Creepy Ghost
This time of year it’s important to watch out for ghosts. Especially creepy ones that want to give you shoulder rubs.
More generally, it’s a good idea to watch out for Halloween themed RPG sessions. Just as surely as the treants lose their leaves and all your potions begin to taste of pumpkin spice, your GM is guaranteed to be hard at work making a vampire/werewolf/haunted house scenario. And while there are plenty of guides out there that can help him to run a spooky game, there’s not much guidance for players.
It was a Savage Worlds Firefly game of all things where I first learned this lesson. Our ship had been forced to make an emergency landing at a derelict station. Our comms were dead, and so we had to scavenge for spare parts to get flying again. Our GM did a great job describing the station’s flickering lights, the echoes down its elevator shaft, and in general making the place foreboding. By the time we encountered the Reavers (because of course there were Reavers) the fight came as a welcome relief from the oppressive atmosphere.
We managed to survive a difficult combat, but afterwards the sense of foreboding was gone. We were still jazzed from our victory as we continued to explore the ship, and so the horribly mutilated bodies, when we encountered them, lacked some of the punch they should have had. We’d already seen the monster. We’d beaten the monster. We were big damn heroes, dammit!
And so I described my character throwing up.
As players it’s natural to crack jokes and deliver one-liners. It’s natural to want to feel like a badass, to make your character a fearless action guy with nerves of steel. But in a horror game, if you want to keep that atmosphere going, it’s important to put a check on the bravado every once in a while. I’m not here to tell you how to play your character, and maybe you really are the fearless warrior type. But when my gruff ship’s mechanic reacted to those flayed bodies with actual horror, it added something to the session. The group seemed to collectively recall that, oh yeah, there’s some terrifying shit going down, and so the horror atmosphere began to rebuild. Just something to keep in mind going into this Halloween weekend.
Question of the day then: What’s the creepiest moment you’ve experienced in a game? How did the GM achieve the effect, and how did your fellow players react?
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I can’t think of much creepiness outside of the Crimson Throne campain where we were exploring several areas that were overrun with undead.
What made it exceptionally creepy was the invisible person who attacked us, seemed to enjoy killing and turning everyone there undead in the first place.
I think NPCs (if done right) can be WAY creepier than a given scenario.
I think I have trouble keeping character emotion in mind in general.
It’s a sort of meta gaming that happens unconsciously for me since I know the big bad is just a ball of stats and features…
I do like to roll play though, so I’m trying to keep in mind how “not-me” would react to this situation, having just rolled a nat 1 on their knowledge check for what is obviously a Shade…
One thing I’ve run into is that it’s extremely difficult to maintain a creepy tone for any length of time. People laugh nervously, crack jokes, etc. I think it’s better to plan for that, designing for creepy “moments” rather than an entire creepy session. Besides, the scary moments are made scarier when they’re interspersed with moments of fleeting relief.
DM- The door locks behind you. You can hear frantic banging on the other side.
Player- “I grab the princess’s hand and we start moving again, now that we’re safe from the creature.”
DM- She is nowhere to be see… The banging on the other side of the door grows more frantic…
And that is how you lose at ICO.
My favorite was a game we played in a legitimately abandoned sanitarium for people with lung diseases and after it got dark the DM took me and another player into a different room with nothing but a candle to light our way and when we go into the other room there was a body hanging from the rafters. (He had taken some clothes and stuffed them with bags, but in the flickering light it looked pretty convincing for a second or two).
Now that’s the kind of adventure I’d like to run. However, I’m fresh out of legitimately abandoned sanitariums for people with lung diseases. Any good substitutes?
Abandoned schools are creepy at night. Heck, not abandoned schools are a little creepy at night. Parks can be creepy at night. Even if you have a fire going. Play After Dark before going to a park, and have fun….
Wait a minute… This is a LARP, isn’t it? We’re talking about a LARP. I’ve been tricked!
*looks around wildly for boffer swords*
Hey! Picard LARPs! You respect the LARP, & respect Picard!
Depending on where you live, I guess old abandoned churches or factories could probably help with the creep factor. 🙂
BRB. Climbing into a missile silo.
The haunted wreck of a burned-out mansion. Creepy atmospheric music. Weird-but-not-exactly-dangerous phenomenon like candles floating down a hallway, obviously going somewhere but it wasn’t clear where. Riddles and poetry that all sounded nice at first but the more you thought about it you realized they were hinting at some really messed up shit.
The key here was subtlety- throw a hundred skeletons at the party and they become just another monster. In this case we went nearly an entire session without making a single attack roll, and very few skill checks (that mostly turned up blank) and by the time we started finding children’s toys 3/5ths of the party was on the verge of saying “fuck the XP, I’ll take the dragons and the assassins guild over this, lets get the hell out”.
When we finally did find something to fight, it was mostly a relief. Only mostly because shortly after that we started finding answers and everyone wished we hadn’t. Turns out the toys belonged to a little girl, who’s “caretakers” had kept her imprisoned in a secret room while prostituting her out to high-society clientele.
I think at that point we grabbed what stuff of value we could quickly and easily (because hey, still adventurers) and headed for daylight as fast as Expeditious Retreat could move us. No one ever suggested we go back to try and answer such basic questions as (A) what happened to the girl, (B) what caused the fire, or (C) what raised the undead, which is how I think you know you’ve done horror right. No gore, no demons or pacts with a devil, just the very worst of humanity and a lot of mysteries no one wants to actually solve.
Woof. That’s the kind of psychological horror you need to sign a waiver form for. Props to the GM for pulling it off well.
Does it have to be something that happened as part of the game the game?
Because hands down my creepiest D&D moment was during the campaign I was in during college when the guy hosting the game informed us that the toilet was busted and suggested we pee in the sink if we needed to go.
Sometimes, it’s easy to spot the barbarian player. ಠ~ಠ
Friend and I were playing Deadlands years back, when the game was still fairly new. Wandered into a town that was completely empty of life, but looked as if people had been there only an hour before. Food laid out on the table, money on the counter of the General Store, that sort of thing. I started describing the odd sounds coming from different buildings. Laughter from the saloon, though there were no lights and when he went to investigate the building was empty. A draaaaag-THUMP coming from above him in the Hotel, though again, no one was there. He started getting pretty spooked, so when the bandits who had set up in the old barn on the edge of town showed up he was glad to have something tangible to shoot at. After the battle was over he asked the surviving banditos where all the people went. They had no clue. Had, in fact, been avoiding the town proper cause it was creepy. He never did find out what happened to those people, and frankly, I don’t know either.
Ah man… Your game master never told you? Even years later? That’s some brutal inscrutable right there. I know I’d have a tough time never spilling the beans to my players.
Our GM did have a haunted house/woods session once. Just once. We were supposed to enter the house and find the macguffin before making our way home through the woods. We were told never to leave the path and to run if we heard rattling chains. Well, to make a long story short, the Dwarf went into the house and just walked right through it, ignoring everything until he found the macguffin. Then later when we heard chains, everyone ran except Dwarf. He just walked normally and got separated from us. We realized this and ran back to rescue him. It took us 3 turns to notice, 5 turns to get back. During those 8 turns, the Dwarf is facing off at what was in fact a ghoul. The ghoul kept trying to wrap Dwarf in chains to siphon his life force. The problem was, Dwarf was the party tank. The ghoul couldn’t beat his CMD. After we got there and ended up killing the ghoul, we asked Dwarf (in character) why he didn’t run away like he had been told to. He said that he was old and didn’t feel like spending energy to run when he could use it to just hit the thing.
What should have been at least a two hour session was over in 30 minutes. Dwarf retired from the adventurer’s life not long after but we still see him from time to time.
What’s your feeling on this interaction? On the one hand, it’s cool for the dwarf to feel like a badass. On the other hand, it does kind of feel like he wasn’t getting into the spirit of the thing.
Was that supposed to be a pun?
I enjoyed it. Even though my character wasn’t there yet, watching the GM roll for the ghoul to wrap the dwarf in chain and repeatedly fail was funny.
In college, we were playing Call of Cthulhu, and we had a pretty good Storyteller. We were approaching the climax of the campaign, descending down the elevator into the Evil Conspiracy’s base, and the Storyteller was describing the waves of fear and pain being broadcast up from the shadows below. I don’t remember the exact description, but it creeped me out enough that I started praying. Not as an in-character thing to add ambiance either, I was creeped out enough that I didn’t actually notice what I was doing until someone pointed it out.
I’m not sure that muttering “holy shit” to yourself repeatedly counts as praying. 😛