Setting

Revulsion: PCs constantly confronted by monsters become inured to them over time, a situation you can set right with Things That Should Not Be. This mood might be extra dimensional beings incomprehensible to mortal minds, or necromantic experiments gone horribly wrong, or what ever else you think might really get under your players’ skin. Magic and the “unnatural” are a normal part of life in most fantasy worlds, but if you can find true oddities and abominations beyond the players’ expectations, the reward in tension and terror will definitely be worth the effort. SelfLoathing: The PCs themselves somehow become the source of evil or suffering in others. Perhaps they were tricked into committing some vile act, or some supernatural force (lycanthropy or dominate person or possession) drove them to it. The enemy within is often the most horrifying, particularly if circumstances are such that the players cannot be sure they will not do it again. This mood differs from internal struggle, above, in that the players are not conflicted; they know that what they did was wrong. Shoc : The horror of this mood comes primarily from surprise, shock, and gore. The mood is not a slow escalation but a sudden explosion as the PCs stumble into something they could never have imagined seeing, and would never want to. Shock works best when used to support one of the other options, rather than carrying a story itself. Spiraling Despair: Everything is slowly but surely falling apart, on either a personal or setting-wide level. Living conditions worsen, loved ones find themselves in straitened circumstances, war ramps up between nations. And nothing the PCs do—at least not initially—seems to be able to stop it. This sort of story should become less and less pleasant (for the characters, not the players) as time passes and frequently leads to one of the other moods presented here. Violence: Everything seems to result in bloodshed. Diplomacy breaks down. Wars erupt. Horrible creatures stalk the streets, slaying all they come across until they are slain in turn. The PCs might even be forced to shed innocent blood in self-defense, if they are blamed for ongoing crimes or faced with mystically controlled crowds. This is a good mood to intertwine with others, or for players who want a taste of horror without dramatically changing playing styles. eight of Suspicion: The heroes find themselves on the wrong end of the law, on the bad side of the Church or the Crown, or facing down an angry mob. Everywhere they turn they fi nd enemies, not because they are surrounded by evil, but because they are seen as evil themselves. Can they survive without becoming exactly what they’re accused of being? And how do you fi ght an entire community?

The setting, like the mood, characters, and plot, plays a large part in evoking an atmosphere of dread. The DM’s choice of setting both indicates and enhances the type of horror she wishes to portray. An adventure set in an old, drafty castle during a lightning storm certainly implies and encourages a different sort of unease than a sudden spilling of blood in the midst of a sunny sylvan hamlet. When deciding on the setting for a horror adventure, consider the following salient points. ring the Heroes to the Story or the Story to the Heroes? Putting the PCs in an unfamiliar environment helps to build tension. The characters are strangers in a strange land, with nobody on whom to call. They have little knowledge of local customs, laws, or lurking threats. People are, by nature, most comfortable in areas they know well, so removing that familiarity removes that cushion of comfort. Additionally, bringing the PCs to exotic locations enables the DM to introduce elements unavailable in more familiar grounds—environmental hazards for which the heroes are unprepared, monsters the likes of which they have never seen, and so on. Perhaps the heroes are stuck on an enormous ship, being stalked by an undead or undersea horror even as the vessel is slowly sinking into the ocean. Maybe they’re in an abnormally shaped mountain range that could not exist without magic, wherein every surface is steep, and outcroppings protrude at impossible angles. On the other hand, the corruption of the familiar can bring about a shatteringly horrific experience. An evil hidden in the midst of an area the players consider safe is the most dangerous of all, because it is totally unexpected. The heroes might initially feel they have the home field

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HORROR-ORIENTED SETTINGS

Chapter 3 discusses, in some detail, designing settings specifically for horror campaigns, environments in which almost every imaginable story is going to include at least a few horrific elements. While these settings are well suited to horror adventures that are part of larger horror campaigns, they are not usually appropriate to a horror adventure that occurs in a standard campaign. Quite simply, most horror-specific settings are broad enough to contain more than a single adventure. PCs in such realms should usually encounter multiple horrific plots and villains, rather than just one. For a horror adventure that is meant solely as a break between other types of stories, it is far better to work the horror into a more mundane (or apparently mundane) setting. In the span of a single adventure, it is easier to explain the PCs entering and leaving a haunted castle, or confronting a possessed murderer hiding among the clergy, than it is to have them locate, enter, adventure through, and leave an entire nation of undead-haunted moors. Exceptions exist, of course. Maybe the PCs are traveling cross-country, and pass through a small kingdom of demonworshipers. Maybe they are plane-hoppers who land briefly in a domain of intrinsic evil. Perhaps they simply wake up to discover themselves in a blasted wasteland occupied by aberrationlike mutations of all they used to know and must find a quick means of escape before they, too, begin to warp under the effects of taint. For the most part, however, a stand-alone horror tale should occur within a setting that, except for the horror elements, resembles a standard location. Reserve the truly twisted and abnormal realms for long-term, campaignlength horror.