While I rarely find myself interested in fantasy RPG's much any more, I do often find a foray into the realm a bit tempting.  That being said, one can only clobber so many gnolls and necromancers before it begins to get tiresome.  I would eagerly welcome a fantasy game that brings some degree of horror to the table, without requiring the player to be some variety of 'cowardly peasant'.  Additionally, the idea of 'this can totally kill you fast' doesn't seem genuine.  

While even White Wolf's old games claimed to be 'horror', the only true 'fear' I had was that some random dice roll would have me biting myself or incinerating my car while on the way to visit Fansy the Fanger.  It wasn't horror, it was 'you are a horror thing'.  

How could I possibly reach out and get a horror 'feel' in a game?  What setting offers this?  What particular campaign or adventure path can evoke this, without it turning into a medieval fantasy B-movie?  What techniques have YOU used for this?

Depends on what you mean by Horror?

Here's a description I made from another thread...

Fear, whether rational or irrational, is an initiation of the body's Fight or Flight system, emphasis on the Flight. It's strongly tied to physiological responses.

Terror is Fear turned up to 11, where the level of Fear rises to where rational thought is severely impaired. You may not know what's happening, but you have to run away, or do whatever RIGHTNOW!

Horror is more mental (ie not adrenaline driven). It is a combination of fear/disgust/other stuff, more of a dawning realization, where you are having trouble putting together what is actually happening due to it being so terrible or beyond your experience.

Example 1. Responding to reports of activity at a deserted building might bring with it a level of Fear, due to all the possible factors the reality of which are unknown. Exploring the building and coming upon Hannibal Lector's slaughterhouse or kitchen would fill one with Horror as you realized what was happening. Hearing Hannibal Lector moving around upstairs might fill one with Terror, leading to getting the hell out of Dodge.

Example 2. Realizing your child isn't on the swing where you saw them 5 seconds ago = Fear. Looking around the playground and still not seeing them = Terror. After tearing through the whole park and not finding them and realizing that they are gone as the adrenaline wears off = Horror.

There's also Dread, based on anticipation of an event which can cause physiological response similar to anxiety or Fear.

What psychological state are you trying to mimic or induce?

Quote from: CRKrueger;943795What psychological state are you trying to mimic or induce?

I didn't really know until you put it that way, and now the answer is "ALL OF IT".

Hardly a controversial opinion but I think CoC is the best horror game there is. The actual game Dread is more fun than scary, Ten Candles is authentically spooky but a storygame.

Mixing horror and fantasy would require a pretty significant de-powering of the fantasy PC by D&D standards. I don't think most of Raggi or Carcosa achieves this. Ravenloft I find more fun than scary as well. To really do this would probably require a game built from the ground up with that intention, a truly unexplored aspect of fantasy.

What would be the literary touchstones for tone? I'm thinking Clark Ashton Smith, some of the Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber's stories, some of Karl Edward Wagner's stories and Bellair's Face in the Frost.

The characters would probably have to be oriented towards the barbarian, tomb robber and wizard in-over-their head archtypes. Peasant boys and girls would also work. Or a Priest like in the stories of the French Decadents. I think most horror works against extended campaigns, the world should be so deadly that just a possibility of extended campaigning would be as unlikely as it is in CoC.

It would have to be a fairly low magic setting, BtW would be a good starting point there, perhaps with some inspiration from the demon binding approach of Stormbringer.

Quote from: Voros;943805It would have to be a fairly low magic setting, BtW would be a good starting point there, perhaps with some inspiration from the demon binding approach of Stormbringer.

Our Wednesday night group's Traveller campaign is on hold so we can play some Holmes D&D using B1. My first trip to that trough.
Not having much magic along is really keeping the 'horror' aspect going.
So far we've lost 3 PCs and some hirelings to swarms of rats. The other critters haven't been much of a problem yet, but the rats... sheesh. And there's maybe two spells per day in the whole group. So when we found ourselves in a long hallway and a sudden wind blew out our light source... and then we heard chittering/squeaking out in the darkness... total panic!
There's been 'terror' (rats!) and 'dread' (opening doors we haven't been through yet)... but only a bit of 'horror' (seeing what those rats did to the halflings).

To me, horror really works best when you have some sort of emotional tie or feeling for the characters. If something happens to someone you like, you feel it far more than someone you don't know anything about or dislike.

In RPGs it works the same way. Attachment to characters, even your own, isn't something that is automatic. This is why I never found CoC particularly scary, even though I am a big fan of it - in general, you can't get too attached to characters because it's much too deadly.  Instead, it's more like a puzzle solving game.

This is why I've always found D&D's level drain system the scariest. When you've spent several months working up a character 5th level + and you encounter a creature that could take all that work away from you, it's scary. OTOH, it can also feel cheap and arbitrary. So it's best used rarely.

And there is the gross factor.  A lot of horror movies rely on gore and the grotesque vs character development and do a decent job of still provoking horror. In a fantasy setting, the grotesque can be really gross indeed.

Run a lethal game. That'll keep them on the edge.

My OD&D players soon droped their new school conditioning and learned to fear goblins and kobolds and rushing in without a plan.

I still get scared during combat running TFT or GURPS when it's not completely unmatched, or even when it is, and something unexpected happens.

Dangerous opponents are common and scary. All sorts of situations are scary, and can come up unexpectedly - an organized group of soldiers, a dropped weapon, an unexpected blow to the head, or weapon arm, getting cornered...

Just last night, we were trampling our way through a pack of lowly hobgoblins when one of them decided to throw his club and got a critical hit on one of us, who fell from his horse and was on the brink of death. Suddenly my character was isolated and surrounded by hobgoblins who also got the idea to attack my horse rather than me (whose chainmail made it hard for them to hurt me by typical attacks, and very nearly brought me down, at which point they could likely have tackled and swarmed me. Fortunately, what first happened was they spooked and ran. Now however we have several days of lonely deserted trail ahead, with Earnest tied slumped to his horse. It's going to be a close thing.

Really any situation where there's an unexpected, unknown and/or uncontrollable risk or set of bad choices or increasingly worsening circumstances. Look at some of the better horror films that are largely actually just real-world circumstances: Jaws is about the tactics of dealing with a shark that's bigger than you thought and is coming after you, and the tactics of fighting it from a disintegrating boat. Psycho is about a crazy assailant with a knife and like many slasher horrors, people not expecting attack and/or not knowing who/where/how an attack is coming. Deliverance is about a river trip and murderous hillbillies. Duel is about an enraged trucker.

Magic is scary when it's being used against you in intelligent ways, especially when done in covert ways that you can't really detect who or where it's coming from, and/or when you don't have great defenses against it.

Game of Thrones is scary because of unpredictable but frequent murder, intrigue and betrayal, and a deadly "combat system".

What's not scary, I think, is when a game is overly gamey. When it's not much like actually being a person in the situation described, but it's about game mechanics, especially when those game mechanics make it unlikely anything really bad will happen, there are piles of safety hitpoints or other artificial mechanics that allow players to manage risk, and/or lots of magical resources for healing or even resurrecting your own "dead", and/or the GM is almost surely going to make things turn out ok for the PCs in the end one way or another.

Unknown, tension, implicit, lack of control, danger, risk.

Everything else is either easy or runs the bleeding edge with mindfuck or squickery.

Buy-in is essential, otherwise the player risks nothing, and thus detached feels nothing. This can be established through play over time as well as earlier emotional attachment to characters. But if a player refuses to attach there is not much you can do (besides mindfuck-squickery).

It's not hard, but it's in no way easy. A good scary story just might actually be one of the hardest tales to tell.

I'll try to tackle the fear aspect from the perspective of fantasy 'realism'. YMMV

Your goal as GM isn't to convince a player to be scared, it's to illustrate why a character should be scared. That being said, it's hard to convince a player to be 'scared' in-character. The best way to instill this is to have a mechanic that makes their character less effective in situations of stress and terror.

And no, I'm not talking about random tables that force a player to act in a narrative way that they normally wouldn't (e.g. the age-old run away/hide/cower scenarios). For ZWEIHÄNDER, I approached it from the perspective of giving players diminishing returns on their dice rolls by inflicting 'peril' upon them. Much like how players have a threshold against physical harm, they also have a threshold against mental harm. As they suffer more and more mental harm, they become less effective at what they can do.

With this method, I can impose personalized mechanical penalties upon players that still gives them agency to determine how their character would act. My experience thus far has been that players will act in kind to the amount of 'hit points' they have left; in some cases, they may make the decision to be more careful, in others they may throw themselves towards more danger. Ultimately, I let the numbers on their character sheet tell the story, and let the players decide how they'll act.

Bottom line - impose mechanical penalties upon player's dice rolls in stressful or terrifying situations, but never, ever force their character to cower/run/hide. Let the player make that decision on their own.

Here's how I tackled it in ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG: http://grimandperilous.com/?p=617

Quote from: ZWEIHÄNDER;943934Here's how I tackled it in ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG: http://grimandperilous.com/?p=617

Your game very much intrigues me, I won't lie.

There's two broad ways to approach it. Zweihander's is the mechanical approach, having it simply be a modifier no different than a physical disability.

The other approach is to attempt to affect the player and have them actually feel the fear the players are.  There are two broad sub-approaches, here too.  One is external, like Dread...making the players feel anxious due to the anticipation of the Jenga tower falling or using music with disturbing sub-frequenices.  The other is roleplaying.  Obviously I prefer the roleplaying approach.  Get the players into the character, they'll fear what the character should.

One simple way to start is by having the setting be internally consistent and as nasty as it should be.  Take 1e AD&D for example...

• Rot Grubs, Ear Seekers etc... are very deadly to PCs, but also kill the PCs in ways invoking Body Horror in the players.
• Classic Undead drain stats and levels that are permanent, unless high level clerical magic is involved.
• Use Psionics.  Intellect Devourers, Mind Flayers.  Player's will be scared shitless.
• Drow. Don't use them like BDSM fantasy, use their powers of stealth and darkness to be like Dark Knight Batman vs. Criminals, or the Predator.
• Fire is a vastly overused type of damage, but the actual effects of fire would actually do are vastly underused.  Most people fear fire, it's one of those Lizardbrain things.
• Snakes, Insects, Molds, Fungi, etc, not only tend to be stuff that grosses people out, or even edges on phobias, but also tend to be very deadly with save or die poisons, diseases, etc.
• Goblins, Kobolds, Jermaline, whatever, are described as being cunning...you don't need to go Full.Tucker to get people scared, you just need to have Small Unit Tactics matter.  As a jarhead that shouldn't be difficult.
• Combine all this, and you have what a lot of purpleites dismiss as Fantasy Fucking Vietnam...but what's the #1 US war you'd rather not be a soldier in? Maybe Civil War because of the "march in lines before cannons and there is no medicine", but if you're talking small group out alone gripped by fear?  That's the Nam. Channel that, but not 24/7, then it becomes the norm.  The key to Fear is that it's Not the Norm.

You make the game naturally, organically deadly, where the reality of the PCs situation matters and people will start to feel the emotions their characters should.  Then you don't need special psychological mechanics, mental and spiritual hit point tracks or any of that, you just need people to get into their character's headspace and roleplay.  

Play a more deadly fantasy game like Harnmaster, Rolemaster, RuneQuest or Mythras, people get injured in a close, tense battle, sometimes you see players needing a quick break, they have the shakes, the after-effects of adrenaline.

Now literal Terror is getting into Panic Attack territory.  It's an awesome testament to your GMing skills if you can get players there, but I wouldn't really want to get there, although I have had players break and run voluntarily, without mechanical dictates or tactical calculation, they just got the fuck outta dodge because they were freaked the fuck out.  Sometimes when stuff like that happens I ask players later what was going on, frequently it's just roleplay, but sometimes players just get scared.  That's when you know you did a good job.

Quote from: CRKrueger;944286Combine all this, and you have what a lot of purpleites dismiss as Fantasy Fucking Vietnam...but what's the #1 US war you'd rather not be a soldier in? Maybe Civil War because of the "march in lines before cannons and there is no medicine", but if you're talking small group out alone gripped by fear?  That's the Nam. Channel that, but not 24/7, then it becomes the norm.  The key to Fear is that it's Not the Norm.

Well, obviously you don't know anything about the 'War on Illiteracy'.  People do NOT want to hear about your confirmed kills in that war at all.

Quote from: CRKrueger;944286Now literal Terror is getting into Panic Attack territory.  It's an awesome testament to your GMing skills if you can get players there, but I wouldn't really want to get there, although I have had players break and run voluntarily, without mechanical dictates or tactical calculation, they just got the fuck outta dodge because they were freaked the fuck out.  Sometimes when stuff like that happens I ask players later what was going on, frequently it's just roleplay, but sometimes players just get scared.  That's when you know you did a good job.

I think this is straying only slightly from what I am looking for.  I want it to be more like, well- a horror fantasy movie.  Some examples of things I would like to do-

A massive city, once the jewel of [insert nation], now a ghost city- things move around in there, big and small.  Terrifying creatures sending villagers into a panic at night, huddling in cellars with their families.  A 'hero' trembling as he opens the door, terrified of what can be behind it.  A focus on surviving to first light, rather than getting the treasure or recognition for your deeds.

I'm almost thinking it would be fun to just drop magic altogether, except in the most subtle ways.  That includes magic items- at best, I'd want the heroes' 'reward weapons/items' to be 'good quality' rather than 'blessed' or 'arcane'.

Quote from: Crüesader;944290I think this is straying only slightly from what I am looking for.  I want it to be more like, well- a horror fantasy movie.  Some examples of things I would like to do-

A massive city, once the jewel of [insert nation], now a ghost city- things move around in there, big and small.  Terrifying creatures sending villagers into a panic at night, huddling in cellars with their families.  A 'hero' trembling as he opens the door, terrified of what can be behind it.  A focus on surviving to first light, rather than getting the treasure or recognition for your deeds.

I'm almost thinking it would be fun to just drop magic altogether, except in the most subtle ways.  That includes magic items- at best, I'd want the heroes' 'reward weapons/items' to be 'good quality' rather than 'blessed' or 'arcane'.

Well, you did say "All of it".

You're right in that the lower the magic level gets, the less equipped in general PCs will be against any threat, but more specifically, the supernatural things that should be scaring the fuck out of them like Undead, Demons, Devils, etc.

Btw, about Demons.  A great way to convert demons from tough opponents to pants-shitting nightmare fuel is to go Full.Catholic.  Possession and disembodied spirits are much scarier to deal with.  Add in Witches, Warlocks, Sorcerers who are allied with the evil or behind it, and now you have Paranoia jump in as well, which leads to a different kind of fear where normal humans become the Monsters.

Quote from: CRKrueger;944301Well, you did say "All of it".

You're right in that the lower the magic level gets, the less equipped in general PCs will be against any threat, but more specifically, the supernatural things that should be scaring the fuck out of them like Undead, Demons, Devils, etc.

Btw, about Demons.  A great way to convert demons from tough opponents to pants-shitting nightmare fuel is to go Full.Catholic.  Possession and disembodied spirits are much scarier to deal with.  Add in Witches, Warlocks, Sorcerers who are allied with the evil or behind it, and now you have Paranoia jump in as well, which leads to a different kind of fear where normal humans become the Monsters.

I like it.  I also like the idea of the general arms and equipment of the population being something akin to reality- good weapons and armor aren't generally easy to come by, nor do you just grab up some breastplate in the dirt and wear it easily.  I'm partially tempted to have the players' equipment 'improved' along with them, rather than have them go on loot-crawls.  

You know anything about that guy's Zweihander game at all?