Horror Campaign Brainstorming

I mean there's a PDF dedicated to tips for running and playing in horror roleplaying games. I don't know if it was compiled by Veeky Forums or someone else, but it was pretty solid.

I have three systems I've got my eye set on.

The first is DnD 3rd edition, since it's fairly well known to most of us and the rules can kind of be moved from setting to setting fairly easily. I want to keep this one as a fall-back though.

We've just gotten into Shadowrun recently and we've had some fun doing a couple of one-offs just mucking around and learning more about the game itself. I just don't want the game to end with a rigger making an APC out of some dustbins, an old wheelchair and the remains of the one player we have who is incredibly talented at dying just before the team succeeds.

The last one is Dark Heresy, but I've never played a game or run a campaign for it. I'm fairly knowledgeable in 40K lore and I imagine with a bit of planning I can transpose it to a different setting. I feel a system with a higher lethality factor would lend itself to the atmosphere of the game, but I don't want it to feel cheap.

Does this help you out?

Cool, do you have a link?

Well guys, we're off to a good start here.

I'll be back in a couple of hours with a goodnight bump and to see what' you've managed to cook up.

Horror games work best as one shots, rather than campaigns. Something like Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green works well in a long term campaign but loses a bit of the horror flavor.

I personally like Fear Itself for horror games. It does a great job of using mechanics to convey a sense of being worn down.

As far as general horror RPG tips go: you can't scare anyone who doesn't want to be scared. Setting the atmosphere is important. Isolate, separate, and pursue.

Make one player betray the others, talk to him before hand.
Make the other player start having 'revelations' that would help them out just to later turn into hallucinations that would constantly suggest that his friends have been replaced but while he clearly knows that he is out of his mind.

Search for any mental condition and try to emulate their effects on the players lightly at first until reaching a breaking point where they can't completely say if what their character's are perceiving is a part of their problem or because some shit is actually going on

Use paranoia, schizophrenia, capgras syndrom and many others. Make them keep secrets and always send private notes to the players to tell them what they are perceiving instead of saying it out loud.

I've never heard of fear itself before.

Would you mind giving me the TL/DR version of what it's about?

The point is that they know something is going on, which they come in knowing in my example. Panic, which is the heght of horror, comes from knowing you are in danger but not how to avoid it.

Thinking about it now, has anyone tried to run a horror campaign using Paranoia before.

The Alpha Complex already has the hopeless utopia feeling and screwing other players over is basically the name of the game.

All I need to do is find a legitimate reason for the clones to simply stop coming and we should be good to go.

The idea that's popped into my head is that the players are sent to Outside and whoever returns to Friend Computer first with the most interesting find receives a wonderful prize.

Who knows what might be outside of the safety of Alpha Complex, and of course, only one of them can receive this prestigious prize...

This coulbe a good read for you.