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DREAD ENCOUNTERS
CHAPTER 1
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A successful Search or Spot check reveals that all the furniture in a particular room was recently moved around, then meticulously put back in place. All the clothes in the closet are stained with blood, but there’s no blood anywhere else. The only door to the cellar is reinforced with iron bars and locked from the inside. As a PC stares at a portrait on the wall, its features change until they depict her own, but she is clearly older in the portrait. If a second PC does the same, the portrait again changes to mimic his features, but this time the face shown is clearly that of a long-dead corpse in an advanced state of decay. The portrait then slowly reverts to its original state. While a PC is looking at herself in a small round mirror, her image is suddenly attacked from behind. She sees her reflection die in agony only inches away on the other side of the mirror, leaving behind only a blood-splattered surface, without ever seeing what attacked her image. Thereafter she casts no reflection for three days, after which her image appears as normal. A PC’s touch suddenly withers and blackens living plants, then the effect ceases as suddenly as it began. A cleric awakens to find he’s gripped his holy symbol so tightly that his hands are cut. A rogue awakens to find that her fingers have been stained an inky black while she slept and her forehand branded with an odd mark that quickly fades. A fighter awakens to find himself panting and sweating, his blade covered in gore, although he’s fought no enemies. A wizard opens her spellbook to find pages covered in ramblings in a foreign language, all written in blood in her own handwriting after a minute the strange writing fades and the pages resume their normal appearance. The PCs find that all their rope has sprouted leaves and thorns. A PC wakes gasping for breath and finds he is throttling himself with his left hand while his right hand lies numb and inert it takes a round or two for his numb right hand to pry the left hand off, whereupon both return to normal. At the stroke of midnight, all animals in a small town begin to shake uncontrollably, howl, and attempt to hide. The PCs enter a valley where it never gets brighter than dusk, even at midday. One (or more) of the PCs hears the soft but insistent buzzing of flies over carrion. After a night of troubled sleep, one of the PCs wakes to find himself in a strange place—an alleyway, swimming in the middle of a lake, embracing a long-dead corpse on a slab in a masoleum. One part of a house or town has an unpleasant, not-quiteidentifiable smell. The PCs hear whispered conversation coming from around a corner but turn it to find nobody there. The local church appears gray and decayed, although the townspeople seem cheery. Smoke trickles from a chimney, but when the PCs enter the fireplace is cold and dead. The PCs glimpse a cheerful roadside hamlet not far down the road, but when they arrive they find it a long-abandoned decaying ruin. After a few hours in a new town, it slowly dawns on the PCs that there are no children. One word: Fog.
THE VILLAIN OF A HORROR ENCOUNTER
The heart of any good horror encounter is the villain. Regardless of your campaign world, the bad guy of your horror encounter will probably be an entity with its own ideas, ambitions, and characteristics. Thanks to the myriad of options D&D offers, a DM can craft a worthy adversary from all sorts of raw materials. The villain need not even be a person: a cursed site or sentient object can serve just as well, or something totally impersonal such as a plague of contagious madness or cannibalism. It’s an easy task to model a D&D villain on a character from popular fantasy. Tolkien’s Saruman is the very archetype of an evil wizard. Many evil warriors who serve a greater evil power owe their genesis to the Horned King of Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain. Beowulf’s Grendel is the model of many modern monsters, and even Goliath has appeared, at least conceptually, in tales that involve a hulking, nigh-unbeatable warrior. To take from more modern examples, it’s a matter of only a little effort to create a D&D equivalent of Zedar from The Belgariad (David Eddings) or Voldemort from the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. It’s nearly as easy to take villainous inspiration from nonfantasy material, as long as it’s the general concepts, not the specific details, that you carry over. One can easily imagine, for instance, that Lord Soth of Dragonlance fame was inspired (if only unconsciously) by Darth Vader. Both of these villains were good knights who fell to evil through pride and arrogance. Both are armor-clad, hulking warriors with mystical and martial prowess. Both serve a greater entity but have their own agendas, and both have a soft spot for a loved one. Yet each is clearly his own character as well and fits perfectly into his own niche. Other science fiction worlds can be mined for material. The Terminator could be transmuted into a powerful golem, or perhaps an inevitable. Predators could become a powerful goblinoid race or perhaps an offshoot of githyanki. The Vorlons and Shadows of Babylon 5 could be recast as outsiders. The kythons of Book of Vile Darkness are a perfect example of the concept of Geigeresque aliens in D&D, but almost any animalistic demon or draconic entity could serve the same purpose. Horror tales are, of course, an ideal source of inspiration, given the theme of Heroes of Horror. Mr. Barlow of ’Salem’s Lot and his efforts to convert the entire population of a village into vampires can serve as a ready-made D&D plot. The various spells and powers available in the game combine to allow even the strangest, creepiest effects. For instance, the horrified corpses left in Samara’s wake in The Ring could be the result of a phantasmal killer spell, with the movie’s cursed video reworked as a cursed book or painting. While they wouldn’t necessarily be ghosts, the notion of undead who do not realize they are undead, à la The Sixth Sense, makes for interesting villains—or even victims. Also consider the various entities that possess the ability to haunt dreams. Combined with the rules for dream-adventures presented in Chapter 3, a DM can easily create a Freddy Krueger-style character to bedevil players.
