I want to start up a space opera/horror game. Through ideas at me user...

god that scene is so creepy

I once did Lord of the Rings in space, with everything from a band of four different species (humans and three types of alien) having to land on the evil planet to destroy an item, to space wizards, 5th-dimensional eagles, space nazgûl and the whole lot. Only one of the players even noticed what was going on, and he didn't say anything to the others until afterwards.

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Android present on-board starts doing weirder and weirder stuff to the point of welding certain doors and observing the players while they sleep

If you know a good player, you could give one a secret role and make them a traitor with their own agenda to accomplish.
Throwing in some old fashioned paranoia really works wonders, especially when there's another threat they need to focus on.

Sunshine is a fantastic movie, just wanted to say. Also OP, google "Martian Death Quest" in the archives. There's the original thread with the story of a brilliant DM running a mindfuck horror game set beneath the surface of Mars. A must-read! Then there's another thread with a few resources to use for yourself, though it's mostly repeats I think.

Space lends itself to excellent horror because space is already terrifying and punches both the "Fear of the Unknown" and "Fear of the Void" buttons hardcore.

EC 032
>Rossum Heavy Industries commissioned for construction of super-Carrier sized colony ship - the first of its kind - in secret. Construction commences around AE20230428B in a neglected corner of the system.
EC 038
>Work on 'UES Neu Erde' completed. RHI begins planned three years of testing and fitting. Access to the site expanded to accommodate new workforce, but contracts mandating all personnel remain on secure construction yard facilities until project completion at the risk of termination expanded to include UNS inspectors, freight ship crews, and one foreign dignitary.
EC 040
>First round of testing and diagnostics completed on Flashpoint Drive. UNS gives go-ahead for trial run.
>Flashpoint Drive section of ship rips itself from frame during testing, fires off into unknown space. The remaining sections of the 'UES Neu Erde' and construction facilities ruined in the process.
EC 079
>"Nerde" is now a hub for junkers, scavengers, and undesirables in the floating arms of the colony ship.
>Players sent on a relatively routine job to retrieve some construction components and data drives recently located by a salvaging outfit.
>Some conflict with junkers, some tricky business with some defense systems, but otherwise the mission goes great until the drive section of the 'UES Neu Erde' suddenly reappears.

Here's the link to the Mars adventure.
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12130366/

Holy shit. That's some good stuff.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12180900/ is also full of great ideas. Living tsundere ship with control issues is my personal favorite.

Cargo ships are so large entire ecosystems form inside the the miles of hallways, never having seen the light of day.
>Be class D maintenance personnel.
>Get lost
>Something big, pale and- /Holy Shit/ it's fast, RUN!!!

Do you mean Europa Report?

That movie is also great for a very grounded hard sci-fi horror game.

It's also awesome for solving the two main problems with found footage movies (nauseating camera work and the question of "well how did they find this footage?"

What Europa are you speaking of specifically?

Read Revelation Space if you haven't already

Just run Rogue Trader

>Anything in 40k
>Scary

Yeah it's got some creepy stuff but everything exists in such retarded extremes it's hard to take the horror elements seriously.

Good horror needs restraint. Nothing about Rogue Trader offers that.

>Event Horizon like situation

Check out the book 'Blindsight.' It's cosmic horror as fuck and the sci-fi aspects are all well-researched, but I got turned off of it because I found the unrelentingly negative tone irritating and self-indulgent.

"Sphere" is also a good one with plenty of sources for inspiration, even though it takes place underwater instead of in space.

shame it jumped the rails three fourths of the way in

this
The Sphere really ain't a good movie, but I guess you have a point in that there's some decent portrayal of a "OMG WE'RE TRAPPED IN THIS SPACESHIP/SUBMARINE THING AND SHIT'S FUCKED UUUP!" situation...

>Sphere
>Movie

Nigger it was a Crichton novel first. Read it.

No. You BUILD UP TO Event Horizon material.

that movie sucked fucking ass

This is good advice.

For an ongoing horror campaign, you can't blow your load with hell portals and shit like that right off the bat. Things have to start pretty mundane first and build up to the crazy stuff.

I ran a space-horror game once.

The characters were on their way to answering a distress call emitting from a research station orbiting Titan, one of Jupiter's moons. They left from Mars, and the first three sessions were all about them getting there, trapped in the cramped conditions of their ship and dealing with mundane problems that, left unattended, would have resulted in terrible death. I wanted to play up the incredible distances involved in traveling though space, partially because it was important to the plot and partially because it made the players antsy.

You start your game like Alien. Life in space is hard, it's dirty, and it's dangerous. Only once the players are used to it do you start raising the stakes.

>Titan
>One of Jupiter's moons
>Jupiter

Oh man, I remember that thread. Super creepy.

>Jupiter.
Aw, fuck, I meant Saturn.

Horror games are all about illiciting stress and building tension in your players. Not too little that they start to get bored, but not so much that they stop jumping when they experience something startling. Balance is key to a good horror experience. You want your players to investigate that something here is very, very wrong.

Wasn't that a Futurama plot?

>I'm thinking starting them off with an Event Horizon like situation.
I considered that once having the story be 40k where the gellar field fails. The astropath pulls the shit out of the warp almost immediately but almost everyone is dead, daemons are everywhere, minds are broken, and the ship has been altered by the warp. Some ideas I had
>Hallways that loop back around despite never turning or bending
>Passage of time changing depending on location and direction (eg. ascending a flight of stairs takes 30 seconds, descending it takes 30 minutes)
>Random mechanical failures for seemingly no apparent reason (doors suddenlt shut, airlocks suddenly open, empty escape pods randomly fire off)
Plus the whole groups of Imperial Navy personnel having gone made and formed tribes of obsessed death cults and chaos worshipers.

youtube.com/watch?v=hGJVq2kT0S8

Considering Imperium ships have crews numbering in the tens of thousands and daemons are incredibly numerous, monstrous, and bloodthirsty, you're basically starting the game with the ante revved up far beyond most horror movies.

Does anyone have that storie about a bunch of astronauts in cave in Mars having hallucinations?

here

You could take inspiration from this thread:

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/43460515/

Though that specific scenario might not work for what you want.

Of course, there's also the Veeky Forums space horror classic "The Staring Woman."

Staring woman?

Major Tom threads followed by Our Superstitious Solar System.

She was made up in an early space horror thread some years ago: a nude woman with long black hair and freezer-burnt skin, either trapped in a vented airlock or roaming around somehow in the vacuum outside the ship or station. Every time the PCs encounter her, she's either right up in their face, looking straight at them through a window or viewscreen, or is seen out of the corner of their eye, moving somewhere off in the distance.

In 's thread, she was outside the moonbase leaving bare footprints in the lunar dust.

Is there more of this? Love me good horror webcomics

Unfortunately, those are the only two, and they were made specifically for Veeky Forums's space horror threads.

I think I've finally gotten enough inspiration for a new game to run when my current one wraps up.

A hard sci-fi adventure horror game where the players investigate all kinds of crazy stuff out in space. Abandoned space stations, alien cave systems, crazy robots. Could be great.

Anything particular ideas you feel like sharing?

>Party gets distress call from ship out in deep space.
>Person calling herself "Eris"
>Arrive, ships is immaculate but totally empty.
>Eris only communicates over intercom; normal feminine voice.
>Ship looks like no one's ever lived in it.
>Plentiful food stocks, fully functioning automation.
>No sign of crew.
>One locked door, Eris says malfunction caused it to seal shut.
>Find out Eris is actually the ship itself.
>Says crew abandoned ship and never returned.
>Party searches around ship. Find some neat stuff. Plan to take it with them.
>Someone opens the shut door.
>Finds the crew...

>Forgot to mention party hears constant, regular, rhythmic tapping every 15 minutes from other side of the door.

An old-time more-code signal maybe?

MorSe code, rather.

Also, from the haunted moonbase thread, there was one suggestion where you would create a rather endearing female NPC, a survivor of whatever backstory-disaster you've invented or another salvager that's been on the wreck longer than the PCs have, wearing a space suit with the mirrored visor pulled down at all times. She would be consistently friendly, helpful and loyal, but would always find excuses for not taking off her suit or showing her face to the PCs. When they finally manage to convince her to take off her helmet and let them see her face, the suit is revealed to be empty, falling over in a heap immediately thereafter.

Seconding "Blindsight".

>read

This is actually bretty gud low-key space spoopiness.
Practically none of the holy philosophy, Batman! that the first one contained and instead a lot of cramped living on a giant spaceship. Until shit that shouldn't be starts lurking the corridors...

And it has mufuggen John Lithgow, Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren!
2010 is so damn much better than the original!

Ah the Icarus II... once again proving how Russians fuck everything up (I know he was on Icarus I. I guess he fucked up both)

That movie fucking sucks.
Had so much potential. Ruined everything with shitty looking space squid at the end.
Why not just never reveal the horror?

Yeah, I felt the same way. I don't know why it's so difficult for people to understand. Once you quantify something, it always becomes less scary.

I actually didn't mind that at all. In the end it doesn't turn out to be some "erhmegehrd, the horrar!", there's just an indigenous lifeform on Europa that happens to be pretty damn dangerous. It was an interesting sidestep from the usual horror fare, going for space zoology instead.

Problem with that is it works a lot better in theory than it almost ever will in practice. Most players are by nature paranoid, so some NPC who shows up and refuses to even show them what she looks like will illicit nothing except suspicion; suspicion which may turn violent. Remember also that simply making the character "friendly and helpful" is no guarantee players will perceive them that way.

>inb4 get better players, fag

desu by far the scariest part of Europa Report was when the female crewmember, alive and in her spacesuit, fell into the Europan ocean, going deeper and deeper and deeper, still alive but with no way of being rescued...

Aw man, totally forgot about that :

I'm with this guy. No matter what, the reveal would have been disappointing because the build-up was so great. Making it space ghosts or some shit like that wouldn't have made it any better, so at least it was a different kind of approach.

You're right. Maybe saying that she refuses is a mistake. Maybe it just never comes up until the reveal, or maybe you purposefully play off their suspicions and paranoia so that if they do something, the reveal is that she was just a normal woman with a nasty scar all along.

A setup like The Dig could be really atmospheric if done right. A high-priority mission goes wrong and all hell breaks loose.

Possibly literally.

>Computer: "Negative. Three crew members."

...

Man, that really takes me back. Wasn't she made back in 2010? If so, I remember a long ass thread that came up with various ideas for sci-hi horror.

My favorites were animated space suits walking along the hull moving in inhuman ways, and coming across the derelict ship or station, but no matter which angle the crew observes it, the perspective stays the same.

...

Do you have a PDF?

Make your players at some point get sent to a station that's been cut off for hundreds of years, like in Have the descendants of the crew be mutated into moonman monsters, but DON'T have that be the focus. In fact, the players should never even know what their origin was or what they look like for certain.
Have the moonmen avoid the players out of fear at all times - just well enough that the most your players will see is a swinging vent, maybe a long, pale leg, or they might hear a tornado of movement from a pitch-black room they just opened as the moonmen desperately try to hide and escape. However, make the moonmen do it just poorly enough that the players always feel as if there's something close and something inhuman watching them at all times. Maybe at the very end you could have them accidentally catch one out and have them come to the grim, sad realization of what happened there as the moonman cowers in the corner shitting itself and waving something at the scary suit-people to keep them away.

I like this, but I'd probably make the moonmen much more sinister. Sort of like The Hills Have Eyes but in space .

2 words. Maschine Zeit.

Sounds a little like Pandorum, watch that film OP.

Nice

This sounds fun. I might actually use this as a short story inspiration. It's company policy to have at least one human unfrosted on one month shifts as its required by law to have a live pilot do course checks and other duties, while the android covers maintenance and general "keep humans alive duties" and starts saying deeply disturbing things to the pilot, who now fears if they fall asleep they will be dismembered, or something, I dont know. Good premise to work with though.

"Where are the stars?"

>I want to start up a space opera/horror game.

>spacefarer made pact with ancient space god for safe return
>his end of the deal is that he'll sacrifice the first being he beholds upon making landfall

Just rip off early modern opera plots.

Pic very related

Europa Report was not a horror movie. It was marketed as a horror movie for stupid reasons, but the only "horror" aspect was that the situation the astronauts were in was incredibly stressful and how they reacted to it. If you went in expecting a horror movie you pretty much went in expecting something that's not Europa Report.

Besides, I was referring to underneath the ice, not above it.

Europa potentially has enough liquid water under its surface to rival the amount of water that exists on the fucking Earth, and almost all of it is completely without sunlight. You have an endless abyss below a thick surface of ice in a potential ecosystem that would be extraordinarily competitive compared to the Earth on top of being similar to the kind of shit you see at the bottom of our ocean. The ice on Europa has some cracks in it to let sunlight and radiation in, but outside of the cracks the ice can be 15 kilometers thick.

Once you go below the surface there are only a few places you can escape. You can't use your eyes. Everything around you will be VERY big* and very hungry. Using sonar to see only makes you an easier target.

* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-sea_gigantism

The best damn Mars horror RPG you will ever read

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12130366

That would be because Europa Report is not a horror movie.
Repeat after me: Europa Report is NOT a horror movie.
It's a hard science fiction movie. Probably one of the best out there.
If you went into Europa Report expecting a horror movie, then no shit you were going to be disappointed.

Tell me what you think about this idea guys?
It's a modern game where the players investigate a mysterious disappearance in the woods
They see a number of staircases, with no accompanying house, just staircases and most seem to be of a spiralling design

They see other odd unsettling things

They discover the hatch for an underground bunker, which they descend and it turns out to be a cathedral of metal

There are windows but the Vistas they see are planets and stars

Turns out they've been transported onto a derelict ship in the deep reaches of space

And that's when the horrifying fun starts

Def horror elements to it. It has a nicely creepy vibe.

All depends on what they'll see down there. Why can't they go back? What threats (or perceived threats) could they come across?

They'll be seeing some pretty freaking shit, things that have not right to exist and I'll be cribbing liberally from that inspiration thread

Brain theft by giant worms and brains in canisters to name two ideas

They've been literally teleported into the space craft via a one-way portal like a Stargate

Freaky* shit
No* right to exist

Fucking phone

Reminds me of that series of "I'm a forest rescue ranger" spooky stories from reddit.

Oh, so good stuff then?

Link? Never heard of it.

Man, I love how hard sci-fi is so conducive to really freak, unique styles of horror.