FOR ME, horror is a factor of immersion, not system or even setting.

I used to run Ravenloft Spelljammer and Ravenloft Hollow World.  The key was threats that weren't "normal" in behavior, appearance, or feel and huge focus on the atmosphere of the locales and "something's off" interaction with the NPCs.

Instead of focus on reality, horror is highlighting the unreality, the weird, the wrong. But to do this, the setting needs "normal" baselines.

As for Zweihander, its a Warhammer Fantasy RPG retro-clone-ish game.

I just finished running a 2 year long Shadows of Esteren campaign. The setting is basically medieval Celtic horror in a fantasy version of our world (like how L5R is not-Japan).

The system is pretty streamlined but worked very well for getting out of the way and letting you get immersed in the game. There are some fantastical elements, like druid magic, church miricles and a bit of mad science, each with their own mechanics.

Monsters are suppose to be pretty horrific for normal people and mostly unique. It's pretty easy to stat out your own using the examples in the book. That said, an experienced group isn't going to be tpk'd in 1 round, but they better be smart in their tactics or there will be casualties.

There is a free intro guide pdf on drivethrurpg.com that gives a basic setting overview, system overview, some pregens and 3 scenarios to play. The books are gorgeous and the company is very friendly and easy to talk to.

Earthdawn was made for this.

Alas a wish unfulfilled.

Quote from: Sommerjon;944588Earthdawn was made for this.

Alas a wish unfulfilled.

YES IT WAS. I have re-written/updated one of the stories from the 90's "Sizzle Brochure" (which was put out by FASA before parts of the world were nailed down... they still called the Therans "Atlanteans", for example).

The Legend of Barkadamus the Thief Adept and the Red Man introduces you to nearly all the major setting conceits of Earthdawn, and seriously gave me chills when I first read it back in the 90's and again recently. I've updated small parts of it to fit with the current game-world/terms/metaphysics. For now, I can let you have a preview of the Google Doc

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RCVbqtwAbE49RPGoN6RGAZAiS4Zc2SjGQwoZlcoGRaI/edit?disco=AAAAA60Wfos#heading=h.2nj50j2um1z3

QuoteIt is hard to apply a simple classification to the Horrors. Some of the creatures simply eat anything in sight: trees, grass, animals. Some prefer the taste of intelligent beings, and hunted down members of sentient races that did not seek shelter within massive fortresses. Still others pursued the most difficult prey: the people living in the shelters. These Horrors spent years looking for chinks in the citadel defenses. They attacked the inhabitants through mind control and spirit possession. Once inside they went on rampages, killing everyone they could. The inhabitants went mad with panic, for they knew that they could not escape. Whether they stayed within their walls or opened their doors to flee, they were doomed. I have little love for the Therans, but I am grateful to them because of their efforts to prevent the Horrors from ever again breaking through to this plane in such numbers.
-Perris, Elf Nethermancer Adept

The intersection of horror and fantasy is something I find very interesting. There are moments in the Lord of the Rings that really get your hackles up with fear: Shelob's lair, and the way he describes her lurking and hunting through those awful webs; the Barrow Wights tomb; Frodo slipping on the Ring at Weathertop, and falling into the shadowland of the Nazgùl.

Many fairy tales and fantasies don't need to be shifted much in order to be horror. For example, the stories of Hansel & Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood share fundamental plot similarities and themes with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or the Blair Witch. Outsiders lost in the woods, finding an awful place, being hunted, etc.

While "system" can help to enforce a feeling of horror, description and narrative tricks will serve you much better. When in doubt, I fall back on MR James' brilliant rules of the ghost story. Lovecraft describes his rules thusly:

“The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modern period, in order to approach closely the reader’s sphere of experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than beneficent; since fear is the emotion primarily to be excited. And finally, the technical patois of “occultism” or pseudo-science ought carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of casual verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry.” – H. P. Lovecraft

No Jargon:  Nothing kills tension faster than endless discussions of whatzits and widgets. Don't make up pseudo-scientific reasons why the awful thing exists, just let it be awful. Night of the Living Dead and Alien are great examples of this. The monster is never explained, it just is, and there's no reason for it. Nobody comes along and says "Aha! This is a retrovirus composed of eleventy-twelve DNA strands in a anti-helix structure! That explains everything!" In NotLD, scientists argue where the "disease" came from, but never reach a consensus, and in the end it doesn't matter. In Alien, there's never even an attempt to explain it away. The monster just shows up and starts hunting everyone down.

Familiarity: Set it someplace people can reasonably imagine themselves to be in. Era as well as location. While this can be hard in a fantasy game with all the strange locations available to you, take a moment to try and figure out how to set your horror in recognizable locations. Haunted castles, the streets of a town at night, a dark forest.

Malignity: The Evil must be bad. Nothing kills horror faster than the evil thing being indifferent, just another monster. A great example of this done well is in Stephen King's "Cujo". A rabid dog is just a monster. But King gets into the dog's head, shows how it goes from being a loyal, loving pet, degenerating through the sickness to the point where it just -hates- humans. It hates it's master, hates it's friends, and just wants them all to die. It hunts people down. It traps them and waits them out.

Combine that with CRKruger's three types of horror (which I think were first described in King's "Danse Macabre"), and you've got the foundation of something excellent.

Contemporary fantasy and horror share common roots. Just go back to the dark romanticism/gothic fiction of Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allen Poe, etc.
Outcasts from society, personal torment, human fallibility, existential alienation, the uncanny...
All themes revisited in the writings of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, and present also in the works of George R.R. Martin today.

Quote from: Telarus;944627YES IT WAS.

Oh I know it was.

It's unfortunate that the current developers have turned ED into Generic Fantasy 113.4

Quote from: Sommerjon;944728Oh I know it was.

It's unfortunate that the current developers have turned ED into Generic Fantasy 113.4

Original Earthdawn was awesome, one of the reasons I'm glad Kubasik is over here.  I haven't read all the ED versions, at what point did things start moving more generic?  Is it as simple as when FASA folded?

Quote from: Crüesader;944315I 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?

I think CRK nailed it.

But let me offer this as well in terms of gear/magic poverty as creating that tension - I say if you play your enemies with great consideration it's *more* terrifying when PC's are well geared and they realize they *might* be in over their head, not because their opponents are equally well geared, but because they're just cunning in the extreme and/or relentless.

Think of Aliens - all those colonial marines individually were far more lethal than the aliens themselves - what made it terrifying was that the aliens were inexorable. They were cunning! And there was no reasoning with them, no quarter.

I find that I draw a strong distinction in my games between my NPC's that in that I play them, as appropriate, with a sense of self-preservation. I'll have NPC's beg for mercy, or try to run away when the tide turns (morale checks not withstanding). But when the PC's come across those truly dedicated enemies that do fight to the death, they instantly know it. And it's scary. You have to condition your players into passively being aware that not everyone fights to the death (which in my experience tends to be pretty common in most games I see people run, ymmv) and it cultivates the inner-murder-hobo in them. It's when they come against real crazy shit that grants no quarter - that you see their true colors.

Having adversaries that have entirely different outlooks and strange practices that may seem bizarre evokes that horror too. Think 13th Warrior. Those vikings were far superior to those quasi-Pict-neanderthals (or whatever they were) but the sheer alien nature of them (not to mention the cannibal bits) were scary as shit. The unknown. That's what scares players.

Quote from: CRKrueger;944730Original Earthdawn was awesome, one of the reasons I'm glad Kubasik is over here.  I haven't read all the ED versions, at what point did things start moving more generic?  Is it as simple as when FASA folded?

Pretty much.  When Redbrick got the license the downward transformation into bleh-ville started, with nuFASA at the helm the transformation is complete.

Quote from: CRKrueger;944730Original Earthdawn was awesome, one of the reasons I'm glad Kubasik is over here.  I haven't read all the ED versions, at what point did things start moving more generic?  Is it as simple as when FASA folded?

Me too! I'm also curious as how the current presentation gives "generic fantasy" feel, as I don't share that opinion. Is it market saturation (Pathfinder, etc)? Anything you can add would be cool.

Quick breakdown of editions:

2nd edition presented things in kind of a "wuxia fantasy"... I personally did not care for many of the 2E products, but that's after I shifted to running 2E in the middle of the Blades campaign arc and 2E fell apart at high Circle play.

Earthdawn Classic was very much a collection of material spread out over many many books into a few huge tomes. Didn't really change the tone of the game much, imo.

3rd edition was a more radical change, but it did introduce some good concepts. It was here that the tone of the setting books became about namegiver-on-namegiver politics, but the Horros were there (albeit in the background). I ran some Greyhawk mashup materials for this edition, didn't dip much into the Horror side (just a little) as our son was 8 at the time. But he loved killing evil-fae kobolds and squirmy tentacled things.

4th edition, imo, goes back to  Classic but keeps the better things from 3e. It has not kept all the changes to the setting from 2 or 3, and it has advanced the timeline 7 years. You can always go back and play through the older adventures, but what it has not presented yet are the very large scale threats or bone-chillingly insidious Horrors, as those got marked for the Companion material. I am currently working on material* for the Earthdawn 4e companion, so that of course colors my opinion. You still get classic gribblies like Jehurthras, Spectral Dancers, Bloatforms, Crystal Entities, Despairthoughts, and Wormskulls in the 4E Gamemaster Guide, but (and I'm not involved in these sections) higher Circle challenges like the Named corrupted Spirit Artificer, or Named Horrors: Ubyr the telepathic worm large enough to swallow whole lizard-men riverboats, Aazhvat Many-Eyes, Nebis (knocks onnebis woodnebis), or Verjigorm the Dragon Hunter, will show up later.

*(I'm pushing for new mechanics that straight-up acknowledge that Earthdawn was inspired by the campaign play-style and innovation of people like Gygax, Arneson, etc, which means workable ship-to-ship and mass combat rules to support that style of play, with morale, reaction rules, etc. I'm really trying to make it all balance out so you can use locks of wyverns or hordes of horror-constructs in these scales of play, or actually run a fight between Ubyr and 3 riverboats with fire cannons without hand-waving the whole thing except the Horror's and the PC's actions.)

Horror is difficult in a TTRPG - because I think that a lot of horror is the fear of the unknown.

While I generally don't like random encounter tables etc. very much, I think they might fit in a horror game.

That - and make it so that players don't always know when they're being affected by various long-term diseases/effects.  Maybe notes passed to different players if they have been mind-controlled?

While it's a board game - Betrayal at House On the Hill has some pretty good horror elements in it - though other parts are goofy & over-the top enough that the game as a whole isn't actually scary.

Quote from: Telarus;944827Me too! I'm also curious as how the current presentation gives "generic fantasy" feel, as I don't share that opinion. Is it market saturation (Pathfinder, etc)? Anything you can add would be cool.

Quick breakdown of editions:

2nd edition presented things in kind of a "wuxia fantasy"... I personally did not care for many of the 2E products, but that's after I shifted to running 2E in the middle of the Blades campaign arc and 2E fell apart at high Circle play.

Earthdawn Classic was very much a collection of material spread out over many many books into a few huge tomes. Didn't really change the tone of the game much, imo.

3rd edition was a more radical change, but it did introduce some good concepts. It was here that the tone of the setting books became about namegiver-on-namegiver politics, but the Horros were there (albeit in the background). I ran some Greyhawk mashup materials for this edition, didn't dip much into the Horror side (just a little) as our son was 8 at the time. But he loved killing evil-fae kobolds and squirmy tentacled things.

4th edition, imo, goes back to  Classic but keeps the better things from 3e. It has not kept all the changes to the setting from 2 or 3, and it has advanced the timeline 7 years. You can always go back and play through the older adventures, but what it has not presented yet are the very large scale threats or bone-chillingly insidious Horrors, as those got marked for the Companion material. I am currently working on material* for the Earthdawn 4e companion, so that of course colors my opinion. You still get classic gribblies like Jehurthras, Spectral Dancers, Bloatforms, Crystal Entities, Despairthoughts, and Wormskulls in the 4E Gamemaster Guide, but (and I'm not involved in these sections) higher Circle challenges like the Named corrupted Spirit Artificer, or Named Horrors: Ubyr the telepathic worm large enough to swallow whole lizard-men riverboats, Aazhvat Many-Eyes, Nebis (knocks onnebis woodnebis), or Verjigorm the Dragon Hunter, will show up later.

*(I'm pushing for new mechanics that straight-up acknowledge that Earthdawn was inspired by the campaign play-style and innovation of people like Gygax, Arneson, etc, which means workable ship-to-ship and mass combat rules to support that style of play, with morale, reaction rules, etc. I'm really trying to make it all balance out so you can use locks of wyverns or hordes of horror-constructs in these scales of play, or actually run a fight between Ubyr and 3 riverboats with fire cannons without hand-waving the whole thing except the Horror's and the PC's actions.)

As he explains his love of the new you understand why Earthdawn has become Generic Fantasy 113.4, it's a lovely bonus that he is oblivious to the generic-ization.