I love horror, but hate the idea that whatever's scary should somehow be immune to small arms.

Aliens did it right IMO.

Lovecraftian stuff should usually be vulnerable to small arms, by which I mean man portable grenade launchers and squad automatic weapons.

If a bear attacked you it would be scary but you could still prevail if you had a BAR.

Now add tentacles and SAN loss to the bear and you're all set.

Dread diseases are immune to small arms but realistic transmission probabilities and incubation periods etc would not be scary enough for RPGs.

Right. I think this is the fundamental difference between "horror" and "thriller". To me, horror is when the bad guy always knows where the good guy is, can always walk faster than the good guy can run, and has the impossible ability to hide in places the good guy was watching the entrance to just moments ago.

Thriller is when the bad guy has at least some constraints on his power, whether they're realistic or not.

Speed is scary.

Three scariest critters in Fallout 3, IMO?

Deathclaw
Giant Radscorp
Yao Guai

All three of them come out of nowhere to maul your ass as you're just walking around. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

If no one's mentioned it before, I strongly recommend the Carnival adventure by Khadim Nassir (sp?). Horror has never come difficult for me as a GM, for Shadowrun or otherwise.

Horror things in Shadowrun: Bug City, Blood Magic, Shedim... "The Horrors" themselves whenever they show up, which is sooner than even the Dragons would like...

not to mention all the infected types.....so sad that no one considers them elements of horror....DAMN YOU TWILIGHT!

The problem is that if there's no constraints, explanation, or limits on the bad guy's power, you end up with one of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. If Freddie Kruger can basically make you die at any time by getting sucked into your bed and spewed out as chunks onto the ceiling, or can just fiat himself into being immune to Magic Missile in Dream Warriors when the parapalegic D&D player lucid dreams himself into a Magic User, then there is no explanation as to why anyone has any success against him as all. Any time things don't work out for him, or someone successfully battles him somehow, you just say, "That made no sense, why didn't he just automatically kill everyone in the first 10 minutes of the movie while remaining invulnerable?"

Stuff like that just makes me irritated and makes the movie not make any sense. It makes the movie transition from being "horror" to being "stupid".

"We. Are. Their. FOOD!" is how I explained it to one fan.

Still didn't get it. *Shakes Head*

Here's a book I found, could you tell me what it's about?

Yeah, if I get my hands on the Infected they are elements of horror.


You've seen this, right?

Hmm, you know, somewhere I still have a copy or two of a cyberpunk magazine which was specifically exploring the cthulu mythos in the cyberpunk future...

Including an experimental street drug made from ground up shoggoth...

GURPS had a supplement called CthulhuPunk which did a fairly good job of incorporating Cthulhu style horror into a cyberpunk setting. Check around online, it might still be available somewhere.

The main hurdle in Horror themed SR (well...any genre actually) games is the player character....scratch that, the player. I've been in games where 90 percent of the group is in the mindset of the horror setting, and well...there's that 1 guy (or two guys) that either act like they always act, borderline chaotic neutral/chaotic douchebag, that break the mood, and by damned luck of the gods, fail to die swiftly, leaving us in peace for a few hours.

You can't really just surprise a gaming group by changing up the mood and hoping they'll catch on and act accordingly, often its necessary (and sane) to inform them, and hope they want to do it too. Also, it tends to be a little more difficult in a group setting, as the characters can (arguably) watch each other's backs and tend to have a nasty array of damage-output. Unlike...say the most recent Predator movie, without using godmode and gm railroading, its harder to do a 'pick them off one by one' thing.

Its a mindset thing too. Consider. In a 'real world' setting, if I've unloaded a crap-ton of bullets into that shambling thing that looks like my mother, my reaction is going to be different than a player after having their player-char unload a crap-ton of bullets into that thing you've described looks like their mom.

I'd be freaked the hell out. The player would accuse you of railroading, cheating on game mechanics, point out how its impossible that a human sized creature can take 50 of their customized 'as good as .50 cal rounds' and still even be a semblance of a humanoid.

CthulhuPunk is indeed quite good. It's not written with Shadowrun in mind, but a lot of the ideas are good.

BA-HAHAhahahahaha! Awsome.

Well, yeah. Which was part of the whole "talk to the players, before you worry about what rules to use" advice.

I quote the whole post because, just like mine, I hope the OP reads it more than once. It's important. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

You know, the most horrific thing in Shadowrun is probably living in the Decker/Hacker's fridge.

I have done a couple games of a horror themes shadowrun. And yes make sure your players are on board. I sprang it on mine, and i had 3 characters perfectly set up for it (Gun Nut, Decker and Harry Dresden) and they loved it, unfortunately the other player (wannabe Tony Stark) just kept complaining that his super awesome chest lights shouldnt be able to be remotely turned off by occult forces. Game died after the second session.

Spooky music is a plus. I worked it into the normal background music rotation, and when it got to the spooky bits left some ambient spookiness on repeat, slowly inching the volume up. I was told after the game that i actually scared 2 of the players.

No mages.

That's all you need for horror.

It's solid advance for ANY gaming, especially when you are going at least slightly off-label with genre, but even more applicable to horror because horror tends to be so mood sensitive.

The true face of horror...

...

BIG FAT TROLL IN A SPEEDO!

deleted. I decided I jumped the shark on this one.

Bugs
Ghouls
Vampires/other infected
Various critters
Genetic experiments
Archology Shutdown
Shedim
"The Enemy" aka Horrors
Blood mages
Psychotropic IC
AIs
Dragons
Free Spirits

That's just off the top of my head in a minute. Shadowrun is FULL of horror and it's been that way pretty much from day one. It's all a matter of how it's presented. If you put it forward as "Here's the bad guy, grab the C4" then that's how the players will approach it. But if you build up the atmosphere BEFORE the combat, then you get into horror territory. That's why FPSes tend to have long, darkened corridors with the lights flickering constantly.

He's not fat, but how about this?

For some ideas on horror, I definately have a few ideas as I have thought out this concept before a lot.

There are three main types of horror genres that I think work in Shadowrun:

There's the unkown enemy. To quote from Lucky Number Slevin, 'That's when the villain is most effective...when you don't know what he looks like." This is the 'You hear a rustle in the bushes, footsteps behind you, but when you turn around, there's no one there'. This is the 'You have something recorded on video, but you don't know what it is'. The Matrix could be played like this, so could so many other AI movies, as well as various spy movies. You know there's something out there, but it is the lack of knowledge of what it is and what it is doing that makes it tense and scary.

There's the monster like a Jason/Freddy/Myers movie, where the good guys are being stalked and killed. You can focus on NPCs and have PCs get attacked but survive or whatnot if you don't want to kill PCs. Alien, Predator, any number of such movies get you into a situation like that. Dracula is another example of this, and a few cutscenes here and there can make your villain that much creepier.

There's the 'Is it really happening' sort of story. Mind control and manipulation having them wake up in places they don't know how they got there like waking up covered in blood and a slew of dead bodies around you and the last thing you remember was ordering dinner, horrors that are beyond belief, the players wonder if it is really taking place. Cthulhu is probably a perfect example for this, as are some games like Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which comes from Cthulhu mythos but at the same time, it focuses on how things weave through time that way. The player finds a chapter of the historical encounters, and then experiences that story. Typing that, I think that it could be a fun way to have historical events happen in SR; you find a magic book, and then flash to that, having the players play bit characters in a revealing story.

You can combine these three in any such combination, like System Shock 1 and 2, where the character wakes up with little to no clue of what is going on and is now dealing with these horrific creatures trying to kill them, a main enemy they can't see who taunts them and keeps sending these other creatures after them, and to add tension to the scene, you have limited resources, no help from outside, and very few options.

That last sentence makes me now think of the Resident Evil series, which in the series, is a great example of horror, but the games didn't pull it off well. I was thinking of dropping my PCs sometime into a city that was blocked off from the outside world, and now they have to survive these horrific creatures with only what they can carry or scrounge, and they need to survive and find a way out. Got the idea originally after reading the comic series DMZ, and just sorta built off of that after the second Resident Evil movie.

Just a few thoughts on horror anyway. Hope it gives some ideas.