drayle88
Apprentice Douchebag
Posts: 57
Preferred Game Systems: AlcheMonster D20
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Post by drayle88 on Jan 22, 2018 13:21:01 GMT -8
In need of inspiration. I have my team going through a cave in a mountain. What they dont know is that the mountain is actually encasing a giant horror titan.
Being in the cave, near this, I wanted to do something trippy. Maybe a fear check? or a sanity role? or something. SOMETHING to really mess with the characters for when they are inside.
However i'm not sure what exactly.
How can I invoke dread, madness, or fear into a player verbally? We wont be in a private setting, and getting loud or setting up mood music is out of the situation.
I DO plan on pulling each character aside one on one to describe to them what they are seeing, but I am not sure WHAT to say, or how to say it. As many unique ideas as I can get is much appreciated.
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Post by ericfromnj on Jan 22, 2018 17:40:20 GMT -8
Tell them their magic feels tainted and make fake notes whenever they cast spells.
Do a stu classic and say the rest of the party is acting strangely.
Describe monsters like the party had just injested the scarecrows Fear gas from Batman begins
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blydddreug
Apprentice Douchebag
BAAAAD doggie!
Posts: 69
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Post by blydddreug on Jan 22, 2018 19:03:16 GMT -8
Flex your description kung-fu! Make the visual and audio components of whatever your describing vague, but the smell / taste / feel components specific. Leave room for the player's imagination to run wild, but be suggestive at the same time. Describe things that are oddly out of place. For instance -
Visual: "The walls are slick and slimey, covered in some sort of fluid that's difficult to make out in the dim light"
Audio: "You hear the faint click of metal on stone in the distance - perhaps a battle, perhaps some infernal machine."
Touch: "The air feels clammy and heavy on your skin."
Smell / Taste (to easy to make these go together, so use it to your advantage) : "The antiseptic cleanliness of the cave fills your nose and clings to the back of your throat."
Also, I'd make it a goal to have the players ask to make a fear / sanity / oh shit! roll rather than calling for one. A good indicator that they are buying into your portrayal of the horror, I think.
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tomes
Supporter
Hello madness
Posts: 1,438
Currently Running: Dungeon World, hippie games, Fallout Shelter RPG hack
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Post by tomes on Jan 22, 2018 22:00:11 GMT -8
Have one of those big dice on the table, with the "1" facing up. As they go through the dungeon (or whatever), every once in a while, pick up and change the die so that it increases, to "2", then "3"... This escalating number will bring on a sense of horror (and should actually reflect in-game difficulty; getting closer to the big 'thing' or higher difficulty monsters/traps/weirdness). I had a GM do this to us... he was tracking the difficulty "level" of the place, as both a warning to us and a reminder to him. We all loved it. There was that "oh shit" moment whenever the die side went up.
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Post by Kainguru on Jan 23, 2018 6:26:17 GMT -8
It's one of those ones where physical gaming setting in the real word boosts the ambience a lot: Get hold of an RPG sound board and trigger certain sounds at the right moment using a small portable bluetooth speaker hidden nearby (I've used DMDJ on iOS at my LFGS in the past by kicking the speaker under the table will no one was looking*) - the trick is to have it set low, and use it sparingly, so at least one player will hear it just loud enough to comment on wondering if they actually heard it and if anyone else did. Play to the players actual fears/anxieties - not in dick way though, just try and work in eg: fear of heights, have some choice, well described, encounters that exploit height as a danger to be overcome Aaron *it wasn't for a horror setup, my PC was a bard and I had a playlist of brief instrumental tunes I could breakout when casting spells
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Post by Houndin on Jan 23, 2018 7:40:09 GMT -8
When describing things, make sure to use more than just what they see. Smells are a great way to invoke feelings in your players, they're tied very closely to memory. Think of each description and pick three senses to use. Also, include things like goosebumps, hairs standing up on their necks, that sort of stuff.
I also like the ideas of the incrementing die, or alternatively have a bowl of beads that you take one away from every once in a while, a dwindling resource is good for ratcheting up tension too. Just don't tell them what it's for, just say it's for you to keep track of something.
Oh, and don't let them rest, or make rest less effective, their sleep is disturbed by nightmares, they feel bugs crawling on them, etc...
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Post by chronovore on Jan 23, 2018 21:22:23 GMT -8
This is all tremendously good advice!
Another thing that works better than most people expect is subtlety. It’s easy to go for the walls dripping with blood, but describing it as “an oily fluid that smells like metal” can be more effective. As others have pointed out leaving your descriptions to what the experience of sensation is, rather than what the object is, carries weight and is quite immersive.
In the D&D game I played yesterday, the DM gained good traction with us by describing a large beast hiding in the trees, then letting us know that it was feline and black, and subsequently letting us know that it was difficult to see, because it would appear in one location and shimmer to another. We felt very tense while trying to figure out what we were confronted. If he had just said, “there is a displacer beast in the trees“ it would’ve been far less climactic.
Lastly, keeping it subtle can be more effective then going for a grand horror. The game I ran in college, I managed to really disturbed two players who would have been happy to tackle ghouls, ghosts, or giants, but I led them to a campfire surrounded by corpses of a group who have died without any apparent trauma. Their stomachs were all distended spherically, and when one of them touch the stomach tentatively, thinking something might burst out, I described that the stomach stayed pushed in as though he had stuck his finger into wet clay. The whole group of players was tremendously unsettled by this. It was the most effective moment in the campaign, when all was told.
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Post by jazzisblues on Jan 25, 2018 14:30:02 GMT -8
I would lean on narrative tools and cues rather than on mechanical ones. narrative tools tend to evoke emotion while mechanical ones tend to evoke logic. As others have said, evocative lurid descriptions. This is a really good time to use your words.
Cheers,
JiB
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