labors most of the time. Every now and again, though, a lull before the fi nal pounce is a perfectly valid technique for really hammering the terror home.
you can bet the encounter will have a more direct impact on the players—precisely the goal in horror encounters. The Unexpected: Even the most epic sagalike campaign is fairly episodic in nature. The PCs can make contact with NPCs who pop up on a regular basis, but simply by virtue of what they do—destroying evil and taking its stuff—there usually isn’t much room for recurring elements in the ongoing story. One of the most frightening things a DM can do is to introduce the notion of lasting consequences into the game. After the players have achieved their goals in a particular episode, reveal an unexpected and dark consequence of their characters’ actions. For example, if they succeeded in ending the reign of a murderous tyrant, they now learn that her daily sacrificial killings were keeping a powerful outsider placated. The ravenous outsider has now opened a portal from the Plane of Shadow, admitting packs of shadow mastiffs into the countryside to devastate the populace. The Unthinkable: Present the PCs with a dilemma that doesn’t offer a simple, black-and-white solution but instead only shades of gray. Forcing a hero to choose between two evils almost always has an unsettling effect, opening the door to self-doubt and for more horrors to come.
DREAD ENCOUNTERS
CHAPTER 1
HORRIFIC IDEAS
8
While the use of descriptive details is an effective component of running a good horror encounter, at the end of the day what makes horror horrific is the idea. No matter how eerie the circumstances surrounding a given encounter, if the central idea isn’t scary or at least deeply thoughtprovoking, it will not give rise to an emotionally successful horror encounter. A horror encounter differs from most other encounters not in how it looks, but in what it has to say. If the concept that lies at the heart of an encounter seems to whisper something dark to the players and their characters, then that is a potentially worthwhile horror encounter. Finding out at the end of a taut whodunit that the one who killed the local constable was a child is not in and of itself horrific. Discovering that the child who killed the constable was one of the constable’s victims, returned from beyond the grave to put a grisly end to the twisted madman’s depredations is. Or at least it’s an idea with a solid foundation in horror. The execution of a solid idea is perhaps more important than the idea itself, but a lackluster idea can’t be saved by any amount of explication or finesse. One of the things that players find truly frightening is when a DM uses the unexpected. Fear of the unknown is perhaps greater than any other fear, and that kind of wellspring shouldn’t be ignored. Coming at things from a different angle can make them fresh, and thus unexpected. Describing what would normally be secondary characteristics of a creature, object, or location, for example, is a surprisingly effective way to make people see it in a different light; that revelation can be a disturbing one for those who took it for granted. Focusing on the dreadful aspects of a creature, rather than its Challenge Rating or attack mode, is the cornerstone of making players afraid of it. It’s surprising, for example, how scary an encounter with a CR 1 flock of stirges can be, given the right treatment. Consider the following techniques for putting horror into a new context for the players. The Unknown: Using a monster from an unfamiliar source is an effective way of getting under the skin of players and characters alike. Sometimes the impact of a particular creature or ability is diminished if the players already know what it does, or even just what it’s called. (The power of names and of naming is an entire subject of its own, although it clearly plays a role in how people react to things.) Using a monster that no player in the group can readily identify can foster a mood of uncertainty that is often the key to evoking horror. The Unforgivable: One of the simplest but most effective ways of invoking horror is to bring it home to the protagonists. In most encounters, the PCs are the outside force; the heroes come to save someone else’s day. By making the circumstances personal to the players, a DM raises the stakes and introduces an unsettling element. If, after months of dealing with strangers and their problems, the PCs suddenly fi nd out that this time it’s a loved one, or at least a character they’ve often interacted with and actually like,
CREEPY EFFECTS The following are little incidents you can drop into your campaign at any point to unsettle the players and their characters. Don’t linger over any of these, and don’t let the PCs become so obsessed with one that it distracts them from the adventure at hand. That said, it’s good to have a general idea in mind of why a particular event occurred; it can be the first hint of something sinister in the offing. If the player characters resort to asking for checks to investigate one of these incidents, don’t bend or break the rules. Instead, it’s better to think of these incidents (for the most part) as instantaneous events; their effects may linger, but whatever caused them remains elusive. For example, take the hostile birds described in one example. A character with wild empathy can soothe the crows with a few good rolls, and one with a high-level familiar or access to the speak with animals spell can ask the birds why they were so hostile, but the animals themselves do not know and can only report being filled with sudden emnity toward the PCs (or perhaps humanoids in general). The same or similar events might occur again and again, and all the PCs can do is learn to recognize settings where they might be vulnerable to that particular effect and avoid them as best they can.
• • • • • • •
A wolf howls in the distance. The torches/fire/lanterns flicker and almost die, despite the lack of any breeze. A PC awakens to chewing noises beside her bed or bedroll, with no sign of what might have made them. A PC finds blood on his clothes or blankets, with no obvious source. A PC finds an old ivory pipe whether she keeps it or throws it away, she keeps finding it again and again in new places. The PCs wake up one day without shadows their shadows return without explanation 24 hours later. All background animal noises, such as insects churring or birds chirping, abruptly cease.
