My turn for GMing duties is coming up and I was thinking about taking Shadowrun to a 'darker place'.

I personally have never played or run Shadowrun with darker themes, it has always been the atypical Leverage/A-Team/Mission Impossible style of game.

Anyone have any experiences with Shadowrun on the darker side?
How did you do it if you have?

Horror themes are easy in SR.

One of my last arcs took whatever the team did regarding a certain company and added it to the 'final dungeon' of the arc - in this case it was Universal Omnitech and one of their research facilities.

Over the course of the arc the hacker had penetrated the system looking for paydata and I turned it into Arkham Asylum. I kept with dark themes - lights not working properly in the VR, moldy stone, the sounds of screaming in the cells where the test subject files were kept, agents and IC were orderlies and guards. The VR overlay itself had the hacker in a doctor's coat and carried a black leather bag with tools signifying programs.

The hacker was suitably freaked when she went by the cells and something with a tentacle slapped her on the shoulder and begged her for freedom. She decided to open all the cells...

...Suffice it to say, by the time they got the final job of the arc, it was from a Firewatch team that reported that the entire facility was on lockdown and there was no activity from it after the screaming had stopped some time before. I kept with the themes of darkness and ruin. Emphasize the crumbling and decay. Take joy in the detail of the dark experiments the subjects were performing on their tormentors. I had a bodycult spring up after the hacker for letting them all free, and there were dozens of people that looked like her in the operating and recovery rooms, faces in varying degrees of deformity.

This facility had a good ten floors of horrific fun I had planned for the team. They took the charge they were supposed to blast the facility with, booked it straight down the ruined elevator shafts to the bottom, set the charge and ran like hell. They only had to deal with one archvillain - an infested mage with a Spider spirit riding him. They slowed him down long enough to escape the exploding bomb, but they weren't able to check for a body...He came back later. Muhaha.

There was a post awhile back about "tooth fairies" from hellboy; I'd look at that (sorry on my phone so I'll link it later). A good old ghoul outbreak in some isolated mountain town that the runners have to investigate; low on ammo but there's plenty of ghouls

I'm pretty sure it can handle anything you can think of. You just need inspiration. Go play F.E.A.R, I loved that game, and it was creepy as hell!
If you can translate that feel to a shadowrun game, you are the king.

I am toying with the idea of a "ghoul cult" people lopping off their own limbs for their ghoulish masters to eat, before making the ultimate offering...

There would have to be some mind control involved.

I think one of the most important themes of true horror is that things are unexplained. There is some element of mystery. In Doc Chase's example mystery held a lot of importance. Just rampaging monsters hold no horror for us in games. The monsters need to be used to good effect.

The sense of wrongness is also a big part of much horror. Some subtle wrongness that you don't spot at first probably sets off our natural danger sense. It says wake up because something is not right here and you may be in trouble. This of course plays into the whole mystery element and it also ties into atmosphear which is probably equally important.

Like where?

Are you at all familiar with Renraku Arcology Shutdown? Very much survival horror, turn up the weird mojo aspect and you have supernatural.

You haven't read Threats II, right? The section describing a shedim is pretty damn grim.

Like a Wendigo leader.....

Alas poor Chip, we knew him well....
before the Wendigo took him over, and forced him to eat a rump roast.
His own rump of course.
Chip is still the only player I know with a cyber-ass.

I ran a Cthulhu influenced mission. A small bio development firm was experimenting with gene splicing to create more seemless integrations between metas and their cyberware. They were focused on overcoming implant rejection, overstress, and infection problems. What they were doing was using fish DNA in some of the test therapies and inadvertantly creating Deep Ones.

The test subjects had persona-fix chips that made them terrified of leaving the facility where they were being held.

To add some creepiness, I gave them company a psycologist to monitor the patients and the data he stored on their patient files strated attracting Dissonence.

Hm hm... i love to have a horror-themed adventure every few sessions (I pretty much go: Filler, Filler, Main Mission, Background, Filler, Detective Noir, Horror, Action, Background, Main Mission etc and mix it up a bit)

Some workings of the sixth world is very viable for Horror. Some Spirits and Critters automtically become survival/cult horror . But i also found that High-Level magicians and some cyberware automatically reduce the dread:

Aura reading in general is hard to block (And giving information is allways bad in horror) Only some things, which are also magicians can mask their aura to hide (Inhabitation free spirits for example)

Other things is a internal radar: The user can see in perfect darkness and through most invisibility effects and walls. Concealment still works though... must be couplled with high stealth.

Mind reading also uncovers the whole plot in seconds too, if the mage can target something which knows what is going on. The only thing preventing people to do so is that it is horrible obvious and VERY impolite *g*. (Also it pretty much destroys every detective story, if the key persons are not mighty enough to punish the mage for violating them)

This are some of the problems i found, which make the runners, well SURE enough, to not be easily frightened. And remember: Just having a mighty monster with a crapload of powers does not make horror.

It's easy to dodge a mind probe - Deep cover the schlub giving the mission so he doesn't realize what's going on, or have the one pulling the strings out of range.

Good suspense and good horror is about uncertainty. A cockroach scuttling across a pipe in a cistern so quiet you could hear a pin drop is going to make an interesting echo.

Get your players jumping at shadows. Heighten their paranoia. Get them to the point where they start thinking the absolute worst of everything you describe - jumping at shadows, flinching at every scrape and noise from the hallway, questioning every flickering lightscreen they see.

Keep ramping up the tension and get them all focused on one point - maybe it's a rattling box, the sound of someone sobbing or rasping under a desk way off in a ruined corner, something that focuses all of their attention on it - and deflate.

It's an emotitoy, or a clock radio. Everyone has a chance to grin and laugh it off, or berate you.

And that's when the motion sensors go insane with rats (regular or otherwise) fleeing something like the depths of Hell were coming straight toward you.

Or the team's electronics black out when a transformer overloads and drops an EMP nearby (two for one, exploshun surprise!)

Or the tainted Guardian spirit manifests, pissed off as all hell because the team has intruded upon its domain.

Or Alma. Just Alma.

Giving information is NOT always bad in horror. You have to know enough to be scared.

Assensing results are easy enough to deal with. If they see enough it fries the assenser. Blacks them out, damages them, etc. How you handle that coming in, with rolls, etc I can make some suggestions. It depends a lot on player expectations, how long you expect this to run, and just how much 'survival' you want to emphasize.

There are things not meant to be seen!

Have the Assensing Mage take temporary essense damage (or magic damage) if he scores too many Assensing hits?

There was a post a long time back (have the archives been made available) that detailed a Halloween oneshot (set in the Arcology Shutdown incidentally) where rolling enough successes killed the Mage straight out. That is tricky to make work, though.

The hardest part of running horror in any modern or futuristic setting is the ease of communication - so the first thing I'd do would be to somehow disable (or corrupt) all of the parties means of communicating with the outside world.

A bit hard on the hacker, of course...

Just have them make a SAN roll...

Call of Cthulu - what do you mean you took 0 spot? - Hell yeah, I don't want to actually SEE those things!

"If you set a target they'll hit it."

It doesn't solve the problem of the players getting particular info that reveals too much. Horror depends on proper info management. Too much and you mute the source of the fear, the parts imagined. Not enough and the tension, the suspense isn't there. Incidentally from what I've seen the later is a MORE common problem for GMs. Especially telling things individually to players. Really, if one player knows it then they all can know it and it'll INCREASE the suspense. A character has become possessed? Don't tell anyone else and it is, relatively speaking *snore*.

Anyway, stepping off the soapbox, how I would probably handle it if this was something meant to last longer than a session is after the roll start describing what the character notes with the "safe" stuff, then get to a point where "...you feel your grip on reality slipping, to you press on?" If they press on it's damage and more info. Then let the player know something like "...you realize you've come the the thresh hold, step beyond and you aren't coming back and aren't going to get much info back to everyone else, press on?" If the do character is dead/totally insane. GM might give a bit of a cryptic utterance from them, or maybe they just drop dead, or their eyeballs peal back and they go unrecoverably catatonic.

Meh, I don't like possessing characters. It's their job to play their chars, not mine.

But I have bias.

Possession of a PC is really, really tough. To be effective while not stepping on other people's turf it needs a lighter touch, more urging rather than a puppet show, than anything in the SR books I think.-

Think The Devil's Advocate, only the Milton-Lomax exchanges are inside the person's head. "Free will, it is a bitch."


EDIT: Incidentally I've run a game with a PC that was possessed for several sessions. It wasn't Shadowrun, though.

This reminds me of something that happened way back in the early 90s, 1991 I think , when I was in the military and on guard duty way out in the sticks(Kentucky, Ft.Knox). My unit was on a range(tank range) so we had to pull guard duty at night. 3 of us were out there, we kept the ammo for the tanks in the tractor trailer it came in, they just unhooked the truck left the trailer. So there I was like 1-2am and bored out of my mind, we had a folding chair underneath the trailer, sitting where the trailer hooks up to the truck. When out of the corner of my eye and catch a patch of white moving, I glance over and see a skunk waltzing towards me. I freeze. The skunk continues to walk towards, then completely underneath me(I was sitting on the chair), I hadn't moved a muscle, breathed, nor swatted at the numerous mosquitoes. With that experience fresh in my mind I was quite alert for a while...which leads me, yes I know long set up, to what really got to me
As I was sitting there in that uncomfortable metal folding chair I hear this buzzing sound, it's loud, and something I have never heard before. It's loud, didn;t know if I said that, but I will again. It's like a helicopter coming in, and it's behind me then I hear it land and hear it walking on the gravel(golfball sized gravel no less) one leg at a time click, click, click, click, click, click.
I ran like scared little school girl, ran straight to the deuce n'half climbed inside and slammed the door shut.

To this day I have no idea what it was, but if I hear some bug's individual legs walking on stones...I. am. out. of. there.

Shadowrun is set in the 6th world. Earthdawn was the 4th world. Earthdawn had horrors. Horrors are nasty...

As always when it comes down to horror in SR, there's the option to revert to the SR-ED x-over.

You could have a game full of people who want to play toxic mages that get thousands of karma and inhabit great dragons. That sounds horrible to me.

Honestly, I'd pull the old kobold trick.

One important thing is to actually check with your players and see how receptive they are to the idea. Don't make a big production over it and call some emergency team meeting or anything, but chat with them -- they're your friends, right? -- and just casually bounce the idea around and see how they take it.

If they're playing shadowrun because they want awesome mohawks, electric guitars, katanas, and machineguns all over the place, they might not like it when their GM tries to turn it into Cthulurun. Likewise, if they're into the mirror shades, trenchcoats, and suppressed pistols; no one wants to be a steely-eyed Robert DeNiro knock-off who suddenly finds themselves screwed by dice rolls into SAN checks and wetting himself.

And nothing will ruin an attempt at a horror game like someone that's not "on board." They won't have fun, they'll ruin the atmosphere for everyone else, and the fallout from ensuing arguments can kill a campaign.

So yes, the tools are there in Shadowrun. You can run a Chicago bug hunt, something with Horrors, the Arcology, ghouls, or just a chase through a dark sewer after a Twisted Path physical Adept...there's plenty of horrible stuff in T6W to fuel this sort of game, and keep perfectly within canon.

It's just a matter of not it will work in your game, with your players and their characters.

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.

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.

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.