setting the mood... tips? ideas?

[ynnen]

just wondering what some of you do to help set the right mood and create the right atmosphere for a session of little fears.

here's what i currently do:

- turn off all the lights. we game in the basement, so turning off the lights keeps only the few LCD displays of the clock, stereo, etc. glaring like evil eyes...

- give everyone a tiny little flashlight. they turn it on and shine it on their face (like around campfires) when it's their "turn" to act...

- creepy music is a must! preferably something without lyrics (but if you must, Nick Cave is sufficiently moody)...

my top choices would have to be Danzig's Black Aria, Delerium's Archives Vol I & II (that's 4 CDs worth of fabulous moody music!), and some select movie soundtracks like Dracula, Mummy and Mummy Returns...

- use glow in the dark dice... they get charged up when the players use their flashlights, and since there are so few stats and abilities most players don't have to refer to their character sheet unless there is an injury.

[Jason L Blair]

As I said in the book, toys were probably the best mood setters I had. Music is always good (I used Poe's "Haunted" CD both when writing and playing LF). Dimmed lights are always a plus for horror games. ;)

One method I heard about (on DigitalLlama.com, I believe) was separating the players (if their characters were separated). I think the GM put one in the kitchen, another in the living room, and some in the dining room, etc. If everyone stays in character, that (along with the dimmed lights and spooky music) would be a great mood setter.

[Comte]

As a game player I never had a good experiencer with being put into seperate rooms but that is just me.  If you do it and pull it off effectively by all means let me know how you did it.  I'm postive that this is an invaluable tool, but I have no idea how to use it effectivly.  

Also I found that a very valuable tactic for horror gameing is to keep the players off balance.  Don't let them predict what is comeing or do something to throw them off.  You can do this in both the game and the environment they play in.  For example have something terrible happen and turn on all the lights.  This will confuse and discombobulate the players makeing their charecters act in strange and interesting ways.  Of course you can't do this every game session, or even every other game session but once in a long while it is a terrific card to pull.  Keep them off balance, make them paraniod, and once they start leaping at shadows and screaming for mercy, let them have it.  This principle hasn't failed me yet.

[Comte]

Oh bloody hell I forgot one last thing.  If you have the players off balanced or confused it is much easyer to put them in situations where five minuts latter they look down at thier hands and go wait a second what did I just do?

The classic example would be when we were playing SLA.  For thouse of you who aren't familiar with the game just think of cyber punk on several diffrent illeagal drugs.  Anyway the players are being stalked by this serial killer named Animal Freind, who has been tormenting them for weeks.  He's been doing the usual things, stealing their panties, nailing kittens to doors, makeing the players unknowingly eat human flesh et cetera.  Anyway one time I was narrating a crowd scene and compleatly at random I shouted and you see Animal Freind flitting through the crowd twords you.  My increaded volume and the randomness of the situation combined with the pure terror caused once of the charecters to utter the golden words I draw and fire.

:-)  I spent the next 5 minuts describeing the effect the bullets had on the crowd.  A mother weeping over her headless child not being the least of the examples.  She was looking rather green when I was done.  The party is still trying to work off the damages from that one.

Doing this sort of thing in Little Fears is a bit diffrent.  Basicly I would pull this card out so that the charcter would fataly endanger their teddy bear or one of thier freinds.  I don't think I have the heart to manipulate the situation so that one charecter kills another...but that might change.  The oh god did I just do that, aspect of horror gameing is VERY powerful.  If you can pull it off it will be a game session that they won't talk about for years to come because they don't want to remeber how they felt during it.  Perhaps this is a bad thing to do to the players...but they all came back the next game session so I guess it is okay.  Anyway this is sort of hard in little fears but very possible.  If anyone is really interested I'll expound apon the topic but right now I need to go to bed.