Supernatural Horror in Gaming – Zombies! (1)

I know I haven’t been keeping up with the gaming-related articles; trying to turn that around now that I’m through listing horror films (for the moment).

Zombies have had a major rise in pop culture over the past few decades: the board games Zombies!!! and Last Night on Earth, Dead Rising, Zombieland, 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, Shaun of the Dead, Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil, Planet Terror, The Walking Dead, World War Z… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s only natural to incorporate them into roleplaying games, given how popular and enduring the genre is.

But how do you make zombies scary? Their horror, along with the “fear” associated with vampires and werewolves, has diminished to naught with the rise of zombies as a trope in and of itself.

Originally they were a parody of life contrasting with the serene peacefulness of the afterlife concept we’ve acquired from the Victorian age; a perversion of what makes us us—life—the forceful and unnatural reanimation of unlife. The Victorians had a strange fascination with death, and made a thing out of taking death photos and wakes: the stillness of death captured on the stillness of photography, a strange fascination with its tranquility. (The Victorians were weird.) Instead of living peacefully in death, our rotting, shambling husks return, showing the decay and grotesqueness of death.

In recent years, George Romero’s vision of shambling corpses has done more to influence the genre than the original mythology of Haitian voodoo. The drive has been to make zombies into the result of a plague, a perpetual motion machine of killing and eating and rising again, which in and of itself is terrifying: something that cannot be countered or defended against by conventional means. And when you eventually die, you are stripped of your humanity, returning, without your bidding, as a ravenous corpse to continue spreading the disease.

But does any of this make zombies inherently scary? Nope. We all know the pieces of this picture: rotting flesh, ravenous hunger, groans, shuffling, soulless stares. They’re even less scary in a fantasy setting, where a holy character might have the power to drive them away (or turn them back into dust, ala Van Helsing). What makes zombies scary, besides the obvious, are the standard things that make all horror scary: the threat of dying, the isolation, atmosphere, tension. Once the world is dark, grim, lonely and atmospheric, that’s when zombies start being scary.

Still, there are quite a number of other tricks to pull with zombies.

Make them ambiguous! Some of my favorite uses of zombies are when they appear to be something else entirely. One of my friends’ games that I borrowed involved a group of FBI agents lurking around in recent-post-Katrina New Orleans, being stalked by what could be either looters or walking dead. My Weird Wars game used a lot of zombies spread all over the place; technically they were humans infected by a Lovecraftian parasite, but let’s not split hairs. Nobody realized they were zombies until they entered fisticuffs with them, and found out after one’s brain case had been split open. In any case, making your zombies act more like something else—or, rather, less like zombies—is a neat trick to play early on, before your players have figured out what exactly they’re in the middle of.

Description! These are rotting, horrible un-creatures. Play up the five senses you may forget to describe: how bad they smell, the squishing sounds they make, the bits hanging off their open rib-cages and their empty eye sockets pecked clean by birds.

People you know! This is a trick that’s showing up with some frequency now: have someone the character knows, or one of the characters, become infected. How long they have before turning, and how the group deals with the  problem, now becomes its own narrative driving force. Maybe it can be staved off with something grotesque: eating or using something from a zombie, mayhaps.

In other cases, have a player run into somebody they knew: unless they were already established early on, don’t expect too much roleplaying other than “I’ll miss you” *blam*, but it’s a great time to run fear or sanity checks after blowing away a close friend.

Plague! Again, a new but well-used development. How each plague spreads is different: in some cases, you need to die by zombie attack, while others just need contact, or a simple zombie bite.

Conserving Resources! Not just ammo and food, which will be in short supply during a zombiepocalypse, but also game resources. If you’re in a system that uses bennies or bonus points that can be spent for ingame bonuses, cut down on those: only allow them to be spent ahead of time. No rerolls or post-roll bonuses puts more emphasis on the dice, making it into a make-or-break event instead of something the players have security nets to cover.

Zombie Flavors! Fast zombies, burning zombies, exploding zombies, tough zombies, zombie animals, zombies who can use simple items/guns… the purist in me thinks these are pure cop-out, but if you’re playing a zombie game, your players might want (or might not expect) a variety in undead. Or you could just change them up altogether, and make them into something else entirely… the creatures in I Am Legend were theoretically vampires, acted like zombies, and were unique to that story/film, for example.

Play the other side! Here’s one that I always wanted to do: subvert the trope and have the players play semi-intelligent zombies. Combine aspects of the zombie genre with a heavy dose of White Wolf-style introspection and “personal horror.” Probably a bit too roleplay-heavy and cerebral for most people, but I think it’s a viable idea. (Yes, it’s Harrowed from Deadlands as a party mechanic.)

Also, check out Libris Mortis if you’re into Pathfinder or d20. It’s one of the greatest d20 supplements, and worth every penny.

Badly Done Horror

I’ve been in two games where lackluster atmosphere killed any attempt at horror. Atmosphere is what makes or breaks horror; without it, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

The first one was in my ex-roommate’s Shadowrun game. Our run was to infiltrate some old “mortuary” in the Projects, only we spent over half the session trying to get into the damn place. We showed up to its location only to find two smokestacks jutting out from a lawn in-between some apartment buildings; any attempt to get into what’s now obviously a crematorium were dashed. (Apparently it wasn’t connected to the city grid—in the projects—at all.)

That game (and session) can be a poster-child for weak GMing, but the capstone was when it turned into a horror adventure. In his description the GM casually threw out that a line about the “bumpy unevenness” of the pitch-black wall. I immediately went, “Oh, so it’s a wall made of skulls covered in crematorium soot,” which got me a scowl. It’s an interesting idea—a stock horror motif—but it’s too predictable, as I proved. A better way would have been for the lights to go out, and have some character feel their way along the walls, describe the texture, and when the group finally turned on a flashlight they’d see the bones now that the PC’s hand had wiped the char away.

Or something. It ended up turning into rock-em sock-em zombies with two necromancers—the GM had been reading Shadowrun: Augmentation—and that was pretty short and easy (due to time constraints). Never mind that the horror mood was lost after a frustrating hour trying to find sewer mains, electrical outlets, water pipes, ducts, crawlways, service hatches, or anything else we could use as a point of egress. (The “real entrance” was found by one of our NPCs, which was a secret tunnel in the basement of one of the three apartments.)

The other was one of Keving’s Dark Heresy games. After a bad roll on a random warp feedback chart, we found ourselves pursued by a Greater Unbound Demon; abandoning ship, Keving merged us into a space hulk, an abandoned tech ship in the void of space. For the first ten minutes or so, he layered the details on thick, of flickering hazard lights and darkened corridors, but suddenly stopped the description. When several previously missing players showed up next session, they figured the ship was in new and pristine condition—they’d missed the description.

Things went downhill, again due to some mistakes in GM-player communication. Only half the group showed up, which was problematic; without a driving focus, we just sat around on the bridge. What made things worse—and broke Keving’s otherwise fine description—was telling us that the ship’s engines and power systems were “off;” Rich attempted to turn them on, which led to an argument on semantics (“off” versus “non-functional”) which lasted on and off for over two hours. Keving was frustrated by the griefing, Matt was bored, and I gave up and started my German homework.

The next session was pure botched horror. Keving didn’t bother repeating any description from the last session, so the two players who’d missed out imagined they were in some ultra-sterile, ultra-clean, brightly lit spaceship. The loss of atmosphere was a major blow; if Keving had expanded on his description, and painted a picture of a rusting, dilapidated, lights-flickering-silently space hulk, it could have been salvageable.

Next, things broke down into horribly predictable pacing. Eventually, the group split up, with me (the Tech Priest) and Matt’s Guardsman into the ship to the hold to jump-start the engines. Here it broke down into the atypical haunted house: we’d see blood leaking out from under a door or section of wall, and take aim at it, just before the obligatory weird horror jumped out. That was it: we’d see blood, or hear something, and then something would jump out suddenly, and we’d shoot it dead. Little to no description, too much foresight; the illogical design was worst, like this space hulk was some haunted house carnival ride. (Some Doom III/Half-Life style “corpses pulled into crawlspaces moments would have helped.) Horror’s biggest strength is the unknown, knowing that there is a threat but not where it is or how to counter it. Predictability kills all of that.

There are dozens of good ways to handle this situation; the first thing that comes to my mind is using other tactile senses. Hearing some scuttling off in the dark, the occasional noise heard only by one person, the feeling that something is watching you… that would have been fantastic. Having two characters walk down a winding corridor, killing everything that jumps out at them isn’t scary; unlike in a movie, yelling “Surprise!” doesn’t work in a game. Instead, Keving should have worked on atmosphere and the isolation of leaving the group: make us wonder what’s out there, why it’s following us, how to get rid of it, rather than assume it’s just more of the things we’ve been killing every couple of corridors.

Interesting to note, both examples involved things breaking down before the horror mode is turned on. Handling players is a critical skill, as is thinking on your feet; some improv would have killed either of the two examples rather than make them into horrible memories and some of our group’s memes.

The Shadowrun example was a perfect horror set-piece setup, but too much time was spent finding its single illogical point of access. (The only other thing we could think of was to rappel down the smokestacks, only we didn’t have any rope or climb skills.) If the GM had allowed one of the many “use a common access point” options we’d thought up, I don’t think we would have been as frustrated and uncaring as we were: if this building is so janky that it’s in the middle of the city-funded Projects, but not connected to the city grid, that we need an NPC to hand-wave us into the building, I’m preparing for GM railroading, not serious horror.

Dark Heresy could have been handled much, much better. I’ve had semantics issues between myself and players every now and then—the picture in the GM’s mind is always clearer than what the GM can tell the players in words and maps. This was the worst example I’d ever heard. A simple correction would have worked, but instead, Keving and Rich dug in their heels, which left everyone else bored. The second half of the space hulk session (and final session of that game) didn’t improve our investment, and Keving didn’t try to hook the players who’d missed the previous game. Atmosphere could have made up for the poorly designed “haunted house” feel that the session had, and having all the players interested would have worked wonders.

Supernatural Horror – Lovecraft (2) The Cthulhu Game

When I last bothered to do a Supernatural Horror in Gaming post—last week’s doesn’t count—it was about Lovecraft.  I was reading a lot of Lovecraft at the time, and figured it would be the first of several posts on Lovecraft and gaming (or, rather, Lovecraftian gaming); most of all, while the tropes and recurring themes of the Mythos work are useful, they’re not clear-cut helpers for running a horror game. As we’re counting down to Halloween and the witching season, it’s time to get the old horror cogs grinding again.

A Cthulhu game is a very different animal from most roleplaying games you’ll run or play in. While there are any number of flavors a Cthulhu game can come in—the characters can be pulp heroes, or D&D adventurers, or elite military operatives—the tried-and-true formula for Call of Cthulhu is normal boring player characters, who may or may not have horrible secrets, who stumble upon something much larger than themselves. As everyday working-class joes, the players don’t have access to mystic spells or ‘mecha or the big guns; they have to survive by their wits and through teamwork together.

Neither of which usually happens, of course; most Cthulhu games are one-nighters or short tournament games for conventions, since that’s all the time needed for the characters to die, go insane, and murder everybody else, hopefully in that order.

People tell me you can run full-length Cthulhu campaigns; I’m kind of skeptical. Between the fragility of the characters, and finding 2-6 players who are interested in the methodical, oppressive grind of the Mythos, I just don’t see it going on for years and years. Not that I think it wouldn’t be fun, but it’s hard enough to find people interested in a space opera game, much less “let’s play ‘you’re a speck of dust in the eyes of these all-powerful extraterrestrial entities, and will probably go insane and die from learning a fraction of their secrets,’ mkay?” Your group may prove me different; power to you!

Choose Your Style: The Characters Have A Chance!

There’s been a movement in recent years to make characters more capable, closer to pulp heroes. The Mythos monsters can be killed, or at least subdued for another millenia, or otherwise driven off before they finish eating the world. The two-fisted protagonists can still die, depending on the GM, but they at least have a chance of success. A lot of games with Mythos aspects also fall into this genre: it’s hard to imagine D&D or Pathfinder characters falling to their insane deaths, unless the module is built that way, and CthulhuTech walks the fine borderline between oppressive-depressive and awesome anime heroes.

This is another style of game entirely, and a lot of purists don’t see it as truly Lovecraftian: Lovecraft’s horror was the realization within people that they are nothing more than insignificant specks of dust, lost in the void where greater cosmic powers shake the rafters of the heavens.

Choose Your Style: Grand Theft Normal Boring Life

The standard Call of Cthulhu game puts the characters as normal people: nothing out of the ordinary, nothing too powerful. We’re talking average joes here, bartenders and teachers and whatnot. The Mythos horrors are even more deadly and powerful when the insignificant specks of dust are insignificant specks to the rest of the dust cloud. In theory, characters are less likely to try action-movie heroics when they’re playing pencil-pushers; in reality, when they do, their lackluster characters are unable to pull off anything awesome.

“Gaming the system” and making a soldier or cop won’t actually help; when that character inevitably goes insane, they’re just giving the GM even more fodder to kill the other characters—firearms and/or explosives. The way to game the system is not to play: no matter what the players make, the GM will have some trick up their sleeve. Players may think that having big guns is an asset, but when they go insane (or get corrupted), the other players may think twice on their choices in life.

Investigation

All Cthulhu games share one general theme in common: investigation. The characters will, at some point early on, hear about some strange occurrence or organization, and will (hopefully) hit the books. It may sound dull—and it is a reason people don’t like Cthulhu games, because they spend so much time researching things that won’t matter shortly since they’ll all die—but it is a stable trope of the genre.

There are some advantages to doing all this research. Knowing what they’re going up against could be a major asset to the PCs, if they choose to pay attention and plan accordingly. It may also be a chance to learn some of the antagonists’ weaknesses: maybe the ancient voodoo cult was terrified by a certain symbol. Or maybe the players could get a bonus to some rolls against the bulbous horror (which would work really well in, say, tactical high fantasy; I’m thinking of the archivist class from Heroes of Horror here).

Madness and Sanity

A central theme for Lovecraft, and something most games latch on to. There’s lots of fun little bits to play around with here. You can always describe the world in more and more nightmarish tones as the characters’ sanity drips away. And it’s fun to play the paranoia card: if someone has something they’re hiding, have the less-sane characters notice it. Or perhaps have someone find something that could be read as incriminating another character. The less sane the characters are, the more reason you have to give them ideas that their companions are actually working against them. Work that inter-party conflict; it’ll come out eventually, when the characters go fully insane.

Characters that Hate Each Other

Speaking of paranoia and party conflict… many great Call of Cthulhu adventures feature pre-generated characters with pre-generated reasons to hate each other. Long-standing hatreds, jealousies, phobias or disorders. Some adventures have intricately detailed histories of why the characters are so messed up, why they hate one another so much, or other reasons to build party conflict. The best one I’ve seen was from one of the World of Cthulhu magazines, where the characters were inbred country folk on a rural island village. Each one had a very grim past, filled with dark secrets; some were jealous of other PCs, while others had personal reasons to hate someone else.

Trust and mistrust are two of the most important tropes to horror, and two that come up the most in a Lovecraft game. Any reason to not trust another PC is another reason the monsters will win: if the party’s focusing on screwing each other over, or are too preoccupied with other things, they’re not going to be looking into the dark for monsters. And are going to be much less likely to do the “working together” parts necessary to survive.

Nobody Believes You

Let’s play What If. What if you uncovered some dark, foreboding secret about that traveling religious group that recently set up shop in town, revealing tales about human sacrifice and elder gods coming to destroy and slaughter, finding all sorts of horrible truths about this outwardly friendly group of pacifists? And what if you took this information to the authorities: the first harness bull walking the beat that you run across, or perhaps the lieutenant at the station itself? What would happen?

Most likely, you’d end up with a breth test on the spot, followed by a night in the slammer to cool you off, and a drug test to boot. Or they might laugh at you to your face and shove you aside, continuing on. Or they might send you to a psych ward, and you’ll end up in… a sanitarium. Or, if you’re really unlucky, the chief of police is in on it, and throws you to the wolves—in this case, the cult you just stumbled upon. And you already know how that’s going down.

Which is why it’s never a good idea to go running to the authorities in a Cthulhu game. Either nobody will pay attention to you, or something bad will happen, be it a $20 fine or death by cannibalism. The only option is to keep delving, looking for more evidence (and a good contact to unload it on), or to prevent the cult’s goals by your own power.

Baiting and-or Switching

Probably the biggest problem with a Cthulhu game: if you’ve played one, you’ve played them all. The first time players run through a Cthulhu game, they expect something other than what they’re in for: sure, it’s got a legendary reputation for character-slaughtering, but would is the GM cruel enough to really… Oh. Apparently so.

After the first couple Cthulhu games, your players probably won’t be looking forward to another one: the goal isn’t exactly to kill their characters, but that’s what happens nine times out of ten. (Unless you’re being very, very nice and softball the hell out of everything.) On a macro level, people are investing a lot of time into the game, and not all players it “productive” or “fun” to continually play in campaigns where they already know what’s going to happen.

So, the first rule: if the characters don’t want to play a Cthulhu game, either don’t run one, or better yet, don’t tell them it’s a Cthulhu game. At this point in time, you can find a roleplaying game in every flavor with elements of the Mythos in it: Cthonian Stars and CthulhuTech for science fiction; 4e D&D and Pathfinder have elements for tactical high fantasy; Trail of Cthulhu and Realms of Cthulhu for pulpy “heroic horror.” If you don’t want to pull a complete bait-and-switch, run one of the pulpy, action-heavy game where players not only have a high chance of survivability, they also can allow the players to save the world.

Choosing the Right Horror System for You

In this day and age, there’s a sizable chunk of gaming systems for a horror game to choose from, covering all the major genres and styles. But how do they deal with horror? Any game can be an awesome horror game through a good GM: description, atmosphere, working those horror tropes and playing your cards right. But what separates one horror system from another?

Generally, they fall into three big categories; there’s no real downside to any of them, and they’re just my quick observations on the subject.

Games with Horror Elements Attached

Most game systems (and settings) aren’t built to cater solely to horror; instead, what horror mechanics they have are attached to the rules, and amplified by their detailed setting and atmosphere. Maybe the game doesn’t go into as much depth with their horror, or perhaps it splits its focus between horror and another mindset. Not being designed around horror means that the GM will have to do a lot more legwork, but mastering atmosphere will go a long way to making any game a horror game, and any good horror game comes with plenty of great atmosphere.

Ravenloft is a great example of this; Dungeons & Dragons is not a game with a horror mindset, and AD&D was no exception, yet Ravenloft managed to pull it off. The mechanical changes were minimum, and largely to create an air of the unknown—many spells and powers didn’t work as-written in the Player’s Handbook—topped off with corruption features for the GM to “taint” the players through bribes of power. The biggest thing going for Ravenloft wasn’t the tacked-on mechanics, which were slick; instead, it was the setting, atmosphere, and some of the best horror advice for the GM ever penned in a RPG supplement.

Horror Games

This style of game combines form and function by making its horror elements a major part of the core system. Instead of being a normal game that can cope with horror, this would be a horror game that can run without its horror elements.

Deadlands is the game that comes to my mind first. It won a stack of awards in the late ’90s, and for good reason: it is one of the best combinations of form and function in gaming. I’m not just talking about the horror elements, but also the western elements: the Tombstone Epitaph tabloid sections, how the character sheets had little bullets on the sides for the player to track ammo using a paperclip, the text’s vernacular. The supernatural horror elements were highly engrained with the western ones: hexslingers cast spells by making a poker draw against manitou demons; Guts checks (fear checks) and phobias were a major part of the system; characters could, would, and did die in shootouts, only to get back up as an undead Harrowed. And there were the titular deadlands. The game had a fantastic setting, filled with plenty of atmosphere and isolation, carefully tweaking the Old West into the darker, sinister, grittier Weird West.

Games which Create Horror by Character-Threat Disparity

The smallest chunk of horror games are those which create an atmosphere of tense, visceral horror from the vast difference in power level between players and monsters. Players are more powerless and weak, while the monsters are true supernatural entities, vastly more powerful than human comprehension allows. Most authority figures don’t believe the PCs, or just don’t care, or are in league with the evil; thus the players have limited resources and no backup.

I’m actually thinking less Call of Cthulhu and more Little Fears. At least, how I’d run Little Fears. The game is based around children who are terrified by the bogeymen who live under their beds and in their closets (in actuality, doorways to Closetland); this is a game where you play terrified children fighting back against the darkness. The idea takes one of the most vulnerable archetype, children, and sets them against the nightmare realm of soulless children and terrifying monsters.  Your parents don’t believe you, of course, and as a child it’s not like you have access to weaponry or magic or anything. You do have your power of believe, but even that can work against you. There’s a huge disparity between a child and a monster, and Little Fears does a great job with it.

So, Where Do Other Games Fit In?

Don’t Rest Your Head: While not entirely horror, it is built around the horrific Nightmare City; madness and horror are close enough to be linked easily. The system is tight yet simple: you roll a dice pool, made up of your Madness, your Discipline, and your Exhaustion; whichever one rolls the highest determines your fate. Rolling too much Madness causes the world to take a step further into Nightmareville; rolling your Exhaustion can cause you to crash, breaking your insomniac connection with the world… but not the connection of the nightmares to you. As an indie game with its own new system, DRYH falls into the second category, as its mechanics are specifically built to fit with the setting and mindset.

CthulhuTech: This is a hard one to place, if only because the game design is balanced between cinematic anime-esque mecha action, and traditional Lovecraftian horror. It has most of the traditional horror mechanics, such as fear and phobia tables, and a variety of Lovecraftian monsters, and a gritty nigh-apocalyptic ending. But CthulhuTech is a lot more of a epic action game with horror elements, where characters have many options to put down these foes at their disposal: characters can be psychics or mecha jockeys or use Mythos symbiotes or spells to fight Mythos creatures. I’d put it in the first category. The game never felt as oppressively horrific as CoC or Deadlands, even though its horror elements are on the surface.

World of Darkness: WoD certainly is a horror setting, but is it a horror game? The characters are notably more powerful than the vast armies of “average joes,” and while there are plenty of threats to put PCs in their place on the feeding order, having supernatural powers gives players a major advantage. I’d file it in the first category, though it could squeeze into the second category: it was first billed as “a game of personal horror,” after all, and most of that was supposed to come out via roleplaying.

Weird Wars: Are we talking d20 or Savage Worlds? In either case, the first category; both Weird Wars are excellent examples of horror setting and atmosphere, but the mechanics aren’t based around horror. Instead, characters exist within a horror world, but aren’t as influenced by the horrors. Weird War II always felt like it wanted to be a serious historical game in its ratio of horror elements to timelines and overviews.

Call of Cthulhu: Probably the only other game to fall into the third category; also, the biggest and most popular. Characters are specks of dust in the eyes of the Great Old Ones, and are treated accordingly.

Dark Ages, Morality, and Horror

With Netflix all but pushing me to see Black Death, popping up in multiple suggestion categories, I caved to peer pressure and gave it a view. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking movie; if you’ve seen an action-horror hybrid flick in recent years, you’ve probably seen this movie. Not that it’s a bad film; Sean Bean gives his usual stellar performance, the atmosphere is damn creepy in a non-horror way, and the movie’s big twist was one I didn’t actually see coming. It’s a tad short, and doesn’t feel fully developed—not living up to its full potential—which is kind of a letdown.

Still, what sticks with me from the film isn’t the film itself; instead, it put me in mind of Dark Ages Vampire, and I keep coming back to that.

Vampire players usually get typecast as gothy, tortured soul, fairy-wiccan-neo-pagans. And like most stereotypes, there’s an element of truth there. And the game isn’t actually a White Wolf line that interests me, partly because of the weird player base, and partly because I have no idea what I’d do with it. (Not that the latter stops me from liking Mummy or Changeling at all.)

And how does this relate back to Black Death? Dark Ages turned a lot of the WoD stereotypes on their head. See, as a historical supplement/setting, a surprising chunk of the game’s material deals with religion. Think about it: it takes place in a time period where the predominant part of the world is deeply religious, be it Catholicism or Islam. Bam, now you’re the living dead, unable to ever see the sun again, and forced to drink blood to survive; everyone you knew withers and dies while you remain untouched by the pass of ages.

Having turned into a supernatural being scorned by life—or, having discovered that such beings exist—how do your character rectify that? Is this a sign from divine, punishing you for sins you must have committed? Is this a reward, giving you the powers of the enemy to strike back at them? Do you embrace your base animal urges, having been cut free from morality? Plenty of interesting roleplaying opportunities, though I’m not sure every group would have fun delving into those questions, particularly with the slippery slope of roleplaying religion.

That’s also a huge part of Black Death, too: dealing with faith in a dark, oppressive world. It’s a character study, in a way, of how different people cope with the hellish world of the plague: compare the protagonist Osmund with Sean Bean’s crusader knight Ulrich, and if you think you’ve pegged it, wait until the end. This also ties into the other study, warring religions rolling into the “battle of good and evil” trope, where things are purely in shades of gray. The voice-over intro is what really caught my attention:

The fumes of the dead are in the air like poison. The plague, more cruel and more pitiless than war, descended upon us. A pestilence, that would leave half of our kingdom dead. Where did it come from? What carried its germ. The priests told us it was God’s punishment. For what sin? What commandment must we break that could earn this? No, we knew the truth. This was not God’s work, but devilry. Or witchcraft. But our task, to hunt down a demon, was God’s cure.

Black Death is a solid example of the World of Darkness in a Dark Ages setting. The film’s not exactly Dark Ages Vampire in particular—its plot and characters are far closer to Inquisitor—but there’s a lot of inspiration for the whole line in there. The time period is roughly a hundred years later (depending on your Dark Ages edition). It has a gloomy, oppressive world, pretty much the best visualization of the historical World of Darkness I’ve seen. And it has a solid blend of action, mystery, and horror.

Supernatural Horror – Lovecraft (1) Lovecraftian Tropes

Originally, I started out writing this for Wednesday (3 February ’11), but thanks to a surprise case of Head Injury Theater and a trip to the ER, I didn’t get past the rough draft stage. Needless to say, I took the rest of the week off recovering. So, I’m splitting up the entry into three smaller parts, looking at aspects of Lovecraft and how they relate to horror roleplaying.

I had a decent intro paragraph that is now long since forgotten, save that it brought up a quote from some random dolt (more on him later) who plays in the game I’m in. The quote is roughly “What’s the point in playing a game [Call of Cthulhu] where you know everybody is going to die at the end?,” an only slightly bitter sentiment following the guy’s first exposure to CoC a few months prior. To be honest, I don’t have so much a problem about playing in a Cthulhu game so much as I can’t comprehend how you can have a “long-running” Cthulhu game. Sure, sure, the protagonists can spend a half-dozen tense sessions building up knowledge of strange cults, leading to extraplanar entities, leading to the eventual madness and death. But since the guys at Chaosium have honed this arc down to the point where you can play it in a three- to five-hour session (e.g., convention adventures, tourney adventures, pretty much all premade Cthulhu adventures)… I don’t see a reason to delay the inevitable and draw it out over several months. Namely, because either the players will have done something stupid and went insane/bumbled into the local Migou/Esoteric Order of Dagon convention, or because the GM would have done something right and driven the PCs mad/into the downward spiral of infighting/straight into a shoggoth hive or something.

One last Lovecraft-related anecdote. After playing in a few CoC games, my roommate decided he should (as a nerd and all) delve into the actual Lovecraft stories and read some of the Mythos. So, with all due attention, he asked to borrow one of my Lovecraft comps (the SFBC collection Black Seas of Infinity, which I’ve been reading again, hence the topic). Some fifteen-twenty minutes later, he returned the book, having read the first story (“The Call of Cthulhu” proper), telling me “It wasn’t scary at all, but I thought it was pretty cool that they brained Cthulhu with a tramp steamer.” No, these are not terribly scary in the campfire tale/ghost story vein; they’re not even spooky or spine-tingling.

Let’s put that up front (along with the fact Lovecraft used prose we now consider antiquated). The Mythos is scary because of the exact tropes I’ve underlined below, namely the first one; it’s a psychological terror, realizing that everything we come to accept as fact, realizing the boundaries of Human Ingenuity, realizing the place of humanity on the cosmic scale are so finite and infinitesimally small that we are nothing more than playthings to beings vastly more intelligent and powerful. Don’t read Lovecraft because you want to jump out of your seat. Read Lovecraft because you want to see human perceptions of the world—namely, the Victorian/Edwardian “humanity is so incredibly advanced right now,” “pushing back the dark boundaries of the universe with the light of civilization and industry” conception—shattered when the smartest and most powerful are put in the Migou’s killing jar.

Anyways, onward.

Supernatural Horror in Gaming: The Familiar Unknown

Most likely, you thought this series was dead and gone; truth be told, there’s a metric ton of horror-related parts left to (over-)analyze. I figured it would be weekly(ish) only in October through Halloween, and pop up whenever I got around to it during the rest of the year. So far, that would be the weeks surrounding the fifth of never. However. I’ve spent most of this week beplagued, so posting something left on the backburner is easier than writing new material. By posting this, it leaves me free to wander back off to watch more police procedurals and Doctor Who off the DVR.

One of the most important yet underused rules of effective horror: making the unreal seem normal. Horror works great when it appear as an everyday setting, perhaps nothing amiss but with a distinct feeling of difference or strange, until the horror is uncovered.

Think about this setup. On a dark and stormy night, the characters walk into a shack in the middle of the woods, finding it full of bodies and gruesome description. What are they going to do? Most likely, they’re hitting it with whatever explosives or area-of-effect spells the system can muster while high-tailing it in the other direction. This place is not uninviting; it’s blatantly advertising the horror nature of the building, the inhabitant, and your game. You may as well put a neon sign outside the building that says “The Disembowler is Now [OUT].”

Compare that to finding an old hunter’s cabin on the stormy night, with a roaring fire, a few inviting beds, and even some stew on the stove. The characters are more likely to stick around, until the person standing watch starts to drift off, hears a scratching on the roof, sees a light approaching the door… The shack’s horrific inhabitant is coming home, and the tired guard is sluggish and dopey from too much turkey stew, sitting in the chair under a blanket as the doorknob slowly rotates. Or perhaps some creature jumps out of the smoldering hearth, right as the watchman is closest to sleep, coming from a place nobody expected it. A fireplace with a (formerly) roaring fire is almost always considered a “secure” entry point compared to doors and windows, after all.

In the meantime, the players have been wondering about what’s going on, and any small bits that don’t make sense can amp up that paranoia and suspicion: not enough for the characters to bolt, but enough for the players to be a little concerned about their safety.

This series is meant to give a deeper look at using horror and terror in roleplaying games. Ghost stories and horror tales have been enthusing people for time immemorial; people like to feel a constructed sense of emotional fear. Things work different in a roleplaying game, but horror is still enjoyable, it’s still an ancient and established trope. Obviously, as a GM, you must want to incorporate horror, and your players won’t necessarily want the horror included. But for those who do…

Supernatural Horror in Gaming – Audience

Truth be told, a horror game is very easy to run, in terms of making the PCs afraid. All it takes is for a player to say “My character’s scared,” or for the GM to inform someone “You’re terrified!” and bam, job well done there. Making a character scared is easy, and means nothing. The real trick to horror is instilling this fear in your players—making players afraid is worth unquantifiable amounts more than “terrifying” their characters.

This series is meant to give a deeper look at using horror and terror in roleplaying games. Ghost stories and horror tales have been enthusing people for time immemorial; people like to feel a constructed sense of emotional fear. Things work different in a roleplaying game, but horror is still enjoyable, it’s still an ancient and established trope. Obviously, as a GM, you must want to incorporate horror, and your players won’t necessarily want the horror included. But for those who do…

Supernatural Horror in Roleplaying – Playing the Players

In your standard roleplaying game, it’s in everyone’s best interest to keep the group unified and working together. That changes in a horror game. As a GM in a horror game, sowing the seeds of dissension and fracturing the group bonds is a must. You want your players to be suspicious of each other; you want them wondering where Bob the Cleric wanders off to every night, who Rutger the Street Samurai is always getting vid-calls from.

In the horror game, information is a commodity, even within the group. So is trust. Knowledge and trust build security, and you can’t rightly build an atmosphere of dread when people feel secure. Your job, as a GM, is to fragment the distribution of both of these: instead of security and help, players should find paranoia and cautious glances.

This series is meant to give a deeper look at using horror and terror in roleplaying games. Ghost stories and horror tales have been enthusing people for time immemorial; people like to feel a constructed sense of emotional fear. Things work different in a roleplaying game, but horror is still enjoyable, it’s still an ancient and established trope. Obviously, as a GM, you must want to incorporate horror, and your players won’t necessarily want the horror included. But for those who do…

The Art of the Faustian Deal

Faustian deals are a prime part of roleplaying; they might not be aspects of supernatural horror, but they have a solid tradition in gaming. The stereotype is that evil will reach out to PCs, and offer them power… at a price. And who can say no to powerful abilities or weapons, especially when one is sure of their own safety?

In short: you must know what your players want, find out what they’re willing to trade for it, and close the deal, while everyone knows it’s a bad deal. There is nothing more satisfying than having players willingly walk into a Faustian trap, knowing there are strings attached, and yet they walk into it anyway.