How do you like your horror Veeky Forums?

How do you like your horror Veeky Forums?

Slow, creeping, and psychological. Vampires, werewolves, and zombies need not apply.

Sitting alone in your apartment and hearing a door open.

I like my horror simple and brutal.
However, I like my terror to be complex.

You see, terror is the foreplay. Horror is the orgasm.

I like my horror to be an action show about fighting monsters and men, constantly dealing with injuries till they become crippling, running from the beasts while fighting them tooth and nail...until it becomes The Holy Mountain for a session and all the players realize that no matter how many bullets and fire you push into a corpse gods don't work that way.

Remember your place little man or your struggles will no longer amuse me.

...

>until it becomes The Holy Mountain for a session and all the players realize that no matter how many bullets and fire you push into a corpse gods don't work that way.

My nigga.

That spider has tits on its back

I also like to have a tendency to end my games with all the players being basically RIFTS power level characters but that takes like at least three years before one my games ends. Generally if the players haven't all gone insane or given up by that point they've earned the ability to try and punch out the king in yellow for all the pain he's caused them. Most of my games end in a year or a year and a half cause the players end up in a place where they can't see a way out. A lot of them just end with the PCs filling their trucks with every weapon they can buy, steal, or borrow and driving into the madness guns blazing. Obviously they die but I gotta say my players really had balls for the first bit of game. Now a lot of my games just have the players either kill each other or pass a gun around a table.

I prefer it as a secondary theme rather than the main attraction, so less Silent Hill, and more Bloodborne or Killing Floor

>"Do not ask which creature screams in the night.
Do not ask who crouches in the shadow.
For it is my voice that wakes you in the night
And me who watches you from the shadow.
I am Tzeentch and you are the puppet
That dances to my tune."

Creeping awareness of it. Good horror doesn't present itself as such, you gradually figure it out for yourself.

This user gets it. It's the slow realization that something is horribly long that's so satisfying.

I like it fast, violent, and with a harrowing sense of mystery at what the fuck they're trying to survive

Not connected to any preexisting lore or culture, just weird and surreal shit that sprung up out of nowhere one day. Also I like the idea of humans being able to dip their toe into mind-shredding metaphysical forces, just enough to seem like they might have a fighting chance, but in the end they must leave humanity behind if they want to survive

I like my horror like I like my women; screaming eldritch abominations that I'll thankfully forget about fucking with thanks to hard liquor.

I like it layered. First you figure out there's zombies out there, whatever lol. Then you start noticing unnerving things about them, so that sucks. Then you start realizing they're connected to the other stuff in an oh shit sort of way, so things are not great. Then it never really stops, you just keep digging down and finding more and more shit you really did not want to find, and by the time you really aren't strong or smart or whatever enough to dig any deeper you really wish you had never gone looking in the first place.

So classic Lovecraftian, I guess.

Here is my chart(from least to best)
Biological (serial killers, zombies)
Gothic( vampires, demons)
Spiritual(ghosts, curses, silent hill)
Cosmic(you cannot be on this board if you do not understand cosmic horror)

Junji ito makes really good cosmic/spiritual horror
He is also the only manga artist I know of that can make a romantic comedy manga unnerving

Spiders are overdone for horror, cute spiders are the only way to make spiders work in fantasy.

True monsters should be bipedal and distorted humanoids, not arachnid with maybe a disgusting human feature or two to warp their otherwise cute and adorable spidery form.

I like the idea that IT level cosmic horrors might spring out of the place where walls of a room come together at whatever moment they choose, but with enough panicked willpower you can still choke whatever manifests to death while involuntarily screaming your throat bloody.

You might one night wake up with a Nightmare sitting on your chest, and you might just pass it off as a bad experience with sleep paralysis, but if you bring yourself to break the horrible thing's bony neck the body won't vanish, nor will the whatever wounds it gives you in the act. In the morning you'll have to deal with the corpse thing you awoke to on your chest, and tomorrow its horrible form will still be where ever you put it. You can show it to someone, and they'll have no more answers than you do. You can kill nearly any given monster in my settings, because the problem is that its there at all. A monster should be an aberrant presence, wrong and horrific in being, not just a hardy, unfamiliar predator.

Horror doesn't work in d&d 5e outside of like first 3 levels so I don't do it much, mostly just throwing undead at level 1 players spooks em good especially when bodies of dead npcs go missing and stuff like that

>no matter how many bullets and fire you push into a corpse gods don't work that way.

Nah, I'm with Conan on this one. If it has a physical form, then it can be physically killed. Or as he phrased it,

>"Some find their way to Earth, but when they do, they have to take on earthly form and flesh of some sort. A man like myself, with a sword, is a match for any amount of fangs and talons, infernal or terrestrial."

>Horror doesn't work in d&d 5e outside of like first 3 levels

You're just not trying hard enough. You want to instill horror in your PCs? The gray ooze's corrosion ability. Just keep scaling the ooze or create other monsters with the same ability.

Basically just borrow a page from 1e/2e's book, where you'd have PCs who could fight gods and fell Tarrasques but who ran screaming like little girls from wights and rust monsters.

I like my horror to be human based but obfuscated by something else like body horror or cosmic horror, something like The Mist.

Yeah so?
Where else would a spider put her tits?

On her abdomen, so she can spray milk-silk.

Duh.

With copious amounts of paranoia

From the old human torso it used to be!

Agreed.

Doing horror in D&D is really also dependent on the DM making things tense and unnerving to the players, so even with their skills and gear stuff still seems bad.

My personal favorite is introducing horror slowly over the course of a longer set of sessions, where things become more and more apparent as they go. Session one might have the rogue noticing some kind of weird shit while they're wandering through town, but it doesn't really rise to a head until session three.

It also helps to not hard-stat some of the more horror-y elements. Sometimes the strange shadows around the campfire don't have to be the result of any magic or monsters. Sometimes that's just how they are.
And to the player, that can be even worse.

Unexpectedly out of left field. Nothing beats thinking you are in a high fantasy action- campaign, having several sessions of the typical badassery of kicking ass and taking loot, only to find out too late that the potion you drank was NOT a healing potion at all. Suddenly there's screaming, melting faces, indescribably cosmic horrors, and the dungeon you just cleared like any other tuesday seems like your tomb when the layout starts giving Escher a headache while you're being hunted by some indescribable... thing... that your +3 Flaming Greatsword does jack shit against.

good times, though I feel sorry for the Bard. He had to die pretty horribly for us to get the gist of how downhill everything just went.

>milk-silk
Tasty but lewd.

You do realise that in every but one story featuring Lovecraftian horrors, Conan fucking bailed like an Imperial Guard squad getting charged by an Imperator Titan?

That's the idea.

Vampires can be slow, creeping & psychological if they're done well.

How are they done well?

Play up the supernatural angle; make them less 'human with pointy teeth and super-powers' more 'curse made manifest' like the original vampires used to be.

It's not a 19th century nobleman who flies in through your window going BLAH! and asking you to count to ten with him; it's more like that girl out of the ring; a creeping horror relentlessly stalking its pray.

sexual

Vagina based.

You can use that trick Hammer Films used for their Dracula. IIRC, Dracula in those films doesn't even talk. He just lurks, skulks, kills and drinks blood.

Zombies fit 2/3 of your requirements

>How do you like your horror Veeky Forums?

Cosmic.

Body horror is good too.