What scares fa/tg/uys?

>Like for real.
Nuclear war

Inspirational story's? Try this guys "monster of the week" series even though it isn't weekly. youtube.com/watch?v=PCXg19YXMqE

He goes in depth with the origins of some monsters or ideas and real psychology behind ideas and themes.

...

>Cheeto fingers
>Near the manuals

In my limited experience of running horror games for my players anything with bodysnatchers tends to freak them out. One of our one-off sessions basically involved one of the NPCs on a camping trip getting replaced by a goatman/fleshgate/memewalker. Only one of the players realized it at first, so watching him silently freak out while trying to communicate what was happening to the other players was a lot of fun. I guess it of plays into the whole "Does it know that I know?" kind of fear. They seemed to like the session a lot, so maybe try something like that?

naval mines

for some reason they creep the ever living hell out of me. I suppose it's taking fear of stepping on something in a lake/ocean and combining it with hulking rusted melted that's just sitting there. They look so alien too.The explosive aspect doesn't really bother me that much

>The cracking sound a rule-book spine makes when you open it

That´s was already on my bucket-list. Took some inspiration from It follows and Goatmen storys. Still working on the details like. The biggest problem is "how obvious is it?" The scary part from those storys to me is that you don´t know if it´s evil or not and when do you know your buddy/body is evil?

Example: I wrote a story once where they entered an old abandoned manor, they met the ghost (attic whipserer) of the young daugher of the previous owner. Always when they tried to ask her where her daddy is (they knew from research something necromantic or evil lurks in the manor) she answered cryptic stuff like "he is upstairs, with the others.", since she was too young to formulate it any other way and a ghost after all, so they were not sure if they could A. trust her B. know if she would snap and attack her anytime.

Things that make you question yourself, and by that I mean question "what makes you, you"

Anterograde amnesia AKA inability to form new memories.

Generally I've found it works best when it's only NPCs that get body snatched, when you really only drop hints to one player via notes, when the players are good about not metagaming, and when the PCs are super low-power. Then the fun comes from trying to get everyone not-snatched involved in finding a way to kill the thing, without tipping it off that everyone knows. Bonus if more and more NPCs get snatched the longer they take.

That's a good story and you sound like a fun GM; your players are lucky

I like mysterious creatures that aren't explained. Take the Black Schuck, for example, if I meet one, I don't want to instantly say "oh, that's a black schuck", I want to have no idea what I'm looking at, unsure of whether it is dangerous or not, and only figure out what the creature that chased me is after I get back to town and consult with the local priest/hunter/king/wizard.

In real life? The possibility that the last year and a half of my life is actually a coma induced dream; that instead of escaping mostly intact from a car crash that should have killed me and every other occupant I'm instead in a hospital somewhere unconscious and paralyzed, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Game wise, brainwashing, hypnosis, things like that. I'm in a scifi game right now where it turns out that my character used to work for a black ops unit and has a host of augmentics and implants left over from serving. One of them hijacked my body and I killed a couple targets without realizing it. Turns out, the idea of having an implant in my head that makes me lose my memory and uncontrollably kill people is a big fear of mine.

Spiders. I don't quite have arachnophobia, but I find them creepy and don't want them anywhere near me - they're fast and have too many legs.

This isn't very useful for a fantasy setting, but in sci-fi settings when a machine is trying to shift, stops, and starts trying again...it's unsettling. It's like the machine is in its death throes, even if it's not as visceral as such an organic thing. Bonus points if it's somehow throughout an entire room.

Then there's the usual stuff - fear of change, fear of responsibility, fear of being conscious while frozen on a surgical table.

Mortality.

I'll get over it when I'm dead.

Thank you very much, i could write down the whole adventure if their is interest. You just stated an important point. "Low Level", this is a thing which they don´t succumb to anymore. They are in the 10ish by now and i need to make even more use of narration and monsters "they don´t want to face". At the moment there is a banshee in the near forest. The current (and their first ever) BBEG is an elven which they build a relationship with. They started to realy trust him. Ofc, he backstabbed them in exchange for power from a great demon, in the process his wife (they also built a relationship with) had a change of mind and wanted to stop him. She died by his hand and turned into a Banshee which stalks the forest of their current hometown (i use the kingdombuilder rules, they govern it). The new player, a bard was like "fuck this i can just silence her". What he didnt knew is that a banshees veil pierces all low level silence spells. He know is responsible for his own death and that of a teammate (which followed him as backup).

youtube.com/watch?v=qV0I-iA5lJU

This video, and the other Local 58 videos, are genuinely disconcerting. I'm not sure how you could translate something like this into tabletop, but they get to me every time I watch them.

For me, audio is very key towards making something genuinely frightening or unsettling.

Yeah, I'd be interested in the whole story.

I agree, that "oh we can just silence/banish/kill it" mentality is why I don't really run horror things as part of a main campaign. Players either are unafraid of things or feel cheated when things end up being too powerful. But that might just be me being not a good GM. I have the best success when it's only one-offs where nobody has class levels and the strongest member of the party is either a town guard or the local huntsman and the closest thing they have to magic is herbalism.

They build up a lot of trust to me as GM over the year. They know by now if they died, they fucked up. I give them a lot of 'hidden' hints they can catch up on. I would never kill them just for the sake of it, it´s their story and there are just some things that are too powerful to be dealt with. It´s a cruel world and stuff is out to kill you. They got told by a lot of clerics it´s a bad idea to face her. His knowledge check told him of old bardic tales of banshees as the ultimate messengers of death. Even an old friend (Paladin and royal guard of Taldor) of the party said, don´t mess with her. Still, i gave them hints to deal with her when they got to face her. For example, when he asked via knowledge arcana how his spell works i told him "it blocks any sound produced in the area, magic or non magic from entering or leaving the zone". One Session earlier so, the monk of the group faced the banshee and i told him very clearly and descriptive "you got the feeling, that the voice of this being is not part of the forest around you, neither of her non-being lungs. You got the feeling that is in your head, in your mind and very soul". The monk even stated this the next session and discussed it. They also know how i narrate, everytime they enter the forest at a certain point i drop the forest ambience (birds n shit) and start the banshees sobbing. It get´s louder the nearer they are. It´s a very clear indicater that running is an option.

That all makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the input! I'll probably work on developing out some of those techniques for my next few sessions. Thanks man

Omg yes

Silent Hill. Been playing those recently and 3 keeps getting under my skin so bad that I have to stop and recollect myself every now and again.
Oh, and the Hound of Mons. I know it's a fake story, but there's something about I that I can't put my finger on.

My card being declined for insufficient funds. It is actually a consistent nightmare, where I'm out buying something, and my card is declined. I think it's because when I was little my parent were always dead broke and got their cards declined all the time and it was embarrassing enough to imprint me all these years later.

The story as short as i could write it.
pastebin.com/iDFVzNns
There is a lot of stuff missing. For example, i had a witch near the village which would help the group destroy the jewels but seemed very untrustworthy. If they don´t trust her and take the jewels with them they will be constantly attacked by undead on their future adventures. (my group trusted her and she as promised destroyed the jewels and they took little marry with them (which faded after some time since the necromantic energy of the jewels couldn´t sustain her anymore)).

Awesome! I'll check it out. Thanks for posting

My greatest fear is that everyone I know is actually just humoring me by pretending to like me

Not sure how you'd translate that to an RPG though

Also on the bucket list, in pathfinder their is actualy a realm pretty similiar to silent hill. I got a castle with a dungeon near the groups hometown. Beneath the dungeon is a second village underground with a cast of pretty common and happy villagers which hide from the outside world to build their own utopia (pretty bioshock so far i know, i don´t even like bioshock). If the group stays there they will realize the village worships Zon-Kuthon (pic) and the village is a gateway to his realm Xovaikain.
pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Xovaikain

Someone post a pic of that creepy as fuck 40k spawn. If anything scares it me. It's that.

Oh and the idea of falling from a really high height. Fell off a roof as kid. Really fucked me up desu.

Soap

Slowly dying of cancer over the course of several years filled with false hope and miserable chemo sessions.

THAT is true horror, not spooky ghosts.

Memetic entities are hard to do right, but could potentially be pretty spooky.

There's also tons of extremely freaky shit you can find that exists IRL, depending on how you feel about body horror type stuff. Double spooky both from the things themselves, and also the fact you share the planet with them.

Thanks user, this is gold. Exactly the horror i was looking for. Lovecraftian "You will never understand what this shit scaring you is because your feeble human mind can´t understand it and never will". Like in it follows, there are a billion theorys what 'it' is but there will never be an answer.
Maybe if the group earns reputation over the length of the adventure and in the end they realize they are just better pest-controllers? Like, they someday need help from the people they protect and those people just turn around because the group, well, is just not important enough to risk your own life?
I would seriously alter the crux of the PC and they couldn´t control it at all, which is pretty horrid to do as GM: They have to be responsible for it. This way it´s just "rocks fall you die"-scenario, misused GM-Powers.
Somehow this makes me think. A lot.

Things that shouldn't be.

There's plenty of other things like this you could find among the SCP stuff. Things that aren't really "things" that you could use an abstract sort of antagonist. Think less Cthulu and more the The Colour Out of Space.

Open ocean is a pretty terrifying thing for a multitude of reasons,not even counting the practical concerns you should be worrying about when being stranded in the middle of the ocean. You're completely alone. There's no-one and no thing for miles in any direction. There's nothing to anchor to, just you and the abyss. And of course the existential dread of knowing literally ANYTHING could be around you (both real and imaginary) at any given time.

Bonus points if you could instill this same sort of fear in a setting that isn't strictly the ocean. Particularly the last bit. It's always interesting mixing practical "real" threats with the possibility of a much worse one that might just be in your own head but might not.

A mate of mine used to be a fisherman in New Zealand. His crew would sail out to the middle of nowhere on nice days and they would just swim around the open ocean. The closest land was the bottom of the ocean, and the closest help if they got in trouble was the mainland.

Apparently it was really relaxing just jumping in the water and floating by yourself out there. He said it made all of lifes problems seem small and petty.

>Bonus points if you could instill this same sort of fear in a setting that isn't strictly the ocean.

The sky.

Cloud level is only a hundred or so meters above the ground, anything above that is filled with horrific beasts, no one knows how many there are or how big they can get, or if they know we're here.

That time someone brought a meatbread with a lot of beetroot in it and the next day everyone thought they had bowel cancer because it made our shits look bloody.

I like to do that with forest environments. Half my group has a respectable amount of actual survival and forestry experience and knowledge, so when I have quiet background noise playing for most of the session only to turn it on and announce "The silence is all pervading. Throughout the trees, what was once the normal sounds of nature has become the silence of a tomb" or some variant of that instantly puts the players on edge. Silence, and the knowledge that what was just thriving with life has become an empty nothing freaks out the more susceptible of them.

It´s also what the underdark does. There are giant caves deep underground which connect to each other. There are even oceans big as oceans above ground filled with being as big as citys or giant grey deserts filled with ancient black pyramids.

One particularly neat instance I've seen of this is with the white whale from Re:zero.

Essentially a big sky whale that travels under a massive blanket of fog that would ambush traders and caravans traveling along a large otherwise barren plain. Was pretty neat.

Honestly I'm not scared of anything I can fight
(that's not to say I have to stand a chance of winning)
bears, spiders, escaped convicts ect... fuck em, I'll Av'em.

but things like infectious diseases, something I can't just straight up deal with. that's scary.

I would say ghosts, but I'm pretty convinced that dousing myself in holy water and wrestling that mother fucker is a viable strategy.

You have a link to the scene that talks about that? Not really a fan of shows with time travel but I'd like to see stuff about the whale at least.

>Things that shouldn't be.
This.

Which can be a variation of:
>Revealing that some common knowledge is false.

>"when was the last time i slept with shivers after some narration?"
This is my hang up, I can't really remember a narration that ever scared me a little.
I'm a visual person and what has scared me most have been visuals that are just wrong.
Number one with a bullet is mirrors not following what is being reflected.
Never fails to encourage me and my skin to leave the room at varying speeds.
Yeah, to me at least, Poltergeist 3 was the most fucking terrifying movie ever made.

But that is hard to translate into a game narration.

>Lovecraftian "You will never understand what this shit scaring you is because your feeble human mind can´t understand it and never will".

LET ME LEARN YOU:

youtube.com/watch?v=ph_sR51KBi8

Now we´re talking. I only red like the first 1500 SCP Entrys by now even though i know it as it only had ~500. One of my favs is 610 and there are some good in the new ones. I can´t remember the numbers.
One that particular stung out was where people fell into some kind of dreamstate where they could talk to people around them but were mentally inside a big ruin of a giant white city with giant skysrcapers. It´s all about that "you´re small and let´s be honest, utterly uninmportant to anything that realy has a saying in our cosmos". A dream of mine is exploring giant abandoned citys, long forgotten to humankind.

Originally intended to give a video, but the only clip I could find was of the final confrontation where they fight it with an army (Which obviously is much less frightening). As a little bit of bonus info the whale had some ability that could erase someone from existence in the sense that they never existed in the first place, which could be a cool "wtf" trick you could pull (Both in that setting or otherwise).
The groundhog day thing wasn't too terribly done, in my opinion. Only thing is I feel like they milked the "Subaru dies in an edgy way" thing a little too much towards the middle before he finally got good. I'd still recommend it though.

This freaks me the fuck out.

I understand that. Been flat broke, $3 to my name and no savings. A similar thing I've had to deal with is paying for a night's dinner in nothing but saved up nickels and dimes and shit. The glares and unrestrained disgust are the worst. And from supposedly "progressive" people that care about suffering, no less.

All the little paranoid fears. Is that person following me? Maybe in this setting, he might. Did they notice when I messed up? Yes, and in this setting, that's a law-breaking offence and you'll get the watch on you if you don't run now.

It hits at you because those are probably the tiny little fears and worries you have any day, but now suddenly they have a heart-pounding reality to them. You can't trust that little voice that goes 'oh just ignore those worries' anymore, because suddenly they are legitimate.

Threats to NPCs that I've grown attached to, developed relationships with from friends to rivals to professional respect to lovers or whatever else. Especially if harm that may befall them is due to my own failures to realize what the threat is.

While I'm on the subject of Re:Zero, I think the Witch Cult is also a good example for a sinster organization.

A good way to keep things like cultists (or whatever flavor of faceless antagonist groups you might be using) more in the realm of creepy and sinister instead of generic villain organization is, ironically, to keep them in the background as much as possible. It gives a sense of powerlessness to your players as their threat feels almost out of their hands in a way that a more concrete BBEG like a tyrant king doesn't. Bonus points if said organization doesn't even have a clear leader.

For example: Give them some clear goal or agenda, give them a recognizable modus operandi, but make sure the players are completely in the dark about what those things are/what the logic behind them is (Maybe never tell them at all). Also going off of what said, it furthers a sense of dread if they're not even antagonizing the PCs specifically. Maybe they randomly and arbitrarily kill a known NPC or the party comes upon a town that they slaughtered weeks ago. Foster a sense of dread that these people could strike anyone anywhere, and your players have no way of knowing who might be next.

This video always makes my skin absolutely crawl. Especially since Bears fucking terrify me.
youtube.com/watch?v=2gMjJNGg9Z8

Crocodiles
Volcanoes
Lobotomies

In that order

...

i assume the whole thing was a metaphor/daydream of her killing her own children on a drugtrip?

bro

Existential and systemic shit. It's less 'monster in the dark' and more 'poor man shivs and robs me so he won't starve because he was laid off because he made 59 reports an hour instead of 60." Antibiotic resistant bacteria scares me a fuck of a lot more than some hillbilly mutants.

the void
not existing
existing but not being conscious
being conscious but not being able to act

I'm actually doing really well now as a special ed. teacher, not broke at all, but I can still remember how people look at you in disgust when you don't have enough to cover your bill. Thanks for sharing with me m8, makes me feel less sad.

How can you really be so scared of such things, except in an abstract sense? Antibiotic resistant bacteria is scary, but you can't do anything about it if it does come about, and it's not like you can even see it. It'd be like being afraid of the world getting blown up with nukes. The poor man with a shiv at least makes sense, because you can physically see that and try to escape from that and whatever, and it's in its own way more likely.

Yeah, I found a job as a leatherworker, so I make just enough to get by, but doing work I actually enjoy, so it balances out. Best thing I can say to anyone in this thread (though admittedly I'm getting a bit off-topic) is to never give up, even if your life is total shit. Good to see you didn't, user.

It's pretty easy to be scared of things you have no control over. In fact helplessness is one of the greatest fears. Granted that's super hard to work that into an RP system that's any fun to play.

But when it's so abstract it's almost impossible to really comprehend or be afraid of it, why bother? It's like being afraid of the end of the universe.

>It'd be like being afraid of the world getting blown up with nukes
This was a very real reality that people lived with for a long time, mostly with inaccurate perceptions of what it would be like.

>But when it's so abstract it's almost impossible to really comprehend or be afraid of it, why bother?
Why bother being afraid?
As in, "Oh I was going to be scared of something, but it was too much of a bother."?

I do get what you're saying. It's like when Arthur Dent had trouble processing the destruction of Earth so he scaled it down to where he could perceive of the massiveness of it.

Because fear is an irrational emotion. In most people comprehension isn't needed to fear something. In fact in most cases the lack of comprehension breeds more fear. Yeah, I get you're saying the event in their whole are hard to wrap your head around, but for people who fear those things it's not about the event as a whole. It boils down to "X could happen, then I would die, and I can't stop it. Death is scary. Helplessness is scary. X is both. Therefore X is scary."

>Not afraid of snakes
>Not afraid of bees
>Not afraid of the dark, heights, or most of the usual fare
>But spiders
>Holy fucking shit, spiders

I don't get it. Nothing dumps adrenaline and wild flailing into my system like a goddamned spider. It hits the primal terror button and keeps hammering it until I get away from it and stay away for long enough to get myself to calm down again.

My DM found out about it and thought he'd run a game in the Underdark, and was sorely disappointed when it didn't get much of a reaction. Months later, he tossed one of those rubber Halloween decoration spiders at me and I came unfuckingglued.

You know those Sultan tables that people drool over in threads about awesome setups? The ones that have a mechanism to expand and serve up to ten people, have dice holders, and weigh an Imperial fuckload?

In my fathomless terror, I knocked his over and nearly took the door off the hinges, trying to get it open.

Fuck spiders.

Unknown Armies is fun.

Horror Story time. Warning, extreme horror ahead. Read with caution:

You're sitting at a table, running a Saturday night game session. It's the first session and the players are meeting in a tavern in a standard fantasy world. You begin to read your introductory spiel and describe the tavern, but one of the characters interrupts you to ask a minor question about the rules. You ignore them and keep talking, only to be interrupted again, by a different player, making a stupid joke about the BBEG's name. You continue trying to describe the scene, but you are interrupted a third time by one player saying he wants to rape one of the serving girls. The other players agree. You look up at the players around you. They're That Guys. All of them. Six That Guys, sitting around you. You go to get up but find yourself tied to the chair. You look down. The game you're running is FATAL

You sir, are a very sick individiual.

It could be worse it could be "Catan"

Social justice warriors and normies that are evading the game.

And the worst part of it is. Its become a reality...

Stuff that that scared and impressed me when I was a child.
In my particular case the thought of cockroaches crawling in your ear and eating your brain over the course of weeks.

Azlu from Werewolf the Forsaken captures that fear particularly well.

Spiders scare me. I'm deathly afraid of them and have crippling arachnophobia. To the point that I refer to them as s-words, because the word can make me want to pee.

I used to keep tarantulas as pets, as a kid. No idea what the hell happened but, in my mid-twenties? Overwhelming arachnophobia suddenly struck me.

But anyhow: yeah, put those in a game and I'll straight up leave the table.

Like Locke's Socks or Theseus' Ship. If you can replace any part of something and the entire object is replaced, is it still the same object? So if your body is comprised of cells that die and are made again, what has become of your original body? Where did it come from?

>Time Crimes
>Triangle
>Primer
>Coherence
>Predestination

That kind of stuff.

I really would love playing a genuine scenario where I play myself and the Apocalypse happens (yeah I have End of the World).

It should be a more grounded and slow apocalypse.

A Zombie/Infected scenario or Cthulu Apocalypse word work really well.

You would need the right kind of players and a slow start to really immerse yourself in the game situation. A long holiday trip for example.

Taking a layer of abstraction away might do wonders.

I know this feel... all too well...
Another is fucking up at work and losing my job and not being able to find another one soon and losing my house and car and becoming homeless.

The Cold War was a weird and terrifying time.
youtube.com/watch?v=TIoBrob3bjI

The possibility that /pol/ is right.

You don't pull out do you?

Well... I... I thought this was a horror thread not a dream come true thread...

Am I The Bad Guy..?

There's a short story about that, called The Horror of the Heights, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

As cool as it sounds on paper, I don't really want to live in a cyberpunk dystopia ruled by schizophrenic vampire cultists.

>Really like paranormal stuff
>Have encountered several ghosts; they were spoopy but not scary
>Shadowmen however fuck me the fuck up
>Mention this to my group
>GM says that's interesting
>Acts nonchalant about it

I think I might have screwed myself over here.

Rape. Specifically, when they're raped. But in an Alien kind of way. Like, "the monster puts its finger down his mouth and embeds an egg in his throat" type rape. But brutal male rape where the pc feels powerless and feels lasting consequences.

I try not to be afraid of anything
this was actually initially for religious reasons but now it's more because I feel it makes me a better person (although the perspective gained from the religious view backs it up still)
there are a lot of things that make me jump, but I don't think that really counts
as for things that make me check if there's someone behind me, probably creepy-crawlies of the large variety, crazy bad guys (but not so crazy they can't plan ahead), and anything that you could call "world rot", anything that makes the world seem like it's completely wrong and fucked up
bugs just make go "ooh, gross" but stuff bigger that than, anywhere from angry rats to a xenomorph, that'll make me think twice about things
crazy bad guys have a tendency to pop up anywhere for no reason, and that's when they're not vaguely magical
I don't know that I can explain world rot scariness beyond it feeling like a nightmare that you can't wake up from

anything else?

In a word, inevitability. It takes many forms, a monster that can't be hurt or outrun being one of the most obvious.
Alternatively there's loss and isolation. I can handle isolation well, but when it gets to horrorspook levels, the prospect of not being able to stop to sleep or eat because there are enemies everywhere scares me a lot more than just the idea of having to fight when I'm hopelessly outnumbered. Losing my loved ones is also a frightening prospect, particularly if I'm helpless to do anything about it. Seeing family killed over a video call, for example, or NTR shit.

>What scares fa/tg/uys
Job application.

>A similar thing I've had to deal with is paying for a night's dinner in nothing but saved up nickels and dimes and shit. The glares and unrestrained disgust are the worst. And from supposedly "progressive" people that care about suffering, no less.
what I've been finding the last few years (if not the last decade, if not most of my life) is that everyone is a bit selfish
some people fight it, some people hide it, some people wallow in it, but we're all selfish on some level-- and I don't mean "I want to continue to live and not be tortured" kind of self-desire, I mean "I want to have and do nice things" kind of self-desire, coupled with not really caring if other people get it (and indeed often not caring if other people get to live and not be in constant agony)
everyone singles out "their group" that they want to have nice things, sometimes it's a group of one, sometimes it's their family, sometimes it's their town, it can be people of their country, or their race, or frequently people of their religion, or even people of their same political beliefs
anyone outside that can get fucked-- maybe not brutally royally fucked, but if they get fucked over a bit then oh well
I try very hard to not fall into that, to care about every single person, every single group, no matter what
the funny thing is I'm mildly autistic, and a defining feature of autism is self-centeredness, and I am pretty self-centered (on top of being kind of oblivious and the other symptoms), but I try hard not to be selfISH
and yeah, kind of on topic, that shit just breaks me, not in a scary way but in an "I need a fucking drink/I need to lay down" kind of way
I don't know how people are able to not care to the degree that they do, I don't know why it doesn't hurt them to think that some people don't matter and deserve whatever they get, because it would make me very sad