demonology 101

[rafael]

i'm designing my first game.  there.  i said it.  god help me.

it's a horror game.  the occult, flashlights, trembling hands, ancient texts, and the like.

i want to do something that has not been done.  i want to surprise my players.  i don't want the players to recognize the predators that lurk in the shadows (and, of course, i don't want the characters they're playing to recognize the demons, either).  so i am constructing a dark pantheon from whole cloth.

here is my questions:

what kind of monsters/demons/fiends really get to you?  what are the creatures that you have encountered in horror games that really disturbed you (as a player)?  why?  if it's never happened, if you've never been unsettled by a monster or demon in a horror game, what was it that just didn't work for you?

thanks.

[.deadguy.]

[Valamir]

Monsters aren't creepy.  They may be revolting, disgusting, and "scary" from a "he could kick my character's ass" perspective...but they aren't creepy.

Tension is creepy.  Suspense is creepy.  Mood and setting do far more to flavor a situation than guys in rubber suits.

How do you do this mechanically?  I don't know.  I don't know if its possible.  The presentation of the GM will have far more impact than any monster stats, or ancient texts, or art.

That said, best advice I can give you is to make it subtle.  The most ridiculous part of Cthulhu (a game I can't stand) is a section of "monsters" with pictures and stats.  That's just dumb.  Concentrate on things that seem normal but are somewhat twisted.  I wouldn't worry much about your pantheon...the people who contact the evil shouldn't really know whats going on.   They might have bits and pieces of what they believe, but don't but anything down that says this is what it really is.  No player is going to not read the GMs section, and if they "know" there is no hope for creepy.

[contracycle]

Gah.  Of course monsters can be "creepy" - thats why we have the term "monster" as opposed mere "animals".  Evil that arises from stupidity or ignorance is LESS, not more creepy than otherwise.  Monsters are NOT only frightening when they are invisible - monsters are often LESS frightening in this scenario (Alien being a case in point).

[hardcoremoose]

Monsters are only creepy insofar as they reflect or illuminate something within ourselves.  The baseline monster is a bland, life-threatening creature, playing off our fear of death.  Cthulhu's creatures are creepy when used to illustrate the pointlessness of our existence.

In my opinion, a horror game is most scary when its villains challenge the players' (not necessarily the characters') ethical limits.  Your creatures will be scary if, to deal with them, the players and their characters have to go somewhere they're not exactly comfortable with, morally speaking.

In my most recent revision of Human Wreckage, which adds a GM to the mix and attempts to be a "traditional" rpg, the players (not necessarily the characters) have to decide which of their NPC friends and loved ones live and die - they literally make choices about the value or non-value of specific lives - on their way to facing the ultimate horror.  Hopefully it's scary, but I dunno yet.

Take care,
Scott

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I am fearing yet another "what is horror" thread, which I am beginning to think is among the least valuable effort we could spend.

Deadguy,

I have a basic problem with your opening post. You state that you want something original, and then you give all the familiar tropes of Call of Cthulhu play. This is a lot like saying you want to play original fantasy and then describing the classic wizard-fighter-cleric party as an example.

I do think your questions are good ones, but in many ways, they're back-to-front. Horror does not start with the threat; it starts with the characters being threatened. All good horror stories begin with the normal, in order to validate what will be threatened. It can be idyllic-normal, or it can be dysfunctional-normal, but (to stick with lit & film) the audience must care about the people who are in danger.

I suggest thinking in terms of what your game will validate through the nature of its protagonists. Threats to it will then become meaningful, and they can be scary or horrific or whatever, depending on further details.

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

Gah.  Of course monsters can be "creepy" - thats why we have the term "monster" as opposed mere "animals".  Evil that arises from stupidity or ignorance is LESS, not more creepy than otherwise.  Monsters are NOT only frightening when they are invisible - monsters are often LESS frightening in this scenario (Alien being a case in point).

Ron's probably right and we should take this to another thread.  But kindly describe to me in detail even one time when you've ever been creeped out by a monster in a role-playing game.  

I submit that in Alien its the atmosphere, ambience, sound effects, and witnessing the reactions of the actors that cause the "monster" to appear creepy.

If you've ever've been creeped out in an RPG I submitt it is for exactly the same reasons, which is precisely why I said in my post that this relies more on GM presentation than comeing up with any particularly "new" brand of monsters.

Thats also why once you codify a monster in some form of "monster manual" they stop being creepy at all and become nothing more than mere beasts of varying degrees of nastiness.

If you want to use movies as an example, try Preditor.  In which part of the movie was the Preditor more creepy.  In the beginning when the soldiers are being stalked by something that they have no idea what it is, or after the famous "If it bleeds, we can kill it" line when it became a tactical combat excercise.

I stand by my statement.  Monsters aren't creepy.  Their presentation is what makes them creepy.  Monster stats complete with little pictures like you'd find in some wilderness field guide are the enemy of creepy presentation.


To bring this back on track and address the question of the original post.  My advice would be to have rules for creating "monster effects" in the game as needed whenever it would be appropriately "creepy" to do so.

Want patches of slime oozing down the wall, want strange burbling noises, want deep gouges in a wooden door from some impossibly huge claws, fine.  Insert those bit by bit into the game as the player encounter the periphery of the monster.  Don't worry about creating a bestiary with a monster already stated out that has those features.  Create your bestiary as you play.

Hell there is no more powerful tool for making monsters than to take what it is the players THINK the monsters capabilities are based on the little bits you've shown them and either use that or twist it around in some fashion.

[rafael]

ron, i see what you're saying, so i'll perhaps go back and peruse those "what is horror" threads, rather than let this rehash old ideas.

i know what you mean about the old tropes, but i wasn't sure that it would have gotten my point across had i described the game in terms of sciomancy, the rephaim, cathexis, and hamartiology.  these are some core concepts in the game, but aren't as recognizable, so i went with the obvious.  bad idea, i know.  mea culpa.

i agree that horror is meaningless if the protagonists are unsympathetic, but my question is, when the norm has been established, when the characters/victims have been created, and when they are sufficiently endearing to twist the audience's guts as the threat emerges, what is it that truly makes us squirm in our seats?  plenty of horror movies and novels have been derailed, after a promising start, by intolerably silly fiends.  for whatever reason, there are some that linger in the mind.  for instance, the young woman infused with diablerie (carrie, the exorcist).  this one is certainly creepier, for instance, than the werewolf (which almost never gets done properly in film).

i'm rambling.  sorry.  i'll quit now.  but i'll try to phrase my questions more precisely in the future.

[.deadguy.]

[Laurel]

For a couple of bucks on Ebay, I picked what was supposed to be a "How To Run A Horror Game " by West End Games which turned out to be "Cryptic Campagins for the Tales of the Crypt game line, but nevertheless is proving to be worth the $4 I paid for it on its analysis of what's necessary to make a horror game.. scary and intense.

Deadguy- I recommend looking for a copy if you are serious about making a horror game.  I haven't finished it, and I'm at work and not able to go into an indepth description, but in terms of your original question about kinds of monsters.....

.... Human monsters.  People, normal every day people, who are so monsterous inside they are capable of making choices that causes unfathomable suffering to others.  Seriel killers, stalkers, terrorists, gangs with baseball bats, kids who dump gasoline on homeless people, parents who force their children to engage in child pornography.  

I want a game where characters are "normal people" facing this kind of "monster" and are limited in the ways they can deal with it.

[Ace]

As  goofy as it sounds "Make 'em care so they will scare" is  the best advice I can offer.

When I have run effective horror games I found my best strategy is to get the players really into the character and story. The closer to 'immersion' the player is the better.
With immersion the players begin to feel as if they are at risk and not just numbers on a sheet.

When the character is little more than numbers on a sheet than it really matters little what happens to the character.

Tools that I have used to faciltitate immersion are pretty varied.

Keep the monsters mysterious.

Players who run into common monsters time and time again will end up like Buffy and company. "Look its a Feklash demon, hand me the consectrated sword, yawn..."

The fear of the unknown and of death and or corruption are what scares us not the simple fact it is a monster.
A perfect TV example is the Buffy episode "Fear Itself" Once exposed and without its mystery the monster was just a little thing to be squished

Having the players play themselves worked very well for me in a GURPS lite "voodoo" game.

I had very good results in Second Edition D&D of all things. While it wasn't a 'horror" game per se the dramatic tension level got so high the player was sweating. I never felt so proud.  I think this was do to carefull story design  and the players experience that lead to complete rules transparency.

When you design a horror game it is utterly neccesaary IMO to make the rules as invisible as possible. Ron's game Sorcerer does this very well and the combination of simplicity and surrendering to the GM's judgement adds to the fear factor.

The last trick I have used is, Small groups. Make it explicit in the design that a small group size is better.
Again IMO but more effective Horror requires a lot of stage time for each character. I tend to think 3-4 is an ideal number, 6 or more is  too big to allow a lot of GM /player interaction.
Less than three cuts down on the variety and surprise factor that makes table top games so much fun

If you need more info I might recomend GURPS Horror 3rd edition or if you allergic to GURPS books (and this one is a little system heavy) look up the mostly systemless Nightmares of Mine (printed by ICE).
Ken Hite knows his stuff.

[Walt Freitag]

Here is what I think is creepy. You perceive something and you think, "This is wrong." And then you think, "Not only is this wrong, but the very fact that this wrong thing can exist means that the whole world is not what I thought it was."

A tidy little example from an otherwise forgettable fantasy novel: A scholar says to another, "Something strange is going on. Look at this." He picks up a dead leaf from the floor, and puts it on his open palm. The leaf begins crawling, like a caterpillar, up his arm. And it's autumn, and the wind is blowing, and outside the fallen leaves swirl by the millions. A gust blows some of them against the window, where they splat, oozing blood and ichor as they slide down the pane.

There's nothing very directly threatening about dead leaves coming to life. But what else out there that was supposed to be safely dead and gone might also be coming back to life?

When a normal-seeming person is revealed as a vicious human monster, it's not so much the specific revelation that's creepy, it's wondering what other monsters are lurking among all the other normal-seeming people.

9-11 was creepy in that way too, I think. Besides the terrible direct loss, and perhaps even overshadowing it in the long run, there has been the enduring feeling of "the world is not what we thought it was."

This is very hard to convey in an RPG. Just because of the medium you're in, everybody is expecting the world and its characters to be unusual, to have secrets, to have strange things going on, or to be in a state of upheaval. The players must come to see the world as a reasonable, knowable place before they can be creeped out or even surprised by the "wrongness" of anything. The only way I know how to do this is to portray the world and its conflicts in a way the players think they understand at first, then change the "rules." This usually involves a genre switch or the "embedding" of an unexpected genre under a veneer of another. A premise change may even be involved, like in Hitchcock's "Psycho."

The movie "The Long Good Friday" does this. It's a gangster movie, and you think it's going to be about a straightforward mob war, but the enemy proves to be so vicious and shadowy and unstoppable that the story has the emotional framework of a horror movie even though it never introduces any unrealistic or supernatural elements. It is truly horrifying.

- Walt

[Mike Holmes]

Wheryoubeenallmylife Walt? Well said.

This is why I think Cthulhu does work as long as you have players who haven't read it before. Or even if they have and you play it right. The game is about wrongness.

In one game I played last Origins, the most horrific thing that we discovered had nothing to do with the Mythos per se. One shock came when a man in a seat facing away from us turned out to be an Orangutan dressed in human clothes. Worse was later when, after finding the bodies of the family that owned the house, we determined that the daughter of the man had been having relations with said Orangutan. The GM just laid out the facts from the diary briefly and to the point like he was ashamed of having said it and wanted to pretend it never happened. That shot the Wrongness factor waaaay up....

That's what worshiping crazy alien-star-gods will do to ya.

Mike

[Sidhain]

I must agree with Walt. In essence it's a matter of perception that creates Horror/Terror, and that is very hard in RPG's because their is a level of removal from the source--that is we have literally a barrier between us and the material.


There are however ways to blur the line--physical real world things: Low light, possibly candles. Phone Calls that actuall are phone calls (If the players are expecting or not, and you can call a phone near the group or have an associate--giuve them a script...). Imagery and description only go so far, but sounds can increase it--get a good soundtrack which plays spooky music, play at a low level--all these things add up. Some people, may very well think it's all silly. But I've been complemented time and time again for horror games I've run (even on the one where everyone died in an Avalanche) but it was all about shifting their perceptions--In that case that group, I'd never allowed inter-party conflict of the extreme sorts (that is PC's with conflicting goals) but for the horror game one of the /player/ played the monster. He and I worked out a simple signal system for when he was one form or another (being a werewolf) and I used a tiny bit of gore, mysterious happenning and the like to keep everyone looking at /NPC's/ as the werewolf, so when  they alone fled in a jeep away from the site of the oddness--they carried the source with them.   Needless to say though, it was revealed when he changes in the jeep with them--their reactions as PC's were far more earnest than usual--more "Oh hell!" "I'm getting out of the jeep now!" than "Hey lets fight the critter."

Playing on perceptions, and expectations are very important. I don't know a way rules can convey that, but your advise to GM's in your came may very well give a brief overview of how to.

I'd also suggest no firm explanations of the things in the night--no metacosmology. Cosmologies work in some supernatural/occult games for the GM, by telling him what is "real" for the setting, but each horror story is different, even though most of the elements are similar. Keeping the cosmology as amorphous allows someone to run games with no easy truths the pleyers can latch onto.  Werewolves are like "this" is not a good way to create fear---Werewolves simply are. In a world that they believed to be /just like our own/ however is very perception/expectation altering.

A lot of why horror works for me, is I do run many modern day games where I make the PC's superheros in the course of the story, or I get them tangled up in espionage, or other "adventure" type--so when they expect one--and I do horror, it works.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

I must agree with Walt. In essence it's a matter of perception that creates Horror/Terror, and that is very hard in RPG's because their is a level of removal from the source--that is we have literally a barrier between us and the material.

I continue to "not buy" horror roleplaying, because in just about every example I've seen/heard of, the game focuses on scaring the players not their characters.

[Kenway]

I've been a player in a couple good horror-themed and Ravenloft AD&D adventures.
 Some observations (I'm sorry if these are redundant with earlier posts):

 -play at night!  It's subtle, but whatever helps.
 -no combat at all.
 -it goes against some rules of rpgs, but make some of the key scary stuff happen when the pcs aren't in the scene.  Keep the pcs one step behind.  Assuming your pcs aren't too hack-happy, they'll like the "chase."
 -When the pcs enter a room, never say "You see a pool of blood by the desk."  Say "The room looks normal" or even "The room looks normal, but you smell something slightly odd that you can't quite place."  The pcs will then search the room as usual- then say something like, "You walk around the desk at the corner and your foot slips a bit on something moist."  Hopefully a pc will say, "Okay, I look down at the floor."  Then, finally, you should say it's blood.  Hopefully your pcs will be game and don't mind when you slow things down like this.  Contrast the routine with the unusual.

[Ace]

I must agree with Walt. In essence it's a matter of perception that creates Horror/Terror, and that is very hard in RPG's because their is a level of removal from the source--that is we have literally a barrier between us and the material.

I continue to "not buy" horror roleplaying, because in just about every example I've seen/heard of, the game focuses on scaring the players not their characters.

Thats a fair point Jared.

The thing to be sought in a Horror game is Identification with the character, essentially you are bluring the lines between player and character. After all characters can't be scared

Anyway most RPG isn't theater. Its a strange kind of "interactive" story telling and that interaction is sometimes where it becomes difficult to make fear happen

Now in order  to make Fear in an RPG work you have to feel it not just act it out or roll on some chart or table.

IMO a big part of the pleasure of a good role playing session is the deep indentification with the character.
Even the D&D folks I have played see part of themselves in the character sometimes to the point of excess.
When good RPing happens (and its rare) the viceral feelings are like you get from the best books, only better.
After all its your story and you can visit again and again, each time a little different...