Hi everyone and welcome back to Finder’s Archive. This time around, I’m going to be looking at horror games, and why they are so difficult to get right in a roleplaying game context. (Seems fitting as Halloween’s almost upon us, doesn’t it?)
Definition of Horror
First, we should define what horror is. If you look at the textbook definition of horror, it’s defined as an “intense feeling of fear, shock or disgust.” But this is not actually what we consider horror to be when we think about it. Generally, within games (and films), it’s a sense of fear and shock and often gore. So, they’re trying to hit all the major high points, but only rarely does any single book or film dive deeply into just one subject. That is what we’ll be looking at here, but we’re going to do so in reverse order.
Suspension of Disbelief
In order for your game to be a horror game, you need to get the players to buy in, and suspend their disbelief. This is something that’s incredibly hard to do with roleplaying games, because humans are (as a general rule) pack animals. We feel safe when we’re in a group, we seek comfort with each other, and our instincts tell us to do everything in our power to lighten the mood when we’re afraid, whether that is by cracking jokes (my own personal failing: I apologize profusely to my GM in my early years for doing just this when playing Ravenloft), or grabbing food, drinks or even just calling for a toilet break. Anything we can do to break that tension.
So, for this to work, you first need the players to buy into it. They need to KNOW that this is a horror session so that they can mentally prepare themselves for that. Ironically, just knowing that a horror game is coming up makes people more susceptible to it, even though we all assume otherwise. That’s because we’re expecting something horrible and terrible to happen, and we’re sat there waiting for the moment, which causes us to break that tension a bit less.
Part of doing this though is setting the mood. That means anything you can do to break your normal gaming space into a “light within the darkness” type setting. For example, you could host the game in the evening where you normally do it during the day use candles instead of normal lights (I would suggest using LED-candles though, they give better lighting, and there are just some times where you have to read that character sheet); using music of a tone fitting to the setting (my own group’s personal favorite back in the day was this little piece of music; but even a simple trick such as moving your gaming table around would work well. Simply put, try to put the players out of their comfort zone.
Disgust in horror
Probably the easiest for you to manipulate as a GM is disgust. This Is where the players sit there and go “Okay… That is VILE.” That is scenes like the ones you find in the old film Se7en where they are reliving the various sins in the most explicit manner possible. This is normally in the form of acts that humans are not supposed to engage in (flaying people alive and that sort of thing) over to simple excess of normal behavior, like the glutton in Se7en. In many ways, the excess route is actually better than the abnormal behavior for the simple fact that it’s a type of activity that most of us can recognize or partake in on a regular basis (like eating), but not to the extremes that could be presented in a horror setting. This is something that takes us out of our comfort zone and causes the disgust effect.
Shock in horror
We’ve all seen the jump-scare, in films or games. It’s the person jumping out from behind a wall going “Boo!” as well as the horrible things crawling through ducts and trying to grab you as you run down a corridor in Dead Space. It’s even the things you’ve already seen, but which have an added layer to them, like the extendable mouth of the Alien in the Aliens series. You know perfectly well that the monster is there, but then it turns out to have a reach of about a foot more than you expected.
This is not quite as easy to pull off in tabletop gaming as it is in a movie or a film, as there’s rarely anything actually jumping out at you (unless the GM starts chucking dice or miniatures at his players, but that’s usually in frustration 😛 ), but it can be done with the right amount of work. The key here is that sense of security, making the players see what they expect and having them go “Ah! I know this, this is familiar” and then throwing in something completely unexpected and out of the blue. This is not to say that you should throw something necessarily deadly at the players (though it should be a significant threat, otherwise it doesn’t work), but you should use the sense of familiarity to your advantage.
For example, if you have a group of PCs making their way through a goblin-infested cave, you should let them see what they always see. Goblins, lots of them, then some Goblin mounts, some lousy (literally full of lice) treasure and lots of disgusting dirt. Then you suddenly have them come upon the mastermind of the place, in a location that’s almost sterile in its cleanliness. It turns out that the Goblins are in fact led by a Dwarf, who’s had enough of the humans in the area, and is using the Goblins for that purpose, fully intending on getting rid of them when they’re done. The players will likely be rather discomforted by that, or at least find it weird. They’ll likely kill him, but as they’re leaving they suddenly hear a distorted scream, and a ghostly figure charges them, trying to possess one of the PCs – in short, their opponent is now back, as a vengeful ghost.
Players have become so used to what’s dead STAYING dead, unless it’s a spellcaster, that they’ll almost always assume that it STAYS dead, which you can use to your advantage.
Fear in horror
This is the most difficult one of the 3 definitions to use in your games, and the least evident. I personally find it to be the most fulfilling though. This is incredibly difficult to build up, and don’t be frustrated if you fail to do this (I fail 90% of the time when I try), but it’s a matter of making the players (not player characters) fear what comes next. Not in terms of “Oh my god, he’s going to chuck a dragon at us,” but in terms of “Oh man! Something around that corner is going to be nasty, I can hear it breathing!” In short, you need to use premonition and ambiance to maximum effect. Describe anything and everything as being somewhat suspicious. After all “It’s a 20-foot long corridor, 8 feet to the ceiling, and 5 feet wide” is much less scary or interesting than “The tunnel through which you’re going is approximately 20 feet long, with moisture dripping down from the 8 feet ceiling above. The walls are slick, as you brush against them, the 5 feet on which you can move not giving you much space in your armor, and below you, a mist moves across the floor, in waves, as if some great beast was slowly drawing breath and releasing it again.”
It’s all in the presentation and look to your favorite horror books on ways to improve your own presentation and crank up the tension for your players.
That’s it for this time, I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay in the Finder’s Archive.
Kim Frandsen
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