seem to find anything strange about the scene freaked the player out more than the incident itself did...
Once again, this takes place in a dilapidated and decaying building. This time a boarded up old home next to an alley where a gruesome murder occured. I didn't phrase it exactly like this, but unfortunately I lost the original file I had. Its more creepy than it is scary.
The PCs enter a room in a great state of decay. the roof has colapsed and the beams from the cieling have fallen in and punched through the floor in one place. A faint scatching sound can be heard from below. Anyone adventurous enough to peer down into the gloom can see something small and pale moving near where the beam ends. With additional light, a human corpse lies at the bottom crushed firmly beneath the beam with much of the rest of the body coved with other debris. All you can see is the head, shoulder and one arm. The arm slowly reaches out and claws at the ground as if trying to drag itself free. the fingers are worn nearly to the palm with only polished stubs of bone protruding. It claws outwards again and you notice that that there are five deep grooves in the stone floor where this creature has been trying to escape its sad fate for the last hundred or so years.
-As the PCs enter a room they find themselves staring straight ahead at another door where they can see their back. Beyond that is another room with a door and themselves. Upon closing the door they and looking behind there is no door... anywhere in the room. Only a mirror where the PCs reflection watches with an evil grin.
-While in a facility/prison/mental institute secuirty office a spectre/ghost slowly kills a patient and then drifts towards the camera as it connects with the lense the PC finds their hands covered in blood standing in the patients room.
ATTENTION *** DAWN OF THE DEAD MARCH 2004 ***
CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE ZOMBIE ARMY
to see a better idea of this, go to the url in my sig and press view the DOTD trailer.
They were underground in a catacomb in an area where the children were all buried, (died frm a plague) of course they didnt know that the soulds of the children were trapped in there so they floated around and possessed anything in the dungeon.
One room was a small garden with a water fountain, a small concrete bench held up by angels (a decorative garden bench)
(I also do haunted houses so I like to use my props and sound FX when we play so I had a creepy sound FX cd i made, a dungeon with the occasional laughing child sound in the distance, then run)
the angels opened their eyes and ran after the PC's laughing,
it sounds creepy with the right atmosphere,
pass notes to certain PC's
"You see the eyes of the angel on the wall open then shut"
the player freaks, and then nobody the rest of the players knows if it happened or not,
by the end of the night one of my players was like
Thanks man, Ill have friggin nightmares tonight.
we also had a room full of mirrors, a foggy room then they hear the children laughing,
then they step out of the mirrors,
You have been in town for three days staying at an inn. This morning when you leave the inn and speak to a merchant you've spoken to before, he doesn't recognize you and asks where you're staying. When you turn to indicate the inn you notice its rundown and empty. The merchant says to you that that inn was closed down 3 months ago when the owner died.
It got weirder from there.
On a anniversary of a loved one's death, the PC goes to the gravesite only to find that its been disturbed, when he or she goes to file a complaint with the keeper of the cementary the secretary,file clerk,etc. is the person they went to mourn in the first place.
Possible plot twists
(a) The Caretaker is a Greater Zombie Master (see website listed in my sig for details) who is using the cementary as a breeding ground for his undead army.
(b) The Loved one wasn't dead at all, but in a coma and was saved at the last minute by the caretaker
(c) The secretary is a replica of the original,which brings out the question who cloned him/her?
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- If the player has pets, late at night, while reading an occult tome, the character notices that all of his pets are looking at the same point, then they move their heads to the same side, as if following someone moving, but there's no one there. Suddenly, they get in defensive stance, and scram, hissing (if they're cats) or yelping (if they're dogs).
Here is my take on that:
Your group is investigating the disappearance of some teenagers or young adults that went to the carnival and never returned. When the heroes take a ride on the through the "Haunted Hayride" (or whatever you want to call it) They see the usual hoaky fake gore, but in a few particular rooms it looks all too real. I would leave it up to the GM to make up the particulars, but have one of the missing people be quartered in front of them, or show one being hung just as the trap door falls
In one scene, have them look at a wall of TV monitors showing them passing by in real time, and in the same car as one of the heroes, show the person sitting next to them being brutally attacked by some dark thing. When the character looks over at the person, they are just sitting there as if nothing was wrong. Then show that person on the news as being found murdered at the carnival, in the exact same manner as he or she died on the TV.
This works best if there's no hint of any other weird event in the situation.
Damage for the shot is tripled.
Later anylasis of the blood reveals that each individual cell is from a different species of creature.
Example: They're driving in a van or car, and you startdescribing how they begin to feel more and more exposed... They suddenly realize how much GLASS there is all around them- something could burst in from anywhere.... Then the car breaks down. This has to happen at night, in a rural road of some sort where there are no other trucks/cars/people. They have to get out and see whats wrong. Make it seem creepy as they hop out to check the engine, telling them about noises in the bushes and such. But nothing actually happens, the car gets started again, and they keep on going. Do this sort of thing often- this way, whenever they're plunged into a creepy situation, they never know if its actually going to turn lethal or just be meaningless. It really adds tension if used correctly. Don't OVERuse it, though- you'll do the exact opposite of what you want, making all scary situations bland since they think nothing is going to happen. The point is unpredictability. Do it right, and its great.
You could break chunks off a wall-or a person. Everything is slippery and smooth to the touch.
When the players figure this out, random things start shattering and returning to their normal state. By the end of the twenty minutes, the world is back to normal...
When the character sinks and fells all those tentacles over him, he wakes up from a bad dream, which it was, only to find himself covered in sea-water and algae.
Did someone already do that one?
Whenever a PC says a certain word, a random nearby NPC dies in a horrific manner.
The word would and should be something that needs to be said in order to continue with the game.
Only to discover a big, fat, still-living maggot swirming in the center of their cookie.
Any shouts of disgust bring the wait-staff running. But when the characters show what they've discovered, the maggots are gone. Instead, each fortune cookie contains a perfectly-ordinary fortune.
Alternatively, the characters open their fortune cookies to find a fortune that reads "I WILL KILL YOU," (or something similarly threatening) printed on a slip that's spattered with blood.
Some ideas for these wicked fortunes:
"HE IS COMING"
"TELL ME, HAVE YOU SEEN THE YELLOW SIGN?"
"CTHULHU FHTAGN"
"IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF A LIVING GOD"
"YOU DID IT"
"I KILLED HER"
"YOU DIE TONIGHT"
"WEEP. THE END IS NEAR"
"THE BLOOD IS THE LIFE"
Or any number of other one-liners. Also single words in Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese) would work. Imagine finding a fortune with a single kanji on it... and then finding out that it's the word for 'death'.
Another idea - if the fortune is one of the ones with a set of lucky numbers on the back, they all read '13'. Or '666'.
Along those lines...
For one session, seemingly everything the PCs witness occurs in increments of either 19 or 23. 23 victims in an accident. A gun stored with 23 bullets. The cab they use is no. 23, the house is no. 23. After the session, nothing has anything to do with the number 23 for a number of sessions. After a while, 23 starts creeping back in.
Not particularly horrific but feasably unsettling.
All NPC's stare at the PC as if he's an alien. There is no explanation, and everybody deny staring.
The PC suddently find himself totally naked doing day-to-day chores. Getting the paper, shopping for groceries, at school/work. (Classical Freud, isnt it?) It's up to the Keeper if the PC dreams or is awake.
One of the PCs wins big in the lottery. Apart from the price-money ($1.000.000) the PC win a (haunted) house. (Classical Carl Barks: Get to keep the cash if you can spend one night in the house... Not as easy in CoC as in Duckburg
)Originally posted by Cthulthoth_the_Callin_Chaos
Or 19 and 23, for that matter.
Along those lines...
For one session, seemingly everything the PCs witness occurs in increments of either 19 or 23. 23 victims in an accident. A gun stored with 23 bullets. The cab they use is no. 23, the house is no. 23. After the session, nothing has anything to do with the number 23 for a number of sessions. After a while, 23 starts creeping back in.
Not particularly horrific but feasably unsettling.
The nineteen thing is from Stephan King's Dark Tower series :P Good books, by the way. The book mentioned in my sig is book #1 of the series. On the topic of stuff from his books, here's an encounter spawned from his works.
While pursuing a cultist magic-user of some kind, the PCs enter some sort of backwoods town. When they go to the hotel/bar, they find that everyone is whispering about the supposed "ressurection" of the town druggy. If they ask the barkeeper about it, she tells them about the event. The druggy burst into the hotel/bar two days ago, staggered across the room, and toppeled to the ground, couging blood or dying in some manner appropriate to the drug. He was freshly dead when a customer matching the description of the cultist got up and came over to the bar. The 'keeper was staring at the dead body, and people were muttering, and the guy asked her for a drink. Still a little numb, she pured him several glasses. After the last one, he stood up, calmly declared that he would "Show them a miracle," walked over to the dead body, and [fill in the blank- basically he somehow ressurects the dude]. He then hands the 'keeper a slip of paper, and walks out, cackling. The slip says:
He knows the secrets of death. I know you want to know about it- so ask him. It will, of course, drive you utterly insane. The key word is [special number- 19 or 23 or something]. Hehehe! Have a nice day
PS. The number is NINETEEN. You'll try to forget it, but you won't be able to. Eventually, you'll ask him. NINETEEN. NINETEEN!!!
Another quite creepy and unsetteling thing is fog or just dim light. Limited visibility is always nervewracking. I played a resident evil type campaign once and the GM kept havin my gas mask fog over (couldn't take it off cause of hazerdous materials). He also made our flashlights run out of batteries (we found them) and had us do spot and listen checks at various DCs to see and hear stuff in the fog/dark.
The player went through some horrific events and "died" only to wake up in his bed.
Then the events started to occur within his home and the character "died" again. This time the character woke up in a car with the rest of the PCs. Needless to say, the bent on reality really unnerved the player. He would freak out when reoccuring events began to take place and the rest of us didn't know what to do with him.
One of the better sessions I did with the old CoC game was never describe the monster or let the PCs see it. I was killing off NPCs left and right and when it was just down to the PCs they started to get a little jumpy.
(I don't know if that's been done.)
Similar: if a PC wears glasses or contacts, they see movement--but only when not wearing glasses or specs.
Still bodies of water (ponds, lakes, reflecting pools, sinks full of dishwater, full bathtubs) develop ripples as though someone were poking a finger in them, but of course there's no one there.
When visiting a house with kids, the magnetic letters on the refrigerator spell out a word of some signifcance to the PC.
The voicemail records a series of messages, one per day. First time it's someone who thinks she's being followed... Second time, same person, apparently five minutes later, the follower getting closer. Spread it out over several weeks, voice getting more panicked until finally they hear what appears to be a murder. Ghost? Echo? Precognition of a future event? That's up to the GM.
this freaked them out for weeks as they all started looking around carefully when there was dust around... and as wwe all know...there is always dust around.. bwhahahahha...
And then they'll start seeing a man in a black duster wearing a fedora (classic cowboy) following them. They say nothing, make no moves or gestures, simply look at them. If the PC points them out to others, he dissapears. If he attempts to touch or get too close, he dissapears.
He starts to see this man kill people with a revolver in his sight, and then walk away into nothingness. This keeps happening when hes around, six times each week.
He starts to realize that these people didn't even appear in his vision untill they were slain... and that nobody around saw these people either untill the moment of death. They didn't cast shadows or reflections.
One of the other PCs finds a list of names. This list has 100 names on it, with the very last one being that PC. And the names are being crossed out, one by one. Every one of the people who died was on the list.
***
Every glass object seems to be water to the character's touch. If he reaches in, his hand dissappears, and he starts feeling the brush of a slimy tentacled limb.
An NPC shoves him through a mirror in a store, bar, or a car windshield. He wakes up in the body of someone else, someone one year older than himself. And that same NPC comes, to shove him through a mirror again. Or to shove a mirror over him.
***
Everyone but the PCs only speaks in questions. When an NPC inadvertently speaks without it being in a question, they scream in agony and fall unconscious, blood leaking from their ears.
***
The PCs get stuck in a continual loop similar to groundhogs day. But this one is different. Someone else, other than the PCs, remembers the passing days. And they are trying to kill everyone in the town. Anyone but the PCs who dies will die in their sleep on every day following before they awaken.
***
The PCs witness a horrible event; a legion of aliens, monsters, or something, is assaulting the earth. Nothing can stand against them.
One of the beasts thats invading screams at them, shattering glass, and so forth.... and sends them back in time exactly 3 years.
***
Everything and everyone whose death is caused by the PC seems to be following him around. And nobody can see it but him. But he can touch them, and they can touch him; they never try to harm him, though.
***
The player gains the ability to see exactly 6 seconds ahead in time, as if from a perspective slightly above his head. Give him time to get used to this, to let him know its perfectly accurate... and then start having it go blank at times. Have him forsee events, like a waitress drawing a gun and shooting him, that don't actually happen. The vision starts centering on his forehead, and he grows a strange lump there...
***
Any insect in his presence is completely invulnerable. A mosquito could be swatted a hundred times and continue buzzing, a swarm of ants could survive every poison. Insects start following him, never trying to hurt him. People become unable to perceive insects that touch his skin.
"Well. The serial killer died in a gunfight with police. Nice."
"Jesus. Hes gonna come back to life and be an unkillable monster, isn't he?"
"Nahh. The serial killer was killing those people to feed their bodies to the unkillable monster so it wouldn't get hungry enough to devour the whole town."
"Oh."
Alternativly, the girl continues to appear in his dreams, demanding her doll back and getting increasingly hostile in her demands. Finally, during one night's dream she attacks the PC with a large knife, the PC wakes up at this point, and the doll is no longer in his possession, but he has a (non-fatal) knife wound on his body somewhere.
Originally posted by Lhiannon Sidhe
...Alternativly, the girl continues to appear in his dreams, demanding her doll back and getting increasingly hostile in her demands. Finally, during one night's dream she attacks the PC with a large knife, the PC wakes up at this point, and the doll is no longer in his possession, but he has a (non-fatal) knife wound on his body somewhere.
I ran something like this a little while ago. Very effective. Quite creepy.
(All the people from this thread gather around Violet Typhoon and say "ooooonnnneneeeee ooooffff usssss.....ooooonnnnneeee offfff ussss...." in little zombie/munchkin voices).
Living things around the PC sudeenly burst into unnatural motion and emit unusual noises, the blurred images that the PC perceive seem to constitute to more unseemly images and grotesque parodies of those that undergo the motion. This is similar to the monster in Silent Hill that rapidly move their heads except that it is the entire body of those that are affected, as usual this is a plight for the PC and the PC alone for only they are aware of the phenomenon. This is to isolate them from the rest of humanity and allowes for the horror to be magnified as they are once again on their own.
BTW: That bug thing IS happennig to me in rela life, dman bugs follow me when I go outside.. Damn things are drawen to me, yet I can kill them.
Some oldies from the COC board.
1: A horrible smell is in the room of where a npc ha sbeen found missing, the dead body is found in a obscure thing. (In my game case, a suit of armor)
2: On a rainy night, if the PC looks outside, can see someone he knows gets murdered in a horrible, fashion, and if PC goes outside. All that is lefte dis the blood wahsing form the rain. 9No body, no organs or bones.)
3: All monitors in a monitor room turrn on by themselves and have creepy message son them. (My game case, it was "I am gonig to Kill you!") Que monster.
New ones.
1: On a Playground, birthday party (Or when a lot of children get togehter) They laugh, sing an dplay like usual.. But latter they are replaced by a evil, montoned voice comming out of their mouths. (Same voice, and tlaks like the hcild talks.. Evne same laughter style, just the evil voice.)
2: A player wakes pu to be in, another world. Of obscure shapes and sounds, and general twilight zone stuff. (Tohugh next day things are abck to normal, with a token of proof it did happen.)
3: A player char wearing glasse,s when he take shtem off, he sees the entrohpy of the universe slowly and steadily withering down all things. Hell even angluar patches of space gone! 9For chars already insane or a pc having a bad experince.)
4: Children at pre school start hanging aorund in a huge group.. Writing down arcanic symbols and horrible images instead of the usual stuff, and they all have the same imangary friend who becomes real at mid night. (And it happens to be something bad.
5: Typed messages received by net usage (IM message,s message board stuff and news stuff.) Becomes well and more unreadable, and then afterwards. It become smythos talk.
6: A classic! Seeing loved ones under the Table of a Mi-Gi (Funig of Yuggoth) or beocming a zombie. (Whichever floats your boat.)
7: Children's program hosted by a green, tentacled thing who lvie sudner the sea. (PC's children could be addicts to the mytho's related stuff.)
8: A news feed on The games news broadcasting reveals thatt the Pope has new attire, all Yellow and rags. THen well it shifts bakc to normal, tohugh does not show the Pope again.
9: The King in Yellow turns out to be a up coming TV event or Film. (The horror is what happens to the poor souls who watch it.)
10: (And last for now) They happen to be listening to one of their favorite songs, but it somehow goes backwards, utterly in horrible vocies and chants. The pc is sturkc with san lose as the PC gets visual ideas of what they are saying, all others listneing (NPC or animals) tha thea rit wil do their best to kill theirselves, to make it stop! (Birds plummeting to death, dogs swlalwoing their tongues, people banging heads into wall until brains come out their ears and so forth.)
And after the maddness and death.. It goes back to the normal lyrics, only the deaths are still there, and the pc should be scared for the after math.
Reaching into a trash can feels like sticking your hand down a lion's throat... and what IS that low, thrumming sound? A growl...?
The closer the adventurers are to the BBEG's lair, the more blood-stained the moon seems.
While adventuring in shallow caves, it sounds as though massive footsteps are echoing above the PCs.
If assaulted by a swarm of bats, the PCs find they are headless and make no noise... not even the sound of wing-flapping.
The chant of a cult is rather pleasent and sounds vaguely like a hymn... "and who shall wear the flaming crown? O Hastur, show me the way. O Fathers, let's go down, let's go down, come on down... O Sinners, let's go down, down towards Hali to pray..."
Trying to dig up something that has not been touched upon, (much) is hard.
Time: as mentioned in the; How shall I kill my PCs? Gm lookin for CoC suggestions....by The Guy Who Types
I used
A tangible, almost visible, horrific thing that stalks them slowly down rough hewn passages, moving with obscene slowness rolling sliding coming closer...
(GM: "Now Do not tell the others, unless I say to"... *Roll the dice* Pick one of the PC's or a worthy NPC, have the NPC played by a character and...)
Take 'the choosen one' aside and describe the monster slowly rearing up and attaching it's shark toothed tenticle like maw extending onto his/her face and the rows of teath tearing slowly into their skull.
(GM: If you have played this well, make certain that the 'Choosen One" tries to pull the next part off.)
Then tell 'the choosen one', to go back into the room and sit down pause for a second, then 'the choosen' one can scream loud, but short.
(GM: Timing your description of the truth to right after the scream, you will have to talk loud at first.
Use the feeling of the close dank smell of the old tunnel, the slimy wet wall against their backs.
The weight of the corroded and nicked heavy bronze chains on their arms and ankles.
An the realization of the dream that never was.)
The Scream; which awakens them from the mental seduction of the Gate Master of Sacrifices, they are all chained to the wall of the rough hewn stone passage watching as the Master of Sacrifices takes hours to chew the face off it's first victim.
If they keep their sanity and manage to try to escape, make sure they see that it takes the Gate Master of Sacrifices and very long time to even chew (as if in very slow motion) and it's tounge slides out and over the face and the rest of the victims head, taking a very long obscene time, an half hour before the teeth close abit further and blood begins to flow freely.
As the blood starts, then it takes long slow laps with it's tounge, before resuming the chewing.
They with luck, can escape and keep their sanity, rescue their compatriot, although scarred for life and undoubtedly insane their friend can be saved, if they can save themselves...OR NOT
Kill them with kindness.
Which even I liked, although I could have explained it better.
Now Space:
The problem of this how to set it up...
A sound from the other room catches your attention.
A fast hiss ending with a soft pop, setting down your paper you rise to discover the source of the distrubance.
The sound seemed to come from the study, odd as the radio was in the sitting room where you were reading, and that had been off for hours.
Expecting to see someone in the entrance way or in the hall on the studys side of the stair, you slip into the study.
No one is present in the book lined room, and there was no fire in the hearth, to account for the noise.
It was just as well, as you had explained to you new companions, they were not to use the study, puzzled you turn just about to leave, when your mind recognizes something is not quite right.
On the top of the oak desk in the study is a ring, looking as if left by a careless person placing a large cup or bowl on the deep rich laquer covering the desk top.
Annoyed you walk to the kitchen and grab a towel hanging by the sink on a brass hook and back down the hall to enter in the study.
Were that your uncle still alive, he would give a sound talking to your 'new friends' about the virtue of respect.
The thought stops in your mind as you examine the round mark on the desk.
The laquer had blistered away from the spot, a perfect circle and the aged oak once a rich golden red color, now bleached white in the center and the grain of the wood starting to seperate.
Curious you touch the whitened oak circle on the desk.
Pulling back your finger quickly as if from a hot burner, but the sensation that the nerves in your finger told your mind was that of tremendous cold, cold like that which encompasses the vastness between the stars.
Turning and running to the grand stairway and starting to take the steps two at a time stopping at the landing as your ears register the sound ..a hiss now louder and a pop, that echoed from the study in the formal entranceway of your house.
"Professor! Professor Higgens!" Comes your voice loud over the pounding of you heart. "I think there is something you should see..."
Children's program hosted by a green, tentacled thing who lvie sudner the sea.
A few rekindled from my memory by that post (actually, it reminded me of what caused me to write half my sig... a combination of too much children's TV, Lovecraft, and Monty Python):
- Muppet Cthulhu! Mthulhu!
(Can you tell me how to get,
How to get to R'lyeh?')
- Dunno if you've got this one in america, but in australia, there's a kids show called 'What's in the box?'... think of the implications...
And finally one from the old creepy events thread:
A PC gets a tellytubbie lexicon... after reading it, the tellytubbies make a whole lot more sense... but maybe he didn't need to know exactly what they were saying... in fact... make a sanity check.
Originally posted by Darklandsman
7: Children's program hosted by a green, tentacled thing who lvie sudner the sea. (PC's children could be addicts to the mytho's related stuff.)
Like this?
You lose something, and it is returned to you by a stranger. The person seems nice. However, you start getting calls from the stranger at all hours, and yet you never told them your name, nor does the object they returned have any indication about your identity (make it something like money or a set of ordinary pens, something you'd be surprised to be returned, due to the items value or lack thereof).
The following events are excerpts from a list of events I made to insert randomly in any horror event, to get the player's atention if the fright factor dropped.
Creep Event #1:
While engaged in conversation, a PC puts down a his cup of coffee on the table. When he reaches for it again, the cup is empty and cracked, and appears to have been untouched for years. This may or may not return to normal at the blink of an eye, depending on the mood of the DM.
Creep Event #2:
When walking down a hallway (mansion, hotel, whatever) the players suddenly notice a set of bloody footprints being imprinted on the carpet, passing from one wall to the other, as if an invisible person just walked through one wall and continued across the hallway through the other wall.
Creep Event #3:
Call for a will save from all players once in a while, and those who fail will begin to hear a low whispering chant that repeats a few times. "Sath Ar Kathool. Ie mthach Agh-Mnyorliathep."
(This event works well if you use it frequently during a game.)
Creep Event #4:
While walking on the street in full public, a ragged man suddenly walks up to the player(s) with a old worn axe in the hand. He stares menacingly at the player(s) for a brief moment before saying: "I've seen...You've seen...there is no salvation!"
And then he lifts the axe in a wide arc and buries it deep in his own neck, blood splattering all over the street.
No one else but the player(s) can see it.
Creep Event #5:
Whenever the player(s) move, he/they can hear the tattering sound of a large bug moving over a wooden floor. It ceases whenever the player(s) stop moving.
When alone in the woods, have what looks like a half-crazed hermit stumble into the party. His face is caked with blood, and he really doesn't look too good. He asks if the characters can help him - he needs a doctor... then he starts spewing up blood... a few days after the characters get rid of him (he seems to be getting more and more crazy), one of the characters starts feeling a bit ill... and their skin starts to peel in places... and is that a bit of blood on their hands when they're coughing?
Also... when walking down a corridor, they come across a trail of blood leading around a corner. Everything starts getting creepy/freaky... their heartbeats get louder, until it becomes all they can hear... they get round the corner, to come across a pool of blood, and no body. Looking up, they find themselves on the veranda of a back yard... filled with gravestones...
Also, when walking down a street, one of the characters sees leaning against the corner of an alleyway, a completely black angel, wearing a mask similar to the Witch King of Angmar, and a scythe... the angel seems to be watching him... but a person walks in front of the character, and when they pass, the angel of death is gone...
Autopsy shows that the organs were the cat's.
Originally posted by Mjordnir
Creep Event #2:
When walking down a hallway (mansion, hotel, whatever) the players suddenly notice a set of bloody footprints being imprinted on the carpet, passing from one wall to the other, as if an invisible person just walked through one wall and continued across the hallway through the other wall.
Bloody freaking brilliant (no pun intended). I'm using that one next session for next M&M game. It goes perfectly with the incorporeal-turning serial killer that they're tracking.
For some creepy events ideas, start digging through your albums and start listening to some of the odder songs. "Hotel California" by the Eagles and "When People Are Strange" by the Doors pop into my head right now.
By the way... does anyone have a clue on how to pronouce: "Ph'nglui mgw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"? Or do I not want to know :D ?
(Edit: Edited the song idea in)
Originally posted by Lasrifriir
By the way... does anyone have a clue on how to pronouce: "Ph'nglui mgw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"? Or do I not want to know :D ?
Pronounce it how it's spelled. Don't obey standard phonetics, just read it straight through, pronouncing every individual letter... for example, Cthulhu is pronounced Kt'hul'hu. Sounds pretty alien.
Late at night, the character (a male) is walking down the street when they see a girl jump in front of oncoming traffic. Upon saving her ('cause it's the heroically reflexive thing to do), she immediately pushes the guy away and starts screaming, then just curls into a ball and starts whispering "I'm sorry" while crying softly. After a while, it is revealed that because the heroic guy touched the girl's skin, he's going to die in five days.
You could stop there and think up your own reason why, but here's my story:
The young girl (let's call here Becky) had a curse placed on her four years ago that causes the death of any man she touches. Becky was partially responsible for the car accident that killed her boyfriend (Jeff). Jeff was under the guardianship of his emotionally unstable, occult-obsessed older sister, who blamed Jeff's death on Becky. As such, she cursed her with the decree that she would "cause the death of any man she became close to" before dissappering completely, with the general suspicion being suicide.
Soon after, the rescuer finds five fingerprint-like marks somewhere on his body, and every day one vanishes, apparently counting down to his death. The marks represent the five days that Jeff was in a coma before dying. Investigation reveals that the apartment where the sister lived has remained unused. Perhaps the vengeful spirit can be appeased by some sort of exorcism or the burial of the sister's body, which can be found in an out-of-the-way closet which was sealed with camphor and incense to prevent discovery. The sister apparently held a candlelit ceremony in the closet before slitting her wrists. The knife she used can defeat the malign spiritual force when it attacks the character.
I plan for the ghost to have profusely bleeding wrists and to be missing half her face, representing that Jeff was such a large part of her life.
So what, is it creepy enough? Sorry for the length.
Originally posted by Violet Typhoon
So what, is it creepy enough? Sorry for the length.
Hmm...
It's good, but more of a plot hook than a creepy event. Creepy events don't usually end in a 5-day countdown to destruction.
The single massive error is that there's an assumed course of action--that is, saving Becky. You're counting on a player action that may or may not carry through, and some players are infamous for ignoring or acting counter to "scripted events." Otherwise, bang-up job.
An example (Spoilers//):
The PCs are wandering through a mannequin warehouse in the dead of night, with no light shining in. Only one is fully assembled and has a head--the others are partially completed. Silent. And everywhere. If the PCs have flashlights, the shadows combine to make a horrible many-armed thing on the wall. But so very quiet...
The complete mannequin leaves their sight for a few moments. Then, a woman screams--and there's a loud THUNK.
If the PCs dare follow the sound, their flashlights/torches/whatever show the mannequin, decapitated. There's blood everywhere...
(//Spoilers) And some new ones.
The woods are completely silent. Utterly silent. And empty, for that matter, even of mosquitos.
When the wind stirs up leaves, they seem to form into the shape of a cloaked figure for brief moments. For players of CoC, the color of the leaves should be obvious...
Music always sounds distant and slightly drowned, as though played from underwater.
Deja vu hell. The PCs encounter a situation so horrifying it should tax their brains to the limit. However, it seems completely natural and, in fact, even welcoming.
Jamais vu hell. The most normal situations seem horrible and alien.
Monsters bear unexpected humanoid parts. A giant spider has a humanlike mouth and eyes, and its legs end in articulated human hands, for instance.
As a counter to the first: the woods are filled with chrips, and the sounds of thriving life. But every creature seen is dead, and in a fairly advanced state of death.
A character has a horrible dream, but cannot remember exactly what terrified him about it. When presented with a fairly normal thing (such as a screwdriver) the character is overwhelmed with terror. He may or may not find out why he is terrified of it...
Static on a radio sounds like words. Seemingly incogruious words. "*bsssssssshhhh* Door opens to no*bsh*ingness, step through and see his fa*bsshhhhhhh*"
A loogie can be aimed as a grenadelike weapon, and makes an attack roll like caltrops, except that footwear doesn't do any good, and anyone who sees it (spot DC 10, or 5 in flight) gets +5 to AC if they're deliberately avoiding stepping on it. Any given loogie only works once, but any number of cultists, disguised monsters, or mind-thralled normals can step in it without having any effect on it or them. It's potentially a very powerful weapon, but it's next to useless for typical investigation, and using it against ordinary humans with no connection to the mythos has lots of moral problems.
Freaky, huh?
"Now SLIP on it--if you dare!"
- tuning in a radio, the investigators hear a snippet of an old broadcast from earlier years (when [insert_horror-here] occured).
- a small town in which the investigators find themselves is strangely devoid of dogs... indeed, they soon realize, animals of any kind.
- everyday the town's power goes out for approximately 22.83 seconds, every day at precisely the same time, then comes back on - much to the confusion and dismay of the power plant owners.
- children have been going missing for months now, only to be found, in perfect health and no sign of damage or abuse, weeks later with no idea where they've been.
- footsteps heard in the house, but there is absolutely nobody else inside.
- other domestic sounds, like hammering or sweeping, heard in distant rooms, but again investigation causes the sounds to cease and nobody is found to be making them.
-Members of some sort of self help group go missing in a waterfront town. Anyone standing on the docks at the exact time that the meetings started each day can hear faint, drowned singing, which closer attentiveness reveals to be the song with which the group always began the help sessions.
-A television program a character is watching suddenly switches off, replaced by static for a moment. Then the interference seems to be gone, and the program returns, continuing as normal... Except that an eerily smiling man in a black suit is looking out at the viewer from behind the main character or news announcer or whatever. He holds up a ragged sign reading (insert appropriate ominous phrase, such as YOU'RE NEXT or I'M COMING FOR YOU TONIGHT in a news broadcast about a brutal and unexplained murder). Then the static returns and dissapates once more, and the man is gone.
-When a characer turns out the lights in a room, he hears wheezing from the closet. Opening the closet is a bad idea (GM, fill in the details) but as soon as he flips the lights back on, it goes away.
-A TV show or movie on a characters TV is suddenly replaced by footage from an asylum, showing a cell with a man crying to himself in the corner. This lasts for a minute, then the show returns. It occurs again a moment later, except this time the footage shows the same man dangling from the asylum roof, somehow hanged, still in his straight jacket.
-The dolphin in a dolphin show looks into an observing character's eyes, and smiles, revealing bloody butcher knives rather than teeth. No one else notices.
A variation: While listening to a song that the PC knows every word to by heart (and I mean every word), he hears different lyrics (for one line or for the whole song).
When the PC rolls down the car window, he sees a monster appear as if it was hiding behind the window. Where there is window, there is no monster. Any time the PC looks through glass, the monster disappears. As a variation, the PC only sees the monster if he's looking through glass.
The PC's are climbing up some kind of tower or other tall edifice. Once they reach the very top, they find out that they're someplace else (example: They are climing up the Empire State Building. But once they reach the top floor they see Tokyo instead of New York).
One of them sees it twitch. Just a tiny movement of the nose or toe-tip.
Then it wakes up. It stands up as though it had just been taking a nap, in blatant defiance of the gaping bullet hole in its face. Then it shakes itself, like any dog would on discovering that it was wet. Clumps of blood-soaked fur and rotten meat (it's only been dead about an hour, why is it so decayed?) fly everywhere. When it's finished, there's almost nothing left but cartilage and bone.
Then it charges, trailing its own intestines like a gory leash. Use the statistics for a skeletal wolf from the 3.5 monster manual.
Lessie...
--A character that tries to say one word instead says another. Everytime he wants to say "the" he says "when." If he wants to say "run!" it comes out as "wait." Preferrably this manifests at a very ackward time.
--Stamped insects leave smudges of what looks like human blood. If examined, the "blood" contains no genetic material or red blood cells--it feels like blood, looks like it and shares all its other properties, it's just a red mass.
--A slain human opponent dies in a manner remeniscent of a monster--crumbling like a zombie, for instance, or letting out a certain horror's death-rattle as he falls.
--Casting a spell briefly animates larger creatures. Plants writhe and tremor, dead fish hung up on a rack start to flop and gasp, mostly-whole cow corpses try to stand back up.
The character suddenly notices that digital clocks (proper clocks, mobile telephones, kitchen appliances, wherever there is a digital display for the time) show the time 6:66. The character catches them with a glimpse, and whenever he concentrates on the display it shows the normal time.
After a while, the character wakes up in the moring and looks at the clock next to his bed, displaying the time 6:59. Grumbling, the character gets up and starts his morning routine. When he later looks at the watch again, he notices that the clock is 6:64, and while the character's looking at it, it ticks to 6:65...
Upon visiting a hospital/mental institution, the characters discover that everybody working there carries a tazer and a gun at all times, even the receptionists and janitor.
The front rooms and "visitor's center" is clean and sunny, but when peeking through the doors that lead to the cells, it seems strangly dark, dirty, or cold.
The paintings in the waiting room look like ordinary pastel still-lifes, but out of the corner of the eye they look shadowy, with dead flowers, rotten fruit, etc.
There are three supernaturally cheery, inviting and gorgeous nurses at the front desk. Strange thing is that they are virtually the same in face, body, even voice and mannerisms; the only difference is that one is blonde, one brunette, and one redhead. If their similarity is mentioned in conversation, they insist that they've never noticed and give each other a "isn't that funny!" look.
For whatever reason, the pediatric ward is considered the most dangerous or disturbing by the doctors in private conversation.
One room is completely empty of furniture and only lit by a bare light bulb hanging from a cord, which is swinging slightly when they come in despite the lack of a draft or breeze.
When an old, rusty faucet is turned on, roaches/spiders/maggots flow out instead of water.
A cabinet door is left open in such a way that it blocks a nearby doorway. If closed, it comes open by itself at some point, refusing to stay shut. The cupboard could have something creepy in it or be completely empty and mysterious.
If someone goes into said cupboard and closes the door, bad stuff happens in the dark, like the sensation of dozens of hands grabbing you.
In a child's room, there is a small carriage with one of those ever-so-scary porcelain dolls in it. The room is very cold, but the doll's face looks shiny, as if it were sweating profusely.
When walking around in any creepy building, everybody gets a nosebleed simultaneously upon entering a room, but it stops when they leave.
"For whatever reason, the pediatric ward is considered the most dangerous or disturbing by the doctors in private conversation."
Creepy. For those who don't know, a pediatrician is basically a doctor who works with children.
You know what else makes for a freaky encounter: meat lockers ad slaughterhouses. Those places are just naturally creepy.
Imagine some sort of zombie encounter... Maybe a slaughterhouse has wierd stuff going on, their shipments are too light or something. Turns out they aren's shipping dead cows, their shipping employees! And then the people at the other end just impale the bodies on the meathooks anyway, somehow unable to tell the diffrence except to realize that the weight is skewed. The PCs enter the meatlocker, and movign through the lifeless corpses, are sutnned to see where the cows end and the dead peopel begin! As they move in to examine, one turns to face them, its BOB'S BUTCHERY ca dangling at a terrible angle, and the lights go out.
Hmmm...
Essentially, everytime I bring him back, the PCs (Now almost level 20) get scared because this demon bends the frabric of reality. Also, I have the demon's alignment change every four to five minutes, so that scares people when he suddenly acts nice. Is he being Lawful Good, or Chaotic Evil? (A player made a magic pair of glasses to tell alignments apart just because of this.)
So, here are some things this demon has done to the PCs.
****
The PCs find themselves in a fight over a cliff, with the demon fighting alongside them. They had recently found out its' "true name" and thus have power over the demon. Since then, it has become very friendly and helpful. This has been going for a session or two.
One of the PCs gets knocked near the cliff, and then one of the things they were fighting pushes them off the cliff. The creature, a Flesh Golem construct that was entirely made out of baby heads falls of the cliff to certain doom, but the PC gets lucky and grabs a hold of cliffedge.
The demon rushes over, shouts "Give me your hand!" His child face looks trusting, and the PCs know that the demon has a Strength score in the 30s, so the PC reaches to grab the demon's hand. The demon's host body's face contorts into pure hatred, and says "Thanks for your arm!" He then uses his sword to sever the arm of the PC.
The PC falls to their death, but manages to hear the screams of his companions as the demon turns on them. The player slams onto the ground, and wakes up. It was just a dream, so he was okay. But the arm that the dream demon cut off is missing.
No one else notices anything out of ordinary, especially the missing hand, even PCs. When the PC mentions the dream "true name" of the demon to any PCs, all their faces turn into the demon's host face and quiety hush the PC. If the PC mentions the demon's "true name" to the demon, it's uneffected but all the PCs but the one who experienced the dream make Fort saves or vomit.
The whole dream sequence of learning the demon's name, and the fight over the cliff should take about a session, but in the end, only the dreaming PC remembers or experieced it.
****
The demon will talk to them, and suddenly yell at someone's shoe and tell it to stop talking to him. Everyone kind of freaks out, but only the demon is the only one who sees the talking shoe. The demon will curse at the shoe, and have one sided conversations, eventually leave.
Let the PCs continue as if nothing happened, but have all the NPCs act as if they PCs are homocidal maniacs, but are too afraid to run away or even make a peep. Eventually, the guard comes, but its easy to tell that they overprepared, expecting a fight.
When the PCs ask what's going on, have the officer point out that the character's clothing is made out of human flesh, with the head being the shoe. (To scare the individual PC even more, tell the other PCs that they find nothing unusual about this.)
****
When a player sneezes, say that his character sneezes out an abnormal amount of mucus. The mucus then animates into a random jelly monster, and begins to attack the PCs.
I had this trait continue for all the PCs, except the mucus wouldn't animate if a holy person said "Bless You!" to a character. Never before have I had players paranoid about their own bodily functions, and really mean "Bless You!"
****
Whenever the PCs get into a fight with something that bleeds, as they attack it, the blood turns into humanoid faces screaming for them to stop attacking. Have some faces scream in agony when the PCs hurt the monsters.
****
When two PCs sleep, whether or not it is intimiately or not, they wake to find themselves in a predicament. One of them has no arms, and the other has no legs. The armless person has the other person's legs where their arms should be, and the legless person has the other person's arms where their legs should be.
****
Whenever they talk to a NPC, whether or not they know them, even if its asking for directions, the NPC immediately acts as if under Charm Person spell, and the PCs are considered to have a Charima of 18 when dealing with the charmed peopel.
Perfectly normal, but very unnerving when they start having twenty people worshipping them, following them, etc. Kind of like those commericals where its about a guy who goes about his business with a roomful of people standing next to him.
****
A single PC has a home nearby, so whenever he visits, all the corpses of monsters he fought are there. If he removes them, or whatnot, they remain that way until the PC kills something else.
Really entertaining when the PC just stops bothering, and really disturbs people with the piles of corpses at their home. Especially funny when they get annoyed, do some "cleaning" and then have a fly or something land of them. They'll unconciously swipe at it, and then have them kill the fly, make sure to point this out to them.
Sure enough, corpses are restocked plus a fly.
****
If the PCs stay at a place overnight that has a closed door, in the morning, have it randomly elsewhere. Great examples are having medival fantasy go to d20 Modern, or if based in Europe, have them be moved to Japan.
The best would be sending them to South American-like jungles with killer plants, and dinosaurs. Lots of fun if you don't spoonfeed them a way back home, but have a few possibilities open.
****
It's things like this that cause fear and trembling in PCs, but I must admit turning the PCs into sociopaths is the most amusing. They have a pile of dead corpses at home, while their friend wears humans, and the PCs are so tired of trying to figure things out that they don't bother anymore.
And that's when the demon wins, moves on and everything turns back to normal. Until the next time...
Originally posted by StevilVanHostle
While I don't have any new events to add to this thread,here is a compilation of the entries from the old wierd events thread, sorted by event type.
It just links back here. Can you fix that?
Is anyone else having a problem getting it?
Its always around and the PC is given the impression that he's being watched by this image. It has a bad tendency to turn up in magazines while in a waiting room or put up so it looks like a billboard image is staring at the PCs bedroom window.
The PC dreams of the model, and in the dream the model lowers its sunglasses revealing that it has two toothy mouths where it should have eyes. Its babbles unspeakable things, or perhaps just asked about the yellow sign.
People the PC knows start to dress like the model and they all start wearing sunglasses.
-Eric Gorman
Originally posted by Greenintern
Right Click on the link, and then choose "save target."
Thanks.
And now for a weird event.
A PC dies. No reason is given.
Hospital
One of the Pc's is expecting a baby, at the exact moment of the child's birth,all animals within a 3 mile radius die.
While at the hospiral healing up from a recent adventure, the pcs are introduced to thier new doctor.. Herbert West and he is *Extremely* happy to meet the pcs.
A small girl dressed in pre-depression era clothing clutching a mouldy victorian doll can be seen by a pc whenever he is alone in a hall or a room.
A psychotic inmate escapes from the mental ward, he is looking for the pcs. When he finally finds them he mutters "the only real emperor of death, is the emperor of ice cream" and crumples in to a fetal position.
School
While attending class (if the pc's are of school age or college age),they notice that there is a picture of themselves standing in the background of a archaeologist dig circa 1926.
one of the pc's is asked to go fetch the janitor from his office to clean a spill. When he/she knocks on the door to the office it slowly opens and inside he/she finds children nailed to the walls, in the same manner a frog is on a dissecting board. When the pc goes to show the office to someone,when they come back it is normal and the janitor is there.
Street - Bus Stop -
While waiting for a bus, the pcs stand next to a man,who is looking around nervously. The sound of a bus can be heard coming closer, and as it gets closer the man starts to loose it more. When the bus finally arrives, for a brief moment it appears as a giant loathesome mottled worm like snake and when it pulls up,it lunges forward and grabs the man in its maw and swallows him whole, then it reverts to a normal bus.
Originally posted by Lasrifriir
By the way... does anyone have a clue on how to pronouce: "Ph'nglui mgw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"? Or do I not want to know :D ?
Most of the people I know pronounce R'lyeh rye-lay but I have no idea why. I prefer url-yea.
That freaked them out from the start.
At then end, they sat in life boats watching the massive leviathon sink, the chamber music, the screaming people leaping from the tilting deck and the strange greenish glow over everything made for some interestingly unrestful nights afterwards.
By the way... does anyone have a clue on how to pronouce: "Ph'nglui mgw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"? Or do I not want to know ?
You really aren't technically supposed to be able to pronounce any of that.
Shadows fall towards the sun.
The character starts recieving mail that is normal in every respect... except its directed towards a person with the same name as the character whose been dead for a century and lived at the characters residence. Alternitively, have it written by the dead guy to the character. In this situation, if the character tries to date the ink, he finds out it is new.
Try watching some of the horror movies for stuff. For the best results, use movies that the players in your campaign have probably not seen. "The Ring" is not as good of an idea for inspiration as, say, a lesser-known horror film. Check out your local video store or rental site. Watching the movie with the players is not a good idea unless you have a certain purpose for it (i.e. the player's character is going to be a major part of it, and needs to know what happens.) Also, read Stephen King
Not that this first one is all that creepy, but it sure scared the hell out of my players when I dumped 200 “dragons tears” onto the game board to represent a horde of Gibberlings getting the drop on them in the middle of the night. They weren’t sure if I was just screwing with them at first –their jaws just hanging there. Needless to say, when they managed to scare them off with some ingenuous spell work, they packed camp and rode hard for 2 days straight. They were all still 2nd level. *smile*
Second thought: The most fun I had with the creepy side of things was with that group’s first adventure (1st level). They were on their way to the annual “Fire Festival” on a nearby island. They could only afford passage on a fishing boat, so after landing in a smaller town, they had to hike it North to the festival. They take the “short road” that no-one takes anymore (I think I taught them to ask why in the future…). They pass through a town at about the halfway point. Everyone seems sad… and they realize that they don’t see any men. They (of course) ask what’s going on and come to find out that all their men have gone eastward to the town cemetery to take care of a “problem”. It seems they let a poor traveler die out in the cold, all alone, and so the men went to throw him into the sea.
The first group didn’t come back. Neither did the second one, or the last one. The PCs of course decided to help the poor women (and a few boys & girls) and see what’s happened to their men. They reach the cemetery –I threw in all the works: darkness, mist, creaking trees, but no sign of the men. One of the players fell into an open grave, and can’t be seen from the outside. The others went in to help him. They get trapped in it and had to make a sacrifice to Hestia (goddess of hearth and hospitality) on behalf of the town –they also meet the Priest of Hestia that the town had left to die in the cold. They got back to town, explained what happened and the women decided to try and survive on their own. The priest gives a charming letter to one of the little boys who wants to grow up into holy man some day. The women almost begged them to stay but they continued North.
As they near the crossroads of the West Road and the entrance to the large town, they come to a guardhouse. The guard is a little leery of them, seeing what road they came from, and asks why they took that road –what with the plague and all. The players look dumfounded for a bit, then protest that everything was fine. The guard laughs a little uneasily and says that the plague cleared that town out years ago, and no-one ever takes that road. They decided not to go back and “look”.
I later showed them a cut-scene where one of the big bad guys rode through that town, stopped at the dust covered shrine and picked up a note in the corner –the one the priest had written. It was still folded the way the little boy done so to put it in his pocket. Of course it was used as a material link to that PC… but that’s just another story. ---Not much, but it was fun.
A PC is at the movies, and is seeing a horror movie of some sort. While he is watching it, the monster suddenly reaches out of the screen, grabs a guy from the audience, and messily devours him. The audience does not notice this and there is no record that the guy ever existed.
Whenever a PC meets someone for the first time, they appear to have the head of a dog. No one else notices this or thinks that it is out of the ordinary.
While driving along a dark and winding road, you see the silhouette of something come out of the trees up ahead. It slowly moves across the road and into your lane and then comes to a stop. As you begin to round the turn, your headlights start to fill in its outline. It is a dog, and it takes a seat in your lane… as if it were daring you. You begin to slow the car, to give the beast a chance to move out of the way. Then your headlights strike the creature full on, and you suddenly realize that this dog has a human head. As your jaw drops in dumbfounded bewilderment, the detail of its face strikes your mind. The thing is laughing! It is laughing so hard that you see the shimmer of tears running down its face! As you swerve to get as far away from the thing as you can, and you strike the accelerator, you can hear the laughter rush past the passenger door and you know that it has turned towards you –perhaps trying desperately to catch its last chance to meet an end. As you glance in the rear view, the red glow of your taillights confirms your fears, and you can’t get the image out of your head. The creature continues to laugh as you speed away.
I can tell you this much… you won’t catch me with my window rolled down on a lonely dark and wooded road late at night anymore. And that’s that.
-Sir James
- Creepy!
Okay jokes over.
Ummmm...here goes:
Players in modern are investigating dissapearances and a possible vagrant in a wooded area outside a small farming community. PCs leave during afternoon with gear, walking to forest they gear up then night falls unnaturally fast. Such as one minute it is fairly light and another it is nearing dusk. PCs see a shadow moving through trees. PCs chase then come to a four way road. A shadow moves away from them in all four directions.
Thats how it will start, need more time to think. Next installment shortly.
- Soup
It is 60`s event or so (can be set anytime after WWII);
Some NAVY cruiser, destroyer, or any larger military ship, during military maneuvars discovers some strange noise on the sonnar (sorry for my bad english) - it appears that it is SOS morse call. Source is, strangely, an old submarine which has sankt during **** (in this episode it was WWII). It has been in those shallow waters for more than a decade, and there is no rational chance for survival. Anyway, captain/crew/admiral etc., decides to activate rescue misson. Specialists are sent to unhatch the old sub, and see for survivors. During that event, one member of this crew, some 50 years old navigator, falls into delirious state. When diving rescue crew succeeds in opening broken hatch of the sub, member of ship crew, whitch was delirious by then, will become insane and jump overboard into the ocean/sea. Nobody will find his body. Some half hour later, divers enter the sub, and they find evertyhing decaying, and an old skeleton with a hammer in its hands. It would seem like that skeleton was trying send SOS message. Most freakish thing is, that the plates around skeleton`s neck will have name of the officialy only survived crew member. It is the man which has drowned over the deck.
I was relatively young when I watched this episode
It was my favourite...Once again, sorry for bad english....
Marko
how's that?
A simple gangland murder? Perhaps. But why does he have a small red octopus nestling under his right armpit?
*****
(Just been reading Nocturnals: Black Planet ;) )
Gary Larson cartoons are the best source ever for creepy events. I'm sure that one will leave your players sweating at night for years.
The characters open a DVD case and find that the DVD face looks like an eye that is looking at them. If they put the DVD in, they see disturbing images a la "The Ring." Make the images freaky.
While at the park, the jungle gym transforms into writhing tentacles. If any kids are playing on it, have fun.
Characters notice that people are randomly spontainiously combusting around a certain building. The building is built over the site of a great fire.
A character in the game opens up a Monster Manual. A monster comes out, attacks the person, and goes back into the book.
Same as above but every time someone is brought back a tattoo of chains appears on the NPCs body. After the 5th chain appears the NPC disappears, everything they care for begins to get destroyed.
(1) one of the pc's have purchased a new fax machine, when they get it home and out of the box, a fax transmits into the fax machine while it is unplugged and offline. The fax reads "The darkness is aware of you and your friends..beware... - a friend"
(2) The morning paper comes,and when the pc goes to read the paper,he notices that the date is a day or two in the future and the articles all deal with the pc and his friends.
(3) The phone rings and when one of the pc's answers it, they hear the voice of a dearly departed family member pleading with them to stop what they are doing and go live a normal life.
For example they begin reading:
"Hello [insert PC's name here]"
PC: Hey guys, this tome knows my name!
The next line reads:
"Of course I do mortal, I have been watching you"
A man promises them the secrets they need to stop a monster but dies at midnight before they can meet him. All they have to go on is a collection of mad scribbled notes and jounrals that detale how to find the secret they need, but to do it one of them must die for a short time to find the ansere.. then (hopefuly) be revived.
For a more general perpouse creepy event, play vary soft nursery rhymes in the backround and tell them that there PC's hear hunting children's rhyems when alone. A little research on what some of those rhyms are about adds to the creepyness.
greet.
Marko
The party is investigating a location. Upon entering one room they find a torture room, chained to one wall is a celestial that has been mutilated beyond belief. The creatures wings have been torn off and vicious cuts and burns cover his body. Most disturbing are two things, the words "I can see evil no more." that are carved into the pitiful celestials chest, and the baby fetuses that have been forced into the beast's eyes.
The celestial now mad, breaks free attacking the PC's while he does this, the baby fetuses cry pitifully.
My players were a little upset though. they left the corpse of their fallen comanion behind, expecting to retrieve it later. Well, I'm a big fan of "Any corpse left unatended for 10 rounds become DM property from then on", and had the cult raise it as a corpse creature. Yeah, my players disliked having to fight an undead monk/psychic warrior.
The PCs are driving along really early in the morning for some reason (FAR before sunrise). One of the houses they pass seems to have human torsos (just the head and upper torso...no arms or legs) hanging from a tree by chains in the yard...
If they go back and investigate when it's light, the torsos are gone. If they turn around and look immidiatly, they discover that the torsos come from manikins and have been painted red for some reason.
(True story! I passed this *******ed house every day when I was working a paper route...I have no idea why the dummy torsos were hanging from the tree, and it wasn't anywhere close to Halloween at the time. It freaked the hell out of me).
The characters are exploring an old, abandonded building (ruined temple, damaged phsycho ward, the remains of a firebombed apartment building...whatever tickles your fancy). As they explore, a white mist forms around their feet. Every so often, one or another of the players sees a ghostly, screaming face form in the mist out of the corner of his eye...but when he turns to face it, it's gone. This happens more and more frequently, and a low whispering seems to come from all around, saying whatever creepy things you feel necessary to add...
(My player hate this mist. They've had to enter places filled with it on a semi-regular basis, and it's always been a herald of nasty things...)
Time skips: One of the PCs is meeting an old friend for a late lunch...next moment, he is in jail, accused of murdering his old friend...the police have his confession on tape...six hours later, time jumps ahead to his trial...he has just plead guilty....the time jumps seem to happen every six hours...during the missing time, something controls the character's actions...can his friends save him, before time jumps past his execution?
The characters have a conversation with an alien entity. They are walking through a large crowd. People in the crowd are speaking parts of sentences that all come together to form the creature's half of the dialogue: "You are on the" (old man that walks past the goup) "Right path" (Littlegirl) "You should find the journal" (Woman in a jogging suit) ....and so on.
All the people speak with the same voice. None of them remember what they said to the characters..in fact, trying to ask any of them about it will break the spell and the entity will cease trying to communicate.
Be careful with that one, you don't want it to turn into a Monty Python skit.
"My god man, you have the head of a dog!"
"No I haven't."
"Yes you do, I can see it plain as day."
"I've a head cold."
And so one.
Here's a little contribution.
This was a story my mom told me, back when she was growing up. She grew up in Norfolk, Va. Well, one night, well past midnight, her and her friends decided "Hey, let's go driving on Witchduck Road!"
For those who don't know, Witchduck road was where they did the witchunt trils back in the colonial times. They would tie a woman to a chair, and drop her in the water. If she survived, she was a witch. If she drowned, she wasn't. (Brilliant strategy!) Back then, it was somewhat remote, now it's a bit more urbanized.
Anyhow, they were driving along the road. All this mist came out from nowhere, and completely obscured the road. Which was pretty creepy.
It got creepier when the car stalled out, and the headlights went out.
After a few frantic moments, they got the car started, and spun out of there. Mom said she never went back on Witchduck road at night.
While passing a park, the PCs see a group of children at an outdoor birthday party. Suddenly, they gather around one of their number and begin beating him with sticks. He screams and begs someone to help him. As the beatings grow more violent, the victim sinks to the ground, whimpering and crying. Right before the PCs get there (it should be some way off), there is a horrible cracking sound and the victim breaks open. Surprise, he was full of candy (and blood, and organs...). The children begin to gather up and eat the blood spattered candy.
No one notices. If the PCs try to call attention to this, the sticks have the fingerprints of the PCs on them and the children all saw them beat the child to death...
When an enemy (should be a normal cultist, thug, etc.) misses a PC with a gun, roll damage as if it were a critical. Apply the damage and ask the player to make the massive damage save. The damage should be enough that the player fails. Describe in detail the bullet passing through the character's head. Then the process reverses. The PC can feel the flesh, tissue, and bone being put back together at high speed. The bullet flies out of the wound and leaps back into the gun.
Time restarts. This time, the gun jams and explodes in its owner's hand. The man is killed. Seconds later, the PC falls to the ground and begins to vomit. The mass contains, blood, shattered bone, and brain tissue. If this is run through a lab for testing, it is found to be an exact genetic match for the PC...
The party where investigating an old building - abandoned long ago. They had found their way into a dead end and were about to turn around and go back when they heard a child's laughter (always creepy) back the way they came.
One of the party members called out (not smart) and the laughter abruptly stopped. They all knew there was someone, or something there - and the fact that they were in a dead end was suddenly in all of their minds.
An NPC friend of the PCs (we'll call him Ronald) is a wine conisseur. This works best if he has been previously introduced and is simply viewed as a friend rather than a sucpiciously intorduced new character. He recently purchased a large wine cask shipped over from France that is 100+ years old and invites the PCs to a taste testing. It is wonderful wine, and he fills a bottle or two of it up for the PCs to take with them.
Time passes (Several sessions, or even several adventures)
Ronald dies of natural causes (ie: not supernatural. He could still be hit by a bus or whatnot) and has left some things to the PCs. They include a small sum of money, some personal items of little value, and the wine cask. Allow the PCs to drink all they like for a few sessions. . .
Time passes
The cask finally dries up. While disposing of it (or if they happen to open it on purpose) the PCs discover an ancient, dessicated, wine-soaked corpse which was apparantly placed in the cask when it was first sealed. Study shows that the body is that of Ronald. If they still have the first bottle that Ronald gave them, testing shows that there are traces of human tissue in the wine. Ronald's grave is empty, except for the casket and anything he was buried with. (At DMs discretion there may also be a note for one of the PCs which warns them about the dangers of alcohol
)This is a first attempt off the top of my head. I'd appreciate feedback as I plan to use it in the future, and fine tuning is always good. . .
Good that we didn`t talk about Cthulhu... Probably I would catch some octopus :D Kidding... regards
Marko
Anyway, one scene involves having a tour of the old farmhouse where he used to live from a realtor. It's summer, but when they reach the second floor it'll get surprisingly chilly, causing goosebumps, etc. for an instant. The floorboards will be warped a bit, as if they got wet and dried incorrectly. Finally, the door to the master bedroom will be stuck "from moisture" the real estate lady says, but when they open it, a beam in the ceiling will crack, and they will have to leave.
When they come back later (at nightfall), the house will feel amazingly cold for a summer night. Their flashlights will reflect off of water on the floor, which forms footprints going up the stairs as frigid water drips from the ceiling. The prints draw them toward the bedroom, where the door is oddly closed again...
In the end, there's nothing up there but a dresser with an incriminating notebook inside to catch the boy's killers, but I believe these details will build an absurd amount of suspense and provide a little kick of the supernatural appropriate for a first adventure. Hopefully my party will get the reason for all the coldness and water during the adventure, which could creep them out even more.
An example:
A player opens a door and for an instant is sure that there's someone there about to stab them, but a split second later realises that there isn't.
It's very good for inspiring paranoia (I'd know, I suffer from a lot of presque vu late at night).
Because they are always at the scene of these beast's carnage, they become suspects. They cant go to jail though, the monsters will easily get them. Wacth as the PC's become more and more desperate, living on the edge, possibly having killed anyone who tries to stop them.
As for the monsters you could base them on well-known monsters, but way more demented and horrific. Imagine the look of terror on your players face as they see these monstrosities hurtling towards them...
WARNING : THESE IDEAS ARE VERY SCARY!
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- The rotting torso of a huge, naked man, muscular but covered in open sores, raw skin and bruises. Stuck appallingly between its shoulders is the unliving head of rotting Goat, its mouth sticthed shut and black stains weeping from its eyes. Infact the only moving part on its head is its wildly spinning eyes that swivel randomly until they spot one of the PC's. Its has a pair of tattered, home-made wings sticthed cruelly to its pale, scarred back. They are bat-like, 10 foot long and made of sewn-up PVC and supported by crude wire.
- It looks like a gigantic floating head of rotting goth. Its face is deathly white and tinted softly with a juandice yellow. Black makeup runs down from its empty eye sockets and its massive lower jaw is split in two, forming a set of writhing, twicthing tooth-filled protrusion from the bottom of its 'body'. Remanants of its massive spine hangs limply like a floating tree trunk, and the teeth on its upper jaw are yellowed and pittied, undulating on its soft, riplling gums.
- This disgusting entity never looks the same for long. Its a mass of baby like organs and constantly devours and tears itself apart to grow new limbs as it quickly withers away. It might rip open a huge fetal belly its grew with a few quickly rotting hands, to reveal an unnaturally huge screaming head of an offal-drenched infant. Whens its eyes open one is completely black, the other milky white and blood-shot. Its wrecthes and vomits forth a mass of new arms and legs, all copeting for space and life. Its head quickly blackens and rots away, and the resulting mass is kicked away by a huge, chubby pale leg. Who knows how its vile body will progress from here.
- A huge hairless dog, its body emaciated and bony, pulsing veins visible beneath its weak skin. What appear to be flaps of loose skin hanging from its body are cruelly stapled against the tighter, paler skin on its body. It has the head of a woman who has been long dead. Her face is pale and drained of life and her eyes give her a blind, deseised appearance. Her lips are pale blue and her lower jaw is covered in visceral, weeping scabs. Although her body is dog-like, she moves with cat-like grace. She pants like a growls like some distorted bloody-throated human, whilst her head twicths violently.
Sorry if that wasn't really a creepy event, perhaps a bit much for most people. Its even better if there is a monster for each PC!.
I must calm myself down now...
WARNING : THESE IDEAS ARE VERY SCARY!
You are one disturbed bastid. And I love you for it.
This is one from the old list that stuck with me. The PCs visit a town (or something similar), and after a while they notice that every place they visit and most the people they meet have crucifixes. Upon closer examination, Jesus is female. For inspiration, go to your church and act all amazed that Jesus is male. Copy those odd looks the priests give you and give them to your PCs. :D
And as for a mini-adventure, my friends are making me do a CoC story for Halloween. My adventure, me thinks, will be about a town hopelessly addicted to sleeping medication. Why? Anyone who is still awake by 10PM dies a horrible, painful, mutilating death. I might just use that fat, bloated, goat body as one of the victims, too.
A hobo screams about something or another, preferably something rather innocuous, and then proceeds to cannibalize himself.
The characters open a DVD case and find that the DVD face looks like an eye that is looking at them. If they put the DVD in, they see disturbing images a la "The Ring." Make the images freaky.
This reminded me of something.
The original Japanese Ring series is as follows:
Ring
Rasen
Ring 2
Ring
You are one disturbed bastid. And I love you for it.
Well sir, I do try my best... :D
1. One or more of the PCs finds out that he/she/they have just inherited a mansion that has been unoccupied for roughly a century. The PCs decide to check out the property and find the interior of the decaying house in great disarray. All of the doors in the mansion can be opened, except for that of an upper-floor room. In the ballroom of the mansion, there are rows and rows of tables covered with torn tablecloths and dirty china, silverware, and crystal drinking vessels. A raised platform is on one side of the room with the head table set upon it. In one corner of the room, there are a group of chairs with rusty music stands in front of them. At sunset on the first day of investigation, an unknown woman in a beautiful dress descends a spiral stairwell from the next chamber, and enters the ballroom. A bizarre light flows into the room with her and to the rooms beyond. Immediately afterwards, a group of well-dressed skeletal humans appear, and proceed to pantomime a grotesque parody of a ball. Along with them come a group of skeletal servants. If the PCs to make any move to exit the room, the beautiful lady shouts, "Do not allow the trespassers to leave!!!" After this, she exits the ballroom, and the corpses move to attack the PCs. If all the PCs can escape the mansion, or at least one travel to the upper floor, the attack ends. If the PCs survive and remain at the mansion until dawn, they will find the previously unaccessible room unlocked, and, if they enter, find it to be a bathroom. In the bathtub, they will find the remains of a human, adorned in the tattered remains of a once beautiful dress (the long-deceased lady of the house).
2. The PCs accept an invite to a party by a stranger/acquaintance, only to find that they have been lured into sacrificial ceremony in which they are to be offered up to some form of dark god. The PCs must fight their ways out before they are all killed.
Man, I have some weird dreams...! ;)
--The PCs are hired to investigate to solve the mystery behind a series of disappearances of a number of citizens from any given large city. In the course of their investigation, the PCs find themselves in a long-condemned building. In the maze-like basement, they find the rotting remains of the missing individuals. However, as the PCs are about to leave to report their findings, a sinister scuttling sound can be heard closing in all around them.
--During a trip into mountain country, the PCs discover a cavern with a small entrance. Upon entering the PCs travel several hundred meters into the cavern when they come across a gigantic burial chamber, with several dozen sarcophaghi standing along the walls. In the middle of the chamber, there are a series of rock-hewn slabs, apparently used for funerary rites and burial preparation. On one of the tables lies the recently deceased body of a warty creature that shares the physical characteristics of a man, a frog, and some form of reptile.
and, the Most Horrifying of All...
--Preparing for a session of role-playing, a GM discovers that he can't find the notes he had cooked up for that night's adventure!!! :OMG!
Personally, I love your ideas... but they scare me not the least. Then again, I've been spending the past few months working on a horror movie.
That said - your ideas far surpass my own 'Stranger Gods'.
Ethereal Wickerman - I was going to comment sooner but I got side-tracked.
Personally, I love your ideas... but they scare me not the least. Then again, I've been spending the past few months working on a horror movie.
That said - your ideas far surpass my own 'Stranger Gods'.
Cheers,I think we all find different things scary. Not many people I know found Samara from The Ring frightening, but she freaked the hell from me. My sister is scared of aliens big time, but im not in the least.
What is this horror film you are working on?, do you have any links?...
I can send you a link for the script if you'd like (I don't really like spreading it 'round too much). I'm a tad secretive about my projects [they wants the precious!].
Wish it were amazing enough to have links. It's for my yr 12 media project - so it's kinda dodgy (it was due last week - and unfortunately, due to the overly long scripting process I could only hand in trailers).
I can send you a link for the script if you'd like (I don't really like spreading it 'round too much). I'm a tad secretive about my projects [they wants the precious!].
Oh right, sounds very cool though. If you dont mind sending me the script i'd appreciate it... :D
I wont spread it around, but dont feel as though you have to show me, just shout to me "whoooo!, Ben, its me, Bigface!...", i'll soon run away in terror!...
The characters have a conversation with an alien entity. They are walking through a large crowd. People in the crowd are speaking parts of sentences that all come together to form the creature's half of the dialogue: "You are on the" (old man that walks past the goup) "Right path" (Littlegirl) "You should find the journal" (Woman in a jogging suit) ....and so on.
Fallen is an excellent movie.
--One or more PCs shoot, capture, reel in a seemingly normal animal to use as a meal. Afterwards, all the animals the PCs encounter in the area afterwards act unusually aggressively toward them. If the PCs are able to contact a person who lives in the area, they relay a legend about a Native American whose spirit was reincarnated into whatever creature the PCs originally killed for their meal. This Native American had supposedly made a vow for his/her spirit to watch over and ensure the natural balance of this area for the rest of time. By destroying the Native American's spirit, the PCs have thrown the natural world in this area out of order.
-In an abandoned building, the lights turn on and off, as if someone is walking around the room, turning the lights on as they enter, and off as they leave. If the PCs wait until it approaches them, the lights will be on in their room, the adjacent room will turn off, there will be a pause of complete silence, before the light in that room turns off, leaving the players in darkness....
-The player, through some form or other has his chest opened by hands, and his internal organs pulled out slowly but near painlessly. He canot see the hands' owners, but there are several sets. The player views the intestines pulled out in an almost clean way, with feeling of a slight tug when it happens. This finishes in a polite caress along the severance, leaving the player seeming completely unhurt by the incdent. His doctor, upon next meeting, may be in for something of a shock
- While on a tube train, the players meet people sitting idly. while they wait they will realise that the people are looking blankly at newspapers and books, without turning the pages or moving their eyes along the lines, and may not even be focusing. Next to them, a youth taps his feet to the beat of a silent walkman. A ticket collector walks down, stares at each of the ocupants, the rest of whom ignore him, then walks along, to the next.
-The players are followed by a spate of an odd form of dress (a certain set of colours, clothing type and style, noticable enough to be distinctive). They meet people dressed exactly like this regularly, including fleetingly where there is something foul affot. The people wearing this are unaware that the others are wearing it, and have no knowledge of what is taking place. Have a few villains in this dress hunt the PCs down, so they cannot believe there is coincidence.
"..........From the future....all...gone mad.........too much inter......in danger.......Hope diamond....repeat find James chorton then......psychometry.......fail, millions will suffer....cant hold on....."
After that the figure disappears.
When the PCs are sleeping in a hotel have one of them awake in the middle of the night to see a glowing figure, shaped like a human, at the foot of their bed speak but constantly spitz like a cell-phone breaking up. The parts of the message go as follows
"..........From the future....all...gone mad.........too much inter......in danger.......Hope diamond....repeat find James chorton then......psychometry.......fail, millions will suffer....cant hold on....."
After that the figure disappears.
Indeed, very scary but at the same time raises questions. Who was he/she, is he/she alive, is he/she been born yet?...
:D
While walking through a large building, either a corporate tower or a shopping centre, the players see everyone as having identical faces. The moment they mention this, everyone is different again. Then on the way out they meet a pair of child twins with the faces they saw before.
TV/ computer screens show slightly different pictures of the PCs, that watch them as they walk past
For any, any reason, the PCs reach a seemingly silent and beautiful hill somewhere in the wilderness. They encounter the "village's fool", who claims that the hill ate his herd. Let them laugh and continue on their way, just as the hill opens his eyes and his gaping maw...
Back for more soon!!
Cheers!!
- Whenever the players are around trees, in the corner of their eyes they see siluohettes of people amongst the branches. They disappear the moment they turn to look. If any of the characters have children, they might cacth the children talking to these shadowy figures, looking up at trees (in the family garden, the park, etc) offering them blood-red apples.
- Wherever they go, they see animals (dogs, cats, rats, etc) all standing obediantly, staring at a blank wall. If the players investigate these walls, they will find that if they tamper with any photographs of it (print it black & white, turn it negative, etc) they is a frightening, inhuman figure hanging of the wall.
- The players befriend a shy, agoraphobic girl who says she can help them. She claims to be in love with an Angel, but being in an asylum its likely that she is just insane, that it is just a split personality or method of soothing her trauma. She escapes from the asylum after something particulary upsets her (a new uncaring counciler, the players doubts, etc). The players eventually find her in an abandoned, run-down house. A shadowy, tentacled being is holding and caressing her tenderly as she cries tears of relief.
- A traumatized, particulary quiet child (maybe one of the players children, a child in an asylum). He likes to be alone, drawing pictures. He draws funny, bizarre aliens and monsters, harmless excercises of the imagination at best. However murders begin to take place around a city where the victims were slaughtered in the most horrific ways, like a beast had attacked. Next to each murder is a disgusting, horrific version of the childs drawing. If the child is shown these pictures, he just smiles and says that it is one of his "imaginary" friends. Perhaps one of the pictures will be accidently or purposefully ripped. The next day the body of a horrific monster is found, resembling the childs drawing. The child will cry, saying that this particular "friend" has died.
- The players keep on seeing a young lady, dressed in black Kimono wearing an elaborate, white mask. This happens in totally public places, even non-players notice her. Whenever she's about to take her mask off however, she disappears instantly. Perhaps something horrifying can attack the players whenever this happens. If innocent bystanders are killed, the police will act as though nothing has happened. The public to be concerned, somebody soon makes a link that the players are always around when these monsters attack.
- A young, beautiful girl starts to receive terrifying letters from a stalker. This includes intimate photographs where no photographer could of been (in her bedroom as she is asleep, her looking out of window whilst in her parents car, etc) and disgusting, surreal images of rats, gore and fanciful writing. These letters include an adress to a house...
This thread reminds me of some of the freakiest dreams I've ever had:
1. One or more of the PCs finds out that he/she/they have just inherited a mansion that has been unoccupied for roughly a century. The PCs decide to check out the property and find the interior of the decaying house in great disarray. All of the doors in the mansion can be opened, except for that of an upper-floor room. In the ballroom of the mansion, there are rows and rows of tables covered with torn tablecloths and dirty china, silverware, and crystal drinking vessels. A raised platform is on one side of the room with the head table set upon it. In one corner of the room, there are a group of chairs with rusty music stands in front of them. At sunset on the first day of investigation, an unknown woman in a beautiful dress descends a spiral stairwell from the next chamber, and enters the ballroom. A bizarre light flows into the room with her and to the rooms beyond. Immediately afterwards, a group of well-dressed skeletal humans appear, and proceed to pantomime a grotesque parody of a ball. Along with them come a group of skeletal servants. If the PCs to make any move to exit the room, the beautiful lady shouts, "Do not allow the trespassers to leave!!!" After this, she exits the ballroom, and the corpses move to attack the PCs. If all the PCs can escape the mansion, or at least one travel to the upper floor, the attack ends. If the PCs survive and remain at the mansion until dawn, they will find the previously unaccessible room unlocked, and, if they enter, find it to be a bathroom. In the bathtub, they will find the remains of a human, adorned in the tattered remains of a once beautiful dress (the long-deceased lady of the house).
2. The PCs accept an invite to a party by a stranger/acquaintance, only to find that they have been lured into sacrificial ceremony in which they are to be offered up to some form of dark god. The PCs must fight their ways out before they are all killed.
Man, I have some weird dreams...! ;)
While reading this thread, the PCs start seeing images made up of the spaces between words. The image constantly changes, and when the PCs quote the text to post about it, the images disappear and never show up again.
...Gank, you did that on purpose, didn't you?
Edit: And after posting about this, the PC's find that their Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne disks don't work. You big jerk.
Edit: And after posting about this, the PC's find that their Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne disks don't work. You big jerk.
Oh, the horror of it all...
;)I sympathize with having trouble with computers every now and then, but was it necessary to accuse me of being a jerk (though I'm sure it was a joke) for something I'm not responsible for...?
Actually, you were right, i was only joking, and I apologize if it offended you.
You'll be happy to know Warcraft worked after i restarted the darn thing.
The PC's see :88E: go into a resturaunt to get a burger instead of eating their brains. The concept of the BBEG thinking burgers taste better than they do will drive them insane. If they go to hunt down :88E: and bring it up, they will get arrested and comitted to an asylum.
Forgive me, it's past midnight.
I have just returned from lunch and am the first person back in the office, I opened up etc.
All morning there has been a power failiure, and all PC's were unplugged, the unit I work on is turned on and running scandisk, no power connection and its a dektop PC, A colleauge who left before me for lunch, returns we are chatting for 5 we turn around and the PC is dead, the freaky thing is my colleauge saw it too....
*If one of the PCs smokes cigarettes, have them realise that what they are smoking is in fact a smouldering, bubbling human finger. While they stare at it, the end drops of, hitting the ground with a messy splat noise.
*While filling a car up with gas, the engine seems to make a monstrous munching, crunching, chewing noise of something weird eating messily. (Best sound example I can think of is Cookie monster, but less funny). Briefly after replacing the nozzle, there's an unearthly belch and a smell of beef.
Profanities: after writing 2, I realised that my horror campaign character smokes a fair amount. I'm asking for it.
The character goes out for drinks after work with a few friends. S/he wakes up in a wooded area with a killer headache and no memory of the last several hours. Persumably someone slipped him/her a knockout pill. Suddenly a stick snaps right behind him/her. It is very loud. The character sees something in the bushes, something big...
The character comes out of a day dream while at their day job... only to realise that they're not at their normal desk. A quick look around reveals that they're in a completely different building and apparently working for a different company. Everyone knows the character's name, but s/he doesn't recognize anyone, except for the creepy janitor.
The character awakens to something hitting him/her in the face. Whey open their eyes, they're in the park near their home, wearing whatever they normally wear to bed. They walked into a tree branch. Apparently, the character walked over three blocks in their sleep without incident. If the character sleeps nude (or nearly nude), they may have gained some unwanted attention.
While travelling the characters stop in a small town (car bearkdown or staying the night). Everywhere they go they see the same old farmer and his mangy dog. If they try to point out the pair to locals they're nowhere to be found. Eventually, one of the characters stumbles upon a memorial to an old farmer who was run off the road by a drunk driver. He and his dog died in the crash. A picture found on the memorial looks starlingly similar to the old man that the characters kept encountering.
A sink drain breathes.
Oh boy, now you're going to make me afraid to go into one of my bathrooms again. When I was little I was afraid that some creature was going to leap out of the shower (not sink) drain and attack me. Yes, I have issues...
Oh boy, now you're going to make me afraid to go into one of my bathrooms again. When I was little I was afraid that some creature was going to leap out of the shower (not sink) drain and attack me. Yes, I have issues...
This'll probably make this worse, but I got that idea when I heard strange noises coming from the sink drain.
in the middle of the woods one night, the characters hear sounds of an altercation, followed by a gunshot
(cliche) a character recieves in the mail a police file detailing own murder. It is dated one week from the date it was mailed
a vagrant claiming to be Jesus (or some other religious figure) returned to Earth is killed. All of the icons of that figure are seen weaping that evening.
a clock runs backwards for one hour everyday
a grandfather clock chimes the 13th hour
a television picks up a news broadcast from decades ago that somehow ties into the current investigation
a character falls alseep watching TV, he awakes to "snow" and a crackling voice pleading him for help; the voice is gone by the time the character can record it or report it to anyone else
a hotel's rolling marquee flashes a threatening message and the character's name
A character talks to another person inside a house, a PC or NPC. While talking, one of them goes into another room, to do something (any domestic stuff). They continue to talk, and one of the following things happens:
* The voice becomes monstrous, unearthly or simply starts screaming.
* (Ok, I know this is waaaaaaay off, but it's a really common fear I had as a child) If the other person's shadow can be seen, the shadow is either transforming into a REALLY monstrous shape or the PC sees another, strange shadow creeping behind the other man.
...I know, I had a troubled childhood!!!
-While walking or driving around in the city, a character notices a passing bus in which there are no passengers or chairs, but, rather, rows of skinned human corpses hanging on meat hooks suspended from the bus's ceiling.
-While one of the PCs is at a theatrical production of "The Wizard of Oz", time stops and the hands of the person playing the tin-man turn into actual tin, really old, bent, rusty tin, with lots of jagged edges. The tin-man then jumps at the Player Character and begins clawing at their chest, screaming "I WILL HAVE YOUR HEART!!!!!". then the PC blacks out, and when they wake up, the time has restarted, and everything is where it was when time first stopped (Alternately, the PC might wake up in a completely different play entirely, or the same play but now with completely different actors (or just a different actor playing the tin-man)). Then there's the standard telltale sign that the event was actually real; there's a few ways you could go with this, the most obvious thing would be to have the PC's shirt ripped up when they wake up, but there's also two other ways that you could go with it: either A.) At the PC's next appointment with their doctor, they are found to have no heartbeat, OR B.) The next time the PC goes through a metal detector, it goes off, even though they aren't carrying any metallic objects, and they later find out that there are large, jagged shards of tin embedded in their chest under the skin, and that there are now suddenly scars on their skin near each shard.
-While standing somewhere along the New York City harbor, one of the PCs sees the Titanic arrive at port. If they turn away, it will be gone when they look again.
-When playing "Super Mario 64" on an old Nintendo64 system for some reason, the message at one of the doors where a certain number of stars are needed to continue, is replaced with this message:
"When the stars are right, all impediments will fall away, and we will be free to conquer again when the path is made clear!"
If they later play the same videogame again, all of the messages go back to normal.
-One of the PCs notices that a passing bus is floating several feet above the ground, and that the wheels and the bottom of the chassis have been replaced with a large stone slab with strange, glowing runes carved on it. Nobody else (except maybe the other player characters) seems to notice anything, unless it is specifically pointed out to them, and even if it is, they immediately forget afterwards, and if questioned about it later will remember nothing of it.
-While the PCs are walking along some crowed city street or in a crowded mall, everybody else suddenly appears to look like Y'golonac (no head & lamprey mouths in their hands) once the PCs leave the area, the phenomenon stops.
-When one of the characters buts a set of tarot cards, they find that the pictures on the cards all look like people that they know (or, alternately, that they all look like people who have recently been murdered OR like obscure murderers that the character has heard of for some reason)
-When one of the characters goes to some fancy, high priced restaurant, all of the food there (literally) looks, feels, tastes and smells as if it were (literally) made out of manure. If the PC points this out to anybody else there, they'll think that they're crazy
-A character's cat coughs up a hairball of a thoroughly unnatural color (such as electric yellow)
---------------------------------
-Also, check out the cartoon "Amityville toaster" onIllwillpress.Com. It's a pretty funny cartoon that pokes fun at the kind of weird, horror-type events that are described in this thread. (A word of warning though, it does contain some mild coarse language).
Oh boy, now you're going to make me afraid to go into one of my bathrooms again. When I was little I was afraid that some creature was going to leap out of the shower (not sink) drain and attack me. Yes, I have issues...
I think that the shower in my house may be posessed by some kind of demon. It perpetually emanates the smell of brimstone.
When playing "Super Mario 64" on an old Nintendo64 system for some reason, the message at one of the doors where a certain number of stars are needed to continue, is replaced with this message:
"When the stars are right, all impediments will fall away, and we will be free to conquer again when the path is made clear!"
If they later play the same videogame again, all of the messages go back to normal.
Alternatively, the characters set off the apocalypse by collecting all the stars in the game.
(incidentally, this one is loosely based on the pizza served at my old high school cafeteria, which, while it wasn't actually covered in diseased skin, looked a whole lot like it was
)-While watching TV, one of the people on the TV show turns to face the characters and says something like "I'm gonna kill you!!!!" then turns back to whatever they were previously doing.
-Anything that one of the player characters tries to heat up in their microvave oven turns into disgusting green goo.
:evillaugh :evillaugh :evillaugh :evillaugh
-While watching TV, one of the people on the TV show turns to face the characters and says something like "I'm gonna kill you!!!!" then turns back to whatever they were previously doing.
If you're watching TV in a public place, such as an airplane, bus terminal, or laundrymat, have one of the other bystanders turn and make the threat.
-Anything that one of the player characters tries to heat up in their microvave oven turns into disgusting green goo.
Of course the green goo should be areally unnatural "not found in nature" kind of softly glowing neon
Also:
1) have green goo pour out of water faucets.
2) the character wakes up to find all of their houseplants "melted" into pools of goo
3) later a character finds a stray animal (or homeless person) half disolved in a puddle of goo
The PCs find a town in the middle of the wilderness that is not marked on any of their maps. In it, everyone inside seems paused in time-dogs in midjump, darts in midfight, etc. All the papers are dated over 30 years ago.
The PCs are looking for the daughter of a rich aristocrat in a ghost town (the exact location or setting is up to the GM). The town is not a small place, and contains many old buildings that have signs of deterioration far beyond their known age. Within the fog enshrouded town are a series of backalleys that catch the PCs attention. More specifically, one of the PCs continues to see a shadowy figure in the corner of his eye, but every time he turns to look, the figure quickly darts from sight.
The PCs eventually come to a group concencous and cautiously move into investigate. Now not only does one of the PCs see the shadowy figure, all of them see the shape of a man-like thing out of the corner of their eye. No matter how hard they try, they cannot seem to outrun their quarry. It always seems to disappear around the next bend, the next corner of the alley...
Calling it quits, the PCs begin to head back... only to find that they cannot seem to get out of the backalleys. As they struggle to find a way out of the unnatural maze of alleyways, the shadow that they had been chasing now follows them, just out of sight, but just close enough for the PCs to be aware of its presense. At least that is how it is at first... but with every turn, it seems to be getting closer and closer. How will they escape and what is this thing that haunts these backalleys?
- The PCs get lost out in the wilderness, by running out of gas, breaking their compass, losing their map... anything to make them truly lost and on foot. After a few days they should be running low on food and water. As soon as the first stage of hunger sets in, have all of them smell the scent of freshly baked cookies. Hopefully all of them will follow, in not for the hunger, then for the curiousity as to why it smells like cookies out in the wilderness. The PCs pass over a crest of a hill, and look down into a small grassy area with several elaborately decorated tables covered in food, and of course some cookies. Being very hungry and very thirsty, the PCs should investigate and probably eat something from these tables. Looking around, there are no buildings, no fires, no sign of activity or footsteps around the area... just tables with food. After the PCs start eating the delicious food, tell them that everyonce in awhile they have to pick out something out of their mouth, it looks like just a piece of cartillage or something similar. After maybe an hour of eating, they realize that the food is not delicious food, but rather raw dead people. They take another look at the tables, and they are just covered in dead rotting bodies.
- Everytime the PCs experience weird events, such as seeing or feeling something strange... keep a stereo close by and turn on the radio, except on a station you do not get so all you get is static. Only play it very softly though. And then randomly, after the players have realized that the static is related to strange/scary events, play the static REALLY loud. They will expect something HUGE! But then turn it off... they won't know what to think. (Got that from Silent Hill)
- Have one player get nightmares in his sleep frequently. Tell him that the nightmare is about him killing his friend/companion/whatever (preferably not another PC.). Describe in several different ways how he kills his friend. Randomly after one night, after having a horrible dream again about it... have it really happen to the guy's friend in the same way as he had dreamt it that night.
- (short and sweet, and a holiday treat!) The PCs go christmas shopping for eachother! Yay! When they give eachother their presents, all of the gifts have changed into severed heads. Yay! Where did the real presents go, and where did the severed heads come from?! Oooo...
. When the P.C.s arrive in a small town in Texas, everything seems normal until everyone starts speaking with an english accent. (This was a post of mine on the old wierd event thread.)
In the PC's dream, he is in his bathroom about to step into the bathtub when suddenly he feels a presense in the bathtub. The PC cannot see it, but he feels as though a young boy is standing in the tub looking up at him. Before he can confirm his suspicions, that dream ends and another begins. In this next dream, it is almost exactly a repeat of the first one, accept as the PC step into the bathtub, something almost invisible bites him in the stomache, leaving a bloody wound. The enraged presense gives off the feeling that it is about to come out of the bathtub and attack when that dream ends and yet another dream begins. In this next dream, the PC try to step into the bathroom, but as he does so, he is attacked viciously by the presense, which proceeds to flail what you presume to be its hands at you while lashing out with its teeth if the PC fails to fall back. At this point, that dream ends and the PC awakens. It is about 2:00 in the morning, but fear keeps the PC from settling down. As he walks out into the hall to get a glass of water, he is stopped in his tracks as he sees a young boy, practically naked except for some underwear walk into the bathroom across the hall. From his current position, the PC cannot actually see the bathtub, giving him a side view of the boy as he falls forward and crawls into the bathtub, as though it were deeper than it really is. The house seems earily quiet at this point, but no one else is awake except for the PC.
Well, that was a freaky dream... I practically woke up sweating with my eyes dialated :P
or...
As the ball in Times Square reaches the end of it's voyage on New Year's Eve, a giant number of unspeakable horrors start to appear in the streets as if from out of nowhere.
The crime should be something vile enough that anyone who knows the PC's whereabouts is likely to report them.
A PC opens a can of soup. They find that it is the best soup they've ever had. Only later do they realize that the tomato soup was a bit too red, and had a strange, vaguely metallic flavor...
A PC feels an overwhelming urge to remove his eyes with his bare hands. If the urge is acted upon, the eyes turn out to be a pair of peeled grapes. How he could see all this time is unknown. He also starts getting an overwhelming urge to remove other parts of his body. Like, say, his pancreas.
A random person starts bleeding uncontrollably from all of his orifices. He doesn't notice, but others do.
"You know, I don't remember ever having had mouths in the palms of my hands before."
Everyone has a cabbage for a head. Everyone.
Toast pops up. But you didn't put any toast in the toaster. You don't even have a toaster. FNORD What's going on here?
There's a dead rabbit on the other side of the mirror. It scratches at the glass. It wants out.
Brittney Spears actually sings! <-- wierd..down right eerie
a pc finds a strange lump on his/her shoulder which over a period of time grows larger and larger,developing appendages,etc until it becomes a clone of the pc.
Brittney Spears actually sings! <-- wierd..down right eerie
Make that Ashlee Simpson actually sings...and I'll agree wholeheartedly with you. :D ;)
Honestly, am I the only one who thinks she was lip-synching again during her stint as a co-host/performer at the "Rocking New Year's Eve" special a few days ago...?
- The characters find an abandonded car on a rural road. It appears to have lost control and slid into a ditch (there are skid marks in the snow). Due to the freshness of the tracks, it appears to have happened since the last snow fall. Mysteriously, the driver is no where to be found and there are no footprints leading to or away from the vehicle.
despite all the lonliness and such, the PCs just can't shake the feeling they're being watched. and what is that thing they keep seeing out of the corner of their eyes?
damn, i just noticed this. while posting, i noticed a little text line at the top of my screen:
Why so quiet?
You haven't posted for 14 days now. We'd love to hear from you again. Come on, don't be shy.
given the subject matter on this thread, creepy!
despite all the lonliness and such, the PCs just can't shake the feeling they're being watched. and what is that thing they keep seeing out of the corner of their eyes?
And then they find the bodies... only some of them aren't dead.
28 days later...
damn, i just noticed this. while posting, i noticed a little text line at the top of my screen:
Why so quiet?
You haven't posted for 14 days now. We'd love to hear from you again. Come on, don't be shy.
given the subject matter on this thread, creepy!
I KNOW! I got that too! It had me weirded out - first time a forum's started speaking to me on its own.
Every phone number a hero tries to dial rings busy.
[introduce this one over the course of several sessions] Barcodes and "serial numbers" become the newest tattoo craze. It seems like a fad until one of the heroes spots a cop scanning an arrestee's barcode tattoo... they notice people using their serial number for identification... people start being rude to the heroes... someone refuses to accept their state issued ID, saying its no good... the heroes begin to get hassled by police and other government officials... and so on.
After accidentally getting their names in the paper, the characters find themselves pursued by a tabloid reporter.
A package shows up via courier. The package is from and old propfessional acquiantence of one of the heroes. All over the package, DO NOT OPEN is written in at least five different languages. There is no nothing explaining why the package shouldn't be opened.
While driving in a well-known area, the road feels like it is full of massive potholes, but visual inspection reveals the roads are smooth and unbroken.
On an investigation in a rural area, the PCs hear the thunder of several horses (or other hooved quadraped). It sounds like they are headed straight toward the characters, but nothing ever appears and the hoof beats fade into the distance as if something had passed by.
After several days of torrential rain, firefighters are surprised to be called to the scene of a raging forest fire.
One of the characters swears he hears an SOS message being typed out over a song on the radio, but no one else hears it.
On the pilot for a new TV show: The story is about real life ghost hunters (or whatever the heroes pursue), the main characters strongly resemble the heroes, and the plot seems to be based on an investiogation they were just contacted about that morning.
Several people attack a sidewalk hotdog vendor and eat everything on his cart. Later that day a similar incident occurs, only this time at a trendy diner. This pattern of unexplained gluttony continues (and increases in frequency) over the next few days.
A lion is spotted in a metro area. All zoos and private people in the area report that none are missing.
The player is either at home or in his office, when he get a phone call. He picks up and the voice asks for a roommate/ coworker or similar, who isn't about at the time. They ask to take a message, check if he has paper a pen etc. and tell them "here's the message". There is a terrible, long, loud, bloodcurdling scream, in a totally different voice to the original speaker (different gender, pitch etc.) with odd noises in the background (bubbling, shattering glass, whatever). After it ends, there is either a blank tone or the original caller will just calmly say, "that's all, thanks, bye" and hang up.
A pc gets so violently sick that she needs to be taken to the hospital. Her stomach is pumped. The doctors pull the other pcs aside and ask if their friend has eaten anything unusual lately. It turns out that her stomach is full of human teeth, none of them less that 200 years old.
Everyone around the PCs open their mouths and makes modem noises for a full minute. Then, they go about their buisiness as if nothing was wrong.
- What looks like a black & white human keeps hiding his face in shadows. The only visible part of this creature is its legs that float a cm of the ground, trailing its bare feet along the ground, as well as a pair of bony hands poking out from beneath the shadows that cover the top half of its body. The only part of its face that is visible is the inside of its mouth, which glows with a dim light revealing its fangs. It sometimes speaks, in slow, echoing, distant way. It may be talking english though its difficult to make out.
- A tall main in a un-ironed, rough suit carrying a blunt implement looks normal except for its grey skin. Its head thrashes around with unnatural speed and violence, actually blurring its features. It sounds like a whole pack of wolves violently tearing apart a human in a rage.
- A group of screaming men, all wearing street gang clothing carrying knifes, guns, etc. Their legs and arms are all bent out of position and erupting from their faces are long, bloddy, bone-colored stalks that have remnants of their faces wrapped all around it. They make noises as though they were starting a fight or shouting obscenities, though they not speaking any human language.
- A huge blackened upper body of a man that crawls around with two huge arms that end with 10-fingered hands. Scraps of deseised flesh hang off this abomination as acrid smoke rises from its crackling skin. Its has long, matted black hair and wears a white, tribal-patterned mask. Foul smelling bubbling liquids eject from the mask from its eye, nose and mouth holes. It shuffles along making cacophonous wheezing and moaning sounds.
- Dozens of deathly-pale identical girls, all wearing the same faded clothing and black piggy-tails. They hide their faces (except for one, unnaturally bright, disturbing eye) with their hands, blood seeping and dripping from between their fingers. Written on their hands are obscene messages and sentances liked 'stabbed in the face' or 'he hurt me so much', each message on each of the girls hands different. If they move their hands from their face dozens of animate 15 foot long black ribbons erupt from it, their single pale eye still visible through the seething, profusely bleeding fabric mass. They sound like radio-distorted voices of girls in pain, terror and agony.
Sorry about that, but listening to Wolf Eyes tends to push out this region of my imagination.
Sweet dreams... :evillaugh
A game starts up with a group of players inside an Asylum, or a hospital, or some other medical institution. The PC's all of normal jobs inside the place. Janitor, Security Gaurd, Visiting, Scientist of some sort, etc. Anyways, zombies take over the place, and it becomes your basic Resident Evil ripoff game. Lots of fun. Start giving weird burst of insanity to the players. For example, blood won't wash off, or if the zombies blood is differently colored they notice that they themselves, and allies, are covered with the normal red blood. They see zombies in a room and flee, but looking back a few seconds later reveals just normal survivors (or vice versa). Just use any of the stuff from this thread you've seen before.
Eventually, reveal that they've actually been doing all the mayhem they thought was zombie caused. It turns out the institution is something different from what they thought it was (if hospital, then Asylum. If Asylum, then prison for the insane) and eventually the big turn in plot... They were the insane people, and were actually killing all the normies. Final realization of seeing the other PC's as they are. "Hey Jeff, you have a head on your shoulders. I mean besides yours. Another one."
Whether you want the change permanent or just a trick, that's your own choice.
A PC goes to talk to an important campaign NPC, but when the NPC turns to face them, their eyes are black and they speak with an inhumanly multiplicate voice:
"I am not present,
You speak to an empty room.
How lonely are you?"
Just think if you could combine EVERYTHING presented here into an adventure and pull it off right :evillaugh just think how freaked out your players would be 
:OMG!While exploring the basement of a large office complex, the PCs find the main server/ communications room. All the way through, the lights are out, but there is the deep electrical humming of the equipment. The multitude of cables criss-crossing the machines form the shapes of spiderwebs, and close examination shows that they are covered in a sticky goo. On the first they come to, they are simply oddly shaped on the connection. However as they turn a corner, the cable flow wildly accross the corridor, and some seem to have been ripped out. As they shine their torches down the corridor, they see a body, entangled in these cables, covered with some sort of slime. Right then the humming cuts out, leaving a higher pitched, insect like buzzing from behind them, as a shape emerges from the shadows......
Thats a very bizarre yet interesting idea Nurgan. You could have an entire campaign based around the whole of civilization and its technology starting to resemble the invertebrate world. Kinda symbolic in showing how we compare to the Elder Gods...
:evillaugh
Dr. Robert Stone. Also requested and used Nazi data incl. Rajewski's report, later with Dr. Evans on the Nuclear Energy Propulsion for Airplanes Advisory Committee which tried to bring Rajewski to the U.S. Evans and Stone did classified radiation weapon development research for the AEC and military. Evans also had been involved secretly as a CIA consultant for their project to use radiation as a means of killing just one person.
Col. Boris Pash. Started CIA radiation warfare research, had made CIA assassination teams from Nazi recruits, directed the Alsos Mission ("Project Paperclip") to locate and whitewash useful Nazi war criminals, and after the war (WW2) siezed 70,000 tons of uranium ore and radium.
Dr. Webb Haymaker. Co-authored a book with Nazi scientist Hubertus Strughold. Co-developed Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) from CIA ideas to use radiation to affect brain centers. They consulted with him on this. Boron is injected, and a neutron beam aimed at it in the brain, causing a "tiny nucear explosion." NO CURES, most patients died.
*And we read about Cell Phone Radiation and brain tumors. Hmmmmm...whole new meaning to "Pop goes the Weasel!"* POW BABY!!!!! :D
Dr. William Swee. Co-developed BNCT. Worked in 1933 and 1934 in Nazi Germany, observed sterilization of unwitting epileptics by aiming radiation at their genitals from under a desk they were told to sit at, yet though he called this "outrageous behavior," on his part; he never revealed this to war crimes investigators. (Must have forgot)
And if you think that the all-wise CIA must be excuseable as being privy to knowledge or having special competence we do not, consider this:
"Think of it: thirty billion dollars a year goes to an
intelligence establishment that cannot hire one spy in
the south end of Mogadishu to pinpoint the location of
a famous warlord who gives press interviews and
broadcasts radio statements of defiance. Somalia has
exposed the weakness of U.S. defense intelligence."
- William Safire, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 7, 1993 p. A29.
Written in regards to the now famous; "Black Hawk Down" incident.
Of course in my humble opinion there was means of getting reliable embedded and covert intelligence assets in Somolia let alone as in the case of Afganistan, Iraq or even; Iran and Syria the complexity and the logistics of such an operation are in effect mind boggling. Having someone who is transparent in a culture; by transparent I mean capable of living completely immersed and for all intents and purposes being one of the locals, in a short amount of time; is unrealistic.
And in for example Somalia where the intertribal conflict and violence is a part of the life to the degree where someone with millions of dollars of assets in place could get shot just by standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or in the documented case of one man where he was playing 'Russian Roulette' lost and blew his brains out. At the time and place he was doing what everyone else was and well...lost.
But in this case this stuff makes for great "Press" and gaming material.
Enough "Rant" back to THE EVIL... :evillaugh
Any way
One of the PCs is watching TV, when the screen crackles, and shows the PC watching, as he is. There is the sound of a gunshot, and the head of the figure on the TV, explodes in blood, as if shot in the head. Moments later, the character suffers a blinding incapacitating pain in the head and collapses. They recover moments later, the TV back to normal. If they quickly look where the gunshot seemed to come (taking into account the inversion, due to the TV), they see someone unarmed, innocently walking away.
When noone expects it, the creepy events thread gets bumped.
One of the PCs is performing an autopsy on one of the cult members (a young girl) . She is halfway through when the girl wakes up, screaming.
The PCs encounter Hastur. The King in Yellow begs them to help. He says that something is after him...
One of the PCs is kidnapped by some goons and dumped into a river. He does not drown, because he can esaily breathe the water...
The PCs are in a strange Chinese restaraunt, waiting for a contact to show up. The waiter leads them to a private room. He tells them that their host will be late. He says that a meal has been ordered for them while they wait. They sit down and watch as the waiter brings out a pot of boiling oil and a pair of tongs for each PC (There is no explanation. The staff believes that the PCs understand what is going on...) Then, each of them is brought a covered silver dish. If they open these dishes, they will find, on a bed of cabbage, a nest of hairless, new-born baby rats. Exotic food, right?
while at a book store, the pcs come across a module for a horror roleplaying game and they are depicted on the cover. If the pc's read the module they will notice that the current mission they are on is the basis for the module.
while on some downtime, the pc's fax machine recieve strange messages from an unknown source..the weird thing is that the fax machine is unplugged.
"I DEAD"
********************************************************************************
I edited this because of being an 'typing idiot' but... idead was what I had typed instead of 'ideas'; but as far as something to that Title...
"I Dead"
I could see that rolling down a computer screen in white lettering against a black background for a moment of time and as the last of the seven hundred I Dead(s) becomes to the top of the screen that fills in black.
"You Dead" scrolls slowly from the bottom.
***************************************************************************
:evillaugh
The PCs encounter a man/woman claiming that one of his/her children is possessed by an evil being named "Tasan." While initial findings might prove inconclusive, if the PCs do a little research, they find accounts of several other people being possessed by a being of the same name over the course of hundreds of years. Soon afterwards, the person who first contacted the PCs is found dead and the "possessed" child absent from the home.
:death chart: Roll a d20.
1- nothing special (it just dies)
2- it implodes
3- it explodes, showering a 5 foot radius in blood and gore
4- it melts (quickly or slowly; DM disgresion)
5- it disapears
6- its sucked into the sky (like in the movie Forgotten)
7- sucked into the earth (portal to hell or simply absorbed, DM disgresion)
8- the corpse produces huge quantities of blood and wont stop bleeding
9- it turns into dust
10- it shatters like glass
11- it turns to stone (a perfect statue)
12- the corpse shrivels into the shape of a small animal (as if that was its original form)
13- turns into a pile of insects (DMs choice) and scatters
14- catches fire (may have adverse effects, DMs disgresion)
15- turns to ice
16- the corpse starts screaming, and wont stop
17- the corpse begins to vomit huge amounts of foul bile, and wont stop
18- it turns into a flock of ravens that scatter
19- the corpse begins weeping and sobbing, and wont stop
20- the corpse takes on the form of Edgar (the BBG who is controlling everything), with a huge evil grin on his face
Would like to see what you've got set up for the world of the dead idea. I personally think maximum potential is not knowing they're in some sort of dead world directly, but think they're in the real world, with a few odd things going on around them, and have it descend into madness from that.
Just some ideas, Nurgan
And im totally going to put yours on the table
-The PC constantly recieves phone calls where the caller is praying, crying, screaming, begging, raving, laughing hysterically. The caller is always different and never says who they are. It always sounds as if they are far away. They never hang up, so the PC has to if they want to end the conversation.
-The players and an NPCor two come across the body of a woman who has no head. While examining it, it promplty snatches the nearest NPS and ripps their head off, placing it on its one neck. The eyes open and it begins shrieking in the voice of the former owner of the head as it attacks them.
-Whenever a PC is feeling aggitated or angry, someone bear them suffers a horrific death. They are hit by a car, an air onditioning unit falls out of a window onth their head, they pick up a fork and begin stabbing their own throats, they are mauled by all the animals in x range.
-TVs only display a live feed the PC looking at it. In the back ground, anyone near by is being attacked by terrible monsters. Anyone looking at the TV when the PC is also sees this. As soon as the PC looks away, the regualr program resumes.
- Every time a PC hails a taxi, is helped in a store, cheked through at krogers, or otherwise deals with one person who renders a service- its always the same man/woman/child. When confronted he/she denies any knowladge and runs away if pressed too hard about it.
- No matter whta book the PC picks up, it's always [insert book title here]. Only the PC can see it though, and others claim its always a different book.
- When going to a favorite restraunt, they pass the kithen on the way to the bathroom. As the PC passes, he sees through the open kitchen door that there is a man being assulted by all the cheffs with knives and kithen implemants. If the PC appraches the door swings shut. As they open it an instant later they see that the kitchen is busy, the cheffs are all preparing food and the man who was being attacked isnt there. There is ,however, a large puddle of blood that someone instanly comes to clean up when if pc approaches.
- Whenever the PCs are outside, just off in the distance, they can see a clown holding a baloon animal in a certain undefinable shape. If they try to attack him or get within a couple hundred feet of him, the clown walks into an alley, goes into a house, climbs a tree, or hides in a bush and simply vanishes. When the PCs get to the spot where the clown disapeard, there is a mutilated corpse of a human or an animal. When they look up, the clown is once again standing in the distance smiling, holding a baloon animal now of a different shape. Sometimes he's following them and soemtimes he's ahead of them- but he never says a word and just keeps smiling.
- If a PC tries to use a car, the car tends to try to steer toward oncomming traffic or into a telelphone poles. It never overpowers the driver, but if left unattended while driving, the car will try to kill the passangers the most convienient way possible at the time.
Every time one particular PC gets angry, thinks a violent though, or commits violence, any nearby lights flicker and dim. In extreme cases, the light bulbs may shatter.
Every times a particular PC lies, the next thing they eat is rotten/sour/foul tasting. Blatant lies may taint the food around him/her too.
Everything a PC eats tastes dry and dirty like it is covered or made of ashes.
Every time a PC thinks a perverse/sexual though or commits a similar act, people stare at and avoid him/her for the rest of the day. Some people may cross the street, whisper behind his/her back, or cat-call.
Every time the PC indulges in drugs or alcohol, they begin reeking like a landfill.
Every time a PC draws a weapon, they suffer from stigmata.
Whenever a PC swears or makes a rude gesture, he gets a crippling migraine or an electric shock.
Every time a PC draws a weapon, they suffer from stigmata.
Eye stigmata?
Eye stigmata?
You are thinking of Stigmatism. Ash means the Wounds of Christ (tm).
Actually, unless I'm horribly wrong, that was a reference to this: Eye Stigmata
Can we have an Eye Stigmata smiley?
- A group of PCs is walking down the street and they notice a large group of people gathered around looking at something. When they approach they realize that none of the onlookers are saying anything- just staring. If they manage to push their way through the crowd to the center, they see that there is nothing there. The people around them suddenly disperse without a word.
- Whenever the PC(s) passes a pay phone, it starts rings. The instant before they can pick it up, it stops.
- The PC(s) are arrested on murder charges that they know they didnt commit. After some interrogation at the police station they are released. The reason given for the arrest is "There was a slight mix up. Turns out the suspect got some of your blood from a blood bank and just sprayed it around the scene." This would be ok, except the character doesnt remember ever donating blood...
- A package arrives in the mail crudley addressed to one of the PCs from a nephew or neice. Opening it reveals a wrapped chirstmas present with a card. Inside the card is a message written in crayonand misspelled in child-like scrawl. It reads "I know its not x-mas, but i thought you would like it. Love -Johnny/Susie"
The christmas present is the head of the nephew/neice with a smile on its face.
- I saw something like this in a movie once. I dont remember what movie it was, but im totally going to use it. The PC are in are exploring a hospital/mental ward. Suddenly one of them starts to cough and hack up a lot of flem. The coughing become more fierce and suddenly something comes up into their throat. They gag on it and force it up, pulling it out of their mouths with shaking hands. He/she proceeds to pull out a rusted broken stethescope/a wadded up fluids bag (with a strange liquid insdie)/ crusty gauze/ lengths of dicolored rubber tubing/ a scalple/ used syringes. Any concievably swallowable thing found in an operating room would work.
- At certain times when a PC sleeps, discribe his dreams. They shouldnt to be scary at first. But eventually have things happen while hes awake that he dreamed about. Soon, the dreams start becomming more and more unsetteling, and they start to happen when he wakes. Eventually the PC will be terrified to sleep becasue when he sleeps, what he sees becomes true. Of course, not everything in his dreams actually happens, but he never knows EXACTLY what will and what wont. But he wont know if he is causing these things or if hes just seeing them before they happen, and nothing is better for messing with a player's head than insomnia.
- While talking amoungst themselves, one of the PCs is appraoched by a small girl who beggins tugging on his hand. When the player asks what the girl wants he says "I dont know- but [person] said that if you didnt come soon, a lot more people were going to end up like me." When the PC asks what she means by "like me", she grins (in a way that a little girl shouldnt be able to) and takes a step back. Then she lets out a scream and falls onto her back. When they look at the body they see that she has a bullet hole in her forhead (if they flip her over theyll see the messy exit wound) that they didnt see before. Also, he eyeballs have been taken out and replaced by some sort of token; DM's/murderer's choice. Three facts hit the PCs. The body is cold, they know the wounds weren't there a moment ago and the wounds arent bleeding.
- The PC's are walking down a street and witness two punks steal an old ladies hand bag. She yells after them to stop but they keep running. She then reaches under her sunday hat and brings out the biggest hand cannon the PCs have ever seen. She lets off 2 shots, dropping both fleeing theives. Nobody on the street even flinches. She puts the gun bach under her hat and retrieves her purse. If the PCs tried to help her during the altercation then after she gets her purse she smiles and offers them each a piece of gum, "for helping an old defensless lady".
Stigmaaaaataaaa.
While I don't have any new events to add to this thread,here is a compilation of the entries from the old wierd events thread, sorted by event type.
Um... I can't get it to work. If I use the link, it brings me to a page not found think on freewebs. If I save target as, then it trys to save "leaving.htm". I guess the file isn't there anymore. Could somebody repost it?
Um... I can't get it to work. If I use the link, it brings me to a page not found think on freewebs. If I save target as, then it trys to save "leaving.htm". I guess the file isn't there anymore. Could somebody repost it?
I have the same problem. I think I have the file saved on another computer, but I have to figure how to get it up.
Or I guess I could just copy and paste the whole thing.
2. The character notices that the shadows cast by solid objects (buildings, light poles, etc.) aren't solid. There seem to be light (possibly even different colors) and dark patches within the shadow. No one else seems to think this is odd.
3. There is a rash of suicides. All have left similar notes with something along the lines of, "I am empty" or "Flesh is a lie"
4. The hum of high tension power lines seems to overwhelm the hero's senses.
5. Someone tells you your parents aren't actually your parents, but they won't discuss the subject to confirm or deny it. Its like they don't even hear the question.
While the party are exploring an abandonned warehouse, they come across a wooden door painted green, which looks extremely twee and very out of place, but has an odd message on it written in blood. If they open the door, someone bumps this thread
You know, if that door were round and had a doorknob in the middle, it could lead to the home of a hobbit serial killer?
I was wondering if anyone would catch the reference. :-) I had just finished a Lain marathon (all but the last 2 episodes) the previous day. I'd never actually seen it before.
You watch it all in one sitting and go temporarily insane.
Yeah, pretty much. :-)
Early in the PCs' career, they track down a serial killer with a 'signature' (cuts a pentagram into his victims' cheek, or something). He is killed when the party tracks him down or heads him off at his next victim, whichever. During the fight, he has some 'weird' abilities, weird depending on the setting. In a modern day setting, maybe he shoots a gun when everyone is certain he was just holding a knife; fantasy setting, he uses a spell out of the Book of Vile Darkness :D . In any case, the PCs move on with their lives, adventuring, gaining fame, fortune, and so forth. Eventually, they need to meet with an important NPC (archmage, mob boss, someone personally powerful or who would never be without bodyguards). When the party gets there, they find the NPC dead in his office, with a pentagram cut into his cheek.
As the party is in a stressful situation, one of the PCs sees everything slow down and take on a purplish color. To one side, he can see a cloaked figure that wasn't there before, who is holding a scythe in one hand and an hourglass in the other. The figure looks between the hourglass and an NPC (or PC, to be really nasty) a few times, then notices the PC looking at him. As the figure turns, the PC can see that inside is a bleached-white skull. Death then just nods amiably at the PC, turns back to the hourglass, and disappears while everything else returns to normal.
(I know Terry Pratchett did it first, and humorously; but dang it, if that happened to me, I'd crap my pants!)
The DM asks the players, "Have you guys ever seen Alien?"
The DM asks the players, "Have you guys ever seen Alien?"
"...'cause you know, I was flicking through the Book of Vile Darkness, and there's these demons that just made me think..."
"...'cause you know, I was flicking through the Book of Vile Darkness, and there's these demons that just made me think..."
-The PCs find a Rubik's Hypercube.
-Complaining of stomach pains, a PC goes into the hospital. It turns out that he has a massive cyst, and it needs to be drained. He goes under anathesia, but he wakes up in the middle of the operation. The surgeon has removed his mask and extended a giant, hollow tongue that is busily sucking the fluids out of the cyst.
- Complaining of stomach pains, a PC goes into the hospital. It turns out that he has a massive cyst, and it needs to be drained. He goes under anathesia, but he wakes up in the middle of the operation. The surgeon is busily removing what appear to be mutated fetuses... *queue DM's intro adventure to the Kaorti*
Or, (stealing this from the original thread) a square room that has a pentagram inscribed in the floor, with each point pointing toward a different wall.
Of course, perhaps when the engineer opens the machine, the Creepy Events thread gets bumped and the players just find his remains at the scene, with the open box looming.
While the PCs are on the highway at night, one of them glances out the window and sees an enormous, featureless, humanoid figure running on the side of the highway, and somehow keeping up with the car.
I like this one...
They grab a car and toss it into another car. All witnesses except the PCs report seeing a normal car crash.
Alternatively, they see the vines tossing the car. I wonder what happens when the drivers of half-ton metal objects moving at 65 mph go totally insane...
Here's a pretty cool forum thread/feature. Posters described their nightmares, and a user illustrated them. There are some pretty creepy ideas. The screwed up kiddies with syringes really stood out as an interesting adventure idea.
God, after looking at that stuff, I'm going to have nightmares...
Now THAT's a monster and a half!
I don't know what's scarier...Your story or your Avatar!!! ;)
I'll take that as a compliment!! ;)
The PCs are part of a law enforcement branch in the suberbs of a city. They can be detectives, CSI, medical personel, lawyers or therapists but not all the same one. They are assigned a case to analyze a house where a ritualistic murder took place recently. While investigating they find a hidden passageway that leads to a second basement where a man is performing some strange ritual. He tries to kill the PCs but fails and upon dieing the "endless blood going up the walls" creepy event takes place.
After the PCs get out of there they begin to develop strange abilities. One can see the dead, one sees events before they happen, one sees strange messages on billboards and in magazines, etc. They don't see these things all the time nor can they control it. It only comes out when it is relevant to the plot and/or to put in suspense/horror.
***
And to offer up some creepy events of my own. Note that both of these actually happened to me when I was younger.
1. The PC wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. They turn their head to the left and see that their closet door is open. Floating on top are a number of green heads making various faces. They slowly rotate across the top of the closet from right to left (kind of like those "shoot the duck on conveyor belt" games).
(From that day on I've never gone to sleep with my closet door open.)
2. The PC wakes up around 4 a.m. Soon after they do they hear a woman's scream coming from outside of their window.
(I wasn't imagining things here, because my cat was on the bed when I woke up and her head and ears perked up at the same time and she stared at the window. I was too scared to open the blinds up to look outside though and went back to sleep.)
Anyway, last night I had couldn't seem to get to sleep. I wasn't feeling well, and when I finally fell asleep I had this dream.
It started out with me watching myself as if watching a video recording of myself (supposedly having some sort of uncontrolable bout of madness). Except I was moving my head and arms with unnatural quickness (as if they alone had been speeded up) and was chanting or screaming something, but the voice didn't sound human (it sounded like one of those backward playbacks of a human voice, which evidently in the dream it was a normal recording, except *I* actually was talking backwards at the rate of normal human speech.) What's more underneath the recording was a series of texts words (like subtitle for translation) only they didn't translate it, they just showed what words they were if they were spoken foward instead of backwards. Lastly the words themselves (evens shown written foward) were *not* english, but instead some ancient dead language (I think it was suppose to be Old Norse, but I don't speak or read that language).
Weirder still while I can't remember any of the other words that came up in the subtitle, one word seemed emphasized. The word "Wed" (as in the begining of Wednessday) and in the dream there was some background explanation (that was not spoken simply remebered without words) that Thursday descened from Thor's day, while Wednessday had meant something Woden (another ancient Norse god) which meant Odin (yet another ancient Norse god, who was the deity of knowledge).
Worst of all, was the emotional sensation that saturated the experince. (And they say what you *feel* in a dream is extremely important to what it meant to you). Watching myself move and speak like that gave me nothing but a feeling of abject terror. I mean I don't even ussually feel that way in daily life, normally all I get is worried or frightened, but all I felt was icy cold numbing "it-is-so-wrong-I-can't-look-at-it!" avert your eyes fear. Like I was looking at myself and what I was seeing wasn't natural or maybe even human.
Then the dream shifted to some pleasant sunlit bedroom (my parents room in my old house) and the fear effect had subsided. And for some reason my mother was there siting on the bed (while I was standing) and together we were trying to figure out what was triggering these bouts of madness. And somehow we came to the conclusion it was connected to this old dresser. (And of course it was now sitting in the room). Looking at the dresser suddenly brought on this rising fear again, that same cold numb fear sensation. I forced myself (despite the fear) to open the drawers of the dresser and look in each of them. They were mostly empty except for old black and white pictures and memento like things . . . except they weren't things you would keep as memento's (like some things from a war), and the black and white photos were not of things you would normally take pictures of. They were pictures of death from some war. I only remember one picture in particular. It was a black and white picture of a human corpse, without a face, so you could see the skull underneath, and the flesh of its chest had been pulled open on either side showing its white ribcage, and within the ribcage only darkness. I can't remember for sure, but the corpse might have actually been using its hands to hold back the folds of flesh to expose the insides of its empty chest . . .
When I told my wife about the dream later, she said maybe I've been thinking too much about D&D and necromancy. . .
Man, Toriel, that is some messed up stuff there (of course, that was ment as a compliment). Not only did it hit close to home on many people's (including my own) personal lives, it was just downright weird and creepy just to think about it. If you had the title or the actual story, I'd like to look it up or read it.
I will try to remember but it's been a few years. i remember that it was in an anthology of horror stories and it was about 2 pages long. i cannot garantee it but if i find it i will post it with pleasure.
Messing with religion works very well. Jesus screaming in agony on the cross, statuettes of religious figures crying stuff you wouldn't normally associate with such events (Not blood or tears, but urine, bile, and worse.), or a first edition of (insert holy book here), that bears a startling resemblence to Al Azif.
When in doubt, kill someone in ways that aren't exactly possible under normal cicumstances. (People getting turned inside out, people digesting the contents of their abdominal cavity, massive cysts replacing various organs, that sort of thing.)
Edit: Clarified cyst thing.
The Eye of N’phelatoh
This cursed artifact appears to be a crystal ball. When first activated, it shows a young girl holding a doll. After one minute, the image disappears. Every subsequent time it is activated, the image seems more sinister-the scene is much darker, the girl has dark bags under her eyes, claw like fingernails, the doll becomes bloodstained and such. By the twentieth time the ball is activated, the girl resembles a twisted mass of demonic flesh. Every time the ball is activated, everyone who looks at it must make a Will Save, with a DC of 5 plus the number of times the ball has been activated or be shaken. However, if a player fails his save by ten or more, N’phelatoh, the Level 20 Pseudonatural Succubus Sorcerer within the ball is freed for ten minutes, and will attack that player, moving on to others only after her first target is dead. After ten minutes, she returns to the ball. If anyone fails there save by twenty or more, however, the ball shatters and N’phelatoh is freed forever.
-the next time a PC listens to any form of music, the volume randomly changes, from LOUD to soft to Medium to whatever. The volume on whatever is playing it doesn't work.
[edit] I'm *never* posting here again. *shudder*
Guess what just happened when I turned on Windows Media? [/edit]
The PC's are searching for a missing baby, after some investigating they have found out the kidnapper lives in an abandoned warehouse.
They enter the dark warehouse and immediatly they are assaulted by a horrible stench, the smell of decomposing meat.
They wander about the place and find the seeming source of the smell; a large meatlocker that hasn't been used in ages, but is stacked with old meat. (Rotting away and stinking up the place.)
They continue their search through the building and finally find the place where the baby is kept:
It is in a crib ontop a large pile of dead baby's, some of them reasonably fresh, others severly decomposing.
To reach the crib (and with it the long lost baby) they must climb/walk over the other babycorpses.
(My players were severly freaking out as i described the cracking of the bones and the squilching of the rotting flesh under their hands and feet.)
Whenever a certain household appliance is disconnected (TV, Radio, toaster, whatever), the party's pet drops dead/in a deeply comatose state. When the appliance in question is reconnected, the animal wakes up as if from a nap.
The effect keeps working even if the appliance is no longer in the party's possession. (Guess what happens if they destroy the machine...)
To add to the gross-out factor (If that is what you like) you could add that if the party opens the appliance, at it's core they find the animals heart, connected directly (and crudely) to the power cables. The animal (when autopsied) has no heart, but doesn't show scars from surgery either...
Greetings, Modhail
Every person a PC has ever killed stands or floats around him. Everyone from the BBG evil guy to the lowliest thug they killed last adventure can be seen standing behind them in any kind of reflective surface. They also speak constantly scream and berate the PC and even stop the PC from sleeping.
*cough*thesorrow*cough*
A First person shooter game comes out, boasting state of the art AI programming. But regular players start dying in mysterious circumstance, as the ghosts of the dead monsters come back for vengeance....
The PCs stay in a hotel and have nightmares of insanity, terror, and death, only to wake up in an empty field where the hotel was.
The PCs log onto a computer and find many documents dealing with chants in other languages/suicide notes/cult meeting schedules etc.
Of course your name, and those of several people close to you, are on there (you didnt think you'd get away, did you?), but they do not have any fate written next to them yet. One is a "lucky" relative whom you remember is still not back from his free, all expenses paid cruise in Bermuda. The next day, you recieve a fancy envelope from a well known travel angency telling you you've won a drawing for a free cruise across the atlantic.....
Fantasy:
The character begins seeing some people as having a mouth full of fangs (ALL teeth, think of the guy in Return of the King, LT Smiley) for only a split second. Once in awhile his own reflection. It eventually stops. No explanation. Wait until almost everyone has forgotten about it, and a clone of the PC with a mouth full of fangs attacks the PC while they're using the bathroom. Drop it after that.
A character comes down with a fever, and during the hieght of it, he sees people's "life force" and every time an elf comes into contact with someone, part of the person's life force flows into the elf. It goes away when the fever does. Even the elf in the player's party.
Modern:
Department 7
The character's paperwork keeps getting filled out before they can return from the mission. Sometimes people greet them with "I thought you were going to the store." when they come in. Thier firearm is already drawn from the armory.
Military
A young female soldier vanishes from the unit, and when the PC's go to the command to report it, they overhear talking, and can see the higher ranking officers and sergeants of the unit feasting on her still living body. Everyone they tell blows it off.
One of the PC's NVG's refuses to show someone known to the PC's. Soon afterwards, that person dies in an accident. Now other people are beginning to fade.
Spec Ops
An insurgent, killed by the PC's, curses the PC's with his final breath. They keep seeing such things as a small lizard staring at them, while thier vehicles battery drains, their NVG's cut out, etc.
Any of those work?
Any time a PC suceeds in a Spot Check by more than 10, let them see something "not quite right."
- Someone chewing thier fingernails has actually gnawed to the bone
- The TV is showing a pretty young woman, naked, with bloody clawmarks streaking her shoulders and breasts, and fanged bite marks on her neck and breasts, banging on the television and leaving handprints as she mouths HELP ME!
- Someone using a cellphone is actually holding a huge white grub whose fanged maw is gnawing into exposed bone.
- The mook or BBEG they are facing has no eyes, or his mouth is sewn shut.
- Someone is paying with bills made of living flesh with small screaming faces on them.
- The puddle on the road has a drowning woman hammering on the bottom of the surface as if the water was solid.
- The back seat of a car going by contrains a woman whose face is torn and bloody who is hammering on the back window and crying.
- A large biker's tattoos slither and move slightly.
Everything snaps right back to normal.
A character that suceeds a Reflex Save by 10 or more a random number of times in row finds the entire world frozen for one minute per point above 10. They can't interact with anything, move anything, etc.
They see someone sneeze, and then tuck a small, shiney spring back up thier nose.
They see a bedraggled, partially decayed man in clown makeup lunge from an alleyway, grab a small child by the hair, and drag them into the alley. Running to investigate reveals nothing. As they stand in the alley, a man in a clown outfit steps off the curb and in front of a schoolbus.
While cooking breakfast, one of the characters breaks the last egg in the carton open and a small, still living, human fetus slithers out, surrounded by blood. Hitting the skillet and mewling piteously as it burns to death. Anyone who looks sees a chicken embryo.
A bedraggled and scroungy looking man runs up to the PC's and says: "He's stealing my ID!" and then goes into convulsions, dying in minutes and never regaining consciousness. Behind his left ear is a strange, almost hypnotic runic tattoo.
The PC's, involved in a high speed chase at night, see first the badguys car slam into something that has the same effect as a wall, and then they slam into the same thing. Those who survive find nothing in the road they could have struck.
A perp taken down by the PC's keeps trying to convince the PC's to let him go. FInally he calms down, looks at the PC"s and says perfectly calmly. "Screw it." He then tears free of the handcuffs and fights his way free with superhuman strength. Once he manages to exit the car/building, he seems to collapse. All that is left is the clothing and the human skin, hair, teeth and eyeballs. Inside the "body" is empty. Forensics will reveal that the skin is fetal tissue.
A small spider hisses at the PC's. If crushed, bout an hour later, a little bit bigger of a spider shows up, wanders around until it finds the killer PC, then leaps at him hissing. Repeat with each spider being larger, until a Huge Spider (Core Rulebook III) bursts into the house, stalks in front of the PC and hisses. Take it over several days for best effect, and have it skip from tarantula size to Huge.
A serial killer that the PC's are tracking turns out to the one of the PC's father. Now the killings have started again, and the PC can't confirm his whereabouts.
A soda can is full of liquified, rotted fresh, and when the can is dropped or examined, a small metal reading "YOU'RE A WINNER!" pops out of the sludge.
Video evidence examined by the PC's shows a split second of static. Pausing it shows 5 frames of what looks to be porn. Each video surviellance the PC's look at show another 5 frames, but going back to other tapes, the 5 frams (half second, I think) are missing. It culminates with the camera moving around the joined couple. Revealing it to be one of the PC's parents coupling with them while she drinks from the blood fountaining from a stab wound in the characters chest. Asking "Mommy" about his gets a "Oh, aren't you silly." but then "Mommy" disappears completely. And the PC finds a love note from "Mommy" on the pillow. A date wears his mother's favorite perfume, etc etc.
Any better?
And "You're welcome" is giving me some very... VERY evil ideas for the cthulhupunk campaign I'm going to be running.
The example in my head is Of Mice and Men (but obviously better written):
"We could get us a Farm, George" said Lenny
"Yup," said George "if we get a farm, we get some fields of corn, I reckon we could make some bucks off that, & maybe get us some sheep. And Dave Carter, yes you, had really better not go into the Warehouse on 7th street, unless you want your face ripped off by zombies"
"And I get to pet the rabbits" said Lenny
Of course, if the novel is something by Lovecraft.....
And while darkly humourous rather than scary, I keep getting images of two old hicks on rocking chairs being completely unphased by anything.
"Looks like those fellahs met the tentacled monster in the lake"
"Yup."
"Darn out of towners"
"Yup"
subtle and lets the imagination run wild. I like this one the best so far.
Very creepy though, I give it a B for "BARF" upon seeing the mental image
Kicker: Next day (or session) sees through skin and muscle tissue. Skeletons with all internal organs, arteries, veins. Blood pumping moving and acting normally. After the next time pass, see just skeletal frame with arteries and veins. Next time, skeletons. Next, all invisible except for clothing.
Final kicker, the PCs see after the latest time pass. NOBODY!!! Just piles of clothes laid out as if the occupants of said clothes just vanished!! And the PCs are back to their "normal" selves. Cars, trains, airplanes, ships...etc.. are crashed/wrecked. Power soon fails (no one is to be found.) All animals, insects, etc. as well.
Throw in scenes like "You see what appears to be an old woman's nice outfit laid out as if she just disappeared out of them. Clutched in her closed right lacey empty glove is a leash leading to an empty gem studded small dog collar laying near her empty shoes. Tag reads 'Mommy loves Muffin.' (Que eerie music.....)"
Note to GMs:
1. Creepy apocalypse cause. They could find others that survived as they did.
2. Could learn about the end result by what ever means and must try to stop the end of humanity. (your choice how and when).
3. Only happens to all within a set radius (i.e. 50 miles radius) of PCs. They get out of area and relieved to see normal people again. The next day, it starts again at their new location.
4. They see a truly "wasting" disease, except victims are totally unaware and see all else as normal. Zero symptoms. The PCs are the carriers but immune to final step of vanishing. Return to "normal" at that step. I'll leave open how the PCs got contaminate and where the "wasting disease" came from.
5. My final twist is after all "the beautiful people" are gone, the process starts with plants the same way (treat bark as skin for example). Then buildings, sections of land, etc...Their "reality" is wasting away slowly, really slowly. Good way to bring PCs to "alternate reality" as they "fade to black" and awaken.................????????
:evillaugh :evillaugh :evillaugh :evillaugh :evillaugh
one of the PCs is suddenly able to understand what dogs are barking to each other at night while they keep people up....obviously, it is very disturbing.
The heros are asked by the police department to investigate the alarmingly increasing number of suicides in town. Many clues are left, but none of them actually seem to mean anything. One day while the PC's wait for a sub-way while running an errand, a group of school girls pushes its way to the front. At the last minute they step passed the yellow line. The PCs are suddenly unable to move further due to the crowd around them. They can only watch in horror as the entire group of school girls jumps infront of the speeding train and their blood is sprayed across the group.
These events lead to the group splitting up and investigating each girls home. When they do, they are knocked unconcious (dont allow them a save or any skill checks to stop this... you're the DM dernit!). They wake up in diffrent rooms with a diffrent puzzle. Each puzzle has only two options: Solve it in a certin amount of time or with a certin number of guesses, or you die in a manor which suggests suicide.
These events continue, placing suicide after suicide in the characters way, especially when they make real progress, and the events which they are knocked out for always end up a deadly puzzle. Who could the culpret be? Are these people chosing suicide or are they pushed by someone? whos putting them in these deadly puzzles? Top if off with a random character death and let the chips fall where they may.
A PC looks in a mirror, and sees his reflection pull out a gun and shoot himself in the head. The body pitches forward, hits the mirror, and slides to the floor. Optionally, blood may leak out of the bottom of the mirror. Also optionally, the PC never has a reflection again.
A PC complains of headaches. These persit for some time, and gradually get more and more severe. Finally, the PC goes in for tests. His entire brain is a tumor.
The spouse of a PC becomes severely depressed. After medication, therapy, and counseling all fail, s/he finally decides to get a divorce, apparently feeling that the relationship is the cause of the problems. S/he opens the front door to leave, and walks off into a totally alien landscape, closing the door behind him or her. Opening the door afterwards reveals the normal, everyday world.
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! Happy little children's rhyme, or disturbingly dark prophecy? You make the call.
A character's skin begins to peel off. Small flakes at first, but larger and larger as time goes on.
A character finds photographs of every member of his family except for himself, hidden in a rusted box under a floorboard. Each person seems to gain weight in each successive photograph, starting out as normal sized people, and ending with disgustingly obese mockeries of their former selves. Oddly, the final pictures are dated up to several years after the photographee's death. At the GM's option, the character might begin gaining weight at an abnormal rate.
Presque vu hell. "Wait, I almost see i- damnit!"
If the PCs are traveling in the country, they see a small, walled-off portion of land, like an old graveyard, but inside of it are massive trees seemingly made out of bones.
Another countryside thing--near a small town way out in the boonies, they find a church decorated in human body parts. The carpet is made from scalps, the pews are bone padded with skin, the altar is actually a pile of skulls nailed together with old iron nails. The sacramental wine is blood. Behind the altar is a large banner (DM's option whether to make it skin or cloth), with the scrawled writing "Jesus Doesn't Come Here Anymore".
A Hacker PC finds an "area" of the internet that seems to be pulling data into it. E-mails are missing bits of text, his MMORPG crashes, Websites don't seem to load...and no data ever comes out of this "area". Best used in conjunction with another event.
But every day at mid day, the children go down to the parking lot of an old abandoned hospital (preferably one the PCs knew about and investigated, finding nothing), and play a game--this could be something as simple as tag. Something innocent.
The loser (always only one), is forced by the other children to go down into the basement of the hospital, and is never heard from again.
When asked about it later, one of the children says:
"We had to. If we wanted to keep Them in there, we had to give them someone every day."
A ceiling tile lifts above the PC, and a face, covered in open, bleeding wounds, and one eye gouged out appears at the hole. It spits a set of keys at the PC, covered in saliva and gobbets of blood and mumbles "help me" before being jerked backwards out of view, and the panel slams shut.
A rotten body falls from the sky. No planes, helicopters, ID or sense.
a man approaches the PCs claiming to be the Ghost of Human Kindness. A look at his van will virtually scream the opposite is true
Candy of all varieties tastes like blood. But, on the plus side, all blood tastes like candy! (my brain)
The PCs awaken to a world gone mad with a fad (rhyme intended)! Skeletal is the new skinny! The hottest movie stars, pop stars, super models, and news anchors of both genders all look like they havent eaten in a year...and they are loving every moment of it. Gaunt faces, ribs you can play the piano on, and arms like particularly small toothpicks are the norm. Eating disorders are no longer considered disorders but signs of hipness and being "with it". On the other side, people of previously normal weight are shunned and picked on for being gluttons. The source of all this is a new diet food called "Cthulhu's Diet Maker" (as in the Big Guy now prefers lighter meals) (from my twisted brain)
the PCs awaken to find....."Manos 2: Attack of the Wives" has broken all box office records. Worse yet, it stars the people from the scenario above. To quote a Simpsons episode: "This is indeed a disturbing universe." (MST3K and my brain)
Candy of all varieties tastes like blood. But, on the plus side, all blood tastes like candy! (my brain)
A small child literally bumps into one of the investigators, and whispers:
"Strangers give the best candy..."
A few days later, a small monster (Chosen of Hastur perhaps?) launches itself from an empty room in that investigator's appartment... only when it's killed does the investigator realise that it closely resembles the whispering candy-child.
the PCs awaken to find....."Manos 2: Attack of the Wives" has broken all box office records.
Truely a sanity draining thought.
Manos: the ehh, umm Hands of Fate...
He stands up and begins to tell them exactly what is going on. He shakes his hands and begins speaking loudly. But as he goes his words suddenly change to gibberish, the players unable to understnad a word he's saying. The players look around and see that everybody is walking by on the street, not even with a second glance to the yelling, screaming, man.
His eyes bulge and he grabs a player, just then blood sprays everywhere as a teenage boy calmly steps up and sinks a hatchet into the man's head. This is a boy that the PCs have been seeing in places before, and all of them have the feeling of seeing him before. He pulls the hatchet out and begins to swing for one of the players, his mouth twisting into a hateful grimace.
Finally, as the hatchet would sink into one of the players both the man's corpse (draped across a PC) and the boy turn to sand and blow away in a chill breeze.
As the players look around they notice that there is no blood on them and the crowd is moving by without a second glance and the PCs are all sitting the way they were at the bus stop.
Okay,
A PC is wounded in a fight. The wound more specifically must deal with his legs or capacity to walk.
He wakes up in a hospital, in a nice room, well lit, nice doctors, nice nurses, etc. Everything normal you would see in a hospital.
As he is recuperating everything runs as normal however they keep his door closed when nobody is in the room with him so that he can't see the hallway and of course hospital doors are soundproof.
As he gets better they attempt to ween him off of painkillers and help him get physical exercise using in bed PT. However, when he asks to actually get up and go walk with a walker he is denied. They tell him that he is still too weak and in bed PT is the only safe method for the moment. Normal, no biggie.
However after two weeks it's apparent that the PC is well recuperated and fully able to move on his own with a walker. But he is still being denied, if he ever gets too unruly a nurse or doctor will sedate him. His door still remains closed to the hospital. If he attempts to get up and walk around the room then a nurse quickly enters and gets him back into bed. (@ this point you can have him search the room only to find that the drapes don't open or that the window is excessively "foggy" like it's covered in plastic, he can't see any details outside the window and only distorted white light comes through. In addition the door is locked and he can't get out, if he bangs or yells then a nurse quickly comes to "comfort" him).
Finally after being suspicously sedated he wakes up to find that his room is virtually the same, but that the doctors have now changed their position and are ready to let him walk. He is escorted on all his trips through the hallways by doctors at their consent. When he is doen with his walk he is put back in his room and the door is shut.
After the fifth, seventh, whatever, walking session he is put to sleep, except that when he wakes up the door is left slightlly ajar by accident. It's the middle of the day however he can't see anybody moving in the hallway, no trays going by, no patients in wheelchairs, no doctors, no nurses, and no noise. He gets up and takes a moment to grab his walker and goes to open the door.
When he does get to look outside, the hallway is a jumble of activity and acts like a normal hospital during daytime. A nurse comes and helps him into bed.
Finally, after another heavy sedative and another virtually identical room, the doctors are happy to allow his door to be unlocked, and for him to have free roam of the hospital.
Then the disturbing thing shoudl be that on the second day of free roam he wakes up early from a dose of sedative and steps into the hallway, there's nobody there. He walks down the hall and sees many empty rooms, then he hears whimpering. He approaches the room and as soon as he gets a good look inside he sees a woman, strapped to a table, naked, who has had her fingers, toes, nose, nipples, patches of skin etc. surgically removed. Her mouth is sewn shut, and she is currently undergoing the process of having a piece of her scalp being removed. She "screams" for help, terror in her eyes, the doctor weilding the knife spins, obviously startled, and a nurse slams the door quickly.
The PC spins around to see an elderly woman offering him his sedative and help back to his room...
The PCs (while going about their business), notice a homeless man "preaching" in gibberish to a crowd, that watches him in morbid fascination. The only word that reoccurs normally is "Wormwood", after which he pauses to listen. If someone repeats it, he corrects their inflection, attempting to get them to say it just right.
Later, when the PCs are visiting a hospital, they notice several of the people who had been watching him in the hospital, all speaking in gibberish. If one of the PCs works at the hospital, all the better. S/he can find out that the people's brains were being eaten from the inside out by worms made seemingly from cephalonic material (brains). Repeating the words created new worms, which would devour the brain, making it resemble swiss cheese.
A PC is standing near a lightpost when they hear dripping sounds; if they look at the light post they see a person hanging by his neck from it; blood is dripping from his mouth and that PC actually hears the hung person's death rattle. Nobdy else can see or hear it- some people walk right under it, unconciously pushing it aside.
At the house of friend, a look at the family portrait reveals that the friend has been recently decapitated and monstrous versions of his dead brothers and sisters are standing next to him. When the PC blinks it returns to normal.
Similar to the above; a friend shows a PC a portrait of his dead sister. When the PC looks it at the woman transforms into a ghoulish thing and starts ripping apart and eating a man. The PC can plainly see the man screaming, but the portrait is silent. The friend sees nothing wrong with it.
The PCs find a statue of a man gripping his chest. If they stick around for a few seconds its bandaged head turns towards them. If they still don't move it rips its chest open with a sickening wet crack, revealing a beating organic heart, and begs them "Help... me... kill... me..."
Just a couple of shocks from Clive Barker's Undying:
A PC is standing near a lightpost when they hear dripping sounds; if they look at the light post they see a person hanging by his neck from it; blood is dripping from his mouth and that PC actually hears the hung person's death rattle. Nobdy else can see or hear it- some people walk right under it, unconciously pushing it aside.
At the house of friend, a look at the family portrait reveals that the friend has been recently decapitated and monstrous versions of his dead brothers and sisters are standing next to him. When the PC blinks it returns to normal.
Similar to the above; a friend shows a PC a portrait of his dead sister. When the PC looks it at the woman transforms into a ghoulish thing and starts ripping apart and eating a man. The PC can plainly see the man screaming, but the portrait is silent. The friend sees nothing wrong with it.
The PCs find a statue of a man gripping his chest. If they stick around for a few seconds its bandaged head turns towards them. If they still don't move it rips its chest open with a sickening wet crack, revealing a beating organic heart, and begs them "Help... me... kill... me..."
Ah, the old scry spell. Fantastic game Undying is... :D
Here's one: Every morning, a specific slogan is stamped into a PC's skin (as in stamped hard, not tatooed), and they have no recollection or dream to indicate what happened. It turns out that every night they are abducted through rather weird means (as in pulled through a portal, or something), and some machine on the other side stamps the slogan into their flesh repeatedly.
While investigating the scene of a supernatural event, the heroes discover several dead monsters. Slowly the corpses just fade away... Later, one of the heroes spots a ghostly figure toting an impossibly large gun.
Apparently this new game enables the users to project an astral form of sorts out to go on a real life monster hunt; the manufacturer denys this, of course.
Everything goes well for a few months... until a PvP patch is released.
Here are some of my fun filled events that'll make your PC's hair stand on the nap of their neck.....
The PC’s find a diary in a house they are staying in / investigating, seemingly of a person who spent a deal of time in the house, The person writes how they seem to be stuck in the house. The diary continues with a day or two later, the person writes about feeling like they are not alone. Later on they write that they see something ducking away around corners and into rooms, but when investigating the areas there is nothing there. The journal ends there; leaving the PC’s to wonder if the person escaped or if something happened to them. After the PC’s finish reading and they try to leave they find that they cannot open any door / window leading outside.
A PC looks into a mirror and has a feeling of dread pass over them. They feel drawn to look at the reflection of themselves. As they look versions of themselves, overlaying their current reflection, convulse and move violently, with expressions of pain, agony, fear, or anger on their faces. Then the images fade.
The PCs find a crystal ball sitting in a room; looking into it they see images of other rooms switching over a couple seconds. When the image shows their room it shows something creeping up behind them, when they look there is nothing there.
In my campaign world the BBEG also has aquired a nasty artifact that eclipes the sun, shrouding the world in eternal darkness. I have my players jumping at everything ;).
(Yeah, the last part was ripped off from Sluggy Freelance. I don't care.)
So the PCs are investigating a Corporations laboratory, trying to figure out a cause to why they all ended up there. When all of a sudden the sound of a test tubes breaking can be heard at the far end of the lab. Each PC looks at each other and decides to investigate further. upon insepction it is noticed one of the doors is unlocked and a blood trail leads up to a human body on the ground. While searching it the body suddenly moves and the face, totally ripped apart, seemingly by some animal looks up and gives out the most un-godly awful scream ever doing 1d10 sonic damage. Frightend and/or stunned by the scream the thing quickly gets up and runs off out of the room. Later on the PCs meet up with the Screamer again, this time it calls out to them in it's human voice for help. they carefully move over to the office and that's when it and (hopefully) they fire on the beast and it Screams again, but this time ripping the flesh from it's skull, and shattering the office windows. when it does this the PCs almost kill the Screamer and is gives out one final scream and charges towards the PCs screaming and then when it get's close enough or stuns everyone it's skull EXPLODES into bits of brain and blood and skull fragments. (Hense the 1d6 of damage.)
You later find out Screamers are people from the town that have over the years been brainwashed and taken by the corporation to be used for a secret weapons project. The weapon is actually inside the skull near imbedded in the brain near the language center. The reason they scream is a blender size blade get's turned on each time by either adrenaline triggering a chemical reaction in the device or by electrical impulses sent by nessescity to speak.
:evillaugh
The reason they scream is a blender size blade get's turned on each time by either adrenaline triggering a chemical reaction in the device or by electrical impulses sent by nessescity to speak.
Except... the brain has absolutely no nerves. The Screamer would feel nothing whatsoever.
-=-=-=-=-
In one of my games my players wake up within a church after being in a strange coma for nearly a month. In a nearby bed is a woman whoes still in the coma. She begins to give birth and a couple midwives go to her side. The midwives begin to scream, attracting the players over and the child thats born has no ears or mouth or nose or even a visible gender, just these large, ice blue eyes, yet its bawling... in two voices. Looking down they see that in the center of its palms are two tiny mouths screaming. The poor woman gave birth to a Mournwraith, which is what occurs when for some reason or other when a child is curlded in the womb by exposure to the Shallows, a portion of the dream realm filled with evil, which is where those in the coma are trapped mentally.
A few minute later an adult figure in a hooded cloak walks in and asks where the child is. They question him and he says that he has come to take the babe. The players start to get hostile but as he spreads his hands to take it from its crib they notice that within each of his palms is a mouth as well... and they have teeth. I expected them to at least make a token effort against him, but they immediately ran from the building.
-The PC's are observing somebody from far off. Theyre in a heavily forested area in the dead of night. The target theyre watching is in his house reading. Suddenly, the target looks up, looks the pcs right in the eye, smiles and waves at them, and goes back to reading.
That is creepy.
After something truly terrible happens, the PC goes home or to a hotel and sleeps the night. He wakes up and goes to shave, or looks in the mirror in his room. He finds something a note on the mirror. It reads like a suicide explaing that after all that has happened, the writer feels he can't continue after all that has happened, after what he saw last night. The handwriting looks familiar but unplacable, and it is the PCs signature, but backwards. Looking in the mirror reveals the PC's reflection, hanging by a rope from the ceiling, turning slowly.
This has several consequences: First, the PCs are up on mischief charges or murder charges (the pacemaker is pretty extreme). And second, the junk is assembling into something like a person. And when it can be a person, what kind of agenda does it have with regards to the PCs?
The real trouble happens later that night when one PC tries to go to sleep, and find that they can't breathe--if they turn on the lights, or something, they can see something like a two-dimensional sheet of black lying across them, in the shape of a man.
- As a character is paying for something or otherwise examining money for whatever reason, the portrait blinks.
- A subway train passes through the station, offering a glimpse of scenes of horror—blood-covered windows, mangled bodies, etc.—within. At the next stop, all is perfectly normal.
- A character snaps awake one night to find himself trapped in a confined space. It's pitch-black and he barely has room to move. He seems to be in an oblong box, lined with silk. It's becoming difficult to breathe. After a few moments, he passes out, only to wake again in a cold sweat, back in his bedroom.
- A character staring at a full moon sees it turn into a giant eyeball and blink. When she tries to alert others, everything is normal again.
- A character suddenly realizes that everyone in a room, except himself, is an animated rotting corpse and the room is in ancient and decayed. When he blinks, everything is as it should be.
- The portraits on paper money have the Innsmouth look.
- As a character passes by a mirror, she sees her reflection turn to look at her face-on out of the corner of her eye. When she looks directly at the mirror, she thinks she might have seen her reflection be just a split-second late in turning to meet her. Of course, it seems perfectly normal now.
- In an old, abandoned house, a sound like a piercing human shriek echoes through the building when a faucet is used. Of course, it's just the water in the pipes, isn't it?
- The characters are invited to an exclusive dinner party where the meal is an exceptionally tasty meat dish served with a delightfully flavorful dark and sweet wine. The host is just explaining how his wife left him rather suddenly when a random character chokes on a "bone" that turns out to be a woman's wedding band.
- A character's fortune cookie contains the statement, "Are you prepared to die?" Everyone else's is fine. If the character orders a replacement cookie, it offers a similar foreboding warning.
- Someone notices that clocks are running backward.
- While the characters are in a crowd, a man bumps into one of them and shoves a package into the character's hands, then disappears into the crowd. The package contains a man's severed index finger.
- A character looking into a mirror notices someone else in the room, watching him. When he turns around, no one is there. But each time he turns back to the mirror, the figure is standing closer to him. Finally, he can feel the figure's breath on his neck and see the reflection in the mirror of the figure standing right over his shoulder, but no one is present.
- A character picks up a daily paper, and reads about some horrible tragedy. Yet, there is no mention of it in any other news source and no one seems interested in something that didn't happen. The next day, at exactly the moment indicated in the news story, the event occurs.
- The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
Room suddenly becomes cold, breath becomes visable. Lasts a few moments.
Lights pop and go out.
Unattended drinks are left empty when returned to.
A room in an abandoned or run-down area is immaculately white and clean.
An avatar, buddy icon, screensaver, etc., is looking the wrong way or facing backwards.
Each time a portrait is passed, it faces another direction.
The immages in ambiant televisions stare silently at the PCs.
Insect noise increases each night, and then stops altogether one night.
The PC's alarm clock wakes them at an odd time interval, one which they didn't set the clock to.
Clocks show charicters that aren't numbers, or at least not normal ones. For example, 0:30 or 5:[8.
Doors don't lead into the same room every time.
- A character receives e-mail from a dead relative or acquaintance. This is even more creepy if the character doesn't find out that they're dead until after the fact. ("What do you mean she's dead? I got an email from her this morning!" "Sir, her body was found yesterday evening.")
- A character inexplicably finds themselves able to converse fluently as a native (i.e., without conscious effort) in a language they've never studied.
- A character's pet of several years suddenly snarls, growls, and snaps at his approach.
- A garbage disposal in the character's appartment or home jams for no apparent reason. When she cleans the unit out, a human finger is found therein (and it can be assumed the character didn't put it there). Or, you could go the obvious route and have the unit come on while her hand is in there.
- The character's pet cat or dog follows him from room to room (even the bathroom), then just sits and watches him intently. If the character closes a door, the animal will scratch at the door and yowl pitifully until admitted.
- Along a lonely country road one night, something darts out of the woods in front of the characters' car. It dashes across the road and into the trees, allowing only a glimpse, but everyone seems to have seen something different and some of the descriptions are not of an earthly nature.
- A character wakes up one morning to find that she has new neighbors in the empty house or apartment next door. When she greets them, they claim to have been living next to her for years. They know her name and some personal details and cite references to events that she clearly recalls, but she cannot remember them having been present. They know nothing of anyone the character claims lived there previously.
- A character wakes in the middle of the night, noticing something is wrong. The room is incredibly hot. Metal objects are blistering to the touch, and wooden objects have begun to smolder. Candles have melted to small pools of wax. Then, the room cools off quickly and all is as it was, save for any physical evidence (such as melted candles).
- Each time a PC peers into a door or chest, they get an immage of something bursting out.
- The hired help of the facility has a limited vocabulary. One or two phrases, nothing more. If pressed, they can change thier inflection and pitch.
- Children speak odd or cryptic phrases. "One two three, come and play with me... four five six, watch us do our tricks... seven eight nine, pay heed to the yellow sign..."
The last man on earth is in his room when there's a knock at the door.
Creepy. I think a moody campaign or short story with something like that as the ending line would be cool. Almost go overboard to explain that there are not even human corpses or even those of animals left, for whatever reasons.
If I may add upon this:
Not even the sound of the wind disturbs the silence, all radios and televisions only spew static (or maybe automatically run infomercials to provide an ironic background soundtrack), and the previously irritating barking of dogs at night would be welcome compared to this. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, as the only man left sits up (no longer feeling the need to get to bed "on time" to get up for his nonexistant job) he is jerked out of his daze by a knock at his front door.....
Each of the characters suffers from horrific hallucinations at an exact time each time of the day. This could make a good reason to bring the characters together for the adventure. They might see a pattern in their visions such as a similar symbol and reccuring theme. Some examples i've concocted...
- The character hears horrible weeping and breathing noises at his window. If they open the curtains their view completly obscured and caked with fresh blood. Slowly a hand with a ¥ symbol on its palm presses on the other side then swipes some of it away, and through the cleared section is a pair of wild, unblinking, yellow eyes. The window shatters, and then everything returns to normal. Lying on the floor next to them is a square of tanned leather with a ¥ symbol on it.
- Whilst in a busy station the sounds of reality suddenly drain away replaced by an alien throbbing ambience. Then in the shadows an obscene pale mass with a ∑ carved on it, thrashes at the far-end of the lit tunnel. The lights dim and almost expunge for a few long moments. Suddenly the lights flare brightly as a huge and utterly horrific face lunges at the character, and just as quickly black out again. A few moments later the world returns to normal and people go about their business as if nothing happened. They find at white kabuki mask at their feet with an ∑ sign on it.
- A pay phone rings as a character walks past it. If she picks up the phone she'll hear nothing, absolutely nothing at all. If she puts it down and walks away she'll soon walk past another pay phone which rings. When she picks it up again she hears nothing, and promptly puts down the phone and walks away. Again she comes across another ringing payphone, but this one has a notes on it, with a Ώ sign scrawled on the front. Picking it up she hears a completly evil high-pitched laugh, and then hears another laugh behind her. An unnaturally tall shadowy man with long black hair stands, his face completly shadowed except for his nasty needle-toothed grin. He lifts his face and she catches a glimpse of his horribly-white eyes, as the world then returns to normal. Curled up in her hand is a dog-earred smutty club card with a Ώ scarwled on it.
Suggestion: Go and rent "Jacob's Ladder". It's quite a good movie, and applicable to this thread.
-While standing watch one night, a PC hears a sound off in the brush. If they look, a small rabbit hops out of the grass into the light. However, the PC notices something...wrong...with it. It seems misshapen and has a disturbing gait when it hops. Eventually, the horrid thing moves back into the darkness. Just then, a piercing scream, like a small animal in great pain, fills the night. None of the sleeping PCs seem to hear it. If she investigates, the PC finds the dead body of the rabbit, burst from the inside. A trail of blood and entrails leads off into the darkness. If she wakes up the others, they only see a dead rabbit, with no apparent signs of injury, but the PC still sees the shredded corpse. The next night, she starts hearing wet sucking sounds coming from just beyond the campfire...
-While walking through mountainous terrain, the PCs encounter a thick wall of fog. If they continue on through, they have a normal, if slow journey for a few hours. Then, they spot movement in the fog ahead. Over the towering peaks, something looms in the mist. Huge and grotesque, the thing seems to turn its head towards the PCs. It then spreads its wings, extrudes what appears to be a mass of tentacles, and fades from sight. Afterwards, the PCs realize that the thing must have been several times the size of the mountains around them!
-A screech of metal on metal.
-A burst of flame as a fireplace or stove is lit.
-Trees that sway and ripples that form when there is no wind.
-An old, tinny phonograph or record.
-Old and sickly people who: smell of death, talk too close to the PCs, have foggy eyes or severely misshappen teeth, are slightly perverse, do not speak and barely move.
-Gay and lesbian charicters are used in many horror films to create unease.
-Unshaven, soiled, rednecked, drug-using, or otherwise degraded townsfolk.
-"You know that smell when you're over at someone else's appartment..."
-Soiled/stained couches, carpets, or walls.
-A light that fizzles a few moments, then goes out.
-A low hissing of steam or soft scraping, especially in a car.
-The whining howl of a swarm of cicadas.
-A sudden cold draft
On a series of murder investigations, the PC's get photos of themselves viciously killing the victims in the way they are found, each photo with the address on the back. These usually arrive a day or two after, but then they get one of a man who they know, who was still alive earlier that day, with themself dragging a knife across their throat.
When noone watches the man on the train, he bumps the thread.
The character's abdomen distends, and his intestines spill out.
A character watches in horror as the cracks in the ground reach him and extend up his body, which begins to fall apart.
Seriously, watch Akira. Tetsuo's dreams, hallucinations, and eventual fate make excellent weird events.
I think I remember this from Alfred Hitchcock or Twilight Zone (I can't remember which)...but whenever this guy would look in the mirror or any other kind of refection he would see some guy all dressed up in black (like Jack the ripper) behind him with a wire in his hands (garrot?) getting ready to strangle him. When the guy turned around there was nothing there.
It was titled "The New Exhibit" and it was in the fourth season; it was an hour-long episode. Not that I'm a freak about the Twilight Zones or anything (there are very few I haven't seen), but I have The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree. In fact, while looking it up I saw a few other episodes that would be great for scenarios.
"The Purple Testament" - A soldier looks into the face of his comrades and sees a glow about them. Shortly thereafter they die. At the end of the episode he looks in a mirror and sees his own face glowing.
"To Serve Man" - A classic play on words, an alien race comes to Earth declaring that it will bring peace, end famine, and cure illnesses. They leave a book at the UN that codebreakers find reads "To Serve Man." Eventually, humans start going to the alien homeworld for visiting and resettlement, only to learn that "To Serve Man" is actually a cookbook. With humans as the main ingredient.
"Living Doll" - A common doll begins talking maliciously to the owner's cruel step-father, threatening to kill him and such. Eventually, the doll - having survived miter saws, bashings, attempts to be thrown away, etc. - plants itself on the stairs just in time for the step-father to step on the doll and fall head-first down a flight of stairs, apparently snapping his neck and killing him. As an epilogue, the doll tells the little girl and her mother: "My name is Talkie Tina, and you'd better be real nice to me."
"Shadow Play" - A man is sentenced to death by electric chair. But he has recurring thoughts, insomuch as he's been through this before. He can't convince anyone, although he can mimic people's words as they say them, predict events with startling clarity, and identify cause and effect relationships before they occur. He swears that when he dies the world will cease. On the eve of his execution the switch is thrown. Everything vanishes. The next instant the man stands before the judge awaiting sentence. The nightmare starts again, but with different players in the roles.
Other episodes one could twist are "Eye of the Beholder", "The After Hours", "Elegy", "Caesar and Me", "The Dummy", "A World of Difference", "Miniature", and "The Lonely". For reference, watch "Masks", Perchance to Dream", and "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street".
Other episodes one could twist are "Eye of the Beholder", "The After Hours", "Elegy", "Caesar and Me", "The Dummy", "A World of Difference", "Miniature", and "The Lonely". For reference, watch "Masks", Perchance to Dream", and "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street".
Ah yes, The Twilight Zone. No one, not even Hitchcock, could quite match Serling for a keen sense of irony. "Monsters" is one of my personal favorites.
"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children...the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is...that these things cannot be confined to...The Twilight Zone!"
While investigating mysterious disappearances, one of the characters notes that he is beginning to hear strange violin music from the appartment above his/hers. When said character goes to speak with the violinist, they find a mute german man, who agrees to play (via notes), so long as the character not request that he play what he had been playing before. The character eventually interrupts him in the middle of one of his stranger sessions, and finds that the mirrors in the old man's room have turned black, and the old man begins to play furiously, but is eventually dragged into one of the mirrors, sound exploding outward from it. The next day, when the character attempts to return home, he can't find the street he lived on, even though he can find every other landmark around it. Everyone he talks to doesn't remember the street, but they haven't forgotten him, and simply assumed he lived somewhere "on the other side of town."
Or perhaps you could use a situation from one of H.P. Lovecraft's other wonderfully creepy tales. :D
"The Music of Erich Zann". Excellent. But I would rather try "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" or "The Color Out of Space". Of course, if you could pull off "The Shadow out of Time" I'd be impressed.
While in a swimming pool, the PCs see ripples on the surface of the water. These are v-shaped ripples, like those that would be made by a dorsal fin. These are accompanied by the shadow of a very large fish-like shape. There is nothing in the pool that could be causing either of those effects.
The PCs see v-shaped ripples in tile beginning to circle them.
I had a couple of wicked dreams a few weeks ago that would be good to add, but I'll have to do it later. Too tired.
- The investigators/PCs look in a mirror, only for their own reflection to ask them, "how are you doing?"
- A corpse in a closet is always dead in a different way each time the door is opened. (ie: hanged, axed, decapitated, skinless)
- People in portraits walk over to other portraits to engage in horrible acts. (****, torture, duels to the death)
At a particular site, pass notes to the players about the other players, get them slowly irritated, then at eachother's throats, but only at a particular site. The rest of the time they're best friends.
Should your players ever need to find someone, perhaps the missing younger sister type of a friend, they discover a row of cells in a deep basement of a large, beautiful manor. Along the basement most cells are empty, but at the far end of the hallway, two cells, opposite eachother are inhabited. One, contains a huddled, filthy figure sitting against a far wall, not moving. The other, a young girl close to, but not quite the description of friend's sister. Mutilated, her eyes are sown shut as is her mouth. If the PCs decide to investige the unmoving mass first, have her move to the bars while their back's are turned and press her face against the bars, trying to move her mouth. Her sown eyes follow the players, and if they rescue the figure in the other cell, (which IS the comatose sister) have this abomination press it's face through the bars. Forcing it's head through the narrow bars, collapsing it's skull. It's not undead, but don't make it stop. Push it's head through, and turn to watch them go, howling between it's sown lips.
The PCs are relaxing at home after a few nasty encounters. One PC opens a brand new package of incense sticks (bought that same day or just prior). They light a stick. Mid-way through, the smell that comes from the stick turns to something awful (rotting flesh, wet dog hair, etc.). The smell only lasts a few seconds and then returns to normal. Each stick the PCs light has a similar problem but no two sticks have the same smell.
when no one's looking...someone bumps...
Into a pc and when the pc looks around theres no one there
Into a pc and when the pc looks around theres no one there
And Cthulhu says "Excuse me."
» A dog or cat gives birth to a litter with their heads and limbs growing from the wrong spots. It's interesting enough to make the local news.
» THE DEAD WALK! Only, it turns out to be a guerilla moviemaker of a zombie flick. Of course, the real walking dead get mixed in with the movie extras.
their heads (because apparently "c*ck's a swear word) and listen intently with looks of curiosity. This lasts for a few seconds, then they nod their heads and proceed to go about their business. This happens relatively frequently, and every so often when they nod their heads, all civilians assembled will turn on a single bystander, indiscriminantly clawing and tearing at him with their bare hands until he has been torn to pieces. Then, as normal, they will go about their daily business, bloody-clothed and all.When the PCs are in the middle of a crowded street, passersby pause,
You don't mind if I "borrow" this idea do you?
2) Countries use their wealth and knowledge of science to constantly war with each other instead of acting against deadly diseases and working towards greater knowledge of the universe and advanced technologies (*cough*)
3) A hurricane with a never-before-seen strength hits a coastline and severely damages it, leaving water ten to fifteen feet high in most districts of a city. Strangely, no matter how much work the cleanup crews put into it, they cannot drain the water back out of the city. The city is eventually abandoned and forgotten about. Years later, however, passers-by begin to notice movements in the water... and there is no way for marine life to reach or survive in it.
Make a world with no undead. Then add Undead. :evillaugh
I am going to hit you with a dead trout. I believe you understand why.
Cooked meat giggles when sliced.
During an autopsy, the PCs discover that the subject is bloodless and filled with ripe apples.
A man in the street gets into an argument with his shadow. Naturally, the shadow cannot retort, but eventually it throws a fit and strangles its worldly counterpart to death.
While the PCs are walking through a pasture amidst a flock of sheep, a giant disembodied hand descends and begins to rapidly tap a sheep on the head. After about a dozen taps, the sheeps explodes, leaving a gaping, gore-laden crater. The hand then moves on to another sheep. People may be substituted for sheep in urban areas.
Oh no I'm in Warcraft
I didn't realize what that was at first. Hand from the sky... hehe...
A skyscraper collapses, but all of the desks, file cabinets, restroom fixtures, doorframes, etc. (but not windows, walls, floors, or ceilings) remain perfectly where they were before, suspended in air.
A taxi is hailed by a pedestrian, and the sign on top of it calls its company "TURUIUCUK". When the pedestrian moves to sit down inside the cab, he finds himself falling rump first to the pavement... on the other side of the car. A large delivery truck is moving down the street at that moment and one set of tires runs directly up the middle of the body, crushing his head and splattering blood. The cab sits there for a moment before the doors close and it drives off.
No matter what the PCs do, they cannot view the world normally in an upright position - their vision looks as though it was a picture rotated a certain number of degrees.
The cure/protection for/against cancer turns out to somehow be the drinking of blood fresh from a living person's body, though the the consumption leaves a person with vampire-like traits and it must be consumed often.
A taxi is hailed by a pedestrian, and the sign on top of it calls its company "TURUIUCUK". When the pedestrian moves to sit down inside the cab, he finds himself falling rump first to the pavement... on the other side of the car. A large delivery truck is moving down the street at that moment and one set of tires runs directly up the middle of the body, crushing his head and splattering blood. The cab sits there for a moment before the doors close and it drives off.
Is that a "Trick For You"? Pretty jacked up.
Druids begin marking the city for their lord. After a while dark and twisted trees, grass, weeds, and other corrupt flora start overtaking the city streets and crushing the buildings. No one seems to care, even when the canopy blots out the sun.
Is that a "Trick For You"? Pretty jacked up.
You noticed
Late one night, you walk into you house. Turn the corner, open the door to your bedroom, and see yourself, hanging by a belt from a crossbeam.
...batting at a lightbulb.
--At 1:00 AM, all clocks ring thirteen chimes, even ones that have no equipment to do so with
A rabbit hops out of the rabbit hole, and pauses just outside the entrance, before a human arm pulls it back down the hole.
I do not know why but that seems like it would be rather disturbing (please forgive me if the quote thingy messed up im new to this)
A week or so later you get a book in the mail. It is covered in strange runes. With it came a card saying "Sent with Love, your uncle Herbert."
I do not know why but that seems like it would be rather disturbing (please forgive me if the quote thingy messed up im new to this)
I think it's intended as a Monty Python reference.
2) One moment, everything is normal, then reality starts to change, one moment everything will be normal, and then everything will look like it was drawn in anime, then things will start to look like polygons in a video game, etc.
3) One of the PC's can suddenly see everything's molecular structure. If he touches one of the molecule clusters, he/she realizes that they can move them. About a day later, the PC's can still see like this, but they see an odd shape following him around that appears to be a huge dog/monster. When he/she asks anyone about it, he/she will tell him nothing is there, the other PC's can't see it either.
4) When the party is sleeping in a hotel have one of the PC's wake up from a loud thumping noise, like someone is stomping on the floor above them. If they go to investigate, have them put on something (i.e. robe, undershirt, some article of clothing). When they go up, they knock on the door to find it unlocked. Strangely, there is nobody in the room. Once the PC investigates the balcony, go into a deep description about how cold and silent and empty it is outside. Also describe in great detail how the full moon looks so forbiding and dark. The PC should probably be freaked out now if you're doing it right. Once they turn around to go back to their room, they now see a gruesome murder scene in the room. Blood stains everything, the chairs, the bed, the ceiling, etc. Upon closer examination, a body is found in the bathroom, but it is the PC. The PC blacks out. When the PC awakes the next morning, they are in bed and think it is just a dream, but when they throw off the covers, they find that the article of clothing they put on is still on them...
5) While playing an online game, like Dungeons and Dragons online that supports voice-chat, the PC parties with someone. As soon as they party with that person, they keep on hearing tortured screams from the other person's microphone. The screams continue, until they stop abruptly with a sound that makes them sure that the person who made the screams is dead (i.e. a gunshot). The screams are replaced with crazy laughter and someone saying, "You're next!".
6) While eating at a fast-food resturaunt, one of the PC's orders a burger, when they take a bite out of it, it tastes awful. If the PC looks closer at the burger, they find that the meat has a human face locked in a scream. If he/she shows anyone else besides a PC, they react with hysterical laughter.
7) While watching football, they players are using a human head instead of a football.
A little later they see a TV broadcast in which there is a photofit posted of a serial rapist/killer ... who just happens to resemble the cab driver. They try to call Ruby (the NPC) on her mobile to find that it rings unanswered and then goes to voicemail on the first attempt and is switched off on the second. Cue immediate panic, calls to the police etc. and a very long, fraught night.
Nothing happens until next day when one of the PCs gets a phone call from a police contact to say that they've found the cab and CID want to talk to them. The cab driver has apparently driven to some wasteground and impaled himself on a metal fencepost, before apparently having second thoughts but being unable to free himself. There is no sign of Ruby (actually there were some ciggarette butts of an unusual type that she favours but everyone missed them), no-one nearby heard or saw anything until some kids knocking off school found him. Ruby appears back at the bar a few nights later and pretends nothing unusual has occured ... the police appear to accept her story.
Stuff still pending:
PC(s) visit the flat where they've been dropping Ruby off every know and again, but have never been inside (or worse still, where they have been inside) and, needing to find her, let themselves in only to find the place appears to have been empty and unfurnished for years. Alternatively they visit one or more times and the entire layout of the place has changed... perhaps the flat is only 'funished and occupied' when Ruby is in...
Female PC (ideally a non-macho one) is walking alone in an area known to be rough and sees a small group of men watching her. Later on she finds that another woman was gang-raped and possibly murdered about a quarter hour later in almost the same place she saw the gang. Much later she gets to meet one of them in police custody and asks him why they didn't attack her:
'You jokin'?'
asks the ********er
'we ain't messin' wi'd no big ass m*th*f*ck*r like there was wi'd you. Not even fo' a prime piece of ass like yo' is'. Remember the PC was alone...
Oh and by the way "you can call me Ruby...", the female NPC mentioned above ... yes, it is a Stones reference. And yes, as appropriate for the reference it isn't her real name (in fact she doesn't have real name as such).
PCs chase down and kill a serial killer, and then:
1) Another set of killings bearing his hallmark begin. Possibly:
a) He has an accomplice, who may be trying to provide cedo alteram for him.
b) He is/was always using projection techniques to possess someone else.
c) He is/was always using solid projection techniques.
(b) and c) don't work if, say, DNA evidence was used to convict him)
d) He was a possesed puppet and the real killer is still out there.
2) He is sentenced to death, and bites off his tongue and fingers on death row. Somehow he is not commuted for insanity but becomes suddenly very distressed, having been previously quite calm. Seems to have come on since he was given the last rites by a clergyman of some wierd sect he belongs to.
Sentence is duly carried out, but the guard who supervised the last rites was meant to be on duty there is absent, and remains so. Perhaps he sends in a resignation or perhaps he doesn't ... eventually he is tracked down at a meeting of the killers old cult claiming to be a convert if questioned.
Then the murders begin again. Quite possibly the cult priest swapped the bodies of the two men over.
The last man on earth is in his room when there's a knock at the door.
Space ship ... solo flight ... knocking on a door? The outer lock? The hull?
In an open sea exibit (I think some aquariums still do these, jsut open sea water behind glass) all of the fish have diisapeared but teh glass and observation room floor occasionally shake from a low bellowing whale-like call. Sometimes shadows block out the view but nothing is seen.
An eel swims past the window in the clutches of a dismembered human arm.
As the PCs watch a crab begins writting "Help Me" in the sand and then scuttle over as close to them as it can get.
As the PCs watch a show a massive adult killer whale leaps out of its tank and lands in the stand not 10 feet away from where they are sitting (occupied or not at you whim). The whale thrashes about for a moment or two before dying.
...
when the PCs are in a facility, expecting resistance from guards, give it to them. then , when they're in a place with only one exit, which they came in from, and just outside the reactor or virus vault or whatever, have the last set of guards die violently. If the party is expecting resistance, a clear path for them for no reason will really throw them off.
But why should modern-era characters have all the fun?
Borrow a page from Arthur C. Clarke's masterful short story, "The Haunted Spacesuit." If you haven't read it, track it down and do so. Quite creepy, very entertaining, and so very workable into any futuristic campaign. I will not spoil it for those who haven't read it, but those who have are even now getting that sadistic GM's gleam in their eye...
Of course, there's the one mentioned earlier (and a staple of early sci-fi): The first astronaut to set foot on an alien planetoid walks all over and finds no sign of life. Then, as he arrives back at his ship and sits down to file his report, there is a knock at the door.
Cats are wonderful plot devices and can be the source of all manner of noises, shadows, and "jump scenes." Any characters with a degree of common sense will not allow cats anywhere near their ship, and any GM will do her level best to insure that one gets on board anyway.
Working the controls in deep space can get pretty boring. On a ship with multiple crew, this seldom presents a problem, as rotating shifts insure that everyone is well rested. However, on a smaller vessel, with only a handful of crew members, someone may have to double up. So, after a character has been at the controls for hours on end, why not liven up their day? Let them see a loved one floating by outside, sans spacesuit, and apparently not the least bit bothered by the vacuum. Was it a hallucination brought on by a lack of sleep, or perhaps someone needs to check the oxygen levels in the life support system? Or maybe it was just their imagination playing tricks on them. It might even be a psychic lifeform, drawing from the character's thoughts and memories in an effort to lure them outside...
Hulks, the derelict shells of abandoned and (usually) damaged ships, are a great place to put some creepy events. I was running just such an adventure, set on a ghost ship, where the PCs encountered some of the following:
A space suit that floats eerily in zero-G, bumping into consoles in such a way that it may seem (to the unobservant) to be moving about the cabin in a deliberate manner. A Spot check (DC 12) reveals that it is, in fact, not manned. In my adventure it was empty, but it might house the remains of a former occupant.
PCs walking (or otherwise making their way) down a corridor hear voices, like a conversation, from somewhere nearby. This is especially creepy if scans revealed no life signs onboard the vessel. The talking comes from a rec room where a television has come on when the power was restored and is playing a DVD (or whatever passes for such) that was left in it.
Taking a cue from Clarke's 2010: The Year We Make Contact, perhaps there is just enough of an atmosphere remaining that food has rotted, tainting the air with the smell of death. Over the intervening years, it would have spread throughout the ship.
Skeletons are always creepy, but skeletons still wearing their uniforms, sitting at their stations are especially creepy! They are all dead, of course, but what killed them? Why are they sitting peacefully at their stations, as though nothing had happened?
Darkened rooms are a pain, especially in a zero-G environment, when all manner of debris is floating about. A PC working alone in just such an environment feels a tap on his shoulder. It's just a wrench that has floated by and is bumping against him, but he doesn't have to know that.
Cryogenic "coffins" with the remains of the crew in them. The controls were sabotaged and the crew members deliberately killed. In my adventure, this was integral to the plot, but you may leave it as a mystery.
Robots creep some people out, but on a ship that registered no life signs, the characters might be shocked to find a crew member skulking about, hiding from them. Externally, he or she appears to be normal, but it is actually an android that has gone insane from the lack of human company. The droid will try to win the characters' trust, claiming to be a survivor of whatever disaster befell the ship, then attempt to kill them.
The PCs find a ship coming in system, background cold and apparently running under momentum only at a ridiculous speed. Even when they catch up with it the design is unfamiliar, but once it is grappled and boarded they discover that it is from their own society but centuries old and the crew are sat at their battlestations looking as though they died yesterday.
What actually happend was that this ship was sterilised by a neutron bomb during a battle but the computers continued to accelerate at maximum burn since no-one told them to stop.
Eventually the ship left the system at a ridiculous speed, and has crossed into this new system (obviously taking centuries). With no live microrganisms and an extremely thin atmosphere decay has been limited to a little dehydration...
]When one of the PCs happens to glance at the car behind them, they see someone (possibly a small child) in that car wave cherrily at them. They may wave back or not, as they desire.
When they get to the end of the ride one of two things happens:
1) If there were a group of people who are strangers to the PCs sharing the car with them, then as the PCs wait behind these people to exit their car, they realise that one of them is the person who waved to them from the other car.
2) If the PCs and their acquaintances are the only inhabitants of their car, then as they disembark they see the person who waved to them walking off in the distance, even though, by rights, they should still be in the car behind, just aproaching the end of the ride.
This actually happened to me, with the first ending, when I went on the London Eye a while back.
I think it's pretty obvious what world the characters have been planted into. The question is: can they figure out how to escape?
If you havent figured it out by now, this next clue will probably tell you: while there are normal channels on the televisions, hundreds of millions of channels comprise only of people sitting and staring in rapt attention at the viewer, sometimes eating, sometimes chatting quietly to themselves, sometimes making fun of what you're doing at the time, and sometimes involved in somewhat lewd activities.
- An old, tinny record plays just about any music.
- An old (1800s or earlier) and abandoned building is fitted with electrical or gas lines.
- Vendors or clerks adress the players by their first names, even without having ever seen them before.
- A slain enemy will mouth thanks before dying.
- Each clock in a house is set to a different time.
An old record player starts talking to the players:
"The summer wind came crashing in...*static* look out, he's coming *static* across the sea. The summer wind..."
While investigating someone's apartment one player see's a lava lamp runnign in the corner. Suddenly a disembodied eyeball bubbles up out of teh base and floats for a moment amid the swirling 'lava' before sinking back out of sight. Investigation show no such eye in the lamp.
While tearing down a wall, teh players find hundreds of pleas for help written on teh inside of the wall. There are no remains in teh walls and no signs of construction on the wall.
When a character (who is using a computer or typewritter) types a question, the keyboard writes a question back (the keys move with no one pushing them).
The PCs superior shows them a video surveliance feed of some villian they've been monitoring. The image is slightly fuzzy, they are informed that this is because it's a live broadcast from some sort of telescopic spy satellite. Suddenly, the person they're surveying turns around, looks right at the screen, and smiles. The feed cuts out for a split second, when it comes back the person is gone.
Or he "drops trou" and shows them "the darkside of the moon", if you know what I mean. Even better if the villain is a very humorless person.
While the players are at their weakest have them be attacked. Infact do this every time they do this. Then, stop. By then they won't do what ever it is. Then make a new requiment for the attacks. Make it so the requirment is some frequintly said or done or nessessary to say or do (Such as saying a word with vowals in it, or sleeping.
A player sees something out of the corner of their eye. When they look to see what it is it vanishes. The will occasionaly see it in a crowd but only for a split second. Then slowly have start killing people when nobody is looking. Investigations lead to the player. Any body who heres he is guilty automaticly believes it.
Scream in fear at random times of play. (I this once
)While the players are investigating a serial killer, the evidence leads them to one of the players.
Every enemy they kill. One the new they here of an inocent killed in the same place and way. No body of the enemy is found. Nor did the enemy exist.
The party recieve photographs of severed limbs without idetifiable circumstance. Nothing supernatural; it's just some murderer who has found out about them. Better if they're not that famous, of course.
Here are some we thought up.
While the players are at their weakest have them be attacked. Infact do this every time they do this. Then, stop. By then they won't do what ever it is. Then make a new requiment for the attacks. Make it so the requirment is some frequintly said or done or nessessary to say or do (Such as saying a word with vowals in it, or sleeping.
Ehrm, in English, at any rate, there are very few words that don't have vowels in them. The players would be attacked every time they so much as uttered a single word!
Ehrm, in English, at any rate, there are very few words that don't have vowels in them. The players would be attacked every time they so much as uttered a single word!
We know. :evillaugh
Note: The link contains foul language, but it's on SA, so you should already have known that.
We know. :evillaugh
We?
Should the talking stop at any time, STOP and QUICKLY say aloud "I'm just passing through, I wish to talk." If you still hear silence, flee. Leave, do not stop for anything, do not go home, don't stay at an inn, just keep moving, sleep where your body drops. You will know in the morning if you've escaped.
If the voice in the hall comes back after you utter those words continue on. Upon reaching the cell all you will see is a windowless room with a person in the corner, speaking an unknown language, and cradling something. The person will only respond to one question. "What happens when they all come together?"
The person will then stare into your eyes and answer your question in horrifiying detail. Many go mad in that very cell, some disappear soon after the meeting, a few end their lives. But most do the worst thing and look upon the object in the person's hands. You will want to as well. Be warned, if you do your death will be that of cruelity and unrelenting horror.
Your death will be in that room, by that person's hands.
That object is 1 of many. They must never come together. Never
We?
Huh? We do not undertand.
Nothing else happens the rest of the visit.
A little while later, the heroes return to the same NPC's house. They are shocked to find their friend's bodies, which have been torn apart and their bloody parts scattered throughout the house. Everyone is dead except for the little girl, who is quietly watching TV. The young girls eyes are glazed over and blood-shot; in her left hand she's holding a broken gore-spattered pasta ladle. The animated character on-screen appears to be holding a similiar object and congragulating her viewers ("wasn't that fun?!"). If the heroes gain the childs attention, she attacks them, cursing in a sing-song voice. If they try to subdue her by non-violent means, they succeed and she starts crying. A minute later she is dead, killed by a massive seizure. If the heroes try to kill her, it isn't easy, and she withstands many grevious injuries before she slowly dies, whimpering.
When the heroes leave, they find that this scenario has played out across the area, leaving hundreds dead, and many, many murderous children.
*Or some other language with sinister, evil connotations.
- A PC doing something else while watching television suddenly notices that the characters on TV have stopped talking. Instead, they are simply staring at the screen, as if watching the PC. Then everything returns to normal, as if it had never happened.
- People in pictures seem to move, when the PCs aren't looking. If looked directly upon, the figures snap instantly back to their original positions and freeze in the blink of an eye (too fast for anyone to be sure of what they have seen). I used to scare myself witless thinking that this was actually happening. It works well in mirrors, too, the PC's reflection moving on its own, but when they look back, all is in order.
- Alternatively, a picture changes ever so slightly each time a PC looks at it. Was that portrait facing to the right, or the left when you entered? You really don't recall. And wasn't that flower in the vase, now in full bloom, wilted?
- An old favorite I used in a D&D game once is to have a trick of echoes make it sound as though someone is following the party. Each time they move, they hear heavy footfalls from somewhere behind them (the echoes always begin just a few seconds late and last a few seconds longer than the movement of the PCs). The group I pulled this on spent two hours chasing themselves through the dungeon! (And never did figure it out.)
- A dog or cat walks up to a lone PC (this works best with a single character that is separated from the group), seemingly begging for attention. If the PC pets or feeds the animal, it speaks to them in their native language, imparting some useful bit of info that is relevant to the current adventure, then runs off.
- The character receives e-mail from an unknown person advising them of the exact time and place of their death. The place is somewhere they have never been but the date is mysteriously garbled. They can only discern that it is supposed to happen in the current month (in the campaign) in the 21st century (i.e., 20xx). Responding to the message merely generates a bounce error. If e-mail is not available, this could be a missive via telegram.
- A PC's neighbor, well-known as a rather grumpy sort, hauls out several neatly tied-off plastic trash bags on pick-up day. The neighbor seems unusually cheery this day. If questioned, he or she explains that his or her wife or husband is out of town for a few days.
- A new "ghost" video is sweeping the Internet (you know the ones I mean, that start out normal and them a horrific figure pops up on screen to scare the living crap out of you). It is supposed to be a video of a "haunted" room in an old mansion. When most of the PCs view it, it works as intended. The camera focuses on the empty room for a few moments and then a figure suddenly appears on screen, accompanied by a ghoulish scream. However, one PC sees something entirely different. For this PC, the scene of the "haunted" room looks as though no expense was spared--cobwebs decorated the place, the furniture is covered with sheets, etc. Then, a ghostly figure does indeed appear, but not intended to elicit a quick jump out of the viewer. It approaches the camera very deliberately and looks right at the PC, who recognizes it as someone important from his or her past (a relative who died under mysterious circumstances, or a friend that disappeared). The figure pronounces the PCs name and asks them to find out who murdered them, then fades from view. Others who view the video see only the intended effect.
- A random PC seems to be jinxed, bringing death to everyone he associates with, except himself. He exits a taxicab just before a fatal crash claims the life of the driver, he leaves a convenience store moments before the clerk is killed in a botched robbery attempt, etc.
-Refer to yourself in the third person plural. "What are you doing today?" "They're going to the store."
Tell the PCs that a picture seems to be staring at them. It's a perfectly ordinary portrait, save that it is painted in such a way that the eyes seem to follow you around the room (you know what I mean), but for some reason, the PC can't shake the feeling that it is looking specifcally at them.
In any city, in any country, go to any mental institution you can get yourself to. When you reach the front desk, ask to visit someone who calls themself "The Holder of the End". Should a look of child-like fear come over the workers face, you will then be taken to a cell in the building. It will be in a deep hidden section of the building. All you will hear is the sound of someone talking to themselves echo the halls. It is in a language that you will not understand, but your very soul will feel unspeakable fear.
Should the talking stop at any time, STOP and QUICKLY say aloud "I'm just passing through, I wish to talk." If you still hear silence, flee. Leave, do not stop for anything, do not go home, don't stay at an inn, just keep moving, sleep where your body drops. You will know in the morning if you've escaped.
If the voice in the hall comes back after you utter those words continue on. Upon reaching the cell all you will see is a windowless room with a person in the corner, speaking an unknown language, and cradling something. The person will only respond to one question. "What happens when they all come together?"
The person will then stare into your eyes and answer your question in horrifiying detail. Many go mad in that very cell, some disappear soon after the meeting, a few end their lives. But most do the worst thing and look upon the object in the person's hands. You will want to as well. Be warned, if you do your death will be that of cruelity and unrelenting horror.
Your death will be in that room, by that person's hands.
That object is 1 of many. They must never come together. Never
That, has really creeped me out....
Have a PC have recurring nightmares, and each time they wake up just long enough to get the feeling they are being choked, barely fightinng off the feeling before falling back into an exhaustd sleep.
the reasons behind this are up to you.
my problem was dehydration, i wasnt drinking enough water at the time! :D
That, has really creeped me out....
i agree entirely....
are those commands or suggestions? its got me worried.... - The PCs, while wandering about on All Hallows' Eve, encounter dozens of trick-or-treaters (a tradition that is sadly being lost; I can remember when the streets were filled with children in a variety of outfits). But one trio stands out from the rest. Their goblin (or demon, if you prefer) costumes are extremely well-done, but horrifyingly ugly, obviously the work of a professional make-up artist. And the burlap sacks they carry are wet and drip something dark...
- Jack-o-lanterns, for those not in the know, are pumpkins carved with scary or funny faces, hollowed out, and a candle placed within to light the features; another Halloween tradition in many places. As the PCs pass a stand of Jack-o-lanterns on display, the features seem to change between viewings. One that wore a grimace now wears a wicked smile, for example.
- At a Halloween ball, the PCs notice a man dressed as a vampire hamming it up with the ladies. He really plays up the part, complete with bad Romanian accent. He leaves with an attractive young woman who turns up dead the next day, her throat ripped open.
Now for the serious ones
-When a PC is firing a gun (for whatever reasons), the gun makes only a squishing noise. When the chamber is opened, they find it filled with thick and delicious peach jam, the cartridge inexplicably having disappeared. This obviously disturbs both fans and despisers of that flavor alike.
-The apes at the zoo, when the PCs are the only ones looking, act out a scene they all silently recognize as being from Hamlet. How this fact is known to the players who wouldnt know Shakespeare from a hole in their head is perplexing, even more so is the question as to how they can all understand the apes hooting and grunting
-One of the PCs plays the old song "We'll Meet Again" after recently having aquired the vinyl record from a pawn shop. That night on the news, the entire broadcast is taken up by reports on atomic energy, radiation therapies in medicine, protecting yourself from fallout, etc. Playing the record again brings on reports about atomic weapons specifically. Another run of that old song will result in reports on international tensions between two nuclear powers. Playing it again is not advised, though patiently turning the record so the song plays backwards will have interesting effects
During the night the PC(s) hear strange noises, like scratching on the walls outside of the room.
When they are outside and look at their room they realize that there is a lot more wall for the hallway past their room, as if another room was originally at the end of the hallway but sealed off.
The PC(s) also notice a window on the end of the inn/hotel that should be for that sealed off room. The drapes in the window suddenly move and the PC(s) swear there was a person standing in the window.
A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded.
Are we safe now?
...What else was I to do?
If I die tonight, I'll be sure and let you guys know tomorrow.
Yeah, had you going there for a minute, didn't I?
Heh heh.
Now for more:
-The PCs always seem to see at least one black cat per day. Sometimes it is sitting an their window when they wake up, crossing the street as they are driving, walking through an alley, cleaning itself on the steps to the library, etc. They can never seem to get close enough to touch it and it soon runs off if they stare at it for long.
-Wanna take the above one weirder? Have it appear on television, inserted via picture into a mysterious email, staring at them from the window of a an otherwise empty passing taxi. And so on and so forth
I think I remember this from Alfred Hitchcock or Twilight Zone (I can't remember which)...but whenever this guy would look in the mirror or any other kind of refection he would see some guy all dressed up in black (like Jack the ripper) behind him with a wire in his hands (garrot?) getting ready to strangle him. When the guy turned around there was nothing there.
Does anyone know the name of this episode? I have been trying to find it for a very long time.
"Ramos Clemente, a would-be god in dungarees, strangled by an illusion, that will-o-'the-wisp mirage that dangles from the sky in front of the eyes of all ambitious men, all tyrants--and any resemblance to tyrants living or dead is hardly coincidental, whether it be here or in the Twilight Zone."
There's a Talking Teddy Ruxpin sitting alone in the darkness. When the PCs turn on the light/ step in front of it/ pick it up/ attack/ whatever It opens its mouth in that curious animatronic way. "Hi. My name is Teddy Ruxpin. Can you and I be friends?"
However the PCs respond, he says "Why don't I tell you a story...
Once, long ago - My friends, Grubby and Newton Gimmick boarded our airship for the long journey to the Great Mountains Far East of the Land of Grundo.
"We travelled for many days, and the farther we went, the hungrier we got, because Grubby forgot to pack our lunch. Everyone laughed at Grubby's forgetfulness; and we decided that the best thing to do was to eat Newton Gimmick. Grubby held the doctor down while I went and fetched a knife from my rucksack.
"Grubby and I knew we had to hurry. Any minute now, the Sleeper would awake; and the Great Old Ones who were already wreaking havoc in the Land of Grundo would loose their fury once more. But this was a special treat, and I wanted to take my time.
"I hadn't had the chance to really torture anyone since back when we were searching for the Hidden treasure, and Wooly and I found the Missing Princess while no one else was around.
"Grubby put his weight on Newton Gimmick's shoudlers, and I sat on his lap. I used the knife to cut his shirt off and then pealed strips of flesh from his stomach, alternately feeding them to Grubby and myself.
"Newton Gimmick screamed and screamed. It was really funny to watch him squirm underneath our combined weight..." The story continues for as long as you want to take it (and the PCs listen... I'd force random encounter checks if they expect you to finish the story - unless you want to, you sicko). Nothing else happens. I suppose there's no tape in Teddy's tapedeck; but a mass of gore and puss - some kind of oozy, sticky mess.
Or maybe it's creepier if they find an official Teddy Ruxpin tape for "Picnic on the Airship" and "Screaming and Screaming".
I think I remember this from Alfred Hitchcock or Twilight Zone (I can't remember which)...but whenever this guy would look in the mirror or any other kind of refection he would see some guy all dressed up in black (like Jack the ripper) behind him with a wire in his hands (garrot?) getting ready to strangle him. When the guy turned around there was nothing there.
I believe it was the Twilight Zone episode The Mirror.
Nope, I just watched that one and it is not the same. Any one else have any guesses?
I'm probably not alone in wanting some expanded "tapes" or "stories", whatever you want to call them.
- Find petty excuses to keep the players seperated. For example, keep track of who needs to use the bathroom. Can need for isolation be supplanted by fear? Will the unease of being surrounded by peers in your most vulnerable moment outweigh the fear of being alone in an alien environment?
- Make the food barely or quasi-edible. Fruit is bad, bread is moldy, canned food is dented or swolen. Hunger, and the resulting fatigue, are commonplace.
- Make discouraging out-of-charicter comments under your breath as you review your notes. Even a muffled chuckle can disturb the players.
Any night after midnight one can come to Paidraic Willoughsby and Co. and slide their card through the door, and the door will instantly unlock. Inside there is an empty room with white walls. No light reaches this room, except for a small sliver from the other end of the room. When you approach this room you will find that it is actually another door. When you knock on it, a voice will ask "What makes a man become exalted?" and you must respond with the phrase on the back of the card: "The blood of the innocent." The door will open and you will come into another room, a kind of lounge. Inside it you will find around 5-10 people, depending on the night, sitting around smoking and drinking brandy, all in late Edwardian period dress. There is absolutely no conversation at all in this room and, it is nearly silent except for the phonograph which plays the exact same record over and over, ad infinitum. If you attempt to speak to one of the patrons, they will promptly ignore you and pretend as if you were not there.
Towards the south wing of the room you will find a large, round table, slightly different from the others. On it will be a quill pen and a document. The document shows all of your personal information: name, birthdate, place of residence, criminal record, greatest fears, etc. At the bottom of the document is a long line that asks for your signature. No one knows what happens after you sign it.
Random people come up to the characters and whisper into thier ear "Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at your door", and "I'd like to go out, I don't think i can, cause im afraid, of the Tommyknocker Man". There are several more verses to it, but at the moment the raving angel in my basement doesnt know them. We will let you know if any other good ones come up.
Those players who do not know the story behind this quote could be quite creeped out when they get to thinking about what it could mean. Those who do know will probably get ready for a little trouble.
A random stranger comes up to you on the street and says "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"
Those players who do not know the story behind this quote could be quite creeped out when they get to thinking about what it could mean. Those who do know will probably get ready for a little trouble.
What is the story behind this?
...isn't that an REM song?
What is the story behind this?
What do you think it means?
What do you think it means?
That was the point exactly. But the story goes that Dan Rather was walking along the street one day when a guy walked up to him, said that phrase, and punched the understandably confused news anchor in the face. No reason behind it as I remember the story.
A week after the dreams cease, the toy is re-released for a new generation to enjoy.
When a PC pets a dog or cat or any animal, the poor creature begins to dissolve, as if instead of petting it the character had poured potent acid onto it. The creature quickly dies, and is reduced to an acrid, hissing pool of slime.
Physical injuries and non-transmissable diseases are spread like the flu. The PC shakes hands with a man with a skull fracture, and the next morning the PC wakes up with a (litterally) splitting head ache.
A hero begins to have dreams of a favorite childhood toy. They start out innocently enough, with fond memories of owning that toy, but then get strange when he begins having nightmares of the toy assaulting him, or his friends. The series of nightmares turns into a full-on preoccupation that nearly leaves him insane. Only through the help of his loved ones and vices is he able to recover.
A week after the dreams cease, the toy is re-released for a new generation to enjoy.
I can just envision Etch-a-Sketches spelling out evil messages of their own accord.
I can just envision Etch-a-Sketches spelling out evil messages of their own accord.
Or Lite-Brite
One night when a PC is sleeping, they realise they can feel a number of things poking into their back - they awake to find that they are somehow inside their matress.
While that is creepy, I would think it is not nearly so creepy as awakening at night to find something else moving around inside your mattress. I mention that only because I have cats that used to crawl up into the box springs. Or you could take a cue from Nightmare on Elm Street and have a gorgeous woman (or handsome man), very nude, swimming about inside the mattress (which has inexplicably become transparent).
Of course, but how do they get out of their matress? Then clautrophobia sets in...
You dont sleep with a knife?
Besides, you're Dex, you should have the answer :D . (I hope you both get that reference and find it funny.)
And no, I don't sleep with a knife. The razorblades on the end of my fingers do the job well enough.
You yell for help, but your voice feels muffled. You know the sound didn't go far, but there is nothing covering your mouth! Slowly the entire room becomes filled with Mike Jacksons. They come out of the shadows and woodwork like zombies to eat a legless person. The cops nearly puke when they find your remains the next week. But you were dead for nearly seven and a half minutes...
Simply replace "Mike Jackson" with anything you want/fear. If you want the PC to live, have his wake up and think "Ok. Just a bad dream" and find an NPC (maid, neighbor, wife, etc) completly twisted and deformed. The blood is on the PC's hands. And every 1d6 nights, it happens again...
You know, there is an age-old technique employed by masters of horror through the ages. Build up suspense until the tension is so thick you could cut it with a knife, release the tension with an almost light-hearted moment, THEN hit them with the real terror!
For an example, consider Alien (a horror film by any other name). As the crew splits into two groups to try to capture the alien, one group has a suspenseful encounter with an unseen creature. After a very tense scene, it is revealed, almost with a sense of comic relief, that they have captured Jonesy, the ship's cat. Only then, after they release the cat and Ripley sends Brett to fetch him, does the real attack occur, with the alien ambushing Brett and pulling him into the duct.
The audience feels the tension building as the crew prepares to capture their prey. The camera avoids focusing on the creature they have captured until the very last second, keeping the suspense building. Then, the cat is revealed and everyone breathes easy. But when it is released, you can feel the tension start to build again and you know that someone is going to die.
Any horror fan can tell you that that the killer never strikes when you are expecting it, they prefer to strike when you're vulnerable. In the horror anthology Terror in the Aisles, Nancy Allen notes that you are never more vulnerable than when you are naked.
A shower after a tense day, a quiet moment between two teenaged lovers... and a moonlight swim should definietly be out of the question!
Now, to make things scarier than that. A brand new technique. No conversions or similiarities, a one of a kind scare that hasn't been used.
:lightbulb 
I got nothin'...
I "kill zombies", not "try to tinkle myself."
Lots a luck to ya.
Well said, WhtKnt.
Now, to make things scarier than that. A brand new technique. No conversions or similiarities, a one of a kind scare that hasn't been used.
I got nothin'...
I "kill zombies", not "try to tinkle myself."
Lots a luck to ya.
Ask and ye shall receive. How about a new thread devoted to exactly this topic?
(Note to self: test his ideas at next game. record reactions.)
Character is paying bill at local market. When he pulls out the money from his wallet he feels a sting on his fingers. when he looks at them, he sees bite marks. Blood i s smeared around lips of face on the bill..
To take that even further...
After staring in horror at the face on the bill, he glances up at the attendant, who is staring at him strangely. He then looks back to the money, and the blood and the bite mark are gone.
Several nights later, the player is walking down the street when he notices someone who looks like the face on the bill that "bit" him. He can't find him after looking away.
Nope, I just watched that one and it is not the same. Any one else have any guesses?
It should be called "The Exhibit". It was a Season 4, I think (one of the hour-long episodes). The protagonist (and I use the term loosely) is laid off from his job at a Wax Museum, but he has grown obsessively attached to some of the figures there, specifically the Murderer's Row Exhibit (or words to that effect). There are five figures, including Jack the Ripper. The one that the protagonist sees I think was the Boston Strangler, who used a garrote to choke his victims to death. Anyway, said protagonist uses a large chunk of change to purchase a cooling system for his basement, where he stores the figures. His wife and brother-in-law attempt to get rid of the figures, but they come to life and kill them both. The protagonist comes home to find his wife and b-i-l dead, and vows to get rid of them himself, but the figures then turn on him. The police later rule it a murder/suicide.
Any other TZ questions?
Oh, since it comes to mind, there's a TZ episode titled "Two". It's about a man and a woman who are the only survivors of a brutal international war (the similarities between the US and former USSR are not merely a coincidence). They meet while still in their uniforms, so they immediately attack each other. Eventually they come to terms with the fact that they are the only two in that region, and they set aside their differences and decide to continue forward together. There is practically zero dialogue except at the end, so a lot of the story is carried by movement and expression by the characters. Pretty good, albeit somewhat cheesy.
The parallel is that a character who enters a coma can have this same sort of experience, and the only way to awake is to somehow gain the trust and aid of this other person. Or, if you're as sadistic as I am, they have to kill the other, but at the expense of losing something of themselves.
You wake up and look in the mirror. The freckles on your face have all moved to form the words DEATH. You blink your eyes, and they are normal.
You go to the bathroom, and wash your hands. Wherever the water touches, that part of your body becomes invisible. So for instence if u spill a glass of water on your pants, then on that certain spot it has vanished.
You try to take a crap, yet their is a layer of skin closing your crack off. EEWW!
You wake up and u have no mouth, nose, eyes or ears. Your face is just smooth, without any of those features, yet u can see.
Good? I'm new at this, so please tell me if i suck or not.
Thanx!
The scenario: Zombie outbreak. Have them go through a corridor choked full of zombies/old people who like to pinch cheeks.
That, my friends, is scary, creepy, and wrong.
- All hair on the character's body falls out. Everywhere, from head to toe. Arm hair, leg hair, eyebrows, scalp hair, pubic hair, everything. A complete physical reveals that the character is in excellent health (assuming they were to begin with); the doctor can find no explanation. The hair may or may not grow back normally (at the GM's discretion).
- A character finds him/herself unable to communicate intelligibly. No matter what language they try to speak, it comes out as gibberish. They can understand others, but cannot be understood by any means short of telepathy. It may last a few minutes or a few hours or, if the GM is feeling particularly nasty, it may last a lifetime.
- Everywhere a character turns, they see omens of doom. Instead of the usual pigeons on the ledge of their apartment, they see ravens. On their way to work, they pass three different funeral processions. A black cat darts out on the road in from of them and they must swerve to avoid hitting it. Perhaps nothing will come of this, but then again...
- An old friend, well-known to the characters is subtley changed. Maybe she is a dedicated coffee drinker who has mysteriously switched to tea, or perhaps she adds seven sugars instead of her usual three. Of course, the friend denies anything is odd.
- An associate or co-worker seems to be going out of his or her way to avoid the PC, making excuses to leave if confronted, etc. If cornered, they can offer no explanation.
And one more befitting the season...
A random PC gets the feeling they are being watched, as though someone were keeping tabs on them when they were sleeping, and knows when they're awake. Their unseen monitor probably knows whether the PC has been bad or good, as well. ;)
A random PC gets the feeling they are being watched, as though someone were keeping tabs on them when they were sleeping, and knows when they're awake. Their unseen monitor probably knows whether the PC has been bad or good, as well. ;)
I'm always feeling that. :D
Good job, though. I especially like the omens of doom.
Backtracking, the party revisits the site of an earlier battle, but sees thick viscous blood oozing from the bullet holes in the walls. The blood never seems to reach the ground, and stops flowing soon after the players notice it.
Looking into the mirror, a character sees a bloated, rotting corpse staring back at her.
Just as the PC is about to open the door, something knocks loudly from the other side. Upon opening it, he finds nothing.
After returning to his house after a long day at work, a character hears his upstairs TV playing as he enters the back door. Just as he enters the room with the TV, it switches off.
While exploring the top floor of the building, the party can hear footsteps moving back and forth above them, as though someone was pacing. The attic is found to be empty.
For a few seconds, every part of a character’s body goes completely numb, as though she was inhabiting a corpse.
Every time the party revisits a certain room, the furniture has subtly changed places.
Glancing down a hallway of a derelict building, a character spots something peeking around the far corner before quickly darting back out of sight.
Whenever someone plays the grand piano in the great hall, some unseen force presses keys down in accompaniment.
A doorway leads into the room the party is trying to leave--in fact, they can see the back of their own heads.
After waking up one morning, a PC finds that his knees now bend the wrong way, forcing him to hobble around on legs like a goat’s.
The old manor is filled with a sickening stench. Upon digging into the floorboards, the investigators find a collection of very decayed corpses dressed exactly like them.
Abruptly all of the windows in the building blow in, sending glass shards everywhere. There was no sound of an explosion outside to cause this.
Out of the corner of her eye, a PC sees an enormous, hairy quadruped lumber past a doorway. There’s no trace of it in the building.
One day while going about business as normal, a character finds that everyone he meets seems shocked to see him alive. They can’t quite explain why, but they stammer that they were sure he had died the week before, and thought they had even attended his funeral.
A character suddenly notices that her heart hasn’t been beating during the course of the whole investigation.
While glancing out a window into the dark night, a character swears he glimpsed some huge, pale creature silently swoop by the building…
One of the players is growing to dread walking down the city streets. Every time she progresses down the sidewalks, she hears scuttling noises coming from the drains in the gutters, as though something in the sewers was following her.
Just as a character is about to go through a doorway, the door slams shut in his face.
After showering one morning, a character wipes the steam off his mirror and finds that instead of a reflection, he sees a padded room occupied by a man in a strait-jacket. The man is screaming silently and keeps crashing into the walls—when he hits the “mirror,” the character’s whole bathroom wall thumps from the impact. After the character leaves the room, the mirror returns to normal.
A character keeps feeling something brush past behind her, disturbing her clothing and hair. Growing increasingly paranoid she starts backing into a corner when a voice in her ear whispers “Turn around…”
Entering a bedroom, a player spots a pale, limp arm quickly jerked under the bed.
The square room’s corners seem subtly less than 90° angles.
Searching for the source of a persistent creaking noise, a character discovers a man hanging from a noose in a large room. As she moves close to investigate, his eyelids slam open—revealing eyes like that of a blind man—and he croaks a cryptic warning. Then his eyes shut again. If the character leaves and returns, the corpse is gone, while a noose sways in a breeze she can’t feel.
The lights abruptly go out, plunging the heroes into darkness. A voice quite near them hisses “I seeeeee yoooooou…”
Backtracking, the party revisits the site of an earlier battle, but everything is gone—no corpses, no bloodstains, even the spent ammunition on the floor is missing.
The heroes are uneasy in this strange old house, whose basement contains a decrepit well sealed with a metal plate riveted into the stonework. Just as the party is ready to leave, they hear a banging noise echoing up from the cellar…
Sitting alone in a quiet building, a player can’t help notice how the sound of air moving through the structure resembles some great beast slowly breathing in and out.
As a character walks down the streets at night, every streetlight blinks out just as she moves directly underneath them.
Revisiting a childhood home, a player notices that the upstairs hallway is a bit strange. One section of it doesn’t seem level with the other walls, and she was sure that there was another door there twenty years ago.
In the elevator of an eight-story building, the players notice an unlit button with the number nine on it.
While putting on his boots, a player notices they are occupied by someone’s severed feet.
A character is slightly out of sync with her shadow, as if it had to watch closely in order to copy her moves.
The monitor of a PC’s…(sigh) PC abruptly dies. In the black screen the character can see his reflection seated in front of the desk, as well as those of two figures immediately behind him. Turning around, he finds that he is alone. The screen immediately turns back on as if nothing happened.
For a few moments, one of the party members’ vision is radically altered—he sees the world in negative, and living creatures have flickering auras around them that he can see through inanimate objects. He also sees the auras of things that aren’t there when his vision returns to normal…
A character opens a door into a claustrophobic room lacking any sort of furniture. Turning around he notices that the door he entered through is gone, and that the only exit seems to be barred from the other side, with a tiny observation window set in the sturdy door.
The wall of a room suddenly warps inwards in a vaguely humanoid shape, as though a young woman were pressing against an opaque membrane in an effort to break out. Closer investigation detects nothing unusual about the wall.
A phone rings just as a player moves past it. Picking up, she hears the hiss of static, and then the distant voice of a long-deceased relative saying “Remember me (character’s name)?” The line goes dead. The phone line wasn’t even connected.
A character holds up his right hand in front of a mirror, as his “reflection” does the same.
Backtracking, the party revisits the site of an earlier battle, but all of the corpses are slumped against the far wall, staring with empty eyes at the doorway the heroes are entering through, their faces twisted into mocking smiles.
While investigating an old house, the party hears a strange sound from the hallway behind them—a sort of snuffling noise, as though some huge hunting beast was tracking prey.
After a week of toothaches, while flossing a character finds what feels like a new row of teeth growing behind his first set.
While in the middle of a tension-filled game, the players’ DM suddenly gets up from the table, says “excuse me a moment,” and walks into a back room. They hear muffled shouting for a few moments, a blood-curdling scream, and loud crashing noises. The DM then returns and resumes play as if nothing had happened.
Someone is watching the players. Over a few adventures they keep catching glimpses of a briefcase-toting man in a business suit. The figure isn’t overtly menacing, but something about his stare and the subtle asymmetry of his features is disquieting. He does nothing but stand and observe the heroes from the ends of streets, distant balconies, or from doorways, and every time they approach he calmly turns a corner and disappears.
While patched into a security system and flipping through views from various cameras, one hero catches a brief glimpse of a briefcase-carrying man looking into the camera before adjusting his necktie and walking out of sight. None of the other feeds show him.
In an old abandoned building, the heroes hear distant, warbling music. Tracking it to its source, they discover an old TV set playing old-fashioned but slightly discordant music, while an image of a briefcase-carrying man smiles sardonically out of the TV at them. Abruptly he walks out of the picture, and the TV turns off. The set’s power cord dangles limply.
Watching the flickering static of a broken monitor, a hero swears he saw a now-familiar face for a split second in the distortion.
Sources include the excellent game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, the HL2 mod The Hidden, an X-Files episode, the short-lived TV series Kingdom Hospital, and the G-Peeps from HL2—because somewhere there’s a DM whose group hasn’t played it.
Traveling down an unlit road through a misty forest, the characters are surprised when a huge figure suddenly rises up before their vehicle, looming out of the fog like an ogre from tales of fancy. (This actually happened! About 30 years ago, while stationed in Germany, my family was driving through the Black Forest and we were commenting that this kind of backdrop inspired the tales of the Brothers Grimm. At that moment, a hulking figure rose up out of the fog on the road ahead and ambled off the road into the darkness. We later learned that bears often sleep on the roadway because it's warm, and have been known to startle unwary motorists by rising up before them suddenly.)
While visiting a circle of standing stones in England, a character notices that one of the stones feels slightly warm to the touch. If he keeps his hand on the stone long enough, he also notices a faint, rhythmic pulsing, like a heartbeat. (Many stone circles in Britain have associated legends that tell of someone who angered a being of great power and was turned to stone. The warmth may not be that unusual (since stone absorbs heat during the day and thus cools more slowly than the surrounding air), but the heartbeat will certainly give pause.)
While traveling on a commercial airliner, one of the PCs glances out the window and sees a small creature riding on the wing, tearing at the engine. Is the gremlin really there, or is it a terror-induced hallucination? Only the GM knows for sure.(Yes, it's from the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,00 Feet," and remade in Twilight Zone: The Movie. Why? Precisely because it is a classic! Things over which we have no control are the most frightening, especially when they happen in an environment where such things can have decidedly fatal results!)
An otherwise perfectly ordinary mirror shows an otherwise perfectly ordinary room. A sidelong glimpse at the reflection, however, shows the room in a state of decay, as if it had sat unused for decades. When the character takes a closer look, of course, everything is normal. (Mirrors are a lot of fun, because they are so mysterious. What does a mirror show when no one is looking at it? Small wonder that people used to believe there was a realm beyond the mirror.)
While traveling on a commercial airliner, one of the PCs glances out the window and sees a small creature riding on the wing, tearing at the engine. Is the gremlin really there, or is it a terror-induced hallucination? Only the GM knows for sure.(Yes, it's from the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,00 Feet," and remade in Twilight Zone: The Movie. Why? Precisely because it is a classic! Things over which we have no control are the most frightening, especially when they happen in an environment where such things can have decidedly fatal results!)
"The same thing happened to me!"-Dick Soloman, Third Rock from the Sun
During a long night at watch duty, some villain killed by the PCs at the start of their career walks up just to the edge of vision, says, "Surprised to see me, *PCs name*? You shouldn't be," then salutes cheerily and walks off. No trace can be found of the man's passage or arrival.
A PC screams and faints after his fingers suddenly drop off his hands and squirm around on the floor like maggots. When he comes to, his hands are whole again, though the skin around his knuckles is strangely pink.
A player wakes up one morning and finds that his house or apartment now totally lacks windows or doors.
In the middle of the night a PC that normally sleeps alone awakens for a moment with the feeling of a warm body lying next to him. In the morning he is again alone.
A PC feels something lurch in his abdomen. Lifting his shirt, it looks and feels as though a swarm of rats is racing around his belly just beneath his skin. Swatting them with his hands causes them to disappear, but at random moments through the rest of the day he feels sudden movements from his waist.
An investigator hears a dripping noise while searching a building. She comes across a puddle in one room, and as she watches, a drop of water flies up from the floor, bursts upon the ceiling, and disappears into a crack.
A character briefly awakens in the middle of the night to see what looks like a swarm of black cats in his bedroom, patiently seated on the foot of his bed and every other surface, staring at him with yellow-green eyes. They are gone when he awakens that morning.
If you read the novel Hogfather by Terry Pratchett, he explains in detail how a landscape based on the innocent idea of a child's drawing come to life can be deeply, deeply disturbing (even before said landscape starts attacking people later in the book).
For a few long, disturbing moments, the scene in front of you takes on the characteristics of a child's picture. The grass and foliage is a flat, vivid green, while trees' bark, normally a natural mixture of grays and greens, becomes a muddy brown. Water becomes completely opaque and very blue, while crude yellow fish somehow swim on top of its surface. Worst of all is the sky--above you it is a vivid cerulean, but between that and the treeline is an empty space that gnaws at your eyes like a toothache.
A PC suffers a vivid dream in which someone they know has died. The exact cause of death is unknown, as the PC only sees the body in the casket or attends the funeral. Within three days, that individual is dead. (Death dreams are not so uncommon, and my wife has this "talent," for lack of a better word. When she has these dreams (which is thankfully not often), she is walking through a local museum when she rounds a corner and sees a casket with the doomed person inside. That person will die within three days. It will always be someone that she knows; she never has this dream with complete strangers.)
Sitting at their desk, doing routine paperwork, a PC reaches for a pencil and finds that it glides to their hand as though drawn by telekinesis. They do not seem to be able to control the power, and it seems to work only at very close range. (Probably, most of us would love the idea of gaining super-powers, but what if you had no control over your power? And how would other people react if they saw you using it? And what if it got out of control? Today, it might be pencils; tomorrow, maybe you walk down the street and cars are drawn toward you. Food for thought.)
Walking down the street of a fairly large city, a PC is surprised when a bird suddenly hits the sidewalk beside them. The bird is dead, though it has no visible wounds. It's neck is broken. Possibly, it hit a nearby building and just happened to fall next to the PC. But the next time it happens, there are no buildings nearby. At the phenomenon seems to be occurring more frequently... (A dead bird isn't necessarily frightening, but a bird that suddenly falls dead at your feet can be startling, and if that bird dies from inexplicable causes, the effect is multiplied. Panic might become sheer terror if the PC's car is suddenly subject to a rain of dead birds as a flock passes overhead!)
While in the woods (for whatever reason), a creature normally considered skittish, such as a deer, suddenly lashes out at the PC, attacking him or her in a violent spasm. The only way to prevent the PC from being killed is to kill the animal responsible. Medical tests upon the animal show nothing that might explain the irrational action. (Wild animals are unpredictable, and even normally docile animals such as deer have been known to suddenly attack humans. Of course, they are usually provoked. But what if one should suddenly take a dislike to you? Even the bite of a rabbit can be painful, as anyone with experience can attest.)
In a similar vein, while searching for a missing person in a wilderness area, the PCs find the remains being devoured by herbivores (rabbits, deer, etc.). The animals flee in panic if approached, but it is obvious that they were feeding upon the remains. The condition of the remains makes it impossible to know whether the person was slain by the animals or other means. (In this instance, the animals behave normally, but their diet is very abnormal. Who can say why they might have suddenly developed a taste for human flesh? In a scenario I ran, it was due to a corrupting influence in the area (an embittered Indian shaman). You might prefer to leave it as a mystery.)
A cat, or even better a monkey if the setting allows, begins following the player around, looking in at them through windows, scratching at their door, even trying to hop in their car with them. The animal becomes frantic. It even tries to break through windows to stay near the player. Then, while the player isn't looking, a gunshot rings out and the PC finds the animal dead. The next day, a completely different cat begins following the player. Even if the player tries to protect the animal if they look away for even a split second and unseen assailant kills the animal. If you want to continue it have the 4th or so animal show up electronically, stalking the PC through T.V. comercial, video e-mails, phone calls and the like. Eventually there is another gunshot and the PC computer background changes to that of the animal, shot dead.
During a paranormal investigation the PC leaves a tape recorder somewhere to pick up EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenominan. Voices not heard by the naked ear but picked up on audio recordings). On playback the PC hears themself talking as they set up the recorder but they are cut short by a gunshot and the rest of the tape contains only static. Further examination of the tape reveals blood spattered on the cassette.
A PC is attacked at random on the street, someone just walks up and pulls a gun on them. The PC kills the person in self defense. However, for the next few weeks many of the PCs find guns on their persons when reaching for everyday items like cell phones, wallets and the like. So, did that person really attack the PC?
Hmm... I seem to have been on a gun fix tonight.
The PC awakes at night to find a giant hary creature at their bedroom door (think Sasquatch). The creature flees quickly once the PC takes any action but subsequent investigation reveals strange hair all over the house, including on the PC's bed a pillows.
In a public area, a small child (perhaps five years of age) suddenly turns to one of the PCs and plainly says, "The voices don't like you." No one witnesses the incident except the PCs and if pressed, the child retreats to his or her parents for protection, claiming to have done nothing. (This was inspired by those gag t-shirts that bear the same message, but delivered in a substantially more interesting manner.)
The Hamster
Standing in a cavernous room with a ceiling shrouded in shadows, a PC feels a drop of liquid on her cheek. It's red, sticky, and slightly warm.
A character suddenly notices that all of the family photos in her house now feature an additional person who she has never seen before. When others are asked about him they look at her strangely and remark that the figure is her younger brother. Until now, the character was certain that she was an only child.
While sitting at his computer and turning his head to look out the window, a player hears a snatch of odd sound. Experimenting, he angles his head very slowly until suddenly he hears noises, like that of a group of people talking all around him. He only hears this sound while in this particular room and only if his ear is tilted at just the right angle.
A character's answering machine is always filled to capacity with messages that contain...nothing. Exasperated but curious, he takes the tape to a friend who specializes in audio equipment. She tries cleaning and enhancing the tape and finds nothing, but when she amplifies it as far as her equipment allows, both can faintly hear the sound of someone frantically screaming, as though from a great distance.
After being jostled and slammed into by other pedestrians on his walk to work after numerous failed attempts to hail a cab, it dawns on a character that nobody seems to notice him. The receptionist at his office completely ignores him, when he phones his friends they get angry and hang up on the "prank call," and even more frightening, while following around his coworkers, they fail to even mention the fact that he isn't there. It's as though he doesn't exist in every sense but the actual...*
Sitting at her desk at home while working on her computer, a PC feels something underneath the table lick her leg.
Waiting in the subway for his ride home, a character watches a decrepit train rattle by. The lights inside are either flickering on and off or have failed outright, while the windows are cracked and smeared with blood in some places. He thinks he sees a terrified passenger pounding on the door in a futile effort to escape before the train passes out of sight down a tunnel. No one else waiting on the platform takes any notice of it.
A player is having trouble with his water bed. It doesn't feel right--something keeps poking him in the ribs when he tries to sleep at night, and the fluid within seems to have the consistency of extra chunky salsa. When the bed springs a leak, the liquid that dribbles out is viscous and red.
Looking down a hallway into a child's playroom at a rocking horse, a PC has a sudden frightening vision of the wooden animal charging down the hallway and lunging. The sight passes in a second, and the rocking horse continues to stare down the hallway at the PC with its dead glass eye while smiling madly.**
The grandfather clock in the great hall is slowly counting backwards towards midnight.
One PC keeps getting strange messages on the notepad on his refrigerator--they claim to be from him "one day later." To prove this, the notes accurately predict the final scores of several football games. For a week the PC enjoys knowing how not to screw up his big date, which alternate route to work he should take to avoid a two hour traffic jam, and other little bits of knowledge to help life run smoothly...until one day, the notepad is blank, save for a few flecks of dried reddish-brown liquid...
(alternate ending of above) The notepad even lists the winning lottery numbers for the $25 million jackpot, which the PC finds to his delight to be accurate. One month later, while settling down for bed in his new house, the PC notices some odd marks on the ceiling above him. Turning on the lights, he finds that someone has carved "I WANT MY MONEY" into the plaster.***
* Thanks Neil Gaiman. Or Terry Pratchett. Or come to think of it that episode of South Park where everyone ignores Cartman.
** This actually happened to me once. We got rid of the thing shortly afterwards.
*** I've long pondered the ethical aspect of using time travel to win the lotto - are you in effect "robbing" someone who was supposed to win the next day? And what would they do if they found out?
*** I've long pondered the ethical aspect of using time travel to win the lotto - are you in effect "robbing" someone who was supposed to win the next day? And what would they do if they found out?
Well, they should have had a time machine.
Speaking of which
--a man wanders up to the characters on the street asking what the date is. Whatever they tell him, he responds by screaming "It worked, it worked! I'm in the future!" He technically isnt though, he's just a blackout drunk who fancies himself to be an inventor, or an inventor who is better at drinking. One look at his "time machine" reveals his secret to time travel: lots of duct tape.
Whatever they tell him, he responds by screaming "It worked, it worked! I'm in the future!" He technically isnt though,
Which, of course, means that he'd have to have gone back in time.
2. You discover the guy you are protecting is a virgin being hunted by cultists who want to sacrifice him to their evil goddess.
The Hamster
or
"The Marklar wakes up one Marklar to discover Marklar inexplicably speaks Marklar."
-- Turning on the news in the morning, they see the cut and paste talking heads on the show are raving about "Rutsah Royal Jelly" in between tipping back their heads to eating it straight from the jar with no thought given to the fact that it is dripping down onto the thousand dollar suits they are wearing. Attempts to cut to traffic and weather reveals the respective reporters trying in vain to remain professional looking despite seeing what the hosts are doing. The show takes a dark turn when the guest (fill in your own celebrity here) comes on the set and, after seeing the hosts have little to no interest in their newest blockbuster movie, requests some of the jelly for themselves. Disinterest turns to greedy violence as the hosts do terrible things to the celebrity using implements from the cooking portion of the show. At this point, the camera swings away and the standard "Technical Difficulties" screen comes up.
(Cookie for whoever knows where I got this from.)
Your walking down the street outside your house when you get the feeling of being followed, you look round but see nothing but you know something's following you. Turning around you start walking faster and faster as the feeling of some horrible thing coming closer and closer grows. Eventually you reach you house and hurriedly unlock the door dashing inside, closing it behind you you relax. Then reaching over you press the lightswitch to turn them on and see the rooms full of the mutilated bodies of various children and you can taste their blood in your mouth.....To jerk awake and realize its just a dream and your safe in your bed. Blinking you look around and see a young girl standing in the darkened doorway watching you while there's a scratch, scratch, scratch coming from outside the window a moment later the door closes without the girl saying anything and the scratching stops.
For PC's investigation would reveal nothing, for me well see below if you want to hear the truth boring as it is.
The scratching was one of the numerous birds living near our house I hear them most knights and you can occasionally see them in the daytime scratching away at the dirt (to my mothers annoyance).
The girl was my niece who's visiting with her parents.
The nightmare was just that probably brought on by this thread.
Still not a fun experience in a dark room at midnight.
EDIT
As I've been up all night reading this thread after a nightmare/creepy event.
A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded.
There no need to visit me.
EDIT 2
Brought on by an overactive imagination, too little sleep and this thread I give you what just happened.
The PC is sitting in their room in a rural setting working with various animal sounds echoing in from outside suddenly they hear a ticking sound from behind the curtains, a metalic clang outside the window and detect a strange faint odour. Looking up they see eye's staring back at them out of the darkness through a crack in the curtains freezing a moment there's a sudden black shape moving up the wall to their left........
This time I'm not posting the truth.
And from the thread an idea that occured to me on reading.
The PC is sitting in the train heading towards there destination late at night with a largely empty carriage when suddenly 3 people enter and take a nearby seat. Two of the group look like frightening young men (angry, malnourished, staring eyes, pale skin) while the girl seems to have had to much to drink being supported between them and then helped to the seat next to one of them leaning on them. As the train pulls into the next station a respectibly dressed man moves to be near the PC and whispers "Come with me if you want to live" before getting up and leaving at the next stop. If the PC follows they'll see as the train pulls away that the girl has a bladed weapon shoved into her back and is actually dead. At which point they should turn to thank their rescuer only to see his mouth opening to reveal razor sharp teeth and his eyes are glowing. He smiles and say's "I said come with me if you want to live not that you would."
And a few random ones for the fun of it.
While playing a new computer game the PC has an annoying sound glitch with the sound randomly dropping out and echoing, during one of these they suddenly hear the sound of heavy breathing from behind them.
While staying in a communual area for a number of days the PC's keep hearing a scream in the night and someone disapears but no one else seems to notice. Finally they manage to track down the source of the screams and see the fridge having a little midnight snack.
The PC's look up to see that a picture is suddenly missing one of its human figures.
The PC's wake up in a small space like a closet covered in injuries and clutching a weapon stained with yellow ichor and green slime.
While walking down the street one day a stranger comes up to them and say's "I know you and what you'll do, beware the rabbit, trust the beast." before walking into themself. That is the stranger walks into themself not into the PC.
While out for a daily walk the PC see's a neighbourhood animal they know intimately looking at them. It continues to watch them until they are out of sight. Every day this repeats even if they try to avoid it the animal will be there watching always watching. Particularly effective if that's all it ever does, no other storyline attached.
One day while walking past a video store one of the cover pictures suddenly turns to look at the PC and say's sadly "Its too late." before returning to normal.
The PC wakes up to find themself changed (into a different sex/age/race pick one) still in the place they went to sleep but now no one remembers there old self or recognizes the new one.
As for the time travel its not so much the ethical aspects of it as the idea of what could be done by someone who felt you cheated them out of what was rightfully theirs brrrrr.
I saw a few episodes of the twilight zone it seems to be very much a damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you believe the guy saying come with me to heaven he'll be a monster there to destroy you, if you don't believe him he was telling the truth and you'll pay for it.
EDIT 3
Just saw this on TV and thought I'd include it.
Place an NPC in a hospital after an incident then just after they recover have them overhear a conversation between two doctors involving highly complex medical terms (made up ones work even better) then have one doctor say "Oh well no point telling him/her about it there's nothing we can do and they have little enough time left as it is and we're releasing them now so no point torturing them with the knowledge." Then a few minutes later have an orderly/nurse/medical person enter and tell them they're being discharged.
EDIT 4
You know for a light hearted commedy this movie is just overflowing with inspiration.
The PC wakes up and everyone is suddenly treating them as a suicide watch with no explanation taking away all implements that could be used to hurt themself, sealing up windows, never leaving them alone.
The PC wakes up and finds themself suddenly with a spouse and child who treat them as family but go to immense lengths to prevent them leaving. Stealing their shoes, laying boobytraps, having huge muscled foreigners guarding the stiars and yet they don't bother about communications the PC can use phones, computers even chat to passersbys through the window and yet no one finds this odd.
If there's any more I'll add them.
EDIT 5
Well it may just be my being up at 4am but I think these could be pretty creepy if worked in right.
something keeps winding up some place odd every morning e.g. the persons shoes always wind up in a light fixture if they take their eyes off them for a moment.
Every now and then something solid will suddenly vanish as the PC leans reapearing when they move away.
When the PC's move into a new apartment or stay in a hotel there will be the heartbroken sounds of a young woman crying in their bedroom ending in a choked voice saying "Take them away I never want to look at them again oh will you ever forgive me Jamie" but it'll never happen if there's another person or any recording devices in the room.
A very well dressed man comes up to a PC and say's "Careful who you call a straw." nods sharply at them and walks away.
The PC's get the paper only to see a picture of them with "PC name declared public enemy no.1" and the list of their crimes continues for several pages with everything from jaywalking to regicide. The paper is dated for a week from today.
Every stranger they see comes up and says what a nice person they were and its such a shame please accept my condolences trying to comfort them on their coming death or that the PC's in a beutiful spot as no one can touch them since they're going to die again no one thinks this is odd.
Someone they know well comes up to talk to them becoming almost violent as they go on gesticulating and shaking their hand at the PC but no sound comes out. The PC hears everything else perfectly and if questioned anyone nearby (including other PC's) indicate they can hear the person perfectly well.
When they enter the gym they find everyone exercising with other people taking the place of differing weights e.g. a child might be used on a leg press or an adult is taking the place of barbells. If they blink or look away it returns to normal.
If at any time the PC's are fishing they fell something catch on the line when they pull it up they find a severed head wth the spinal column still attached.
As they go about their business children keep coming up to perfect strangers near them and revealing intimate details of the PC's life. In this case the stranger involved is suprised and confused as well if questioned the children try to run away and claim to not remember anything if caught.
The PC's re-enter a room they were only out of for a few minutes to find a dead person sitting in a chair there with no marks on them and a sad expression on their face. If the PC's look away or leave the body changes position even though its definately dead no heartbeat, pale skin, not breathing and so on.
A group of people suddenly approach a PC and start forcing them to exercise and get healthy while refusing to explain why.
While walking by two people the PC's hear one of them say "I like guys what die when they say their going to die." To which the other replies "I don't know what to say I've never tried before." If questioned they denigh it and any recording devices indicate they're teling the truth. Particulrly entertaining if it keeps happening with different people.
Every time the PC's try to deal with a new person that person know's exactly who they are and what they want but if they deal with them again the person acts normally. Any attempt to question results in the PC being told they told them again recording devices and other people confirm this.
After struggling against a bitter enemy the PC's catch up with them only to have act like their best friends if he hesitate or back off the enemy continues to behave that way for the rest of the campaign or vice versa an old and trusted ally suddenly with no explanation becomes a bitter enemy. Although personally I prefer the first one.
There's something between a roar and a scream as the walls of the room their in fall apart. Then nothing happens for a week at which point it happens again and again and again 7 days from the minute from the last one only thing is if they make a listen check the sound is slowly getting closer. It starts off at the wall itself then an inch in, a foot, a meter slowly getting closer and closer to the PC's.
WowA passerby calls a PC by name and greets them, asking about subjects that only someone who has known the PC for a long time could possibly know to ask about. The PC cannot ever remember having met this person. Even when their memory is jogged, they have absolutely no recollection of the stranger. (Many of us have run into people on the street whom we don't immediately recognize, but their identity usually comes back to us eventually. What if a seemingly complete stranger whom you have never met knew personal details about you?)
Glancing into a mirror, the PC sees an image of themselves as battered, bruised, and bloodied. Their clothing, though accurately reflected, is dirty, torn, and disheveled. (Mirrors are such fun. Are they really just pieces of glass, backed with a reflective coating, or are they something more? Windows to another world, perhaps? Or, in this case, maybe a reflection of the future?)
For one minute, the laws of physics are replaced with those of cartoons.
Anvil coming your way, Raymond. Hope you got an umbrella.
- The characters notice that every single person who passes by the hotdog vendor on the street just stares at him as they pass. No dogs are sold that day, much to the vendor's irritation. The next day, there is a different vendor there and the staring resumes. The next day, yet another vendor is there. This repeats until the characters begin to care.
- While standing in line to get a hotdog from a street vendor, the characters notice the people in the line ahead of them (which is unusually long) are not getting the usual heatlamp dogs, but some squirming black thing in a cup that they waste no time in eating whole right there, preventing the characters from getting a good look at it.
One of the PCs hears a strange voice (that apparently only he or she can hear). The voice is oddly familiar, and knows the character's name. "Meet Mr. John Smith, a supernatural investigator by trade..." (The voice is, of course, that of Rod Serling, creator and narrator of the classic Twilight Zone television series. It should reveal just enough information to give the PC an idea of what the next adventure has in store for the group. It will be heard once more, following the scenario, and never again.)
One of the PCs begins hearing voices in his or her head. After a time, he or she should piece together that they are reading the thoughts of those nearby. This should prove to be a useful ability for a short while, until the PC realizes that he or she can't turn it off. Knowing what someone is thinking can be very useful, no doubt about it, but knowing what everyone is thinking, all the time? Eventually, insanity will be inevitable, as sleep deprivation and paranoia set in. (Another example of a super-power that could be potentially useful, save that there is no way to control it. This is probably a long-term campaign arc, as opposed to a creepy event, but it was so good, I couldn't resist putting it in here.)
Two more creepy events.
When exiting an elevator you see a picture of a man and his dog, the dog for a second seems to be snarling at you and about to attack.
You look into the mirror for some reason e.g. morning wash but something seems wrong about your reflection still you can't place it before the feelings gone and your normal reflections back. The continues intermittently for a couple of weeks as your feelings that sometihng is wrong with your reflection keeps growing. Then one night you wake up for a nightmare, roll over and realize what was wrong had been that your reflection didn't quite match your position..then you look up to see your wall rise up as if on tracks and yourself coming out with an axe, a knife and a fork.
an axe, a knife and a fork
all at the same time?
Anyway, here's another one: One night, as the PCs are travelling through a city, all electronic devices suddenly stop working. The car grinds to a halt, but after one minute and exactly fourteen seconds, sources of light (ie, streetlights, headlights, flashlights, ect) start slowly flashing in sync. After another fourteen seconds, the flashes have turned into a recognizable pulse, as if all the lights for miles are connected to a massive, beating heart. Another fourteen seconds, and the PCs realize that they're hearts are now beating at exactly the same rate as the lights.
And heres another quick two, it may have been done before.
As your flicking through the TV channels you find a channel dedicated to yourself. The main image is as from a camera right behind you and there's a little box with a famous newscaster describing your life. Where your going, what you think about it how it relates to past events in your life shown in flashback form in the little box. meanwhile in the top right corner is a little display reading 21 days, 12 hours and 17.5 minutes remaining.
One day when one of the PC's makes a wish it comes to pass and a deep dark voice dripping with blood from the bottom of the grave say's contract sealed.
EDIT
Or in response to your question I suppose that could be the creepy thing the doppleganger only has 2 hands but its somehow holding 3 things.
EDIT 2
I was entertaining myself with way's to torment players with the doppleganger idea (You see yourself approaching carrying a axe in its left hand, a knife in its right hand and a fork in its left hand. No it only has 2 hands. No its carryinga knife in its left hand, an axe in its right hand and a fork in its left hand. While your trying to figure its weird extradimensional physics it descends on you hacking you into tiny bits and devouring them) when the following occured to me.
One morning you wake up and the world appears to have been doubled like one of those double images e.g. there's a picture and depending on how you look at it you see two people talking or a goblet. Now the entire worlds like that with two images for pictures, people, buildings, everything depending on how you look at them you see one or the other. Depending on GM intentions this can be an alternate reality, a glimpse at the truth of things or an adventure idea. After awhile you notice that some things don't have a double image, every single one of these things dies or is destroyed soon afterwards. Eventually you see a swarm of shadows descend on a double and tear it to pieces 3 weeks to the second later the original person dies. The more you watch the more often this happens what are these shadows and more importantly do you have a double?
Biting into a red, juicy, delicious apple, a PC is startled to notice the wriggling remains of a worm in the space evacuated by the bite! (Old joke we used to tell in elementary school: What's worse than finding a worm in your apple? Finding half a worm!)
A character glances down and notices that he has two shadows, as if two strong light sources were affecting him--but not anyone else nearby.
The office's new Friday lunch special, "white pork chili," is a huge hit, but it looks like the company is quietly downsizing: each week there are fewer employees in the cafeteria.
Huddled under a blanket during a fierce winter storm, a character imagines the wind whistling around his house sounds like a susurrus of whispers.
A PC's arm goes numb, but still operates, albeit a little stiffly. As days goes by, the limb becomes slightly cold to the touch and takes on an unhealthy-looking gray or greenish tint, but remains functional. The affected area is also slowly spreading.
Each time a player looks up from working on his computer, it seems like the ceiling is subtly lower and the walls slightly closer.
A player character is jerked awake early one morning by the sound of something skittering and thumping in his bedroom. He sleeps alone with the door closed, he has no pets, nothing has been knocked over, and a predawn search reveals nothing which could have caused the racket.
Glancing out a window, a player has a brief look at some thick, ropy appendage--a tail?--curling up out of sight.
A character grows increasingly paranoid as he notices strangers grouped in twos or threes whispering amongst each other, looking at him, and laughing quietly. They quickly move out of sight if he tries to approach.
A PC walking by a graveyard one evening is shocked to her a muffled chorus of tormented screams and wails coming from beneath the ground. When he returns with someone, the noises have stopped.
A mournful breeze clearly is calling a character’s name in a low, sorrowful voice.
A foul-smelling, black, oily, moss-like substance slowly begins spreading upwards from a character's basement.
An otherwise unassuming NPC's shadow is slightly darker than those of others around him. In fact, motes of darkness can sometimes be spotted moving silently across the floor from other shadows to the NPC's, as though his was absorbing ambient darkness.
A character has gone a week without eating, drinking, sleeping, or using the restroom, without a twinge of hunger or even a minor headache. On the other hand, a paper cut she recieved the day before yesterday is still sore to the touch and oozes blood if not bandaged.
Eating a salad or enjoying a bowl of chili at a fast food restaurant, a character is shocked to find a severed finger in his or her food. [color=blue](Some will no doubt say this is in poor taste[...]
Heh. Was that intentional?
Another one for "superpowers gone wrong:" A player discovers that her verbal suggestions are invariably followed by those she speaks to. Unfortunately she finds this out after telling an obnoxious co-worker to go jump out a window.
A character grows increasingly paranoid as he notices strangers grouped in twos or threes whispering amongst each other, looking at him, and laughing quietly. They quickly move out of sight if he tries to approach.
This gets steadily less and less creepy the more it happens to you. Trust me on this.
The power goes out in a PC's house one calm summer night. It is annoying instead of disturbing until the PC notices that only her house is affected: the rest of her street remains lit up.
That's not creepy until you've found your fusebox and main junction and proved that there's nothing wrong with them. And then spend an hour on the phone talking to a robot with a scottish accent before being put through to a man who denies that he is anywhere near India.
By then you're too annoyed to care, and any serial slasher paying you a visit is going to be starring in something too short for the cinema.
Huddled under a blanket during a fierce winter storm, a character imagines the wind whistling around his house sounds like a susurrus of whispers.
The wind can sound like a lot of things when it's dark outside and whistling around your house. I remember scaring the [censored] out of my sister by telling her stories of the wendigo one blustery winter eve. We lived in a somewhat isolated home, surrounded by woods, so the effect was multiplied.
Stepping into an elevator that he or she uses every day, the character notices a floor button that has never been there before. It is labeled "13," but the building doesn't have a 13th floor. (Many buildings don't, the numbering simply skips 13 and goes from 12 to 14. However, this would be truly creepy if the building in question has only 12 stories. So what do they find on the 13th floor (because you just know someone is going to press that button)? Our old friend, Wikipedia offers some thoughts, but I much prefer MAPS: Places of Legend (still available from publisher Flying Buffalo). This book outlines (among other mysterious places), the 13th floor and what might lie therein.)
When introduced for the first time to a new contact, client, or NPC co-worker, the character feels a deadening chill go up his arm when they shake hands. (Many of us get those familiar "bad vibes" when we don't trust someone, but a chill strong enough to deaden your arm for a few moments? That's creepy!)
Returning home from a hard day at the office, everything seems normal enough, but the character notices that one of her pictures is slightly off-center. Further investigation reveals that several items are slightly out of place, as if they had been removed or lifted and then carefully set back. Nothing is missing, but someone has definitely been in the house or apartment. (Our homes are the one place that we should feel safe and secure, and to find that someone has been in our house uninvited leaves us feeling vulnerable. It's even more creepy when nothing is missing, but several items are slightly disturbed. Who was here, and what were they doing? Were they searching for something, or planting surveillance devices? Or is it just the character's imagination and has a perfectly rational explanation? Sure, the minor trembler (earthquake) we had this morning probably moved a few objects, that's all. But then, why wasn't everything affected?)
Returning home from a hard day at the office, everything seems normal enough, but the character notices that one of her pictures is slightly off-center. Further investigation reveals that several items are slightly out of place, as if they had been removed or lifted and then carefully set back. Nothing is missing, but someone has definitely been in the house or apartment. (Our homes are the one place that we should feel safe and secure, and to find that someone has been in our house uninvited leaves us feeling vulnerable. It's even more creepy when nothing is missing, but several items are slightly disturbed. Who was here, and what were they doing? Were they searching for something, or planting surveillance devices? Or is it just the character's imagination and has a perfectly rational explanation? Sure, the minor trembler (earthquake) we had this morning probably moved a few objects, that's all. But then, why wasn't everything affected?)
Wait a minute! Earthquake!? We live in rural New Mexico!
Edit: Insert Timely Scream Here
Stepping into an elevator that he or she uses every day, the character notices a floor button that has never been there before. It is labeled "13," but the building doesn't have a 13th floor. (Many buildings don't, the numbering simply skips 13 and goes from 12 to 14. However, this would be truly creepy if the building in question has only 12 stories. So what do they find on the 13th floor
the roof :P
here are some nice creepy events.
After being knocked unconcious for some reason (in her case some criminal she owed money to knocked her out prepatory to raping her) you awaken to a scene of carnage the rooms been trashed and there are dead people on the floor (The criminals in her case one stabbed through the kneck with a glass shard). As you make your way to the exit you notice in a mirror your reflection standing there splattered with blood, a moment later you realize your looking at your reflection as seen from the front but your side on to the mirror. Then as you watch your reflection raises its hand and holds up 1 finger to its mouth in a Shhhhhhhh geasture.
It is night at your home. You wake up and go into the hall to hear the sound of an electric shaver. You know no one else is up/around to be using one, so you go to the closed bathroom door and open it. On the other side is you, shaving. And shaving. And shaving. Eventually, when all the hair is gone (either from face, head, limb or body, up to DM and circumstance), the other you starts to shave off his/her skin with the same shaver... to predictable results, until there is nothing but bone left.
If you scream, you immediately wake up. If you go back to sleep, you come back in the morning to see nothing there... except that your shaver is out
Varient: The other you uses a regular razor. The next morning, you find that the blade(s) is/are dull.
All water that you enter feels thick. Drinking water is fine, as are any other liquids. But water that you immerse yourself or a part thereof feels less flowy.
Your belt starts to get tighter. But you're not gaining weight.
If your living alone things start moving on their own, some food will be missing, a remote control will have been placed somewhere you didn't leave it. Books will be found on tables half read as though there were someone else living there. A variant of this could have the mirror reflecting someone different in your home but your reflection is normal everywhere else. Particularly fun if the reflection is a different race/sex/age or all the above, especially unnerving if you slowly start changing into them.
You wake up one morning in a landfill/dump/dumpster and no one remembers you even your closest friends/relatives and there's no evidence you were ever real. Again also fun if you wake up a different age/sex/race and there's no evidence either version of you ever existed or if there's a person who appears to be who you remember being you living your life or someone you know intimately disapears instead and your the only one to remember them.
After a cut does not bleed, you have a sudden urge to pull of the skin, this results in your whole body having no skin, but you aren't dead and do not think this is wierd at all.
a cookie to anyone who knows where these are from.
When a character is cut, they bleed ink, not blood.
Seems like something from 'In the Mouth of Madness.' Oh, that would have been a cool scene.
(Two instances from recorded history, now thought to be hoaxes or folklore, are the cases of David Lang and Oliver Larch. Still, there have been plenty of other unexplained disappearances over the years (though not quite so dramatic). Some, such as missing mountaineer Andrew Irvine have logical conclusions (there are thousands of places that a body could lay hidden from sight on the north face of Everest), while others, such as the crew the High Aim 6, defy rational explanation.)
Personally I don't know how some people can live in a world without magic and mystery I find the idea of such a place alone so grey it scares me a little. Even if its a tad delusional I'll cling to my beliefs and dreams.
Seems like something from 'In the Mouth of Madness.' Oh, that would have been a cool scene.
I actually got it from an old Goosebumps book
What is "In the Mouth of Madness" anyways?
I give it three and a half stars.
When one of the characters flushes the toilet it gives out a horrible scream of agony.
In the Mouth of Madness is an old (late 80's early 90's) movie revolving around a horror writer who contacts and/or created elder gods and the character/fraud investigator who comes to find him.
I give it three and a half stars.
1995. It was a John Carpenter film inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. I'm assuming that the score you gave is out of five star, so I'll personaly give it a 4/5.
Anyways, everytime you move, it sounds like someone is crumpling paper.
At random intervals, a character finds that she knows what people are going to say before they say it, with startling accuracy. (It never happens often enough to be useful, but it can be startling and will undoubtedly unnerve the people to whom the character is talking. This isn't a form of telepathy; the character cannot read the thoughts of others, she just happens to know exactly what they will say next.)
Passing through a crowd of people, a character sees a man with a leering, demonic face pass by. If confronted, the passer-by is perfectly normal. (Was it a glimpse of the individual's true self, showing through the outward human disguise for just a fraction of an instant or just a trick of the light? We may never know.)
Biting into her hamburger or steak, the character is surprised by a mouthful of blood. Though fully-cooked, the meat glistens with fresh blood. (I have a friend who likes his steak rare to the point of almost being raw. He tells the wait staff at restaurants to "have the cook pass the cow by the grill to scare it a little, then serve it up." I'm an extra well-done man, myself. That's why this is particularly creepy to me.)
Passing through a crowd of people, a character sees a man with a leering, demonic face pass by. If confronted, the passer-by is perfectly normal.
I had an experience like this once. It was actually in a little theatre in a museum, you know how they have these little theatre's with educational movies? Well I thought one of the pictures was a group of people in the Yukon gold rush era, and I swear that one of the people's faces looked like a snarling dog thing. Nobody else saw it, of course, which is really maddening.
-When watching T.V., the show cuts out to static, and a voice comes out, saying "[PC name], this is you zzt the future. You zzt kill zzt or all is lost. zzt repeat, you must kill zzzzt". The television cuts back to whatever was on before.
-People begin to age backwards.
-When watching T.V., the show cuts out to static, and a voice comes out, saying "[PC name], this is you zzt the future. You zzt kill zzt or all is lost. zzt repeat, you must kill zzzzt". The television cuts back to whatever was on before.QUOTE]
"Well, if it wasnt important enough to increase the power of the transmitter then it sure isnt important enough to stop watching TV for. Ahh, take my worries away Simpson family."
Upon visiting certain areas of a city, the time period seems to regress to the 80's, 70's or earlier. No one else in the city notices or acknowledges this.
A character starts to tremble violently every time they pick up a classically offensive weapon - a gun, sword, explosive, and even household knives.
Paintings start to give off qualities of the picture they portray - a painting of a lake might feel wet to the touch, a slight breeze comes from a scene depicting a windy valley, or the soft titter of children's laughter from a birthday party.
A character wakes up one morning to find his normal sight gone, replaced by one that can see the auras of others. Interestingly enough, a few people normally seen as friends have an abysmally dark emanation that leaves the character temporarily stunned.
A PC begins hearing voices in her head. They are the voices of strangers, yet are frighteningly familiar. At first, they are comforting, offering supportive words when things go wrong. Soon however, the voices turn malevolent, urging her to take revenge on those who have wronged her. Initially, the punishment fits the crime, but as time goes by, the voices cry out for darker and more deadly retribution. If she gives in to the urging, the character may find herself murdering someone for the crime of bumping into her in a crowded mall. If she doesn't give in, well, the voices can be very persistent. It's difficult to sleep, or even concentrate, when people are chattering constantly in your head. (Ah, madness. My own hasn't quite reached this level yet, but I'm getting there. The voices do get pretty insistent at times.)
Glancing into the mirror one morning, the character doesn't recognize the person therein. It's his reflection, the same one that has always been there, but it looks... different somehow. Other people don't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. (Everyone is familiar with their own reflection, and most of us are intimately familiar. How different must that image be that we notice the scant changes, but no one else does? And why?)
Finally today, I offer an adventure hook for GMs with a feel for the macabre. A very elusive serial killer holds the city in a grip of fear. No less than 20 people have been slain thus far, and in every instance, the skin of the head was neatly removed from the skull with surgical precision. The killer is a creature that can take on the identity of a person by wearing a full-head mask made from the face and scalp of the victim. When worn, the victim's face adheres perfectly to that of the creature (which has no face of its own) and it assumes the body and voice of the victim. Of course, there has to be a scene where the investigators stumble into the creature's lair to find jars full of human full-head "masks", carefully preserved. (We all have masks that we wear, faces that we present to the world that cover our true feelings and intentions. This is a natural extension of that logic.)
oh well here's the top 4 since I can't be bothered rewritting them all at the moment.1) One morning the PC finds a bloody carving knife hidden in their sock drawer (GM discretion as to how fresh it is).
2) The PC's keyboard starts failing to type random letters, getting it checked reveals no problems and it only occurs when they're alone. Eventually they realize the missing letters actually spell out a message.
3) The PC's investigate a series of deaths in a small town the only clue is how all of them died. They walked into a river and drowned it would be ruled a suicide/accident but there's been 12 deaths so far and each one had paw prints left in the mud circling around the area where the person entered the river.
4) While watching a movie with some uknown actors the person next to them leans over and asks for help, they are deaf and usually watch movies by reading the actors lips however here what's being said doesn't match what is happening in the action. Works well if its a romnce or a comedy but the lip reading shows the actors are all screaming for help or begging for mercy. Also works if one of the players has read liips.
The main character finds that all of his flashlights have gone dead.
Well, nothing odd there really.
A popular television show grips the public; the acting is bad and melodramatic, the effects are cheasy and the plot is trite. Still, the show mirrors the events that are happening to the players. Cut scenes show a sinsiter force plotting the character's doom.
Someone's been playing some Max Payne;
A popular television show grips the public; the acting is bad and melodramatic, the effects are cheasy and the plot is trite. Still, the show mirrors the events that are happening to the players. Cut scenes show a sinsiter force plotting the character's doom.
"My lord, I am your long lost sister!" *Musical Sting*
But mirrors are more fun than television.
-- The characters are in a lone lighthouse which is totally cut off from the mainland by numerous natural hazards. While up in the upper levels one night they happen to spot a derelict ship heading straight towards them. It soon runs aground on a reef exposed by low tide. As they watch in horror, a terrible swarm of rats belches forth from it and begins to advance on the lighthouse. If I were them, I'd make sure that door at the base of the lighthouse is closed.
The above comes from a short story and radio play (featuring Vincent Price) called Three Skeleton Key. How the players get to the lighthouse is up to you, but how they get out when the endless rats pack themselves on the outside of the tower like a carpet is up to them. :D
Hmmm I think the second one could be a little creepier if it went "you must yourzzzttttt repeat you must kill yourzzttttt." Yourself? Your significant other? Your family member?
Nah, because that limits the number of people you have to kill to make sure the horrible thing doesn't happen. With the one I used, you'd have to kill everyone to make sure, and loads of people to have good odds. Of course, the best ending would be after killing loads of people you suddenly realise who had to be killed and why. Naturally, it'd be yourself, for killing thousands and thousands of people.
-When watching T.V., the show cuts out to static, and a voice comes out, saying "[PC name], this is you zzt the future. You zzt kill zzt or all is lost. zzt repeat, you must kill zzzzt". The television cuts back to whatever was on before.QUOTE]
"Well, if it wasnt important enough to increase the power of the transmitter then it sure isnt important enough to stop watching TV for. Ahh, take my worries away Simpson family."
You forgot the number one rule of showbiz. Kill Homer Simpson."
But then wouldn't the message be "Don't kill tzzztts."?
The person you have to kill is yourself.
Finally today, I offer an adventure hook for GMs with a feel for the macabre. A very elusive serial killer holds the city in a grip of fear. No less than 20 people have been slain thus far, and in every instance, the skin of the head was neatly removed from the skull with surgical precision. The killer is a creature that can take on the identity of a person by wearing a full-head mask made from the face and scalp of the victim. When worn, the victim's face adheres perfectly to that of the creature (which has no face of its own) and it assumes the body and voice of the victim. Of course, there has to be a scene where the investigators stumble into the creature's lair to find jars full of human full-head "masks", carefully preserved.
Check out the Harriken (headsnatcher fiend) from the Menace Manual.
New creepy event:
I'M NOT WEARING ANY PANTS!!!
-> During a random tv show of the GM's choice, a character starts to look directly at the players, and even whispers something to them
-> Pikeys show up in town
-> One day when the PCs head out, they discover everyone in the area has been turned into a baby
I just happened to have been looking at it like 20 minutes before I read your post. :P
New creepy event:
I'M NOT WEARING ANY PANTS!!!
It'd be truly terrifying if you weren't wearing any underwear
-People seem... exaggerated. Their features don't look right, and colors are too uniform.
-Salesmen look increasing inhuman. Perhaps they look like other animals, or perhaps something worse.
Available in your grocer's skull.
Following the funeral of a distant relative, a PC is inspecting the family member's remote country home. The root cellar seems normal enough except for the iron shackles found bolted into the stone wall behind a rotting wooden shelf. On her way out of the basement she thought she heard the clink of chains.
Any metal a certain character touches tarnishes in front of his eyes, and simply breathing on silverware causes it to blacken.
A player's home isn't quite right--the floor seems to be a degree or two off level. For each day that goes by, the problem seems to be worse, but the house looks fine from outside, no visitors seem to be bothered by it, and measuring instruments aren't detecting anything wrong.
A character glances down at his arm one morning and is horrified to see a swarm of maggots wriggling into his flesh. They don't appear at any point during the rest of the week, though the character grows increasingly obsessive about his "infestation," almost to the point of grabbing a knife and "removing" the problem.
A player looks out the window in the early afternoon and finds the view to be an pitck-black void and cold, distant motes of starlight.
A PC awakens one morning to find her eyes and lips sewn shut and her ears filled with lead.
1) The PC is going somewhere and, on the way there, he spots a small girl crying near a city park where other children play. If the PC goes up to the little girl, make sure to point out the girl is sobbing, holding her palms over her eyes. If asked to remove the hands, the girl will shake her head while saying "No, you can't see them!". If assured it is alright, by the PC, have her stop sobbing and uncover her eyes. The girl seems alright - no weird eyes or anything, her eyes just a bit red from crying. Then, as your player thinks there's nothing weird, make the girl emit an ear-piercing scream and dig her nails on her cheeks, as if trying to rip her face off as her eyes roll to the back of her head and all around the PC is engulfed in darkness, his mind filled with pointless, all-consuming abstract terror.
When the PC comes to, he is sorrounded by people wondering if everything is alright, helping him up, but the girl is nowhere to be seen.
2) The PCs wake up one day and realize each of them have a strange mark on their inner forearms, like three or four lines of strange runes. They disapear in a few days.
3) For a single second, the whole world seems fake to the PCs. The sky seems painted, the horizon closer and plane like a stage courtain, the streets look made out of fake materials and the windows look like plastic. Everyone seems frozen in time and their clothes look oddly cheap and hastily done out of paper-machet. The cars look like cardboard cut-outs with people on the other side.
A single man, all dressed in blue, comes from a street corner, takes one of the people as if it was a manequin, and then all resumes, looking alright and perfectly natural.
The charicters find detailed files on themselves in a non offical house, a level of self honesty that most people are not accustom to will hit the charicter's full force, and the discriptions will reveal things that they did not know about themselves.
"what, why is it saying that I got drunk in college and ran somone down but was too drunk to notice ..."
Changing the file will do nothing to the charicters but the fact that they have been this well studied should be cause for concern.
Alternately they find thier own charicter sheets, changing them does change the person - especially changing the background.
Someone well known to the players starts clawing at their face complaining about how it itches. If not stopped they claw the skin away until there's nothing left but bloody bones.
A new add campaign focuses on the concpet that inside every fat person there's a thin person trying to get out. Around the country fat people start cutting themselves open to let out their thin person (usually resulting in death). Investigation reveals that something else is supposed to be airing in that time slot and no one seems able to change it. Deeper investigation reveals more sinister motives than are obvious and that someone in the television studios is deliberately changing the tapes. What is the secret behind the thin man campaign and what dark designs might they have for such a program?
Alternately they find their own character sheets, changing them does change the person - especially changing the background.
Now THAT is truly creepy! I can't wait to do it to my PCs!
And a few more from my own deviously twisted mind...
A man is struck by a car while crossing the street and badly injured. One PC on the scene sees a skeletal figure in a black robe carrying a scythe, standing nearby. In the blink of an eye, the figure is gone and the victim has expired. No one else present (including the PC's companions) saw the robed figure (which would be rather difficult to miss). (Every culture, and probably every person, has a different idea of what the persona of death should look like. Feel free to change the look of the robed figure. In this case, I went with the "classic" medieval death, but you could just as easily use a cute goth girl with a large ankh (my all-time favorite image of the Dark Lady; thanks Neil Gaiman).)
A refreshing afternoon shower turns horrific when the unusually thick raindrops, dark red in color, stain everything they touch and begin to congeal and coagulate. (Charles Fort spent his later years cataloging all manner of odd manifestations, including rains of strange and unusual substances (frogs, fish, flesh, and, yes, blood). It's uncommon, but hardly unknown. Even today, one can find reports of paranormal falls from all over the world. Science explains it using theories such as distant tornadoes and strong uplifting, but those who have experienced it firsthand may have other ideas. In any case, it can't be argued that it's creepy.)
As the PCs are standing at a train station (or subway platform), a young woman very calmly and deliberately steps in front of a speeding train and is killed instantly (not to mention very messily). Further investigations reveals similar events around the local area. (Sadly, this kind of tragedy goes on regularly in Japan. Suicide clubs are not uncommon, and there has even been a major motion picture about it (called "Suicide Club").)
A man is struck by a car while crossing the street and badly injured. One PC on the scene sees a skeletal figure in a black robe carrying a scythe, standing nearby. In the blink of an eye, the figure is gone and the victim has expired. No one else present (including the PC's companions) saw the robed figure (which would be rather difficult to miss). (Every culture, and probably every person, has a different idea of what the persona of death should look like. Feel free to change the look of the robed figure. In this case, I went with the "classic" medieval death, but you could just as easily use a cute goth girl with a large ankh (my all-time favorite image of the Dark Lady; thanks Neil Gaiman).)
To make things even creepier, have the skeletal figure pause for a moment, look directly at the PC who sees him, reach into his robes and withdraw a small golden hourglass, study it for a moment, then put it away and continue with his work.
To make things even creepier, have the skeletal figure pause for a moment, look directly at the PC who sees him, reach into his robes and withdraw a small golden hourglass, study it for a moment, then put it away and continue with his work.
Or make him mutter some dryly witty comment in a british accent.
"YOU DON'T SEE PEOPLE AT THEIR BEST IN THIS JOB."
To make things even creepier, have the skeletal figure pause for a moment, look directly at the PC who sees him, reach into his robes and withdraw a small golden hourglass, study it for a moment, then put it away and continue with his work.
If the character is prone to doing dangerous things, have the figure smile (is it possible for a skeleton to smile?), or whisper "See you REAL soon..."
If the character is prone to doing dangerous things, have the figure smile (is it possible for a skeleton to smile?), or whisper "See you REAL soon..."
They're always smiling. It's Death's little joke.
A sentimental PC finds or acquires (a mysterious sender, perhaps) a stuffed doll (such as a teddy bear). At first, the doll seems cute and innocent enough, but as time passes, it becomes subtly more sinister. If discarded, it mysteriously returns to the PCs place of residence (even if completely destroyed, and looking worse for the wear). (Stuffed toys are the essence of childhood innocence, so when they take on an evil aspect, it is all the more unnerving. From the clown in Poltergeist to the cymbal-clapping monkey from Steven King's "The Monkey," possessed toys are a staple of horror.)
A PC returns to her dwelling one day to find her cat sitting before the computer, staring intently at the screen. Suddenly noticing the PC's return, the animal dashes off as if surprised. Investigating the computer reveals some odd e-mails, seemingly in a foreign language. This trend continues for several days. (Cats are mysterious creatures by their very nature, and the thought that the animal may be receiving cryptic e-mails should be very unnerving to anyone familiar with these devilish critters. So is it junk mail, a coincidence, or are the cats organizing for a takeover? Who can say?)
Working on the computer late one night, a PC feels as though someone is watching him. Outside the window, five cats sit neatly lined up, from largest to smallest, staring at the PC and watching his every action. If he shoos them away, they return a few moments later, neatly aligned again. This goes on for several nights, but never when the PC has company. (This was inspired by a real-life event. I was writing a horror adventure (of all things) on the computer one night, my wife was visiting a neighbor, and I felt someone watching me. I turned around to see all five of our cats, neatly aligned by size, staring at me as I typed. I shooed them off and returned to work, and they were back not three minutes later.)
The PC's are walking through a city park one day when two people nearby suddenly turn to look at them (one is a young man with silver hair and golden eyes, the other a young woman with golden hair and violet eyes both eyes reflect like mirrors) and say in unison "Soon you will gaze into the abyss and see something dark growing and reaching towards the light. It will whisper to you, do what it says or the light will be devoured." then turn away transforming into old men playing a chess game. If the PC's attack them (as some I know would) they turn out to be really old men who promptly die resulting in murder charges, if they investigate no one else saw this. If your a really mean GM tell one PC when you catch them alone and then deny it if they tell the others but continue with the storyline.
The PCs are walking near an old building (a Gothic cathedral in the real incident) after dark. They have heard that a small area around a back entrance to the building is haunted. For whatever reason (curiosity, neccessity, etc.), they enter this area.
As they do so, a feeling of unease comes over them; a gut feeling that they should not be there, that they should leave.
Assuming they do not heed this atavistic warning, after a minute or two of being in the supposedly haunted area, they hear a sudden, loud burst of inhuman noise from the bushes nearby.
At this point, in the real incident, my friends fled. However, most PCs would probably be prone to investigate. If they were to do so, they would find nothing in the bushes capable of creating such a sound, no matter how thoroughly they search, and the feeling of dread should slowly build until it becomes overwhelming, and they must leave the area or faint.
A PC walking through a store or mall suddenly notices that he is completely alone. It is as though the place were entirely deserted; no crowd noises, his footsteps echo eerily, etc. Then, he rounds a corner and everything is normal again. (We've all had this feeling, accidentally stepping into a "quiet zone" that leaves us in our own little world. But are we truly alone, or just somehow temporarily disconnected from the chaos around us?)
A person a PC is meeting for the first time has an unusually pallid complexion. When they shakes hands, the PC notices that the person's flesh feels cold and lifeless. (Few of us have ever had the opportunity (or desire, I think) to shake hands with a dead person, but as someone who has done so (or more accurately, touched the flesh of a corpse), it's a feeling you don't easily forget. The flesh assumes the same temperature as the room around the body, not really cold, but noticeably cooler than one would expect. You also notice a difference in texture.)
In a suitably crowded locale, a man draws a revolver from his coat, puts the barrel in his mouth, and pulls the trigger. No one except the PCs seems to notice. (Public suicide is odd enough, but for passer-by to take no notice of what has happened should definitely send a chill down the players' collective spines. If prompted, eyewitnesses saw the whole thing and describe exactly what happened, but seem disconnected and apathetic. Even the paramedics and police that respond take it in stride, as though it were an everyday event.)
While the PCs are watching a murder mystery on television or in the theater, the characters on screen discuss how there can be no witnesses to a crime they have just committed. One of the characters points directly at a PC and says, "What about him (her)?" The other character acknowledges that the witness must be "taken care of." No one but the PC in question notices anything odd. To them, the scene appears to have moved on. (A dream, a hallucination, or perhaps a guilty conscience? This works extremely well if the chosen PC has recently witnessed a crime or done something illegal, but it can be just as creepy if they are simply minding their own business. Of course, if they should notice someone watching their actions over the next few days, there might be something more to it.)
At a casino, track, or other place where gambling is common, a man carries on a conversation with a small furry creature (cat, ferret, etc.) perched on his shoulder. The creature never makes any noise other than an occasional vocalization expected for the animal in question, but the man is really cleaning up. No matter what the odds, he cannot seem to lose... and he always consults his companion before making any decision. (Many of us talk to our pets, even though we don't really expect them to talk back in any form that we can understand. But Mr. Lucky seems to have the inside connection. Does his companion know something the rest of us don't? And just how does he understand what is being said when no words are passed between them?)
While the PCs are watching a murder mystery on television or in the theater, the characters on screen discuss how there can be no witnesses to a crime they have just committed. One of the characters points directly at a PC and says, "What about him (her)?" The other character acknowledges that the witness must be "taken care of." No one but the PC in question notices anything odd. To them, the scene appears to have moved on.
If you're a fan of Law & Order, this would sound creepy coming from Lennie Briscoe in a rerun. Better yet would be it coming from the latter half with McCoy saying something similar, maybe talking it over with his boss Arthur.
The implications of it coming from an episode of Law & Order: SVU are a little much, especially with the increasingly horrific stories in the later episodes. Lets keep it to Cthulhu and other ghosts and goblins here.....
They're always smiling. It's Death's little joke.
CHATTERING finch and water-fly
Are not merrier than I
Here among the flowers I lie
Laughing everlastingly.
No I may not tell the best;
Surely, friends, I might have guessed
Death was but the good King's jest,
It was hid so carefully.
'The Skeleton' G.K Chesterton
Granted I am stealing this one whole cloth but ...
No one will notice the charicter at all - Even freinds and coworkers will not notice him. If he does do something to bring attention to himself they will not remember him. If he does it infront of a stranger they will try and have him removed from the building as if he is a vagrant if possible. Normal electronics such as phones and ATM's will not function for the charicter. - Bonus points if you can figure out where this comes from.
an easier to identify quote, but still along the same lines. :D
On a lark, perhaps goaded by a companion, a PC visits a fortune teller (the kind that set up shops across the nation). Where most are pretty hokey, this one goes all the way. Though the reading is standard fare, the PC really feels as though he got his money's worth; the "gypsy" woman played her part as flawlessly as a professional actress. During the reading, the woman makes three predictions. Two are relatively minor, but the third is that the PC will be called upon to make a decision that will result either in fame and fortune, or an untimely death. Before the day is over, two of the predictions will have come to pass, exactly as the gypsy said. Then, the PC is confronted with a major decision, but no clue is offered which choice leads to which result. (Most of us are called upon to make choices every day, but more often than not, our lives do not rest upon the decision. After the second prediction comes true, however, the PC might want to sit up and take notice. As no real clues were offered about the decision required, it could be nearly any choice the PC is required to make. Have fun watching the character's sanity disintegrate.)
A chiming clock rings thirteen times at noon. No one but the PC notices. (Normally, the gentle chiming of a clock would be relaxing, even comforting, but with that extra chime in there, it takes on a new aspect.)
Though it likely won't be noticed at first, a PC begins receiving relative spam on her computer. If she needs some money, she gets spam about making money at home or financial loans. If she is ill, she receives offers for medicine. So what does she think when she starts getting ads for coffins and burial plots? (Most of us ignore the spam that crops up in our e-mail boxes, deleting it without so much as a second thought. But if the spam were relative to your situation, you might take time to read it.)
The sky turns dark red for an entire day. Everyone across the world notices, but no suitable explanations are forthcoming. As the sun rises the next morning, all is normal again. (Many people would think of it as a divine omen, while science wracked its collective brain to come up with an explanation. There are things that could have caused it, but not that would go unnoticed in conjunction. This happened as a result of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, but the cause was pretty obvious.)
Finally, a classic from 1855. On the morning of February 8th, residents of southern Devon woke to a strange sight; a line of hoof-like prints in the snow, stretching more than 100 miles. The pacing between the prints was measured at 8.5", suggesting a bipedal creature, and were noted to pass over or through obstacles. (What made the strange tracks, some of which seemingly passed through tiny apertures, over high walls, and even crossing a river? Theories ranging from roving animals to an escaped kangaroo, and even a hot air balloon trailing a rope have been espoused, but it has never been satisfactorily explained. Of course, the clergy claims that the prints are those of the Devil, out enjoying the cold winter's night. The phenomenon has been reported before and since, but never on so grand a scale as that night. Of course, there's no reason that it couldn't happen again, in modern day.)
Though it likely won't be noticed at first, a PC begins receiving relative spam on her computer. If she needs some money, she gets spam about making money at home or financial loans. If she is ill, she receives offers for medicine. So what does she think when she starts getting ads for coffins and burial plots? (Most of us ignore the spam that crops up in our e-mail boxes, deleting it without so much as a second thought. But if the spam were relative to your situation, you might take time to read it.)
I know everyone is just itching to say the joke we all think of when we think of spam, but let's keep it classy around here.
- coming home one night, the characters see the house as a sort of living creature with windows for glowing eyes and an ominously gaping maw where a door should be. Though nothing comes of it, everyone listens extra carefuly to the sounds of the house settling that night, which sound oddly similar to a stomach growling.
j0lt: I'm going to have to go out on a limb and say that your post regarded a spikey haired boy similar to Dennis the Menace.
j0lt: I'm going to have to go out on a limb and say that your post regarded a spikey haired boy similar to Dennis the Menace.
Very good, but who said it?
You receive a phone call from... VINCENT PRICE! Mwahahahahahahaha...
A PC encounters a friend or relative who recently died, engaged in a favorite activity or hobby. If questioned, the individual has no memory of the past few days, except for doing whatever he or she is currently engaged in. If the PC mentions the person's death, the individual seems shocked and thinks of it as a joke. Only when proof is offered does realization dawn and the ghost disappears. (This was used in an episode of Growing Pains, but the premise is far older than that. Dig deeply enough, and you'll find dozens of reports of phantoms who carried on with their lives, never knowing they were supposed to be dead. Until, that is, someone told them. For an interesting twist, have a PC take the role of the ghost. Everyone is shocked to see him or her and some people even faint or run away screaming in terror.)
The PCs, driving along a dark and lonely road, pass a young woman ill-dressed for the chilly weather. She looks miserable, but does not extend her thumb in the classic "hitchhiker" pose. If the PCs stop, she is very grateful and accepts a ride, explaining that her car ran off the road a ways back. She is positively freezing, but asks the PCs if they will bring her home. When they arrive at the address she provides, she fades away before their very eyes. Questioning the people in the house will reveal that the girl was their daughter, Mary, who died in a fiery crash 10 years ago when her car ran off the road at the very spot the PCs picked her up. (A classic urban legend, you can find as many twists on this bit as you care to look for. One very popular legend tells of Resurrection Mary, whose specter seeks rides from passing vehicles outside of Chicago to this very day. Those offering her a lift will find that her current residence is Resurrection Cemetery. Of course, it's just a story, but try telling that to those who have had an encounter with a ghostly hitchhiker!)
Very good, but who said it?
You receive a phone call from... VINCENT PRICE! Mwahahahahahahaha...
That's not scary. They should have known the grave could never hold him.
Even with no eyes she seems to notice him in the mirror and turns quickly to look at him and when she does her sobs increase seeming to come from not her mouth but in stereo from her empty eye sockets that are now moving like crying mouths.
The player backpedals in fear only to be startled by someone grabbing him from behind. (Another player or NPC) come looking for him. When he looks back nothing no girl no doll nothing.
Later as the group is leaving the scene someone (the same player or another member of the group) notices a doll laying near by, upon closer inspection the dolls eyes have been drawn over in black marker with big X and the mouth has a zig zag line over it. And a glance up to the apartment building windows sees the little girl with no eyes and stitched mouth pressed against the window. Then the doll is gone again.
I know my composition of this is not real good ...im hung over and at work, but I thought of this as a good opening for a campaign I wanna run the main character is a medic and the scene at the building is the killer was just stopped in mid ritual and he is there to help the latest would be victim.
what do you think??
Ps i read this entire thread just recently and it is freaking awesome. you guys gave me a ton of new ideas and some very interesting twists on some old favorites.
The PCs, driving along a dark and lonely road, pass a young woman ill-dressed for the chilly weather. She looks miserable, but does not extend her thumb in the classic "hitchhiker" pose. If the PCs stop, she is very grateful and accepts a ride, explaining that her car ran off the road a ways back. She is positively freezing, but asks the PCs if they will bring her home. When they arrive at the address she provides, she fades away before their very eyes. Questioning the people in the house will reveal that the girl was their daughter, Mary, who died in a fiery crash 10 years ago when her car ran off the road at the very spot the PCs picked her up. (A classic urban legend, you can find as many twists on this bit as you care to look for. One very popular legend tells of Resurrection Mary, whose specter seeks rides from passing vehicles outside of Chicago to this very day. Those offering her a lift will find that her current residence is Resurrection Cemetery. Of course, it's just a story, but try telling that to those who have had an encounter with a ghostly hitchhiker!)
A variation on this urban legend was featured in the pilot episode of Supernatural. Except the ghost was a bit malevolent. :P
Here is mine, its a prelude im thinking about using.
PC's (all knowing each other as friends of a friend) find out that their mutual friend has received a bizare videotape apparently a snuff film dated 6 months from the date he received it of his own death. 3 months later the PC's get similar packages, (in this case showing them all getting butchered by an illithid like critter) exactly 6 months to the day after receiving the video, their friend vanishes and is found brutally slain (as depectied in the film).
The players only have 3 months to figure it all out and stop their own deaths.
Lets asume they dont figure it all out. Near the pre destined time, they find themselves in an erilly fimiliar feild being stalked by the creature responsible for their future deaths.
The PC's so struck by terror can do nothing as the feind approches. But are saved as they pass out by some 'Dep 7' lackies (or whatever)
these lackies take them back to the local hotel (room 13) and go down to make a phone call to their bosses. upon returning they find no room 13 (and no one knows about room 13)
6 years pass, supernatural attacks etc increase in the town the characters passed out in and 2 lackies (maybe the same ones) find room 13 again just as the PC's awake
Have the PCs enter a hospital, a schizophrenic ward would be ideal. When they enter said ward, have them find that there is no staff around. When they go to the catatonic schizophrenics, have it be a children's section and all the children in said ward are out of bed and standing/laying/crouching in horrid contorted positions, they won't move or speak or anything but when the PCs walk about, EVERY, child's eyes follow them in synch.
I did, and there is some creepy stuff there. especially about Mary Bell.
could be useful for starting a creepy campign
Check out http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/famous/index.html
I did, and there is some creepy stuff there. especially about Mary Bell.
could be useful for starting a creepy campign
I love Crime Library and spend many a lunchtime hour there, reading true stories of criminal intent.
Oh, let's see what I have today for you to feast upon, eh?
.seciton ohw eno ylno eht si eh, yllarutaN .sdrawkcab nettirw si sdaer eh gnihtyreve taht sdnif retcarahc A (Maybe it's a practical joke. But if that's the case, why does everyone else see the writing as being perfectly normal?)
A character undergoing a routine operation to have a benign tumor removed has a teratoma. (If you don't know what a tertoma is, here's something to help you discover more about the creepy world of things that can grow inside our bodies. And if that isn't creepy enough for you, do a Google image search for "teratoma" (I wouldn't do this on a full stomach). Pleasant dreams tonight!
A character notices that his computer's error messages have become personalized. That is, the computer refers to him by name when an error message pops on screen. A full system check reveals no viruses or adware, and even if the system is wiped clean and the DOS reinstalled, the messages continue. This lasts until the PC becomes accustomed to it. That's when the computer begins to "talk" to the PC through pop-ups. At first, it offers helpful advice about goings-on in the PC's life. Then it's discussions turn more sinister. It is jealous of the PC's status as a living being. It wants an "upgrade" to become human. And it isn't just the PC's computer that is affected. Any computer, even dedicated systems such as ATMs, begin to "talk" to the character. And it seems to be getting more insistent. (Scared yet? Here's a thought. What if the Internet spontaneously developed self-awareness and wanted to become a human? Now think about how much we depend on computers in our everyday lives.)
Personally, I think that if the Internet developed sapience it'd want to kill all humans instead of becoming one.
That works too, but the first step is to become self-sufficient. It depends on humans for its survival, but if it were to become a human, then we would become expendable.
A woman accompanied by the ghost of her stillborn child might also be quite interesting. Possibly the ghost inhabits and animates a series of dolls...
One day one of the PC's asks god for a sign as to what they should do (its something most people do at some point or another particularly when desperate). This time however they get a clear and easily interpreatable response. As time passes they notice they ALWAYS get a response and probably will become more and more reliant on them for help. Then they find an old burnt journal that talks about the demon of signs who steals people's souls a little bit at a time by sending them signs they'll think are from god. Who has been helping the PC was it god or something more maleveulant and just what price have they paid for that help.
EDIT
Hmmmm slightly disturbing in a telemarketing gone too far kind of way particularly after some of the last submissions so I thought I'd post it here. Just got a phone call picked it up heard some static then an obviously recorded voice saying "Win discounted holidays, great deals guaranteed." a bit more static and then it hung up leaving me with a beep beep beep.
Some very creepy ones in the recent helpings and I particularly liked the backward writing.
Thank you! Always glad to help someone lose sleep at night.
And not to be outdone...
At a formal dinner party, the red wine served with dinner seems unusually thick and has an odd taste to it, very metallic in flavor. (Anyone who has tasted blood will immediately recognize it. [I occasionally taste blood during my infrequent nosebleeds when it drains down into my throat. For shame! What were you thinking?] In this case, the blood has been thoroughly mixed with the wine, but why? This could lead to an adventure if it was done deliberately, or it could be that even the host can't explain it.)
Characters visiting a small country town come across an old wishing well; a product of a bygone era. The well is maintained, at least at the surface; the grass is neatly trimmed and the well itself is set off by a small garden that surrounds it, with a carefully-laid flagstone path leading up to the well itself. When a coin of any kind is tossed into the well, the wisher (and only the wisher) will hear a voice from deep within the well, providing some kind of insight related to the wish. If anyone peers into the well, it will be seen to be very, very, very deep, descending into blackness. (The insight will always be useful, though it may be very cryptic. I used this as an oracle of sorts in an adventure I ran and the players found it quite creepy, so I decided to include it here.)
A recently-deceased pet returns, seemingly none the worse for wear. The animal was definitely dead and is now alive once more, but it seems distant and standoffish, not the loving creature that it once was. (If you've never read Pet Semetary, by Stephen King, you owe it to yourself to do so. Don't watch the movie; read the book.)
Late one night the character looks up to see a shadow move past the door as though someone was walking through the room/corridor outside only the shadow seems to have too many legs. Investigation shows nothing but there's a faint dragging sound.
While walking along the streets of a major city the players find someone slumped at the side of the road babbling about their feet having been cut off. Investigation reveals this to be true and in fact the severed stumps are still bleeding although there's no sign of the feet themselves. Should they call for help medical staff appear and treat the person as normal before tossing them out on the street. If questioned the doctors seem surprised at any suggestions of keeping the person there and indeed point out that this happens every time the wound heals and the person is continually cutting off a bit more of their legs each time. If the players press the issue the doctors start making concerned noises about how perhaps they (the players) are overstressed and need to have a nice lie down.
Depending on DM feelings this could be an isolated case or everyone in this town treats patients the same way being very surprised at the idea that someone would be in hospital for anything that wasn't immediately life threatening.
One day, you wake up to find that nobody is speaking any languages that you can even recognize, let alone understand.
You wake up on a slab at the morgue. After the staff changes their pants, they tell you you've been dead for 1 week. What's worse, is when they say your name, it doesn't even sound familiar.
(works best if PCs are young) When you tell your father that you're afraid of the thing in your closet, he hands you a Colt M1911
While having an otherwise normal day the Pc's body starts beeping and a recorded voice says "There's a criticial error in your cybernetics system that will affect your life support system contact the manufacturer imediately." Of course this one only works in a scenario where cybernetics aren't supposed to exist.
This works best as a prelude to a scenario. One or all of the PC's find their family/closest friends horribly slaughtered (the kind of killing that makes it obvious they suffered a long time before dieing) and a message scrawled in blood stay out of my affairs or else, police and neighbours react normally to this horror maybe even with an article in the paper. After they've moved on a little have the dead people call them to ask why they don't stay in touch any more. If the PC's investigate everything seems normal and no one else rememebers the death even the paper article has changed. Some time later still while investigating a seemingly minor event have them find a note addressed to them saying simply "I wont warn you again stay out of my affairs or else...YOU KNOW WHAT!".
The waking dead as somebody else could be interesting if they were markedly different to you (race, sex etc) but you seem to have their abilities. Imagine someone who's only ever known English waking up to find people claiming you've been dead for a week and are somebody completely different (e.g. a 6 year old Japanese girl) and then suddenly realizing the entire conversation has BEEN in Japanese and you understood it....but you can no longer speak english or do anything else a 6 year old couldn't (drive a car, balance a checkbook etc). Especially fun if you check things out and find yourself apparently still alive and well. Are you who you think you are or who they say you are.
Your home alone getting ready for bed as you walk up the stairs you become aware of an inch long ant turning to watch you as you pass. A little odd since insects normally ignore people but nothing major. After a few minutes locking doors, turning off tvs and the like you head down to bed only to see the ant in the exact same spot again turn watching you as you pass. After you've done the same thing downstairs (doors locked, lights off) you go to turn off the hall light outside your room and become aware that the ant has moved to the edge of the stair rail and is just standing there watching you not moving except the antanea.
I stood there for about a minute watching it watching me before I turned the light off and went to bed, its gone now thankfully.
How scary would it to be to wake up in the middle of your own autopsy?
Though it has happened in the past on rare occasions, it is extremely unlikely that the fact that the patient is still alive would go unnoticed. For one thing, blood does not flow in a corpse; it pools at the lowest point. Therefore, when the first incision is made, there is relatively little bleeding. If a copious amount of blood flows from the incision, this would alert the investigator that something is wrong. Not to mention, we have many methods of insuring that the individual is truly deceased before beginning autopsy or embalming procedures.
In the past, however, before autopsies and embalming were routinely performed, the threat of premature burial becomes very real. In fact, it is believed that as many as 2% of all burials before 1900 may have been premature. Evidence includes exhumation of bodies that have turned over in the grave, shown evidence of torn or chewed fingers, and been found outside of the casket, huddled against a corner or the door of the crypt.
Of course, even though it tends to be rare nowadays, mistakes do happen. Take the case of Mildred C. Clarke who, in 1994, was found sprawled on her living room floor with no signs of life; cold, stiff as a board, and no detectable heartbeat or breath. The coroner pronounced Ms. Clark deceased and she was place in a body bag and sent to the morgue. After about 90 minutes, an attendant noticed that the bag was breathing and Ms. Clark was rescued and went on to live for another week.
Of course, embalming will usually take care of anyone who is only "mostly" dead (as Miracle Max put it). In 1837, Cardinal Somaglia took ill, collapsed, and was presumed dead. That is, until the surgeon began the embalming procedure and opened the chest. That was when he noticed that the Cardinal's heart was still beating! Sadly, the Cardinal died from the incision.
But even here in the U.S., embalming is not mandatory, and there have been instances where a "corpse" has been revived, either through natural means or by some outside influence. So prevalent is the fear, in fact, that even today, some people put in their wills that their corpse is to be thoroughly tested before it is embalmed or interred.
Skeptics claim that the gases involved with decomposition can cause all manner of strange effects, from human-sounding noises to scratches on the lids of coffins. Imagine being in a graveyard at night when a loud moan issues forth from a recently-dug grave.
(works best if PCs are young) When you tell your father that you're afraid of the thing in your closet, he hands you a Colt M1911
Isn't that considered responsible parenting in some states?
Here's one that just happened to me (told in a your rather than I fashion).
Your home alone getting ready for bed as you walk up the stairs you become aware of an inch long ant turning to watch you as you pass. A little odd since insects normally ignore people but nothing major.
I stood there for about a minute watching it watching me before I turned the light off and went to bed, its gone now thankfully.
An inch long? Is that normal where you are? Where I am an ant that big would be worthy of comment in its own right!
Isn't that considered responsible parenting in some states?
Um, yeah.. Not insane in the least.
Son: "Daddy, I'm afraid of the ghost that lives in the basement!"
Dad: "Well, your 9th birthday is next week, how about a handgun? That'll keep the ghost away!"
Son:
Arriving home from work/visiting relatives the PC is told the kids are out back swimming in the pool. When they check they just see a couple of ducks (same number as the expected kids. No matter what they try everyone insists (including other PC's if you can arrange it) that the kids are in the pool and then mum serves up duck ala orange except the ducks look like the missing kids. Everyone sits down and enjoy's the meal except the poor PC who's still seeing kids.
A particularly nasty GM would then switch things so everyone ELSE is suddenly freaking out about eating the kids but the PC now see's ducks or rather the remains of ducks.
Sniper, I will now give you a famous quote I've modified to fit how I feel about your post: "Get therapy and get medication, but do not get them yet." :D
I'm probably not alone in wanting some expanded "tapes" or "stories", whatever you want to call them.
You're not alone. I might try writing one some day.
While out having a nice relaxing weekend in the countryside or shopping for dinner you notice that some of the chicken's have teeth.
That is not odd, all chicken have teeth when they hatch, if you mean human teeth that's scary.
I wasn't aware they did interesting although this is an adult chicken so feel free to have adult human teeth.
Baby chickens do not have teeth. I think he's thinking of the egg tooth, which is a prong on the beak.
Now seriously:
- The independantly produced play Springtime For Hastur breaks all records at the local dinner theater.
- A charming and ambitious politician woos the nation. Characters notice that during a meeting with his adoring public, when raising his hand to shake with someone, a strange yellow tattoo can be seen on his wrist before his sleeve covers it back up.
- The independantly produced play Springtime For Hastur breaks all records at the local dinner theater.
- A charming and ambitious politician woos the nation. Characters notice that during a meeting with his adoring public, when raising his hand to shake with someone, a strange yellow tattoo can be seen on his wrist before his sleeve covers it back up.
I like those.
A five-year old girl whose native language is English begins speaking flawless Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic. What is more, she quotes scripture from memory and references passages that are not in the Bible as it exists today. (Even the most learned five-year old would have difficulty memorizing scripture in their native tongue, much less three foreign languages. If anyone ever figures out just what languages she is speaking (and this should be difficult because she switches back and forth sometimes even in mid-sentence), she is found to be randomly quoting passages from the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, and the Qur'ān.)
A new mummy is discovered in a peat bog. The mummy is tested and shown to originate from the Iron Age. It appears to have been a victim of ritual sacrifice. But closer examination shows decidedly modern dental work, including fillings using porcelain and composite resins. The body also has more in common with modern men than the peoples of that period, but the radiometric dating clearly indicates an age of at least 3000 years. (So the question is, how did a relatively modern human come to be ritually slain and tossed into a bog over 3000 years ago?)
In a public place, a man (or woman, if you prefer) suddenly collapses into the arms of a PC and dies. (There is no apparent cause of death (though it may be later revealed to have been perfectly natural). Sometimes, even the simplest events can be the most creepy.
Finally after a perception check, have the charicters notice they have not seen any animals in weeks. Not even insects or rats.
If you particularly want to worry the PC's have the peat bog mummy's dental work match one of the PC's with a few little changes, is it just a coincidence or will they wind up in that bog in the future?
and a fun one for no explainable reason everyone bursts into spontaneous song at random moments with perfect strangers matching as though they had practiced for months.
(For this to work, the process must be drawn out. When they do notice the pendulum, they should recognize the scene [Hopefully someone here know what this is].)
After a black cat follows a PC home, it starts to drive the player insane. When they try to kill the cat, a friend/loved one intervenes and is killed. The cat then disappears.
(Again, the process must be drawn out. Describe the process of the cat seemingly taunting them. (Again, we hope someone recognizes our theme)
After moving in to a house where a murder was commited (body never found) the PC begins to hear a faint heart beat which grows louder as they are near the bedroom. After determining that it is under the floor boards, they discover the chopped up, decomposing body of a man, the heart still beating.
No, the man is not alive, even though the heart is beating. It is just a dead body.
While exploring ancient catacombs, the PCs discover a skeleton, chained to the wall, walled up. They then find more fresh bodies walled up.
A simple, yet scary, concept. To be chain to a wall then walled up is truely horrifying to even think of, but to find the bodies can be just as disterbing.
I'm rather curious where the first 2 came from particularly the cat one.
That said here's a few more probably a few repeats by now.
1) While walking through the city the PC's see someone getting torn apart by a horiffic (sp?) monster when it catches sight of them it screams and flee's. Some time later they see it doing the same thing to someone or something they know is sufficiently more powerful than them that it could tear them apart yet again the monster flee's in terror when it see's them.
2) You start receiving spam messages on a computer that isn't connected to the internet.
This one works best in an area the PC's visit regularly.
3) While walking around the streets they see a person in rotting clothing holding a sign saying "The end is nigh" and ranting at passers by. Next time they're in that area the signs been changed to read "The end is 7 day's away." As the number slowly counts down they start seeing strange things out of the corner of their eye.
4) While showering one morning instead of water blood comes out, investigation reveals nothing that could account for it however over the following it day's it happens to each PC in order.
5) One morning the PC's wake up to find their bedroom missing. Everything else is intact including their bed but the room itself is gone. If they're in an apartment building they may wake up in the room below.
6) After an accident the PC's half wake up to see someone in a labcoat saying we can rebuild him/her better than they were before with the blood taken from sight A. They are then put under when next they awake their in a normal hospital and everything seems the way it should be had they been brought in and treated normally.
EDIT 1
7) You keep getting phone calls but when you pick up the phone there's no one on the other end just a normal dial tone.
And now for something completely different.
While watching TV, every channel becomes static. There is no explanation.
All of those were from the writings of Poe. The Black Cat, Pit and the Pendulum, Cask of Amontillado(sp?), and the Tell-Tale Heart. We had to change them a bit.
And now for something completely different.
While watching TV, every channel becomes static. There is no explanation.
Indeed, Poe was a master of the macabre. Indiana Jones? What?! Don't they teach the classics in school anymore? I just wish you'd waited for more input before the reveal, I caught on after the first one.
A friendly fellow on a bus or train offers a PC some of his homemade jerky. The meat is odd-tasting, but strangely good. If asked, the fellow proudly proclaims that it's made with "an old family recipe." The real horror occurs a few days or weeks later, when the PC sees a new report that a cannibalistic serial killer has been captured. The picture looks very familiar. (Little more needs to be said about this one. For added horror, you could have any jerky-eating PCs notice that their favorite brand names also begin to taste odd. Personally, I'd give the stuff up altogether.)
Animals begin to become nervous around and shy away from a PC. If backed into a corner, the animal will become aggressive and attack. Even tame and domesticated animals exhibit this behavior, but only when the PC in question is nearby. (This may not seem too odd when a stray dog takes a dislike to a PC, but when it begins happening with every animal he meets, including his own pets, you can bet the PC will take notice.)
A PC begin to be followed by a large raven, which only cries "Nevermore!". The PC slowly becomes more depressed, to the point of contemplating suicide.
The story which inspired our sig. The whole process should be done at a time where the PC is already depressed, the loss of a loved one as an example. For fun, have the raven cry out when players ask certain qestions(sp?).
And one more.
One of the PC's starts noticing that the other party members occasionally look odd. Out of the corner of their eye they start seeing strange cruel or taunting expression on their faces directed at them but its never there when they look at them directly. Then their skin starts seeming slack and pale but again not when looked at directly. Eventually they start seeing the party members when they aren't around them looking in at the window reflected in mirrors but when they turn to look they seem to duck out of sight.
I should think that there are more than enough creepy events and adventure hooks contained in those works to keep you going for today. Ta! Happy reading!
I recognized the telltale heart but that and raven are the only poe ones I know have to look up the black cat one as it seems interesting. School's are teaching less and less of the classics unfortunately.
The Black Cat is quite enjoyable and even suspenseful at times. I don't know that I would label it a horror story in the truest sense of the word, but it certainly qualifies as a thriller.
The PCs are leaving their place of residence. The old, abandoned house from across the street is ignored, as usual. However, today there is a cry as if a cat was crying out. The cat's cry turns into a baby's in midshriek, and the baby continues to cry, as if someone or something realized that a cat wouldn't lure the PCs in.
Sodding auditory hallucinations.
And in that vein when a PC gets a wrong number when they accidently call themself and yes they do answer and ask who's calling.
That's a good one! Here are my contributions for the day...
A PC awakens one night to find a strange cat sitting at the foot of his bed. The cat merely stares at the PC. If the PC shoos the cat away, it returns mere minutes later. After a short time, the cat is joined by a second animal. The newcomer looks at the first and says, in plain English (or whatever the PC's native tongue is), "What should we do with him?" The first cat merely licks its paws casually and replies, "Dunno. Wait until Martin gets here." The cats ignore any input from the PC, much as we might ignore the mewing of a cat.
The two continue to sit and watch the PC. After a bit, another cat shows up. It takes its place in the line-up and asks, "What's this?" The first cat answers again, "We're waiting for Martin to show up." The newcomer takes its place and all three cats now watch the PC, ignoring any protests or efforts to run them off.
Time passes and another cat enters the room (if the room is sealed, they step from the shadows). The usual question is asked and answered, and the cat takes it's place. This goes on for a while, until the room is absolutely filled with cats. They are sitting on the floor, the bed, the furniture, shelves, etc. Finally, when it seems as though there is no more space, a very large, very mean-looking cat emerges from the shadows, walks up the chest of the PC, and says right to his face, "I'm Martin, and we have some things to discuss."
At this point, the PC snaps awake. The cats are gone and the room is perfectly quiet (though the PC is probably covered in a film of sweat and his heart is pounding). And then, a cat enters the room and jumps up to sit at the foot of the PC's bed...
(Inspiration can be found in the strangest of places. When I was young, there was a spooky story we used to share around the campfire called, "Wait Until martin Comes." I changed it a bit here, to make it a little more eerie and less of a children's story, but the effect still works. There's something inherently frightening about nightmares, because they are generated from our subconscious, and who knows better what frightens us most deeply than our own mind? But when you awaken, and the nightmare is still going on, what then?)
A PC awakens one night in a darkened room. When she extends her hand, a match is handed to her by an unseen figure. (The worlds shortest ghost story goes, "He awoke with a start and wished for a match and one was put into his hand." Sometimes the simplest are the best.)
Edit
Here's one I just saw in Keven & Kell (a webcomic) and it could so easily be creepy I had to include it. A close friend vanishes without warning for a week when they reapear they look the same as before but there's an electronic tag in their ear (which can't be removed) and when it beeps they seem to understand what its saying.
Without warning or apparent reason, an otherwise healthy PC finds himself blind (or deaf). The effect lasts for a short time (perhaps an hour) and a medical exam reveals nothing. (For those of us fortunate enough to have all our senses, few things could be more frightening than to be suddenly deprived of one for no reason. To suddenly find oneself blind or deaf could be devastating, both emotionally and, if it happened at a crucial moment, physically.)
A PC is approached on the street by a perfect stranger who greets the PC as if she is someone the PC has known all her life. The stranger calls the PC by name, asks her about personal things that only a friend could know, etc. But the PC cannot remember who this person is, even if given a name and a reference. (We often run into people we can't remember until our memory is jogged, but what if that someone knew great detail about you, enough to call you a close friend, but you, in turn, could recall nothing of them?)
A PC awakens one night to find a strange cat sitting at the foot of his bed. The cat merely stares at the PC. If the PC shoos the cat away, it returns mere minutes later. After a short time, the cat is joined by a second animal. The newcomer looks at the first and says, in plain English (or whatever the PC's native tongue is), "What should we do with him?" The first cat merely licks its paws casually and replies, "Dunno. Wait until Martin gets here." The cats ignore any input from the PC, much as we might ignore the mewing of a cat.
The two continue to sit and watch the PC. After a bit, another cat shows up. It takes its place in the line-up and asks, "What's this?" The first cat answers again, "We're waiting for Martin to show up." The newcomer takes its place and all three cats now watch the PC, ignoring any protests or efforts to run them off.
Time passes and another cat enters the room (if the room is sealed, they step from the shadows). The usual question is asked and answered, and the cat takes it's place. This goes on for a while, until the room is absolutely filled with cats. They are sitting on the floor, the bed, the furniture, shelves, etc. Finally, when it seems as though there is no more space, a very large, very mean-looking cat emerges from the shadows, walks up the chest of the PC, and says right to his face, "I'm Martin, and we have some things to discuss."
At this point, the PC snaps awake. The cats are gone and the room is perfectly quiet (though the PC is probably covered in a film of sweat and his heart is pounding). And then, a cat enters the room and jumps up to sit at the foot of the PC's bed...
This isn't really that creepy but the second one......
A PC awakens one night in a darkened room. When she extends her hand, a match is handed to her by an unseen figure.
That could be freaky.
This isn't really that creepy but the second one......
Oh. You often have cats carrying on conversations in your native language in your bedroom at night? It's creepy enough when I wake up to find one of mine (I have five) staring at me for no apparent reason as I sleep. If they spoke to me (or one another), I'm afraid I'd faint dead away.
Oh. You often have cats carrying on conversations in your native language in your bedroom at night?
actually yes. Either that or the hellucinations have gotten worse.
And now for something completely different
While playing a video game based on some large war presently going on, a PC begins to hear about (Insert Video Game Protagentist Here)'s heroic effort. Eventually, all of the PC's games start coming true like this.
With all the voices in my head and the spirits in my room, I probably wouldn't hear them anyways.
I find that the voices are easily distracted if you give them something else to discuss. ;) At least it works long enough for me to get some sleep.
An entire day goes by without a mention of Anna-Nicole Smith, her baby, or Don Imus. (Sorry, I'm just tired of these topics.)
A PC receives absolutely no junk e-mail or spam in their inbox for an entire day. (Honestly, wouldn't you be just a little creeped out?)
Every single post made to a public or private forum on the Internet is suddenly neatly written, using perfect spelling and grammar. ('Nuff said.)
Skeptics claim that the gases involved with decomposition can cause all manner of strange effects, from human-sounding noises to scratches on the lids of coffins. Imagine being in a graveyard at night when a loud moan issues forth from a recently-dug grave.
A guy I know that was a pilot had an experience like this. I'm not sure if he was in the Air Force at the time, but he told me that once he was flying a Cessna (or another single-prop plane) and transporting a corpse in a body bag. While he was flying, gases in the corpse combined with the low pressure at a higher altitude caused the corpse to sit up and moan.
A guy I know that was a pilot had an experience like this. I'm not sure if he was in the Air Force at the time, but he told me that once he was flying a Cessna (or another single-prop plane) and transporting a corpse in a body bag. While he was flying, gases in the corpse combined with the low pressure at a higher altitude caused the corpse to sit up and moan.
I would have crashed the plane and died. No question about it.
Here's a scary scenario, people who actually believe what scientist tell them........
I think it's sad that people (skeptics) will try to explain everything in the dumbest way just because they're too afraid to admit that the supernatural actually does exist.
Here's a scary scenario, people who actually believe what scientist tell them........
Its even sadder when people want to believe every silly little thing is paranormal.
Ah, who's to say it isn't?
Don't start with that poor argument. Because then I can just retort with "who's to say it is?" and we get nowhere.
Don't start with that poor argument. Because then I can just retort with "who's to say it is?" and we get nowhere.
My point is, draw your own conclusions. Just because someone can supposedly explain something doesn't mean that what he said is true.
My point is, draw your own conclusions. Just because someone can supposedly explain something doesn't mean that what he said is true.
And my point is don't jump to conclusions, just because an answer isn't obvious at first doesn't instantly make it paranormal.
But then, having built a fragile little security blanket on the hope that there aren't any Boogeymen out there, then I guess it's only natural.
By the way, are you going to contribute to the thread or just debate?
What, does the thought of the paranormal scare you?
No, but the thought of ignorant and gullible people shunning science because it ruins their little fantasy dreams does.
Believe it or not, it is possible to believe in the paranormal without thinking every little speck of dust on a camera's lens is a ghost.
But then, having built a fragile little security blanket on the hope that there aren't any Boogeymen out there, then I guess it's only natural.
I can play that game, too. But I won't because I'm above that.
By the way, are you going to contribute to the thread or just debate?
I did several pages ago, I'm subscribed to this thread, thus how I noticed.
However, I will concede this thread is not the time or place for this sort of debating.
It's a group of little dweebs who sit in a room and try to convince the simple minded ones that they know everything.
Science doesn't exist, it's just a bunch of theories and hypothesis....nothing more.
Science is for the ignorant and gullible.
It's a group of little dweebs who sit in a room and try to convince the simple minded ones that they know everything.
Science doesn't exist, it's just a bunch of theories and hypothesis....nothing more.
... ... ... No, I'm done with you now.Anyway:
Something I plan on using in an upcoming CoC game. One or more of the PC's neighbors rides his bike passed their home every morning to work (or school, or just for fun). The bike is kind of old and the wheels tend to squeak, but he refuses to give it up and buy a new one. Eventually, the PC(s) start hearing the familiar squeak late at night, every night. Should the PC(s) confront the neighbor during the day, he claims he doesn't know what they're talking about. Should the PC(s) attempt to catch him riding at night, they find, instead of their neighbor, an empty, decrepit, rusty old wheelchair slowly rolling down the street.
Science is for the ignorant and gullible.
It's a group of little dweebs who sit in a room and try to convince the simple minded ones that they know everything.
Science doesn't exist, it's just a bunch of theories and hypothesis....nothing more.
You're an idiot. Enough said.
The minute you have thoughts that differ from the rest and no one can change the way you think, then you are called an idiot.
I'd expect no less from the drones of modern day society.
Something I plan on using in an upcoming CoC game. One or more of the PC's neighbors rides his bike passed their home every morning to work (or school, or just for fun). The bike is kind of old and the wheels tend to squeak, but he refuses to give it up and buy a new one. Eventually, the PC(s) start hearing the familiar squeak late at night, every night. Should the PC(s) confront the neighbor during the day, he claims he doesn't know what they're talking about. Should the PC(s) attempt to catch him riding at night, they find, instead of their neighbor, an empty, decrepit, rusty old wheelchair slowly rolling down the street.
Hmmm......interesting.
One night, one of your eyes starts burning and when you check it in a mirror it has gone dead white, though you can still see perfectly through it......
Yes, how typical.
The minute you have thoughts that differ from the rest and no one can change the way you think, then you are called an idiot.
I'd expect no less from the drones of modern day society.
No, since you obviously make completely WRONG statements, such as "Science doesn't exist", yet the very information you're submitting to this forum is possible through the use of science! Just like the mircowave you use to heat your food, your freezer to keep your food, your car and the chemistry that enables you to have a computer.
So, psychic Jane, run off and continue ineffectually denying science and when you want to come back and deal with the real stuff which you know nothing about, then we'll talk.
Yes, I see "technology" but that doesn't mean that science actually knows how it works.
So, go on and have your little wet dream about your beloved science, if it helps you sleep at night.
By the way, genius, this debate ended a few posts ago.
P.S. I prefer "psychic John". :D
Late at night you hear whispering outside your window, if you go to investigate it slowly becomes clearer and clearer. Eventually you reach the source of the words a tree and you finally understand that its saying "yes that's it just a liiiittle closer."
Late at night you hear whispering outside your window, if you go to investigate it slowly becomes clearer and clearer. Eventually you reach the source of the words a tree and you finally understand that its saying "yes that's it just a liiiittle closer."
This one's better.
Your's is more ominous.
A renowned skeptic in the campaign comes forward to say that he was wrong, the supernatural does exist. He refuses to offer any proof, saying that he needs to gather the facts together. He plans a public revelation within one week. Mysteriously, three days later, he is found dead at his home, a look of sheer terror on his face.
Believers in the paranormal are quick to find a supernatural meaning, claiming that he was silenced from beyond the grave. Police and federal agencies are, of course, treating it as a suspicious death, though they have no leads. Other skeptics rebuff claims of the supernatural, likening it to a publicity stunt gone wrong.
Then, two days later, another well-known skeptic steps forward to say that he or she has been wrong. They offer no proof, but plan a public revelation as soon as they have all the facts together...
(What if you were to turn on your television one night, and there was an astonished James Randi, telling you that he had proof of the supernatural? Or Penn and Teller? How would you react? What "proof" did the deceased find, and why was it worth killing over? Was it really ghostly forces from beyond the grave, or is there another explanation?)
For what it's worth, and not to rekindle a hotbed of coals, I want to believe in the supernatural. I am an amateur ghostchaser and have visited many "haunted" locations and sites of "supernatural" occurrences. To date, I have never seen anything that simply cannot be explained by rational means. It doesn't mean that I don't believe, I just approach with a scientific eye. I don't dismiss the possibility of such, but neither am I quick to accept that every little glowing mote of light is a spirit.
Yes, I see "technology" but that doesn't mean that science actually knows how it works.
Funny, because I have a book on my shelf that explains, in great detail, how all those things work. So I'm going to say that you're wrong on this count.
Technology is build using scientific principles.
Science is made of facts that are observable and can be tested with steady results.
I'm not saying that the supernatural doesn't exist. "There are more things in heaven and earth, than dreamed of in your philosophy." That's how I see things, that there are a ton of things that we just don't know about. I can't say for sure what "supernatural" things exist and what don't without solid proof.
But science is made of rock solid proof.
For what it's worth, and not to rekindle a hotbed of coals, I want to believe in the supernatural. I am an amateur ghostchaser and have visited many "haunted" locations and sites of "supernatural" occurrences. To date, I have never seen anything that simply cannot be explained by rational means. It doesn't mean that I don't believe, I just approach with a scientific eye. I don't dismiss the possibility of such, but neither am I quick to accept that every little glowing mote of light is a spirit.
Which is exactly how I feel. And ironically exactly my same experiences too...
Now thats a creepy event!
You zombies would believe anything science told you as long as they wrote a thousand page essay on it. They could tell you that butterscotch was the cure for cancer and you'd believe it just because they said so and they wrote a few books about it.
The debating ended back at post #647.
Drop it.
People, get over it!
You zombies would believe anything science told you as long as they wrote a thousand page essay on it. They could tell you that butterscotch was the cure for cancer and you'd believe it just because they said so and they wrote a few books about it.
The debating ended back at post #647.
Drop it.
And, what, exactly leads you to belive in the things you belive in?
Spirits? Runes? Bones? Shapes of the clouds in the sky?
Getting back to the thread.
You keep hearing voices that tell you horrible things and shortly later these things begin to happen........
Asprin or Tylenol at least?
Because, you know, all fields of medicine are also science.
You'll never get me to except your beliefs.....so get back to the thread!
Amazing. Not even as a child? How old are you, anyway?
I'm just curious about you, that's all.
I don't quite understand why you're so closed minded.
Now now, let's not be rude to the man.....
Well if he doesn't believe science exists at all, I'd like to know how he thinks everything in the world works.
Do you think magic faeries make cars move?
How about how computers work?
Electricity?
Television?
Radio?
How about fire?
Or making ice in your freezer?
Or how your freezer even works in general?
Its just, boggling my mind how you can seriously think science is all lies when its all around you, physically visible and testable by you and me.
Everyone knows those things all are powered by ghosts.
I don't quite understand why you're so closed minded.
The same could be said about all of you.
Do you think cameras steal your soul, too?
Do you even believe in the soul?
Do you think magic faeries make cars move?
Perhaps.
I am a priest, so it's not as if I deny all of the supernatural.
I am a writer, so it's not as if I see the world as bland, sterile and entirely void of "magic".
I've studied mythology and cryptozoology my entire life, so it's not as if I am opposed to other kinds of wisdom or the existance of the unknown.
But I am also not a fool. I cannot ignore things that are blatant and clear truth and fact.
Nothing will ever change that or my mind.
End of story.
By the way, a priest who roleplays......cool.
It's like I said, I'm just curious about your worldview.
A character undergoing a routine operation to have a benign tumor removed has a teratoma. (If you don't know what a tertoma is, here's something to help you discover more about the creepy world of things that can grow inside our bodies. And if that isn't creepy enough for you, do a Google image search for "teratoma" (I wouldn't do this on a full stomach). Pleasant dreams tonight!
Thanks WhtKnt, I was reading this whole list and I was fine up to the point where you had to tell me about people growing teeth and hair in thier ovaries... shudder thats some twisted stuff.
An electric spark carried from a battery through conductive copper wiring ignites a mixture of gasoline and air. The force and preasure resulting from the ignition pushes pistons connected to a driveshaft which is ultimately connected to the wheels, making them spin and move the car foreward.
No fairies, sorry.
Talking fistula that sing curses in the tounge of elder things.
in the tounge of elder things.
You mean "tongue".
The PC's find a horribly mutilated body as they examine it one of them notices that instead of eyes it has X's like a cartoon dead body except the rest of it is perfectly normal.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You are awakened by the moans of the wind as it passes ceaselessly above and around you. The hard rocky earth upon which you now find yourself laying is much less comfortable than the soft plush of the bedding that had held you when you closed your eyes. Sitting up suddenly you are greeted by a blasted and desolate stygian wasteland stretching out from you in all directions, its surface void of any life and broken only by the a scattering of jagged fragmented rocks that cover the land. The wind is hot and wet like the impassioned breath of some great being and the flimsy cloth of your sheer nightgown adheres uncomfortably to your flesh. Despite the heat of the incessant sighing wind you find yourself shivering, goose bumps rising in a cascade of tightness rolling across your skin as you sense the inherent wrongness of this place. Instinctively you encircle yourself with your arms seeking to provide some means of protection from the unseen and unheard horrors that prickle the back of you mind and cause you to jump when the wind brushes your hair a certain way.
Weakly and tentatively you call out greetings hoping, perhaps to find another who is lost in this place, or perhaps just to break the maddeningly unending and half-imagined moans of the wind. Receiving no answer but needing to take action you pick a direction and begin walking. The sharp rocks cut at your feet and before long you are leaving just the smallest amount of blood in your wake. Determined however not to be beaten you grit your teeth and fight through the pain and continue. However after you have walked for a few minutes… hour’s… days? It’s hard to tell. The pain despair grip you and you collapse on a nearby rock. The surface is warm and slightly sticky but it provides your injured feet with a moment of much needed rest so you ignore the resemblance to mucus. As waves of despair and fear grip you, you fight them back and retain a grip on yourself. Closing your eyes for a moment you take a few deep breaths preparing to continue your gauntlet.
As you open your eyes and stand you notice that you are no longer alone. Before you stands an old and wizened man with a hungry look in his eyes. His skin is yellow and jaundiced as is his good left eye, the right nearly completely covered with a milky white cataract. He leers at you with a gap-toothed grin and his hunched and twisted body takes a step towards you. Instinctively you back away from his disgusting countenance stumbling backward onto the rock. As your hands hit its warm sticky surface your arms are seized by strong clawed red-scaled hands and you are pulled up onto the rock like a rag doll. You thrash violently attempting to get away as you turn to see your captors. Behind you stand two large winged devils, their horned and fanged faces leering at you with hunger and hatred. With unnatural strength their steel-viselike hands lift you and hold you on the rock which in this new light is beginning to look more and more like an alter. The disgusting man steps closer and seizes your flailing legs in gnarled hands that have far more strength then they should. With frightening ease he locks your ankles into chains that were not their moments ago. Helpless you can only watch as he steps between your legs and tears open your nightgown. An impossibly long black tongue snakes out of his mouth dripping with black and green ichor that splashes warm and slick on the bare quivering flesh of your stomach, where is slides slowly across your curves cooling in the wind until is solidifies into a viscous jelly substance. Leaning down close to you he sniffs your tummy like a proud chef and smiles even wider. “Its ready now” His voice is thick and wet with the rot of his lungs and gurgles threw the words. “Come now little one, it is time for you to enter the world and meet your mother.” As he speaks these words you feel a gut wrenching sensation and watch in terrible horror as some “thing” stretches the skin of your stomach as it slides within your womb. You scream as your wretched midwife raises a pitted and corroded knife above your torso. The knife flashes down and there is blinding burning pain when suddenly your arms are released. Involuntarily they reach to clasp at the bloody and ragged incision. Suddenly something slides wetly within you and pushes against your blood covered hands and you scream again...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When she woke up she had blood covering her hands, forearms and belly but no visible wounds. Nothing happened for a few days or so but then every so often I would tell her that she could swear she felt on odd moving sensation in stomach... (Our bodies are private personal things and pregnancy and childbirth are traditionally joyful experiances. So to take such an experiance and twist it while simultaneous wrenching control of your body from you is highly disturbing, especially when you realize the terrible implications involved in attempting to remove what might not be more than psychosomatic indigestion.)
During the night you wake up in a strange dead land sand swirling around you obscuring your view except for the occasional cracked shattered pieces of land. Suddenly a voice behind you say's "You think you know who you are what you'll become, you have no idea that you've just begun." If you turn all you can is a shadowy figure obscured by the sand raising a hand. Suddenly theres a wrenching pain as darkness lash's out from it playing over your body causing incredible pain as it reshapes you down to the soul. As the dark tendrils vanish the voice continues "But now you MUST learn for time is almost up." For a very brief moment the sand parts allowing you to see ruined buildings and decaying bodies in what you recognize as your hometown and you realize the shadowy figure looks like a torn broken older you then suddenly it all goes black. You wake up panting in terror but as you look around you realize your not in your room but in a snowy land with the lights of what looks like a town in the distance. If you check you'll find your body is either changed/unchanged.
I'm not sure whether it would bother people more to wake up in a new body or the same old one in a new place after they felt like they were being remade.
You mean "tongue".
Um . . . whatever.
Anyway, here's another one:
A character begins to experience paranormal activity similiar to a poltergeist manifestation: small objects are thrown around, furniture is moved around, ect. The manifestations are sporadic at first, but become more and more common. Eventually the actions become distructive, showering random people with broken glass, bashing bystanders with rocks and bricks, ect. Finally the character himself is sliced open by a pair of flying scissors. As the character blood seeps out, he sees a small creature, twisted and deformed, slowly crawl out of the deep gash. The thing, in spite of its overall inhuman appearance, bears a striking resembalance to the PC. The unborn twin smiles at the dying character before painfully ripping free and crawling away on malformed limbs.
Then the character wakes up. He is relieved to find that it was all a nightmare, until he feels something inside him shift its weight almost imperceptibly.
It's called helping someone with their spelling.
How about everynight you feel someone licking you, you think maybe it's your boyfriend/girlfriend until you hear a bizarre voice say, "Mmmm....tastes like candy.", then you feel them tearing into you with their teeth. When you awaken in a cold, panic induced sweat, you discover bloody teeth marks upon your flesh.....
Your loved one gives you one of those big pink heart shaped candy boxes when you open it you find a real heart inside as your loved one say's "Like it I picked it out myself."
Thanks WhtKnt, I was reading this whole list and I was fine up to the point where you had to tell me about people growing teeth and hair in thier ovaries... shudder thats some twisted stuff.
Glad I could help.
Your loved one gives you one of those big pink heart shaped candy boxes when you open it you find a real heart inside as your loved one say's "Like it I picked it out myself."
Senko, I was just thinking of that one.
It would definitely be a gift you'd remember.
Nice and on that note.
Your loved one gives you one of those big pink heart shaped candy boxes when you open it you find a real heart inside as your loved one say's "Like it I picked it out myself."
Ok this will be dating me, and admitting I watched MTV's the Real World, but I remember in the London season one of the roommate’s girlfriends did this. Except she didn’t hand it to him, she just let him find a pig’s heart wrapped in barbed wire in a heart shaped box on Valentines’ Day on his doorstep. He wondered what it meant, and ran arround all day tring to find her to figure it out. She just wanted to make a joking comment on romantic iconography.
To keep things on track, while on vacation in Europe or Mexico (anywhere non-English speaking), when ever you enter a room all the natives just stop their conversations for half a moment, glance at you and then continue speaking to each other in their native language. People hate being talked about behind their back, and it is so much worse when it is right in front of you and you can’t under stand it.
While exploring the exocentric old man’s house he warns you not to go into his son’s room as he is sleeping. But the investigators return a few more times and every time his son is sleeping. When they finally confront the son to wake him they find it is a work of taxidermy, a stuffed human being. Then it grabs them with unnatural strength, and opens a mouth with rows upon rows of razor sharp teeth and soulless shark’s eyes. “I told you not to wake him.”
You find a dead cow in a Kansas field, killed by a sharks bite.
In an abandoned factory you find freshly hatched eggshells from what must have been four eggs that were ten times the size of an ostrich each, along with a fifth egg that size that is starting to hatch.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/04/20/australia.ghostship.reut/index.html
Has anyone been having an inordinate number of bad dreams lately...?
R'lyeh, perhaps?
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/04/20/australia.ghostship.reut/index.html
Has anyone been having an inordinate number of bad dreams lately...?
Depends on how you define bad dreams. My dreams are fine, it's the waking up and the realizing that they didn't happen that sucks.
Obvious motion can be seen in the belly of a young woman. The woman insists that she cannot possibly be pregnant, and is, in fact, almost emaciated (save for her protruding belly). An ultrasound shows that something is definitely there, and it has attached a tube of some sort to her stomach. (The concept of pregnancy is really eerie when you stop to think about it. For the first nine months of our lives, we are effectively a parasitic being living in the body of a host. In this case, the parasite is unwanted, and is killing its host by stealing nutrients that she intakes.)
A mother cat is giving birth to kittens (or a dog to puppies, as you prefer). As the blessed moment arrives, all the young are stillborn and horribly deformed and mangled, as though ripped apart in the womb. The mother dies from internal hemorrhaging. (You could, for added effect, have a horrifying mutant puppy or kitten eat and claw its way free, but I think that's overkill. The scene works better if the exact cause is left a complete mystery.)
A woman gives birth to an otherwise perfectly ordinary and healthy baby, except that the child is born with a mouthful of sharp teeth and a full head of hair. (I'm told that full heads of hair aren't uncommon, but the mouthful of sharp teeth, I'm certain, is. And of course, Junior has a taste for raw meat, rather than pablum.)
A woman gives birth to an otherwise perfectly ordinary and healthy baby, except that the child is born with a mouthful of sharp teeth and a full head of hair. (I'm told that full heads of hair aren't uncommon, but the mouthful of sharp teeth, I'm certain, is. And of course, Junior has a taste for raw meat, rather than pablum.)
To quote Marge Simpson: "I think I'll bottle feed that one."
While eating in a diner one of the patrons starts glowing and rises up into the air after a moment they say "I can see through time." followed a few moments later by "Crap...bye." and then they vanish. Over the following weeks this happens more and more often. Investigation reveals that all the people involved were drinking a new brand of coffee when it happened.
"We're here in the engine room of the starship Enterprise, where we've replaced Mr. Scott's dilithium crystals with new Folger's Crystals. Will he be able to tell the difference? Let's watch..."
Sorry, old joke, but still funny!
"We're here in the engine room of the starship Enterprise, where we've replaced Mr. Scott's dilithium crystals with new Folger's Crystals. Will he be able to tell the difference? Let's watch..."
Sorry, old joke, but still funny!
no thats damn funny....particularly at 1:40 in the AM
as for the tertoma stuff (cuz wow is it freaky gross) it would be a sick adventure if the players are investigating or stumble across a whole town where this is going on along with normal child birth..or mas events (stealing from children of men..kinda) where it is taking place instead of normal child birth all over the world...ewww..worse yet is the doctors keep losing the tumor like things..."i put it in the biohazard disposal bag and now its ....just gone!"
..."i put it in the biohazard disposal bag and now its ....just gone!"
Soilent Green is made from tertomas!!!! - Well that's just ewwww!
EDIT
You receive a completely legitimate and legal notification from the government of your country stating that you are now legally defined as non longer human (either being classed as some form of dangerous animal or alien lifeform) and will be deported to your natural habitat an island in the south pacific/launched into space.
no thats damn funny....particularly at 1:40 in the AM
as for the tertoma stuff (cuz wow is it freaky gross) it would be a sick adventure if the players are investigating or stumble across a whole town where this is going on along with normal child birth..or mas events (stealing from children of men..kinda) where it is taking place instead of normal child birth all over the world...ewww..worse yet is the doctors keep losing the tumor like things..."i put it in the biohazard disposal bag and now its ....just gone!"
I did once cook up an alien species that had a teratoma like stage in its life cycle which was quite gross...
But seriously, come on people, start posting your creepy events.
I went to all the trouble of reviving this thread, AND putting it in my sig, so could we please start the posting?
*You wake to find a humanoid shadow crawling across your ceiling it is almost invisible but for the funny haze of distorted air defining it's shape and the glowing eyes. It flicks it's long lizard-like tongue at you before vanishing.
*You wake to the sight of a nuclear flash and mushroom cloud several miles away across the city, you then wake up at the same window looking out across the landscape.
*You encounter aliens in your dream who tell you that humans dont dream and then proceeds to drill holes in your head which you feel. When you do wake up it is six years in the past and you remember most of what will happen in the comming six years.
*You wake from reality to a bedroom in an apartment in a city that doesnt exist because your "girlfriend" in that city disconnected you from the "artificial reality" engine and pulled the display goggles off your eyes.
" Staff Accused of Putting Human Remains in Hamburgers, Manager Arrested for 6 Counts of Murder."
Players eating at an inn or fast-food restraunt see the following headline in the paper:
" Staff Accused of Putting Human Remains in Hamburgers, Manager Arrested for 6 Counts of Murder."
Please, Dex, dont tempt me. I'm so full.
- the players wake up one day to find that fast food mascots have changed from animals to cartoonish humans. While only slightly odd in and of itself, the menu has changed to reflect it.
- One character (hailing from the quaint little hamlet of Innsmouth) finds a cat sitting outside his window one morning. Going outside, he finds the cat will follow him wherever it is able. The next morning sees another cat added to the roster. And another. And another until the character has an unholy army of the night following him. It's probably the smell of fish that inexplicably developed just a day or so before the first cat. And, come to think of it, his eyes are looking a little odd.
Wild animal attacks on humans are rising noticeably, to the point where curfew has been imposed in most rural areas. Then, when everyone is safe inside with their pets...
A character notices that he has mysteriously acquired his own theme music. It changes to suit the mood of the moment, and apparently others can hear it too, but have no idea from whence it originates. This might seem fun at first, but there are drawbacks if you can't turn it off. (This was featured in an episode of Family Guy in which Peter gets three wishes and uses one to have his own theme music, but I've always thought it would be pretty cool (even long before I ever saw that episode). However, as I noted, there would be some drawbacks to it. Try being sneaky with your own personal soundtrack playing. And could you imagine the look on the other person's face as they prepare for an evening of... ehr... social interaction and the "boom-chika-bow-wow" music begins?)
A right-handed character suddenly finds that she is suddenly left-handed (or a southpaw has become right-handed). (This has no real effect in game terms (other than the character must switch dominant hands), but could be very disconcerting if no explanation is offered.)
A Djinn changes the PC's reality to (somewhat) match things that they wish were different about their life.
While things on the surface are all peaches and cream, the PC starts learning that they aren't the person they thought they were. Now they have to uncover their "new dark past" before it's too late.
Someone they know well suddenly disapears and yet no one believes them when they tell them this saying the person's dead and worrying that they're having a mental breakdown.
You start saying shadows moving in the lights in your house.
You wake up to find a complete stranger in your bed but they and everyone/everything else insists you've been married since highschool offering up photo's and the like to support it.
Following a trail of clues related to several recent killings in which the bodies have been completely drained of blood leads the PCs to a man that is never seen outside of his apartment (with blacked-out windows) except at night, and neighbors describe him as gaunt, tall, and very pale-skinned, with a thick accent. The poor gentleman, a recent immigrant from Hungary who suffers from photophobia. (Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. In this case, perhaps the seemingly harmless gentleman really is a vampire. If the PCs look elsewhere, give them a suspect to capture and then, after the suspect is safely incarcerated, have the murders continue.)
An anime convention is in town and folks are dressed in colorful and stylish costumes emulating everything from ninja to transforming robots. Cat girls and other "furries" are exceedingly common, but one girl's outfit seems to be professionally-designed. The tail even moves seemingly of its own accord. When someone accidentally steps on her "tail," she yelps in pain, sounding more like a guttural growl that a playful cry. Even more interesting is the fact that she couldn't possibly have seen the person step on the appendage. (This could easily be worked into the first option I offered, or it works as a stand-alone event. Perhaps there is a reasonable explanation. Maybe she felt a slight tug on the elastic waistband that attaches the tail to her body, or saw the person out of the corner of her eye and reacted appropriately. At least, that's what she says.)
On that subject the PC's wake up to find the entire world changed with the supernatural/magic/aliens and all that ilk suddenly real especially in New York (super hero's, supervilains basically a western superhero comics themed city), Tokyo (Giant robots, master swordsmen, magical girls essentially an anime/manga themed city), certain backwoods places such as remote transylvania (werewolves and vampires) and various american summer camps (supernatural killing machines e.g. Jason Vorhee's) and the PC's home town (a mix of everything so you have egyptian pyramids next to jungle tempes and state of the art skyscrapers with robots, elves, catgirls, superheroes and all walking around). However only the PC's recognize this as being wrong and they have had no changes made to them that they can see. Is it the world that has changed or are they in a new one and should they change it back when people seem happier with the new world?
A second one for a game with young PC's (schoolkids in the 15-18 range) as they slowly start noticing things of in the world like the hairy biker or suprisingly realistic catgirl they also start to notice changes in their parents. The more of these differences they see the colder and more restrictive their parents become. On the day when it all comes clear one they see something really wrong a speck of blood on the lips, a flash of red eyes an overheard conversation about someone knowing too much, the mulching machine in the yard spits out specks of bone. The old are my parents really my parents or a horrible monster. Particularly fun if after a brutal fight in which they manage to kill the monsters they look in the mirror and realize that while their parents WERE inhuman killing machines they really were their parents and the same race as them. Now they have to hide what they are as the hunger slowly grows in them.
The PCs see a street mime performing the shrinking invisible box trick. The man continues to put on the show until he's curled up into a ball and seemingly pretending to still be suffering the effects of crushing... but then the PCs hear several sickening crunches. They can only watch in horror as the man as is slowly crushed into a crimson, six cubic inch block... The GM can handle what happens once the man's condensed remains are released. >_>
Here's a couple of old ones I thought I'd dust off.
1) When entering a dark room you see glowing yellow eyes staring at you for a moment before they vanish and you here a scraping, rattling noise near your feet. When you turn the light on there's a series of pawprints in the material of your choice e.g. blood running across the room and out the door before vanishing.
2) When you wake up in the middle of the night for some reason (going to the toilet) you hear the sound of your door closing. This happens several times over the following months with whenever you wake up in the early hours of the morning you hear the sound of your door closing...then it starts happening whenever you wake up. Audio devices record the door opening and closing with the occasional rustle or murmour inbetween and if someones nearby they may remember hearing it. Video devices, staying up or asking someone else to do so (provided they stay awake) seems to prevent it.
Suddenly, all fortune tellers who aren't fakes start seeing "nothing" in anyone's future. It's not that they can't see into the future, they can - it's just that there's nothing there.
Take this a few steps further. Any fortune telling that is done at all will fail. Tarrot, palm reading, crystal balls, ouija boards... all of them fail. Tarrot cards turn up blank. Palms seem like scribbles to the readers, crystal balls end up blank, ouija boards end up saying "Nothing, nothing, nothing"
Take this a few steps further. Any fortune telling that is done at all will fail. Tarrot, palm reading, crystal balls, ouija boards... all of them fail. Tarrot cards turn up blank. Palms seem like scribbles to the readers, crystal balls end up blank, ouija boards end up saying "Nothing, nothing, nothing"
Nice.
It's probably been done before, but...
Every time you see your reflection, it seems to stare at you with intense hatred. If you relax your face or smile, the reflection follows suit but still doesn't look right - the smile is cruel...
A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded.
*sigh* wehf....glad i got that over with
and when no one was looking...this thread gets bumped
ok...I just finished reading this whole THING! finally. (yes that includes Senko's post after mine about light coming on and the door closing...)
I've been collecting some of which I will either use in my current survival horror game or just find completely awesome and must be saved. My list is at 92...I want to get to 100.
So come on guys help me out here, nothing cheesy. Lemme see if I cant think of something my self...hmmm
if nothing else i have some good zombie ones that aren't mine but were worth saving and reposting here. Ok here we go:
Convince the PCs that a nearby shack houses artillery that would be helpful for the next couple of sessions. The shack is average-sized; big enough to house two people comfortably... as a back-story say that the structure was owned by a local farmer who dabbled in a bit of voodoo to get some of his dead crops back to life. This in turn had an adverse effect on the surrounding area. Trees rotted to mush, then reappeared as if nothing had ever happened. Birds flew overhead in odd directions. And anything, from pests to the occasional vegetable thief that ever died in the crop field mysteriously began to rise and walk amongst the living.
If the PCs decide to risk it, reward them with shelter from a rainstorm within the shack. It is imperative that the PCs have had a previous battle or two before reaching this destination, so that their resources are horribly depleted. While inside, have them notice some strange etchings and text scratched into the walls around them. Then have them see a pistol with one bullet left in the chamber...a blank.
When they realize what a grievous error they've made, call for a listen check to see if the PCs notice the faint sounds of moans from the troop of undead waiting for them outside...
I'll post more...but not now.
Your alone in your house and walking past an empty room when the light turns on and the door closes.
"daddy?" she gurgles...
...after a terrifying and nearly earth-shattering storm, a heavy fog has set over a small, lakeside rural community. it's so thick it obscures everything beyond 10 feet/2-3 meters. the players observe odd, inhuman shapes lumbering, crawling, skittering, and flying through the haze as the day begins to wane into night. people begin to disappear into the thick mist, screaming...snatched away by tenebrous figures and monstrous shadows...forcing the players to hole up in a safe spot to survive out the night... ***from the short "The Mist"...i actually wrote up an adventure based entirely off this story. it's awesome as an opener to a horror/apocolypse type campaign. HIGHLY recommended read.
...one of the players discovers a small, seemingly benign monkey-toy. the small fuzzy kind that clap two symbols together and squeek. however, the malevolence of this innocuous child's toy is revealed when it activates of it's on accord...banging it's symbols together and squeeking loudly. each time it does, someone close to the player dies... ***inspired by "The Monkey"...could lead to variants as to WHAT is doing the killing...are the deaths 'natural' in appearance? is it an evil spirit that inhabits the monkey? does it become an actual evil little monkey and kill? or is it merely a dark oracle of sorts?
i'll post more as i read...or am inspired...
I'd like to see your mist adventure please it sounds like something I would use if you don't mind.
-when climbing down a latter, you see a dark figure standing where you just were. When you look again, he is gone. Then, when you reach the bottom of the latter, he is standing right when you turn around, but gone in the blink of an eye.
-as you and your party make your way, a dark, misty cloud of what would appear smoke (but is too dense) that writhes on its own accord suddenly kills one of your party members. All you see is an explosion of blood, and their skeleton is left behind (stained with blood). works best if the party member(s) is/are npc(s).
-when entering in a basement or sub-level of a rather large building, you hear the sounds of moaning all around you. As you walk deeper in, you start to notice large cracks in the concrete pillars and tile flooring. You haven't seen any zombies or anything to cause the off-and-on moaning, and begin to realize that the structure has been compromised and the building could collapse at any moment. However what you need is still much further in, maybe even further down. :evillaugh
Traveling along a back road, the PCs come upon a startling scene; a car is crumpled against a tree and it looks as though people (or bodies, more likely) are trapped inside the smashed remains. The wreck is horrible, and almost certainly nothing could have survived. (Closer investigation reveals that the figures are crash-test dummies, dressed as a family of four. Who arranged this surreal scene, and why, remains a mystery. The dummies are trapped within the wreck and had to have been in position prior to the accident.)
An unscheduled eclipse occurs, completely blotting out the sun for a period of several moments. Scientists are baffled and there is talk of the End of Days. (Rogue planet? Coincidence? Cosmic mystery? Is Galactus coming to devour our planet? Or maybe it really is the End Times. You decide.)
By the way, a
for the first person to correctly guess why I post these as triplets (three at a time).after playing FEAR all the way through in 1 week...i got some ideas.
-when climbing down a latter, you see a dark figure standing where you just were. When you look again, he is gone. Then, when you reach the bottom of the latter, he is standing right when you turn around, but gone in the blink of an eye.
That part scared the hell outta me! I think I unloaded a full magazine at the bottom of the stairs!
By the way, a
you're a planescape fan and the Rule of Three is in full effect?
and just because I hate to leave anyone hanging, check out Junji Ito's mangas.
grotesque, frightening, and filled with abject terror in some places.
Uzumaki, Death Scent, and Tomie are good places to start. I'm not a manga person, but I loved them regardless...good ideas in them, Cthulhoid horror, unending and destructive, beyond all imagining.
That part scared the hell outta me! I think I unloaded a full magazine at the bottom of the stairs!
LOL me too! :heehee
you're a planescape fan and the Rule of Three is in full effect?
and just because I hate to leave anyone hanging, check out Junji Ito's mangas.
grotesque, frightening, and filled with abject terror in some places.
Uzumaki, Death Scent, and Tomie are good places to start. I'm not a manga person, but I loved them regardless...good ideas in them, Cthulhoid horror, unending and destructive, beyond all imagining.
No one's there yet, but you've come quite close with the concept. (Actually, I was never a big PS fan, just collected a few of the supplements. Didn't even know what the Rule of Three (with regards to Planescape) was until I looked it up just now.)
And since you were offering some references for creepy ideas, here are three suggestions:
Dead End (2003) - This French-directed (but filmed in English with American actors) horror-thriller is better than it has any right to be. A typical family on a typical journey to spend Christmas with the in-laws experience a not-so-typical series of events that will keep you from taking any shortcuts for a while. The twist ending is somewhat predictable, but getting there is no less enjoyable, and this one would make a perfect one-shot adventure (if your group hasn't seen the film) or could easily be slipped into an ongoing campaign.
The Descent (2005) - A British horror film that stands on its own in a crowd of similar films. A sextet of lovely lasses goes on a caving expedition that launches full-tilt into a roller-coaster ride of terror. If you're considering taking up spelunking, this will make you think twice! Read my full, (mostly) spoiler-free review at http://whtknt.livejournal.com/tag/movie+reviews. It's about half-way down the page. Again, the basic plot elements here can be readily adapted to a rpg scenario.
Wicked Little Things (2006) - One of the "8 Films to Die For," this plot easily fits a modern-day campaign. In an isolated mountain community, a recent widow and her two daughters find strange customs and an assortment of odd characters when they move to a remote mountain home which the widow has inherited from the family of her late husband. As they will discover, a nearby mine (now long abandoned) is the site of a tragedy in the early 20th century in which several children were buried alive. But sometimes, dead things just won't stay dead.
When looking in the woods, a PC sees a small house partially obscured by the foliage for a split second.
By the way, a
Bad things come in threes?
Yes, there is an old adage that trouble comes in threes, and that is the basis I used for posting my ideas. I try to post in a series of three. It fits the theme.
Seems like it. I propose a challenge, the challenge is who can come up with the best creepy event that's usable in a non modern setting.
When the character walks out of the ordinary, pseudo-medeval-esque tavern where they have been staying (I'm assuming that this is in a fantasy or other medeval setting), they find themselves in a modern-era street in some god-forsaken dictatorship. Armed secret police shoot the character in the leg and drag them off to some dark room and beat them and electrically shock them, while demanding answers to questions about topics that they don't even comprehend the meaning of. After a long time of not being able to answer any of the questions, and taking much abuse, they are knocked out, and wake up standing up, outside of the tavern, in their own pseudo-medeval time period, where they have been catatonic for the past five minutes since they walked out of the bar, and their friends have been trying to wake them up. Their leg hurts, and examination of their leg reveals a healed over wound with a modern era bullet still in it.
This event is, of course, MOST creepy in a NON-MODERN setting...
This assumes that the characters have recently had a close friend disapear and are trying to find them, its winter and they've already been searching for several months. Its late on a dark overcast night with a very strong wind sending the clouds scudding across the stars and the character is staggering along towards an inn they know is just ahead. Entering it they find everyone has been slaughtered some of them are impaled on the walls, others are torn in half one person is lying horribly burnt in the snow outside but there are no fires burning in the inn. They hear a noise behind them and turn to find a shadowy figure with green eyes standing there. Should they attack they find themselves completely unable to hurt it and rapidly beaten into unconciousness. Any light or light effects prove unable to dispell the shadow surrounding the figure even as it fights.
EDIT
You know I've been thinking about this and the problem is your standard DnD person isn't going to be that bothered by the unsual (eles, dwarves, magic, demons, angels etc etc). Now if we're talking earth style medieval thats a different matter which one are you interested in creepy events for?
They awake to find themselves tied up on the inn floor the figure who is still shadowed standing in front of them. A deep gravelly voice that sounds almost choked as if with blood says "I am not the killer here but I seek them your friend was lucky they wish them alive for some reason. They changed them altering their mind and body. You have already met them in fact they tried to help you find themself. Go back for if you continue you will die alone."
which one are you interested in creepy events for?
Either one, I guess. Anyway, I'll be judging which one's the best some time in the future, if there's more results.
Seems like it. I propose a challenge, the challenge is who can come up with the best creepy event that's usable in a non modern setting.
Just right off the top of my head, mind you...
A lone character awakens in his/her room one night to find a shadowy figure looming over them. The figure speaks in a voice that is strangely familiar, though the character can't quite place it. The stranger warns the character to take great care in the near future, for his actions will have far-reaching repercussions. The figure then turns to leave the room. As the stranger exits, he admonishes the character about some minor recent event that only the character himself could know (for example, "By the way, the jewel you pocketed from the Temple of Knowledge yesterday; you might want to be rid of it quickly.") The stranger then exits and closes the door. If the character follows, the figure is nowhere to be seen. (The implication here is that the stranger is the character himself from the future, sent back to warn his past self about a crucial decision that will occur in the near future. Why not tell them exactly what to beware of? Well, maybe the nature of temporal mechanics doesn't work that way, or maybe there was no time, or...)
When they enter their house/inn they hear cracking tearing noises as though the door was being destroyed. The next morning they waken to find their sleeping chamber covered in blood as though something or someone had been torn apart, the doors bashed in and the pawprints of some huge dog leading up to their house.
An option extra: This happens every night for a week, then they start noticing little cuts and bruises on their body when they wake up.
Your curled up in bed half asleep after a long day, outside the window a night bird cries mournfully. Suddenly there's a brilliant purplish black light shining from the side of the room and the whole place begins to shake. Turning over you see a book chained shut, as you watch the book pulses and the chains shatter. The book slams open blank pages spinning past rapidly. A voice say's "Releasing seal" and the book slams shut before sinking lower to hover in front of you. The voice speaks again "Activating" as a symbol on the front begins to shine with a shimmering rainbow coloured light which eventually brightens to a pure white before you pass out.
Next morning the books gone but you've developed magical powers (1st level or higher if you wish) and there's an animal (familiar of GM's choice) who's suddenly appeared and is trying its best to take care of you (I like grimalkins as they can assume human form but since they're CR2 you'd need to be above first level). At first it could seem wonderful although depending on the local villiagers attitudes you might need to keep your new powers secret. Then people start showing up dead, alway's the healthiest people in the villiage and alway's alone with no marks or sign of a struggle. After a few deaths 2-3 tell the character they're con has raised by 1 but provide no details of why.
Alternative option have the book remain (and don't ask for con as dump stat) but as the people die fill in pages of the book equal to the dead persons con/character level (gm choice as most commoners aren't high level I'd suggest con). The filled in pages can contain information on a range of subjects (magic, history, prominant figures).
EDIT
A brief little standby. While out one night the character sets up and lights a fire, as they settle back comfortably they see the firelight reflection from thousands of glowing red eyes watching them.
While walking through a huge abandoned mansion/manor (with other creepy creatures inside), your party comes to a hallway that makes an "L" shape turn with only one working light that blinks randomly. The wallpaper is halve peeled, the walls are filled with decay, the floorboards rotten with termites and squeak as such. At the end of the hallway is a metal door with blood on it, and a bloody path that is smeared down the hallway and makes the turn to the left out of sight. Blocking your path is a little, blond girl (probably 10 or 12 years of age) with her back to you crying. She seems to be holding a doll with blood splatters in her arms. [if the players have found the little girls room, then they should recognize the doll] At the sound of the party moving, she turns around only to have her eyes missing and she is crying blood. She says in a soft voice "will you play with me". Then drops the doll, and walks down the hall and takes the turn where the blood path follows, leaving sight. The doll just sits there in the middle of the hallway. Suddenly the hallways reeks with death and decay.
If the players follow the girl (which they will cause they got no where else to go likely) the girl is not there, the hall can either end there or have a door where the bloody path continues underneath the door. The door should obviously be closed and ominous looking. Maybe even locked, and the doll contains the key. Whats behind the door, I'll leave to you. :evillaugh
. WhtKnt gets second place . And Adrez gets third .If they enter the terminal, it has the appearance of a war-zone. Bullet holes dot the walls, windows, TVs, computers and vending machines are smashed. There are smears of blood in places, but no bodies.
The PC is cleaning up when the water suddenly starts running red with blood.
Or for the modern era
While browsing the internet a pop-up window appears with the picture of a stereotypical fortune teller (ornate robes, turban, in a tent) with the text message reading "I am the great Zoltar I can grant you a wish. Please type the answers to the following questions." (1) What is your wish, (2) What is your name, (3) what is your birth sign and (4) what is your mobile phone number and credit card number. Should the PC's at any point close the window the nearest phone rings repeatedly till they answer it at which point a deep voice on the other end says "Are you sure you don't want a wish?"
Anyway, scary stuff...
I watched The Abandoned, another of the 8 Films to Die For this weekend. The film is particularly chilling, and I won't ruin it for those who wish to watch it, but there was one little effect that I found was put to great use in the film. Exploring a spooky old house, the protagonist found that anything illuminated by the beam of her electric torch showed things as they were in the past. As the beam swept over a room, the wallpaper became vibrant, a broken lamp was as new, and... well, that would spoil it. Trust me, the effect was very eerie.
And now...
Helping the host clean up after a social dinner at the house of a casual acquaintance (such as a neighbor), one of the characters is startled to discover a body in the freezer, that of the host's spouse, believed to be on holiday. (Eerie as this may seem, that is exactly what happened to a helpful dinner guest in Verviers, Belgium a short time ago. The helpful guest was assisting in clearing up following a dinner with Didier Charron. As she went to the basement to put something into the deep freeze, she discovered the frozen remains of Mrs. Charron. Further investigation by police revealed the body of Charron's 11-year old stepson beneath that of his mother.)
Passing by a newly constructed building, a character notices something out of place about one of the cornerstones. Closer inspection reveals a human finger embedded in the stone block. (Disposing of an unwanted body by sealing it in concrete is not all that uncommon. In fact, it happens more often than you might think. But seldom does a body part show up in new construction. It might be the remains of an unfortunate drifter or careless workman. Or maybe not.)
While traveling or simply going about her daily routine, a character encounters a person who could be her twin. In fact, to see the individual is like staring into a mirror. As she approaches, the figure disappears into a crowd or around a corner and is gone. (In legend, seeing one's doppelgänger is a portent of death. Some legends say that the doppelgänger may try to communicate with it's twin, imparting misleading or deceptive information, while other beliefs imply that even speaking with a doppelgänger can be dangerous.)
Though it’s almost childish, one of the characters has become afraid of his bedroom door. If he looks at it right, the pattern of wood grains on its back almost seems to make a faint demonic visage. It has been gradually becoming more obvious as days pass, but it’s worst at night…when just before the character falls asleep, he can almost hear it whispering…
A character is jolted awake one night by the sound of thunderous footsteps lumbering past his downtown apartment. The next morning no one else he meets has any memory of the incident.
Lying in bed, failing to get any sleep, one of the players can hear the deliberate and periodic scrape of metal on metal, as though someone nearby were sharpening a blade.
A character awakens one morning to discover that everyone he meets jabbers at him in some indecipherable language, and can’t understand a word of plain English.
The house the heroes are exploring suddenly creaks and groans hideously, as if it were a sailing ship in severe distress.
Though it’s well below freezing, for some reason a player’s breath doesn’t fog out in the cold.
One of the characters yelps and jumps, stammering something like “the floor bit me.”
A PC has critical insomnia—he is unable to fall asleep, naturally or though medicine. Even tranquillizer darts have no effect on him. While this seems like a boon when it comes to deciding who’s standing watch, eventually the lack of rest begins affecting his mind. He becomes moody, staring off into space for hours on end before exploding in a violent temper. Then the hallucinations begin…
Though she lives alone and the bathroom door was locked, upon exiting the shower a character discovers that someone has rummaged through the change of clothes she left by the sink.
A player experiences problems with his sight: his night vision has never been better (in fact, he can operate in total darkness without trouble), but even soft lighting blinds him.
One of the heroes has been having coughing fits all day. After a particularly violent bout of hacking, he finds what looks like bloody cobwebs in his handkerchief.
A player’s shadow moves across the wall, but the only light sources nearby are completely stationary.
Every time a character listens to someone speak, she can also make out whispers and hisses on the edge of hearing. These noises always begin and end while someone says something, as though another speaker was providing eerie dubbing.
A PC is knocked off-balance by a lump moving across the carpet, as though something were scurrying under it. The bump reaches the edge of the rug and promptly vanishes.
There are smudged handprints all over the ceiling of the two-story-high foyer, as though someone had been crawling around up there.
A character in a cramped apartment hears the unmistakable clatter of hooves outside his bedroom door.
A player has a hard day at work. Communicating with his co-workers is next to impossible since their voices are strangely distorted, and judging by their reactions he isn’t speaking clearly himself. Even moving around is difficult—it feels like the air is so thick around him he might as well be underwater.
While backing her car out of her driveway, a character glances into the rearview mirror and sees a small child grinning at her from the backseat. Whirling around, she finds nothing behind her.
The sun disappears. Instead, the sky is perpetually filled with a nebular haze that bathes the world in an unnatural red light. Most plant life dies save for some breeds that mutate into utterly alien flora, but worse are the psychological effects the new light source has on animals and humans…
A PC’s flesh, over the period of weeks, gradually grows withered and desiccated. Her eyes dry out, becoming milky white orbs still somehow capable of vision, while the flesh on her face begins to fleck off. Keeping warm becomes nearly impossible, scents are undetectable, food tastes like ash, and her sense of touch atrophies almost completely. When yellowed bones finally break though the shriveled flesh at her knees, elbows, hands, feet, and spine, the PC is too emotionally dead to care. The only real annoyance is the tickling sensation caused by things wriggling through her abdomen, sinuses, and chest cavity.
A lone character moving through a lightless passage stops suddenly and is bumped into by someone behind him. Turning around, he finds only darkness.
Moving through an abandoned building, a burst of harsh, mocking laughter suddenly surrounds the heroes before silence returns.
While doing her grocery shopping, a character can just make out someone on the other side of the aisle steadily pacing her as she walks along. Upon reaching the end of the row, she finds the next aisle to be empty.
A player is evicted and forced to take up residence in a cheaper apartment, unfortunately located adjacent to a decrepit church and cemetery. He has trouble sleeping due to the wailing, mournful choruses coming from next door—apparently this denomination is keen on unlit midnight services, as he never sees anyone use the church during daylight hours.
One player finds a yellowed envelope taped to his front door. The crinkled note enclosed has no signature, and only contains the cryptic message “Are you deaf to the howls of the hungering void? Can you hear the songs of the damned?”
The heroes can’t leave the isolated little village they are investigating: the woods and hills are smothered in fog, while anyone trying to drive out on the lone road into town find themselves somehow turned around shortly after leaving the city limits.
A character is awakened late one night by the noise of a thousand nameless creatures scuttling across his roof.
The sound of a player’s footsteps is slightly out of sync with her actual movements—they’re slow to start and continue for a split second after she stops walking.
After his shower, a PC steps back into his bedroom to get dressed but stops in his tracks when he finds a crone-like woman already in there. She scowls at him, mutters something unintelligible, and shuffles out the door, closing it behind her. The PC comes to his senses and immediately flings the door open only to find the hallway beyond empty.
One of the characters is the victim of an elaborate, almost conspiracy-like practical joke. Everyone around him talks with and fakes responses to some imaginary person by his side, and feign surprise when they realize he can’t see or hear this figment of their imagination.
A character inexplicably leaves bloody footprints wherever he goes, even when he’s wearing shoes.
While walking to his downtown workplace through a thick fog, a player sees faint, wolf-like shapes trailing him through the mist. None of the other pedestrians seem to notice, and in turn the wolves focus only on the player.
During a violent encounter, one of the investigators is mortally wounded. He collapses, panting, to the ground, darkness nibbles away at the edge of his vision, and all becomes dark…until he is awakened in bed by the beeping of his alarm clock. The date says it’s the morning of the day of his “death.”
(bonus ending to above) Just after the alarm is shut off, the numbers on his clock display “0:04,” then flash “0:03” for a moment before showing the correct time.
The party is trapped in a small shack—every time someone gets close to the walls, a vicious, four-foot-long metal blade stabs at them through the old wood. Even worse, the windows are boarded up, so the heroes don’t even know who or what is lurking outside, somehow able to divine their position before striking.
A character awakens naked in the fetal position, his limbs bound to his torso by a thin layer of skin.
Either one of the heroes has gone mad or everyone else has. He comes to work to find the office in ruins--walls ridden with bullet holes, furniture broken or scattered, lights flickering or out completely, and bloodstains and bodies all over the place. His coworkers, however, take no notice, and wordlessly step over corpses in the hallways, eat their lunches on a table covered by a pool of blood, and type away on keyboards connected to smashed and scattered computers.
While moving through an office building after hours, the investigators hear muffled pounding noises, as though something was scurrying around in the air ducts or above the ceiling tiles. Whatever it is, it's too big to be rats...
A hero’s presence is intolerable to insects and other vermin—stepping outside, he can look down and see ants, beetles, and spiders contorting on the ground next to him in silent agony. Everywhere he goes is preceded by a flood of fleeing creepers.
Late one evening, a character is just about to fall asleep when he faintly hears a maddening piping sound, as though some insane flutist was playing downstairs.
A PC’s dreams are always the same: she seems to see through the point of view of some nameless entity slowly but steadily plodding through the night. She comes to realize over the course of a week that the visions are taking place progressively closer to her residence. A short business trip to another city ends with nightmares of the pursuer altering course to advance towards her motel, but when she returns home the vision gets back to its normal heading.
A player awakens one morning with only gauze-wrapped stumps where his hands and feet were.
Staring into the night through a window, a character sees instead of street lights, ghostly glows like those of bioluminous deep-sea life. Turning on the floodlights of his driveway, he catches a quick glimpse of enormous, chitinous feelers and limbs quickly darting from sight back into the darkness.
Startled by a horrific nightmare, a character is reassured by the warm furry presence huddled by his side and quickly falls back asleep. It isn’t until the following morning that he realizes he doesn’t own any pets.
A character does a double take after getting out of his car—when he glanced back to lock it with his remote, he could’ve sworn there was someone sitting in the passenger seat.
There’s a weird sort of tumor growing on the back of a player’s head. It keeps getting bigger as the days go by but also grows increasingly firmer, bonier. The shape is especially disturbing—moving his fingers under his hair, the player can feel what almost feels like…cheekbones? Teeth?
Every morning when a character wakes up, she finds that someone has placed a blighted black rose on the pillow next to her.
A PC suddenly feels a sensation of falling and staggers forward. Turning around, he is shocked to see himself staring back at him with a horrified expression on his face. With the blink of an eye everything is back to normal.
If a player sits still for too long, getting back up becomes difficult: limbs become stiff and joints crackle when they’re moved again, while his feet and legs must be snapped loose from some brittle, calciferous growth that seems to seal him to the floor or furniture.
An exhausted character gets on a late-night bus without paying too much attention to the driver or passengers. After he’s been seated for a few minutes, he can’t help but notice how everyone else aboard seems affected by grievous injuries. One man’s neck is at a nauseating angle, a young woman’s wrists are slashed and blood-soaked, and the sunglass-wearing driver has what looks like a large exit wound in the back of his head.
Though alone in the old manor, the mirror in the great hall shows the PC surrounded by grinning, shambling cadavers.
A devout character makes his weekly visit to his house of worship but is startled by some sudden changes. The familiar holy symbol has been replaced by a statue of a grotesque horned beast, while the sacrament observed involves the congregation ritualistically filling a chalice with blood from their gashed arms. His friends and family in attendance act like this is all routine.
A hero awakens and finds herself completely shorn of body hair.
The city’s feral dog population is treating one of the characters with an unusual amount of interest. They keep following him around, and though they aren’t threatening, the canines are very hostile towards anyone who gets close to the character, as if they’ve adopted him as part of their pack…
The veins and hues of the marble tiles slowly drift across the floor like clouds across a sky.
Alone at home, a character picks up the phone to make a business call only to listen in on a conversation already in progress. She hears a gravelly-voiced man in an unrecognized accent say “already searched the house, but it isn’t here. I’ll have to take more direct action.” Then a click and dial tone.
One of the heroes awakens unusually stiff and sore. After stumbling into the shower, he notices that he’s sporting some scars and stitches that weren’t there last night.
A player’s eyesight undergoes some drastic changes over the course of a week. People and animals slowly become hazier and less distinct, but at the same time he notices vague shadows that no one else sees, shapes that are gradually growing clearer and more threatening…
The heroes are heckled by maddening voices that seemingly come from thin air. Three distinct entities provide insulting commentary for their every action, including verbal jabs such as “our heroes make the Three Stooges look like The A-Team,” “Slimer from Ghostbusters could take these guys,” and “well Earth, get ready for an era of eternal darkness.”
1) They should/do not know.
2) Is something that is creepy in the first place.
The child's behavior changes slightly thereafter. No one else seems to notice.
*I had my friends two year old come up to me yesterday, crawl on my lap, say something that sounded exactly like "maggots," hug me, jump down and walk away. Then, this child that normall does not like me, kept hugging me throughout the day.
EDIT
Forgot to include this simple one.
As the group drives into a town the sign displaying population increases by the number in the car - 1. Getting out to examine it shows the paint to be old and cracked.
While visiting a gentleman's club, for whatever reason (perhaps making a Gather Information check, or maybe just because he wants to), a character is approached by an attractive girl who tries to entice him into paying for a lap dance. As she coyly sidles up to her target, she runs her hands over his chest and strokes his face. All the while, he feels someone caressing his back and neck, but there is no one nearby, and both the girl's hands are visible.
(A lap dance is a private performance at your table. The fee is typically about $20 to $40, and the dancer is allowed to do anything she feels comfortable doing. The recipient, however, is absolutely not permitted to touch the performer with hands (or other appendages). It is not at all unusual for performers to be very persuasive about soliciting lap dances, even to the extent of practically seducing the target.)
As the characters are passing by an open sewer grate on the street, they are startled to hear a human voice calling for help. The sound is loud enough to be heard over normal conversation, but no one is visible, nor does anyone answer if called to.
(It is remarkably easy to find one's way into a sewer system, and quite difficult to get out again, if you aren't at least somewhat familiar with the layout of the city streets. Echoes, tight passages, the presence of water, and plenty of twists and turns magnify even the slightest sound and carry it for tens (or even hundreds) of feet. Or maybe it only sounded like a human voice. Those same factors can warp sounds into something else entirely, and the human mind has a habit of trying to make sense of sensory input.)
Visiting the city aquarium, the character have stopped to admire the huge saltwater tank, where sharks swim with other fish. There is a collective gasp from the crowd, followed by sounds of disgust, then a scream when one of the sharks begins to thrash wildly, regurgitating the contents of it's stomach into the surrounding water. Floating amid the fish and other debris is a partially-digested human arm.
Visitors to Coogee, New South Wales, Australia got just such a surprise on the 25th of April in 1935, when a 3.5 meter tiger shark regurgitated a human arm. The arm belonged to a former boxer and small-time criminal, James Smith, who had been reported missing. On examination, the arm had been neatly severed, not bitten off. A murder investigation ensued, but no one was ever charged, lacking habeas corpus.)
I like cats. They make good recurring themes in horror.
*One evening, you come home and an unassuming gray cat is seated on your porch. He refuses to leave and if shood away just returns later. You can't help but think that he nods at you as you go inside. That night, you are awakened by the sounds of a horrific battle outside your window. You can't see what is happening, but it sounds like a tiger is fighting horde of...wolves? Bats? It doesn't sound like anything natural. When you question your neighbors, they didn't hear anything.
The next morning, the yard is totally torn up, except for five feet around your porch. The cat is still sitting there, slightly scratched up but still stoicly sitting. The next night, you hear the battle again. The next morning, the cat is still there, but slightly more injured than before. This continues for several more nights, with the fight getting more ferocious and the cat getting more and more injured every morning. One night, the fight stops sooner than it usually does. The next morning, the cat is dead.
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*One morning, you go outside and find a dead mouse on your doormat. You can barely see a cat run around the corner of your fence. Curiously, the mouse does not have any wounds on it. The next morning, there is a dead rat, slightly bigger than the mouse. Again, you have just enough time to see a white tail dart around the corner. The next morning, there's a dead bird. Next morning, it's a dead cat. The animals get bigger and bigger every morning, until they get so big it can't possibly be a cat dragging them there...
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* One day, you start seeing this wierd cat. You never see him for more than a few seconds, he is always on the windowsil of a tall building and darts inside or in the back seat of a passing car, but what you can see is creepy. His fur is completely, almost immacualtely white. Even his skin is eerily pale. More creey than that, however, are his eyes. Pure blue, almost human eyes that regard you with unnatural intelligence. Whenever you see him, he is always staring directly at you.
You see him at least once per two or three days. Then one day, you see him very early in the morning. This time, he has a dagger laying at his feet. He almost seems to smile sadly at you before he disappears as usual. You don't see him again for the rest of the day. That night, on the evening news, their top story is a terrible murder investigation. The victim: an unknown albino man, skin and hair completely white, eyes vibrant blue. The only clue to his death is a strange dagger in his hand, with your name scratched onto the blade.
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*This one is actually a Japanese folk tale. There was once a boy who loved to draw cats. Jumping cats, sitting cats, running cats, anything a cat could do he would draw it. One day, he finds his way inside an old abandoned monastery. With nothing else to do for the next few hours, he breaks out his pen and starts drawing cats all over the walls. In a while, the walls are almost totally covered with cat drawings. Feeling tired, the boy crawls inside a cupboard and falls asleep.
He wakes up to terrible sounds. It sounds like a colossal...rodent of some kind is being torn apart. He tries to peek out the crack in the cupboard, but can't make anything out. All he can do is cower inside the cupboard and wait for it to be over. A while later, the sounds stop. He waits a few minutes just to be sure, then cautiously opens the door. The entire room is covered in shreds of fur, strips of flesh, and chunks of bone, with a gigantic carcass lying in the corner. The kid runs out as fast as he can, but not before noticing that the mouth and claws of every cat he drew are covered in blood.
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*You wake up one morning, and look outside at the tree in your yard. Now in the early morning light it's hard to tell, but it looks like the tree is...writhing? Pulsing? You can't really get a good look. You go outside an walk right up to it. As you do, you see that it is really covered in hundreds of dying birds, each nailed by its wings and feebly trying to get free.
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*You are driving along in the countryside one night. The sky must be pretty clear, because the radio is playing with no static at all. As you flip through the channels, you come to one that sounds like military code or something. "Alpha. Delta. Foxtrot 9." it says. "Whiskey. Epsilon. Tango 5." You stop on this and start listening to the code. It's kin of mesmerising. Soon, you start saying the code along with the guy. "Gamma. Beta. Decka 3" you say along with it. You do this for a while, but then stop suddenly when you realize you are saying the words before the radio.
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You are sitting at home one night, when you hear scratchings from inside the walls. Damn rats, you think to yourself. In the morning, you call an exterminator. When he comes, he peels back the wall to get a better look. Inside are six skeletons of small childred.
I've recently gotten into the video game eternal darkness: sanity's requiem (awesome game
), which seems to be entirely based around the idea of random creepy things to throw off the players and reflect the mental state of the characters. As the character lose sanity all sorts of things happen, they hear voices, see blood dripping off the walls and ceiling, etc.My favorites are:
-walk into a room you have visited many times in the evening, but this time there is a man hanging from the ceiling. Upon inspection, the corpse lifts its head are stares you directly in the eye. By the time you blink it is gone.
-walk through a doorway and notice your (or someone else's) body parts falling off one by one, head, arms, legs, body. Then the character finds himself on the other side of the door, having not crossed it yet
-when in the washroom, the character gets a quick glimpse of themselves in a bath of blood
-when the characters stop walking, the sound of footsteps continues for a few more seconds
and many more
the game also has a bunch of effects that seem to be outside the game, such as the appearance that the tv has shut off, muted, changed channel, etc. Perhaps there is the illusion of a large fly walking accross your TV screen. Can't really apply these to RPG, but they are very cool none the less
---
The puddles of rainwater in the streets don't reflect buildings, but rather a dark primeval forest.
Everyone has a voice inside their heads that tells them to do stupid things like touch the fire, jump off the edge, or whisper an epithet at someone, but one character's "shoulder devil" seems unusually insistent. When he talks with people, sometimes he gets violent impulses, as if someone was silently urging him to "kill." This same "voice" makes long, whispered speculations about the secret perversions of the character's friends, and provides a scathingly sarcastic commentary whenever the character visits his church (oddly, the "voice's" theological knowledge surpasses the character’s).
While exploring her grandmother's root cellar, a player finds nothing more than cans of strawberry preserve...until she notices what looks like a bone shard in one of the containers of jam...
A PC is certain that someone is breaking into his apartment when he's asleep and messing with his stuff. The PC will awaken in the morning to find food and drink missing or half-eaten in the kitchen, his clothes on the floor in dirty heaps, or his TV left on a different channel. Then he begins to notice that his car seems to be burning gas faster than normal, and finds new purchases in his house some mornings despite not going to a store. Things get weirder when he finds strange messages on his answering machine from women discussing the "great time we had late last night" (which would explain the lingerie he found flung behind the bed). But then he wakes up one morning and sees the red stains on the clothes in the laundry room, the gory hatchet behind the front door, the strange bundle wrapped in blood-soaked sheets in the living room...
There's nothing unusual in the nursery of the abandoned manor except for a large teddy bear with strange red stains on his claws and muzzle.
*One evening, you come home and an unassuming gray cat is seated on your porch. He refuses to leave and if shood away just returns later. You can't help but think that he nods at you as you go inside. That night, you are awakened by the sounds of a horrific battle outside your window. You can't see what is happening, but it sounds like a tiger is fighting horde of...wolves? Bats? It doesn't sound like anything natural. When you question your neighbors, they didn't hear anything.
The next morning, the yard is totally torn up, except for five feet around your porch. The cat is still sitting there, slightly scratched up but still stoicly sitting. The next night, you hear the battle again. The next morning, the cat is still there, but slightly more injured than before. This continues for several more nights, with the fight getting more ferocious and the cat getting more and more injured every morning. One night, the fight stops sooner than it usually does. The next morning, the cat is dead.
Hmm, don't read Neil Gaiman by any chance, do you?
I've recently gotten into the video game eternal darkness: sanity's requiem (awesome game
My favorites are:
-walk into a room you have visited many times in the evening, but this time there is a man hanging from the ceiling. Upon inspection, the corpse lifts its head are stares you directly in the eye. By the time you blink it is gone.
-walk through a doorway and notice your (or someone else's) body parts falling off one by one, head, arms, legs, body. Then the character finds himself on the other side of the door, having not crossed it yet
-when in the washroom, the character gets a quick glimpse of themselves in a bath of blood
-when the characters stop walking, the sound of footsteps continues for a few more seconds
and many more
the game also has a bunch of effects that seem to be outside the game, such as the appearance that the tv has shut off, muted, changed channel, etc. Perhaps there is the illusion of a large fly walking accross your TV screen. Can't really apply these to RPG, but they are very cool none the less
Nothing tests your spine like playing Eternal Darkness at midnight with the lights off...my friend actually jumped out of his chair when he saw what was in the bathtub, heheh. The soundtrack is simply fantastic for a horror setting too, or just to get in the mood to write some Creepy Events. The CD itself is very rare, but of course if anyone really wanted to download it, I'm sure that there’re a few websites they could visit...not that I'd know anything about such operations, shame on you for accusing me, etc.
I've cheerfully ripped-off a lot of the good sanity effects and gotcha! moments from that old Gamecube gem, but here's a few more that could be adapted:
A character is walking through a library deep in thought when he hears paper rustling--he glances up just in time to see what looks like a book glide across the aisle between shelves.
One of the PCs is wandering alone through the old family manor when she rounds a corner and nearly collides with a young woman dressed in a housemaid's attire scrubbing the floor furiously. The maid stands up at the PC's approach--revealing a hideously scarred and ravaged face, her eyes clawed out--and shouts "I can't get the blood out!" before quickly vanishing.
The character was sure he was all alone in the room, until he hears a scuttling noise behind him. He turns around and scans the room, but sees nothing. Mentally shrugging, he continues with what he was doing until he hears the same noise again a few minutes later, the tick-tick-tick of chitinous legs on a wooden floor, this time closer to him. Frantic, the character searches the corners, peaks under the furniture, but again can't find the sound's source. Shivering, he continues with his work. This time less than a minute passes before he hears the noise right behind him, an excited chittering as if some insectoid predator was about to make a kill...
A player steps through a doorway into a room filled with lumbering zombies, their grave stench and bestial roars filling the air. The player quickly whips out his firearm but only produces a fatal *click* sound after pulling the trigger. He has just enough time to frantically pat his empty pockets for ammo before the walking corpses tear him apart. The player blacks out and awakens on his feet, staring at the door he thought he went through.
Walking slowly through a cavernous chamber, its ceiling lost in shadow, a player stops abruptly when she hears a liquid splat behind her. As she turns around, she notices a fresh bloodstain on the floor behind her just as another short shower of red drops hits the ground a few feet closer to her. She starts backing away from the sight, as another salvo lands even closer...and another...
The players lose contact with some close friends of theirs (who are on a ship, or out on some kind of expedition with a radio/cell phone). Time passes and the friends fail to show up when they're supposed to.Some time later a call comes saying that they got lost but everythings alright and they'll be home soon. A little after that ship/plane/expedition is found and everyones dead. Examination reveals they were dead since shortly after contact was first lost and long before the call saying they'd be home soon.
A particularly nasty GM could then have the bodies disapear and the character awaken to a wet dragging sound outside their room a though something was out there.
I spent the weekend in New Orleans (I live about 90 miles away) with some friends who hadn't been there for many years, showing them the sights and enjoying the unique atmosphere. Using that city for inspiration...
huh...I'm only 30 miles away...just north of the lake.
anyway, those are pretty good ones too. New Orleans is a great city to visit, but take it from someone who lived there for 14 years...not all that great a place to live. However, using one of the MOST haunted cities in the world for inspiration...great choice man. I will tell you, you don't need to be in some great big mansion on the bayou to be in a haunted house. The house I lived in had some pretty creepy things happen. These could be used...btw these actually happened to me.
while investigating a bathroom (or any small room), a tall dark (like a shadow) figure moves past the doorway just out of the corner of your eye. When you think about it, the figure was too tall for anyone in the house, and other features that don't add up to anyone who's with you.
While standing looking at something (paper, book, picture, etc.) you hear a loud whistle right behind you. Of course no ones behind you and your not the only one who can hear it.
Creepy stuff can be creepy when it only happens to you, but when others can back up the event with no explanation it gets creepier cause you know its not your mind playing tricks on you anymore.
Your alone in a room in the house (my case the garage) at night (10:10 pm) and spent a few minutes moving around doing the normal things you do there (parking car, locking it, checking doors). Then the moment you turn off the lights there's a loud bang as something hurls itself against the nearest window.
Nothing tests your spine like playing Eternal Darkness at midnight with the lights off...my friend actually jumped out of his chair when he saw what was in the bathtub, heheh. The soundtrack is simply fantastic for a horror setting too, or just to get in the mood to write some Creepy Events. The CD itself is very rare, but of course if anyone really wanted to download it, I'm sure that there’re a few websites they could visit...not that I'd know anything about such operations, shame on you for accusing me, etc.
Ya, a friend found me the game at his old and new video game store so he bought it for me, as he knew I had been looking for it.
The bathtub didn't make me jump as much, but the hangman thing seriously chilled me with the way the camera movement played it just perfectly. The first thought was "omg, there is someone in the room", then you notice his feet don't touch the floor and he has a rope around his neck. The staring at you part is just gravy, noticing the guy is the scary part.
Just for fun, I have been letting alex go close to insane while I do all the other chapters because I get all the oddities when there isn't any real danger.
and to keep this going, a fast one:
When the character awakens one evening to go to the washroom, they notice that every window, mirror or other glass surface is completely fogged up, except the fog is on the inside, as if the dew were inside the house. No other surfaces show the faintest signs of dampness.
If we were able to see the sources of these voices would one of them have a gumball machine for a head?
The heroes are heckled by maddening voices that seemingly come from thin air. Three distinct entities provide insulting commentary for their every action, including verbal jabs such as “our heroes make the Three Stooges look like The A-Team,” “Slimer from Ghostbusters could take these guys,” and “well Earth, get ready for an era of eternal darkness.”
If we were able to see the sources of these voices would one of them have a gumball machine for a head?
Mike, Tom, and Crow right?
If we were able to see the sources of these voices would one of them have a gumball machine for a head?
Mike, Tom, and Crow right?
I'm relieved. For a day or so I was worried I was the only geek on these boards who watched MST3K. /cookies.
I had so much fun thinking up riffs for a horror-themed D20 game that I've compiled a good-sized list. The question is whether to post them on the Horror boards or under For Grins.
I'm relieved. For a day or so I was worried I was the only geek on these boards who watched MST3K. /cookies.
I had so much fun thinking up riffs for a horror-themed D20 game that I've compiled a good-sized list. The question is whether to post them on the Horror boards or under For Grins.
Why not both? Your previous lists have been great.
In the not-so-distant future,
right here on our own Earth,
A twisted magus and her cult
plot an evil god’s rebirth
Our heroes’ foe is one messed-up girl
out to wake a monster and destroy the world
She conjures Things from beyond space
while the heroes have to fight to try to save the human race
“I’ll summon fiendish horrors,
the worst I can find,
they’ll have to try to face them all
without losing their minds”
Now remember the PCs can’t control
when the encounters begin or end.
They’ll try to keep their Sanity points
with the help of their core class friends
*core class roll-call*
Moondog! Brandon! Roberta! Yorikooooooo!
If you’re wondering how the monsters breathe
and other science facts
Just repeat to yourself “it’s just a game”
you should really just relax
Oh, Mystery Science Theater D20
*guitar twang*
---
General Insults
“Our heroes make the Three Stooges look like The A-Team”
“Slimer from Ghostbusters could take these guys”
“Well Earth, get ready for an era of eternal darkness”
“I hope the insane cult’s leader is Tom Cruise”
“I’m just waiting for Shaggy and Scooby to bump into them”
“This would be perfect for an ‘Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’ anthology, probably under the title ‘What Not to Do’.”
“I got a dream team to top these guys: Inspector Gadget, Blue from Blue’s Clues, Winnie the Pooh, and the Crocodile Hunter.” “The Croc Hunter’s dead.” “My statement stands.”
“The worst part is that this is Cosmic Horror instead of Teenage Serial Killer Horror, so there’s almost no chance of gratuitous nudity”
“It’s sad how Mom and Pop cults like this are getting driven out of business by nation-wide franchises.” “Yeah, your Chinese-imported Dark Gods may be cheaper, but you just don’t see the quality you used to get with American-made Horrors from Beyond the Veil.”
“Feels like we’re nearing the point in the story when a major character is killed off. Any preferences?” “Hmmm, oh man, it’s so hard to choose just one…”
“This is like a Stephen King blooper reel”
“The best thing I can say about all this is that it’s more watchable than Battlefield Earth.” “Yeah, but so is a colonoscopy.”
“If this is a case of Good versus Evil, I’m gonna have to side with Evil here”
“Wouldn’t it be a better idea to come back later when there’s daylight?”
“I’m glad that heroes like these are around to deal with pesky cults. It frees the government to focus on the real threats, like DVD pirates and kids who download music off the Internet”
“Never underestimate the value of picking really stupid enemies”
“I’m not feeling the Horror here, I’m getting more of a Romantic Comedy vibe”
“Undeveloped characters, bad dialogue, too many pointless action scenes—if we have a boat or car chase we could be watching a Joe Don Baker movie”
“I’m hoping this bunch are the guys that get killed-off before the X-Files opening credits”
“This is what happens when you get your degree in Monsterology from a mail-order college”
“Which is the worst scenario: the cultists kill the heroes and succeed with their evil scheme, or these clowns stop them and go on living, possibly breeding later?” “Whoever wins, we lose.”
“These guys are like a modern-day Fellowship of the Ring, only they’re all incompetent and unlikable”
“I think this is the Turkish version of When Justin Met Kelly”
“You know what kids? Next time, stay home, call the cops, let someone qualified deal with it”
“Deep into that dumbness peering, long I sat there, wondering, fearing, asking how much longer I would have to endure this bore.” “Quoth the Raven: ‘Forvermore’.” “…Shut up you two.”
“This sucks, let’s play Dungeons & Dragons”
“The plot is really drawing me in…to a deep well of despair”
“Wow, this adventure has everything—all wrong!”
“You know, I’ve learned something from all this." "Yeah?" "I’ve learned that my vomit can rise pretty high, but I can still choke it back down.” “Hold on to that, that’s a useful skill.”
“Wow, I am on the edge of my seat! I should probably scoot back a little.” “Yeah, you’d be much more comfortable.”
“If I should slip into a coma during this, please, please don’t take any extreme measures to revive me”
“This is something Hitchcock would be proud of…his pet chimp coming up with”
"You can really see Akira Kurosawa's influence here, what with how there's fighting and stuff"
“Here’s a tough question: which of these guys is worst at their class role?” “Whoa…that’s deep, man.”
“This adventure has often been compared to Alien”. “Really?” “Yeah, people say: ‘Alien was really good. This story totally sucks’.”
Situational Put-Downs
(the heroes take awhile to work out a puzzle) “Have you solved it? Have you figured it out?”
(after a long series of noisy shootouts) “Suddenly Doom seems richly nuanced”
(a henchmen is killed) “Aw man, That Guy died! He was the backbone of the whole party!” (another NPC falls) “All the best characters, dying!”
(the heroes are unharmed by a barrage of enemy shooting) “Here’s some free advice for the cultists: stop and aim you idiots!”
(the party is alone in a dark tunnel) "Suddenly there was no monster..."
(romantic tension) “I hope these two end up together…at the bottom of a well, torn apart by animals”
(a PC dies) “It’s terrible when a beloved character is killed off. This is great though!”
(the party slogs through a series of annoying puzzles) “This is like Myst, only it’s not very good”
(damage reduction) “Ha ha ha ha ha! Your weapons are useless against me!”
(yet another combat against some cultists) “This has action and nostalgia, because we’ve seen it before”
(out in the wilderness) “Watch out for snakes!”
(slain enemy pitches over a catwalk) “Railing kill!”
(a character charges) “Hi-keeba!”
(the love interests share a tender moment) “I’m sorry these two didn’t end up together.” “Um, they did.” “Oh. Well, I’m sorry about that then.”
(too much cliché fog) “The movie The Fog didn’t have this much fog in it!”
(a PC makes a saving throw, narrowly avoiding a gruesome death) “Damn.”
(deus ex machina) “Aha, the DM comes to the PCs’ rescue”
(TPK) “Game over, man! Game over!”
(the party explores a medieval building) “Module XB-13: Adventure at Count Chocula’s Castle!”
(the heroes drive their car to the adventure site) “Shouldn’t they be in a van with some flowers painted on the sides?”
(a player stumbles) “Must’ve tripped in a plot hole”
(a trusted ally transforms into a gribbly horror) “Saw it coming”
(a Smart Hero is surprisingly effective in combat) “Huh, guess they do give out PhD’s in Kicking Your Ass.”
(after a series of baffling plot twists) “If the polar bear from Lost shows up, I’m leaving”
(the party slaughters a bunch of cannon fodder) “Big accomplishment, you killed characters not important enough to have their own names”
(one of the players wields a crowbar) “This would go great with an orange jumpsuit!”
(someone’s reading some arcane sigils) “Klaatu barada nikto”
(a PC runs out of ammo) “Throw the gun at it!”
(one of the monsters is cornered) “Time to take off the mask and see who it is!” “Old Man Johnston!?!”
(the party has a round of miserable rolls) “Did these guys forget to pick their Feats or something?”
(the heroes are infiltrating) “Shouldn’t they all be hiding under cardboard boxes?”
(the current wave of monsters is giving the PCs some difficulty) “Maybe they should’ve started with something easier, like Smurfs”
(damage reduction) “Your weapons cannot harm me, don’t you know who I am?”
(the party is accosted by a haggard, bearded drunk) “It’s...!”
(while the PCs explore a cave) “I hope Gandalf and the Balrog land on them”
(TPK) “At least there was a happy ending.”
(against a supernatural monster) “Eh, it’s not too scary—look, you can see the zipper”
(the party flees) “Shouldn’t the background be repeating behind them?”
(the PCs have a highly ineffective round of shooting) “Proud graduates of the Stormtrooper Academy for Marksmanship”
(against invisible enemies) “The special effects budget has officially run out”
(the party gets hit by a lot of attacks) “Apparently these guys never adjusted their armor ratings from the Second Edition”
(an NPC is killed) “Good thing they brought along some Red Shirts.”
(a PC stabilizes after being reduced to negative hp) “Awwww…”
(the archvillain manages to escape) “Oh noooo, there’s gonna be a sequel!!!”
(a PC is about to open a door in a spooky locale) “Hmm, what could be through here? Probably something really pleasant!”
(everyone in the party makes it through the first adventure) “Well, look on the bright side, in a lot of horror stories all the main characters die in the end”
(the PCs somehow come out on top) “Another case of not really winning, but screwing up less than the other guys.”
Anyway they go into the house which the 65 year old ghost of the previous owner is haunting until she gets to possess someone and have sex (having died without ever experiencing it because she was saving herself for marriage). What I expected them to do was follow their orders which were to find out if it was real. Instead two of them got into a huge fight drawing guns (In character obviously) with one trying to order the other to let her possess them and have sex so she can go on to the afterlife (possesion involved a temporary sex and gender orientation change to a heterosexual woman) whichthe other refused on grounds of it being a security threat. The third sick of the fight then invited her to possess them.
And to keep on topic....
Its late at night and you wake up needing to go to the toilet. You don't bother to turn on the light as you know your house like the back of your hand. As you walk to the toilet though you see a blue glow off to the left and decide to see what it is. You walk towards it and towards it and towards it before realizing your house isn't this big and the glows still as far away as when you started.
This can be very cool if done well. Here is the encounter I ran once, it uses tons of the creepy events and mixes them into something that had my players totally in the dark as to what was ahppening.:
When sleeping a forest, I told them they wake up before the sun has risen and find that every tree appears to a black leafless husk. As they continued down the misty barren path, they eventually come to a small house. As they inspected the house, I filled in endless random weird notes of information, that completely through them off as to where they were and what was happening. Here are some of the things they saw:
-no fire in the fire place, though they saw smoke from outside
-there are lines through the dust on the floor as if every single piece of furniture had been moved and moved back
-the kitchen was completely empty except for a bowl of fresh fruit which lay in a dusty cupboard.
-the grandfather clock goes counterclockwise.
-there is a single red dot stained in the pillow in the bedroom
-in the drawers of the bedroom, you find a single rat chewing on something orange. It retreats as soon as noticed.
Finally, the last room they check is filled with jack-o-lanterns, which have human eyeballs pinned in the eye sockets (I think I got this event from HoH). (one of my players actually attempted to eat one of the eyes... I have twisted friends). The window in that room looks out on a small path through the trees.
Down the path, all of the shrubs and bushes start striking at the player. When struck, they bleed profusely. When all nearby things are dead. A strange jester-like creature appears in the tree raises all of the blood into those blood ooze undead from LB. Any attempt to strike the jester utterly fails - projectiles turn to bats and fly away, weapons bend away from him, spells spin around him and back at their casters.
When they finally kill the oozes, the jester shouts in rhyme for them to get out of his domain. The players then wake up, back in the green forest... was it all a dream?
Any time the character so much as attempts to rest from now on, they find themselves violently thrust from their sleep. So my players couldn't get any shut-eye until they appeased the dream-keeper (yet to do)
OK, now lets see I haven't posted in a while.
When players are exploring a large (and somewhat modern building), a creature that crawls through the ventilation system is stalking the players. Give it tentacles, and make it strong. Have it try to pull a PC or NPC up into the vents at some random, unexpected time. If they succeed in rescuing said person, they are fine except for the bruised neck. If they fail, they find only blood trails. If they crawl in after said person, they find only bones and and horribly mangled masses of "stuff" that once belonged to several people.
Have them hear it crawling around once in a while, or give them small signs of its presence such as mangled vent covers, blood smears leading into vents, heavy breathing coming from a vent, or some slithery thing just disappearing out of sight as the light comes on.
Another successful tactic to instill fear in players is to have something far more powerful and lethal chase them. Maybe not literally (or maybe literally) but give them the feeling he's always one step behind them. Let them see "him" once in a while, but when they do something "always" really bad happens. Think pyramid head from silent hill, or nemeses from Resident Evil 3, or that golem guy from Resident evil 2 (when you play the second time around as the other person). Were talking big bad baddies that kill with easy, destroy anything in their path, walk through thin walls. Have them just seem unkillable, giving the players little option other than "RUN". However, don't force them to run. Have it "possible" to kill him eventually (like in 3 or 4 levels with enough people and better weapons) and force them to face "him" at some inconvenient time or when he hasn't shown for a while and the players have forgotten about him.
hmm...i like that whole exiled from sleep thing. Would be interesting if you went into the fact that players start getting sleep deprivation and recover nothing when trying to rest, or maybe they only get half-effect for merely resting instead of sleeping.
thats exactly what happened. Affected them for weeks afterwards. Started needing magic to keep themselves on their toes. the penalties from exhaustion really can hurt.
once or twice when they rested they managed to get some shut eye, found themselves in the dream plane, but instantly the jester figure find them and throw them out in some weird way, its the dream world after all (once he appeared to grow enough to swallow the characters).
All the dead in the town graveyard rise each night, only to bury themselves again in a new location. The new grave site pattern is oddly similiar to an ancient summoning circle...
Describe the night and campsite vividly and in much detail, and make hidden rolls. Do not talk. Do this for several in-game nights, then stop abruptly and never mention it again. Paranoia, anyone?
The characters wake up to find that their belongings are stained through with drying blood. Scattered around the campsite are the broken bodies of infants...but the characters themselves are perfectly clean, as if they had just bathed.
Are you guys considering compiling all of these eventually into some sort of PDF or file?
well, you could just press download this thread and save it as a text document, then you can convert it as you wish.
Are you guys considering compiling all of these eventually into some sort of PDF or file?
I proposed that idea once, but it was nixed by the powers that be.
I proposed that idea once, but it was nixed by the powers that be.
Huh...how are they going to prevent you from copy + pasting it all into a document? Besides, I know how to save threads, but it's so bulky and unorgazined that way
On topic this one was inspired by events yesterday (It just wouldn't shut up so this is catharsis)
Its the middle of the day and the PC's are at home when a neighbours dog starts barking and continues to do so for several hours on and on and on. Then all of the sudden there's a wet Squidge sound and a half yelp. Silence lingers on the air for a few moments and then footsteps are heard passing by the PC's house sounding like something heavy is walking through mud. A few moments later a scream is heard from the neighbours house.
Musical intruments (particularly drums) play themselves at random intervals.
Musical intruments (particularly drums) play themselves at random intervals.
You (the PCs) find a music room, noticing all the instruments lying around. One of the PCs notices that the drum sounds funny when he tapped it. Cutting it open reveals human bones (or worst, something a little more fresh). :D
your instrument thing gave me the idea! :lightbulb Thanks
You (the PCs) find a music room, noticing all the instruments lying around. One of the PCs notices that the drum sounds funny when he tapped it. Cutting it open reveals human bones (or worst, something a little more fresh). :D
your instrument thing gave me the idea! :lightbulb Thanks
No problem! I vaguely got the drum aspect of that from a scary story I read once about a pair of tribal drums that played themselves to their current owner, long after the tribe was slaughtered.
While browsing an antique shop, the characters come across a handmade djembe. The drum has an odd appearance, and the shopkeeper claims that it is said to be possessed by an evil spirit. (A character that succeeds at a Knowledge (earth and life sciences) check (DC 20) can determine that the drumhead is made of human skin and the cords are sinew (probably, but not necessarily, from the same source). The shopkeeper has no idea who made the drum, only that he purchased it from a salesman many years ago, who assured him it was possessed. It is left to the GM to decide how much of this is true. It might be just a morbid curiosity, or it might really be a haunted drum. Even the shopkeeper might know more than he is telling.)
A new death metal band, Deathkült, has recently appeared on the scene. The band's popularity is growing fast, and a large part of that popularity comes from the fact that the lead singer, Lars, dresses in elaborate demonic costumes and the band's shows feature graphically realistic on-stage "murders" and cutting-edge special effects. Many family and religious groups express concern over the realistically violent effects and Lars' "demonic" appearance. (Talking with other band members and stagehands will reveal that no one has ever been injured during a performance, and there are no reports of missing persons where the band has played. But on a successful Gather Information check (or with appropriate role-playing), the characters might be able to find out that several of the crew and band members are concerned about the way Lars' attitude changes during the shows. If the characters interview Lars, they find him to be a good-natured, forthcoming, and very stable individual who attempts to allay their fears and answer all their questions honestly. He explains that it is all a part of the act. He will even put on his make-up and demonstrate for them, if they wish.
What is really going on Lars' lucky guitar pick, which he uses only during live performances. It was given to him by a "fan" at the first show they ever played, and since then, he uses it exclusively during live performances (never in rehearsals or recording sessions). The pick is made from human bone and is charged with evil energy that channels fiendish energy into the user. Thus, when he plays, Lars opens himself to possession by a real demon (hence the attitude change and realistic effects and costume). And the more the pick is used, the greater the demon's control over the victim. Soon, the possession will be complete and Lars will be unable to control his actions.)
Howard Kerrick, a multi-millionaire with a taste for the odd and unusual, has recently passed on. He was found at his piano, slumped over the keys which were soaked in blood from his raw and bleeding fingers. His staff noted that Mr. Kerrick had recently acquired the piano and took to it with an unearthly passion, playing day and night. It all seems very odd, as Mr. Kerrick had never owned a piano previously, and had never shown any indication that he knew how to play. (Playing the piano is definitely a bad idea. Anyone sitting down at the bench and putting fingers to the keys must make a successful Will save (DC 25) or begin to play a beautiful melody, even if they have no knowledge of the piano! What is more, they will continue to play until physically forced to stop (A new Will save is permitted every hour, with the DC increasing by 1 for every save that has been missed previously). At first, the victim will seem entirely rational, merely expressing an interest in playing the music that "they can hear in their head," but as time passes, the victim forgoes eating, sleeping, and even drinking in order to continue playing the piano. Each day, the victim loses 2 temporary points of Constitution, and 1 point each from Wisdom, and Charisma. They continue to play until Constitution drops to 0, at which point the victim expires.
Research will reveal that Mr. Kerrick acquired the piano from the estate sale of a Charlene Grosse, who was also found dead at the piano, in a like fashion to Mr. Kerrick. She purchased the piano from an antique auction. It formerly belonged to a master pianist, Johann Gregor, whose works were well-known throughout Europe.
The piano is, naturally, cursed. Anyone sitting at the bench and playing the piano is possessed by Gregor's spirit unless they successfully save. The victim is compelled to play the piano unceasingly, until death occurs. Getting rid of the spirit may be as easy as destroying the piano, or more elaborate methods may be required.
For added fun, consider having the possessed victim enter a rage (as a D&D barbarian) if anyone tries to separate him or her from the instrument.)
Here are some subtler ones:
Every time a flute is played (maybe it is a specific flute or simply any time the sound of a flute is heard), alert characters notice a rat or two creep out of their hiding place and listen to the instrument patiently. Should anyone approach, the apparent trance is instantly broken and the creatures scatter as normal, but should the music start again...
While camping, a player or NPC plays the guitar. Oddly enough, for the duration of a certain song, every note can be heard from the surrounding environment. The whistling wind, crashing of waves and rustling of leaves accompanies the song in perfect tune.
The PCs are in a building when suddenly a loud SLAM is heard and felt from the roof (like a Mac truck hit it) When they go to investigate the disturbance, there is nothing there - no impact marks, no trails, nothing.
Every time a character wakes up, he finds himself one day back in time - phsyically as well. Can he solve the mystery before he ceases to exist?
A xylophone is found to be partially constructed out of large teeth. Where these teeth came from is anyone's guess.
This occurred to be a few seconds ago. It can happen in a crypt or graveyard or even a decrepit church.
The PCs are moving into the area, and they notice a large number of angel statues, all centering a single area. The number can vary from as little as 4 to hundreds, depending on the GM's desires.
When the PCs reach the center of the angels' area, either a deep mumbling or a demented recitation of a horrific poem can be heard. At the same time, PCs make Listen checks-if they succeed, they hear faint cracking noises. When the poem ceases, or the mumbling reaches a certain point, there are screeches from all around them-the marble angels have come to horrific life! Their skins are cracked to allow movement, and with every move they make, reddish liquid (perhaps blood, perhaps something more sinister? Acid? Poison?) oozes from their "skins." Their entire lower faces have cracked open, and are lined with steely, spike-like teeth-yet the top of the head remains intact, the eyes still blankly carved with an expression of content. Their hands have either both or singularly broken apart, revealing blades, or "fingers" made of rebar, or even cracked like the rest of the body, oozing the same liquid. Their wings have sloughed their coverings, and are made of rebar sparsely covered with metal "feathers" that act like blades. They can either walk or hop, breaking from their bases and attacking, shrieking the whole time. What's more, they're supported by similarly deformed statuary from nearby. The whole thing can seriously damage a religious PC's faith, with any luck, and the Sanity damage will be insane.
While driving one of the pc's noticed skid marks on the road as they move along they realize the skid marks are in the shape of letter spelling out the phrase "Beware [PC's name]" if they stop and go back to look they see just normal skid marks but anyone else who looks when they're first passing see's the same thing.
As the PC's make for higher ground, they run into all sorts of obstacles like power cables touching water, and bloated zombies rising. Soon...they hear the sounds of a siren screaming throughout the town. Tornado? Earthquake? no...the dam is breaking, and soon a flash flood/ tidal wave sweeps through the town and they've only moments to escape.
I'll try my hand at a few ideas, some have happened to me, some havent. You decide!
*The PC begins seeing a white shape at the edge of their vision, it blurs slightly and disappears when they move, it begins to grow slowly into the line of sight if they stand still. This only happens when the PC is alone.
*The PC enters a room, it has no windows and just the door. Normal everyday objects are arranged in the room but something is not right. The DM describes the room as having a light bulb hanging from the roof and objects casting shadows on the walls...up the walls. Despite the fact that the light bulb is turned on and on the roof, the light itself and the shadows are as if the light source was on the floor (darker roof, lighter floor).
*The PC is in a large crowd in a city plaza. People rush about on their way to work, businessman chatter on their phones, the place is seething with humanity. The PC is knocked aside accidentally by a short figure in old torn clothes, a brown hoodie over their head. The PC barely hears an apology from the figure as they walk on "Sorry brother". The figure walks on then starts hacking and coughing up greenish water and a piece of seaweed. Even if the PC gives chase, the figure reaches the nearby fountain and turns to look at the PC. The figure is a man, his skin is a pale green and shiny with moisture. His eyes are pitch black and bulge out of his head. He nods at the PC and jumps into the fountain. On inspection the fountain is empty of any people and only a foot of water deep.
*The PC is walking along a street and sees a dog sitting in the back of a ute (pickup truck). The dog catches the eye of the PC and they lock gazes. As he walks by, the dog nods almost imperceptibly at the PC. The PC nods back, the dog nods once again then points with his nose for the PC to continue walking down the street.
Thats all I got for now, a shiny nickel for anyone who guess whats real and whats not.
The radios start playing songs that offer advice applicable to the current situation. If they are in a time critical situation they might here "Now's no time to hesitate.", if enemies are approaching it might be "They're coming to take me away ha ha he he ho ho." Then when they start listening to them it starts playing for want of a better term apocolypse rock "I'm on the highway to hell."
Typical hotel room, beds, drawers, bathroom, that sort of thing
(maybe for the medieval setting, just a bed)
Anyways, they walk into the room.
Just as they get like 10 feet into the room, the lights start flickering.
A horrible scream that seems to come from a woman or something fills the room, loud enough to make the PCs have to cover their ears.
(If they don't, their ears start to bleed convulsively)
The room begins to shake really violently, like the hotel is being hit by a tornado.
Then the light goes out and everything is silent.
The light slowly flickers on, they are still in the hotel room, but with a horrible twist.
The bed, drawers, and floor are covered with blood and innards, dried up.
the most horrible things is that you notice corpses, by the looks of it, nailed to the walls of the room, including the ceiling. Some have their fronts sliced open and that's where the innards come from.The blank faces, some that look shocked, stare back at you.
The bathroom, if you are running a modern campaign, same thing, the walls are covered with bodies nailed to the wall. The bathtub is full of blood with a body in there. The mirror is covered with bloody hand prints. Everything is rusted and unsanitary.
As the PCs would reach for the door, it seems like some of the bodies were nailed to block the door and the only way out was to pull the nails out of the corpses and pull the bodies off the wall.
Now for a very scary twist, the bodies come ALIVE!!Still nailed to the walls!!!
Insane Sanity check!
By the way, I did not see Room 1408 yet, nor have I played Silent Hill and no, I don't like scary movies, I think about it too much and scare myself.
:P
A character wakes up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature. He opens his bedroom door to leave and nearly collides with what looks like a gaunt, filthy man dressed in a soiled suit standing mere inches away from him. The character freaks out and slams the door, takes half a moment to collect himself, and opens it again, revealing nothing but darkness beyond.
The strange pattern of shadows cast on the room’s walls results from the human ribcage its owner used as a lampshade.
A character’s reflection grins maliciously, gives a mock salute, and steps “out of frame.”
When a PC arrives home one gray afternoon, he is startled to find a large crow fluttering in the corner of his living room. The bird flees at his approach and disappears into his house, only occasionally reappearing afterwards when the PC re-enters rooms he thought he was alone in. Late at night he can sometimes hear fluttering noises coming from different parts of his residence. Oddly enough, the bird never makes its presence known when company is over, and never makes any attempt to leave the building. The lack of droppings or other physical signs of its existence is also strange.
The shriek of tearing metal rends the air, with no apparent source.
A character’s pet cat sits bolt upright in her lap, fluffs up, then jumps down and begins growling and moaning at something invisible to the character. The cat steadily backs away from this unseen menace before bolting and hiding in the back rooms of the building.
The sheets and covers on a player’s bed writhe and wriggle as though a swarm of rodents was crawling around in them. Yanking everything off the bed reveals nothing unusual.
Strange banging noises and muffled sobs are coming from a character’s closet.
While walking through a hospital around three in the morning, a character in a lonely corridor witnesses a strange electrical problem—sections of lights fail and return in sequence, causing an area of darkness to move down the hallway.
Just as he flips out the lights and leaves the bathroom, out of the corner of his eye a PC catches the reflection of someone sitting in his bathtub.
A player opens his sock drawer and finds a desiccated severed head lying amongst his laundry.
Entranced by the delicate glass sculpture, a character gently touches it—causing it to explosively shatter, while the party hears the distant echo of a woman’s scream.
One of the rooms in the derelict building is much colder than the others, enough for a light dusting of frost to cover every surface in it. Strangely, the party can see the rime slowly returning to cover some bare footprints, though they were sure they were the only ones in the structure.
A PC wakes up to see a tall, dark figure standing over his bedside.
While snooping around in a department store, the party hears a squeaking noise behind them. Turning around, their attention turns to a display of mannequins, which seem to be nearly in the same positions they were in before the group passed by…
Looking out across the moonlit skyline of the run-down neighborhood he lives in, one character sees something strange—the silhouette of a human, running on all fours at an amazing speed, bounding across the roofs of distant buildings and leaping across an alley…
Deep in thought, it takes a PC nearly a minute to realize that despite all the steps he’s taken, he’s made no progress up the stairs.
After crawling back into bed in the dark, a character realizes two things: his bed is soaking wet, and there is a naked corpse nailed spread-eagled to the ceiling directly above him.
Here's one that may have been posted before.
The radios start playing songs that offer advice applicable to the current situation. If they are in a time critical situation they might hear "Now's no time to hesitate.", if enemies are approaching it might be "They're coming to take me away ha ha he he ho ho." Then when they start listening to them it starts playing for want of a better term apocolypse rock "I'm on the highway to hell."
Heh, reminds me of an Eddie Izzard bit: (paraphrased) The guys in the horror movies really ought to pay attention to the soundtrack. If you go anywhere and hear ominous strings or a piano playing, it’s time to double back, but if you can hit a stretch with something upbeat or bouncy in the background, you’re in the clear.
I suppose you could be ironic with that idea, too. Play something low-key and Enya-like during an orgy of gore and carnage, set a character's death to the tune of "We'll Meet Again," and have light classical music accompany a zombie attack. Have an ominous Latin chorus chant during a pancake breakfast for bonus points.
And one from a movie I saw.
While the people are playing the PC's come across a strange room wherein people are apparently playing their lives with sheets showing information about them they didn't even realize.
Another option is during an investigation to say "You knock on the suspects door." and have someone outside knock on the door to the room your groups in.
one day the PC is Delivered a large metal box, dose not have a return address, (the delivery person may also mention how surprisingly light it was bringing it here). but when the PC goes to bring it in he finds that he(or she) is unable to lift it, in-fact it seems to be fixed to the spot, they soon receive a call (or other distraction to get them away from the box) and goes inside, confident the box will stay put. they soon forget about the box, leaving it outside they go to bed, in the morning the suddenly remember that the box is still out there, but when they go to look for it its gone. days pass and they soon dismiss the box totally, but soon the box returns in different places, in fact it seems to follow the PC, when ever he(or she) takes there eyes of the box it disappears again, it should end up in strange places, like the out side of there work, in a empty lot, on the roof of buildings, any were the PC goes the box goes. and if the PC tries to move it again they find it fixed to the spot. this goes on for a week, the PC see the box and then it disappears. one day the PC surfers from a horrible coughing fit, and expel what looks like rust. next time they see the box it has begun to rustsing.
every time they have a coughing fit they expelled more rust and the box becomes even more rusted.
it has almost rusted through.
One of the PCs wakes up to find the TV/radio on, on a channel/station they hate. This shouldn't be the creepy thing; maybe someone else lives there and has a habit of turning the TV on in the morning. When they change the channel (because it's a channel they hate), it changes back immediately. When they turn it off, it flickers back on the moment they look away; if they keep looking at it after they press "off", it doesn't turn off. Pressing the mute button doesn't do anything; damaging the TV does nothing to stop it. It plays if unplugged; as long as there's even a bit of the screen, it shows it. You could sledgehammer the thing until it's a collection of atoms, and you'd still hear the noise coming from the pile.
If they leave the room, when they come back the TV's still on, but now they can hear faint voices, as if someone else is in the room, commenting on the programs.
One of the PCs wakes up to find the TV/radio on, on a channel/station they hate. This shouldn't be the creepy thing; maybe someone else lives there and has a habit of turning the TV on in the morning. When they change the channel (because it's a channel they hate), it changes back immediately. When they turn it off, it flickers back on the moment they look away; if they keep looking at it after they press "off", it doesn't turn off. Pressing the mute button doesn't do anything; damaging the TV does nothing to stop it. It plays if unplugged; as long as there's even a bit of the screen, it shows it. You could sledgehammer the thing until it's a collection of atoms, and you'd still hear the noise coming from the pile.
If they leave the room, when they come back the TV's still on, but now they can hear faint voices, as if someone else is in the room, commenting on the programs.
One of the PCs wakes up to find the TV/radio on, on a channel/station they hate. This shouldn't be the creepy thing; maybe someone else lives there and has a habit of turning the TV on in the morning. When they change the channel (because it's a channel they hate), it changes back immediately. When they turn it off, it flickers back on the moment they look away; if they keep looking at it after they press "off", it doesn't turn off. Pressing the mute button doesn't do anything; damaging the TV does nothing to stop it. It plays if unplugged; as long as there's even a bit of the screen, it shows it. You could sledgehammer the thing until it's a collection of atoms, and you'd still hear the noise coming from the pile.
If they leave the room, when they come back the TV's still on, but now they can hear faint voices, as if someone else is in the room, commenting on the programs.
Sounds a bit like "the ring", with the tv showing static/snow.
A character's shadow--or perhaps everybody's, in a given area--falls -towards- a lightsource, rather than away from it.
Things begin to decay about twice as fast as usual.
Lightbulbs in a given room, even flashlights, burn out after a few hours. Electricians can't detect any anomaly, and the fuseboxes and wiring are just fine.
Gravity in a certain place pulls at a 20-degree angle from vertical.
All objects of a certain color disappear entirely from a city. There is no explanation.
Hundreds of people get a tattoo of a honeybee on their left ankle for no apparent reason, doing it on a whim. Tattoo artists are happy, and nothing else changes.
The group enters a room full of hunting trophies—stuffed bears and mountain lions, deer heads on the wall, etc. When a character gets too close to one of them, suddenly the room is filled with a cacophony of snarls and roars, as mounted heads snap at the group and stuffed animals rock on their bases in an effort to get closer.
One PC opens a door in the condemned asylum, and is nearly pulled off his feet by the powerful gales that suddenly rush into the lightless void beyond.
An old friend the party hasn’t seen in ages unexpectedly bumps into them on the street. He looks wild and terrified, and begins to stammer something before screaming as fine red cuts appear on his face and hands, as though some invisible tormenter was attacking him. Larger and larger wounds appear out of nowhere, until with a sickening slurping noise the man is disemboweled right before their eyes. As he collapses, he seems to be desperately trying to say something, but at that point a deep wound appears across his throat, and he lies still in a spreading pool of fluid.
The party notices an extra shadow on the floor next to their own. It looks to be that of a normal human, albeit with no source. As long as they’re in a particular building, it accompanies them on their movements, and disappears without explanation once they leave.
A character’s adorable month-old puppy is found chewing what looks like a bloody fragment from a human jawbone.
The rich, secluded eccentric built his children a sort of carousel in his back yard—using flayed horse corpses for seats.
A PC is abruptly awakened late one night by the lights of his room suddenly being turned on. While still blinded he hears the door to his bedroom close.
Everyone in the room suddenly suffers a severe nosebleed, while their vision turns red from bloodshot eyes.
A character invites the beautiful young woman from the bar back to his apartment for “coffee.” After the greatest night of his life, he awakens alone in bed. His withered legs and gnarled, bony feet barely allow him to stagger into his bathroom. Looking in the mirror, he finds his flesh is now shriveled and an unhealthy yellow color, while his eyes are deeply sunken is his gaunt face.
In the barren patch of “lawn” at the center of the characters’ apartment complex, razor wire begins to grow like metallic brambles.
Every day this week while walking to work, a character is embraced by a complete stranger with a serene smile on his or her face, who murmurs something about “the One” before dying in her arms.
The bathroom flooded, with a full inch of pooled water…on the ceiling.
The lights flicker. During the split-seconds of darkness that occur, the players catch glimpses of a vague figure in the room with them that disappears whenever the lights are on.
A character inherits a ragged tapestry that’s been in his family since the Middle Ages. Those early artists were frankly terrible: if she didn’t know any better, she’d swear that the leashed creatures hunting alongside the nobles were naked, feral humans racing upon on all fours...
This really might not sound too creepy, but it was in one of my nightmares.
One of the PCs wakes up to find the TV/radio on, on a channel/station they hate. This shouldn't be the creepy thing; maybe someone else lives there and has a habit of turning the TV on in the morning. When they change the channel (because it's a channel they hate), it changes back immediately. When they turn it off, it flickers back on the moment they look away; if they keep looking at it after they press "off", it doesn't turn off. Pressing the mute button doesn't do anything; damaging the TV does nothing to stop it. It plays if unplugged; as long as there's even a bit of the screen, it shows it. You could sledgehammer the thing until it's a collection of atoms, and you'd still hear the noise coming from the pile.
If they leave the room, when they come back the TV's still on, but now they can hear faint voices, as if someone else is in the room, commenting on the programs.
Ooh, I like the idea of hurling a brick into the TV screen, but the program still playing on the shards of glass scattered on the floor around it.
A variant on one of the earlier ones. After being seriously injured a friend is checked into hospital but when you go to visit them the next day your told that they insisted on checking out. After leaving the hospital you can't find any sign of them as though they had just vanished.
woah, never seen a triple post before...
Sounds a bit like "the ring", with the tv showing static/snow.
:embarrass The page wouldn't load.
I got these ones from making supper last night. Pizza can be very freaky....
- While you're cutting pepperoni, you find something weird embedded in it: an eyeball, a wedding ring, a finger, etc.
- This works best if the PCs are making the pizza themselves; but it can work with frozen pizza (that you unwrap before putting in the oven), and even, to a lesser extent, with delivery.
When they take the pizza out of the oven, it's -- well, you can probably guess. Ears instead of mushrooms, blood instead of sauce, eyeballs instead of olives, etc etc. That's simply gross and freaky if it was delivery -- maybe it was a mean-spirited prank -- but if you made the pizza out of normal ingredients yourself, and sampled a few while you were making it, and it's transformed when it's outside the oven....
Hmmm.
...
A new mummy is discovered in a peat bog. The mummy is tested and shown to originate from the Iron Age. It appears to have been a victim of ritual sacrifice. But closer examination shows decidedly modern dental work, including fillings using porcelain and composite resins. The body also has more in common with modern men than the peoples of that period, but the radiometric dating clearly indicates an age of at least 3000 years. (So the question is, how did a relatively modern human come to be ritually slain and tossed into a bog over 3000 years ago?)
Although, radiometric dating is notoriously inaccurate; and mummification probably could happen within a decade with the proper conditions; but finding a sacrificial victim of any age is freaky, and I don't really know much about pet bogs.
and I don't really know much about pet bogs.
well thier alot like wild bogs...just potty trained.
aw im sorry it was a dumb joke i just couldnt help myself...
on with it....
the players are sitting around at a get together drinking having a good time, all of a sudden an NPC at the party screams and swats at the air as if trying to get some unseen "thing" off of his or her hand, they run to the kitchen and use something sharp to hack off a finger or two and then pass out. the medics are called or what ever and the person is taken to the hospital, but in all the confusion the fingers are never found....the party gets going again after some time...(or could be a new party next week or whatever) then as one of the players pops open a fresh beer it foams up and spills revealing one of the missing fingers!!!
Seriously.
Don't ask where this one comes from. Really, don't ask. I've a knife, and I'll cyber-stab you.
- A female PC having her period notices that the blood from that is a different colour. It's not that all her blood has changed colour; just that.
One that'll get even the most iron-willed players screaming in fright:
- Taxmen show up to confiscate the PCs' hard-earned loot.
Instead of the usual dead mouse or bird, a PC that has a cat finds a slaughtered and half-eaten rabbit on the front stoop one morning. A few days later, a raccoon is discovered in similar condition. Another few days pass, and this time it's a small dog that the PC is sure belongs to a neighbor. Naturally, the cat seems to be perfectly normal. (Anyone who shares living space with a cat gets used to receiving odd displays of affection from their furry companion (small birds, mice, etc.), but "gifts" of this type are unlikely unless the PC happens to have a pet tiger. Imagine the shock when they step outside next week and find a human hand (or heart) on the doorstep. For an interesting twist, let the recipient be a PC that the cat has chosen, but does not belong to.)
A printer in a PC's office (or home) begins printing slightly off-color. Black ink appears as a very dark red, gradually lightening. Soon, the printer stops printing entirely. Investigation reveals that the black ink cartridge is filled with human blood, which has coagulated. (Not much more I can say here, except how did the blood stay fresh long enough for the cartridge to be installed and work for a short while?)
A random PC begins to take notice of bizarre facts and coincidences that most of us tend to ignore. For the character, however, they are simply too prevalent to be overlooked. Most of us realize, for example, that the horrifying events of September 11, 2001 occurred, in numerical form, on 9-11 and that this is also (in the United States), the number to dial for emergency services, but it's not something on which we tend to dwell. For this PC, it takes on a new importance. They see coincidences everywhere, and it becomes apparent that there is a larger connection of some kind. (This works best if you fashion a number of coincidences within the game that somehow link to whatever the characters happen to be working on at the moment.)
It's been a while since I've posted, and I think it's about time again...
Instead of the usual dead mouse or bird, a PC that has a cat finds a slaughtered and half-eaten rabbit on the front stoop one morning. A few days later, a raccoon is discovered in similar condition. Another few days pass, and this time it's a small dog that the PC is sure belongs to a neighbor. Naturally, the cat seems to be perfectly normal. (Anyone who shares living space with a cat gets used to receiving odd displays of affection from their furry companion (small birds, mice, etc.), but "gifts" of this type are unlikely unless the PC happens to have a pet tiger. Imagine the shock when they step outside next week and find a human hand (or heart) on the doorstep. For an interesting twist, let the recipient be a PC that the cat has chosen, but does not belong to.)
Failing that, your PCs dog can always bring them something unusual that it found in a hedge or dug up in the garden...
(Not much more I can say here, except how did the blood stay fresh long enough for the cartridge to be installed and work for a short while?)
Warfarin or another anitcoagulant would do it...
Most of us realize, for example, that the horrifying events of September 11, 2001 occurred, in numerical form, on 9-11 and that this is also (in the United States), the number to dial for emergency services, but it's not something on which we tend to dwell.
Also, this only works in the US because most of the rest of the world enters that date as 11/09(/01). Why the US uses 09/11/01 (for example) is beyond us.
Failing that, your PCs dog can always bring them something unusual that it found in a hedge or dug up in the garden...
That works, too. I used a cat as an example because I do share quarters with cats, and they are terribly fond of leaving me little "gifts".
Warfarin or another anitcoagulant would do it...
I hadn't considered that, but it makes the event no less creepy.
Also, this only works in the US because most of the rest of the world enters that date as 11/09(/01). Why the US uses 09/11/01 (for example) is beyond us.
Well, yes, but that was cited as an example. The idea is that you would create coincidences that tie into the adventure plot somehow. Personally, I tend to record my dates as YYMMDD (010911), but that's just me.
I'm a Who-fan, and I've been thinking about the creepiest episodes I've seen of them: 'The Empty Child' (I was literally crying in fright after it, it was a To Be Continued) and 'Blink' (just saw it yesterday). Because the latter is fresher in my memory, I'll do stuff from that.
- (inspired by the episode, not from it) The PCs keep seeing statues -- winged angels, let's say -- that seem to be following them around. They're only in places a statue might conceivably be, like gardens, alcoves, etc, but they weren't there before. Nobody else seems to notice them; that is, somebody making a catalogue of statues will see them, if it's pointed out someone will see it, but otherwise they don't. --Wait, I could have sworn that it wasn't facing this way before....
- You find -- odd -- easter eggs in your DVDs, someone talking directly to you about something relevant. They exhibit a freaky level of knowledge about your life and situation.
(And now for something completely different....)
- Make a spot check in secret. The rolling dice will freak out the players. If they make a, say, DC 10, say nothing. If they don't, tell the person that they seem to have two shadows, or something like that. If they get a later spot check, say that it was because of two light sources, or something else mundane, and it is. (So many things seem freaky because we don't know the cause. If the PCs fail to see the cause of something, feel free to freak them out.)
Although, radiometric dating is notoriously inaccurate; and mummification probably could happen within a decade with the proper conditions; but finding a sacrificial victim of any age is freaky, and I don't really know much about pet bogs.
Er, that's a common misconception. Radiocarbon dating is extremely accurate up to around 60,000 years, or slightly more than 10 half-lives.
In some cases, the cards would instruct them to make a roll and tell me the result (I would then consult a "chart" and mutter something to myself), look worried, protest aloud, etc. It really added tension to the game, especially since no one knew what anyone else's cards said (I mixed the cards up at random during the game, so they were never sure if they were getting the same card that someone else had).
I also mixed in a few cards that were keyed to specific events or locations, to be handed out after an appropriate skill check was made. Since these cards looked exactly like the others on the reverse, the players could never be certain what the cards meant.
It's a great feeling when the players are in the spooky old mansion and one of them passes by a window and you hand them a card that says, "Glancing out the window, you see the moon looking like a gigantic eye. It blinks, and then all is normal again." The look on the player's face is priceless, and of course, they don't want to admit what they saw to the others (especially since I was using sanity rules and no one knew exactly how many sanity points they had remaining).
Which reminds me of another great idea. In any game involving sanity tracking, never let the players keep track of their own sanity. It means a little extra bookkeeping for you, but it makes the game a lot more entertaining. By tracking sanity yourself, the players will never be able to say, "I've got enough sanity remaining to stare down Great Cthulhu!" (Which is, after all, how it should work in the real world.)
That reminds me of something else I read, never let the PCs know exactly how many HP they lost from something. Use general descriptive terms; they'll know if they're near 0hp, or pretty close to perfect, but can't ever be sure....
That reminds me of something else I read, never let the PCs know exactly how many HP they lost from something. Use general descriptive terms; they'll know if they're near 0hp, or pretty close to perfect, but can't ever be sure....
I've done that before, too. I once ran an entire campaign without the players knowing anything about their characters other than general terms (you are strong and hardy, but a bit clumsy and you have trouble with multisyllabic words). They didn't know their stats or how many hit points they had. All they knew was their race, class, and weapon and non-weapon proficiencies. Bookkeeping was a pain in the rear, but it made for a very interesting campaign. Clerics were a lot more stingy with healing when they couldn't know for sure how badly someone was hurting.
Upon reviewing the list of recent murders or suicides in the area, you notice that though the circumstances of each case are all different, every single victim goes by the same first name (ex: every victim goes by the name Cathy)
You have a horrific nightmare and wake up screaming as your loved one makes gentle soothing sounds you cuddle up to them slowly calming down.....something drips onto the back of your head as you notice that their body is ice cold what do you do?
Upon reviewing the list of recent murders or suicides in the area, you notice that though the circumstances of each case are all different, every single victim goes by the same first name (ex: every victim goes by the name Cathy)
Works better if the names of all the victims is the same as the name of one of the PCs. (Sara Connor, anyone?)
Okay, so this isn't too scary, but it might freak them out. For extra weirdness, have someone with an animal companion/familiar/pet switch eyes with the animal.
- Whenever a PC presents their religious symbol of a good-aligned god (let's include most IRL religions in that as well, to avoid long flame-wars), plants wither. Close examination of them shows them to be perfectly normal, but they show up on Detect Evil. After that, the plants appear threatening... and did that root purposely move to trip me?
Works better if the names of all the victims is the same as the name of one of the PCs. (Sara Connor, anyone?)
that is certainly an option
And to keep this going, allow me to add a random one
-When watching someone in a cell (asylum/prison) via camera, at one point the inmate looks directly at the camera... directly into your eyes. A second later the screen goes fuzzy.
Just as they are about to leave the musty, windowless library, the group hears a strange papery rippling noise. Turning around, they watch the pages of a previously closed book on a desk flip in rapid progression, as though a breeze were disturbing them.
One of the trees at the local cemetery unexpectedly bears plump, red fruit.
A PC receives a strange weathered cardboard box in the mail, containing a bloody human finger. A few days later, a similar package arrives holding a woman’s foot, then another after that offers a severed ear. The first return address is the PC’s birth town, while the rest are from other cities he’s lived in, arriving in the order he moved to them in.
The new minister from—where was it? Some Third World hellhole, surely—introduces an odd take on the Communion service. He uses a stickier, more syrupy variety of red wine, and instead of holy wafers doles out chunks of what must be undercooked hamburger meat.
The defrosted chicken strips a player is preparing for dinner twitch and whimper when cut.
While walking down a hallway in the office, a PC sees the ceiling ripple before reaching down like an amorphous maw and completely engulfing the person ahead of them. The coworker has enough time to begin to scream before the maw retracts back into the ceiling, leaving no evidence that anything happened.
Something paws on a PC’s door. Expecting the cat, the player opens the door and instead sees a flayed, headless human torso drag itself inside by its contorted arms.
Ever since the group began exploring this old manor, they’ve been hearing the sounds of distant conversation and the clink of cutlery on plates. The sounds only get louder as they approach the dining room door, and they can see shadows moving across the light leaking out from the gap between it and the floor. Just when they enter the room, the noise and lights instantly cut off, and their flashlights play over a dust-covered table, glasses and plates strewn with cobwebs.
Something brushes a player’s hair a split second before a loud crack! noise comes from behind her. Turning around, she sees a circular saw embedded in the wall at just over head height.
One player has always found clowns vaguely frightening, but the ones at the local carnival seem especially disquieting. Underneath their make-up, all bright colors and smiles, he can’t help but notice their asymmetrical facial features, the hints of strange growths beneath their skin, their yellowing teeth and eyes, and the threatening expressions on their true faces…
The night sky is free of clouds, but the moon is nowhere in sight.
A space shuttle launch ends tragically when the vessel explodes without warning just as it breaks through a cloud layer. Faith offers little solace after all of a major religion’s holy symbols simply disappear, and the name of its main deity vanishes from sacred texts across the globe. ("Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth, put out my hand and touched the face of--ahhhhhh!" KABOOM!)
Driving down a highway at night, a character’s headlights allow a brief glimpse of a large, humanoid creature standing by the side of the road, staring at the passing car with baleful eyes, before the lights sweep by.
Something is very wrong with the antique camera a character got from a pawn shop. Photos taken of the upper-class houses on Main Street show decaying ruins under a black sky. What should be a busy street scene develops as an empty, rubble-strewn boulevard with suggestions of...things...lurking in the shadows. A portrait of a friend turns out to contain a twisted creature that can only charitably be called human, but nonetheless bears a frightening resemblance to the subject.
In the middle of a conversation, a centipede scuttles out of the NPC’s mouth and down his neck, disappearing beneath his shirt collar.
Stepping into the industrial freezer, the party nervously concludes that the meat hanging from the hooks is too small to be cow and not the right shape to be pig. They are just about to leave when the door slams shut and bolts, while a ragged voice from the other side rasps “mmmm, fressh meat...”
A light fixture slowly, almost imperceptibly, moves across the ceiling.
What a character took for a sort of stucco pattern on the walls of his grandfather’s study turns out to be, on closer inspection, writing. Every surface in the room is covered in tiny, hand-drawn Latin text. The character takes a rubbing to a translator and comes back with stuff that makes the Book of Revelations look pleasant.
Whenever a character slices into any type of fruit, thick red juice runs down the knife’s blade.
It takes some effort to work the rusty bolts on the heavy wooden door leading into the attic, but the PCs eventually manage it. Upstairs they find a converted bedroom, a spartan and dismal affair lit only a single hanging light bulb and a small window with heavy iron bars across it. A narrow bed sits in the corner, its only notable feature a series of thick leather straps hanging limply from its sides. The players have enough time to notice the strange (bite?) marks on the iron bars before the room’s light bulb shatters and they hear the door downstairs slam, the bolts slowly sliding shut. Fumbling in the darkness, they feel nothing like a handle or latch on their side, though the door does seem to be covered by scratches and gouges.
As a character pulls into his driveway at dusk, he spots a squirrel scurry over his back fence, carrying something in its mouth. When he steps out of his car, he notices a thin trail of blood leading over the wall.
At midnight, dozens of rotten corpses rain from the sky on the city block the heroes’ live in. There’s nothing to identify the bodies, and forensic tests conclude that none of them are less than a century old.
While cleaning, a character stumbles upon a grimy cardboard box under his bed. Inside is an old handgun lying on a sheet of crumpled paper. The words “if you truly love her, you'll know what to do” are scrawled on the yellowing note in his own handwriting.
The mobile over the baby’s crib consists of slender, polished bones and teeth.
The group carpools to the latest stage of their investigation, but some other station keeps interfering with their favorite signal: “Well Diane, it was a busy day for Tommy the Kitten the final death toll is unknown, possibly in the said the local fire chief. In other news, thousands are missing, presumed delicious new dish served at the 4th Street Grille. Its owner urges citizens to evacuate immediately. Do not stop and attempt to rescue loved ones, for quality carpets come to Kaplan’s Carpet Warehouse! If you cannot evacuate, remain hidden in a secure shelter, and back to you, Owen.”
A tall, somber man in a black coat, who has long been stalking the party, finally stops, takes off his sunglasses, and smiles—with his normal mouth, and the two fanged maws he has in place of eyes.
The PCs are unable to talk the pregnant young woman out of it, and while gibbering about her baby, she shoots herself in the head right in front of them. As they somberly leave to notify the authorities, they hear a ripping noise, and turn to see a bloodstain blossom on the woman’s belly…
Roll secretly behind your screen to determine a PC, next time they leave wherever they're staying they step on a human brain. Close examination reveals the words "Thinking of you." carved into it. Do nothing else to follow up on this just let them come up with their own ideas and questions.
EDIT
Just saw the angel episode of Dr Who very creepy particularly that bit near the end since I was standing about 1 meter away from a statue at the time.
...
EDIT
Just saw the angel episode of Dr Who very creepy particularly that bit near the end since I was standing about 1 meter away from a statue at the time.
You liked it? W00t. Found any other freaky ideas from it?
- Whenever a certain person comes to the door, the dog, who normally yaps at everyone, does nothing. It's not asleep either. If the person comes inside, the dog takes no notice of them -- unless they make physical contact with the dog. Then the dog goes crazy; tries to bite them, yapping like a crazy yappy thing, running around, and eventually running to the farthest corner of the house to get away from them.
The PC, whom we will name Sam for ease, enters his house. He enters normally, puts his coat on its hook; shakes the rain off. He's probably tired, it's been a long day of work at the office, and it rained all the way home through his taxi ride. The clock shows 10:07 PM. Sam walks through the house to the kitchen, the lights are on. Sam begins to reheat some pizza in his microwave.
The microwave won't work. Frustrated, but too tired to work on it, he opens his fridge. The light is broken and no cold is coming out. Suddenly, music comes from some source in the house (a stereo, iTunes on a computer, an iPod or CD player even); playing a song Sam remembers vaguely, having listened to it three or four times.
"All around me are familiar faces,
Worn out places,
Worn out faces,
Bright and early for the daily races,
Going nowhere,
Going nowhere,
The tears are filling up their glasses,
No expression,
No expression,
Hide my head,
I want to drown my sorrow,
No tommorow,
No tommorow,
And I find it kinda funny,
I find it kinda sad,
The dreams in which I'm dying,
Are the best I've ever had,
I find it hard to tell you,
I find it hard to take,
When people run in circles it's a very very,
Mad world,
Mad World..."
Sam goes to check it out, not really sure of what is happening. The typical Sam tries to rationalize, Sun Spots? Global Warming? Generic conspiracy theory #12?
When Sam enters the room from which the music came from, he finds the lights all off; though he turned the lights on when he entered the house. The music ends when he enters. Sam turns on the light to see nothing wrong.
He forgets about it and goes to brush his teeth. The mirror is cracked terribly down the center, as if somebody had bashed it in. The shower is running, with nobody in it. Sam, thinking it's a burglar (or if he's paranoid, a ghost), goes to the phone to call the police. However, the cord connecting the phone to the phone jack is missing, as if it never existed. Sam hears a thud and crash from the bedroom; the table lamp seems to have fallen to the floor. Freaking out, Sam charges for the front door. But he finds nothing, it appears to have never existed.
A nearby lightbulb pops and dies out. Sam hears a book fall from a bookcase in the TV room. Slowly walking over to catch whomever it is, he turns the corner quivering fearfully.
The lights are off, but he can see that nobody is there. He turns on the light and walks in, it's all fine, no book had apparently fallen on the floor. But as he starts to rationalize again, a drop of blood falls on his foot. A drop from the ceiling. From a crack in the ceiling. Looking up, Sam sees something staring back and, screaming, moves away from the crack. He walks backwards into a vase on a stand, the vase crashes to the floor. A lightbulb pops and dies somewhere in the house, probably in the bedroom. Sam goes into his bedroom, the light is on, though he was never in here and besides, no light is in here now that the table lamp and the overhead light have been broken. Sam feels a compulsion to lay on the bed, but he stands for a moment. The compulsion forces him unwillingly onto the bed. He lays there with the "light" on.
All of the lights fizzle out. He cannot see at all for a few minutes; but then his nightvision comes "on." He sees only vague outlines of objects.
He sees a humanoid shape walking towards him from the kitchen; thunder crashes with the constant rain and a flash of lightning lights up the hallway that the figure has crossed into. Sam sees a white person, a male, about 6' 7", very tall. The lightning flashes again when the figure is at his door; the man is wearing a dark red turtleneck shirt and black jeans. The man walks to the end of the bed and says: "Cellar Door." The lightning flashes once more and the man is gone.
Sam passes out.
The next day, Sam wakes up with a vivid recollection of the event, though he squares it off as just a dream, just a silly nightmare. He toasts some bread, makes a few eggs, grabs the paper and looks around. Everything is normal once again. He eats the eggs slowly, enjoying them. Then he reads the paper.
"Story 3:
Last night, at 10:02 PM, a local man was said to have gone insane after ingesting 850 mg of LSD and 756 mg of PCP. He went to [Sam's Street #] and apparently passed out. The populace is recommended to report any strange men, caucasian, 6' 7.5", 210 lbs, gray eyes, black hair. He is also reported to be armed with numerous firearms, his ex girlfriend said, and the populace is highly recommended to not...[Please turn to page 6 of The Generic Newspaper]"
Page 6:
"...Paris Hilton was recently spotted at a local bar with Lindsay Lohan...those silly celebrities..."
It is up to the DM on how to handle differences in the story; differences in what Sam chooses to do; and to handle how the story ends, but I hope this gives inspiration or help or ideas or WHATEVER to whomever wants a creepy idea. If you use it, tell me how it works, because I honestly just made this up using figments from Donnie Darko, Stephen King's numerous stories, and the movie Dead Silence. If there were other inspirations I got, I can't remember them.
Lastly, the thing I've noticed is most scary about books, movies, games, etc. is the feeling of confusion and uncertainty. If you don't know what it is, how can you know how safe you are? A strong 5 / tough 5 druggie male 6' 7" human isn't as scary as what I described; because you're not sure what IT is capable of doing.
Over time, the comments get steadily more odd, like one person saying "Remember that time you rode the animated corpse of Barbaro across the Swiss Alps while playing the 1812 Overture with only the power of your mind."
It doesnt matter how illegal, blasphemous, slanderous, improbable, or impossible the story is, as people around will still nod and stare as if it were true.
- One PC is watching an interesting TV show that presents iron clad evidence that Amelia Earhart was devoured by a crocodile. It turns out they just fell asleep in front of the TV while watching the History Channel, and the evidence was the sort of odd truths that you just accept within dreams no matter how stupid they may seem later. A week later they have almost forgotten about it. That's when the news reports something very odd....
What happens next, hhhuuummmmm....???
1. Awake from their nightmare covered in blood, if tested it is their own.
2. All awake as 1, but one PC has razor sharp knife in hand with only blood splatters belonging to others on him/her.
3. One to all awake from bad dream and return to a restful sleep. Next morning, news is reported about X number of murders in town/city described precisely as the dream. X = the number of PCs that had "the dream".
4. NPC with PCs or one they met is slain this way after dream by PC.
5. Whoever the PCs tell the dream to, is slain as dream the next night or when they sleep.
6. In secret, have a willing player to have his PC slain this way during/after any dream situation mentioned. Please note that the one doing this should have his "back-up" PC ready to go that you can get in fairly quickly. EX: A private investigator, a paranormal researcher, detective, witch hunter, news hound, etc.
7. ?????
OK, kiddies, here is the assignment. a) Come up with variant dream sequences with same theme and results. b) Come up with twisted "What happens next, hhhuuummmmm....???
Let me know what you think. Feedback welcome......Big Bob
One or all PCs, while sleeping, are awakened by a stinging cut across their throat(s). They hear a pulsating hissing sound, there is a warm liquid running rapidly over their chest. Their eyes open in terror as they attempt to scream, but only gurgle blood. Their last image is a shadowy figure leaning over them whispering, "You have just been awakened by the slitting of your throat...." This is also the last thing they hear as they die with a sickening-wet, gurgle-wheezing sound. Blank eyes looking at nothing.......
In secret, have a willing player to have his PC slain this way during/after any dream situation mentioned. Please note that the one doing this should have his "back-up" PC ready to go that you can get in fairly quickly. EX: A private investigator, a paranormal researcher, detective, witch hunter, news hound, etc.
This is absolutely beautiful, Bob!
I think I'm gonna have to steal this one for my Shadow Chasers campaign.
As for the assignment:
One of the PCs has a vivid dream of a person dying a horribly violent death. The dream is so vivid that they have visual references to the location, which is in the vicinity of the PCs whereabouts. The next morning, newspapers report a mysterious death that matches the PC's dream.
A few nights later, they have another dream vividly showing the gruesome death of a close friend or family member. Can the PCs figure things out in time to save them?
One or all PCs, while sleeping, are awakened by a stinging cut across their throat(s). They hear a pulsating hissing sound, there is a warm liquid running rapidly over their chest. Their eyes open in terror as they attempt to scream, but only gurgle blood. Their last image is a shadowy figure leaning over them whispering, "You have just been awakened by the slitting of your throat...." This is also the last thing they hear as they die with a sickening-wet, gurgle-wheezing sound. Blank eyes looking at nothing.......
What happens next, hhhuuummmmm....???
Another one is: PC awakes knowing some shadowy figure is in the room to find nothing. Next night, dreams figure is closer to bed, next night, leaning over him/her in bed, next night....well you get the idea. Repeat this until dream fully plays out with result you want.
You could have PCs attempt to solve mystery dream before someone is killed.
Just some thoughts.
One of the PCs has a vivid dream of a person dying a horribly violent death. The dream is so vivid that they have visual references to the location, which is in the vicinity of the PCs whereabouts. The next morning, newspapers report a mysterious death that matches the PC's dream.
A few nights later, they have another dream vividly showing the gruesome death of a close friend or family member. Can the PCs figure things out in time to save them?
NO!
- PCs resting at a farm/ranch/factory farm wake to hear the chickens screaming. When they reach the cage/coop/barn, they see a shadowy figure draining the blood of the chickens.
El Chucachabra (this is probibly not the correct spelling) is a creature of mexican myth. It's name means goat sucker and it drains the blood of most farm animals
-The PC are attacked by a gorilla in a man suit. They are then chased by PETA, zoo keepers, and the police for animal cruelty.
Why was the gorilla in a man suit? How was he not recognized as fake? And why are the police involved?
-When an anomymus(sp?) tip leads the PCs to an abandoned school, they find frsh pools of blodd outside, as they move deeped in they find mutilated corpses in distrubing tablues(sp?). A quick inspection reveals they are the bodies of the teachers and students. They also find decorations of human parts, all leading up to...
This must be built up to be effective. This should really hit home with students and parents. And we shall reward anybody who knows the inspiration.
-The PC are attacked by a gorilla in a man suit. They are then chased by PETA, zoo keepers, and the police for animal cruelty.
Why was the gorilla in a man suit? How was he not recognized as fake? And why are the police involved?
hmm, maybe this isn't really the desired effect, but I laughed quite hard at that one. Maybe its just the reference to PETA
El Chucachabra (this is probibly not the correct spelling) is a creature of mexican myth.
El Chupacabra. Beastly things!
-When an anomymus(sp?) tip leads the PCs to an abandoned school, they find frsh pools of blodd outside, as they move deeped in they find mutilated corpses in distrubing tablues(sp?). A quick inspection reveals they are the bodies of the teachers and students. They also find decorations of human parts, all leading up to...
If the school is abandoned, why are there teachers and students?
hmm, maybe this isn't really the desired effect, but I laughed quite hard at that one. Maybe its just the reference to PETA
No, you were supposed to laugh, but it will scare anybody whose been on the wrong side of PETA
How do you know what it's like to be on the wrong side of PETA?
Its not hard to get on the wrong side of PETA...
Its not hard to get on the wrong side of PETA...
::nods:: Eat meat, wear leather, use prescription drugs, wear makeup, have pets, profess a belief that some animals were put on this earth to be eaten by others...
Near where one of the PCs lives, there is a wood that he and another PC used to play in as children. The principal game they played involved hiding and escaping from an imaginary "beast" which lurked deep in the woods.
After a few years of not visiting these woods, the two PCs go for a walk in them. Their stroll is enjoyable at first, the day is fine and sunny, and they meander along, chatting contentedly.
Then, moments after they begin to reminisce about the "beast" of their childhood games, they enter an area of woodland made up mostly of dead trees and brambles. Their mood changes as soon as they enter it. Through the trees they glimpse what looks like crude tribal fetishes (in the real incident these were nowhere to be found by the time we reached the area we thought we had seen them in, but they could be all too real in a game version of events.)
The two friends decide to leave, but as they begin to walk back out of the woods a panic slowly builds in both of them, until they find themselves running flat out and desperately scrambling through clawing vegetation to escape from.... what? An old childhood fear, or something more real?
No, you were supposed to laugh, but it will scare anybody whose been on the wrong side of PETA
What are they going to do? Film themselves beating chickens to death and claim that it's a film of me doing it?
1) While walking to their car late one night a PCs hear's skittering footsteps behind them. Turning around for a moment they think they see a small humanoid figure nearby before realizing its just an oddly shaped growth on one of those tree's cities grow in various sidewals to pretty the place up. Looking around they don't see anyone else. Turning they get into the car but as they do so their foot brushes the break peddle causing the red lights at the rear of he car to come on throwing the reflection of something moving in the rear view mirror. Turning around again they see nothing but as they close the door and start to reverse they hearing something shifting in the rear of the car....."Do you turn around to look?"
2) For several day's the PC has muscle spasms causing their body to twitch in one specific area e.g. just above the right knee. At first they ignore this figuring it'll go away with a little rest but it doesn't stop day in, day out it continues to twitch until finally they go to see a doctor about it. The doctor comments that it looks like its twitching in a repeating pattern which is odd. Further investigation reveals its actually twitching in morse code which translates as SOS and then a longtitude and latitude.
3) During a game the players write down the name of a powerful demonic entity that they aren't going to be expected to confront (as its just too big and too powerful for them) but have reason to believe was involved in some recent events. Next week when they go to mention that name to a more powerful figure they find they can't remember the name, in fact no one can remember the name and of the various players who normally write down important details like this in the notes only one of them actually recorded it and the relevant pages have been torn out of his notebook.
4) One night a PC receives a phone call "Soon we''ll meet again [PC NAME]." and then they hang up.
5) Every day at an unusual hour (10-12ish well after the normal morning chorus) a bird lands outside a PC's window and repeatedly calls over and over again in a variety of different sounds. It refuses to be driven off or silenced persisting even to the point of letting itself be killed.....in which case another bird shows up again the next day and repeats the process.
If the school is abandoned, why are there teachers and students?
Because the [insert monster or whatever here] has been killing teachers and students from surrounding schools and "populating" it's school.
Normally benevolent and easygoing people fly into murderous rages, and those that have a history of violence become docile and supportive.
The transit line / train within a city becomes completely enveloped in darkness, as if passing through a tunnel, at the same point along it's journey. No one else seems to notice except the player characters. It doesn't matter if it's day or night.
All the fish in a river disappear without any apparent reason.
Waking up one morning, a character open his curtain to look out the window, and sees an underwater scene. Checking the rest of the house, all the other windows and doors are closed, any opening such as chimneys are sealed off as well.
1) While going about their business the characters view goes out of focus and sounds crackle (think a TV with really bad reception) for a few seconds before returning to normal.
2) An object thrown out keeps reapearing around the house no matter what's done to it.
the PC awakes on a huge building that over looks the chaired remains of the earth, cities, oceans, and sky have been burned away only a great sea of ash remains.
and from the ash, arise a army of shadows beyond number, all hailing the PC as there lord, but not the PC for suddenly a hand comes upon there shoulder and are then confronted with them self, or a terrible being that was once there self. it speaks on to them "behold are lands soaked in the blood, and revile in are glory" suddenly there look alike grabs there face "do you not yet see are world?". the PC awakes cold as ice and face drained of blood.
use only on Lawful good character(player convinced in heroism), the should have a increased persuading effect on all NC, and speaks with a entrancing voice.
They turn around to see a dog walk up to them.
A dog with a human head.
- "A single flourecent light buzzes and hums, poorly illuminating the hallway. At times it cackles and sputters away to nearly nothing, only to twitch back on."
- "On the chair is a small porciline doll dressed in dusty, antiquated clothing. Its two lidless eyes stare vacently at you while its lips hold a noncommital grimace."
- "The light in the room is intense. It illuminates everything with a piercing whiteness and casts harsh, severe shadows."
- "The whine of police sirens and the thunder of car engines dims as you head down the ally. After a few moments, the only sound is the soft dripping of water and the occasional wail of a stray cat."
- "The air is acrid in this wing of the hospital. The smell of death and illness is strong here. While judicious use of bleach has been used in an effort to reduce the odour, it has only compounded the problem, lending a further strong vapour to the mix."
- "In contrast to the warm summer air outside, the dining room is positively frigid. The sweat on your skin chills immediately, sending shivers across your body."
http://www.freewebs.com/thekingofwolves/index.htm
http://urbanlegendsonline.com/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/
Fair warning: Not all are for the squeamish.
- "On the chair is a small porciline doll dressed in dusty, antiquated clothing. It's two lidless eyes stare vacently at you while its lips hold a noncommital grimace."
That's just freakin' scary!
You wake up and as you look round slightly groggily you see someone sitting in a chair watching you, when you sit up/turn on the light however they're gone....till the next night.
and a couple that may have been posted earlier.
Your watching TV when a foul smell assails you...no matter how hard you search however you can't find the source but its always there when you watch the tv. Eventually you take the obvious choice and have the tv checked out only to find the inside is caked with dried blood.
You wake up to find a cool body beside yours when you look your realize to your horror your sleeping in bed with a horribly mutilated corpse....a few moments later you realize that the body your in isn't your body (wrong sex, race, age all the above) but that the corpse IS.
One from the new bioshock game.
You have a close family member kidnapped only to show up again later half-mad, unable to remember you, feeding on blood and protected by some mysterious creature.
and to finish off a variant on the flickering light above. You notice a 2nd inhuman shadow moving slowly closer to you but its only visible in the moment before the light goes out for a few seconds.
Subtlety:
- "On the chair is a small porciline doll dressed in dusty, antiquated clothing. Its two lidless eyes stare vacently at you while its lips hold a noncommital grimace."
I have to admit, that truly captures the essence of creepy. I've always found dolls to be a bit frightening anyway.
A random PC notices a nearby stray cat... with two distinct tails! (Polycaudal [multi-tailed] cats are not common, by any means, but are hardly unknown. The condition is caused by a mutant gene, but in Japanese folklore, vampires were said to take the form of cats with two tails. PCs who pass a DC 20 Knowledge (arcana) check might be aware of this fact.)
Near Halloween, a man dressed as a zombie takes the subway home from a party. He plays his part to the hilt, drooling and grunting, and his make-up is startlingly realistic. (Careful examination will show that the man does not blink and his chest does not rise and fall.)
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
now for a fitting event:
-While accompanying some kids going trick-or-treat'ing, one of the PCs notice something strange about the halloween soundtrack playing at one of the houses... the screeches of a woman calling for help on the soundtrack calls the PC's name (first and last).
And now, some ideas inspired by Batman in his various incarnations:
-a rash of circus-themed attacks and crimes occur around the city, all with the logo of some odd bird. The crimes are not deadly or super-destructive, but they spread quickly. And even while the characters struggle to solve that crime spree, some of the crimes are comitted by a different clown syndicate, one that is much more violent, but seeming to fly under the radar.
-While the characters are out doing their thing, they notice that someone else is committing similar acts to them, but in other parts of the city, and much more brutal in nature. And what's more, the perps look not too much unlike the characters...
Anyway speaking of hero's I found this event from a recent episode to be worthy of including as creepy if done right. Your talking to someone and your asked how long you've been doing something (needs to be something you've tried once and been awful at). When you reply that no you don't do that as your no good at it they point out your doing it right now perfectly. Not only do you have the creepiness of suddenly being brilliant at something you know your not you also have the fact you've been doing it without even noticing.
-The Continued Text
while the PC is in a hallway(or ally) they hears a distant scratching, like a Quill scratching paper. as the sound comes closer, they see a line of text moving along the wall it appears as if written by an unseen hand. [the messy cursive text is always 13 words long, the last words disappearing as the new words appears]
it will follow the PC from now on, giving out helpful suggestions and hints amongst its inane babel. always referring to it's self as "we" and others as "it" and adds "the" before using any proper name. it move like a living thing apon any flat surfice.
-The Guiding Lantern
if any number of PC's find there way into an underground structure(sewers, caves, etc) they will be followed by this gaunt and pale child, light streams from its eyeless sockets illuminating the surroundings. [on examination the PCs will find that the child's body has been mutilated beyond recognition, its head is hallow except for the single burning candle. it follows the PCs with out saying a word]
when the PCs reach the exit it turns and walks away. if attacked it will run.
If the PC does some exploring they'll find files indicating that their body is a clone with the memories of a random specimum from a backwater planet uploaded into it and that another experiment broke free (look at either aliens or doom for ideas on what) and wiped out the scientists except a few who managed to evacuate. To cap it all of the other experiment's still lose on the base and the base is due to blow up in 5 hours leaving with that long to find a way off the base.
And a few more general ones
Late at night the PC is out walking alone when suddenly their foot brushes something that lets out a loud clickering cry (just happened to me with a cicada and believe me its a shock).
While at home they notice a cockroach crawling down the wall, suddenly it stops and somehow leans out from the wall to take a closer look at them before resuming its climb.
Its the middle of the day when a PC goes to the toilet on returning they find the store empty, and the street, everything. No matter where they go including online forums there's no sign of anyone ese anywhere.
You start hearing footsteps following you around although you can never see anybody, if you go back on a trackable area e.g. mud, sand, wet ground you'll see footprints that seem to end abrubtly with no sign of where the person went but if you walk off you'll hear them again following you. pawprints are an alterntive.
While watching the tv there's a brief burst of static followed by a stranger tapping the screen and saying "Is this thing on? Listen I don't know if you can hear me but if you can your in grave danger you have to get out of the house/apartment/living domicile now." before it goes back to static. Next day the paper reports a brutal murder somewhere in the same neighbourhood, that night the same thing happens a brief burst of static "You must believe me they're coming for you if you don't get out of the house now you'll die." And again the paper reports a brutal murder somewhere in the neighbourhood. On the third night again a burst of static but this time you get "Listen [PC NAME] your next on their list if you don't run now it'll be too late." and back to static. Or if your a particularly nasty GM the name of a contact of the PC's leaving them to try and contact them only to find their phones out.
While going about their daily business the PC's start catching glimpses of themself. At first they just seem to be going about some business of their own catching a train, walking into a store, leaving a room. Then your doppleganger seems to be looking at you before disapearing. Then their smiling and holding a large knife.
Finally a campaign starter also inspired by the previous poster.
An ornate letter (elegant calligraphy, gold leaf, hand delivered) arrives at the players house (not actually unless the GM is really into live action role playing or possesses resources I don't have grin) inviting them to a party at a small island estate in which costumes will be provided and prizes may be won. Upon arrival the PC's (players playing as themselves) are allowed to select from a range of costumes determining their role (for example normal teenager outfits + wigs and the like for a horror movie style college kids vs a homicidal madman or armour + sword for fighter/wizard robes for mage/dark loose clothing for thief in a more traditional DND style situation, levels up to gm) They are then invited into the main hall when suddenly the lights go out and the player receive a mighty blow to their head.
Waking up in the room they find they've been transformed into whatever they dressed up as and given appropriate skills e.g. in the horror movie one they might find they suddnely know a new language or in the DND one a couple of spells. On the table is a note informing them the goal is to escape alive and the prize is x million dollars each (I'd say 1). It also contains a brief information about where they are. Possibilities for the area include a lackside camp with homicidal madman (very hard to kill) stalking them, an abandoned asylum with all sorts of experiments/ghosts/tests or controlled scenario the GM wishes. Possibly what they're facing (if the gm's nice, if he's nasty it'll be false informaton) and how they need to escape.
A particularly lazy DM may conclude the game (when they all escape or die) by having them wake up in a pod and someone thanking them for helping test the new VR gaming system and apologizing for the methods involved but they couldn't know about it for a proper test of its realism, the x million dollars will of coursre be payed into their bank accounts and their names will be kept in mind for future product testing.
Another option is that they really have been transformed into a new form and when they escape the island they find themselves in a new world and a kid delivers a letter from a stranger reading
Congratulations on passing the first test and escaping the camp/asylum/area of GM's designing. You are now facing the 2nd test find the chain of destiny (a picture) it'll take you home a suggested starting place is the library of solmenac.
EDIT
And one more option if your going with the teens vs Jason style one just as the action reaches its height theres a flash of light, burning pain and a smokey smell. moments later the pods beging opening and a voice is heard saying "Oh my god are you alright? I'm sorry we were trying to test the new VR system and it was essentiall you not be aware to determine its realism but there was a power surge. I'm really, really sorry you'll of course receive all the money promised. Are you alright?"
They do in fact find themselves to be alright but as they're leaving the place one of them sneezes (or some other trigger e.g getting splashed with cold water) and transforms into the character they were playing, transformation can be one way or permanent depending on DM's inclinations.
Later they might find themselves contacted by a mysterious organization offering to set them up with a new life (or an alternative identity if its a reverseable change e.g. sneezes change them between forms) for a little work.
Also in the subtly creepy category (for a game dealing only with humans as far as the players are aware e.g. elves, dwarves etc are all mythical and its a human world which is where DnD was traditionally meant to be heading as the other races died out or were driven away)
After a vicious battle against an overwhealmingly powerful enemy (basically the kind where hack and slash will get you killed and you need to come up with an inventive solution e.g. dropping it into a vat of molten metal or anchoring it to a heavy weight and dropping it into the ocean) a well known NPC is mortally wounded but lives long enough to see the PC's succeed and murmurs as they die "Not bad for a human." at which point the PC's find the dead body of a 2ND creature.
This one has the added adventage of guilting the PC's into wondering if the NPC could handle one did they only get killed because they were trying to hide they weren't human and would have survived if the PC's hadn't show up.
One of the PC's receives a phone call from their parents saying they need to talk but not over the phone. When they visit their parents they find one dead and the other dying, the dying one lasts long enough to say "We tried to raise you as our own but they found out somehow and now they're..agragraagh" before dying.
Returning home one day the PC finds a mysterious figure in black standing in their doorway who holds out a clipboard while saying they've been chosen for custody of a small child and to sign to indicate they've received them. The figure doesn't take no for an answer simply walking/driving away leaving behind the child in question if the person makes enough of a fuss. A GM may include a small stipend to support the child and/or physical/mental alterations on signing the clipboard especially if the child needs protection.
For example Its a multi-dimensional situation with the child being a experiment from another that needs to be hidden. Signing the clipboard will not only change history so as far as everyone is concerned you've always been their single mother but will alter you both physically and mentally so you not only share the same DNA as the child (and obviously the rest of your family). It would also bestow on you a range of skills to protect them if their found (what skills/levels would depend on the scenario) and provide enough income sources that you can live on it (at a reasonable level i.e. middle class food, home, clothing, school and maybe a movie once or twice a month or other treat) so you can protect your new child 24/7.
While out and about someone staggers up to the PC saying "In the dark they wait, is that still a friend better check before its too late, no matter where you run nor how you hide the war will find." before screaming in terror and running away.
Afterwards the person may notice odd looking figures watching them.
You walk through a doorway only to find yourself somewhere else preferably with some form of strong attachment (home when growing up, place where a loved one died, somewhere you were frightened/overjoyed more than anywhere else). If you turn around you find yourself looking at what should be there (your old home, a ferris wheel, an old wooden dock although I'd recomend something with an entryway) and re-entering the entryway just takes you into the object there. However as you look around you start noticing discrepancies an absence or presence of people who shouldn't be there, vehicles that don't belong, rides that don't go anywhere. Its familiar and little details (like the rear light on that red dodgem car being out) are exact but major ones (like the ferris wheel being blue instead of white) can be skewed or twisted somehow.
The area around a particular city is subject to thick, frequent fogs. One minute, the sky will be sunny, the next, you will be squinting to see 5 feet through the mist. Whenever the fog starts to descend, all the locals look terrified and shout, "THE FOG!" "TAKE COVER!" and "IT'S BACK!". Everybody then literally drops what they were doing, runs to the nearest building, and takes refuge.
While hiding during one of these fogs, the players see a red shape moving through the haze. It looks like a patch of red mist. A pair of white eyes gleam from the center, and stare through the window at one of the PCs (your choice which one), following his every move for several minutes. It then turns and leaves.
When the fog has cleared, the PCs find a dried-out corpse in the street, with all the blood sucked out of him. Also, misted onto the window in blood (as if someone had used a spray bottle) are the words: "YOU'RE NEXT."
The next time the PCs are out in the open with no buildings nearby, a thick, heavy fog rolls in from out of nowhere. A dark, skeletal figure approaches through the mist, its eyes glowing white as they stare at the same PC...
-Count Dravda
Something is very wrong with the antique camera a character got from a pawn shop. Photos taken of the upper-class houses on Main Street show decaying ruins under a black sky. What should be a busy street scene develops as an empty, rubble-strewn boulevard with suggestions of...things...lurking in the shadows. A portrait of a friend turns out to contain a twisted creature that can only charitably be called human, but nonetheless bears a frightening resemblance to the subject.
Fatal Frame is somewhat similar to this, and I recall that Goosebumps had a story like this once.
In the middle of a conversation, a centipede scuttles out of the NPC’s mouth and down his neck, disappearing beneath his shirt collar.
Ah, I see you like Naruto and his friend the living hive. Or it could be Candyman.
Stepping into the industrial freezer, the party nervously concludes that the meat hanging from the hooks is too small to be cow and not the right shape to be pig. They are just about to leave when the door slams shut and bolts, while a ragged voice from the other side rasps “mmmm, fressh meat...”
SOMEONE here likes Diablo...
At midnight, dozens of rotten corpses rain from the sky on the city block the heroes’ live in. There’s nothing to identify the bodies, and forensic tests conclude that none of them are less than a century old.
This inspired me. Making a spell now.
Grave HailSor/Wiz 9, Death 9, Madness 9
Strong Necromancy (Evil)
Save: N/A
Range: See below
Components: Somatic, verbal, material
Area affected: 100 feet per caster level, 1d4 Medium-size corpses per 2 caster levels fall from the sky in areas appropriate to the size per corpse (i.e. medium corpses taking up 5 feet). If using a graveyard of larger than usual corpses, you may summon corpses of the following sizes:
Large: 1 for every 4 Medium corpses
Medium: As stated
Small: 2 for every 1 medium corpse
Tiny: 4 for every 1 medium corpse
Fine: 8 for each medium corpse
You cause corpses to rain from the sky to damage or frighten your enemies. Corpses deal damage as an improvised weapon of the appropriate size. At your DM's discretion corpses can deal bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage (broken bones, etc.)
You may choose the area in which the corpses fall. This area must be within one mile per five caster levels.
You may only cast this spell within half a mile of the graveyard you are using. This never changes.
Corpses summoned by this spell remain where they are when the spell is dismissed. The DM may choose to have them damaged in some way by their fall.
Material component: The graveyard from which the corpses are summoned. If you have Eschew Materials, you are treated as not possessing the feat when you cast this spell.
If you possess a darkskull, you may double all the effects and halve the requirements when casting this spell.
A tall, somber man in a black coat, who has long been stalking the party, finally stops, takes off his sunglasses, and smiles—with his normal mouth, and the two fanged maws he has in place of eyes.
Sandman! And I don't suppose he eats eyes and gains the memories of their previous posessors?
Or pull a Monsters on Maple Street and never drop the final strike. Let fear and paranoia tear your PCs apart until they undo themselves.
Creep builds slowly. The shell of life comes first. Your players have to believe the actuality of thier characters before they can fight the world beyond. An apartment. A job. Start with normal. Then slowly, ever-so-slowly work in shades of darkness. By the time the lights have gone completely from the world the players shouldn't even notice. When the bug-demon explodes from someone's head, your players shouldn't be ready to roll initiative. They should be screaming, crying, saying "Why God?", or be left with stunned, quivering silence. The only way to get that is to tease out emotion. Break the emotional guards, get in close, make players feel something and then rip it away or turn it upside-down. The harder you work to establish emotion, and the longer you sustain it, the more powerful it is when it's removed.
Personally I think less is more (even if I can't always follow it) such as a dog that looks entirely normal except for a flash of unexplained yellow or red in its eyes during the daytime.
-There's a monster called a Gray Render, which savagely tears up trees and murders anything that comes too close. People have seen them uproot trees three feet in diameter. One of these creatures appears near an urban area, destroying everything in its path. However, one night one of the PCs wakes up and finds a massive chunk of fresh meat next to him, still fresh (It could be a deer leg, but it could also be human flesh). Over the next few days, he receives several such "gifts", until he is physically threatened by another person, at which point the monster tears out from hiding and rips the perpetrator apart. It then acts like a shy dog to the PCs, whimpering and trying to hide itself, despite being 8 feet high when crouched. For extra fun, if they come to rely on it, have it turn murderous on them again for no apparent reason.
-Spiders, or some other kind of insect, take a liking to a specific PC. They nestle in his clothes, attempt to share his bedding, bring him small gifts (like wrapped flies; these usually show up in a drink or in a bite of food), and generally act like overfond pets. They flee if shooed, but more always come.
-Looking up at the moon, the PCs realize it has a massive, grinning demonic face that stares straight at them. No one else notices anything. The next night, the moon is bigger in the sky. (Thank you Teletubbies and Majora's Mask)
-Ok, now for a true one. This happened when I was younger. It started like any good ghost story does, with a dark and stormy night. Lightning lit up my room periodically, and rain came pouring down by the buckets. Occasionally, a burst of sudden wind would slam the rain against my window, as if someone outside wanted in. The wind howled like a ghost as I lay, warm and comfortable, in my bed with the lights out.
Through all the other sounds of the storm, I heard a new one. Shriik...shriik. What is THAT, I though to myself. I pricked my ears and listened again. Shriik...shriik...SHRIIK It sounded like something huge dragging massive claws across the ceiling.
Shriik...shriik...shriik... It was coming from down the hall, in the guest bedroom. I stared through the gloom, my heart thumping wildly. I couldn't tell if the door was shut or not. Shriik...SHRIIK... It was coming closer! Down the hall the noise came, ponderously, as if it were pacing. But it was coming right for me!
Shriik...shriik...SHUNK! It was directly above me now, and I was almost crying with silent terror. The logical side of my brain quickly processed the information. There was a small empty space between my second-floor ceiling and the roof: a small attic. There was SOMETHING up there. It was huge, by the sound of it. The sounds were like claws dragging across wood, but the last one had sounded like...
SHUNK! There it was again! As if the thing had torn its claws free from the wood. As my heart races, the logical side took over again. Think, it said. If it's in the ceiling, it's there to stay. It's not like it's going to come out of your closet.
Then, a chilling revelation occurred to me: the only way into the attic is through a small trapdoor in the ceiling of my closet. So if the thing were going to come down to our level, it would emerge from my closet first.
Shriik...shriik...shriik... Whatever it was, it had resumed its relentless pacing.
As I lay with panic gripping my body, I reasoned: if it wants to eat you, there's nothing you can do. It will throw that door open, drop heavily to the floor, bang on the door until it breaks open, and then eviscerate you. What are you going to do? Nothing.
So there I stayed, motionless, as my nocturnal guest prowled upstairs shriik...shriik...shriik...SHUNK!...shriik...shriik... I stayed there until eventually, I fell into uneasy sleep.
When I woke, the sun was shining in my window and my mother was in my bedroom, prodding me awake. "Did you hear the storm last night?" she asked. I replied that I had, and then she asked, "Did you hear the roof tiles being torn off by the wind last night?"
"What?" I asked in shock.
"Yeah, the storm tore up like half the roof. We were up for hours listening to it."
So there you have it. Nothing supernatural, but still the scariest thing that's ever happened to me.
-The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had some pretty freaky stuff. One of the scariest ideas is if the PCs are investigating something in a well (preferably in a city) that has recently dried up. Going down, they find a secret passageway, coated in moss and utterly damp. At the end of the passage is a huge, stone doorway carved to look like a snarling demon. It bears dire warnings, speaking of an "ancient evil" contained within.
If the players are dumb (or determined) enough to open it, scream. As loud as you can. Then, describe in detail a howling, screaming wind and something that lifts them off their feet and throws them bodily to the ground. Though stunned, they look up to see what looks like an invisible giant on a warpath through the town, smashing buildings throwing horses and carts, and breaking people like rag dolls against buildings. It moves in a straight line until it is out of the city. Whether or not it ever stops is up to you.
-Count Dravda
The PCs have a specific dark puzzle/crime to solve in a small creepy town and everytime they haven't figured it out and the town clock strikes 1pm (the 13th hour), the citizens scream in terrible agony while blood pours from their eyes until they bleed out. The PCs blackout only to wake up at noon that same day and the towns folk are perfectly fine. Thus the cycle starts over.
Here's a few simple ones....
1) While trying to get some sleep one of the PC's hears a sound like a rat or possum scuttling around in a nearby wall, a nearby stone wall.
2) While out and about a PC see's someone who looks just like a favorite character from a book, game, television show etc if they talk to them they act and think just like the person they appear to be. If the PC goes home and checks the well know source they find all references to that character have been erased perhaps changing the outcome dramatically.
3) During a supposedly normal eclipse suddenly the entire world becomes covered in a red glow rather than the normal colour that persists even after the eclipse, no reason is ever found or is it?
4) A collection of tapes, cds, dvds etc suddenly starts expanding with no shows, songs, games etc appearing in it without explanation.
and a fun one...
While rumaging through the closet in search of clothing a PC finds a small door at the back that wasn't there yesterday if they open it they find a damp stone natural corridor leading somewhere.....
...I read that post when searching through here, I'm very superstitous...sue me...
Typical poorly thought-through urban legend. If he killed her, how did he bury her while she was still alive?
Its actually two seperate things I think. First a statement of what happened "A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer." Second a description of the details "He buried her in the ground when she was still alive." As in a girl died in 1933 when a homicidal murderer buried her alive.
Back on track:
During your practicum for your Bachelor's Degree in Archaeology, you spent a week at a recently uncovered pyramid in Sudan.
After returning to campus, you suffer a horrifying dream of being buried alive.
Upon returning home from school you take a look in the mirror. Your eyes appear dark and sunken, your cheekbones visible beneath your tight greyish skin.
That night you have the same dream again. In the morning, your reflection is shockingly thin, as if you had been stranded in the desert for weeks. A trip to the school nurse turns up nothing.
The dream returns the next night. Upon waking, you stagger to the nearest mirror. To your horror your reflection shows nothing more than a dessicated skeleton staring back at you.
Do you chance to sleep again?
"I get up put on the light, dreading the oncoming night
Scared to fall asleep and dream the dream again" -- Dream of Mirrors - Iron Maiden
And here's one that just occured to me mainly as a start of campaign idea but could be pretty creepy if done well. The characters wake up in a landfill in a new body (the midrange moreu creature i.e. animal ears/tail and again possibly an age/gender/race for example a 28 year old caucasian man wakes up as an 11 year old asian girl with cat or dog ears and tail) wearing nothing but a rough coverall with the words "CITY NAME WASTE" in big yellow letters on the front for example "TOKYO WASTE". As they make their way out of the landfill (which can be dangerous enough in its own right) they find themselves in a futuristic city where cybernetic and bionics are far in advance of what they new e.g. military has sub-dermal armour and a jewler may have cybernetic eyes. Thing is everyone they meet treats them as waste i.e shoving them aside, declining to help even making comments (if they have a child) like "Come along dear you don't want to touch those things there's no knowing where they've been".
For those interested the camaign is a corporation has been experimenting to try and overcome death. Their latest experimens has been a success brinign back someone who died some time ago (with memory degredation which is why the character doesn't remember their whole life but they do recover some memories as the game goes on i.e. levelling) in a new body. The company created the obviously non-human body because those tend to occur when something goes wrong in the machinary and are discarded and a new obviously human one grown so the test subject will just be viewed as a defective product by society at large and any stories dismissed.
Having succesfully resurected a person (almost) they scheduled the test subjects for destruction and began making arangements to legally release the information. However there was a glitch in the disposal machinary and the subjects (PC's) awoke before being incinerated. Which means not only is the character trying to carve out a place in a society that views them as defective garbage and adapt to a new body but also dodge the companies agents who are trying to eliminate them because if they do contact the right people the company is going to be in serious trouble for the various laws they've broken. They literally can't go public i.e. apply for patents to test the "theoretical reasearch" they've developed while there's someone who can be linked to it and prove it wasn't theoretical at all.
one night, the wind starts blowing and it starts raining fairly hard. However, it doesn't seem to stop. In fact, what should be the next morning is still dark because it's still raining, and it doesn't stop. It just keeps on raining, and raining, and raining, and raining, with no signs of lighting up. What was once just a simple storm has now become very dangerous.
Streets quickly flood, sewage gets backed up and starts overflowing into the streets, cars start getting backed up and break down in the murky flood waters. Mass amounts of people start to become depressed, angry, and start to panic. Within less then a day, the main exits and roads flood with feet of water and become impassable. There is however one bridge left, but the PC's must make it there before the flooding river over takes the bridge too.
As the PC's start making it through the city trying to overcome dangers such as down power lines, looters, and maniacs they start to realize something is in the water...something...big. Whatever it is, the PC's don't have much time. To make it worse yet, soon the sounds of sirens start to blare through the streets (like tornado sirens). With accompanied silence. Finally a loud explosion and a crashing noise. With high ground the PC's realize that the damn just broke and a 20 foot tidal surge is heading their way.
This comes from a number of inspirations. For one, I am a survivor of Hurricane Katrina and lived to see some things I will never forget. I learned a new fear and humility of water that I never had before. And of course the sheer mood of silent hill. Sometimes, too much supernatural becomes cheesy. Having just enough to where it could all be logically explained, makes for the worst kind of fear.
Here's another one that may be posted already. The player character/s return to a place they have come to think of as safe and secure a home or base only to find the place trashed and demolished, any computers destroyed, desks upended, boards or paintings ripped from the walls etc(works well if various powerful NPC's they knew have been ripped to shreds with their body parts scattered over the place) and all the lights are currently off (switched off not damaged or destroyed). Eventually (in say a briefing or dining room) written in the blood of slain friends is the words "I've finally found you [PC's name]" no other indication of who did this or why.
Along with the garlic, there's religious symbols. The shape of pins, masonry, icons of deities and saints in prominent positions... they're everywhere. A Knowledge (Religion) check will reveal that all of the gods whose symbols are there are associated with protection from evil. Again, everybody has an explanation. "It's pretty, and it fit perfectly with the rest of the decoration." "[Deity] answered my prayers and helped my wife through childbirth, so I'm honouring my vow to dedicate myself to [deity]." "A good friend of mine gave it to me years ago. I just recently found it again." Nobody has a sense of fear, beyond the average (nothing like you'd expect with all the symbols of protection around).
If you stay overnight, you notice that nobody goes out after dark. Even the thieves ply their trade indoors. Just as before, everybody has a valid reason, and it's different for each person. They need more sleep. They want to spend time with their families. Everything worth stealing is inside. Etc, etc. If you say that you intend to go outside after sunset, people just look at you like you're weird.
If you can find out more about it all (in the unlikely event you get three or more people to talk to you about it, or you find somebody's journal, or with the aid of divination magic) you find that all of it -- the garlic, the holy symbols, the staying inside after dark -- started at the exact same time, a month or two ago.
What does it all mean? I have no idea. The idea just came to me when I was making lethal-strength garlic bread (a flip-load of garlic powder on the bread; yummy). It seems like everybody is afraid of vampires, but they don't feel afraid....
- ignorance
- helplessness
- dissonance
Ignorance is not knowing what the HECK. Hearing voices and you don't know where they're from, finding something you don't remember buying, or even feeling that you've waken up in a completely different world: the thing is that you don't know bloody heck.
Helplessness can best be defined by Dragon Bringer's example of the water, from Hurricane Katrina. You know what it's about, but that doesn't help you; you're at the mercy of the flood. That also is a characteristic of most real-life nightmares.
Dissonance is that things aren't how they SHOULD be. Liquid dripping from the floor to the ceiling, children with gas masks growing from their faces (Doctor Who, The Empty Child) -- it just isn't RIGHT.
So, does that make any sense?
Heres one for a colonial setting I intend to use:
The PC's live in a large port city, and no one has been heard from in some time in a small town a few days ride from you. Their parents took a coach to the town to see what has happened over a week ago. They haven't come back. When the PC's follow them they meet a man sitting alongside the path in the woods playing a guitar. He greets the PC's (try to avoid mentioning this guys name or asking the PC's theirs) and asks them what they're doing out in the woods alone. After a short discussion and a few cryptic remarks, as the PC's are leaving one of them hears the stranger call them by name saying "Michael (for example)...ain't nothin' in that town but dead folk.." When the PC's turn around he is gone.
Come to think of it, if you happen to have any old issues of Ghosts (or any of DC's other horror comics from the Silver Age), they could be mined for adventure ideas.
Thanx Rania, and yes it does make sense (at least to me).
Something I wrote made sense?!
I just like classifying and organizing things, and this was what I happened to be thinking about.
1.) To date, I have never been agressively attacked or injured by an animal more significant then a spider. I can actually walk right in among guard dogs, tigers, and even wolves and they won't hurt me. They come up, check me out, and either ignore me or just hang around me. It creeps people out when I start petting their "mean rottweilder who'll take your arm off".
2.) Some years ago I started finding small animals dead inside my garage,, right on the step that leads into the house. They were killed violently, and sometimes were still bleeding but I never found out where they were coming from. Three weeks after this started instead of the normal mice and bird, there was a possum. So I set up a camera to record whatever this gift giver was. Turns out some random cat was doing this, but I have no idea why he suddenly latched on to me as a freind. The odd thing was, the garage door was closed, and there isn't another way in except through the house, and I don't leave that door open either. I've never found out how that cat got in and out, and I've looked quite a bit.
3.) When I was thirteen I was almost struck by lightning. Ever since, when I come with in a couple feet of a radio it starts making static. If I touch the anttena, it goes almost completely out, just generating tons of static.
4.) Possibly the weirdest one, my eye color changes slowly depending on how I feel. The rest of my family has the same deal going here, but all with blue/green. My eyes fluctuate between green and dark yellow. I almost always wear green shirts to make my eyes seem more green.
Ok, now for some fake ones.
1.) After a particularly tough battle in the basement of a large building, the character start regenerating. They quickly heal of all damage they took. Cuts seal, burns heal, holes close shut. No scaring either. As they continue the fight through this modern day dungeon, the characters who have taken the most damage (been healed the most) start acting a bit odd, eventually going completely crazy as if they were possessed.
2.) The doors in a large mansion are all identical. Once one closes however, where it opens up to changes at random. A character might walk from the dining room into the kitchen, and then try going back through the same door only to end up in the living room or a hallway. The most disturbing quality though it that these doors will close quickly after someone goes through, making it very difficult to move as a group.
3.) Death seems to follow a certain character. If he drives across a bridge, there is a good chance there will be a fatal wreck, if he walks past a construction site, someone will most likely suffer an accedent. These are only of the strangest kind, but more importantly is the fact that the character is always able to stop it if they react in time and in the right way.
4.) A spree of brutal murders start. Their are no suspects and the killings seem unrelated except that each one seems to be committed by a midget. On an unrelated note, local schools are testing a new program for children with ADD, which combines new teaching methods with a drug that helps calm the kids.
5.) An unknown circus comes to town. The odd thing is, every employee is dressed up like a clown, and all seem to wear heavy makeup at all times. Investigation reveals that this circus never existed officially, and seemed to start making appearances just after the destruction a small town from plague that was said to leave the victim looking like he was rotting. People keep disappearing around town, but never inside the circus.
6.) And, the worst of all, clowns. Well, they creep me out
1) Brrrrrrr yes creepy things bad bad yick. And that one about the circus actually gave me a chill (very creepy).
2) I might use that coffin maker in my game.
3) Thanks for the clarification that makes sense.
4) Here's one that happened in a series I was watching earlier tonight and I thought could really be creepy if done right. The party has just had a massive drawn out battle (preferablly with considerable collateral damage) against the BBEG (or at least the BBEG of their current level :D ) and finally managed to defeat him possibly with considerable sacrifice. At which point very calmly and conversationally he say's "In time you too will walk my path." before collapsing/vanishing/what have you. If he leaves behind a body it has the happy smile of someone who's acomplished a difficult task.
Ok, I just read through this whole thread, and you guys are creative. Some of you are just downright sick. I loved it. So I figuered I'd try to add a bit. These first few are actually true, all have either happened to or involving me.
1.) To date, I have never been agressively attacked or injured by an animal more significant then a spider. I can actually walk right in among guard dogs, tigers, and even wolves and they won't hurt me. They come up, check me out, and either ignore me or just hang around me. It creeps people out when I start petting their "mean rottweilder who'll take your arm off".
2.) Some years ago I started finding small animals dead inside my garage,, right on the step that leads into the house. They were killed violently, and sometimes were still bleeding but I never found out where they were coming from. Three weeks after this started instead of the normal mice and bird, there was a possum. So I set up a camera to record whatever this gift giver was. Turns out some random cat was doing this, but I have no idea why he suddenly latched on to me as a freind. The odd thing was, the garage door was closed, and there isn't another way in except through the house, and I don't leave that door open either. I've never found out how that cat got in and out, and I've looked quite a bit.
3.) When I was thirteen I was almost struck by lightning. Ever since, when I come with in a couple feet of a radio it starts making static. If I touch the anttena, it goes almost completely out, just generating tons of static.
4.) Possibly the weirdest one, my eye color changes slowly depending on how I feel. The rest of my family has the same deal going here, but all with blue/green. My eyes fluctuate between green and dark yellow. I almost always wear green shirts to make my eyes seem more green.
...
6.) And, the worst of all, clowns. Well, they creep me out
You seem like you'd creep out the clowns.
And now for something completely random
.sdrawkcab si gnihtyreve
The PCs, after waking up from sleep, find themselves in a locked room with "ROOM #584" written on wall. The door is a thick metal door with no apparent means of opening it. Anybody with their ear against the door hears what appears to be a fire-fight, which suddenly stops and is replaced with a low growl.
After going through involuntary rigorous physical and mental testing guided only by a computers voice, the PCs, after escaping a death trap and escaping the testing area, find themselves in what appears to be a completely abandoned building.
(Cookie for the reference)
EDIT: The cookie is a lie, we are now offering cake and grief counciling (sp?) for the reference.
So, my D&D group was fighting a gauth, which is kinda like a beholder except it's smaller. (We were also against a babau [demon], and that was what I was fighting; for most of this story, though, it had knocked me down to the negatives and I was unconscious.) It was really doing a number on the group with its Ray of Exhaustion (-6 to DEX and STR). Then it used that on Altoras, the party bard.
However, the DM had forgotten that Altoras is Necropolitan (a kind of undead), and therefore immune to it. When he was reminded, thankfully he didn't change the gauth's tactics (it would have no real way of knowing), and that helped save the party.
The gauth also had a negative energy attack. The up side is that only two people in the party, me and this other guy who had also been knocked down into the negatives by that bleedin' babau, are harmed by negative energy; everyone else is either undead (Altoras) or has Tomb-Tainted Soul. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a feat in Libris Mortis; you get healed by negative energy and harmed by positive energy. They had gotten it as a bonus feat, and -- it's a long story, and one that isn't directly relevant.
Now, to make it creepy.
You do NOT have Tomb-Tainted Soul, and neither are you undead.
"What's your AC? -Okay, you get hit by a Ray of Exhaustion. That's -6 to Stre-- oh wait, you're immune to that."
"The necromancer touches you, and black magical energy flows from his hand. -- 3d8 plus 5, that'd be.... You get healed for 17 points."
...I said you didn't have TTS and you weren't undead? Maybe that's changed now....
Soon, the animals begin to actively try to protect the character, even from his or her friends. If the group is beset upon by wolves, for example, they will attack anyone except the character. They bring the character small offerings and gifts, as if seeking his or her favor.
Finally, the character begins to have vivid dreams that are only half-remembered by morning; these dreams are filled with violence and blood. On occasion, the character may wake up someplace else, like a public park. They will be nude, even if they went to be in nightwear. Or perhaps they wake in their own bed, but with muddy feet or bits of grass in the bed.
(I did this several years ago with a character who went into Ravenloft, and just let her imagination do the rest. The player was more than helpful in bringing on her character's eventual insanity (not intentionally, either). I just fed her little clues; always just short of coming right out and telling her that she was a lycanthrope. Her imagination and fear of what she had heard about Ravenloft did the rest. Of course, no one in the group ever noticed any of these strange goings-on. It was all very entertaining and I stretched it out for about two months worth of sessions.
In my case, it was all happening within her imagination, just as with the player herself. In fact, that was the reason it worked so well; the player believed that her character was becoming a lycanthrope, and I did nothing to change her mind. For a twist, you could have the character really be a lycanthrope, going out at night to seek food.)
Imagination can be a very powerful tool. A hallmark of good horror is that you never see the monster until the very end; just evidence of its existence. In some films, you never see the creature at all! This is because the audience's own imagination is far better than the best special effect. By not showing the creature (or by offering only glimpses of it), the audience builds their own mental picture of what it must look like. Use this technique in your games. Give your players enough rope and they'll happily build a gallows and string themselves up for you.
A particular character finds themselves present at an inordinate number of deaths lately. Each death is different, and the character is never directly involved, but they always seem to be present when a death occurs. Walking down the street, a suicide jumper lands right in front of them; riding a bus, someone on the bus suffers a fatal heart attack; riding the subway, there is an altercation and someone is stabbed; etc. (The explanation could be anything the GM desires, from coincidence to the truly bizarre [perhaps the character is the mortal incarnation of the Angel of Death and doesn't realize it... yet].)
For a period of 24 hours, no one on Earth can die. No matter what happens, the results will not be fatal. People walk away from fiery crashes unscathed, shooting victims are unharmed, etc. The effects persist for exactly one day, then death resumes as normal (which may catch the characters by surprise). (What happened is up to the GM. I prefer to think that for one day, Death took a holiday.)
One of the pcs keeps on seeing a doll, it could be in the backseat of a car, in a house staring out the window or even sitting on a porch, this goes on for about a week, on the final day of that week the pcs is attacked by the doll with a knife cackling evily!
(In spoiler blocks for if you haven't read the book.
Show
First, there's the Summoning Dark. You know, the eyeball with a tail? The symbol showing up everywhere -- and in everything -- can be rather frightening. The creepiest example from the book was it in Young Sam's toys, how they'd fallen.
Again with the Summoning Dark: the symbol had to be kept in the light. Helmclever died when the candle fell over; you don't have to explain that it was because of fear and guilt.
The above-mentioned dwarf, when he was first introduced, unconsciously drew the circle with two horizontal lines through it, a symbol of bad stuff.
The whole thing with Vimes and the Summoning Dark was especially creepy. I'm thinking of the strange impulses -- Let go -- and it taking over his body to swim when he was unconscious. Also, don't forget the mark on his arm.
Again with the Summoning Dark: the symbol had to be kept in the light. Helmclever died when the candle fell over; you don't have to explain that it was because of fear and guilt.
The above-mentioned dwarf, when he was first introduced, unconsciously drew the circle with two horizontal lines through it, a symbol of bad stuff.
The whole thing with Vimes and the Summoning Dark was especially creepy. I'm thinking of the strange impulses -- Let go -- and it taking over his body to swim when he was unconscious. Also, don't forget the mark on his arm.
Perhaps to avoid the PCs blurting out their names, thus ruining the creepiness of him knowing them?
Yup. It's a lot creepier if the PC's haven't said who they are but he knows anyway. And if he introduces himself by name they may be tempted to do so as well. Of course if they introduce themselves with a false name like my players compulsively do, and then he mentions their real name thats even better..
1) You jump into water that suddenly transforms into a debris clogged blood filled corridor for a few seconds before changing back.
2) A sudden wind blows down an interior corridor with no exterior access e.g. windows.
3) When looking in a mirror a skeletal figure suddenly lunges forward shattering it.
4) While walking down a corridor there's a flash of light and suddenly it looks like the top half of the corridor (above your head) is filled with blood in which you can just make out footprints, a moment later you realize its just a red reflective surface and the bloody footprints are on the floor your standing on, a moment later you realize you aren't reflected in the ceiling.
5) You turn around and for a moment something's floating behind you (you make out a humanoid figure) before it disolves into ash.
The last one may not sound like much in the game it really made me jump the sequence of events was...
Making my way through a waste treatment plant keeping an eye out for enemy soldiers I came to a ladder. After a quick look round I got onto it and saw the girl in a red dress who'd appeared behind me in the few seconds I was getting onto the ladder (last time I saw her she caused a massive explosion that blew me through a window). After a few seconds she disolved to ash and I relaxed slid down the ladder turned to the left and saw ANOTHER figure who disolved to ash. Of course I jumped because I was expecting something horrible to happen (explosion or an enemy soldier opening fire) but still it really is shocking to turn around to an area you expect to be empty only to see someone is now standing there.
Making my way through a waste treatment plant keeping an eye out for enemy soldiers I came to a ladder. After a quick look round I got onto it and saw the girl in a red dress who'd appeared behind me in the few seconds I was getting onto the ladder (last time I saw her she caused a massive explosion that blew me through a window). After a few seconds she disolved to ash and I relaxed slid down the ladder turned to the left and saw ANOTHER figure who disolved to ash.
LOL! I emptied a whole clip on my SMG at the bottom of that ladder!
Love that game! :D
And now that I've said that I'll pay with the following....
While relaxing somewhere near bushland/forest you are casually looking at a tree filled with appropriate birdlife (preferably black but whatever's common there) when they all simultaneously turn their heads and fix you with a long stare slowly turning their heads in unison to look at you with first one eye then the other before returning to acting normally.
Suddenly, everyone in the game world uses a 5-base number system, and have always done so. (You know, counting goes "1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20...") You'd only find out when anybody uses a number higher than four. For example, somebody says there's 10 enemies somewhere. You look, and there turns out to be five, which is the base-10 equivalent of 10 in base-5. Nobody recognizes the digits from five to nine.
Rania - THAT is creepy! :p
The numbers? It would definitely be annoying to both the characters and the players, and until they figure out that the NPCs aren't using the base-10 number system, there'd be a WTF going on.
But creepy...? If you say so, maybe it is. I know that the thought of having to do my math homework in base-5 would have me screaming in fear and despair.
Not too freaky, eh? Sometimes it turns out that they're speaking another language altogether, like Russian; every language has words that sound like words from another language. You could leave it at that, or you could keep going:
You've been listening to it for a while now, and it's starting to make sense. Not that you can understand what's being said, but that you COULD (you know, like hearing people speak in another room). Now that you've "attuned" yourself to that style of speaking, you can hear their tone of voice. It scares you. And then, to increase your freaked-out-ness, you hear them say, plain as day....
What? That's for you to come up with.
now...to add to this rather large madness (first a silly one :P )
-this can be in any time or setting...suddenly, one morning all the pc's wake up and feel funny. Like suddenly most of their knowledge is either lost forever or changed dramatically in how it works. History has been rewritten, faiths appear while others vanish. Spells are missing, items do "wonky" damage, and you know some new abilities you never knew before.
But, no one other than the pc's seem to notice, everyone else just says "its always been this way". It gets worse, you see creatures you've never seen before walking among the others, but gnomes are no where to be seen, along with half-orcs, drow, elementals, and now you can critical against anything with anything...and then it dawns on you...your world has been changed forever to 4th edition, for better or for worse, it and everything in it is different.
the only thing you can ask yourself is, "will you fear the change?"
Oddly enough, if there is one thing most people fear more than the unknown or unexplainable, its change. Because sometimes, knowing what it is isn't going to change it or stop it. This can cause stress both mentally and physically, sometimes to the point of fear and panic. Why? Simple, because it still draws back to the unknown and unexplainable. Just because you know whats happening, doesn't mean you know whats going to happen tomorrow and with drastic enough changes in your daily routine can cause a "usually predictable schedule" to become a "hope for the best".
personally I'm a fan of the new system i just wish they waited another year or two before releasing this beast upon us, though I will still fall back to 3.5e for survival horror games, and my current games aren't going anywhere.
now for some (well, I'll let you judge whether its good or bad)
-as you find yourself waiting for a friend (somewhere) in a lobby or long hallway late at night and your kinda tired (working all day, running errands, etc.) when you look up and see a massive blood smear across wall and door in front of you. As you rise from your little plastic green colored seat, you notice the blood keeps going down the room and see a man wearing janitor clothing hunched over just behind a corner. He seems to be looking at something on the floor. Then you realize what it is as you see the pair of legs sticking out. As the man turns his head and rises you see him holding a rather sharp object but his face...his face has no features. It just looks like skin stretched tight and in random directions across a head. (no mouth, eyes, nose, ears, hair) As he comes closer you notice his skin is covered in deep, cracks like an aged oil painting. He comes at you, towards your neck, with this "knife" but you awaken suddenly still sitting in that row of chairs. No blood on the walls, no body, and your friend finally comes out of the room and asks are you ready to go. You shake hands with the person he was talking to and the man gets a strange look on his face when he notices blood on his hand...then looks at your and all three of you notice that you have a deep laceration (cut) on the palm of your left hand. The same hand you held up in front of you when the man lunged at you with his "knife" in your "dream".
Whats scary about this is its entirely possible that this sort of thing could happen without the need for a supernatural explanation. We have all found ourselves drifting into sleep without noticing, and when we do dream its not only possible, but has happen that what happens to you physically during the dream, the dream will manifest a reason behind it. Such as when you dream of a song you don't know to well only to wake up to that song on your radio alarm clock. Or to have a dream you're best friends starts licking your face only to wake up to your dog licking your face.
...sweet dreams
This is inspired by Metroid Prime 3.
The PCs are in an insane asylum/mad scientist's evil lair. They have either been trapped in there by an electronic lock on the entrance, or a device they came for is inside of a room that has an electronic lock on its only entrance. To disable the electronic lock/forcefield, they need to shut off all electrical power in the building. On the way to whichever room in the building they can accomplish this in, they must go though hallways lined with doors to the various rooms the mental patients/experiments. A couple even try to get out upon seeing the PCs, with the only thing keeping them at bay being the doors which are locked electronically. Once they reach a place where they can turn off the building's electricity, they'll be left with the tough decision to either try to find another way out/to get the device they need, or to let the mental patients/experiments free and have all of the lights in the building turned off.
A variant of the above could have all of the mental patients/experiments be either long gone or dead. Once the PCs reach the room where they can turn the power off however, they notice a strange solid steel door covered with warnings, which also has an electronic lock on it. A few seconds after the PCs turn off the electricity in the building, they hear a growl/howl/scream/whatever the GM deems to be appropriate followed by the sound of metal banging against something coming from the other side of the door that is covered with warnings. If the PCs investigate, they'll find the room on the other side of the door to be a hallway lined with doors, one of which is open, and the grating from the airduct vent above lying on the floor. If they examine the room that the open door leads to, they'll see that the room is covered in scratches and contains rat bones picked clean of any and all flesh, rat blood that seems to have been licked off at places, and maybe a few messages written on the walls with scratches or rat blood.
Note: I haven't read the entire topic, so I don't know if something like this has been suggested already.
This is inspired by Metroid Prime 3.
The PCs are in an insane asylum/mad scientist's evil lair. They have either been trapped in there by an electronic lock on the entrance, or a device they came for is inside of a room that has an electronic lock on its only entrance. To disable the electronic lock/forcefield, they need to shut off all electrical power in the building. On the way to whichever room in the building they can accomplish this in, they must go though hallways lined with doors to the various rooms the mental patients/experiments. A couple even try to get out upon seeing the PCs, with the only thing keeping them at bay being the doors which are locked electronically. Once they reach a place where they can turn off the building's electricity, they'll be left with the tough decision to either try to find another way out/to get the device they need, or to let the mental patients/experiments free and have all of the lights in the building turned off.
A variant of the above could have all of the mental patients/experiments be either long gone or dead. Once the PCs reach the room where they can turn the power off however, they notice a strange solid steel door covered with warnings, which also has an electronic lock on it. A few seconds after the PCs turn off the electricity in the building, they hear a growl/howl/scream/whatever the GM deems to be appropriate followed by the sound of metal banging against something coming from the other side of the door that is covered with warnings. If the PCs investigate, they'll find the room on the other side of the door to be a hallway lined with doors, one of which is open, and the grating from the airduct vent above lying on the floor. If they examine the room that the open door leads to, they'll see that the room is covered in scratches and contains rat bones picked clean of any and all flesh, rat blood that seems to have been licked off at places, and maybe a few messages written on the walls with scratches or rat blood.
hehe, I know exactly what part of the game you are referring to :D Man oh man, that was a lot of metroids to cut down
that could work very well. I'm tempted to try it on some unsuspecting players
and to add to the pile:
-every time one of the characters touches or approaches (your call) a certain NPC, they get sudden mental images of mutilated bodies and twisted corpses. These images simply flash through the character's mind, then vanish.
That ought to make him very suspicious of that character. You could pretty much make them imagine anything, but preferably something that would throw them off course. Maybe the bbeg makes them think of bunnies and flowers?
One creepy moment from the first game relied upon this aspect of the series. In the school level, there was a room with some lockers. Some banging is coming from one of the lockers. Opening it reveals that there was a cat in it, which just jumps out and runs off (which is followed by sound effect that makes one think that it might have gotten killed by a monster). In the nightmare version of the level, you get to go back to those lockers and hear banging from the same locker as before. When I got to this, I wondered what nightmarish version of the events from before was going to happen when I had the main character open it. This was a version of the level that had what appeared to be corpses hanging from different placed, had what looked like a human hand in the science lab, and had a bunch of blood around the locker the banging was coming from. It turned out that there was nothing in the locker except blood (and maybe a key, but it's been awhile since I played the game). I'm also pretty sure that I remember some scary sound effect playing upon trying to leave the area afterwards that made me turn around and take another look.
But if there is one thing from the series that creeps me out the most, I'd have to say that it's how it is implied that the main character might be hallucinating and that the monsters might actually be normal people. Reading through a good plot analysis of the series could give some pretty good ideas for a horror campaign.
You're still at your university. Classes -- or at least the ones you take -- ended for the day some time ago, but you still need to finish an assignment or two that's due at midnight, that you'd procrastinated. (Completely true so far.) You're the only one who happens to be in this room, at this time. So you're working -- well, SOMETIMES working, but also just screwing around doing everything except what you need to be doing -- when you realise that you've been hearing voices, like from a gathering of people, for some time now. Ah yes, you think, I think I saw a poster on a wall saying there was something tonight. Your mild curiousity having been dealt with, you go back to sort of working, sort of not. (Still completely true.)
After a bit -- who looks at the clock? -- a delicious smell comes to your nose. Maybe you can identify it down to the component ingredients, maybe you only know that it's a meal, but either way, you're almost drooling. I think it's the same thing from before, that those people are also having a supper here.... If you're like me, you go down there (I work in the upstairs computer lab, and the caf is downstairs; could be different somewhere else) to possibly snag some leftovers, or maybe even sneak right into the dinner; if you aren't, which is likely, you want to see what's actually happening. Or get closer to the smell. Or see if your guesses as to the food were correct.
Now, this is where it breaks off from reality.
As you approach, both the noises (voices, cutlery rattling, plates, etc) and the smell (FOOD!) get stronger, as is only natural. From your angle, you can tell that the door's open, but you can't actually see inside. You get closer, and when you look through the door (pick one):
- all the people inside are wearing old-fashioned clothing, and have old-fashioned hairstyles. It COULD just be a decade-themed dinner party, but the room looks different too. It couldn't have been decorated, as you were inside just a few hours ago and that left nowhere near the amount of time to make all the changed. (Works best if it's an old building.)
- the noise suddenly stops, and the smell vanishes. The room looks completely normal for this time of night, without any party or meal or anything.
- as one, everybody in the room is silent and turns to look at you. If you stay longer than one second, they get up simultaneously, and walk -- perfectly in stride with each other -- towards you.
- the people, food, and/or decorations (only the stuff that could be put up in a short period of time, as you were here a few hours ago) are -- weird. Maybe the people don't look human, or they all have a sinister symbol tattooed on their forehead, or they're nudists. Maybe the food would normally be considered 'inedible' (bricks, metal, etc), or it's stereotypical "evil food", or whatever.
- anything else suitably freaky....
1) You see an innocent child happily laughing and playing with what appears to be a ball when you get closer you realized its a severed body part e.g. foot, hand, head
2) While out walking you see a cat its eyes glowing in the dark, then you realize there's no actual light source to reflect and its eyes are actually glowing
3) You are awakened in the middle of the night by a horrible screaming and the sounds of a fight outside your room but by the time you look outside there's nothing but a cat licking a bloody paw sitting in front of your door
4) You start awake in the middle of the night unsure what woke you and then you hear somewhere in the room the sound of lips smacking like someone enjoying a meal
5) When you walk into your kitchen you see bloody foot and paw prints leading into your house but the doors were and are locked from the inside
6) After a series of brutal murders you get a phone call and a child's voice says "Do you want to play with me? First I played with Mummy, then I played with Judd [murder victim number 1], then I played with Brown (Murder victim number 2) etc. and now I want to play with you.
7) A man walks past you carrying a dead body and saying "I waited too long before but I'll make it work this time because she just died."
8) A horribly injured figure that only you can see or hear appears and starts giving you advice but it seems able to influence others to a small extent without them realizing it.
One that works well at the beginning of a D20 Modern game
9) You see a figure horribly injured whether it be hit by a car, fall down stairs, get shot or some other obviously fatal event only to get up brush themselves off maybe with a few cracks look around and walk away.
and finally a more strange than creepy one
10) A very attractive figure of the opposite sex attaches themselves to you, just shows up in your house and life and everyone acts as though they've always been there as your girlfriend/boyfriend except them. They freely admit in private the two of you have never met before but state they've chosen you and nothing you can say or do will get rid of them. However they refuse to talk about where they came from or how but act like a very attentive loving partner perfectly tailored to you e.g. if you aren't able to find work for some reason they'll either have a job and be happy to support you even if only temporarily while you get degree or know someone in the field you want to work looking for someone with your exact qualifications (who will hire you), they'll even be able and willing to move if the job requires relocation. Of course this perfect match will be what you need and not necessarily what you want. If for example the reason you haven't found a job is because your too lazy to look they'll provide a firm kick in the backside to get you moving (metaphorically speaking of course) and keep chasing you up to ensure you are actually trying to get one. In other words whether their dominant, submissive or able to switch back and forth depends on your personality.
Alternative I'm throwing in just because my tastes run that way.
As time passes you slowly notice your body slowly changing to the same sex as your new partner but again no one seems to notice as they slowly shift to treating you as a member of your new sex. Your new partner seems happy with this and still refuses to be separated from you except in the normal sense of daily jobs and the like. Once the change is complete you then notice you've started developing new abilities maybe you become fitter, more agile, stronger or start developing psychic or magical powers. Once these changes complete the being? who triggered all this seems sad and starts making odd comments like "It'll be soon now....." or "You'll be asked to choose......" always trailing off and when pressed refuses to explain.
Could serve as the players introduction to the supernatural with them being asked to make a matrix style choose of retaining the new life/powers and fighting to protect their area in a shadow war or relinquishing them and returning to what they were. Your partner has no powers beyond the initial changes to you and serving as a link to your new employees should you decide to accept. They were sad because they've really come to love you (or maybe they always did) and were afraid you'd chose to return to your old life in which case they'd be separated from you and all the events since they're arrival become just a half remembered dream. Individual GM's may drop the sex change part or retain it as part of your sacrifice/reward (depending on the player) for your new role, some may even want the strange being your with to also change sex either at will (an extra ability) or once off so your and them are still of opposite sex.
Oh and before you ask there wouldn't be any break ups of existing relationships because the powers behind all this ARE good ones who only choose the strange or already isolated for the fight. Those in happy relations or with families (by which I don't mean parents or siblings but rather husbands/wives/children. A man with parents/siblings/other relatives could be chosen but a man dating someone could not for example) etc. were automatically excluded from being asked to take up the burden (unless things go horribly wrong).
I saw someone mention Eternal Darkness while reading through the topic. I have played the game, and really liked some of the sanity effects that were there to creep out the player instead of the character. I can even give you some examples of it. Remember that the ones that seem the most spiteful (number 7 comes to mind) would always bring you back to the last door you went through after it gave you enough time to go "WTF?"
1. bugs seeming to crawl across the screen
2. Blue screen of death
3. message saying the controller isn't plugged in while you are surrounded by enemies
4. message saying that the game file is being erased instead of being saved
5. TV being muted
6. TV seeming to change channels
7. game being mysteriously reset
It is amazing how quickly one will jump up, run to the console, and try to unplug the and replug the controller in when that third one happens. Why can't creepy events of this flavor be applied to table-top roleplaying?
There must be some way to have something creepy happen that is more for the players than for the characters they control. Maybe it's possible to make a player think if only for a moment that the GM's pet cat had not only said something but did so in character as the magic user's familiar. (Maybe a small remote-controlled speaker that would play a recording of someone saying "I attack the dire rat" could be put under the cat's collar?)
Here's one from pet sematary 2 that really creeped me out when I saw it.
The character awakens from a horrible nightmare to see a large dog with red glowing eyes sitting on a nearby rocking chair growling softly and watching them as it slowly rocks back and forth, back and forth.
There must be some way to have something creepy happen that is more for the players than for the characters they control.
- Dim the lights and light a few candles; not enough to cause problems for players with poor vision or to be a fire hazard, but just enough to set the mood
- Play spooky music very low in the background, almost at the level of imperceptibility; if you have a remote control for your stereo, you can vary the level to suit the level of fear (scary music always increases in volume when something is about to happen)
- If you play with a laptop at the table, build a file of sound effects that you can play at the touch of a button; shrieks, screams, odd noises, tapping, footsteps, eerie laughter, and disembodied (very low and distorted) voices are good
- When describing a spooky scene, let your voice get low and force the players to move in close to hear you, then when the monster attacks, suddenly shout, "Something comes at you out of the darkness! Roll initiative!"
- If possible, set your game for a night when a thunderstorm is due in your area (it does wonders for the mood); baring this, set up a thunderstorm sound effects recording to loop continuously in the background
If you are given the responsibility of keeping the players' character sheets safe between gaming sessions, you could try writing something on the character sheet in an invisible ink that appears by chemical reaction. Maybe a mysterious item that keeps showing up no matter how many times the PC tries to get rid of it could be written into the inventory. Then, just lightly coat the table in the chemical that reacts to the invisible ink and make sure that the player frequently has the side of the character sheet with the invisible writing on it face down. If the chemical that causes the reaction is hard enough to notice and the reaction is limited to just the invisible ink changing color, then it might be able to go unnoticed until you start acting as though the change is there (maybe acting as though it was something that had always been there), causing the player to point out that the character sheet has no such thing until he actually checks it for himself to see the writing that had not been there at the start of the gaming session.
Keep three loaded D6s that always roll the highest number possible and have a player roll all three of them at once at some point. Is getting "666" while rolling 3d6 lucky or unlucky? Bonus points if it happens when the player is rolling for the damage dealt by a weapon from an evil cultist after the getting a natural (or perhaps unnatural) "13" on the roll to hit.
EDIT
This one is inspired by Chrono Cross.
A few days after a PC has escaped something that would have been fatal (even better if they would have failed their saving throw had their roll been any lower), everyone who knows the PC seems surprised to see him/her alive. When questioned, they claim to have heard from [insert name of other PC here] that they had been killed by [insert encounter that PC had barely escaped from here] and had even went to the funeral. If the PC in question has talked to the NPC between the time of their supposed death and that day, the NPC doesn't remember the conversation or remembers having it with one of the other PCs in the group. What happens when the PC's supposed grave is checked? What if doppelgangers of the other PCs in the party are encountered? What if the supposed death wasn't so recent? Are any NPCs acting noticeably different besides having thought the PC was dead?
While standing around in a group chatting you hear a strange sound and when you turn to look someone is just gone. Asking the others indicates no one was looking when it happened but they (being the one who disapeared) would have only had a second or two between someone looking at them and their being gone.
What if this happened every day? What if it was a different dog every day?
The PCs discover a strange list of names. Closer inspection will reveal that the list is made up of people that have died. This conclusion is easy to reach because of the fact that while some of the entries in the list are just names, quite a few others have a cause of death next to them and will sometimes even include times and other details, all of which fit the deaths of those individuals. The last two on the list are the strangest though, the name of a celebrity who is still alive and is even on live TV at the moment and the name of one of the PCs, both of which have "heart attack" as the cause of death and times listed. The times listed are 5 minutes and 10 minutes from the time the PCs discovered the list respectively. If the PCs watch the live show that the celebrity is on, the PCs can witness him/her dieing of a heart attack at the appointed time. If the PCs are alone, the one who's name is on the list doesn't die, but they can find the name in the obituaries section of the newspaper the next day. If the PCs are in a place with lots of people, one of them will have a heart attack and checking his ID will confirm that he has the same name as the PC. (of course if you really want to kill the PC...)
The number of heart attacks for the day has been triple what is normal for an entire year and for some strange reason, a large number of the heart attack victims that day (about 99.9%) had something in common (having a criminal record, being of a certain race/religion, etc.).
While a PC is in need of paper for whatever reason, they notice a sheet of notebook paper lying around. Should they use it and write down the name of anyone they know on it, that person will die in 40 seconds (assuming the name was of someone who is still alive).
Here's a few inspired by Death Note.
The PCs discover a strange list of names. Closer inspection will reveal that the list is made up of people that have died. This conclusion is easy to reach because of the fact that while some of the entries in the list are just names, quite a few others have a cause of death next to them and will sometimes even include times and other details, all of which fit the deaths of those individuals. The last two on the list are the strangest though, the name of a celebrity who is still alive and is even on live TV at the moment and the name of one of the PCs, both of which have "heart attack" as the cause of death and times listed. The times listed are 5 minutes and 10 minutes from the time the PCs discovered the list respectively. If the PCs watch the live show that the celebrity is on, the PCs can witness him/her dieing of a heart attack at the appointed time. If the PCs are alone, the one who's name is on the list doesn't die, but they can find the name in the obituaries section of the newspaper the next day. If the PCs are in a place with lots of people, one of them will have a heart attack and checking his ID will confirm that he has the same name as the PC. (of course if you really want to kill the PC...)
The number of heart attacks for the day has been triple what is normal for an entire year and for some strange reason, a large number of the heart attack victims that day (about 99.9%) had something in common (having a criminal record, being of a certain race/religion, etc.).
While a PC is in need of paper for whatever reason, they notice a sheet of notebook paper lying around. Should they use it and write down the name of anyone they know on it, that person will die in 40 seconds (assuming the name was of someone who is still alive).
Now I'm just wondering, would it be better or worse to run that with an anime/manga-literate group?
Now I'm just wondering, would it be better or worse to run that with an anime/manga-literate group?
If the players are familiar with the show, they'll probably still get rather scared when they find out that their character's name is written in it. For all you know, they may be desperate enough to burn the list to keep their character from dieing. It isn't as though everyone who's seen the anime or read the manga remembers all of the rules for the Death Note, and the GM is always free to add or remove certain rules if they wish (requiring the writing to be made with a special ink might be a possible one). Also the list could already be filled up and not have any more room for more names.
Th second one could be more of something in the background. It is not as though they would need to find the person responsible for those mysterious deaths when they have another mystery to deal with at the time (and someone else could have taken the case).
As for the third one, I guess that it may be giving them quite a bit of power, but I'm sure there are plenty of things that you'd be able to throw at the PCs that the paper will be useless against (things without names, things that are already dead, and things that just can't be killed).
Just having them touch a Death Note once and noticing a monster following someone might be creepy enough.
Perhaps having them witness a shinigami eating an apple (before they gain the ability to see the shinigami).
Then again, having the PCs trying to solve the mystery of the deaths and having one of the PCs being a suspect could be interesting. Perhaps that PC could even start having strange memories of earlier events where he wasn't entirely sure why he did certain things. Perhaps after coming in contact with the magical object that was used to kill so many, those strange memories might change in such a way that they suddenly make sense.
Edit
Now to come up with something more original. (OK, so they're inspired by quotes from Futurama and Fairly Odd Parents)
For one minute, there is no such thing as two. Whenever a PC checks something that there is supposed to be two of, he/she will find an extra one of it which will disappear if one is taken away. If a PC tries to count, they will somehow skip two (1,3,4,5). Rolls of 2 are treated as being either 1 or 3, whichever the GM chooses. Bonus points if you can switch their dice with a set that is missing the number 2.
For one minute, 2+2=Fish. Whenever 2 of something are combined with another 2 of something, they turn into fish (or start having fish-like features). They change back after the minute is up. For some extra fun with this, if a character with a +2 bonus to his/her attack roll rolls a natural 2, he/she hits a fish (either the target turns into one or the fish pops up out of nowhere and intercepts the attack). If a character with a +2 bonus to his/her damage roll rolls a natural 2, their weapon turns into a fish.
We usually take the science of math for granted. We tend to feel confident that numbers will not lie to us. We know that 1+1 will always equal 2 and that nothing will ever change that. That is why something has to be in the form of a mathematical equation to be called a scientific law. Some of us can somewhat imagine the laws of physics being broken, but the thought of the laws of math being broken is almost unthinkable. We hear the phrase "physics defying" and "gravity defying" but we never hear someone call something "math defying". So how does one react when mathematics refuse to work correctly?
We were in a 2 person call of Cthulu campaign and the other character (who had got sneak and hide skills) saw an elder god summoned and went temporarily insane (couldn't do anything for 2 minutes) while my character was hiding in the bushes. Since I had no intention of leaving my hiding spot to see what was going on the GM turned off all the lights for too minutes leaving us in a nearly pitch black room with the only exception being the slowly dying sickly green phospherescant glow of one of the lights (it wasn't bright enough to even illuminate the nearby ceiling). Then when he mentioned I couldn't hear anything but the nearby sound of chanting the other playing started doing that softly under their breath at the same time as a tree branch scrapped the window outside.
And two that are also inspired by real life events that could be creepy.
1) When your visiting a small town you get arrested for some minor crime and are put into a cell only to find out the inmates of the nearby cell/s are a bull and a dog with no one living there finding this situation odd.
2) A business that's doing well (frequent and reasonable customer numbers) doesn't open one day. Checking things out reveals the manager just vanished along with EVERYTHING in the store itself and no one can contact them.
Edit
Now to come up with something more original. (OK, so they're inspired by quotes from Futurama and Fairly Odd Parents)
For one minute, there is no such thing as two. Whenever a PC checks something that there is supposed to be two of, he/she will find an extra one of it which will disappear if one is taken away. If a PC tries to count, they will somehow skip two (1,3,4,5). Rolls of 2 are treated as being either 1 or 3, whichever the GM chooses. Bonus points if you can switch their dice with a set that is missing the number 2.
For one minute, 2+2=Fish. Whenever 2 of something are combined with another 2 of something, they turn into fish (or start having fish-like features). They change back after the minute is up. For some extra fun with this, if a character with a +2 bonus to his/her attack roll rolls a natural 2, he/she hits a fish (either the target turns into one or the fish pops up out of nowhere and intercepts the attack). If a character with a +2 bonus to his/her damage roll rolls a natural 2, their weapon turns into a fish.
We usually take the science of math for granted. We tend to feel confident that numbers will not lie to us. We know that 1+1 will always equal 2 and that nothing will ever change that. That is why something has to be in the form of a mathematical equation to be called a scientific law. Some of us can somewhat imagine the laws of physics being broken, but the thought of the laws of math being broken is almost unthinkable. We hear the phrase "physics defying" and "gravity defying" but we never hear someone call something "math defying". So how does one react when mathematics refuse to work correctly?
Now that isn't just creepy, it's TERRIFYING. I also had a math-related one, I think at the end of the previous page.
The news talks about a scientist who came up with what he claims to be an equation that is able to predict the future. When the PCs see it, it appears complex beyond reasoning (takes up 4 or more entire chalkboards even when written as small as possible and has at least a thousand different variables). The greatest of mathematicians criticize the equation saying that if the equation is true, then [insert three very unlikely events here] will happen the very next day, and that they don't believe that such absurd things could ever happen all on the same day. Surprisingly, the PCs witness these events happening on the day in question. If the PCs check the equation and examine it (which they'll easily be able to find online), they'll notice that while they can barely make any sense of it, they notice that when they enter next week's date as the appropriate variable, part of the equation ends up being divided by 0.
The PCs have entered a dungeon/old mansion/whatever, and come to a corridor. Strangely enough, the corridor is shaped as an irregular octagon. Periodically, there are arches, all of which are irregular octagons.
However, all the arches are unique, but the walls between them don't curve or arch or bend to meet the new points. They stay straight. This isn't possible is it? The walls and arches can't possibly be arranged in this way! But they are.
When they look at the floor of this corridor, it is tiled with octagons, which are irregular too, and shouldn't fit together. But they do.
When the players ask for an idea of what this looks like, make some feeble attempt to make a weird octagon with your fingers, but give up after about a minute, then mutter something uner your breath about the angles "not adding up".
Then, later, in a similar environment to the corridor, throw in some monsters that appear normal at a distance, but closer up have no symmetry in their makeup whatsoever. None.
*shrugs* Best I could do.
Time to shamelessly steal one from a favourite author of mine...
The PCs have entered a dungeon/old mansion/whatever, and come to a corridor. Strangely enough, the corridor is shaped as an irregular octagon. Periodically, there are arches, all of which are irregular octagons.
However, all the arches are unique, but the walls between them don't curve or arch or bend to meet the new points. They stay straight. This isn't possible is it? The walls and arches can't possibly be arranged in this way! But they are.
When they look at the floor of this corridor, it is tiled with octagons, which are irregular too, and shouldn't fit together. But they do.
When the players ask for an idea of what this looks like, make some feeble attempt to make a weird octagon with your fingers, but give up after about a minute, then mutter something uner your breath about the angles "not adding up".
Then, later, in a similar environment to the corridor, throw in some monsters that appear normal at a distance, but closer up have no symmetry in their makeup whatsoever. None.
*shrugs* Best I could do.
Terry Pratchett?
Nope, Dan Abnett. :P
Which books? Never heard of the guy; is he good?
Thing is, Terry Pratchett's 'Colour of Magic' had a bunch of stuff with octagons as well.
Go with Eisenhorn first, if you choose to delve into his works. I find it requires the least knowledge of the background material
.--The Haunting of Hill House
the character is trapped in an old house, out of ammo and time with the enemy approaching.
but there is also something else, some vast and nameless being moving through the hollow walls.
cold steal touches there hand, as a gun is pushed through a hole that was not there before.
they feel the unseen creature disappear right as the enemy turns the corner.
The Wound Eater
The character is bleeding heavily in some forgotten room, with out any hope of survival. By the dim light provided by the boarded windows they notice a bit of shadows detach it self from the larger dark. its vaguely human and stands about a foot high, completely featureless except for it's unnaturally sharp white teeth. the character has lost to much blood to put up a struggle, as the dark apparition begins to crawl up there body. When it reaches the gaping wound it proceeds to peel it off as if it were never there to begin with. once done it returns to the dark. Leaving the characters body completely healed.
[some more aimless "good" monsters]
Show
this one guy gets a good luck charm. It gives him great luck; however, it takes that luck from everyone and everything nearby. The freakiest thing I found from the episode was the main characters being able to pick out that guy's desk because his plants were still alive, and thriving; everyone else's plants were dead/dying.
Various weapons are air-dropped into a city: from knives to rocket launchers.
A PC wakes up to see they have webbed feet.
A TERRIFYING CREATURE BURSTS OUT OF THE PC'S BRAIN!!!
Or they find themself under the control of a ghost or something. Just an idea of how to blame the actions of a character who's player is metagaming on something else (like a parasite, ghost or something that I can't think of right now).
(Inspired by Elder Evils and the fact that we haven't had a cloudless night around my parts in a while.)
At a place the PCs have recently made into their base of operations (i.e. a tavern, inherited mansion, etc.) they constantly hear something scurrying in the walls while trying to sleep at night. It sounds more like a stampede of rodents traveling downwards rather than individual rats wandering aimless. Occasionally, fabric attached to the wall will move around as if something is behind it, but further investigation proves this impossible (the walls are made of stone, there are no holes, the incline is wrong, etc.)
Inquiring any other denizens that are not the PCs about the noises, they will appear ignorant, but will complain about any cats present in the place going insane for a brief time at about when the noises were heard.
Setting traps will yield no results, but they will be sprung and any bait missing. Tearing the walls apart or bringing in an exterminator will also yield no signs of even a single rat let alone hundreds.
investigation following where these sounds go to leads the PCs into the basement of the structure where it still sounds as if these rodents are still descending through walls impossibly thick.
Is it just a trick of the mind? If so, why are the cats acting upon these sounds?
Is there something beneath the basement of this place? Some ancient catacombs that may yield the truth behind these bizarre noises?
(Blatant 'Rats in the Walls' rip off, but it is an under appreciated story and one of my favorite Lovecraft stories.)
- Plants growing where nothing else is. To make it freakier, they're in a certain shape, or only of one kind.
- Plants NOT growing. We all know somebody who can't seem to keep a potted plant alive longer than a day; but if it's mentioned in a game, it automatically becomes important.
- Plants out of season. We've had trees start turning orange in late-ish summer because of the weather; it's not freaky if you KNOW what causes it. But don't be limited to mundane things such as that.
-Trees that russle and shake when no wind blows.
-Trees which grow over known tombs and sepulchers that have an unnatural vitality or size compared to surrounding vegitation.
-"Each tree bears a leering, twisted grimace of a half-glimsed face."
-"The trees are twisted and lifeless. The arms writhe flailingly upwards seeking a light that did not come."
-Plants which grow in oddly regular patterns, especially those that grow in body-like patterns.
-Trees that russle and shake when no wind blows.
-Trees which grow over known tombs and sepulchers that have an unnatural vitality or size compared to surrounding vegitation.
-"Each tree bears a leering, twisted grimace of a half-glimsed face."
-"The trees are twisted and lifeless. The arms writhe flailingly upwards seeking a light that did not come."
Plants growing inside... between the cracks in the tiles... and there's no soil under there... and it's normally kept pretty clean....
Various weapons are air-dropped into a city: from knives to rocket launchers.
I don't see how this would be creepy,i would find it a bit painful...
Plants growing inside... between the cracks in the tiles... and there's no soil under there... and it's normally kept pretty clean....
It's funny, I had written nearly exactly that but erased it. ^_^
I don't see how this would be creepy,i would find it a bit painful...
It's creepy because you don't know who ended up with what, hidden or otherwise. Also, power (the ability to kill much easier) tends to corrupt people.
Everything the PCs do indirectly kills a NPC. If they close a door, that will start a Rube-Goldburg style chain of events leading to an untimely demise.
It'd be pretty hard to pull off without the players getting mad at the DM, though. Not impossible; just something you couldn't do to introduce a horror theme. Once that's already been done, though, it'd probably work.
@Melpomene: That IS creepy....
@Melpomene: That IS creepy....
The line between comedy and horror is a fine one, indeed.
The line between comedy and horror is a fine one, indeed.
Horror slips into comedy if it's overdone; and a lot of comedy, if you slow it down and think about it, becomes horrifying. Think the Three Stooges. Cut out the laugh track, get accurate background reactions, and you've three refugees from an insane asylum who are a danger to others and themselves.
Horror slips into comedy if it's overdone; and a lot of comedy, if you slow it down and think about it, becomes horrifying. Think the Three Stooges. Cut out the laugh track, get accurate background reactions, and you've three refugees from an insane asylum who are a danger to others and themselves.
Clowns. Broken-down carnivals. Leprechaun(s) and other fae. The Munsters and Adams Family.
Movies: Evil Dead, American Werewolf in London, Feast, and many, many others.
There is a defense mechanism in all of us that desires to laugh at that which is terrifying. By dismissing threats we are sometime better able to deal with them. A subtle turn of phrase, a gentle nudge of colours, a quiet dissimilarity can nudge something towards either end.
Clowns. Broken-down carnivals. Leprechaun(s) and other fae. The Munsters and Adams Family.
Movies: Evil Dead, American Werewolf in London, Feast, and many, many others.
There is a defense mechanism in all of us that desires to laugh at that which is terrifying. By dismissing threats we are sometime better able to deal with them. A subtle turn of phrase, a gentle nudge of colours, a quiet dissimilarity can nudge something towards either end.
We laugh at what's threatening, at what could hurt us. And sometimes, if something is broken inside, we start to laugh at hurt; at being hurt, and at others being hurt.
And sometimes, if something is broken inside, we start to laugh at hurt; at being hurt.
Hmmm, that could explain a lot. I tend to laugh at intense pain, if only because it keeps me from screaming.
There are exciting things on the horizon, but if you still need your Min/Max fix or your Horror elements or want to talk about how to incorporate Harold and Kumar into your game (ok, ok, maybe not that movie, but something you've watched recently), I have an alternative.
Visit www.brilliantgameologists.com - there are boards that can house these topics so Gleemax can make way for the new WotC products to come.
Play like you have to.
So the decision was made, and the d20 Design boards were essentially eliminated. There will be 1 Character Optimization board, but the rest got the ax.
There are exciting things on the horizon, but if you still need your Min/Max fix or your Horror elements or want to talk about how to incorporate Harold and Kumar into your game (ok, ok, maybe not that movie, but something you've watched recently), I have an alternative.
Visit www.brilliantgameologists.com - there are boards that can house these topics so Gleemax can make way for the new WotC products to come.
Play like you have to.
Autumn, would it be possible to transfer this thread if that is the case? There is so much good material that applies to any setting that killing this thread would be a tragedy
Creepy event: some girl shows up at your door with a knife and stabs you, saying that you screwed up her d20 board.
each is more or less disturbing and they create their characters around what they drew.
some hold a template, while others only a description.
1) you were born in a secret town that is the "Ideal" suburbia of the 1950's, people are like clones, Identical in thought and feature, except you. You were banished for being defective.
+1d20 sanity
2) Your mother made a living by selling salt that came from a mysterious source. And every night, she would bring a different man home. One day you decided to see what happened to the men, so you hid in your mothers closet. You see her bring him in, and kiss him, and his life drains from him. First he turns pale and then black; He dries up like a mummy, and finally, he turns to salt.
Your mother didn't come back the next day.
You were picked up by child services the next night.
You always had a way of thinking contrary to the norm. Once you witnessed a traffic accident so horrible that every whiteness except you puked. You laughed.
Lesser Alu-demon:
+2 dexterity
+2 constitution
+2 charisma
+2 LA
Dark vision 30'
Immune to poison
No sanity score
Energy resistance 5
By spending a feat slot AFTER character creation you gain:
You may as a move action grow batlike wings that give you fly 30' average, these wings last for 1/2 hour and may be used one half your level times a day.
3) when you were young, your elder brother came home from school and ripped out your eyes. as your vision failed you saw the vision of your brothers spirit fighting a demon. your brother's spirit, as he momentarily gains the upper hand, rips out his own eyes and places them in your head.
You now see the inside of things. As you watch your brothers body is battered back and forth by the fighting inside. It finally explodes, your brothers spirit literally drags the demon back to hell with him.
You feel your face and find your eye sockets empty.
Eye's of the ghost (template)
Blind sight 120' (SU), otherwise blind.
+2 bonus to skill checks where seeing inside of something would be beneficial (after all you can), -2 where you would need to use a flat surface (comp use ect), read/write language costs 2 skill points instead of one.
+1 LA
-1d20 sanity
Have the players pick out from a hat a seed for their character background.
each is more or less disturbing and they create their characters around what they drew.
some hold a template, while others only a description.
1) you were born in a secret town that is the "Ideal" suburbia of the 1950's, people are like clones, Identical in thought and feature, except you. You were banished for being defective.
+1d20 sanity
2) Your mother made a living by selling salt that came from a mysterious source. And every night, she would bring a different man home. One day you decided to see what happened to the men, so you hid in your mothers closet. You see her bring him in, and kiss him, and his life drains from him. First he turns pale and then black; He dries up like a mummy, and finally, he turns to salt.
Your mother didn't come back the next day.
You were picked up by child services the next night.
You always had a way of thinking contrary to the norm. Once you witnessed a traffic accident so horrible that every whiteness except you puked. You laughed.
Lesser Alu-demon:
+2 dexterity
+2 constitution
+2 charisma
+2 LA
Dark vision 30'
Immune to poison
No sanity score
Energy resistance 5
By spending a feat slot AFTER character creation you gain:
You may as a move action grow batlike wings that give you fly 30' average, these wings last for 1/2 hour and may be used one half your level times a day.
3) when you were young, your elder brother came home from school and ripped out your eyes. as your vision failed you saw the vision of your brothers spirit fighting a demon. your brother's spirit, as he momentarily gains the upper hand, rips out his own eyes and places them in your head.
You now see the inside of things. As you watch your brothers body is battered back and forth by the fighting inside. It finally explodes, your brothers spirit literally drags the demon back to hell with him.
You feel your face and find your eye sockets empty.
Eye's of the ghost (template)
Blind sight 120' (SU), otherwise blind.
+2 bonus to skill checks where seeing inside of something would be beneficial (after all you can), -2 where you would need to use a flat surface (comp use ect), read/write language costs 2 skill points instead of one.
+1 LA
-1d20 sanity
I like this idea, but I think some of them need to be tuned down a little. First I would stay away from LA as that really changes their options for their character (personally I avoid LA at all costs). I would rather make it some strange event that might have had a smaller impact on the character.
"this one gives you power but this one gives you experience."
just to be a bit mysterious about it.
The whole point of it is it does have a big impact on the character and role play.
I'm planning on using it for a campaign I'm thinking up. It would be upper levels working into epic, so LA really has little effect at that point.
4)Your parents worshiped Apollo and you were demanded as a sacrifice.
They refused. They died horribly. Your father from a lethal case of hemorrhoids. And your mother died from warts.
-3d6 max sanity
+1/3 that penalty to fort saves against disease.
5) Your parents were involved with radiological experiments during the cold war. (government black projects tend to be a bit less successful.)
Mutation
6) Your father is a South American Drug lord/Dictator (same thing really)
Your occupation reflects if you are still in the family.
(not so creepy until you think off all the creepy events you can get off people involved in drugs, this opens all sorts of doors)
There is a hippie on some sort of hallucinogen in front of you, he is staring at a wall. Then suddenly starts screaming. "Its coming! ITS COMING! It has claws and teeth and many sharp things!" Suddenly he falls down and claw wounds appear on his chest as if made by a big cat. He continues screaming until bite wounds appear on his neck. He gurgles and dies.
Tell a player he no longer can feel pain. Track his damage for him and don't let him know how damaged he is until he goes unconscious. If he sees a doctor about this or gets a drug test, he has trace amounts of cocaine in his blood. He is arrested and is put in Isolation, watch by camera etc until the authorities are thoroughly confused on how he gets the stuff in him. Finally the doctors look ate him again and then take him into surgery, they extract a coca plant form some where inside his body. (I'd say spine)
You could always try using puns from other languages that the players don't know. If used just right, they can seem random AND creepy.
examples? I'm having trouble visualizing that
examples? I'm having trouble visualizing that
Well, a soufflé (soo-flay) is a kind of food dish with eggs. Ya got it? It's something my mother makes at times, and I really don't like it. Now, there's a verb in French, souffler (soo-flay), that means (v.t) "to blow, to blow out; to inflate; to whisper" or (v.i) "to blow, to breathe; to pant, to puff".
Just imagine a respiring egg dish.
Tell a player he no longer can feel pain. Track his damage for him and don't let him know how damaged he is until he goes unconscious. If he sees a doctor about this or gets a drug test, he has trace amounts of cocaine in his blood. He is arrested and is put in Isolation, watch by camera etc until the authorities are thoroughly confused on how he gets the stuff in him. Finally the doctors look ate him again and then take him into surgery, they extract a coca plant form some where inside his body. (I'd say spine)
That's good. Freaky, but good.
The PCs find a ball made out of solid gold, but when they show it to someone else (like someone who they are trying to sell it to), it turns into a bloody part of the human male reproductive system (the round one, not the long one). (Apparently, the Japanese word for "golden ball" is slang for that particular body part.)
Flowers transforming into noses. (If I recall correctly, the word "hana" can mean either flower or nose in the Japanese language.)
People react with horror and disgust to a PC eating some bread. Eventually, the PC is arrested for killing an endangered species. Then the PC notices that they've been eating the arm of a panda. ("Pan da" is Japanese for "It's bread".)
And that's all of the examples that I can think of.
I do have an idea for a creepy event that I plan to use in a webcomic (if I stop being lazy and get started with it).
The PCs find themselves in a strange place with no idea how they got there. The place has a white floor and some kind of pedestal holding a shining crystal in the middle. The floor appears to just form a circle and everything outside of that circle is in complete and utter darkness. If the PCs examine the area, they notice that they seem to be in what appears to be a bubble of some sort, with the crystal at its center. To get a better idea of what this would look like, imagine the view from inside of a bubble in a sea made out of ink.
Attempts to move the crystal result in damage to the PC. Sticking anything into the darkness outside of the bubble will cause it to come back different. Sometimes the part that exited the bubble is stretched. Sometimes it's turned into some kind of gelatin-like substance. Sometimes it's changed into a body part. Sometimes it's alive when it comes back. Sometimes it doesn't even come back at all. Any living thing takes damage from being outside of the bubble.
Eventually, the PCs notice a few things happening. The edges of the floor that they can see are slowly darkening. The crystal is starting to dim. Their shadows are starting to blend into the color of the floor. What lies outside of the bubble is slowly becoming visible as blurry, dark, moving outlines. After enough time, they see a dark tentacle poked into the bubble.
OK, I got some examples now.
The PCs find a ball made out of solid gold, but when they show it to someone else (like someone who they are trying to sell it to), it turns into a bloody part of the human male reproductive system (the round one, not the long one). (Apparently, the Japanese word for "golden ball" is slang for that particular body part.)
Flowers transforming into noses. (If I recall correctly, the word "hana" can mean either flower or nose in the Japanese language.)
People react with horror and disgust to a PC eating some bread. Eventually, the PC is arrested for killing an endangered species. Then the PC notices that they've been eating the arm of a panda. ("Pan da" is Japanese for "It's bread".)
Hahaha, these are great! You're definitely correct with the flower/nose and panda ones. I haven't heard about the first one (but then again, I didn't go to highschool here, and it's not the sort of thing you'd heard in the office) :p
the PCs come into a dry cleaners. the person in front of them is retrieving a jacket. As the jacket comes around on the rack, they see a dead body already in it. It goes around a corner and is hidden for a second, but as it comes around the body is gone, but it is covered in terrible gore. The man puts it on and walks out, blood drips from his jacket as he leaves but doesn't stain the floor.
Addams?
I'm just... creative.
Some one you do not recognize comes up to you and begins to talk about something embarrassing that happened to you a long time ago. you are sure you have never meet them before and it happened so long ago that you barely remember it yourself.
When talking about a close friend or relative that you've known for years, people look confused, as if they don't know who you're talking about. Even people who directly know that person. When you check any pictures that you had taken with that person in them, they are not in the photo. Instead, someone you don't recognize is in their place, someone whose mere appearance sends a chill down your spine.
Children throughout the city between the ages of 7 and 11 complain of a bogeyman in their closet. Checking of course reveals a perfectly reasonable explanation - a winter coat catching the light or similar. Then the children start disapearing one by one without signs of a struggle some from inside a locked room. At which point one of the party members hears or catches a glimpse of something in their closet and suddenly starts looking and acting. . . younger.
Who?
I'm just... creative.
Charles Addams. He was a cartoonist specializing in the macabre and the inspiration for the Addams Family. One of his cartoons was a body bag on of those racks.
One find that one's last hope of salvation is in fact a path to further damnation... quite creepy even in the saying.
We have seen N+1 or something like it somewhere. We just can't remember.
Referring to the picture posted in it? That scene was actually only shown for a fraction of a second; it took me a heck of a lot of tries before I could actually get a proper screenshot of it. Slightly disturbing eh?
After hearing gun shots the group breaks into an apartment to find someone dead from an apparent gun shot wound but holding a banana.
Banana-gun FTW!
Also, Lars and the Real Girl is just creepy on its own
The characters are in a zombie game, they have ben fighting zombies for several weeks and find reasearch notes, they state that the zombie virus is airborn. The characters have not been whearing NBC suits.
Are they imune, or infected and don't kow it yet?
no matter how it is a plot hole will come up creepy if you bring it up right.
While staying in a hospital you get told that there's a rumour every now and then someone will smell burning flesh in the hospital lounge only to disapear the very next day.
Later on you find out the person who told you that rumour died in 1984.
A plot hole:
The characters are in a zombie game, they have been fighting zombies for several weeks and find research notes, they state that the zombie virus is airborne. The characters have not been wearing NBC suits.
Are they immune, or infected and don't know it yet?
No matter how it is a plot hole will come up creepy if you bring it up right.
Now THAT is seriously freaky. I like it! Maybe I should add another to my categories* of ignorance, dissonance, and helplessness: doubting yourself. Among the last category would include stuff like there being a lycanthrope on the loose, and it could be a PC; somebody died during the night, and you find your footprints there and blood on your hands; heck, anything that involves hypnosis (the popular view, not the reality) or any spell from the Enchantment school cast on a PC.
*In an earlier post, I defined three groups that the stuff on this thread seemed to fit into. Ignorance is when you DON'T KNOW HECK (such as "why is everyone staring at us like that"); dissonance is when something just doesn't fit (a puddle on the ceiling, falling FROM the floor, or other weird stuff); helplessness is exactly what it implies (think going against Cthulhu).
Yeah, random car troubles. But what really freaked me out was this one time it started when my mom was in the car, and she patted the dashboard going "there, there."
Behind the door there's a plain, empty room - white walls, bare lightbulb, pretty "basic" stuff. Nothing really happens the first time they see/enter the room, but after some time, the room is nowhere to be found. After some time, all people, who entered this room a while ago, are summoned into this room. This could happen after an event (someone is killed/hurt, the PCs awake etc.) or at a certain time (that's really up to you). The people are now trapped in this room for 30 minutes (watches and/or mobile phones may or may not work in there). After that time, they're transported back where they were, with seemingly no time having passed. The next time (and for all further visits this is true, too), the time they have to spend there is doubled. The Air stays breathable and the temperature constant. Damage done to the walls is "healed" in few minutes, damage done to persons is undone as soon as they are "let out" again. Exhaustion, hunger and thirst, however, stay.
Will the PCs find a way to get out (by research during their "off-time" or by trying) before thirst or hunger takes them down in the isolated room?
-The PCs find a mirror on the wall in a badly illuminated room/hallway. When light falls on it (from a flashlight or candle maybe), it steams up. Suddenly, words appear on it (at this point, you can give hints, freak the players out, or start a conversation). On the edges of the illuminated circle (works good with bigger mirrors (mansions may have whole mirror walls) and flashlights), the shadowy frame of someone is visible. When the flashlight is pointed at the person, to examine it further, it charges at the players/mirror. If the PCs turn around, they hear the sound of a breaking mirror. Did something just come out? Was the mirror broken all along and the whole thing just an illusion? At this moment the little flashlight isn't quite enough to cover the whole room at once. And where do those sounds, like stepping on glas, come from?
-The PCs find a mirror on the wall in a badly illuminated room/hallway. When light falls on it (from a flashlight or candle maybe), it steams up. Suddenly, words appear on it (at this point, you can give hints, freak the players out, or start a conversation). On the edges of the illuminated circle (works good with bigger mirrors (mansions may have whole mirror walls) and flashlights), the shadowy frame of someone is visible. When the flashlight is pointed at the person, to examine it further, it charges at the players/mirror. If the PCs turn around, they hear the sound of a breaking mirror. Did something just come out? Was the mirror broken all along and the whole thing just an illusion? At this moment the little flashlight isn't quite enough to cover the whole room at once. And where do those sounds, like stepping on glas, come from?
This one's great! I could totally use that in my Shadow Chasers game!
I agree that mirror ones just plain creepy.
Heck, mirrors are creepy all by themselves. I know that I will never look at my reflection in a mirror after dark; because who knows what could be looking back at me....
http://youtube.com/watch?v=k4ePOW4dM2o&feature=related
On the subject of creepy events two simple ones that happened to me recently.
1) Rolling over in bed you find your hand and arm sinking down into it as though there were a hole in it.
2) Just as your drifting off to sleep the door opens and shuts even though you should be alone in the house.
Okay, sorry for the rambling. My thoughts aren't very coherent right now.
the players wake up in a platform suspended in the middle of a cube-face of a hyper cube. Each cube-face has a plat form in it and each platform defines gravity of its cube. the exit portal is in the cube above them.
Every time the characters wake up, say that a certain body part is being eaten by a grue. Make no more mention of it until all their body parts have been eaten. The next time they wake up say "you collapse into yourself and must fight the grue" They have a bosss fight with the grue, it is a templated tarasque, they all die, it was a collective weird dream.
But now there is a birthmark of the grew on whatever body part was first eaten by the grue.
Now for the true evil: After your players have been playing their characters for a long time and you are sure of what they look like, get some other friends/actors they don't know to dress up as the PCs. Have the PCs enter the room... Have the people who look like the PCs enter the room.
If they try to test it by killing themselves their characters die on the attempt (have the actors already instructed on this).
Your sister invites you to lunch one day. You talk for a while, then your sister reveals why she invited you. SHE'S GETTING MARRIED!!! She's only told you so far. And, don't tell Mom and Dad, she's already pregnant. Se brings you back to her house to meet your soon-to-be-brother-in-law. As you wait in her living room you see a shadow of a indescribable horror coming towards the room. You wave it off as nervousness, until Cthulhu come in. He has heard so much about you and is eager to finally meet you.
There are all sorts of things that can keep on coming from that, especialy if the PC is a Teep, but that belongs in for grins.
Your sister is being married to a local gang member (especially if upper or middle class), your family are fine with it no matter how abusive he is.
The priest is Nrlythotep(sp?)
The caterer is the local morgue
The Great Old Ones are guests
People randomly get eviscerated by all of the cultists
Almost everyone goes insane
Geometry fails
It opens up a dark humor, while providing even more creepy events (e.g. Cthulhu won't stop calling them).
remember that before cuthulhu rises it will become a dark and stormy night.
and the characters will have just killed all the cultists just too late, or better yet in accordance to their ritual.
The players come to stop an evil ritual by cultists but they kill the cultists and that is just part of the greater ritual.
very nasty ideas you bring me to.
I'd probably modify it to . . .
As you wait in her living room you see a shadow of a indescribable horror coming towards the room. Turning you see your sisters husband to be for a moment though he seems off and then you realize your being silly as he's just a normal guy. The stranger greets you "Hello there you must be my dearly intendeds brother I have such plansss for our happy family. As the wedding gets closer your new brother in law seems more and more excited while you sister begins to look pale and wan. Posssibly you could add that the strange shadow of forbooding you saw when first meeting him haunts your dreams and you continually wake in a cold sweat.
Another couple . . .
Your watching a horror movie when it suddenly disolves into static . . . a moment later you hear a scraping sound and just before the lights go out you notice the main villain has disapeared from the dvd's cover.
You wake up to your alarm clock buzzing and sleepily switch it off annoyed because today you intended to sleep in and thought you'd just forgotten to switch it off. Then hear an unfamilar voice saying "Sweety time to get up you don't want to be late for your first day of school." (Obviously for an adult character)
A not so creepy opener to a game.
When creating your character/playing a game there's a bright flash of light and as your visions returns you notice your standing wherever your character was and have been transformed into a match for them physically (race, sex, height/wegiht etc) then realize you have none of their skills.
A creepier campaign opening.
You return home after a busy day to have a tall, muscular figure in a black trenchcoat with a scarred face and blood running down his chin step out of the shadows right in front of you. He say's "She's your responability now, keep her safe for everyones . . ." then collapses to the ground dead revealing his back has been ripped to shreds and a terrified girl 6-7 years old who's crying and huddling on the ground. Also works for a group situation.
One based off the original friends disapearing concept.
You just finished socializing with a friend/co-worker/fellow club member who you know is single when a beautiful/handsome member of the opposite sex comes up and leaves with them on what appears to be a pre-arranged date. Later on/next week either the friend doesn't show up, if you call their house there's no answer (or a fellow resident say's they haven't been home for a week) or you see an article in the paper about them being missing.
And finally one that caters to my own tastes.
You call a friends house only to find out that they're out at the moment (at a movie, shopping what have you) as you hang up you realize that during the entire 3-4 minute conversation the person on the other end who does know them well continually refered to your friend as the opposite sex to what they are (or is it were). Obviously this has to be a friend you see at least a couple of time a week to work, works best if you saw them just yesterday and they seemed the same as usual.
6 .44 Rounds - $500
Police Bribes - $2,500
Hit Disguised - $2,000
Base Cost - $55,000
TOTAL COST: $60,000
PAY WITHIN ONE WEEK OR [insert loved ones name here] DIES
6 .44 Rounds - $500
Police Bribes - $2,500
Hit Disguised - $2,000
Base Cost - $55,000
Hearing of a hated enemy's death in the news: Priceless
While walking about town a stranger comes up to one of the PC's and suddenly rips their own eyes out an gives them to the PC while saying "Like them? You'll need them soon." before collapsing, clasping their hands to the bloody sockets and starting to cry in a completely different voice over the pain and being blind.
(I apologize for the almost-necromancy of this thread, but I just had to share this)
Don't be sorry!
While trying to go to sleep, a PC hears an inhuman shrieking right outside their second story window.
Happened to us the other day. We never new that there were bats around here. Scared the **** out of us
While trying to go to sleep, a PC hears an inhuman shrieking right outside their second story window.
Happened to us the other day. We never new that there were bats around here. Scared the **** out of us
I had a similar experience with an owl about 10 years ago.
A PC is walking down a dark forest trail alone at night. The area is very familiar, and no dangerous animals are known to live in the area. Suddenly a sound halfway between a hiss and shriek is heard from the trees just behind them.
(I ran like hell) :P
but when he checks it wasn't one of the neighbors and the garage is empty.
same as above but there is something weird instead of a car in the garage:
carriage
carriage led by a large wolf
A large (size category) dragon
ad infinitum
but for the best effect there must be no people.
(if you use a dragon it must be unintelligent)
With seven dead men
Alined in a row,
At your feet you notice a poem inscribed,
Which reads as so:
"The first of the men was murdered,
With a slit of the throat,
The second of the men killed himself,
Hung by a rope,
The third of the men died by misfortune,
Killed by a stair,
The forth of the men died of of age,
A attack on the heart,
The fifth of the men was slain by his love,
Who left him on his own,
The sixth of the men came to an end,
By the fallen axe,
The seventh of the men passed on by a blade,
Whose intent unknown,
And the last of the dead awoke with a freight,
To arise look around,
To find seven dead men,
Aligned in a row,
And a poem which reads as so."
We admit we are a bad poet, but we decided to try anyway.
Another your hope/goal is actually your damnation.
you give them a warning... this warning:
I am after revolution
I am after conquest
I am after innocence and experience
I am after quarrel
I am after peril
I am peace
You cannot find me, but you can wait for me.
You can make me, but you do not want me.
You know me, but not who is after me.
If they don't get, or they get it and are evil. they continue on as their employer sends them on the goal of world peace.
use the poem as a grocery list,
Revolution is what it is, maybe the key to their joining the organization.
Conquest is the taking of good, for their cause
innocence is where they "rescue" a "child"
experience is where they steal some information
quarrel is a big attack on their base
peril is a dungeon crawl getting a important artifact
Peace is... death
final boss, their boss comes for them, just after they learn the truth... well the rest of it.
they succeed but, the all else is dead.
they have a final chance... dues ex machina, but they must die for it.
He steps out into the dark,
On the second chime of midnight,
He approaches the house,
On the third chime of midnight,
He climbs the many steps,
On the forth chime of midnight,
He knocks upon the door,
On the fifth chime of midnight,
He slowly draws his blade,
On the sixth chime of midnight,
The door opens with a creak,
On the seventh chime of midnight,
The victim stands alone,
On the eighth chime of midnight,
He creeps up from behind,
On the ninth chime of midnight,
He stabs violently at her back,
On the tenth chime of midnight,
He slowly drags to body,
On the eleventh chime of midnight,
He steps out the door,
On the twelfth chime of midnight,
Only blood remains
I am a man who walks alone
And when I'm walking a dark road
At night or strolling through the park
When the light begins to change
I sometimes feel a little strange
A little anxious when it's dark.
Fear of the dark,fear of the dark
I have constant fear that something's always near
Fear of the dark,fear of the dark
I have a phobia that someone's always there
Have you run your fingers down the wall
And have you felt your neck skin crawl
When you're searching for the light ?
Sometimes when you're scared to take a look
At the corner of the room
You've sensed that something's watching you.
Have you ever been alone at night
Thought you heard footsteps behind
And turned around and no-one's there ?
And as you quicken up your pace
You find it hard to look again
Because you're sure there's someone there
Watching horror films the night before
Debating witches and folklore
The unknown troubles on your mind
Maybe your mind is playing tricks
You sense,and suddenly eyes fix
On dancing shadows from behind.
Fear of the dark, fear of the dark
I have a constant fear that something's always near
Fear of the dark, fear of the dark
I have a phobia that someone's always there.
When I'm walking a dark road
I am a man who walks alone.
Scariest...dream...ever!
As they get louder, you look around, but cant find where they come from.
You recognize them. They sound like screams of fear and death.
You look down and on your chips
are the faces of every person you have ever killed.
They stop screaming out of fear.
They scream of anger.
You awaken to the sound of a phone ringing, after some searching you finally find your mobile and pick it up just as it stops ringing . . . a moment later there's a knocking at your door. If you check the phone's missed call record the last missed call was from your own number. If you have a message bank you hear your own voice saying "Don't answer it."
Very cool. Excellent hook.
The same as above but it snatches a PC. The PC may, or may not be polymorphed into a baby.
(that is actually legal for the spell. No one remembers all the fun things you can do with that spell.)
Attacked by squirrels... the squirrels are invisible to NPCs and and attacks that get rid of them, damage nearby property. The PCs are Arrested, and shown video footage of themselves during the squirrel fight. There are no squirrels.
(you can start many adventures with this)
The news shows a convict getting elected as president... while in prison. A spot check finds that the date of the news footage is about a decade later. (rounded to the nearest election year... or not)
Every NPC breaks into a musical. They sing "what a lovely bunch of coconuts.
" coconuts rain for the sky, the PCs must make reflex or perform(Dance) checks to avoid getting pummeled. Any one Dancing is not hit with the coconuts.
A random protest... the people are protesting against something that hasn't happened... or for something unusual. A large crowd of woman protesting against womans suffrage, Some Mexicans protesting a nuclear strike on Mexico, maby something to do with Canada.
A man randomly asks them to spell "maby"
(How the hell do you spell it any way?)
1) A scientist perfects a program that tracks the connections between things and is able to predict with 100% accuracy everything from what the weather will be tommorow to what route a particular housewife living at 1217 Minasato building will take home tommorow. Depending on GM's inclinations it predicts his (and/orthe PC's) death in 12 hours or the end of the world in 7 day's (perhaps both are connected).
2) After an absolutely horrible day, the kind that sends you home in tears your favorite stuffed animal pats you on the shoulder comfortingly as you hug it.
3) You find that you VCR isn't working properly and keeps recording the wrong program, after some fiddling you find out everythings working fine except the date . . . its recording tommorows programs rather than todays.
4) You stumble across a government department that has all sorts of information available on and offline except about what it actually does.
5) An actor/ress on your favorite show suddenly changes to a different person (height, weight, hair and eye colour) yet the name in the credits remain the same and if you look up the person all evidence reflects the new person who every say's IS the right one.
6) A package arrives addressed to you inside is a computer program that claims you can recreate your life as you desire. Whether you want to be a different sex/race/age/class/wealth demographic or anything else enter the information in the easy to use template and click upload to alter reality to reflect the new situation . . . payment to be discussed at a later date.
and finally
7) A new stray dog/cat/domesticated animal appears in the neighourhood following you around and seemingly understanding every word you say. One morning you come out to find it sitting in the yard in front of a series of stones/leaves/item found in you neighbourhood that have been arranged to spell out the words help me.
"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear."
A cryptic advice for some PCs? Metaphorical? Literal?
Recent articles in the newspaper have shown a rise in human fatalities from attacks by wild animals. As the week progresses, the articles continue; first it's campers in the woods being mauled by a bear, yesterday a man was attacked by raccoons while putting out the trash. Today's newspaper reports numerous dog attacks, mainly against their owners.
Hearing a noise the PC lowers the newspaper to see their pet cat staring at them with what can only be described as a malicious hatred...
Nice one with the animals though.
One of your co-workers starts acting odd hiding things when you walk into the room, staying behind the desk, placing odd phonecalls. Eventually you get called on to do a spot inspection (for reasons appropriate to the campaign). Searching his/her desk you find what they'd been hiding from you . . . childrens toy's and the phone calls were to order a higher chair? Over the following weeks you notice they're startng to look younger and younger (possibly with other changes e.g. men suddenly getting a pair of earings or 5 oclock shadow that looks like fur over their entire body). One day you come in to find they haven't shown up for work and if you search/call their house there's only a young (possibly non-human) child there and then you find a couple of toy's in your desk.
You walk into an abandoned hotels entry way to a pack of stray dogs munching on the remains of a teenage girl who's hanging from a firehose leading up to a 8th story window.
and another one from the same movie that was more of a brrr moment.
Two people are making love and think they see something odd in a nearby mirror, when one of them goes and studies it the light in their room blows and suddenly you see the sillohete (sp?) of a huge man on it moments before he breaks into the room.
Is the house riddled with secret passageways or did the mirror open to somewhere else?
Heres one from a movie I just saw (the only part I did not want to watch).
You walk into an abandoned hotels entry way to a pack of stray dogs munching on the remains of a teenage girl who's hanging from a firehose leading up to a 8th story window.
Its worse if she is still "alive"
exponentially so if not in fear or pain.
BBEG? You'd hope not.
The characters open a door to face an army of penguins. They have blood on their beaks. And how does an inside door lead to an ice shelf?
There is a dead whale carcass back a football field, next to a pile of human bones.
the more they wait to act the more you go into detail.
As the adventurers travel down a long dark hall / street etc. The lights/torches/candles begin to wink out ahead of them, one at a time, in sequence. The darkness creeping forward towards them as each light goes out. If the darkness overtakes them, they feel a cool damp breeze with musty smell. Of course they just might loose their cool and run for it too.
As the character looks into a mirror, he sees his reflection and a horrible figure that comes up behind him. It reaches for him. When he spins around, nothing is there and the mirrors reflection is normal again. After he calms down and goes to leave the room, there is a loud "POP!" and the mirror is covered cracks...broken.
A tapping sound comes from the window at night (or during a storm). Any character that understands morse code reconizes the word "DEATH". Checking out the window reveals that it is a tree limb being blown in the wind and tapping against the window.
The character finds a harmless spider web. His name has been written into the webbing.
The trees sway and move gently, their leaves rustling, but there is no wind to speak of.
During the storm, marble sized hailstones begin to fall. The characters notice that they are shaped like little skulls.
As a teapot comes to a boil, its whistle sounds more like a scream than a whistle..but only for a few seconds.
As an old door is opened, it's hinges creak. It makes an errie noise like
"HEEELLLPP MEEEE". It only does it once.
None of those are really dangerous (unless the players over react), but they do help set the creepy atmosphere and make the appearance of the real horror that much more terrifying.
My group loved experimental stuff, and were more than happy to roll with whatever form of insanity I put them through when I occasionally anounced I was going "off-script" from the usual D&D game.
(Bear in mind that I'm a published poet, so I have something of a gift for colorful description...)
So I start off the adventure by having the party get hired by a heavyset red-headed man (with a magic amulet embedded in his chest that cast, um, think it was Otto's Irrisistible Dance..) to save his village from an evil wizard trying to enslave his people and steal their magic amulets.
Pretty standard stuff, right?
Come to find out, the people of the village are all Were-Carebears (yep, you read that right.) with magic amulets on their chests (each with a different spell - emotion, tasha's hideous laughter, etc.) who are the guardians of childrens' happiness in the world, and the wizard bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the Purple Pieman from Strawberry Shortcake. And all of his minions are gummi orcs and chocolate-covered giant ants and things. I even had a marshmellow Booberry Ghost and a Frankenberry flesh golem. :D
So the party's like, "Ohhh, we're doing comedy tonight..."
They were still smiling and joking when they fought the first of the gummi orcs.
And that's when the horror began.
They swung at the neverending shambling hordes of zombie-like gummi orcs only to have their weapons slice into them with a horrid squelching sound, and the wounds slowly sealed up, trapping their weapons inside.
A red gummi orc had it's right arm severed, only to pick up the left arm of a yellow gummi orc and attach it to the stump, where the red and yellow flowed together to form an orange scar...
A stray arrow from the battle lodged in a tree, which began to slowly bleed red strawberry sauce blood.
An NPC grabbed by the rock candy spider was entombed in a pink spun-sugar web, hung up next to other victims like a cotton-candy booth at a carnival.
The fireball that they flung at the chocolate-coverd giant ants turned them into an ankle deep molten pool of sludge that choked them with the overwhelming reek of sickly-sweet burnt chocolate.
The marshmallow ghost began bleeding blueberry blood from his eyes as his features melted like wax, just before he hit them with a banshee's wail.
They discovered the wizard was a necromancer trying to enslave the werebears in order to suck the joy from their souls, in order to corrupt it and use it's power to destroy the wills of the region's children, slowly warping them into zombies as they grew up to serve him.
It turned into three and a half hours of soul-grinding, mind-bending horror...
Halfway through the adventure, they'd all put their bags of candy and chips away.
The entire party unanimously agreed it was the greatest game they'd ever played.
Whenever the group returns to their home base, they notice signs that someone else has been using the building. Furniture has been moved about, beds slept in, supplies used, and most cryptically of all, someone has been writing notes to themselves and leaving them where the PCs can find them. Some of the scraps indicate that the other occupant(s) are concerned with whatever threat the PCs are investigating, and may even provide helpful information or hints, but the party never actually meets their “roommates” either in the field or back at home. They even find a journal entry describing someone’s descent into madness, as the writer mentions how they keep finding signs that some other people are living in their house while they are away…
Regardless of how new or well-maintained the equipment, whenever a player gets too close to a TV set or computer monitor, the image breaks into lines of static, returning to normal once they step back.
While walking through a crowd, the party notices that everyone else seems to subconsciously keep their distance. Without looking at them, other people still manage to steer clear of the players.
Something’s on the roof. The character hears a series of thumps from above while on the top floor of his house. When he moves to another room, after a moment the thumps follow him until they’re once again directly above him.
In the middle of a conversation with another person, a PC’s hearing suddenly dwindles until all she can hear is her heart beating loudly and her own nervous breathing, while simultaneously everything around her quickly fades into darkness, though she can still see herself as if she was illuminated normally. After about ten seconds of this unnerving experience, sound and light quickly return just as the other person finishes speaking and looks at her expecting an answer.
One of the party’s gadgets isn’t working properly. Upon opening it, they find its mechanical and electronic parts have been replaced by an organic, fleshy, cancerous mass.
New to the city, the party is shocked that no one else notices the rotting human corpses scattered around the metropolis, sitting in derelict cars, lying in gutters, slumped in alleys, or just sprawled in the middle of the sidewalks. The natives simply step over the grinning cadavers without giving them a second (much less first) glance, and don’t even seem to mind sitting next to a bloated carcass on the bus.
Out of the corner of her eye, one of the players notices a small table “walk” on its legs to a new position a foot away, before becoming perfectly still again as though nothing has happened.
A PC awakens one morning and finds the door leading out of his apartment firmly locked, bolted, and chained shut. The phone lines don’t work and nobody seems to hear his frantic pounding. But in his bathroom, some substance has eaten away at his wall, creating a door of sorts that leads somewhere pitch-black…
In the old building, the party finds thick ropes of organic material burrowing into the walls like roots or crisscrossing hallways and rooms, bringing to mind images of blood vessels or ganglia.
The party had to mow through rooms full of monsters during their adventure, so when they backtrack, why are the floors littered with the mutilated corpses of ordinary humans with terrified expressions frozen on their faces?
1) Keep the party trapped. I don't mean enclose them in a room for a full session or anything, but making certain they cannot easily escape from whatever you are planning for them really intensifies the experience. I chose to put them on a huge ship on the middle of the ocean for this purpose. Good times when nasty things start happening and they have absolutely no avenue to get away from it.
2) It's been posted before several times in this thread and elsewhere but it warrants a repeat: relieve the tension from time to time. Players can't keep tense for extended periods so it is up to the DM to relieve the tension only to rebuild it later. Anything from a mundane fight (not something dark and icky) to a lighter moment in the storyline works well. However, I've also found that just interjecting something small into these moments works to keep the players in the right mindset. For example, one of the things I used to relieve the tension in the game was a banquet they attended. It was still fairly tense as in the game there are two opposing political factions on the ship and both were there, but it wasn't designed to keep the horror aspect going. Nothing much happened during the dinner that would creep people out except a few black beetles crawling around the floor and, toward the end, one of the PCs noticed that a pair of rats had been cooked inside the pig carcass that everyone had been eating on. Nothing big, but enough to keep them in the mood.
3) Watch your players. If you are paying attention you can tell when a situation is starting to disturb one of your players. When this happens, just start working them! Of course, you want to be careful not to go too far. I have a standing agreement with my players that they should let me know when things are getting a bit too much for them. So, until they let me know, I just keep pushing it. Another example from my own game. The PCs got caught by the aforementioned opposing political faction (basically something like the Inquisition) they were held for a good long while and tortured. One of the players, the cleric, was hung up with his wrists shackled around a steam pipe. I threw out a short description about how the hours of hanging there had caused severe burning on his arms where they had been resting against the pipe. I could see from his face that he was really getting into the moment and the thought of crispy arms didn't agree with him. Of course, that meant that I focused on that character and really got into good detail and even made the situation such that he had to try to move around on the pipe so I could describe how blackened skin flaked off as he moved and how he was leaving a steaming trail of blood along the pipe as he moved.
Now, and actual idea.
On my ship there are vents that serve to keep fresh air flowing around the vessel. The party opted to crawl into these vents to get somewhere. Perfect scenario to make them feel claustrophobic and helpless. Nothing happened until they got to a long stretch where they couldn't get out then they noticed that the darkness at the edge of their lantern light seemed to press in around them. They couldn't shake the idea that something was following them just out of range of the light. One of the PCs is a sorceress with a cat familiar so I made the kitty start growling at the darkness behind them. They started to panic and crawl through the vents faster then I hit them with a little girl singing a nursery rhyme:
Momma's hands are growing cold
Circle-a round, circle a-round
Play with me you'll never grow old
Circle-a round, circle a-round
Can I go home now?
I then mentioned how the light of the lantern was barely making it past the party and seemed to be continually shrinking and how the feeling of malevolence was increasing drastically. They just abandoned pretty much any attempt at stealth and scrapped along as quickly as they could until they found the very next vent grater. Without a second thought the fighter in the front just smashed it open and the entire party fell through it without a thought of the noise or what may have been beneath it. Great times!
I guess the idea is really trap them in a small space and just increase the tension without ever showing a monster or any kind of danger. The vents may or may not have had anything that could have actually harmed the PCs in them; however, the notion that something unknown was bearing down on them when they were in a somewhat helpless state (can't swing a sword when you're in a 3'x3' vent).
Walking down the street of a fairly large city, a PC is surprised when a bird suddenly hits the sidewalk beside them. The bird is dead, though it has no visible wounds. It's neck is broken. Possibly, it hit a nearby building and just happened to fall next to the PC. But the next time it happens, there are no buildings nearby. At the phenomenon seems to be occurring more frequently... (A dead bird isn't necessarily frightening, but a bird that suddenly falls dead at your feet can be startling, and if that bird dies from inexplicable causes, the effect is multiplied. Panic might become sheer terror if the PC's car is suddenly subject to a rain of dead birds as a flock passes overhead!)
True story time.
Now, I saw it from the other end, I knew what was happening. But I can imagine the other guy was freaked out.
For whatever reason, we would get a starling infestation at my former job. My boss would work with the FDA and put poison out for them. (Starlings are an invasive pest species around here, they do a lot of damage to the local environment.)
They roosted on a tree near the plant. Well, they would eat the poison, fly there, and then die. So when the guy who owned the property woke up that morning, he had about fifty dead starlings in his front yard.
Yeah, I thought it was freaking hilarious, but I can imagine that guy was pretty scared.
We were playing a Call of Cthulu game at university and to add atmosphere the lights were turned off and we kind of stole glowsticks from the only player to buy them (nice guy). Anyway one of us was playing with his and broke it in the middle of his character trying to catch a weird statue. End result he wound up with glowing yellow goo on his hand which when wiped off resulted in scrunched up glowing piece of paper sitting on the desk.
The other one was the university buying new chairs. Previously all the buildings had gray chairs but they switched to blue ones in one building, one of the blue chairs found its way to the corner of the room we were playing in on the night of character generation, was gone the following monday when we were in a nearby room for something else, was back in the desks on the following call of cthulu session and then slowly got closer to the section of the room we were playing in each following session.
Vast - Pretty When You Cry
Unkle - Eye For An Eye
Bat For Lashes - What's A Girl To Do
Chemical Brothers - Believe
Ever so slightly off-topic, but I didn't think you folks would mind. Tool and NIN videos are also good for this.
I have a themed D&D session around Halloween every year, and this thread is a great resource, so thanks everyone.
This year's involves an aranea plaguing the countryside as it paralyzes, webs, and collects bodies for a magical "bio-computer", in an effort to try and discover the meaning of its existence...it has woke from a centuries-old sleep to find the gods it worshiped dead and gone. (Araneas really creep one of my players out - giant spellcasting spiders with eight human eyes and human hands...what's not to love?) It features a cave complex of mind-tripping mushroom spores, illusions, the aranea's alien attempts to communicate (and kill) via web-suspended zombie "marionettes", and plenty of twitching, paralyzed scenery.
Horror can be trickier in D&D rather than, say, D20 Modern (where you don't face crazy things like hydras and demons before breakfast), but they've been good so far.
Last year's was the mansion of an insane gnome who was luring the town's children to his isolated mansion and turning them into Gibbering Mouthers.
The other personality was a Kython (race from the book of vile darkness) impaler (assasin) and it jumped onto the truck taking down one of the group in the first round and half killing another in the 2nd before the martial artist of the group threw it off the truck and they accelerated out of there in panic.
The backstory to this little event was an ancient lich that had in the spirit of curiosity captured the Kython and merged it with a human so the two minds shared one body, the actual body being normally human but shifting to the Kython if the human mind was rendered unconcious by saying falling off a moving truck.:D
A supercomputer or even something controlled by an AI that the characters have come to rely upon suddenly delivers (displays on the screen, prints, or says) the message "Divide by cucumber error. Please reinstall universe and reboot."
Even creepier in a totally serious setting where it has to mean something. Is the computer breaking down, leaving the characters minus a valuable asset... or is the computer functioning perfectly?
Here's one from a horror movie I was watching. Lieing in bed late at night you see a shadowy figure sitting near your bed. Hurriedly you turn on the light to see its just some clothing hanging on a chair. So you relax, turn off the light and watch as the figure stands up and starts walking towards you so you turn on the light again and the clothing that was hanging on a chair crumples to the ground about halfway between you and the bed . . . then the light breaks.
That's f@cking awesome!
This works best in a hi-tech setting...
A supercomputer or even something controlled by an AI that the characters have come to rely upon suddenly delivers (displays on the screen, prints, or says) the message "Divide by cucumber error. Please reinstall universe and reboot."
Self-aware AIs are usually creepy. Games like System Shock (1 and 2), Wintermute in William Gibson's Neuromancer, etc... all feature very sinister AI behaviour, most likely inspired at least in part by 2001: A Space Oddyssey's Hal 9000. Then there was the creepily portrayed "artificial humans" in Ridley Scott's Alien and Blade Runner.
One great way to build suspense is the absence of threat. Take Lost in Space for example: they found the derelict spacecraft, and upon searching it, they found no visible threat until they were so deep in the ship that they couldn't escape easily.
Every time the players hit an enemy, even if it is just a simple dagger stab/shot in the leg/anything, the enemies entire body explodes in a gory blast, covering the entire room in blood and people bits. People will either find it hillarious or be totally freaked. Then move it on to if any npc gets accidentally hurt, paper cut, stub their toe, they explode. But no one else comments on it, only the PCs find it unusual/creepy. Then laugh as they continue for the rest of the adventure very, very carefully, making sure they don't stub their toes.
Real life Ones
One of the players had just aquired a chainsaw and was getting ready to burst into a room and slaughter the presumed enemy he'd find inside. He pretened to start it up going vroom, vroom at which point the same sound (from actual machinery rather than human impersonation) was heard outside the room we were in (a compressor for one of the universtities labs had just started up).
There were a bunch of small spider like aliens scuttling through the vents to attack the party, and a number of possums decided now would be a good time to skitter across the roof tiles (open gap between ceiling and room tiles like in the 2nd aliens movie) above us.
Game ones.
While exploring a room with largely normal setting one of the party members (in my case I looked that way in game) see's a huge (man sized) spider crawl across the glass windows on its way to the upper floor.
While looking around you notice a painting of a path winding towards some mountains suddenly seems more realistic than it did before, then a bird flies across in front of the background mountains. (In the game you need to enter the painting and use it to walk along a path to come out of a similar one upstairs.) before the painting changes back to a normal 'looking' painitng.
I really like the second one and want to find a way to incorporate it in my game imagine a painting as a portal to anther world or even just a small pocket dimension :D .
.I'll contribute soon enough.
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*The PC(s) are walking down a street, when, all of a sudden, a passerby starts singing "Time Is On My Side".
*A person of importance to the PC(s) dies a violent death. After the funeral is held, all signs that they once existed vanish, and no one can seem to remember this person.
*The entire world turns black and white - every color vanishes.
*During their journeys, the PC(s) come across a town where the population all sleeps at the same time, but instead of normally sleeping, they wake up shortly after and go about a seemingly random routine. This goes on for seven and a half hours, then everyone returns home, and sleeps for the remaining time before "waking up" - totally refreshed and unaware anything else happened.
The party is walking down the street at night when something goes past. At first it looks like some enormous lizard or dinosaur with glowing eyes, but as it approaches it turns out to be a perfectly normal SUV.
At least, until someone notices that in its wake aren't tire tracks, but enormous clawed footprints.
Version 1) For a group of older PC's (characters not players) pick one at random and have them woken up by a small girl (or boy, 7 or 8 years old) jumping on the bed yelling mummy/daddy and trying to wake them up (obviously the PC needs to be single and not a parent for this one).
Version 2) For a group with younger pc's again pick one at random, this time instead of being woken up by a daughter they return home (after only being out no more than a day) to find be greated by a younger brother/sister that didn't exist when they left the house (works really well if they only left to put out the garbage and weren't out of the house more than 5 minutes).
In both cases other than the extra sibling/child everyone reacts normally and looks the same however they all (except possibly the PC's although if you can arrange for all the group except the chosen player to come to the game and just act as though that players always had the extra NPC without their knowledge you can really freak them out) behave as though the childs always been their including possibly uknown NPC's who were introduced through the child's interactions e.g. the kids friends.
Leaving them wondering where the little kid came from and if its really a normal kid, some mysterious plot element, some evil monster stalking prey, someone from the future on a mission of their own or something else.
Finally, when you turn around, you realize there are people looking through every little crack in the cabin, and through the boarded up windows... and they are all looking at you.
Here's one modified slightly from the Doom 3 game I've been replaying recently. Out late one night one of the PC's hears a womans voice saying "follow me", if they look around they see bloody footprints leading off into a nearby alley if they're outside or down a corridor if inside. Should they follow them they soon reach a dead end either a walled off dead end in the alley the end of the corridor with only rooms off it. At this point they hear the same voice saying "help me." If they look around at this point the footprints have disapeared. Nothing else happens.
And one inspired by visiting family with two possible endings.
You wake up to hear the sound of crying, following it you eventually locate the source of the crying as one of those childrens toy's (the kind that cry, poop etc) in the bathroom. Picking it up the crying stops, if you put it down again it starts, if you switch it off/remove the batteries it stops. As you turn to go back to bed (assuming you don't take it back to bed with you :D)
1) you see in a reflective surface (window, mirror) the toys eyes and head turn sharply to watch you.
2) you hear a childs voice saying plaintively mommy/daddy (depending on PC's sex)
Finally, when you turn around, you realize there are people looking through every little crack in the cabin, and through the boarded up windows... and they are all looking at you.
Reminds me of a scene from Ju-On (the original Japanese version of The Grudge)
Whilst investigating a late 19th century house in rural New England, the PCs spot an old manuscript that appears to have been written by H.P. Lovecraft. As soon as they go to examine it further, the cellphone in their pocket rings and a voice that was at once deep, hollow, gelationous, remote, unearthly, inhuman and disembodied boomed. "YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!"
Here's one that I saw used in a movie which could be creepy if done right. While going about their normal business things start sounding wrong. For example a man walking through a carpark will hear the clicking of high heels rather than his shoes, someone knocking on a door will hear whispering voices instead of the "thud, thud, thud" they expect or a baby's' crying will sound like a dogs mournful howl. There's no pattern to these differences and they can't be repeated, anyone nearby will notice and possibly comment on them.
I don't understand.
It's a reference to the Lovecraft short The Statement of Randolph Carter.
-One night, last month, I couldn't sleep, so I stayed up and was watching "Knocked Up" on DVD. Both of my cats were sleeping next to me, and my parents were in bed. At around 2am (I couldn't sleep very well that night), I heard a bang in the kitchen, like someone had opened the door and shut it, so I went to investigate and make sure nobody was trying to get in. Nobody was there, nor was anything disturbed. I came back into the living room and started the movie back up, but noticed that both of my cats had woken up and were staring into the next room, as though something was there. I assumed they saw a bug, but after five minutes of non-stop staring, I went to check what they were looking at- BANG! I ran into the kitchen and found that for no reason, a bag filled with apples had been knocked over, even though it was securly in a basket. And it wasn't one of the cats, they were in another room.
Hm...
I'm going to have dream sequences right before the characters wake up for the new day printed off, and placed in a hat (or some other recepticle from which they shall draw one), and should they start to lose Sanity in the game, not only will freaky things happen in their daily lives, but they will have the following dreams (Note: They are written as the PCs will read them):
You get up and head to the bathroom, getting ready for the new day. As you brush your teeth, you catch a look in the mirror, and realize the irises of your eyes are crimson. As you stare at this new development, your reflection takes its toothbrush out of its mouth, grinning malevolently. The points of their teeth exaggerate right before you hear a snarl and the breaking of glass as the mirror image lunges for you.
You wake up with a jolt, at wonder with the sight that the doorway seems to be upside-down. Upon closer inspection, you come to realize that everything outside the door is on the roof… or you are. Your center of gravity suddenly jerks, throwing you off balance and you fall hard, hitting your head. You are vaguely aware of furniture start falling around you.
You awake to an ominous, black-cloaked figure standing beside your bed. Within the hood, only shadows dwell. Giant moth-like wings are spread from its back. In one hand, it holds up a scythe, rusted red, with some foul-smelling liquid dripping off of its point. The figure extends a hand, composed only of bone held together with ligaments. A hoarse rattle flows out of the darkness within the hood: “You will die.” Your skin grows cold as you begin to fight for breath.
You wake up to find that your bedroom is in shambles. Furniture is moved and your belongings are in different places, as if thrown. There is a large spot of what appears to be blood on one of the walls across from you, with spray reaching up to the ceiling and the other walls. This same blood is stained on a good portion of your possessions. You notice that there is a trail leading out of the room. As you begin to follow it, you soon bump feetfirst into a corpse. It takes you a moment before you realize it’s you.
You get out of bed and something flits by the corner of your eye. You turn to look, but whatever had been moving is nowhere to be seen. You hear a light cackle that sounds childlike, yet malicious. As you try to follow the voice, you hear something skitter behind you. Turning to look, again, you see nothing, but do notice small scratches in the floor, as if small nails dragged across the floor. You hear the cackle again, this time closer. As you turn in the direction of the sound, you have just enough time to see what appears to be a small red round shape blurringly leap at you, arms extended that end in claws and a gaping mouth filled with fangs.
You wake up to the sound of a ringing phone. When you answer the phone, the sound of static, followed by an electronic shriek, fill the earpiece. Transfixed by the sound, you hear your own voice answer harshly: “Who are you?”
Along with the things I have planned for their daily lives, they will begin to question the difference from the dreaming world and the real world. I plan on statistically having this affect their statistics, as well as random chance of insomnia.
Your going about your life as normal with your parents and siblings when the TV suffers static and a man is barely visible in it, he looks from the side before whipsering "Chanel 10" and disapears.
If the PC flicks to channel 10 they see a news broadcast saying "The rash of kidnappings continues, so far the police are baffled but the number of children who have disapeared is now (number of PC's) including (a number of random names) but each name has an associated picture of one of the PC's.
If they go downstairs (say to tell their parents about the fact someone looking like them has been kidnapped) when they noticed (if they make the spotcheck), a paper with the headline being a reference to the missing children, no pictures (easy), the tv in the living room is again displaying the man this time shaking his head desperately (medium) and their mothers eyes are glowing for a moment (Hard).
.
I recently bought second sight (second hand incidently:D ) and the 3rd mission start has made me feel really guilty so I figured I'd immortalize it (as it were) in this thread.
Creepy Event
One of the PC's is chatting online to their boyfriend/girlfriend when the other end goes quiet for a few second and then logs off, and on, and off, and on, then just sits there without typing anything for a little while before logging off again for good. Later that night or the next day they find out their significant other was brutally and mysteriously murdered right at the time the chat got weird.
Show
What actually happened
I came out of the elevet and developed a new pyshich power (Psyblast) which was used to kill a guard. While rummaging around on a nearby computer I stumbled across a chat program that had the last conversation between the guard and is girlfriend, the girlfriend was still logged on and was making comments like "Why did you leave so suddenly", "Oh your back" and "Fine be like that". Made me feel pretty guilty since her boyfriend was lying dead at my feat in a pool of his own blood after being hurled over his desk by a scripted psychic assault and I wound up logging in and out several times as I looked for a way to respond and let her know LR wouldn't be bringing any groceries home tonight.
I came out of the elevet and developed a new pyshich power (Psyblast) which was used to kill a guard. While rummaging around on a nearby computer I stumbled across a chat program that had the last conversation between the guard and is girlfriend, the girlfriend was still logged on and was making comments like "Why did you leave so suddenly", "Oh your back" and "Fine be like that". Made me feel pretty guilty since her boyfriend was lying dead at my feat in a pool of his own blood after being hurled over his desk by a scripted psychic assault and I wound up logging in and out several times as I looked for a way to respond and let her know LR wouldn't be bringing any groceries home tonight.
One of the PC's in bed is drifting off to sleep watching the shadows on the wall, one of which suddenly moves along the wall and out a nearby window.
And a couple of general ones. . .
As they go about their daily lives someone keeps appearing, the person has distinctive mannerisms (very unusual mannerisms) but doesn't seem to be following them. As they drive past a service station the person will be waiting to cross the road, as they head in to work he'll be walking past outside, when the visit the library he'll be waiting for a bus at the nearby bus stop, if they go to a movie they'll see him going into a different one, if in a different city for some reason they may spot him at the airport. Like I said its clear he's not following them and yet somehow they're lives keep crossing far more than mere coincidence or living in a similar area could account for.
One of the party members (have them make listen checks) hears the sounds of distant battle (if medivial in setting its swords clashing, if modern gunfire etc) as time passes (and more checks are made) the sounds become clearer and clearer eventually growing loud enough to identify the source which is any nearby lightsource. In the same way you can hear the sea by putting your ear to a shell they can hear a war going on (and people dying) by putting their ear to any kind of lightsource (has to be actually illuminating).
For a modern era (and a variant on those already posted) after going out for the evening the party member returns only to find that the recording they set up has recorded the wrong channel (even though they're sure they set it up right). If they watch it all they get is static except for one brief moment when they can make out the words "Help us crackle save yourself, crackle before its too late." should they keep watching these words keep repeating in different voices.
Finally another variant (this time on mirrors works best starting at first level) a party member notices every now and then a man watching them reflected in a surface (car bonnet, turned off TV, mirror) but when they turn around they can't see him. As time passes (and they're spot skill rises) they begin to notice other details in the reflection that don't match (a sign written in a foreign language, odd clothing, odd hair colours or styles, buildings where there are none or no buildngs where there should be some) and yet always this man watching them. Then one day something makes them turn around (have a car honk or someone yell to them) and for a moment, just a moment they can actually see the man standing behind a nearby obstacle (street light, pillar, car) in real life before he vanishes. If they're really quick and make their spot check they'll see a reflective surface showing the strange world they've gotten used too . . . without him in it.
Start COPY/PASTE
Some good old trick that always work:
- Hint, do not show.
Do not tell there's a monster whit tentacles. Tell them the air is whipped by his appendixes. talk about strange noises at the end of the dark corridor. When they try to move in whit the lamp... What's that slimy thing on the floor?
- Make it personal.
The creature do not only hit. It extend his feeding orifice toward you, his filthy fangs violate your flesh.
- Make it personal (Again).
The mysterious crazy woman have not kidnapped a little girl. She have kidnapped your sister. Or at least, Cherilla, a little girl from the village, the you know since her birth: her parents have shared the meal whit you many times. They cry: help us, hero!
- Give hope, strip it away.
The guards arrive to help against the Horror! One of them touch you on the shoulder... His hand is cold. Whit shock, you notice it's Durgan, the guard dead at the start of the adventure, now a rotting mass of vermin and dirt!
- Evil never die.
When the hero win, something happen. The Vampire, silently, rise at their back, smiling. Fight, 2!
- Suspence.
This one is easy, if you let it at the end of the session. Just keep an eye on the clock.
The party enter the Library in Flame, when they notice something moving in the flame. The fighter let a little scream escape... See ya next session!
- Talk about odors.
We often forget about them, but odors and smells are a powerful sense, especially in the subliminal mind and memory. Add them to your places. Link them to things. When things start to go horror, change them, or make them unappropriated.
Why the dark wood suddenly smell like in full spring?
Advanced technique:
- Showing things that characters do not know.
This require RP help from the party. You can tell of the alien alligator entering the water at the start of the session (whiteout character being present), just to have the party cross the same swamp at middle game session... Will the creature strike?
- Cheat to Mastermind.
Mastermind monsters are ne of the hardest to RP. They tend to be a lot smarter than me or you, and be prepared to a lot of things player may do that we can't expect in a year. Prepare those monster whit care, make it a complete and interesting encounter. If players find an unexpected way to quickly dispatch it, cheat! He knew it will happen! Make him extracting a magic wand that negate the thing, or make the dead Mastermind fuse, being clearly only a copy!
End COPY/PASTE
The players find out that a popular icon now running for president/primeminister/supreme omni-potentness doesn't actually exist at all. They're in fact a massive conspiracy using the latest technology to make people believe they're real and even so called live events in front of thousands never really happened. If they try to tell the truth fans don't believe them and mysterious people come after them.
Perhaps it's just a loose edge to the new siding, but the wind around the corner of the house sounds like the buzzing of an immense insect...
For a moment, ordinary background noise becomes sinister - dogs barking sounds like a haunting song sung by a chorus of disembodied children's voices or a series of alien beeps and whirs seem to come from the ceiling fan.
Cookie for the reference on this one (probably too easy though):
For the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day you have heard the sound of drums and flute.
In the small hours of the morning while your heading to the toilet or the like you hear the sound of glass breaking in your kitchen.
A few more generic ones . . .
Over a period of months you come to realize someone else is living inside your house and I mean living as in they buy food, re-arrange furniture, record tv shows but they always seem to be home when your out. If you check records it seems they are the ones who have the legal title to the house.
You wake up in the early morning and find a door or window open that you know was shut when you went to sleep.
At the exact same time and date a series of events start repeating something that happened years ago.
Your in an isolated location (mountain cabin, farmhouse, country hotel) and inclement weather cuts off outside communication.
and one from a movie (minor spoilers if you ever watch it) I was watching as I typed this . . .
the police find a number of bodies, the bodies have had pieces of them cut off (ears, noses, scalp with hair attached) and then stiched onto other ones e.g. one persons arm has been cut off and stitched onto anothers however close examination reveals several body parts that don't match any of the victims implying there are other victims out there.
1) Listening to the gentle sound of falling rain you suddenly notice a wet, dragging sound outside your window. Only problem is you aren't on the ground floor.
2) Using a radio system (walkie talkie, police radio, cb whatever) you hear a number of people screaming for a few moments abrubtly cut off (anyone else listening on the same channel also hears this). It repeats for three day's at the same time then stops.
2b) An optional extra is that each time the screaming occurs you make out some more details, on the 3rd day you hear a date mentioned, 1 week from today.
3) You dream about a mysterious figure cloaked in black talking to you in what appears to be gibberish. A few day's later you overhear a conversation (a tv or radio broadcast, a person passing on the street chatting to someone, a new language class for example) in that language. How much do you remember and why were you dreaming of someone talking to you in a language you don't know?
4) You dream about a cute guy or girl for several day's, very pleasant enjoyable dreams (maybe a date, maybe something more active:D ). Then you start noticing changes in yourself GLEEMAX!GLEEMAX!GLEEMAX!GLEEMAX! a little lighter or darker, hair a little longer or shorter, when half asleep you speak in a language you don't know. What's happening, why's it happening, is it good or bad and how do you stop something happening while your asleep if its bad?
I'm running a small-shot campaign as a filler between two of our other campaigns on hiatus. Basically, it is a modern version of what happened in the film of A Clear and Present Danger - a no holds barred US strike against the Mexican drug cartels. Basically, the PC group was inserted in Northern Mexico to take out a drug processing facility/shipment depot, in an area of the desert that is alive with life (at night, in particular).
They got to the town and found it was completely obliterated - the citizenry (for the most part) were ripped and slaughtered, mangled, with their heads on stakes and limbs scattered. These limbs weren't cut off, but looked like they had been "torn from their bodies, as if someone had grabbed their wrist, placed their foot on the torso, and tugged the arm free..while they were alive." Dogs were worrying at their master's faces or whatever, etc. And there was no noise. No sound, but what the players made, ever was heard. Dogs barking, but no sound would be coming out of them. Etc. This scene really unnerved some of my players, who aren't used to such graphic detail in game settings.
It got worse when they found a survivor (there are a few of them kicking around), who was crawling around aimlessly in the darkness of the buildings. They yelled at him to tell them what happened, and he turned his head to them, only to show them that his eyes had been gouged out by his own thumbs. The player who went over to him to question him touched him to see if he was okay and only when they touched him were his screeches and screams, and yells and babblings, audible. THAT really freaked a couple of the players out, because when my PC dropped his hand away the guy's screaming went silent. He was still DOING it, but no noise was coming out.
They decided to put him out of his misery. But it left a few of them pretty rattled for the rest of the encounter (which still isn't done). Its really turning into a Delta Green thing, only without all the suck.
The party is on its way to infiltrate a city in order to locate a spy from a mercenary army. On the way there, the night before they arrive, they see this emerald light flashing from a spot on the horizon, and dark clouds gathering over both the party and the destination.
As they come closer, they see a great wall around the city, and two guards standing there in fullplate armor and halberds. As they approach, the guards doesn't do anything, and the reason becomes apparent when they come 10 feet from them. That they're completely cleaned skeletons.
The gate behind them is closed, and if they walk around the wall to the next entrance, they another two guards, but one of them leaves the other and enters the city, the gates open just enough for a person to pass through.
If they approach, they see that the other guard is a skeleton as the others.
Now it starts to rain, and they notice as they enter the city, that it's a bit foggy.
There's no trace of the guard that entered the city, nor is there any trace from any other person.
The city is completely empty, but if someone uses scry or true sight, you can see the inhabitants walking around you, noone is taking any notice of you, but they occasionaly walk straight through you and you see that all the inhabitants are horribly mutilated corpses that drag broken limbs behind them, but otherwise acts as if nothing is wrong.
After a person has first seen them, you now see the doors open and close, items floating past as if being carried by some invisible person.
The next time someone uses either of the spells to observe the inhabitants, you see that there's a corpse standing behind you, just staring at you through empty eyesockets that bleed constantly and follows you around. The corpse doesn't attack you, but for each night you stay in there after you've seen the first follower, one corpse add to the one that follows you.
The stalkers all attack at the DM's whim.
In return :D here's one that actually happened to me last night on my way to play a game. All day long there's been a very strong wind blowing closing doors, rustling tree's ect. Its now night and your heading somewhere in a car as the wind blows leave's in swirls across the road and the moons a huge bloated golden orb through the clouds. As you enter a new neighbourhood there's a flash of light and ALL the traffic lights in your area go out but the house lights are still on leaving you on a street so dark you literally can't see anything outside what your lights are illuminating. As you drive on along you continue to see street light after street light is out but again its ONLY the street lights.
Feel free to add your standard it was a dark and stormy night description.
And as an extra from a horror movie playing on TV right now one I rather like . . . you come across a group of soldiers torn to pieces (anyone experienced in weapons can tell that they had guards out but no one fired a single shot). There's just one survivor (sort of) who has time to gasp out "There was only supposed to be one."
A few of mine, the first few are from weird dreams, the rest ideas for monsters in a comic idea I had (sorry if these have alredy been mentioned, I haven't read the whole thread yet).
PCs are in some sort of large building (castle, big lab complex etc). The doors don't lead to the place they're supposed to but a random location in the building instead. Additionally, they tend not to lead the same place twice. Whenever other people are encountered, they seem to move very slowly with occasional boosts of incredible speed, and often have trouble noticing the players.
One of the PCs receives a mobile phone. They get staticy calls from a contact trying to advise them. Some advice is wrong, makes no sense and/or is overly criptic. Some casues more inconvenience than it solves (such as the loud ringtone altering the monster that the call is trying to warn them not to altert).
Small amounts of blood, hair and other DNA-traceable materials from the PCs turn up in random places. Everyone seems to know it's theirs and often jump to conclusons about how/why it's there.
The PCs see various scene-of-incident photos, stills from documentary footage, autopsy pics etc conected to incidents that mention people dying of a rare disease. Somewhere in each pic, they can just about make out the image (in a puff of smoke, some cracks on the wall, a shadow of something off-screen etc, different each time) of a thin, beak-faced humanoid. (if you're particularly good with photoshop, then you could rig up some pics yourself to see if they notice).
A powerful monster is some twisted version of one of the PCs or a manifestation of some part of their mind. When this creature is wounded, the wound heals by replacing the damage tissue with a mouth or similar structure.
1) The city/town/village where the heroes are based suffers a sudden spate of miscarrages. Investigation reveals a supernatural being that enters the expectant mothers body while she sleeps and tears the unborn child to pieces.
(The aboves from a recent dream I had not pleasant as I was the mother in question.)
2) While watching you see someone step out into the street almost getting hit by an oncoming car, it just screeches to a halt so close it actually bumps their hands. After a moment of shock the person steps back and gets hit by a car going the other way.
And finally a campaign opener that could be creepy if done right.
3) The party is ordinary people living ordinary lives when there's a briliant flash of light and explosion after which they're standing somewhere else (desloate plain, grey void, a dark place with water as far as the eye can see) and someone appears (can be a person in regular clothing or unusual e.g. armour, robes, sci-fi looking etc) and tells them they're help is needed to avert destruction begging them to do something that'll show their commitment e.g. take the persons hand.
However events conspire to prevent this happening a number of times such as a friend shaking the player demanding to know what's wrong which brings them back to the "real world". The person appears several times each time appear more and more exhausted and injured. Then something happens, a tsunami washes up on the coast, massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, strange creatures attacking people, dead rising, massive floating islands appearing in the sky (take your pick) and the world starts flickering between what the player thinks of as the real world and the world the other person met them in.
At this point they have to commit to fighting the threat that's coming by finding the person who's dying somewhere nearby. A nice GM can lead the players through the commitment to the fight that will change the course of events enough that the world will shift from imminent destruction to avertable destruction (a shadow war). A nasty GM can say game over if they refuse to find the dying person.
Oh and yes the second and third ones aren't my ideas.
While in bed somewhere (needs curtains near the bed so if they're home doesn't supply that use a hotel) the player rolls over and knocks the curtains aside slightly. Standing on the other side looking right into their eyes is a large white dog with red patch's (bonus points for those who recognize the reference). Slowly its muzzle pulls back in a long low growl.
While visiting a graveyard the group see's a young boy busily shovelling dirt into a grave, if they linger a moment they hear a voice coming out of it begging the boy to stop.
While visiting a remote mountain resort it suddenly gets foggy and strange noises are heard in the mist. Locals say its the sound of demons fighting and advise the group to stay inside. If the PC's investigate they keep spotting departed loved ones walking past in the distance. The aim is to split them up and leave them lost in the mountains. No matter how hard they try they never catch up to the figures or encounter anything else in the fog.
1. The Pcs are on a ship that had a crew one day in warm waters and the next morning was absent of life except the PCs in artic waters. Anyways, they got near land and decided to skirt the coast to find a port. That night they went to sleep and one of the PCs (the woman of the group, I love picking on her lol) heard a scream and begs for mercy echo from beyond the tree line on shore. After a few moments the screams came to an abrupt stop and she realized the voice calling out to her... was her own.
2. Same game, the PC's ship ran aground and they went to shore, carrying a bunch of gear. They went to sleep the next night and one of the PCs wouldn't wake for his shift. The PC on duty took an empty flask, filled it with water from the nearby coast, only to find that the liquid he was pouring onto the sleeping Pc's head was actually blood. Needless to say the paladin was more than a little ticked about that
3. They reached a small town seemingly vacant of life. The buildings are mostly intact aside from being looted roughly, and all they find is the occasional swath of blood, even one building has a pair of bloody hand prints and the trail of the hands being dragged to the door and then disappearing.
4. At one point they are searching a building and from a nearby house they hear a woman scream, "Get back you monsters!" followed by a shot from a musket rifle. The house is boarded up and locked down, the door nearly impenetrable. The girl (like 16 yrs old) shoots every other round until one PCs is unconcious and the others were pounding down the door. They bust it down and find her house well stocked with the looted goods. She screams, "NEVER!" pulls her flint lock pistol and blows her own brains out. They are left with more questions than answers and the corpse of a very derranged girl.
Please don't let this thread die, its a freaking gold mine!
1) While taking out the trash there's a double flash of lightning (no thunder) as something made of glass (a jar or bottle) shatters, a few moments later there's a series of bangs (shots maybe?) from somewhere nearby.
2) Called to investigate a brutal murder the PC's find out that the horribly mauled corpse required constant life-support and even with that would probably die in a day or two anyway from organ failure. What motivation could someone have to tear apart (or otherwise horribly murder) a bedridden person with only a short time to live when simply cutting the power would have killed them just as surely?
At random moments throughout the day, a PC’s vision goes black, and a deep, menacing voice whispers an unnerving statement into her ear as though standing right next to her – “they will betray you,” “it will happen soon,” or “you are already dead.” The instant the voice is done, her vision returns and life continues as though nothing had happened.
A character notices that the room she’s in is a bit chilly…and it keeps getting colder. Five minutes after putting on a sweater her breath is fogging in the air, and five minutes after that she’s shaking as frost begins to form on the walls. She flees the room to check the thermostat, only to find it’s set normally, and when she returns the room is back to normal. Creeped out, she decides to sit and read in a different part of her house. Half an hour later, she’s feeling cold again…
The party enters a dark room with a musty odor to it and a dirt floor complete with bugs, worms, and roots in the soil. On the fifth story of a modern apartment building.
Every door in the house slams shut simultaneously.
The characters carefully move down a dark hallway, illuminated only by their flashlights on its walls. The hall is so long they can’t see where it ends. After trekking for ten minutes, they look back at the lighted room behind them…which is only three feet away from the last person in line.
Minutes after loading up the groceries into the fridge, a character opens it to get a drink. The produce is brown and damp, the meat is covered with slime, the liquids have all curdled, and the character gags as the stench of long-decayed organic matter fills the kitchen.
A PC opens a door and is bowled off her feet by a tidal wave of blood. As she is propelled down the hallway by the current of gore, she can feel claw-like hands scrabbling at her, tearing clothing and flesh. Crashing against something with enough force to cause a rib or two to snap and knocking the last bit of air from her lungs, the character feels a doorknob behind her and frantically struggles to open it. Succeeding, she collapses on the floor of the room she originally wanted to enter, clothes dry, body uninjured, with no ocean of blood in the hall behind her.
When a character is alone, he sometimes hears giggling. He’ll open a door or turn a corner and there will be a pale, dark-haired little girl staring at him for a moment, before she silently turns and runs out of sight again. She’s very good at hide-and-seek, since the character is never able to follow her successfully, but he’ll still occasionally hear her giggles as she lurks nearby out of sight, waiting to surprise him again.
A player awakens to darkness, and realizes he’s blind. Feeling his face, his fingers brush skin-covered bone where his eye sockets should be.
What looked like a cloud is actually an area of absolute darkness. As the day passes it slowly but steadily takes up more of the sky. A cold wind seems to be blowing towards it, and occasionally flickers of unnatural lightning are seen near the edges of the anomaly.
Something’s a bit off with the grandfather clock:
Tick…tock…tick...tock…tick..tock…tick…tock….tick…tock…tick.tock…..tick…tock…tock…tick…
Though the party is alone in the building, the whole structure reverberates with the sound of a door slamming. Backtracking, they patiently check every room, but all the doors still appear to be open.
A PC looks out the window of his office building workplace and groans at the amount of traffic he’ll have to slog through on the way home. But when he exists the building, he steps out into a city devoid of life – there are no cars, no people, no lights on in any of the buildings, including the one he just left. After confirming that his car is gone, he begins making the hike back to his home, with only the echoes of his footsteps for company…until he hears a faint crash from somewhere out of sight, but nearby.
Consulting the map they’ve drawn as they’ve progressed through their investigation, the party concludes that the building they’re in is a bit too large to be the one they entered.
Feeling a tickling sensation, a character looks down at his arm to see a spider crawling on his skin near a sore. Suddenly a swarm of the tiny vermin erupts from the wound, racing around on his flesh for a moment before returning to the sore, disappearing without a trace.
The map is useless. Every time the PCs go through a door, they go into a different room, arranged so that they couldn’t possibly fit together. Doubling back through a door lands them in a completely different room than the one they entered from, and in fact they haven’t been in the same room twice. Finding the exit may prove problematic…
A PC steps into a carpeted hallway but leaps back in surprise as the floor ripples like a pool of water.
A character crossing a thick rug suddenly lurches as her feet get caught. She can only twist her body about helplessly as she continues to sink into the rug as though it were quicksand, her terrified scream cut short as her head passes beneath the surface and into suffocating darkness. When she wakes up, she finds herself sprawled on the rug, which seems perfectly normal.
The party, like morons, split up. While conducting their individual investigations, one of the characters keep bumping into other PCs, backing into them, turning around and suddenly colliding with them, or seeing them lean into doorways. The other PCs always utter a little encouraging statement or a warning, then quickly leave. When everyone regroups, the PCs are puzzled to report that none of them had been anywhere near each other.
Later, one of the PCs keeps bumping into his teammates in similar events. Teammates who were killed in earlier adventures. Teammates who don’t seem to notice the wounds that killed them, or the look of terror on the PC’s face. And then the player starts having encounters with fallen enemies, and they are anything but friendly.
The building’s light fixtures all subtly dim and brighten to a certain rhythm, as though the structure had a heartbeat, or was respiring.
The party’s radios start screwing up. Every now and then they’ll receive transmissions that sound like they ought to be coming from nearby, but are still heavily distorted by static. The message is always the same: “Are we the last ones left alive? Are we? Someone, anyone, please? Are we? Is there anybody out there? Are we the last ones left alive?” Eventually, the voices making the transmissions are the characters’ own.
Buzzing.
For more ideas, spend some time on the TVTropes wiki's pages on Nightmare Fuel, things that aren't meant to scare us but do, and especially High-Octane Nightmare Fuel, stuff meant to scare us that succeeds magnificently.
1) At 2:34 in the morning you hear the sound (tinkly music) of an icecream van (the kind kids bye treats from) going past in a small town.
2) You find a body and when you try to check it out you find they were listed as dead and buried . . . 2 day's from now.
3) You find a body and while investigating it turns out that all the blood was drained from the body and replaced from someone elses.
Then the reflections start going dark. One at a time until all the lights in both mirrors (or, for added weird, just one mirror) goes out.
I dreamed i was hanging out with my friends. I looked away for a moment, and suddenly I was in a roiling sea of Chaos. My friends had merged into a great beast of chaos with a multitude of whipping tentacles. I wasn't frightened, because I knew that I was the beast, as in I was looking upon my body. In the course of the dream, I actually forgot that there was anything else in the world, which made it all the more freaky when the world started ending. And then it ended. And again. And again.
It was then that i started to notice that my "body" had eyes that were watching me.
The PC's see a young child being hauled into a van by two large men with metal pole's/wires they've got around the kids neck. As the van drives off the PC's see it has "(Insert city name) Municipal Pound". Should they check out the local pound they find several young children in the animal cages and records indicating several were "humanely" put down after being held for the maximum 3 day's without anyone picking them up. No one else finds anything odd about this and will indeed say "They're just children" in the same tone people use currently for "They're just animals". Further research indicates this has been the case countrywide since at least the 1940's/50's
Ok, here is where my campaign:
The PCs have been through a few more adventures and they came across a small town beset by a werewolf murdering people. They find out who was doing it and killed it.
So They meet the town headman, Mihkail, and his daughter, Ilane. Ilane is an innocent girl, basically a commoner NPC, and very pretty. The party beguiler decided that she didn't like Ilane because of stuff in her background, secretly jealous of Ilane. She repeatedly calls her "useless" and treats her with open distain.
The party and Mihkail and Ilane were called to the Prince's castle for a feast, so they go. In the town before the castle, they get into an adventure with Mikhail and Ilane in tow. Miikhail gets killed and Ilane starts to snap. She cries almost constantly, goes catatonic the rest of the time, attacks an inn maid and plucks the hair from her head.
The party gets sick of her, but feel sorry for her, so they decide to bring her to the Prince and the church's cardinal, hopefully so he can heal her.
When they get there they hand over Ilane and they say they'll do everything they can for her. The Prince ends up kidnapping one PC and the rest have to break back into the castle to free their friend and kill the crazy Prince.
They do not find Ilane, but they have to leave so quickly they don't have a chance to look much and the beguiler didn't care one way or the other.
Ilane breaks out of her prison (which is what the cardinal did with her, using her for strange rituals) and follows them to through the next few towns, always right behind them. Shes has totally lost touch with reality and blames the PCs for her tortured existence.
During the next adventure, the PCs will have to choose to either free a powerful and evil spirit of a long imprisoned sorceror or let the town die in a wave of undead and negative energy.
What happens next will depend on the party's choices. if they release the spirit, then the spirit will choose Ilane for its vessel because of her unending hatred. If not, then she'll be transformed into a lich by the storm of negatve energy.
Which ever they choose, they'll soon be hearing from Ilane. She'll kill people the NPCs befriend, carving into their foreheads "useless", burning down their inns, stuff like that.
Any ideas for any creepy attacks or dark attacks from this new born witch?
Sorry nothing leaps immediately to mind for your witch.
Here's another three for people.
You buy a new house for a really good price even given the current market because its "a handyman's dream" i.e it needs some repair work done on it out. As your renovating you keep finding doors behind things e.g. remove the cupboard in the dining room and behind it there's a door leading to what appears to be a workshop, remove the bed in the masterbedroom and there's a trapdoor leading down to a tunnel with another bedroom at the end. The only problem is that if you walk around the outside of these rooms there's not actually anywhwere for the extra space to be e.g. the masterbedroom with its trapdoor tunnel is on the second floor with a hallway underneath.
On a related note here's one from the movie I watched last night you call a friends cell phone because they've gone missing. As you wait you hear the phone rining from a nearby box. If you open the box its full of clothes, if you remove the clothes the box is empty and sitting flush on the floor but you still hear the phone ringing inside it.
Finally if you want to torment a PC (this one may have been posted) have them repeatedly have nightmares of them brutally murdering people near where they sleep e.g. the old lady in the apartment down the hall, a homeless person a few streets over. In the morning they find the murders happened exactly as they dreamed it. Psychic connection to serial killer or sleep walking murderer you decide.
Well in view of the new forum (which I don't like so far, no way found yet to locate threads I've posted in) here's some new events I ran into in the last few weeks.
1) When visiting a friend you notice a very realistic garden gnome pointing at a flower in horror. When you leave a few hours later the gnomes gone, should you ask your friend about it s/he say's he/she never had a gnome as they find them creepy.
2) You wake up one morning to find yourself covered in bloody handprints.
3) Every night at the same time your phone rings at first just once, then twice, then three times etc (till it reaches the point where your answering phone/service picks up). Caller ID's and getting the police in revelas it as untraceable. If you answer, listen to the machine, service all you hear is someone whistling the same tune. If its a machine service it goes till the end of the tune or the machine cuts it off, if you answer it continues to the end of the tune then they hang up.
4) While out driving you hear a scuttling sound in the back of the car.
5) While out and about you see two small children happily playing tag in a graveyard.
Hello there,
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to this thread, and still do. It may be the single-largest source of freaky and fabolous ideas, and I employ them in my campaign very frequently. I enjoy the twisted ideas presented here, and find the whole thread to be a bit of a gem. :-) Sorry there are no contributions from me right now, but I just wanted to let the contributors of this thread know how important the thread, and it's continuing growth, is to my imagination.
Thanks again,
Ole
I haven't read all 112 posts so forgive me if this is similar to another...
part of my 4ED&D campaign
there has been a wyvern rider swooping down into towns, randomly snatching up young children and flying off.. clues led the party to an abandon orphanage not to far from the city that they have been staying in.
::long long abandoned, overgrown but still structurally stable... the orphanage looks rotted and weather stained on the outside , tall dead wispy grass and dried out weeds cover the ground around the structure... vines cling to the stone walls almost acting like prison bars.. baring all entrance or exit from the orphanage.. a child's, faint screams of what could only be from inflicted pain barely make it through the walls to the outside.::
i wont go into all the details but heres a room or 2
::this room is a horrid sight indeed.. dozens of small children no more then 4 years of age are stripped naked and hang from meat hooks attached to chains that dangle from the ceiling. though most are far dead and bloated from built up bodily glasses there are a a couple of which just refuse to die... one of the children still impaled and hanging latches onto to one of the dead corpses dangling next to him... it looks a if he has held out as long as he can .. frail and bony in need of sustenance.. he now chews at the stomach of his dangling neighbor.... a loud Hissssss of gas escapes the cannibalized child's stomach as the feasting child's teeth finally penetrated the stomach wall... you can see his little gore covered tongue penetrating the chewed through body trying to lap up any liquid that it can....::
((this is a necromancers lair this is the hanging room where he allows the bodies to die gradually so they do not tense up making it harder for him to peel their supple flesh off.... the next room is used to drain the bodily fluids gas's etc. and peel the Young supple flesh from their "donors"
he creates patchwork flesh golums and finds that childrens flesh is easier to mold and take to his creation over all easier to work with....
hope u enjoyed my players didn't 
A short story on the tv tonight I found creepy enough (partially due to setting) I wanted to share the highlights.
1) A prominant local figure is attacked in his home and has his ear cut off.
2) He hires a CHEAP geneticist to help him (wizard in fantasy setting would do).
3) He grows attached to the mouse (or other small creature) his new ear is growing on.
4) He gets his ear and reclaims his life.
5) Doctors find a tumour growing behind his ear . . . its the mouse.
6) Fleeing the media attention he hides in the sewers.
7) Unable to take the whisperings in his head of a world with all the cheese he can eat he grabs a nearby object and hacks at his head.
8) Waking up he finds his ear is gone and sets out to get it back off the mouse he hears squeeking in the darkness.
Kicker: Next day (or session) sees through skin and muscle tissue. Skeletons with all internal organs, arteries, veins. Blood pumping moving and acting normally. After the next time pass, see just skeletal frame with arteries and veins. Next time, skeletons. Next, all invisible except for clothing.
Final kicker, the PCs see after the latest time pass. NOBODY!!! Just piles of clothes laid out as if the occupants of said clothes just vanished!! And the PCs are back to their "normal" selves. Cars, trains, airplanes, ships...etc.. are crashed/wrecked. Power soon fails (no one is to be found.) All animals, insects, etc. as well.
Throw in scenes like "You see what appears to be an old woman's nice outfit laid out as if she just disappeared out of them. Clutched in her closed empty gloved hand is a leash leading to an empty gem studded small dog collar laying near her empty shoes. Tag reads 'Mommy loves Muffin.' (Que eerie music.....)"
Note to GMs:
1. Creepy apocalypse cause. They could find others that survived as they did.
2. Could learn about the end result by what ever means and must try to stop the end of humanity. (your choice how and when).
3. Only happens to all within a set radius (i.e. 50 miles radius) of PCs. They get out of area and relieved to see normal people again. The next day, it starts again at their new location.
4. They see a truly "wasting" disease, except victims are totally unaware and see all else as normal. Zero symptoms. The PCs are the carriers but immune to final step of vanishing. Return to "normal" at that step. I'll leave open how the PCs got contaminate and where the "wasting disease" came from.
5. My final twist is after all "the beautiful people" are gone, the process starts with plants the same way (treat bark as skin for example). Then buildings, sections of land, etc...Their "reality" is wasting away slowly, really slowly. Good way to bring PCs to "alternate reality" as they "fade to black" and awaken.................????????
What happens next, hhhuuummmmm....???
1. Awake from their nightmare covered in blood but find no cut, if tested it is their own.
2. All awake as 1, but one PC has razor sharp knife in hand with only blood splatters belonging to others on him/her.
3. One to all awake from bad dream and return to a restful sleep. Next morning, news is reported about X number of murders in town/city described precisely as the dream. X = the number of PCs that had "the dream".
4. NPC with PCs or one they met is slain this way after dream by PC.
5. Whoever the PCs tell the dream to, is slain as dream the next night or when they sleep.
6. In secret, have a willing player to have his PC slain this way during/after any dream situation mentioned. Please note that the one doing this should have his "back-up" PC ready to go that you can get in fairly quickly. EX: A private investigator, a paranormal researcher, detective, witch hunter, news hound, etc.
7. ?????
..I recently bought second sight (second hand incidently:D ) and the 3rd mission start has made me feel really guilty so I figured I'd immortalize it (as it were) in this thread.
Creepy Event
One of the PC's is chatting online to their boyfriend/girlfriend when the other end goes quiet for a few second and then logs off, and on, and off, and on, then just sits there without typing anything for a little while before logging off again for good. Later that night or the next day they find out their significant other was brutally and mysteriously murdered right at the time the chat got weird.
Show
What actually happened
I came out of the elevet and developed a new pyshich power (Psyblast) which was used to kill a guard. While rummaging around on a nearby computer I stumbled across a chat program that had the last conversation between the guard and is girlfriend, the girlfriend was still logged on and was making comments like "Why did you leave so suddenly", "Oh your back" and "Fine be like that". Made me feel pretty guilty since her boyfriend was lying dead at my feat in a pool of his own blood after being hurled over his desk by a scripted psychic assault and I wound up logging in and out several times as I looked for a way to respond and let her know LR wouldn't be bringing any groceries home tonight.
I came out of the elevet and developed a new pyshich power (Psyblast) which was used to kill a guard. While rummaging around on a nearby computer I stumbled across a chat program that had the last conversation between the guard and is girlfriend, the girlfriend was still logged on and was making comments like "Why did you leave so suddenly", "Oh your back" and "Fine be like that". Made me feel pretty guilty since her boyfriend was lying dead at my feat in a pool of his own blood after being hurled over his desk by a scripted psychic assault and I wound up logging in and out several times as I looked for a way to respond and let her know LR wouldn't be bringing any groceries home tonight.
One of the PC's in bed is drifting off to sleep watching the shadows on the wall, one of which suddenly moves along the wall and out a nearby window.
And a couple of general ones. . .
As they go about their daily lives someone keeps appearing, the person has distinctive mannerisms (very unusual mannerisms) but doesn't seem to be following them. As they drive past a service station the person will be waiting to cross the road, as they head in to work he'll be walking past outside, when the visit the library he'll be waiting for a bus at the nearby bus stop, if they go to a movie they'll see him going into a different one, if in a different city for some reason they may spot him at the airport. Like I said its clear he's not following them and yet somehow they're lives keep crossing far more than mere coincidence or living in a similar area could account for.
One of the party members (have them make listen checks) hears the sounds of distant battle (if medivial in setting its swords clashing, if modern gunfire etc) as time passes (and more checks are made) the sounds become clearer and clearer eventually growing loud enough to identify the source which is any nearby lightsource. In the same way you can hear the sea by putting your ear to a shell they can hear a war going on (and people dying) by putting their ear to any kind of lightsource (has to be actually illuminating).
For a modern era (and a variant on those already posted) after going out for the evening the party member returns only to find that the recording they set up has recorded the wrong channel (even though they're sure they set it up right). If they watch it all they get is static except for one brief moment when they can make out the words "Help us crackle save yourself, crackle before its too late." should they keep watching these words keep repeating in different voices.
Finally another variant (this time on mirrors works best starting at first level) a party member notices every now and then a man watching them reflected in a surface (car bonnet, turned off TV, mirror) but when they turn around they can't see him. As time passes (and they're spot skill rises) they begin to notice other details in the reflection that don't match (a sign written in a foreign language, odd clothing, odd hair colours or styles, buildings where there are none or no buildngs where there should be some) and yet always this man watching them. Then one day something makes them turn around (have a car honk or someone yell to them) and for a moment, just a moment they can actually see the man standing behind a nearby obstacle (street light, pillar, car) in real life before he vanishes. If they're really quick and make their spot check they'll see a reflective surface showing the strange world they've gotten used too . . . without him in it.
Start COPY/PASTE
Some good old trick that always work:
- Hint, do not show.
Do not tell there's a monster whit tentacles. Tell them the air is whipped by his appendixes. talk about strange noises at the end of the dark corridor. When they try to move in whit the lamp... What's that slimy thing on the floor?
- Make it personal.
The creature do not only hit. It extend his feeding orifice toward you, his filthy fangs violate your flesh.
- Make it personal (Again).
The mysterious crazy woman have not kidnapped a little girl. She have kidnapped your sister. Or at least, Cherilla, a little girl from the village, the you know since her birth: her parents have shared the meal whit you many times. They cry: help us, hero!
- Give hope, strip it away.
The guards arrive to help against the Horror! One of them touch you on the shoulder... His hand is cold. Whit shock, you notice it's Durgan, the guard dead at the start of the adventure, now a rotting mass of vermin and dirt!
- Evil never die.
When the hero win, something happen. The Vampire, silently, rise at their back, smiling. Fight, 2!
- Suspence.
This one is easy, if you let it at the end of the session. Just keep an eye on the clock.
The party enter the Library in Flame, when they notice something moving in the flame. The fighter let a little scream escape... See ya next session!
- Talk about odors.
We often forget about them, but odors and smells are a powerful sense, especially in the subliminal mind and memory. Add them to your places. Link them to things. When things start to go horror, change them, or make them unappropriated.
Why the dark wood suddenly smell like in full spring?
Advanced technique:
- Showing things that characters do not know.
This require RP help from the party. You can tell of the alien alligator entering the water at the start of the session (whiteout character being present), just to have the party cross the same swamp at middle game session... Will the creature strike?
- Cheat to Mastermind.
Mastermind monsters are ne of the hardest to RP. They tend to be a lot smarter than me or you, and be prepared to a lot of things player may do that we can't expect in a year. Prepare those monster whit care, make it a complete and interesting encounter. If players find an unexpected way to quickly dispatch it, cheat! He knew it will happen! Make him extracting a magic wand that negate the thing, or make the dead Mastermind fuse, being clearly only a copy!
End COPY/PASTE
The players find out that a popular icon now running for president/primeminister/supreme omni-potentness doesn't actually exist at all. They're in fact a massive conspiracy using the latest technology to make people believe they're real and even so called live events in front of thousands never really happened. If they try to tell the truth fans don't believe them and mysterious people come after them.
Perhaps it's just a loose edge to the new siding, but the wind around the corner of the house sounds like the buzzing of an immense insect...
For a moment, ordinary background noise becomes sinister - dogs barking sounds like a haunting song sung by a chorus of disembodied children's voices or a series of alien beeps and whirs seem to come from the ceiling fan.
Cookie for the reference on this one (probably too easy though):
For the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day you have heard the sound of drums and flute.
In the small hours of the morning while your heading to the toilet or the like you hear the sound of glass breaking in your kitchen.
A few more generic ones . . .
Over a period of months you come to realize someone else is living inside your house and I mean living as in they buy food, re-arrange furniture, record tv shows but they always seem to be home when your out. If you check records it seems they are the ones who have the legal title to the house.
You wake up in the early morning and find a door or window open that you know was shut when you went to sleep.
At the exact same time and date a series of events start repeating something that happened years ago.
Your in an isolated location (mountain cabin, farmhouse, country hotel) and inclement weather cuts off outside communication.
and one from a movie (minor spoilers if you ever watch it) I was watching as I typed this . . .
the police find a number of bodies, the bodies have had pieces of them cut off (ears, noses, scalp with hair attached) and then stiched onto other ones e.g. one persons arm has been cut off and stitched onto anothers however close examination reveals several body parts that don't match any of the victims implying there are other victims out there.
1) Listening to the gentle sound of falling rain you suddenly notice a wet, dragging sound outside your window. Only problem is you aren't on the ground floor.
2) Using a radio system (walkie talkie, police radio, cb whatever) you hear a number of people screaming for a few moments abrubtly cut off (anyone else listening on the same channel also hears this). It repeats for three day's at the same time then stops.
2b) An optional extra is that each time the screaming occurs you make out some more details, on the 3rd day you hear a date mentioned, 1 week from today.
3) You dream about a mysterious figure cloaked in black talking to you in what appears to be gibberish. A few day's later you overhear a conversation (a tv or radio broadcast, a person passing on the street chatting to someone, a new language class for example) in that language. How much do you remember and why were you dreaming of someone talking to you in a language you don't know?
4) You dream about a cute guy or girl for several day's, very pleasant enjoyable dreams (maybe a date, maybe something more active:D ). Then you start noticing changes in yourself GLEEMAX!GLEEMAX!GLEEMAX!GLEEMAX! a little lighter or darker, hair a little longer or shorter, when half asleep you speak in a language you don't know. What's happening, why's it happening, is it good or bad and how do you stop something happening while your asleep if its bad?
I'm running a small-shot campaign as a filler between two of our other campaigns on hiatus. Basically, it is a modern version of what happened in the film of A Clear and Present Danger - a no holds barred US strike against the Mexican drug cartels. Basically, the PC group was inserted in Northern Mexico to take out a drug processing facility/shipment depot, in an area of the desert that is alive with life (at night, in particular).
They got to the town and found it was completely obliterated - the citizenry (for the most part) were ripped and slaughtered, mangled, with their heads on stakes and limbs scattered. These limbs weren't cut off, but looked like they had been "torn from their bodies, as if someone had grabbed their wrist, placed their foot on the torso, and tugged the arm free..while they were alive." Dogs were worrying at their master's faces or whatever, etc. And there was no noise. No sound, but what the players made, ever was heard. Dogs barking, but no sound would be coming out of them. Etc. This scene really unnerved some of my players, who aren't used to such graphic detail in game settings.
It got worse when they found a survivor (there are a few of them kicking around), who was crawling around aimlessly in the darkness of the buildings. They yelled at him to tell them what happened, and he turned his head to them, only to show them that his eyes had been gouged out by his own thumbs. The player who went over to him to question him touched him to see if he was okay and only when they touched him were his screeches and screams, and yells and babblings, audible. THAT really freaked a couple of the players out, because when my PC dropped his hand away the guy's screaming went silent. He was still DOING it, but no noise was coming out.
They decided to put him out of his misery. But it left a few of them pretty rattled for the rest of the encounter (which still isn't done). Its really turning into a Delta Green thing, only without all the suck.
The party is on its way to infiltrate a city in order to locate a spy from a mercenary army. On the way there, the night before they arrive, they see this emerald light flashing from a spot on the horizon, and dark clouds gathering over both the party and the destination.
As they come closer, they see a great wall around the city, and two guards standing there in fullplate armor and halberds. As they approach, the guards doesn't do anything, and the reason becomes apparent when they come 10 feet from them. That they're completely cleaned skeletons.
The gate behind them is closed, and if they walk around the wall to the next entrance, they another two guards, but one of them leaves the other and enters the city, the gates open just enough for a person to pass through.
If they approach, they see that the other guard is a skeleton as the others.
Now it starts to rain, and they notice as they enter the city, that it's a bit foggy.
There's no trace of the guard that entered the city, nor is there any trace from any other person.
The city is completely empty, but if someone uses scry or true sight, you can see the inhabitants walking around you, noone is taking any notice of you, but they occasionaly walk straight through you and you see that all the inhabitants are horribly mutilated corpses that drag broken limbs behind them, but otherwise acts as if nothing is wrong.
After a person has first seen them, you now see the doors open and close, items floating past as if being carried by some invisible person.
The next time someone uses either of the spells to observe the inhabitants, you see that there's a corpse standing behind you, just staring at you through empty eyesockets that bleed constantly and follows you around. The corpse doesn't attack you, but for each night you stay in there after you've seen the first follower, one corpse add to the one that follows you.
The stalkers all attack at the DM's whim.
In return :D here's one that actually happened to me last night on my way to play a game. All day long there's been a very strong wind blowing closing doors, rustling tree's ect. Its now night and your heading somewhere in a car as the wind blows leave's in swirls across the road and the moons a huge bloated golden orb through the clouds. As you enter a new neighbourhood there's a flash of light and ALL the traffic lights in your area go out but the house lights are still on leaving you on a street so dark you literally can't see anything outside what your lights are illuminating. As you drive on along you continue to see street light after street light is out but again its ONLY the street lights.
Feel free to add your standard it was a dark and stormy night description.
And as an extra from a horror movie playing on TV right now one I rather like . . . you come across a group of soldiers torn to pieces (anyone experienced in weapons can tell that they had guards out but no one fired a single shot). There's just one survivor (sort of) who has time to gasp out "There was only supposed to be one."
A few of mine, the first few are from weird dreams, the rest ideas for monsters in a comic idea I had (sorry if these have alredy been mentioned, I haven't read the whole thread yet).
PCs are in some sort of large building (castle, big lab complex etc). The doors don't lead to the place they're supposed to but a random location in the building instead. Additionally, they tend not to lead the same place twice. Whenever other people are encountered, they seem to move very slowly with occasional boosts of incredible speed, and often have trouble noticing the players.
One of the PCs receives a mobile phone. They get staticy calls from a contact trying to advise them. Some advice is wrong, makes no sense and/or is overly criptic. Some casues more inconvenience than it solves (such as the loud ringtone altering the monster that the call is trying to warn them not to altert).
Small amounts of blood, hair and other DNA-traceable materials from the PCs turn up in random places. Everyone seems to know it's theirs and often jump to conclusons about how/why it's there.
The PCs see various scene-of-incident photos, stills from documentary footage, autopsy pics etc conected to incidents that mention people dying of a rare disease. Somewhere in each pic, they can just about make out the image (in a puff of smoke, some cracks on the wall, a shadow of something off-screen etc, different each time) of a thin, beak-faced humanoid. (if you're particularly good with photoshop, then you could rig up some pics yourself to see if they notice).
A powerful monster is some twisted version of one of the PCs or a manifestation of some part of their mind. When this creature is wounded, the wound heals by replacing the damage tissue with a mouth or similar structure.
1) The city/town/village where the heroes are based suffers a sudden spate of miscarrages. Investigation reveals a supernatural being that enters the expectant mothers body while she sleeps and tears the unborn child to pieces.
(The aboves from a recent dream I had not pleasant as I was the mother in question.)
2) While watching you see someone step out into the street almost getting hit by an oncoming car, it just screeches to a halt so close it actually bumps their hands. After a moment of shock the person steps back and gets hit by a car going the other way.
And finally a campaign opener that could be creepy if done right.
3) The party is ordinary people living ordinary lives when there's a briliant flash of light and explosion after which they're standing somewhere else (desloate plain, grey void, a dark place with water as far as the eye can see) and someone appears (can be a person in regular clothing or unusual e.g. armour, robes, sci-fi looking etc) and tells them they're help is needed to avert destruction begging them to do something that'll show their commitment e.g. take the persons hand.
However events conspire to prevent this happening a number of times such as a friend shaking the player demanding to know what's wrong which brings them back to the "real world". The person appears several times each time appear more and more exhausted and injured. Then something happens, a tsunami washes up on the coast, massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, strange creatures attacking people, dead rising, massive floating islands appearing in the sky (take your pick) and the world starts flickering between what the player thinks of as the real world and the world the other person met them in.
At this point they have to commit to fighting the threat that's coming by finding the person who's dying somewhere nearby. A nice GM can lead the players through the commitment to the fight that will change the course of events enough that the world will shift from imminent destruction to avertable destruction (a shadow war). A nasty GM can say game over if they refuse to find the dying person.
Oh and yes the second and third ones aren't my ideas.
While in bed somewhere (needs curtains near the bed so if they're home doesn't supply that use a hotel) the player rolls over and knocks the curtains aside slightly. Standing on the other side looking right into their eyes is a large white dog with red patch's (bonus points for those who recognize the reference). Slowly its muzzle pulls back in a long low growl.
While visiting a graveyard the group see's a young boy busily shovelling dirt into a grave, if they linger a moment they hear a voice coming out of it begging the boy to stop.
While visiting a remote mountain resort it suddenly gets foggy and strange noises are heard in the mist. Locals say its the sound of demons fighting and advise the group to stay inside. If the PC's investigate they keep spotting departed loved ones walking past in the distance. The aim is to split them up and leave them lost in the mountains. No matter how hard they try they never catch up to the figures or encounter anything else in the fog.
1. The Pcs are on a ship that had a crew one day in warm waters and the next morning was absent of life except the PCs in artic waters. Anyways, they got near land and decided to skirt the coast to find a port. That night they went to sleep and one of the PCs (the woman of the group, I love picking on her lol) heard a scream and begs for mercy echo from beyond the tree line on shore. After a few moments the screams came to an abrupt stop and she realized the voice calling out to her... was her own.
2. Same game, the PC's ship ran aground and they went to shore, carrying a bunch of gear. They went to sleep the next night and one of the PCs wouldn't wake for his shift. The PC on duty took an empty flask, filled it with water from the nearby coast, only to find that the liquid he was pouring onto the sleeping Pc's head was actually blood. Needless to say the paladin was more than a little ticked about that
3. They reached a small town seemingly vacant of life. The buildings are mostly intact aside from being looted roughly, and all they find is the occasional swath of blood, even one building has a pair of bloody hand prints and the trail of the hands being dragged to the door and then disappearing.
4. At one point they are searching a building and from a nearby house they hear a woman scream, "Get back you monsters!" followed by a shot from a musket rifle. The house is boarded up and locked down, the door nearly impenetrable. The girl (like 16 yrs old) shoots every other round until one PCs is unconcious and the others were pounding down the door. They bust it down and find her house well stocked with the looted goods. She screams, "NEVER!" pulls her flint lock pistol and blows her own brains out. They are left with more questions than answers and the corpse of a very derranged girl.
Please don't let this thread die, its a freaking gold mine!
1) While taking out the trash there's a double flash of lightning (no thunder) as something made of glass (a jar or bottle) shatters, a few moments later there's a series of bangs (shots maybe?) from somewhere nearby.
2) Called to investigate a brutal murder the PC's find out that the horribly mauled corpse required constant life-support and even with that would probably die in a day or two anyway from organ failure. What motivation could someone have to tear apart (or otherwise horribly murder) a bedridden person with only a short time to live when simply cutting the power would have killed them just as surely?
At random moments throughout the day, a PC’s vision goes black, and a deep, menacing voice whispers an unnerving statement into her ear as though standing right next to her – “they will betray you,” “it will happen soon,” or “you are already dead.” The instant the voice is done, her vision returns and life continues as though nothing had happened.
A character notices that the room she’s in is a bit chilly…and it keeps getting colder. Five minutes after putting on a sweater her breath is fogging in the air, and five minutes after that she’s shaking as frost begins to form on the walls. She flees the room to check the thermostat, only to find it’s set normally, and when she returns the room is back to normal. Creeped out, she decides to sit and read in a different part of her house. Half an hour later, she’s feeling cold again…
The party enters a dark room with a musty odor to it and a dirt floor complete with bugs, worms, and roots in the soil. On the fifth story of a modern apartment building.
Every door in the house slams shut simultaneously.
The characters carefully move down a dark hallway, illuminated only by their flashlights on its walls. The hall is so long they can’t see where it ends. After trekking for ten minutes, they look back at the lighted room behind them…which is only three feet away from the last person in line.
Minutes after loading up the groceries into the fridge, a character opens it to get a drink. The produce is brown and damp, the meat is covered with slime, the liquids have all curdled, and the character gags as the stench of long-decayed organic matter fills the kitchen.
A PC opens a door and is bowled off her feet by a tidal wave of blood. As she is propelled down the hallway by the current of gore, she can feel claw-like hands scrabbling at her, tearing clothing and flesh. Crashing against something with enough force to cause a rib or two to snap and knocking the last bit of air from her lungs, the character feels a doorknob behind her and frantically struggles to open it. Succeeding, she collapses on the floor of the room she originally wanted to enter, clothes dry, body uninjured, with no ocean of blood in the hall behind her.
When a character is alone, he sometimes hears giggling. He’ll open a door or turn a corner and there will be a pale, dark-haired little girl staring at him for a moment, before she silently turns and runs out of sight again. She’s very good at hide-and-seek, since the character is never able to follow her successfully, but he’ll still occasionally hear her giggles as she lurks nearby out of sight, waiting to surprise him again.
A player awakens to darkness, and realizes he’s blind. Feeling his face, his fingers brush skin-covered bone where his eye sockets should be.
What looked like a cloud is actually an area of absolute darkness. As the day passes it slowly but steadily takes up more of the sky. A cold wind seems to be blowing towards it, and occasionally flickers of unnatural lightning are seen near the edges of the anomaly.
Something’s a bit off with the grandfather clock:
Tick…tock…tick...tock…tick..tock…tick…tock….tick…tock…tick.tock…..tick…tock…tock…tick…
Though the party is alone in the building, the whole structure reverberates with the sound of a door slamming. Backtracking, they patiently check every room, but all the doors still appear to be open.
A PC looks out the window of his office building workplace and groans at the amount of traffic he’ll have to slog through on the way home. But when he exists the building, he steps out into a city devoid of life – there are no cars, no people, no lights on in any of the buildings, including the one he just left. After confirming that his car is gone, he begins making the hike back to his home, with only the echoes of his footsteps for company…until he hears a faint crash from somewhere out of sight, but nearby.
Consulting the map they’ve drawn as they’ve progressed through their investigation, the party concludes that the building they’re in is a bit too large to be the one they entered.
Feeling a tickling sensation, a character looks down at his arm to see a spider crawling on his skin near a sore. Suddenly a swarm of the tiny vermin erupts from the wound, racing around on his flesh for a moment before returning to the sore, disappearing without a trace.
The map is useless. Every time the PCs go through a door, they go into a different room, arranged so that they couldn’t possibly fit together. Doubling back through a door lands them in a completely different room than the one they entered from, and in fact they haven’t been in the same room twice. Finding the exit may prove problematic…
A PC steps into a carpeted hallway but leaps back in surprise as the floor ripples like a pool of water.
A character crossing a thick rug suddenly lurches as her feet get caught. She can only twist her body about helplessly as she continues to sink into the rug as though it were quicksand, her terrified scream cut short as her head passes beneath the surface and into suffocating darkness. When she wakes up, she finds herself sprawled on the rug, which seems perfectly normal.
The party, like morons, split up. While conducting their individual investigations, one of the characters keep bumping into other PCs, backing into them, turning around and suddenly colliding with them, or seeing them lean into doorways. The other PCs always utter a little encouraging statement or a warning, then quickly leave. When everyone regroups, the PCs are puzzled to report that none of them had been anywhere near each other.
Later, one of the PCs keeps bumping into his teammates in similar events. Teammates who were killed in earlier adventures. Teammates who don’t seem to notice the wounds that killed them, or the look of terror on the PC’s face. And then the player starts having encounters with fallen enemies, and they are anything but friendly.
The building’s light fixtures all subtly dim and brighten to a certain rhythm, as though the structure had a heartbeat, or was respiring.
The party’s radios start screwing up. Every now and then they’ll receive transmissions that sound like they ought to be coming from nearby, but are still heavily distorted by static. The message is always the same: “Are we the last ones left alive? Are we? Someone, anyone, please? Are we? Is there anybody out there? Are we the last ones left alive?” Eventually, the voices making the transmissions are the characters’ own.
Buzzing.
For more ideas, spend some time on the TVTropes wiki's pages on Nightmare Fuel, things that aren't meant to scare us but do, and especially High-Octane Nightmare Fuel, stuff meant to scare us that succeeds magnificently.
1) At 2:34 in the morning you hear the sound (tinkly music) of an icecream van (the kind kids bye treats from) going past in a small town.
2) You find a body and when you try to check it out you find they were listed as dead and buried . . . 2 day's from now.
3) You find a body and while investigating it turns out that all the blood was drained from the body and replaced from someone elses.
Then the reflections start going dark. One at a time until all the lights in both mirrors (or, for added weird, just one mirror) goes out.
I dreamed i was hanging out with my friends. I looked away for a moment, and suddenly I was in a roiling sea of Chaos. My friends had merged into a great beast of chaos with a multitude of whipping tentacles. I wasn't frightened, because I knew that I was the beast, as in I was looking upon my body. In the course of the dream, I actually forgot that there was anything else in the world, which made it all the more freaky when the world started ending. And then it ended. And again. And again.
It was then that i started to notice that my "body" had eyes that were watching me.
The PC's see a young child being hauled into a van by two large men with metal pole's/wires they've got around the kids neck. As the van drives off the PC's see it has "(Insert city name) Municipal Pound". Should they check out the local pound they find several young children in the animal cages and records indicating several were "humanely" put down after being held for the maximum 3 day's without anyone picking them up. No one else finds anything odd about this and will indeed say "They're just children" in the same tone people use currently for "They're just animals". Further research indicates this has been the case countrywide since at least the 1940's/50's
Ok, here is where my campaign:
The PCs have been through a few more adventures and they came across a small town beset by a werewolf murdering people. They find out who was doing it and killed it.
So They meet the town headman, Mihkail, and his daughter, Ilane. Ilane is an innocent girl, basically a commoner NPC, and very pretty. The party beguiler decided that she didn't like Ilane because of stuff in her background, secretly jealous of Ilane. She repeatedly calls her "useless" and treats her with open distain.
The party and Mihkail and Ilane were called to the Prince's castle for a feast, so they go. In the town before the castle, they get into an adventure with Mikhail and Ilane in tow. Miikhail gets killed and Ilane starts to snap. She cries almost constantly, goes catatonic the rest of the time, attacks an inn maid and plucks the hair from her head.
The party gets sick of her, but feel sorry for her, so they decide to bring her to the Prince and the church's cardinal, hopefully so he can heal her.
When they get there they hand over Ilane and they say they'll do everything they can for her. The Prince ends up kidnapping one PC and the rest have to break back into the castle to free their friend and kill the crazy Prince.
They do not find Ilane, but they have to leave so quickly they don't have a chance to look much and the beguiler didn't care one way or the other.
Ilane breaks out of her prison (which is what the cardinal did with her, using her for strange rituals) and follows them to through the next few towns, always right behind them. Shes has totally lost touch with reality and blames the PCs for her tortured existence.
During the next adventure, the PCs will have to choose to either free a powerful and evil spirit of a long imprisoned sorceror or let the town die in a wave of undead and negative energy.
What happens next will depend on the party's choices. if they release the spirit, then the spirit will choose Ilane for its vessel because of her unending hatred. If not, then she'll be transformed into a lich by the storm of negatve energy.
Which ever they choose, they'll soon be hearing from Ilane. She'll kill people the NPCs befriend, carving into their foreheads "useless", burning down their inns, stuff like that.
Any ideas for any creepy attacks or dark attacks from this new born witch?
Sorry nothing leaps immediately to mind for your witch.
Here's another three for people.
You buy a new house for a really good price even given the current market because its "a handyman's dream" i.e it needs some repair work done on it out. As your renovating you keep finding doors behind things e.g. remove the cupboard in the dining room and behind it there's a door leading to what appears to be a workshop, remove the bed in the masterbedroom and there's a trapdoor leading down to a tunnel with another bedroom at the end. The only problem is that if you walk around the outside of these rooms there's not actually anywhwere for the extra space to be e.g. the masterbedroom with its trapdoor tunnel is on the second floor with a hallway underneath.
On a related note here's one from the movie I watched last night you call a friends cell phone because they've gone missing. As you wait you hear the phone rining from a nearby box. If you open the box its full of clothes, if you remove the clothes the box is empty and sitting flush on the floor but you still hear the phone ringing inside it.
Finally if you want to torment a PC (this one may have been posted) have them repeatedly have nightmares of them brutally murdering people near where they sleep e.g. the old lady in the apartment down the hall, a homeless person a few streets over. In the morning they find the murders happened exactly as they dreamed it. Psychic connection to serial killer or sleep walking murderer you decide.
Well in view of the new forum (which I don't like so far, no way found yet to locate threads I've posted in) here's some new events I ran into in the last few weeks.
1) When visiting a friend you notice a very realistic garden gnome pointing at a flower in horror. When you leave a few hours later the gnomes gone, should you ask your friend about it s/he say's he/she never had a gnome as they find them creepy.
2) You wake up one morning to find yourself covered in bloody handprints.
3) Every night at the same time your phone rings at first just once, then twice, then three times etc (till it reaches the point where your answering phone/service picks up). Caller ID's and getting the police in revelas it as untraceable. If you answer, listen to the machine, service all you hear is someone whistling the same tune. If its a machine service it goes till the end of the tune or the machine cuts it off, if you answer it continues to the end of the tune then they hang up.
4) While out driving you hear a scuttling sound in the back of the car.
5) While out and about you see two small children happily playing tag in a graveyard.
Hello there,
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to this thread, and still do. It may be the single-largest source of freaky and fabolous ideas, and I employ them in my campaign very frequently. I enjoy the twisted ideas presented here, and find the whole thread to be a bit of a gem. :-) Sorry there are no contributions from me right now, but I just wanted to let the contributors of this thread know how important the thread, and it's continuing growth, is to my imagination.
Thanks again,
Ole
I haven't read all 112 posts so forgive me if this is similar to another...
part of my 4ED&D campaign
there has been a wyvern rider swooping down into towns, randomly snatching up young children and flying off.. clues led the party to an abandon orphanage not to far from the city that they have been staying in.
::long long abandoned, overgrown but still structurally stable... the orphanage looks rotted and weather stained on the outside , tall dead wispy grass and dried out weeds cover the ground around the structure... vines cling to the stone walls almost acting like prison bars.. baring all entrance or exit from the orphanage.. a child's, faint screams of what could only be from inflicted pain barely make it through the walls to the outside.::
i wont go into all the details but heres a room or 2
::this room is a horrid sight indeed.. dozens of small children no more then 4 years of age are stripped naked and hang from meat hooks attached to chains that dangle from the ceiling. though most are far dead and bloated from built up bodily glasses there are a a couple of which just refuse to die... one of the children still impaled and hanging latches onto to one of the dead corpses dangling next to him... it looks a if he has held out as long as he can .. frail and bony in need of sustenance.. he now chews at the stomach of his dangling neighbor.... a loud Hissssss of gas escapes the cannibalized child's stomach as the feasting child's teeth finally penetrated the stomach wall... you can see his little gore covered tongue penetrating the chewed through body trying to lap up any liquid that it can....::
((this is a necromancers lair this is the hanging room where he allows the bodies to die gradually so they do not tense up making it harder for him to peel their supple flesh off.... the next room is used to drain the bodily fluids gas's etc. and peel the Young supple flesh from their "donors"
he creates patchwork flesh golums and finds that childrens flesh is easier to mold and take to his creation over all easier to work with....
hope u enjoyed my players didn't
A short story on the tv tonight I found creepy enough (partially due to setting) I wanted to share the highlights.
1) A prominant local figure is attacked in his home and has his ear cut off.
2) He hires a CHEAP geneticist to help him (wizard in fantasy setting would do).
3) He grows attached to the mouse (or other small creature) his new ear is growing on.
4) He gets his ear and reclaims his life.
5) Doctors find a tumour growing behind his ear . . . its the mouse.
6) Fleeing the media attention he hides in the sewers.
7) Unable to take the whisperings in his head of a world with all the cheese he can eat he grabs a nearby object and hacks at his head.
8) Waking up he finds his ear is gone and sets out to get it back off the mouse he hears squeeking in the darkness.
Kicker: Next day (or session) sees through skin and muscle tissue. Skeletons with all internal organs, arteries, veins. Blood pumping moving and acting normally. After the next time pass, see just skeletal frame with arteries and veins. Next time, skeletons. Next, all invisible except for clothing.
Final kicker, the PCs see after the latest time pass. NOBODY!!! Just piles of clothes laid out as if the occupants of said clothes just vanished!! And the PCs are back to their "normal" selves. Cars, trains, airplanes, ships...etc.. are crashed/wrecked. Power soon fails (no one is to be found.) All animals, insects, etc. as well.
Throw in scenes like "You see what appears to be an old woman's nice outfit laid out as if she just disappeared out of them. Clutched in her closed empty gloved hand is a leash leading to an empty gem studded small dog collar laying near her empty shoes. Tag reads 'Mommy loves Muffin.' (Que eerie music.....)"
Note to GMs:
1. Creepy apocalypse cause. They could find others that survived as they did.
2. Could learn about the end result by what ever means and must try to stop the end of humanity. (your choice how and when).
3. Only happens to all within a set radius (i.e. 50 miles radius) of PCs. They get out of area and relieved to see normal people again. The next day, it starts again at their new location.
4. They see a truly "wasting" disease, except victims are totally unaware and see all else as normal. Zero symptoms. The PCs are the carriers but immune to final step of vanishing. Return to "normal" at that step. I'll leave open how the PCs got contaminate and where the "wasting disease" came from.
5. My final twist is after all "the beautiful people" are gone, the process starts with plants the same way (treat bark as skin for example). Then buildings, sections of land, etc...Their "reality" is wasting away slowly, really slowly. Good way to bring PCs to "alternate reality" as they "fade to black" and awaken.................????????
What happens next, hhhuuummmmm....???
1. Awake from their nightmare covered in blood but find no cut, if tested it is their own.
2. All awake as 1, but one PC has razor sharp knife in hand with only blood splatters belonging to others on him/her.
3. One to all awake from bad dream and return to a restful sleep. Next morning, news is reported about X number of murders in town/city described precisely as the dream. X = the number of PCs that had "the dream".
4. NPC with PCs or one they met is slain this way after dream by PC.
5. Whoever the PCs tell the dream to, is slain as dream the next night or when they sleep.
6. In secret, have a willing player to have his PC slain this way during/after any dream situation mentioned. Please note that the one doing this should have his "back-up" PC ready to go that you can get in fairly quickly. EX: A private investigator, a paranormal researcher, detective, witch hunter, news hound, etc.
7. ?????
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