Make Your Halloween Horror Themed TTRPG Game One to Remember

[@FindFamiliar]

I gave my five players “sidekick” stats from Tasha’s and placed them in a Resident Evil like mansion with plenty of puzzles and a large looming stalker golem that would reappear throughout the mansion. Was a great Halloween one shot last year!

[@drivinganddragons1818]

@@FindFamiliar throw away NPCs are a great tool to reinforce lethality

[@michaelcrumlett187]

First, I feel your pain with the distributor. I run a municipal garage, and slow parts delivery is the bane of my existence. Second, I am in favor of the F150 project. Third, I’m running Curse of Strahd for a group with a diverse experience level. We started with first level characters, so I’m running them through Death House. One of the players was part of my last TPK, so he knows I’ll pull the trigger and has set that expectation with the rest of them. I allow him a little anecdotal metagaming, to prime the horror pump. We play in my rec room, so I can use lighting to set the atmosphere, and I actually bought miniatures for the group to use. I encouraged them to paint and customize their characters. Then, when I had the atmosphere right, and the group was invested deeply in their characters, I plunged them into a dark, claustrophobic, subterranean labyrinth full of undead monsters and eerie chanting. Horror achieved.

[@drivinganddragons1818]

@@michaelcrumlett187 Yeah, the parts house is the my Plane of Dread. So many cool options for projects around distracting me from the two I have going on. 67 Impala sedan right up the road, a 54 Studebaker 2-door wagon about 30 min away, a 49 REO Speedwagon dump truck... Lots of cool stuff. Normally, I'm completely theater of the mind and I think minis are a big detriment to horror because it physically separates the player and their character, but you have definitely optimized them in a big way by having the players invest a lot of time and thought into customizing them. I'd sit there with a pair of tin snips and and other fun ways to... decommission, those minis if a character dies lol

[@michaelcrumlett187]

@@drivinganddragons1818 I bring them back as revenants. If your character dies in one of my campaigns, you will likely wind up encountering that character again. Maybe as a friend, or maybe as a pissed off avatar of Orcus who blames the party for his current situation.

[@age-of-adventure]

Good tips, particularly useful if you run a very heroic game. Thanks. Will incorporate these in my upcoming Halloween game

[@drivinganddragons1818]

@age-of-adventure@age-of-adventure glad to help. Check out the article version when Tales from the Tavern drops.

[@age-of-adventure]

@@drivinganddragons1818 - sorry I’m not familiar with TftT… can you point me in the right direction

[@drivinganddragons1818]

@@age-of-adventure www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/481989/elven-maid-inn-tales-from-the-tavern-magazine-issue-1

[@drivinganddragons1818]

@age-of-adventure@age-of-adventure issue 2 is out later this month

[@CowCommando]

The opposite of courage is cowardice. The opposite of fear is safe. The opposite of anxious is relief. The opposite of horror is normal or mundane. That's why it's nearly impossible to play ongoing horror where you stop mid session. You spend so much time living the mundane in between sessions that it becomes nearly impossible to switch back into the horror mindset. It's too far for the pendulum to swing at once. The subversion of the mundane is one of the defining characteristics of horror. The normal everyday things that are just a little bit off. The weird things that have spiraled out of control into the insane. That's why good horror movies take the beginning of the movie to establish what normal looks like before they start to introduce the horror. Don't believe me? Think about some classic horror examples. The Nostromo is an everyday work ship, until suddenly that familiar place shifts into a place of dark corners harboring the unknown until eventually it becomes the hunting grounds of a monster. Zombies are just normal people except they lack the humanity to not eat a person when they get hungry. Vampires are the every day greed we all experience taken to an extreme where they don't take wealth but your very life essence. Jaws starts with two young people out for an every day evening swim until a shark that's just a bit bigger than normal with an aggressive appetite for human flesh shows up. Most monsters are just an insect or animal with the script flipped. Instead of us being large and holding power over them, they're large and able to get power over us. Giant spiders are scary not because they're supernatural but because we subconsciously know that the only thing keeping regular spiders from eating us right now is simply the size difference. Tweak the mundane by changing the power balance and suddenly the previously mundane has become a horrifying monster. I think that's why people switch rules systems for horror games. It's the subversion of the mundane from the ground up in addition to potentially removing safety. It builds fear by disempowerment and horror by altering the status quo, especially if you've just taken the known, the typical session rules they confidently know, and made it the unknown, a new system they have little if any experience with. I think a good horror RPG session works the same. You just have to consider what normal is for your party and then tweak it. Remembering that you're trying to horrify the party and not their players can help you keep from upsetting the players while you're at it. They're here to have fun, even if that fun involves some fear.

[@drivinganddragons1818]

This is in no way a bad way to think about it. I've done horror effectively in multiple systems and subversion is a HUGE part of it. It is easier in a system with fewer safety nets, but circumventimg then doesn't require a system change either.