Greets,

I was looking through some old RPG books I have, which included ones by Dark Conspiracy. I was thinking what would it be like to include monstrous technology into Shadowrun. To have more mundane horrors as part of the urban landscape.

How would you feel about having items that were twisted and wrong and had background counts. Highly sophisiticated computers made from slides of human brain. Drugs that were distilled from humans tortured to death. Cadavers reanimated with technology. Creatures that prey on shadowrunners.

This would a be world where the horrors had won and Shadowrunners just did not know about it.

I believe the game you are after is CthuluTech.

- J.

I feel that all of those things would be good. For a year I ran a campaign for the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying game where Fu Leng had won and taken over. It was fun and challenging for everyone.

Those computers you speak of, the sophisticated ones.... I hear you need to head to Mexico City. [ Apologies for not spelling it the Azzie way ] Actually, this could be a Mexico City campaign. Really, its not too far off from an utter hell.

Indeed. Hell, she's already named after the mega that's secretly controlled by Nyarlahotep, one of the great Old Ones.

Cthulhu is an unknowable horror. Cthulhu does not inspire horror anymore, just a stream of bad jokes.

It is also so last century.

What about porting some of the technology from Dark Conspiracy directly into Shadowrun?

I believe all of those things already exist in Shadowrun, or are perfectly plausible in the setting. The Horrors need not have already won for this to be the case.

I'd like to point out that reanimated corpses with background counts exist. They're called Cyberzombies, remember?
Everything else listed is just more in the same vein.

Honestly, if you want to run horror in Shadowrun, you don't have to change the setting in the slightest to do it. Just work with what's there.
For inspiration, get your hands on Threats 1 & 2. The chapter on Winternight, in particular, is utterly chilling. Completely mundane horror, inspired by nothing more than people with absolutely no sense of mercy or remorse.

There are facilities where Ares is experimenting with dogs inhabited by insect spirits. There are the dark blood magic rites of Aztechnology, and the shadowed halls of the Renraku Archology where some of Deus' secrets might still lie buried. Kept far from any watchful eye there are secret facilities where the megacorps perform horrific experiments. MCT keeps entirely automated lockdowns with not a single living being inside. There are deep sea arcologies, deep space facilities, bases on the Moon and on Mars. There are, in short, endless opportunities in Shadowrun to scare the living hell out of your players. It's all just about building up atmosphere, about emphasising the darker side of what is happening every day around them. Look at the descriptions of what happened to the Technomancers in Emergence. Imagine your players actually discovering something like that for the first time. Ordinary people, men, women, and children, with their brains cut open, probes pushed through their skin, layers of scars where they've been cut into again and again and again.

It's just about how you play it.

Hi.




Serial killers? Human suprematists that kidnap and torture meta? Slaver that put up death matches? Are they mundane and horrible enough?




Inanimate object can't generate background, but can be impressed with strong feeling so they might feel wrong when handled (an atzlander priest's knife?).




That doctor that experimented on technomancer (the one that in the 3rd ed kidnapped children to extrct their brains) could have unfinished projects that Mitsuhama is trying to complete.




It shouldn't have background (at least untill it is still to be used) but a snuff BTL is "distilled" from deaths.




Cybermancy? Otherwise an Otomo will do much better than a cadaver.




Why should they chose shadowrunners? Anyway anything that preys on or attemptes to kill metahumans (including other metahumans) should do.




Not to brust your boubble but if the horrors are going to win they are going to wipe out all the life from the world in a rather horrible way. However one of the parts of Harlequim's Back metaplanar quest tooke place in a reality that followed the invasion of the horrors (something like Earthdawn immediatly after the kaer were opened).

Bottom line: SR can be made much darker just using existing material.

The doctor tiped faster than me.

as far as the twisted being and tech goes. i created the rules for the baroque. twisted anomalies in the world that drained essence and could create ware into/from there bodies.

i created the baroque as a kind of horror aspect in the world.

might not be what you are looking for but its worth a shot.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...&hl=baroque

ive finished my rules, not everything is in that thread. if you are interested message me.

Did you mean introducing certain horror tropes into SR, leading you to something like Dog Soldiers?

Or did you mean adding rules to reflect the world impact on the minds of the characters (e.g. Unknown armies)?

Or changing the tones and themes of the game (Conspiracy X or Delta Green in the world of SR?)

Or changing the mechanics of SR so that it is more conductive to telling horror style stories (for example, adapting some of the rules for Afraid?)

I think those suggestions are very, very cool. Have you given any more concrete thought to it? What it would look like mechanics-wise? How it would change the world? Or are you just tossing the suggestion out there?

Some of those things look like they've escaped from my nightmares after a particularly heavy day at the gym.

Oooo, Delta Green + Shadowrun would be the best game ever.




"Cthulhu" specifically is over exposed in jokes, yes, but as a Keeper for Call of Cthulhu I will say: there is some freaky sh** in that game.

Cthulhoid horror is definitely not out of style or stale - not even close. It's just a matter of getting past the cute Cthulhu plush dolls and Cowthulhu t-shirts.

Check out "Delta Green" (regarded widely as the best roleplaying supplement ever written for any game) on wikipedia, or the campaign "Masks of Nyarlathotep" (regarded widely as the best roleplaying campaign ever written for any game). Consider the fact that, while excellent games such as Shadowrun are very well done for an RPG, CoC is based so heavily in literature (and it's fan-base and writer-base comes to the game with that mindset) that the material produced for it is, by and large, more suited to telling excellent stories than any other RPG out there.

A homebrew marriage of SR to Cthulhu (done well) would tickle me pink, I think.

CthulhuTech specifically...maybe not.

Actually, Delta Green has some rather nice canonical precedent in SR: the Draco Foundation.

After Big D sacrificed himself to keep The Enemy from crossing over, the Draco Foundation carries on in his name. The "Delta Green" equivalent could be elite teams of Shadowrunners kept on retainer by the Draco Foundation as deniable assets, whose job it is to ferret out tools and minions of the Horrors and destroy them, to help stem the tide before the Enemy returns in force.

*Jaw drops*

What old books are the Draco Foundation mentioned in?? And the Enemy etc.?

I guess the thing is discovering that in a similar vein as the movie Soylent Green that certain basic foundations of the world rely on very horrific things. The corps have done their sacrifices to keep the modern world working and they have paid the too high price. It is the runners who slowly uncover how much part of the problem they are as part of the final solution. Will they continue to support horrors of the world in the name of luxury and progress.

This would see the runners going down a very dark path. Would they be willing to take a hit of tempo knowing that it would be a spirit pact which could kill them or make them invulnerable. Would they be willing to use nanotechnology, burying its way into the motor cortex of target slowly taking over the brain and personality of the target until the body itself collapses. Would they be willing to take cyberware that slowly starts turning them into something else.

The concept being really changing the tone and themes of the game (conspiracy X would be a good example of this, everything is in the shadows it is just too strange - outlandish even for the public to fathom).

When I first started running, this statement held true. 2050, pre UB, pre Chicago, pre D for Pres. IE's and as mentioned above Aztlan. Shadowrun is a pretty great game, you can run whatever strikes your fancy and somewhere its already there.

Just don't tell Dumpshock

Isn't that the truth.

Books that I can think of off the top of my head are Portfolio of a Dragon, and Dragons of the Sixth World.

If you're looking for horror based SR, I suggest looking up Khadim Nasser's Shadowrun adventure, Carnival.

I'm new to SR, but a huge D&D junkie. There's a good book called Heroes of Horror about incorporating horror into a campaign with concepts and snippets that can easily be applied to any system, SR included. Obviously the technological aspect isn't there, but it could be added with a small degree of effort. It's usually easy to find cheap used copies for about $5 online, and it's well worth that.

... and now I need to go find some of the Shadowrun books mentioned here to compare and contrast them to my horror book. *shakes fist at all the ups and downs of learning a new system*

Sadly, Heroes of Horror and other horror books for D&D tend to be more "here's stuff that should be scary, but it's so freaking cool, and YOU can use it as a player! how awesome is that?" or else "Here's stuff that should be scary, but it's so freaking fun to kill it all! Slaughter to your heart's content, because it's so darn dirty and evil!"

It's not actually "horror" if your players aren't frightened.

Edit: I just realized that might beg flaming; I'd like to note that I'm not saying D&D can't be scary, just that it's printed supplements don't present it that way and most GM's / players play "horror" wrong. It's certainly possible to make D&D scary as hell, even without "horror" supplements.

Example: PC's start at level 1 as a traveling troupe of Bards (yes, everyone is a bard in this example.) They show up in a medium-sized town. Nobody in the whole town will meet their eyes; gear bought here is at half cost, gear sold nets full value. the Inn gives free food and cheap drink. Everyone's wearing the same outfit, and nobody is wearing any shoes - their feet are black with dirt and dried blood. The PC with the highest Charisma bonus starts seeing shadowy figures out of the corner of his eye. That night, sleeping in a room at an inn, rented for a single copper piece, all the PC's sleep restlessly, with horrifying dreams of being hunted. The next morning, upon waking, they go downstairs only to find that everyone in the common room is sitting silently in their seats, stone dead. Only the innkeeper is still alive - and he's wiping the bar with a dirty rag, as if everything were just fine.

At that point, the PC with the highest Charisma bonus feels an intense pain in his stomach, and if he fails a willpower check (difficulty 15) he doubles over and begins shrieking.

That's much more "horror" than most things in published supplements. It's all in the GM's imagination and the players' too.

You can also try screaming "Boogie-boogie-boo!" when your players get quiet... Or not.

Adapting elements of the horror genre is easy. But genuine horror is tricky to integrate into any role-playing game. It requires the complete participation of GM and player. Once the mood is broken, it's tough to get back into that "zone". I've never tried it myself and I'd be *ahem* scared to.

Shadowrun, while possible to make creepy, might not lend itself to horror very well.

After all, if you can't blow it up with a gauss rifle or assault cannon, your mage can probably geek it with an overcast Force 9 Manabolt. What's scary about that?

Then again, a colony of 8-year-old cannibal girls with preturnatural speed and grace, abnormally overdeveloped intelligence/cognizance, and claws, yet no speech and the ability to levitate... who are always silently crying... that could be fun.

Good point. Horror works best when it combines the fear of the unknown, visceral imagery (like a little boy who buzzes like a hornet when he speaks), with overwhelming odds. Horror protagonists only survive through luck or grit, not tactics.

I just read the Chicago portion of Feral Cities. Having not read Bug City or really dealt with any of the Universal Brotherhood/insect spirit story-lines, I found the whole notion of maggots and people who are addicted to the alien thought processes of insects to be pretty terrifying. What would drive a person to say, "you know what? I think I'll give up my free will to become host to an alien being that wants to lay eggs and rip apart flesh with mandibles." That kind of thought process is "horror" to me. Treating an insect spirit or flesh form as a target to blast with an anti-equipment rifle isn't terrifying (Starship Troopers isn't horror... Alien is horror). Being dropped into a Butterfly hive in the Chicago Spire with only a knife and no map for escape is pretty damn frightening.

I am currently rewriting a tribute to the old UB plotline for 2070. What I have done is taken some of the old adventures and tied them together in new ways with a Harliquin style where side runs will go inbetween each. Also of course I renamed/changed a lot of the npc but at the core of the story they are the same like Mecurial is still save the rock star from the corporation but thats about all it has in common with the original.

Mecurial
*side run*
Queen Euphoria
*side run*
*side run*
Ivy and Chrome
*side run*
*side run*
Missing Blood
*side run*
Double Exposure
DNA/DOA

Its one idea of how you can add horror to SR. The old UB plotline was full of it and there are several non UB plotlines that could easily be adapted to fit.

Personaly I think that much of the horror feel comes from two factors:

Perceived danger, knowledge that something is wrong and it's potentialy lethal;

Lack of identification of the problem.

When you know that you are risking your life, the survival instinct kickes in and you get on allert, the first thing you are going to do is figure out what the hell is going on, knowledge allowes to cope with the problem, when you know how to deal with something it's only a matter of taking action and everything is linear; when you know what is going on you can't organize, you can't plan, all you is looking for clues, knowing the the danger could strike anytime without you being able to do anything to prevent it, it becomes a race against the time (the time for the next strike) in wich you can do little beside waiting for death to pay you a visit, hoping that either you have discovered what's going on for the time (and so you are prepared) or that when death showes up you manage to survive. The key factor is taking away the control from your players, if things happen without that your players can affect them, and this things affect the PC than the players will do what they can to gain control, even better is if you temporanely take away from the PC the control of themselves (you wake up and you are not where you were when you passed out/fell asleep, you have been doing something but you don't know what); if the players are just put in front of a problem leaving them the control they will just solve it (especialy if it is something that can be solved blasting it into nothingness), if you leave the problem undefined it will be much more effective (there's nothing as scary as the unknown).
Naturaly this must be done in a way that your players don't get frustrated, you have to leave them space for action and you don't have to railroad them trought the story, you have to show them that the solution is a few steps away and as they reach it they discover that it isn't yet they start to put together the various pieces of the whole thing; also don't make it obvious what the next step is (otherwise it becomes a pen & paper version of final fantasy: ok, you have done this, now you have to do this), let more than one possible lead to follow, some will bring to some clue, other will bring to nothing but it won't be you that railroad them, it will be them that navigate the maze that standes betwen them and the solution. One last important thing is that at the end of the story they have to understand what the hell is going on, maybe not all its ramifications and consequences, but not letting them to discover the true would be very unfullfilling; the very last thing is about the gran finale: it could be that they discover the true in the final confrontation or immediatly before, leading to having to improvvisate with what they have at hand (but knowing what must be done), or they could discover the true and have the time to prepare for the final confrontation, knoking at the the problem door with vengeance.

Ok. It's naptime for me ........... maybe I'll post again tomorrow if I have to add something.
Good Night.

I always felt Lovecraftian horror would be better if you *could* actually shoot the scary monsters dead, but there were a lot of them, and a lot of human drama elements to the horror.

My prime example is Clive Barker's Undying. The game was scary as hell, but it had characters and character-driven horror, and I went through the whole game mostly relying on the 6-shooter and the shotgun.

So Doom 3.

Try to find a game called Dark Fall - The Journal.

It was an adventure game like Myst. Scary as all hell.

The thing about Lovecraftian horror is that it's entirely about man's struggle to delay the inevitable. You can't kick evil's ass: it's just too Big and you're too Small.

However, by using your brains and any spells you find along the way (which also uses your brains, technically, as it drives you slowly insane) you can drive the evil into it's hole for one more day.

For Lovecraftian horror with guns being more prevalent, try Delta Green. I swear by it.

Edit: a D.G. quote for the purposes of shameless plugging!

Major General Reginald Fairfield, U.S. Army and founder of Delta Green (deceased):

"We've got it down to a science. Something crops up, phone calls are made, operatives are re-assigned, paperwork is filed, and the darkness gets pushed back for another day. When it's over everyone goes back to their routine and no official records exist to reveal the truth. We travel light, we probe deep, and we strike hard. We may be outlaws and cowboys and fools, but we've kept this green ball of sh*t safe and sound for longer than most people have been alive."

To the Original Poster: here are some ideas you can follow.

1) Isolation

Get the PC's into a position where they can't get backup from the outside world; a matrix deadzone with no long-range communications, stripped of their contacts, or perhaps on the wrong continent. Make them have to rely on themselves. "There's no help coming, chummer. Save the last bullet for yourself."

2) Unknown Danger

Something freaking weird is going on, and goddamn do they want information: indulge them, but don't give it to them for free.

3) Horrified NPC's

Nothing is scarier than someone else who is apparently tough and confident becoming stricken with pants-wetting terror at something they saw.

4) Sanity

When they see something freaky, have them make a willpower check: if they fail, lose a point of willpower. They can gain it back again by defeating whatever is plaguing them.

5) Weird Imagery

Blood and guts don't necessarily do it anymore. You can explain entrails and brain matter on the wall all you want, it's just not scary.

(The following is from the game Don't Rest Your Head.)

How would you feel if hunting dogs with sewing needles for faces were chasing you, and if they caught you, they would sew your shadow to the floor, immobilizing you?

6) Big, Slobbering Monsters Aren't Scary

A person with his mouth sewn shut and his feet on backward is much scarier than a twenty-foot centipede with a breath weapon.


Hope some of that comes in handy.

Personally, I'd be terrified if the GM hinted that Fastjack's not as nice as he seems, and he just happens to have copies of both the Crash Virus and the Jormungand Worm, which he's kept upgrade through the times. They're his babies, you know. He never had children, and this is as close as he gets. Captain Chaos is all too happy to help him, and the runners might find Jack surrounded by both Buddhist monks, both thje Awakened and Emerged. You wouldn't' take a man's children from him, now, would you? Just think how sad it would be to walk away and leave him sobbing amongst the remains of the shattered chips of the only things he loved.

Horror can broadly be classified into three types, fear based, disgust based, and empathy based. The three are very different things.

Disgust-based horror is about producing disgust. The purpose is to shock the sensibilities. This usually means blood and guts galore. The more recent Saw films and their imitators are great examples of the disgust horror movie, and great examples of why it doesn't work very well. Audiences become desensitized quickly, transforming horror into comedy. If fact, many great horror-comedies are based on this premise. The more subtle variants involve things that are simply creepy, like little girls chanting nursery rhymes and non-human characters that fall into the uncanny valley. But creepiness alone can't support a whole movie.
It is fairly easy to do in a tabletop RPG, but it will usually be more funny than frightening, unless it is used sparingly.

Fear based horror relies on manipulating the audience's fight or flight response. This is difficult to do well on film, but the masters have reduced it to an artform. Combining widely-recognized visual and audio cues in the right ways can create truly terrifying film experiences. A well-written fear-based horror movie simulates what is known as paralyzing fear, which occurs when the fight or flight response is confused and the individual doesn't know whether to attack the threat or run away from it. They do so by turning the characters into sorts of audience avatars, which compel the viewers forward even when their fear tells them to run away.
Doing this in a RPG is extremely difficult. The lack of visual and auditory cues makes it difficult to cultivate real immediate fear.

The last, empathy based horror, is easiest to do in an RPG. It isn't about immediate fear. It is about dread, and despair. It is about making the audience empathize with the character's plight to such a degree that the views share the character's emotional turmoil. And you smash every last bit of hope that they have to bits.

Saw, the original, is an example of this. So is Cube.

Empathy based horror is generally more disturbing and often more emotionally brutal than fear based horror, but it's as visceral. In empathy based horror, you fear for the character whom you have become emotionally attached to. In fear based horror, you fear for your own life, even if you intellectually know that it isn't real and can't harm you.


Disgust based horror, in Shadowrun, is possible, but extremely difficult. You have to attack the player's sensibilities in unexpected ways. Avoid the blood and guts and instead go with disease-ridden child prostitutes in dilapidated urine-soaked apartments.

Fear based horror is unlikely. The only way to do it well is to leave the players confused as to the safe course of action. You have to keep them in the dark about the threat against them as much as possible and give them no easy way out. And even then, you also need a great deal of immersion. Being rendered helpless or powerless is very frightening in real life, but is not recommended in RPGs, because it damages the player's immersion and weakens the connection between him and his character. Most players, if put in such a situation, would simply rather fast forward to the interesting part.

Empathy horror is also difficult to do, because Shadowrun players tend to be optimists. No matter how mind-numbing the despair is, it can always bee fixed by a happy BTL. Players are naturally disassociated from NPCs, and NPCs aren't the centers of the universe, unlike movie protagonists. So torturing an NPC isn't nearly as horrifying as torturing a horror movie protagonist is. But, it can be done. The trick is to focus the player's protective instincts on an NPC (Not the PC's, the player's), to cultivate those instincts, and then put the NPC in any sort danger that the PC cannot control.

A good horror movie combines elements of all three, as does a good horror game.

The key is to know your players, and to manipulate their emotions as you see fit.

Well said, hyzmarca!

Good point, I ran a game involving cyber zombies, the Renraku arcology's upper sealed levels, etc and it scared the living shit out of my players. I've never seen seven gun-toting badasses so scared of bloody footprints, mysterious messages, and strange astral counts

While I do tend to agree with you somewhat, that doesn't change a word of my post that you quoted...

- J.

I've always found ghouls to be good for various horror scenes. They can run faster than most humans, can "see" in the dark and are pretty damn hard to sneak up on. They also have claws, eat dead flesh and can transmit their condition. Depending on what I'm running, I might add Stealth, Gymnastics, and Unarmed just to make things a bit more challenging. Yeah, the troll combat monster might be able to blow up a pack with his assault cannon, but if the team gets dropped in the barrens without all their gear and a ghoul caster running interference on the mage and that could be horror.

Before 4e came out with the stat-ed out A.I.'s I also toyed with the idea of an A.I. that had escaped and was hiding in an old abandoned black clinic. The A.I. was inspired by and wanted to continue Nazi medical experiments so it sent out people that it brainwashed to get more people and supplies. The idea is that it used the drones and medical equipment in the clinic to install bootleg cyberware that it made up by breaking down things that its followers brought back. The stuff ate up a lot of essence worked like skillwires and wired reflexes and the A.I. could upload any skills it thought would be useful in the squads it sent out, switching from a stealth spec to a melee spec to a ranged spec, whatever the situation called for. They were also thematically ghouls, and had all their innards replaced with some type of tech that broke down meat to power all of the inefficient cyberware that was crammed in them. yeah, i think ghouls are neat.

I guess i experimented with rules involving biodrones and wireless transmissions about 2 years before the rules came out for them! (the current rules are much better though...)

@hyzmarca; some more common terms for a few of your categories


"Fear based" = both....

Terror
Powerful, yet lasts only a moment: it's the startling moment when the Unknown becomes Known; when the Big Bad leaps out of the shadows; this is when the viewer/reader/whatever experiences fight-or-flight urges. Best used to punctuate a long period of Dread.

and Raw Fear which is the entirely instinctual reaction to smells, sounds, and visual cues.


"Empathy based" = both Psychological Horror and...

Dread
A creeping sense that Something is Terribly Wrong, but you have no idea what. You're in the dark, but you're not as alone as you'd like.

"Disgust-based" = Biological Horror
Deals specifically with the graphic destruction or decay of the body, through disease or mutilation, etc.

These are not real horror stories: avoid them. Most slasher films are Biological Horror, and they are generally only done because the writer has no freaking idea how to create real spine-tingling fear.

Wow, great thread. A lot of good stuff. This makes me want to paint a pentacle on my basement floor in UV-reflective ink and install some black lights for a nice late-game surprise.

Some comments on Hyz’s great post...

1) Disgust-based – shock and moral disgust I think will work better than other sources. Blood and guts just excites the action-adventure in us. Shock (as in surprise) catches us off-guard and penetrates our defenses. Someone mentioned waking up in a different place than where you went to sleep – fantastic example of shock (more fear- than disgust-, but a good example of shock). Things too far out for us to process will work better. Moral dilemmas meanwhile, for example the child prostitutes without a ‘right’ solution, work well in our medium and lead to a sense of general unease and malaise, regardless as to your goal.

2) Fear-based – as Hyz pointed out, this is extremely difficult without visual and auditory cues. For tabletop, that means props. Recorded noises, prop items and such make a huge difference, and everything is about the environment. We ran a freeform CoC game with one-shot characters. Each player had a candle he’d extinguish when his character died. All the other lights were out. Just by using this simple prop, I feel like we pulled the players more into the story, investing them more in solving the mystery. Knowing your players is also important. As Hyz pointed out, many players don’t have patience for a convoluted mystery, and a clear direction significantly reduces fear. They have to enjoy just interacting with the environment.

3) Empathy – Hyz noted a good point here. We need to focus on the player, not the PC. Bringing in an NPC the PC has a ‘dependent’ flaw with is okay for an adventure. For horror, that NPC happens to match the description of the player’s younger son, or has the name of the player’s wife. Little cheats may be obvious, but if they work, the players should be forgiving.

One thing I have to work on for myself is loosening up on holding myself to tight standards of reality. It’s okay to have unrelated and inexplicable scary effects. It’s okay to have something that violates the rules of the game. If everything can be reduced to numbers and rules, if anything, it reduces the horror (if it has stats, we can kill it – keep it a mystery whether it has stats at all!) Don’t be afraid to experiment and play a little, if it gets you good results.

nezumi, I recognize that from a thread on Yog-Sothoth! My tentacles wave in silent greeting to your bubbling oily froth.

Spotting fellow Yoggies now and then gives me that wonderful cold, clammy feeling deep inside.

From a totally different thread, too.


That's what I get for replying to multiple threads in multiple tabs at once while using a plug-in that automatically saves everything I write and pastes it back so I don't lose it in case my browser crashes.

I am not that same poster. However, I have captured him, hollowed out his skin, and now wear it as nice evening wear, when weather permits. I wave back, although at a safe distance. Oily froth stains leather, you know.

You can do Fear based but it is the hardest in my opinion and requires more than storytelling. If you can hide some light switches, put in some sound FX or music etc and then use them in the story to enhance a fear moment it can work. I've got players screaming that way but its not easy to pull off and I think its as much luck and trickery as skill.

Say my name three times in a thread and I appear.

Carnival is here. Someone suggested substituting Black Magic for Hedge Magic and I think they were right. But whether you can actually pull off fear with this, is going to depend in large part on presentation. I have occasionally managed to pull off fear in a group of players, but it's not easy. I managed it best a long time ago with a Vampire: The Masquerade game. We were playing in Winter at the back of my parents' house in a fairly bare room with the wind apparently trying very hard to beat its way through the windows. I hadn't done it consciously but I'd managed to foreshadow quite well that something was following them. During a confrontation with a gang in an empty warehouse, there came a scream from above them and the strip lights all shattered, everything went dark and they heard the thud of something dropping to the floor on the concrete close to them. At the same time, I turned the lights off and struck a match, narrating quickly by its flame. I lit an oil lamp that I had close by and the atmosphere changed immediately. The players genuinely looked nervous, and without realising it, were talking in character, not the "I'm going to say..." narration that inhibits immersion.

What worked in the above? Well I don't think it was my under-developed GM'ing skills. I think more than anything else, it was my willingness to step outside the ordinary. Plunging the players into darkness, narrating rapidly by a single match... These were signals to the players that we were out of the expected. Some people have a lot of set responses to things. They act cool, they make jokes and they just generally don't accept loss of control in circumstances they're familiar with. I guess what I'm saying is that if GM wants her players to step outside their comfort zone and react in a new way, the GM has to be willing to do so themselves.

I've written quite a bit on fear in role-playing games. I don't have time to re-port it all now. If you check out my post here and subsequent ones in that thread, you'll find a few tips from me on the subject.

That candle idea above is absolutely brilliant, by the way. I very much want to try that sometime. I may do a one-shot horror game based around it. Will be great fun.

The horror.

So you insist we speak of you more? How´s it going?

Horror pretty much sums it up. I seem to have made a severe strategic error and am now managing a project that will not die. Gah - it's like the Cthulhu of the business world. I've probably averaged about 45-46 hours work a week, every week, for the past six months. I don't actually mind that too much, but at some point you need to see that it's actually achieving something. And role-playing is on a hiatus. There was that big thread I spawned a while ago about what to do with my group, and many kind and helpful people responded with good suggestions, but I never replied to it and feel bad about that. In short, I gave up the group. It was probably salvageable, but they wanted "kill things, take their stuff," and I wanted atmosphere and realistic consequences. I just didn't want to put that much work in for that little reward. I suggested running a certain cancer causing game (which I can prepare in my sleep) but they said they loved my Shadowrun game.

I don't have another group around and convincing most of my mates to try role-playing... Well, they're all friends and I'm sure they'd try it for me, but it might be a bit weird for some of them. Reading through the Cthulhu thread though, has given me the idea that I might do a one-shot horror game with pre-gen characters, full back stories and secret objectives. We'll play by lamplight and I reckon it would be a really fun experience. If they like that, then I might see if I can turn it into a regular gaming group with either Shadowrun, WoD (yeuk, but modern day is easy to relate to) or that Ye Olde Carcinogenic. Like modern day stuff, the fantasy stuff is really easy for people with no role-playing experience to get their head around and the 4e rules are simplistic, *ahem*, I mean simple. I've just realised typing this, that the group I've just ditched is the first group I've ever been with that were actually "gamers". All other groups were just friends who (for the vast majority) had never played a table-top role-playing game at all and which I introduced to the hobby! That's got to be nearly thirty people I've introduced to role-playing so far! =: o

Wow! I think I am massively and hugely off-topic. Sorry friends, very knackered and rambling! You want my advice on introducing horror into a role-playing game? "You are in a 10'x10' office. An ork is demanding to know human-resource estimates. Roll Logic + Bureaucracy." Doesn't get more horrifying than that.

Peace,

Khadim.

I always felt a lot of films that were trying to make the victims avatar-like everymen failed by making them too wussy and pathetic. In real life lots of people would be tougher and smarter than them.

FYI, Knasser, I'm madly in love with Carnival, and am almost to the point of kidnapping friends so that I can put them through it.

One problem is that we all know the genre conventions, so things that would seem reasonable to a real person in that situation seem incredibly stupid to us, because we know that it is a horror movie. Though it still doesn't explain why people act stupid once they know that they're dealing with an immortal monster of some sort.

I think that Jeepers Creepers 2 did this better than most. Once the characters knew that they were dealing with a flying immortal monster, they put up a pretty good offense. It got off to a rocky start (decapitation doesn't work) but eventually they figured out that if they just immobilized it until it's time was up they'd be alright, and they did just that. Using a giant machine-launched javelin. But by that point it ceased being a horror movie and became an action movie with a flying immortal monster. Like a less sucky version of Reign of Fire with an abundance of teens who are played by 33-year-olds.

I'll add that creating the right atmosphere requires that the characters coping mechanisms fail in a logical way. For example, consider how in Dog Soliders the guys shooting stuff is marginally effective, but everyone knows that you need silver to kill a werewolf. So the fact that the main characters are considerably more well armed that normal werewolf victims only helps them a little bit.

On the other hand, consider how Silence of the Lambs would have been ruined if Hannibal Lecter had gotten the standard slaver movie killer immunity to bullets.

The constraints may also be social, rather than physical. For example, why the guy who gets bitten in the zombie movies is not immediately set on fire by his fellow survivors.

So, running a horror story with a group of runners is considerably complicated. Runners typically have vastly more physical power than typical horror movie protagonists and typically have less social constraints on their actions as well. For example, how many runner groups would shoot the creepy little girl in the head that they found in the Chicago containment zone right away; and not be bothered by the chance that she was just a traumatized regular little girl? Running fear of the unknown for runner groups is also usually difficult. They tend to light up the darkness, with flamethrowers.

So, on the technical side of things, how can the runners coping mechanisms (guns, magic, might kung-fu, drones, satellite images, google-fu, explosives, the kitchen sink, etc) be made to fail in a believable or, at least, not be fully effective?