Today Veeky Forums, I would like to talk about Fridge Horror and any examples of it you've encountered in your games.
The basic description of fridge horror is something that becomes more terrifying in hindsight.
For a more in depth description, here's the link to the TV Tropes page. Don't worry, I left a trail of breadcrumbs so you can find your way out again:
tvtropes.org
So without further ado, let's get cracking.
Why don't they just call it "hindsight horror" or "horror in hindsight"? That way the meaning is clear from the jump. They already have "hilarious" and "harsher in hindsight" for things tht ended up as part of a joke or a tragedy after the fact. (For example, in Dresden Files a character introduced like 10 years ago who attempts to kill his own son is referred to as "a model father; him and Bill Cosby". Later that very book, we learn he and his entire race are psychic serial rapists. Last year, the public relearned that Bill Cosby was accused of serial date rape. So yeah, just like Bill Cosby!)
>Be playing a group of ragtag investigators in CoC Modern who are sent to solve weird and possibly paranormal cases on the hush by the local police department.
>Latest case focusing on a potential serial killer. Three bodies have been found so far and apart from being slashed to ribbons and partially eaten, there is nothing to tie the victims together.
>Oh goody, sounds like we got a monster hunt boys.
>Third victim has only been dead for a day and wasn't found to far from his home, so we head there to, you've guessed it, search for clues.
>Turns out victim was fairly well-to-do and lived in this pretty well kept gothic-styled house.
>Now before we go to much further, one thing you must know is that our DM fucking loves double bluffs. He also started using sound effects and kept smiling worryingly at a mix tape he made earlier. So when you see sinister shit on the horizon, your best bet is to cautiously walk towards it; guns drawn if socially acceptable.
>Know this and seeing this looming spectre of a house before us, we decided to enter the house. Not too fast though, since we had two handguns and a crowbar between the five of us.
>Surprisingly for us, we found both the front and back doors were locked. This coupled with the fact the windows were too high up to climb into meant we had to, eh, "gently" leverage the backdoor out of the way.
>The house itself was suspiciously lacking in anything occultish.
>There was no dark vibes, the place was tastefully decorated in a modern style, Men In Hats' Safety Dance was playing on the radio, hell even the floor boards didn't create softly.
>Wait...radio?
No idea.
Maybe because it's "cold" horror and it just sits there in the back of your mind until it suddenly thaws.
TVtropes itself says it seems because you pause the movie, go to the fridge for a snack and hey wait a minute that didn't make sense
I don't ynderstand. Are radios suddenly anachronistic?
>Now, there are certain things you come to expect when traipsing around a place that the Adam's Family would feel right at home in. Cheesy pop music is not one of these things.
>So being the experienced, and lightly armed, mythos investigators that we are. We bravely decided to search as a group in an area as far away from the source of this music as possible.
>As is to be expected, we didn't find an awful lot in the area NOT playing suspiciously cheerful music.
>So armed with two guns, a crowbar, a sturdy table leg and, according to the professor, a priceless, but hefty, antique vase, we made our way to the upper floor. To the source of the music.
>As we got closer to the sound, the DM slowly, slowly, turned up the volume on the music whilst this large grin that grew with the music.
>Bracing ourselves for victory (a Pyrrhic victory still counts) we burst into what appeared to be a study. There was a lightless radio, a writing desk with various papers, a well-worn armchair and......nothing.
>Despite the professors protests, we had our "reformed" burglar hurl the pot at the desk. Just in case it sprouted arms and tried to eat us.
>So now a mimic was out of the question, we decided the first thing to do was turn the radio off. Because we were getting sick of the song and it would probably only lead to the horrific mauling of one party member.
>Click....radio turned off, no hands were devoured. Great Success.
>Now we were pretty sure there was only a 30% chance of death, we started routing around the room.
>Turns out our good friend Vic No.3 here kept a pretty extensive diary of his day to day activities.
>Three days ago, he began to here loud music playing outside his house at night, so he started playing Safety Dance on repeat to drown out the sound and drive away whoever was playing the music.
>Must have been pretty loud since his bedroom's two storeys up...
The DM decided that setting the game in a more modern setting would let him have a bit more breathing room and let him play around with things like cybernetics.
It also gave him the excuse to through sturdier and freakier stuff at us, since we could literally walk down the street and buy assault rifles.
Basically it was Delta Green, but we were "normal" people instead of a covert, special forces team.
>Armed with this brilliant clue which narrowed are line of suspects to a horizon, we set off to talk to the neighbours.
>After a couple of hours of charming our ways into living rooms and only getting three broken feet, we found out that, apparently, no one else heard anything out of the ordinary and certainly no music loud enough to be heard from an upstairs window.
>Walking back to the station to give a status update about our thrilling adventure so far, we heard Dolly Parton's "Jolene" playing from a dilapidated house.
>Although we were now suspicious about music, we weren't at the "Accidental Arson" stage yet.
>During the meeting, we learned that there had been another victim. She had been killed in the same fashion as the rest but, luckily for us, the murder had only taken place an hour ago. So we packed our bags and headed off to the crime scene.
>Now armed with five guns, we were much more confident as we entered the dive bar and made our way down to the ladies bathroom.
>They weren't kidding when they said that the victims had been slashed to bits. She was not so much as butchered as she was splattered across the entire room.
>So monster then, oh well, this is Mr.5.56mm is for.
>As the doctor and the professor started splashing around, or as they called it "conducting an autopsy", the professor started humming.
>"Yo prof, what's you humming"
>"Hall of the mountain king. I know it's not the most appropriate time, but I just can't help but hum along when I hear it."
>Wait...uh oh
>Battle stances go!
>It was hard to say what was more unnerving, classical music in a dive bar or pop music in an old gothic house. But hey, more guns, greater chance of Pyrrhic victory.
>Advancing in the most tactical way two academics, an ex-con, a penniless bum and a private investigator can, we made our way into the dance hall as cautiously as we could.
>What met us there was flashy lights, a thumping bass and a pulpit hosting the DJ's gear.
>Although we couldn't tell exactly where the music was coming from, it was definitely coming from the stereo.
>Using the highly-successful and prestigious tactic known as "The Bum Rush", we bravely engaged the audio equipment and started hitting switches.
>The music soon stopped, which of course meant we had succeeded in vanquishing the memetic, rupture bea-BAM
>"So...who wants to turn around and who wants to run?" I asked the rapidly dissipating dust clouds that used to be my comrades in brown pants.
>After we performed that calm and collected tactical withdrawal. We celebrated a decisive victory against the creature, since we now knew it was a creature and that meant we could shoot/incinerate it, Yay.
>Bug Hunt mode engaged.
>So now we knew what the problem was how to deal with it, we just needed to figure out how to lure it out.
>We then set about the most dangerous part of any mythos investigation. Going back home to sleep.
>It was whilst three out of five of us were wrapped up safe in jury-rigged bunkers, that
someone received a visitor. Guess who...
Probably because "Fridge Horror" is a more evocative and interesting term, albeit less obvious. The Bill Cosby example doesn't fit the category, either; in fridge horror, all the information is present beforehand, but the terrible implications of that information are left unstated, and realized later. The Bill Cosby example relies on the addition of new information.
>As the professor was sleeping in his comfy double bed at his room on the campus, he heard the unmistakeable sound of Alien Ant Farms "Smooth Criminal" coming from his locked, bedroom window.
>Fortunately he passed his San check so he didn't do anything silly like "opening the window to calm his fears" and just played it off as students mucking around.
>To cut a long adventure short, we went to a few more locations, kept encountering out of place music accompanied by radios, some a bit battered, others not and gradually became more gun than man.
>At this point we decided that the next time we encountered the music, we would find out this thing was or almost TPK in the process.
>This showdown was going to take place in a small storage yard near the edge of town, since their had been reports of odd music coming from the place at night.
>So as our kinda-but-not-quite officially sanctioned government death squad rolled up to the small warehouse with Steel-Eye Span's "Gaudete" playing ominously in the background, we weren't surprised.
>The Warehouse was about 2/3rds the size of a football pitch and had a short flight of stairs leading up to a small office. The song was echoing around the empty, but confined, space. This, of course, makes it very hard to decide where the live flash-bang in your hand should go.
>I decided to throw it into the window, because double-bluffs, but fluffed the role. Instead of going through the window, it bounced of the top of it and landed in front of us.
>We then had the wonderful experience of seeing a flash brighter than a thousand suns, a bang louder than a nuclear bomb and a wet splat as something fell off the ceiling.
It was meant to be an example of hilarious/harsher in hindsight because 1. The reference works on two levels (reputation vs reality) and 2. Both are bad in the same way
>After everything got stunned by the grenade, we all then got stunned for another round by almost passing the San check of finally seeing the bloody thing.
>The first thing you noticed was the almost unbelievable thinness of it's body. Although it was roughly man shaped, not a single part of it's withered body was wider than a mans wrist. Except of course, for the head...
>The head was this sort of fleshy phonograph-like thing, that never quite closed, but never seemed to fully open either. Around the rim of this maw where evenly spaced yellow-orb which we though might of been eyes.
>Now this was bad enough, but what came next just made this thing fucking horrific. The DM had spliced Hitler's speaches, random adverts and screams of various creatures drowning in heavy static all into one nightmare track which he blared at us at almost full volume.
>After adjusting to the ear-rape just well enough so that we could attempt to fight back and only the burglar getting a slight clip to the side; we began blasting away at the thing.
>Of course, this thing was as easy to hit as it sounds. The only viable target was the "trumpet" which was a right bastard to hit as the thing spazzed to and through between swipes. A couple of good blows would have done it in, but that would mean hitting it without getting your face clawed off. Fun times.
>After some cuts, bruises and an insignificant amount of bullet wounds, we brought the vicious bugger down. As it died, it made the sound of a radio being re-tuned before slowly fading out.
>After that, we scooped it's body up, dumped it back at the station and celebrated another professional and well-performed adventure.
So here's where the fridge horror comes in my dear anons.
1. What is a lightless radio?
2.What wasn't turned on in the dive bar?
3.If you had to kill someone in public, what could you use to drown out any sign of struggle without drawing to much attention?
Sleep tight anons, and feel free to add any Fridge Horror experiences of your own.
1. I don't know
2. I don't know
3. I don't know, a lot of things?
There was a moment during our 5e campaign where we figured out the answer to a puzzle to pass through a door.
>3, 4, 7, 12
>1 is 2, and 2 are 1
Don't remember what the solution was. But we realized that the 7 angels were themselves the 7 devils of the setting, a Jekyll/Hyde deal. The 2 beings were actually one.
See, it was a clear chain of creation: the 3 gods made the four primordial titans, who made the 7 angels/devils.
So who is the 12? We had thought it might be the PC races, but there's far more than 12.
So either someone other than the angels/devils made some races, or the 12 is something nobody has even heard of.
Itts because you dont get it until after youre done the movie and just idly thinking to yourself making something to eat.
>tvtropes
lol
1. If there is no lights, then there is no power. If there is no power, what's making the music?
2. The disco lights were on, but the stereo wasn't. That's why hitting random switches worked, because it was never playing in the first place.
3. What did the group hear when walking back from the 3rd victim's gothic house?
I was going to leave it for tonight fellow anons, but I have literally come out of the shower and something has just hit me.
The DM never told us if something entered the bathroom of the dive bar....or exited it.
That sounds pretty cool, was there a trigger that forced the devil-side to become the angel-side and vice-versa?
Your story needs to be sharper and neater if you want the idea of "the monster was stalking you the entire time" (which I'm gueswing is what the fridge horror is) For instance, you say the radio wasn't turned on, but you clearly said that the character turned the radio OFF. If you had said the character flipped the switch and the music stopped, that would have been more honest.
Its a tricky thing, certainly, obscuring the truth without lying.
Not to say you were purposely dishonest
No idea, but our clue was that trapping a devil in an amulet trapped the corresponding angel as well. They're also separate enough that one can consume and subjugate the other.
Unrelated, but what's the general hate against TVtropes?
I guess it's a pretty solid database all around for all the tropes, even thought the community is cancerous isn't it?
A lot of it stems from Troper Tales, which was killed and buried a long time ago, so now it's just holdover resentment that nobody can offer a decent explanation for.
The fact that they include fan fiction which tends to be self-shilling and MLP-centric
Then don't open the Fan Fiction tab, what's the problem?
I also laughed when I saw they included Let's Play channels and Youtube shit
Goddamn was that anticlimactic.
Maybe you had to be there.
If they don't put in LPs, they have to take out MST3K and Johnny Carson, because it's just vidya commentary instead of film or current events.
If they don't put in YouTube, they have to take out TV, because it's just video content on a particular online platform large enough to have its own internal culture, instead of on tv.
I mean, it is a long story with a boring conclusion. But I can see how it probably felt neat for those involved.
I have a radio on my desk that has no lights of any kind built into it, and runs either from battery or power cord. "lightless radio" doesn't convey what I think you want to convey.
It's a really cool concept for a foe, and sounds like it was executed well for the party, also some really great music choices. It's pretty rare I even hear of anyone else who knows Steel Eye Span, but your summary doesn't so much inspire fear as "wow, good job, GM, way to create group enthusiasm"
Yeah...sorry about that.
Apparently we were supposed to be stalked through the area whilst the radio man took swipes at us from the shadows and throwing it's "song" to make it hard to work out where it was.
But then we accidently blew ourselves up.
Unfortunately I can't even begin to describe the spliced track the DM played all the while it attacked us.
The best way I can think of right now is a bowl of alphabet soup which spells out foreign swear words every time to look at it to closely.
I'll see if he's still got the CD lying around somewhere, I'll try and post it up here if the thread is still alive.
It was just so...surreal
Normally I wouldn't green text a story like this, but I didn't want to just give you guys a huge text dump to read.
But you're definitely right, the first radio was a dead battery radio and when the player (I can't remember if it was the doctor or burglar) hit the off switch, the creature watching us in the room stopped "singing".
Like you said, I probably just need practise learning how to properly obscure facts in the re-telling of adventures like this without it appearing like I am actively keeping facts from the reader.
Any tips for the future?
Forgot relevant pic.
Think of something like this, blaring at you as loud as a jet going over head.
What an absolute waste of time. A boring story, and no fridge logic behind it.
>was exploring a deserted town
>trapped there like Silent Hill
>perpetual night but with no stars
>went exploring around the edges
>every time we got near one bit where a car was, we were all getting hit with minor "fear" damage
>it got worse as we got closer to the car
>looked around but couldn't see anything
>nothing invisible nearby
>think it isn't a problem
>leave whatever is hiding in the car to itself
>later on end up in a building
>get up to the top and look out from a balcony
>see the edge of town
>see where we were
>see a gigantic fucking creature floating above where we were, just staring at us with a wide smile
>it was waiting for us to get in the car
>it was right above us that whole time
>What is a lightless radio?
The calling darkness hones without reply.
Fuck...what happened from there?
I feel like I should know this, but for the life of me I can't put two and two together at the moment.
We never went back to that end of town (because fuck that for a game of laughs) and were constantly checking above us before we went anywhere. Nothing special, it just made us double-check everything.
It's related to icebox questions
Not bad. Not bad
I'm no expert, but in writing in just takes some skill, some time, some careful consideration. Having someone give your write-up a test read helps.
When I'm running a game and the players are asking hard questions that the answers, or non-answers, would reveal information, I find that easier. Sometimes you need to know how to not tell the whole truth, like "what took you so long?" "Well there were lines at the grocery store" you didn't lie, you just left out that you went to snort blow off of hookers after buying groceries.
It was honestly just my first thought in response to that question.
Glad you seemed to like it.