How do I properly describe gore? Assuming my players are fine with the visceral details

Also Aerith.

Well it depends on the circumstances. You see, first you need to let go of the sanctity of the human body. You know when you see a watermelon explode in a youtube gun video? It's a bit like that. Analogy is important. The human skull is a bit like a watermelon, especially when bullets are involved. You're not writing a novel. Use comparisons to things you know your players know. There is nothing special about the human body, again. If you run a car into a sack of flour and it blows up and goes everywhere, the same will likely happen to a human. And honestly even real gore isn't that bad after a point, it's more the pain and agony that goes with it. Personally I most prefer describing the NPCs' submission to the irresistible will of death. Actually some of my favorite things to describe are when women succumb to disease or poisons, with their bodies twitching on the ground and coughing up blood as whimpering for mercy from a merciless, thoughtless entity. But if gore is what you're after, ask first: what purpose does it serve? Without visuals, you are trying mostly either disgust your players, or make them cringe, or for the "cool" effect of a weapon / attack that turns an enemy into giblets. Honestly, "you lop off his head in a fountain of blood" works just fine. Other than that, describe squelching, shininess (of fluids), stretching, snapping, et cetera. Really, gore isn't the best way to make your players cringe. The brutality and cruelty of it will go much farther. Force the players to kill an innocent woman whose body is posessed by a demon and they can see the fear in her eyes as, she is fully awake as her body works against her will, causing her to murder her family, and the characters are unable to exorcise the demon, so they will have to kill her, watching the life fade from her eyes as she wonders why this had to happen to her, an innocent peasant girl whose soul is dragged to the Abyss to be tormented forever.

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Is it bad my first thought was "Where are all the clothes from all the naked people?"

Virt, didn't they ban you?

>Virt, didn't they ban you?
They did. He wrote a tear-filled blog post about it.

Then since he couldn't resist, he started using other tripcodes, but since he's not very original everyone could tell right away.

Now he has to be anonymous.

It's not crossed it's from the legend of luthor strode.

Doesn't he have a tumblr chronicling all the times he's been banned?

Just use euphemisms for everything.

Don't limit yourself to the visual.

Tell them about the smell, the sounds, the tastes of copper in the air. Blood smells and tastes like copper. Bones make a wet snapping sound when broken in living flesh. Things falling out of bodies make a wet, spattery sound.

The trick is to foreshadow intensely. The smell of sweat, the acrid tang of fear, the strange metallic flavor in the mouth that is the taste of your adrenaline. bile is a sour, hot flavor, and smells of acid and bitterness. And when the time comes, you don't want to let them catch their breath or talk about it. You want them to see it in their heads, experience it, and then you make them realize that there are things to be done, work to be had. don't let them process, force them to act quickly and effectively.

Because if they don't have time to process, they will be ripe for the next and worse thing. THEN let them process, let them have a breather. Not after then first scene of gore, but after the second. When they have processed, then introdice small things. Little tidbits that hearken back to the hellscape previous. A finger with a few drops of blood. A torn off nail on a table. A smear of blood in a stainless steel sink. Make them remember the first scenes. Don't over-saturate: hint and suggest, immerse and shock them, then awe them with overwhelming force, then retreat back to hints and terrible, simple, almost incidental suggestions.

It's HARD, user. You have to be able to walk the walk yourself. Go to /b/, wade through a half dozen gore threads. Go to gurochan, study in depth the visual hell and THINK and IMAGINE the sounds, the smells. Brains are soft and fatty. The fat tissues of the body are just under the skin, yellowish. Raw meat is rubbery and soft, but has a strange tensile strength - it doesn't rip or tear easily, unlike skin. Bone can be moved when exposed, and they make soft sucking sounds when you disjoint them.

If you can do that, you can give it a try.

Luther Strode

Basically the nerdy protag wants to get buff and orders a guide to 'The Hercules Method' which actually suceeds in giving him muscle powers. But a bunch of Historical and Mythological Figures (along with some other OCs) going all the way back to Cain have used it, and there are some still kicking around the protag has to stop. OP's pick is what happened when Jack the Ripper escaped the imprisonment enforced by Method users who didnt want the regular world to discover its existence.

God tier action, but the main characters are respectively the dullest protagonist possible and the writers incredibly abrasive Waifu.

This isn't the same Virt as this Virt is it?

youtube.com/watch?v=8iV71YbHayw

Doubtful.

Bonesaw is about the quality of her art, not the quantity, none of the others are interested enough in corpse arangements to decorate the place (plus the bodies are mostly full form and not turned giblets)

This is clearly the work of the teeth gang.

Emotion.

If you want it to have impact, you have to go further than just describing the scene. The diction needs to be visceral and mean.Someone doesn't have a snapped neck, their head is sitting at an unnatural angle. That leg isn't broken, it's powdered.
Is totally right, its about details. the cult leader doesn't just eat those intestines. He TEARS into them and you can hear the chewing, and you can smell the putrid stink of the half digested food within. The victims face (always describe faces, they are windows to the soul after all) is frozen in a ghastly stare.

I usually go into detail until my eyes want to water.

Nah, this one is a low-test troll who introduced himself by spamming threads with screencaps he made of himself getting banned on reddit. After about a year of making a nuisance of himself on Veeky Forums he received a very public permaban, which caused him to write a long, tear-filled blogpost about how he was done with Veeky Forums.

Now that he can't post as a tripfag, he has a harder time getting attention. This thread is probably the most erect he's been in months.

Aerith is also impaled on one of the pillars

Ahahaha there's all the resident evil protags insoles on the corridor right next to them

reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/xo41d/doctorsnursesredditors_what_has_been_your_most/c5o66p2/
inb4 >reddit

For inspiration, let me share with you a playthrough of Song of Saya - True Route, that couple dedicated user came up with to honor their waifu.
Buy a box of sheep guts, let them sit out in the sun for a day to get the aroma started, then put them in sealable container, place the container next to your computer. At every scene with meat-o-vision keep the container open. At every scene with physical intimacy, put one hand in the container.

Verbiage, OP. Disgusting, disgusting verbiage. Pouring, dripping, slopping, squelching.

That, combined with the human mind's propensity to sharpen when adrenaline is involved, letting you be very specific and detailed, makes for grossness.

I found the dragonball to the upper left of the left side tree.

There's another above that one hiding behind a trashcan.

They're all there.

For fuck's sake, I thought we had Virt contained in the "Womyn Officer Corps" thread with the bait pic

Even virt is capable of maintaining multiple simultaneous open tabs.

Conserve detail. Pick the three of four most evocative things about the situation and describe them and let their brains fill in the blanks.

Terry Pratchett, for example, once painted a picture of the visceral nastiness of a room with just the smell of blood, the soundproofing on the walls, and a single tooth lying on the ground.

That's good, they can wish everyone back.

Read a bit about what severely injured people actually do: go pale from blood loss, become dizzy / nauseated, throw up, flop sweat, go into shock, die, shit themselves. Put the viscera in visceral.

What was left of the body sat in a sea of blood. Chunks of flesh, torn from the body, sat in the blood like tiny islands in a great, red sea. A vast ragged hole had been torn in his torso, and what remained of his intestines spilled out like fresh spaghetti. Smaller chunks of meat had splattered against the wall, and became stuck there as they dried. Globules of yellowish fat had left trails like tiny slags as gravity pulled them down the wall, even as they dried to it. It looked as if the explosion had been quite powerful. His legs were bent in an odd, unnatural way, and his left arm had been split open, exposing the painfully white bone of his ulna. His bracelet lay next to him. It seemed to have hit the wall hard enough to have shattered the display, which lay on the ground in pieces. Half of his head had simply collapsed. The blood coating made it look like raw pizza dough covered in tomato sauce. His clothes, too, were covered in blood.

Nice

> thread about describing gore
> no mention of Dark Heresy crit tables

Look, Veeky Forums, your mom and I aren't mad, just disappointed.

Were those stories that one user who claimed to know him in person ever confirmed?

They have nothing on the Rolemaster crit tables, user.

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Good. All mimes must die.

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One of the things that I never realized while studying medicine is that doctors/nurses are in a customer service role, essentially. I work in the field of durable medical supplies now, which may not be as prestigious as a direct practitioner, but whenever I 'get' to interact with patients and doctors, I'm so grateful that I don't have to deal with that shit. Not to mention the pay isn't good when you consider the stress, hours and loans.

But, back on the topic of gore. I generally skim over it for MOST situations. Sometimes I'll remark on it to give the players a good idea of what their characters would consider 'normal' amounts of blood and dismemberment in combat. This really helps your case later on down the line when you want to describe a really gore-ridden scene. When you start to mention the thick puddles of blood, the way that masses of flesh glisten in their fluids and how a severed limb looks, outstretched and ripped ten feet away from the socket it was torn from - that mental image that the players never focused on before is a bit stronger.

tl;dr, don't overdo the gore imagery. Save it for when it really matters.

When I saw this thread, I knew someone would remember the filename from the other day.

Plus there is a lack of burnt corpses, and the windows are intact. But it could be work of a previous set of members, pre-Brockton Bay Hyperclusterfuck.

I personally find that a real key to describe the gore is not just the physical sensations of what they see, the smells, the sounds (all covered well in this thread already) but triggering the player's empathy by describing the emotions of the victims. Death is rarely as quick or clean as shown in movies. The lucky ones are the ones who are dead before they hit the ground

Let's go with 40k as a setting, cuz it gets gruesome and brutal. A bolter round to the head is typically all she wrote, they're dead instantly, but a gut shot, the victim has a few moments to crawl on the floor screaming in pain, attempt to scoop up whats left of their GI tract out of sheer panic and terror, knowing that those bits are supposed to be inside their torsos if they want to live. Begging and screaming that this is where they don't want to die, "No! Not like this, please, please no no noooo oh throne it hurts so much".

The disbelief, the fear. Until mometns ago they where whole, but now they're missing a leg, or their guts are on the floor, or there's a slash in their neck and there's so much blood coming out. Normal people don't think much about how mortal they really are until they're mortally wounded, and staring death in the face. Part of them doesn't want to believe it, another part knows all too well that this is the end of the ride.

The visceral details are one thing, my friends. But if you want to truly hit your players deep, drive home the emotion of those who are dead but still screaming.

Totally backwards. Amateur mistake. Don't describe it at all. Say things like "Your eyes don't want to even look at the details. You feel queasy even glancing at the viscera and gore."

Horror writers suck at creating gore horror because they don't RESPECT death. The more you sympathize with the tragedy and treat the dead with dignity, the more effective each little hint of the details of the gore becomes.

Don't over-describe it. The most chilling sentence I've ever seen in a book is from Salem's Lot, by Stephen King - When a vampire's henchman sacrifices a small boy to the Lord of the Flies, the only description of the sacrifice is:

> "It became unspeakable."

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You're good at this!

>Basically the nerdy protag wants to get buff and orders a guide to 'The Hercules Method' which actually suceeds in giving him muscle powers.
Where have I heard this before?

>Jack the Ripper
>Serial Killer
>Massacre
It really pisses me off when writers can't seem to grasp that serial killers DON'T go on massed killing sprees.
Fucking research this shit.

As a Night Lord myself I can say thats some pretty far off shit.

It's pretty easy user. Just describe the type of injury, the motion needed to cause the injury, and the natural result of the injury.

For example:
>The cyclops let loose a swing from his greatclub. Varg attempted to absorb the impact with his shield, but the titanic strength of the monster was too much, and as Varg attempted to regain his footing, his shield arm fell limp to his side. From the unnatural angle of his bowed arm, it was clear Varg wasn't going to survive another hit of that magnitude.

Now, if you want "gore", use analogy and onomatopoeia :
>Blah blah cyclops swinging his greatclub. As Varg attempted to absorb the blow, his arm buckled like the bough of a young tree, before snapping and contorting into an odd angle. Blood began pouring out of the gaps in his left gauntlet as he stared meekly up at the terrible beast.

Smells and textures. Describe them most of all. Put real thought into it. Smell is sense that has the most tie to memory. Use that to draw up disturbing memories to enhance the imagination effect. And texture, tell them how the air is sticky and humid with the evaporating liquid in the blood as it dries. Make them feel dirty just being in the same room.

Use metaphors!

Slick with gore, chunky salsa, a mess of mangled limbs, etc etc.

Focus on sounds and smells. The copper taste in the air that catches in the back of your throat, a smell that sets everyone's teeth on edge.

This.

Blood isn't just coppery. You can feel it in the air, like a sheet of grease across your face. Smell it, but feel the dry, crusty remains in your nose. Watch as it slides, water-like, down your legs to make them warm and sticky with your insides.

If you really want to get good at describing--in terms both dramatic and simple--gore, trauma, and medical issues, go to EMT school, OP. You're talking three semesters or less, and if your clinical rotations were anything like mine, you'll see plenty of awful shit to fuel your manic descrptions--plus you'll have a good idea of how the human body works and fits together, which really helps in describing how it can all fall to pieces.

As an example, let's go with someone breaking someone's right leg with a baseball bat.

>Clinical Description

The victim's right leg has been fractured and contused in multiple areas by purposeful blunt force impact. There is a compound tib/fib fracture, the patella has been shattered, and the femur has a closed fracture, type unknown. Bright red blood is spurting from the lower leg at the sight of protrusion, signifying arterial bleeding.

>Normal Description

He's been hit in the leg at least three times with a baseball bat or something like it; his knee's a mess of blood, and you can see bone poking out from his lower leg, where blood is also spurting out.

>Invented the Internet Description

The man's screaming and clutching his leg; his face is contorted in pain. His knee looks like it exploded; there's blood everywhere, dark blood, and he can't seem to move the leg at all. Bone--isn't bone supposed to be white? Why is it that sickly yellow color?--pokes out of his lower leg in a couple of spots, and bright red blood spurts around it; you can see the layers of fat and muscle the bone has torn through, and it's obvious the man is in great agony. There's a long streak of blood leading from the chair in the center of the room towards the wall where he now leans; the whole room smells like copper, urine, and desperate pain.

Like all descriptions, keep it short, but descriptive enough to get the general idea. You don't need a bunch of prose.

"His head rocks back from the impact of the blow, showering you in a viscous mixture of gore and brain matter."

"The arrow pierces her throat with a wet thud, a startled, mewling sound escapes her mouth as she pleads for help."

"As you press further into the cavern, you realize the soft mud beneath your feet is actually a slurry of human remains."

"Stripped bear and emaciated, their remains are tangled together in a cocoon of flesh."