The Horror
By Cape Rust
These days it has gotten harder and harder to run a horror game. Hollywood seems to dish out movie after movie designed to scare the heck out of us. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. With the deluge of zombie and vampire movies, it all feels played out. It is often the same with horror games. Some game systems lend themselves to horror and some systems that are designed to be scary end up being almost comical. One factor GMs tend to forget is that most fantasy gamers look at zombies and skeletons as nothing more than cannon fodder. How can a GM or Storyteller convey actual horror and make a horror game work? It’s not easy, but I’ll try to give you some tips based on the horror games I’ve run.
I love H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, he was influenced by Poe and there have been many other greats but when it comes to horror games, give me Cthulhu any day. I have added horror elements into all types of game including Shadowrun, but for pure horror, Lovecracft is my poison! There are some amazing new psychological games out there that have caught my fancy, but I always end up going home to H.P.! So I will use Call of Cthulhu as an example of how you can put horror back in horror games.
First, we have to look at the setting. The time and place end up being as important as the characters themselves. I will go so far as to say the setting is a character unto itself. The roaring 20s and the 1800s always seem to be popular. I was involved in a Vampire: The Masquerade (Dark Ages) campaign that was downright creepy! I love the idea of the dark, foggy, soot covered streets of London in the middle of a dank winter night. Just typing this gives me the chills! The only drawback to such a delicious setting is the fact that to make it come alive the way I would want it to, quite a bit of research would be required. I have proven that I’m not afraid of research but the investment by the Storyteller and the player might be more than some people are willing to give. I love getting to step back into the age of reason and witness the horrors of the other side as they are revealed through séances held in the parlors of respectable women who are overindulged by their wealthy husbands as much as the next guy, but for me modern day is the way to go!
There is a method to my madness, and the madness I hope to spread! Remember those cannon fodder skeletons I spoke of? If we set our horror game in a fantasy world, our players already are expecting those magical creatures. These expectations make it even harder to bring the horror. Modern times provide a false sense of comfort, like your warm fuzzy childhood blanket. Modern day horror games provide quite a bit of ready-made materials as well. There are plenty of maps and even pictures of buildings the players might enter. I like to choose a local area, which most of the players are familiar with. This is like tucking them in with a warm glass of milk.
Right now we have our players in a time period they know everything about and in a place they have a good idea about. They feel comfy, cozy and it is time to read them a bed time story…… right before we bring them into our nightmare! I normally have my players play facsimiles of the player. There is no way to completely capture a real person’s skills, feats, abilities, and knacks. By making a character that is similar to the character but not an exact replica of the player, we create a personal identity comfort level that most players won’t even know they are getting. For example, I had a player in one game who worked at a local branch of a big box bookstore (Say that 10 times fast!). Big box bookstore isn’t very exciting, so I changed his book selling job to a local used bookstore. That was a good start, but I took a page from a popular movie about a group of out-of-work academics who go into the business of capturing paranormal entities and I made sure the bookstore had a robust paranormal section. This added great flavor and gave the players a great resource to check later in the game. Another player was attending the local college and was interested in SCUBA Diving. Too easy! Both occupations of the players were easy to deal with and provided me with some great ideas for venues and plot hooks in the game. This is just one more way to take familiar day-to-day occurrences and flip them for our nefarious purposes later in the game.
The last thing I like to do to the players is give them some kind of creepy quirk or ability that gives them a more in-depth connection to the supernatural and strange. I always make these quirks, feats, or whatever you want to call them beneficial and flavorful. I will say that many horror games add these types of character traits into the system. I love being Roman and taking those great ideas and placing them in a completely different game. I was telling you about the guy in one of my games who was interested in SCUBA Diving. I gave him the ability to hold his breath for a long time and later in the game I added an event where his “holding his breath for a long time” was a plot point! More on my diver later.
Let’s wrap it up for this week and leave a little for next week. For me, the key to setting up a good horror game is creating a warm, fuzzy environment that we can drench with horror and mayhem. If you have the time, historical settings are great but if you are dealing with life and a 40 or 50 an hour a week job, stick with a modern setting. Next week we’ll discuss how to spice up your horror game.