High thresholds and/or GM fiat.

I've got several very good role-players in my group. One of them is playing a former doctor who spent some time in prison and came out addicted to Jesus [character's name is Newhart].

I had them do a run where they inadvertently derailed a mag-lev train onto a town to get a shipment of an unknown drug. This caused Newhart to seriously question his motivations for running, and the team he is working with. He very nearly ran towards the derailment to save people, but was distracted and pulled back by the rest of the team. Later on, the full reality of what he had done hit him, and in the middle of talking to the Johnson he jams himself full of the mystery drug in a suicide attempt.

That attempt attracts a shade to him. A shade which has now assumed "The Voice of God" and whispers into Newhart's ear that everything he does is part of His plan, and that all will be well if he trusts the Lord.

I have a spirit that thrives on abasement, degradation, despair and sorrow influencing one of my players. I'm just now realizing the horror that I, as the GM, can create from this. I must thank this thread.

I'm not that fragile, Jeff. You didn't hurt my feelings or piss me off. And you do make a good point. I still like the book as inspiration, not merely fuel for the stereotypical hack and slash D&D dungeon crawl. Among other things, it talks about DM/GM style, how the material can be presented effectively to achieve the intended horrific effect, and the difference between villains committing evil simply because it is evil and villains with motive and beliefs. Of course, you're right. It's a lot easier to ignore that part and just play around with the "cool stuff." The book is crap without a capable GM or player looking for more than a scary new monster.

For instance (I'll be brief):
The road to hell is paved with good intentions: imagine a "bad guy" who earnestly believes that he is the hero and the PCs are the evil ones. How many villains really see themselves as villains? And on that note, who's to say the PCs haven't unwittingly partaken in their own fair share of villainry? Forcing players to confront their own morality and/or trick them into committing acts of evil they thought were good deeds is a favorite tactic of mine. There is no greater horror than discovering one's own follies and observing the repercussions they cause. How horrible to find horror within oneself. Much better than a random taint elemental tossed in just for the hell of it... Sorry, I just had to defend the book and D&D in general with my firmly held belief that the printed material in source books don't matter nearly as much as what the GM and players do with it.

Ah, the infamous (rock band) bard party... that, right there, is horrific in and of itself.

I was thinking pan flutes, a pair of banjos and a washboard.

A lot of horror depends on the players more than the GM ability. Some of them will just laugh regardless of material and method of presentation.

It hasn't been said yet, which surprises me, but if you're going for horror... don't do zombies. Just... don't. They're fun and all, but horrifying to decked out street sams they ain't. I don't care if they're naked in the rain with nothing but a wet washcloth to defend themselves, they ain't gonna be scared. Zombies won't do it.

Depends on how you do it. I've tossed something at my group that they've categorized as zombies for the lack of a better term. I'm not going for horror, but these guys are turning tail, possibly even leaving a team mate in the process (and a $30k drone), so I guess it was effective.

If you can outrun a threat, there's no sense of danger and no horror.

What's interesting is if you look at the history of the zombie, pre-Romero, they were bodies brought back to life by the Hatian Voodoo practitioners, the bokors. There was also the zombi astral which is a human soul that is captured by a bokor and used to enhance the bokor's power. I find that more much more intriguing than a mindless, shuffling, eating machine.

I still maintain that the giant insect is the most frightening concept ever!

That's assuming that running is an option. If you're trapped, the fact that you can run faster doesn't mean a whole lot. Or for that matter, if they can keep coming, forever, and you need to sleep... Once they realize they can run, but they can't rest, then it becomes a different matter.

Is crawling an option?

You have to give them a reason not to. Either the little girl is someones relative or this is not the first time they have met her. Maybe they saved her and her family from a Corp several missions before and the family went underground. The runners then bump into her again in Chicago, mom and dad are dead and shes hides from the nasties ala newt in aliens. She just wants to leave and be safe. You cant expect them to throw away the basic human need to survive on someone they don't even know who might be a threat.

[edit] honestly if your in a war zone that has used little kids to blow people up by strapping explosives to their backs and you see some kid you dont know running toward you with a backpack and you have a gun. What are you going to do? Chicago is like a war zone.

The most unsettling experience of my life has been a dream, I dreamt that I was dreaming, than I woke up and went on with my buisness but when I tryed to get out of home I found it was floating in a void (more a sky without clouds and with no ground, just a light blu background and a sense of unlimited vastness; it was a pleasant sensation), at that point I realized that was a dream (yes I was actualy able to think in the dream, I was litteraly awake in the dream) so I forced Myself to wake up, but there was still a sense of non-reality, after a while things around me started to fade into nothingness and I realized that I just dreamt of awakening and I was still dreaming; it went on for several awakenings until my mother came to wake me up, at that point I didn't know if I was awakened or I was still dreaming.
Just think to the PC going to sleep and keeping awakening again and again, and make them belive that if they don't find a way to get up their bodies are going to die for starvation and/or disadration (or have the organs harvested, or what you want), and the whoole thing goes on until they all manage to get killed in the dream and wake up in the real world. It could be something like a metaplanar quest within their dreams, they gain karma and later they might come across things already happened in the dream that can lead to some nice gain (for example in the dream they discover the combination of a safe, and than they come across the same safe in the real world .... do they realize that they know the combination? Do they remeber it?); it is also a good way to introduce horror themed runs without messing up the setting (and to mess up the players minds at the same time).

I recently dreamed that I was watching the new Terminator movie in a theater and it sucked horribly. And it was long. And it included a two hour long intermission during which they showed various cartoon shorts. At some point, near the end of the intermission, I was forced to leave the theater for some reason. And the movie ended while I was outside. And despite it sucking horribly, I wanted to see how it ended, thus forcing my to sit tthrough the whole thing again. Of course, I wasn't going to pay for a ticket to see such a horrible movie when I had already paid to see it once so I broke into the theater this time. But a cop saw me break in and I had to kill him with his own gun. So there I am, in the lobby of this theater, shooting at various police officers who had converged on the scene after the death of the first cop, killing many of them, waiting for the movie to get to the part that was on while I was out. And then, when the movie nears the end of the second two-hour long cartoon intermission, I wake up, never having seen the ending of the sucktastic film that I had, by this time, kiled dozens of police officers for a chance to see.


Sitting through a long sucktastic movie twice and missing the ending both times. That is true horror.

Yeah, I had run a few horror scenarios back in the day but basically nothing that is traditionally horrific like a zombie or a lone vampire or a serial killer can stand up to the direct sustained firepower of a full runner team. So I am sure people had fun and we did fun things with the atmosphere but the challenge level on the horror runs was far down there.

That really makes me smile. I had a lot of fun writing that. I have a 1/3 completed new module which is also horror-themed, but also comic. It is definitely more structured as an actual adventure. And I have a 3/4 complete second part to Dark King. I really must free up time to finish them both.

Thanks for the feedback,

Khadim.

You know chummers, we have been talking about how implement the horror theme in SR for a while, and it has been a good discussion so far, but Crysalis has replyed only three times in this thread and all in the first page. I wonder if she's still reading this thread and if we are of any use to hers champain.

A long time ago, I ran a horror game using the old WoD system. Everyone got pre-generated characters who were mostly non-combat focused archaeologists, each with their own goals and traits. It was a Lovecraftian style adventure set in the Jungles of South America, investigating ancient Mayan ruins. It blended some real world politics (the Shining Path organization were part of the adventure) and native myths (Jaguar men and fragments of Aztec mythology). The PCs had been warned by the old shaman that no mortal weapons could harm the Jaguar Men and given three blessed spears that could harm them.

Unfortunately one of the players had a habit of reading rule books and thought he knew a bit about "Jaguar Men", particularly as I was using Werewolf: The Apocalypse for basic rules. When the players stumbled into a weapons cache, they thought it was Christmas. For ages they'd been playing low-power games where the most powerful weaponry they'd get access to were automatic pistols or maybe an SMG. They asked what was in it and I off-handedly replied "oh, machine guns, grenades, RPGs." Then one of the Jaguar men entered. Did they do what any sensible archaeologist would do? Nope - the rulebook reading player explained that even if the Jaguar men regenerated from "non-blessed" weapons, they'd certainly go down under full machine gun fire and that damage would probably become "aggravated" (non-regeneratable) once it hit overflow.

So the one combat-capable member of the party hefts a machine gun up and unleashes a hail of bullets at this supernatural creature. The player excitedly asks for the results and I say: "The bullets pass through the Jaguar man's body as if he were a ghost, blowing chips of stone and dust from the chamber wall behind him." The player's jaw actually dropped. Well duh - the shaman had told them they couldn't be harmed by mortal weapons.

Anyway, the entire party was eventually sacrificed to an ancient monstrosity atop a forgotten Mayan pyramid. It was a bit of a downer.

What went wrong? Well mismatched expectations was probably one, though it was fairly clear that I was running a more mystery-horror sort of game than anything else. At some point though, everybody suddenly lost their immersion and snapped into metagame mode. It was undoubtedly the weapons that did it. Things had been quite good up until that point.

There's probably a point in there somewhere, though I don't know what it is. The only conclusion I can honestly draw is that my game would have gone much better if the players hadn't shown up.

Maybe we were too scary and she's run away!

Maybe she got so bored that she started sleeping, and she dreamt about posting, than she woke up and realized it was a dream and posted, just to wake up again, and post, and wake up again, and post, and wake up again, and post, and wake up again, and post, and wake up again, and post,............................ You know dreaming of dreaming, well maybe you just dreamt it.

Hi guys,

I still read the thread, but I have been busy with other things. Nothing big really.

I'll post a message later.

-Chrysalis

My last dream was that of being in a cold room. The steam from my body dissipating elusively against the cold stone walls. There a hulking man with a knife and a knowledge of all things anatomical, separated my skin off the frame of muscle and sinew. He would occasionally tisk and throw a lump of fat to a junk yard dog that waited by his side leering at me. I was being prepared and beautified for my tryst. I was dressed in a pink silk dress, my bloody making the dress glisten. I was very small and I danced with my father at my wedding. Everyone else had long since died, their skin turned black, with white mold growing out of their eyesockets.

I remember being twirled around as I saw the dog circle me, with its dark bristling fur. It padding on the tables and looking at me.

I was brought into a bed room, it was called a bowery, with white gauze fly nets hiding, and a round silk bed. I fell on the bed and he lied on top. He lifted my veil and kissed me on the lips. We consumated the night, the bed sheets slipping showing it to be a bed of nails. I picked the knife from the bed and cut off his face. As he lay there in his own pool of vomit and blood, I fed each morsel to the dog that no longer stalked me. He licked my wet fingers.

That's what I dreamed last night.

vivid AND massively disturbing. Well done. Well done indeed.

Dreams aside. I think it would be advantageous to go with a more Conspiracy X style of game. Where the player characters are members of a splinter faction of Aegis. Black Book has totally been subordinated by the Saurians, while Aegis has turned and sold technological advances to what would become the corporate court. Earth is now a colonial planet, funneling resources and supplies for an unknown purpose.

Survival horror is really survival until the PCs ammunition runs low. Then it starts taking on a horror aspect. Personally I was thinking more on the lines of secret war, of opening up a commlink and discovering that it's actually filled with an organic biocomputer, or that technomancers are an outgrowth of genetic experimentations with Atlantean cybernetic systems.

My lady it paines me to know that you had a such dream; I realy hope that it's just a sporadic nightmare, if you happen to have this type of dreams frequently I'm going to be realy worried, and sadened.




Sorry I can't be of any help, cospiracies aren't my forte.

I do. Surgical pictures following dissection. I do have nightmares, heart pounding, shocking, but mostly my dreams are strange. As they progress I am no longer the tormentee but the tormentor, nightmare turns into a strange dream.

One strange dream which I remember badly is that of being in Verdun. I am wearing an embroided white shift, my feet cold on the snow speckled ground. The smell of cordite mingling with the spice of rot. An artillery barrage from 88mm shells landing all around me kicking up a gray dust that partially clouds the landscape. I stand in the middle. Sometimes I hear the muted staccato of a Vickers machinegun. Everywhere I look I see dead bodies covered in the gray dust, their weapons clutched in dead hands. Broken gas masks litter with memoirs in the trenches. The trenches stink of mustard and brown paper bags. I do not linger there for I fear the gas that does.

It is a familiar place almost home. It is a pastiche separated from time and space. Nothing lives here but the sounds of battle and the hauntings of rats in the shifting of bodies. Sometimes I stare at a tin button for hours, other times I puzzle over a dead German soldier his belt buckle carefully scraped so the words "Gott mit Uns" are near rubbed out. Sometimes I think the soldier thinks too loudly, yelling in words of German I do not understand. Sometimes I see someone warning me to not be there, but there is the sniper strike that silences them, the artillery barrage to make them disappear.

I am there alone, but someone had come before and arranged the scene from being a battlefield to a dead historical monument. The dead, dead, but their souls play acting their positions, nailed into their positions in that moment of death.

You have real talent at writing, Chrysalis. A creative mind like yours is a rare and precious thing.

The horror of Soylent Green wasn't that they were turning people into food, though that's what struck the chord for the main character. The horror was that the world was dead. The last tree was wilting. The oceans could no longer support life, not even algae. Technology had failed, science had failed. Humanity would just dwindle into extinction through entropy. The elite were simply hiding the facts to prevent panic. They wanted an orderly extinction.

That's a pretty easy conspiracy to import to SR. The runners find a Corporate Court report that the Earth is dying and there's simply nothing anyone can do about it. Not dragons nor elves, nor anyone it seems. The report eludes to a plan, which, if uncovered, involves mass genocide, abandoning the planet (for space or the metaplanes), converting the population into 'survivables' via a nanite plague, etc. As usual, the plans don't seem finished, it appears the corps are prepared to bicker and posture while humanity is on the brink.

Now if only I could make money off of it.

You have the raw talent. Unfortunately, an independent author also has to have a head for business. And lots and lots of luck.

I don't know what to say..... I realy hope that you are just making fun of me.
If not, DRECK you don't deserve this kind of torment.
In any case I wish the peace may grace your heart, my lady.




Well try to start something on-line, a website in which you put some material and take donations (just to let people know you), than if enough people are interested in your work you could start to make serious projects.
Or maybe write some novels and send them to some of our contacts in CGL, it's good to have them here on DP.
Anyway don't give up before having given it a shot, it would be a real shame.

RETSU GO DEUSU ECKSU!

That's so awesome I had to fight the urge to stand up from the computer and start air riffing.

That's almost Clive Barker-esque. You should go and pwn him.

Thank you for the entertaining anecdote.

I don't think that attempting to pwn the jaguar man with a machine gun is necessarily out of character for a "real" person. I imagine that if I were in that situation in real life, if we assume that I took action instead of being overwhelmed with horror, that I might attempt to use the firearms before using the spear.

I see it like this. If you got into a fight with a bison and you had a spear, it could be possible that you stab at the bison as many times as you could, but the bison would just keep coming and still kill you. Onlookers could tell all their friends later that only a magic spear could kill the bison and a regular spear would be useless.

So in a sense it would be accurate that a mortal weapon couldn't kill the bison, if by that what we really mean is a spear or something wielded by a man on foot versus an enraged bison.

But none of that necessarily impacts whether or not you would be able to pwn the bison if instead of the spear you had a submachinegun and did your best to dump 30 rounds into the bison while he's charging you.

See what I mean? So that's why if I were in the same situation as that player character in real life I might try to shoot the jaguar man, the warnings of elderly magicians nonwithstanding. Seeing as I don't believe in magic in real life anyway.

Seconded, on both counts. It doesn't sound to me like you're making this up.

Yes - I thought of that as I wrote the post. But the decision wasn't based on in-character thinking. It was based on a ten-minute explanation by the player of garou regeneration rules and a quick calculation of how much aggravated damage a Strength 3 character would do with a spear vs. how much more, but non-aggravated, damage the character would do with a machine gun on full auto.

Plus, I was 14-15 when I was running this game. Live and learn.

Cheers,

K.

If anyone wants a very strange horror that would be pretty inspiring for Shadowrun, try to get hold of an old out of print book called "Too, too solid flesh" by Nick O'Donohoe. Unfortunately I can't say much about why without terrific spoilers, but the book is very intelligent and especially enjoyable if you're familiar with Hamlet. What really got me was how much the back-cover synopsis sounds like a light, slightly silly comedy and how jaw-droppingly none of those it turned out to be. And considering how long ago it was written, almost prescient in some ways.

Well, I guess that's what published RPG rules-writers mean when they write that with the Awakened or Undead you can always bend the rules to keep the players guessing. Maybe it's all about the reaction you get when things don't act as expected and the player characters start getting savaged. It kind of mimics the reactions of the Colonial Marines in Alien 2 when they realize the Xenomorphs aren't really playing by their rules.

Lady, I could be missing completely the mark but there's this "Writer Wanted" thread that could be a beginning.
You write some Missions to see if you have a potential consumer base, than if the thing works out ok you can make plans about the future.

Well ... I think giving it a shot costs nothing.

I doubt there is much need for the talent of a person who can write Clive Barker-like horror that is not horror. I also do not know enough of the Shadowrun world to be one of its contributors. If I was it would be the kind where there would be much agonizing, for I would take an amoral stance. Where every step the ideals have to be shed for the sake of survival, where each individual choice is a step closer to becoming the thing men fear to be. It is about being the abyss, being the cure that is worse than the disease.

I really do not think that many would wish to play a game where the fun can be found in damnation. But then again us Europeans do play games that are less black and white than Americans do. The loss of childish idealism was the price of the 20th century.

One of the things I really liked about the Deadlands series of RP games is that there was a section that flat out said, dont go back here unless you're running a game: its got monster stats and SECRETS! Of course everyone did anyways, but it was cool that the designers were angry about metagaming and tried to do something about it.

Back to horror: Does anyone use music? I'm a different game I play in the DM uses music to great effect to set a mood for a scene. The game isn't horror based at all, but the music is a nice back drop. I was thinking of importing this idea to Shadowrun and thought that it might work especially well for a horror themed run. Any thoughts?

Yeah, like that German F1 racing game.

If you use music, you will definitely need to do a good program before hand. The downside to this is that in a movie, music can be timed to build suspense up, and it would be harder to time this sort of thing for a game. However, having the music mix cut in something from Weird Al while trying to build suspense will ruin the mood, and it'll be hard to get back to. So plan carefully.

My current GM used the SR rules to run a space opera game (because no other rules set worked nearly as well). Needed almost no modifications at all. Gouls became the result of genetic experiments to create life that could survive the vacuum of space, robots and AIs are common (one of the players was a brain-in-a-jar cyborg and the Big Bad of the game was that once a planet develops FTL communication a virus-like AI takes over and tries to concert everything Borg-like), and "Pilot Aerospace" was as common as "Pilot Groundcraft" is in core.

PCs were the survivors on a colony ship headed to a jungle Jurassic-like planet (dinosaurs were not confirmed by the GM as they never landed) along with about 1500 to 2000 other people (still in statis pods) and a group that had woken up (this idiot farmer decided he was highest rank, along with one of the players, so they dived into two groups: Team Alpha and Team Prime--I'm still not sure which was which).

Was a fun game to watch.

One of the best scenes in the remake of Dawn of the Dead was the montage of the survivors in the mall killing time as Richard Cheese's take on Disturbed's "Down With the Sickness" played in the background. It was hilariously creepy, if such a concept could exist.

Any music can work so long as it compliments or appropriately contrasts the tone. Imagine an organlegger cheerfully singing Weird Al's "Like a Surgeon" over the sounds of bones splintering and flesh ripping as limbs are removed from a still-living victim. Brr.

We can't force you to do anything but we can tell you what we think: you are understimating yourself.

Someone should make a deep philosophical and ideological comparison of Formula 1 and NASCAR.

QFT

Please don't generalize, there are far too many (often diametrically opposed) types of people in this country to take us all as a group like that. Personally, I've found that most gamers here in the states revel in damnation, though there is a difference between slaughtering people because it's awesome and making the kind of hard moral choice you're referring to. Look to the popularity of graphic novels (and their movie counterparts) such as Sin City, The Crow, and Watchmen to see how that type of amorality goes over in the states.

"The world will look up and shout 'save us', and I'll whisper 'No.'"

I was not seeking to generalize, but create a gulf. My own perceptions are based on the media, which often myopic in its interpretation of society.

Well, one thing I was doing that week was reading Two Fisted Tales and Punisher.

So if I was to run a play-by-post game of Conspiracy X / Shadowrun crossover with a sprinkling of Delta Green would anyone be interested?

How would the thing be organized?