Solar and horror?

[NilsH]

i]horror-movie<

[Eero Tuovinen]

Hmm... Horror is tricky, but I would perhaps try to do some information restriction as the SG. As you say, uncertainty has a cachet in horror games.

Nobody's done a lot of body work on SS horror yet (except for zombie apocalypses), but I guess I'd start my experiments by going through a normal adventure prep and just filling the field with horror elements. Then I'd just run it with horror gaming techniques to see what works and what doesn't.

[oliof]

Horror isn't necessarily a function of the game system itself. It's a tricky subject, because it's easy for players to break a groups' suspension of disbelief when they don't buy into it. As Solar System is geared towards active characters who eventually overcome the limits of their being, it's hard to use without some re-engineering in terms of skill efficiency and pool refreshment.

One change I remember from another thread of another forum that made things pretty horrific in a pretty standard dungeon environment is to change the way harm collapses to allow it only at the beginning of the next extended conflict. It makes small conflicts way more dangerous, because they tend to fill up the holes in the harm track quickly. Another twist is to deny players easy refreshment scenes; coupled with the way effects are handled in refreshment scenes, this gives players some hard mechanical choices that may lead to basic tension necessary for a horror game.

That said, there is a pretty nice book about horror gaming techniques called Nightmares of Mine by Kenneth Hite. It's long out of print, but available in the used book market.

[NilsH]