How do you make an encounter with a friendly ghost maintain its creepiness...

How do you make an encounter with a friendly ghost maintain its creepiness? How do you make a reoccurring ghost ally stay spooky?

Other urls found in this thread:

yokai.com/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Every now and then just appear by the people or show up as their dead body looked on accident. Will just walk through a wall randomly for one reason or another.

Make the ghost cute and helpful, but don't outright state how it died. Instead, use environmental storytelling to drop hints that the ghost's helpful nature and naïveté got it to go through a bad ending. Like a little girl ghost who got raped and killed by a stranger she thought she was helping, so while friendly she gets really triggered by phallic objects and bedroom decor.

Think Chesire cat

>How do you make an encounter with a friendly ghost maintain its creepiness?
option one: make the ghost look super fucked up. it looks like the corpse of a grisly murder, even as it's going around being nice and talking pleasantly. or it looks all monstery and creepy and inhuman in some way.
option two: make it a poltergeist or only a vague presence, the players can't look straight at it and see it, or hear it as whispers and ambient sounds collectively forming a voice, it literally communicates by being spoopy.

>How do you make a reoccurring ghost ally stay spooky?
the latter approach above will help, if a reoccurring ally is constantly creepy noises and a question of "is it even really here" is going to be at least a little spoopy. also, if the ghost is either mischievous, or likes being spooky they could poke fun at the players, intentionally creeping them out but ultimately being harmless.

i've had this idea for a long time to use a ghostlike creature that is pretty much a girls imaginary friend brought to life. as she grew up she forgot about him, leaving him all alone in a limbo like state where only the people and things around her pictures are real to him. if you see the pictures he can see you and exist within your perception, usually sticking to the edges of your vision or where you can just hear him but aren't consciously aware of his presence, most of the time. it help that he can effectively teleport to anywhere within the perceptual field of anyone who has seen a drawing, photo or had him described to them, basicly if you are aware of him he is aware of you and can pop up whenever he likes. he sticks mostly out of sight, he does this because he's shy, knowing his frightening visage can scare people. he doesn't want to scare people, he wants to be there friend. but he's only ever had a young girl to teach him things so he's bad at making friends. it doesn't help that he can't speak but he is a very good listener. he tries leaving little gifts, their favorite snack, a book he's seen them reading, putting a pot of coffee on in the morning, tucking them in when they fall asleep on the couch and other highly invasive but well intentioned gestures of kindness. these gifts are accompanied by little notes folded into origami animals, telling them he likes them and asking if they like him back with little check boxes for yes or no like you might see on a grade schoolers love letter. if they check yes the next time he leaves a gift he will fully manifest right in front of them holding it in his outstretched, wickedly clawed, six fingered hands. how things go from there are up to them. can they get over there creepy new friend or will he become a haunting stalker that invades their life in a vain attempt to win over a friend?

Go though this and pick one of the ghostly ones.
yokai.com/

Give that fucker the Jerry Holkins treatment. Make the ghost that of a powerful wizard who got sucked into a gelatinous cube. The original skeleton is inside the cube still, and animated, and disagrees with the ghost on everything of importance. The ghost is inside the cube also, and controls it. The wizard ghost and the skeleton are only rude to each other. Bonus: the skeleton is mute.

Have the ghost travel inside of party members, but don't say which one at any given time.

It only needs to have goals aligned with the players. Maybe "friendly" isn't the right word, you know? I'm imagining, like, some kind of Asian horror style revenge ghost allies with the players, in which case it could still be pretty terrifying when an enemy gets death touched.

>How do you make an encounter with a friendly ghost maintain its creepiness?
It's is a friendly ghost with a good sense of humor. But it needs to drink warm blood to manifest and communicate with the living

The ghost represents a clear and not fully controlled environmental hazard of some kind.

Like say, its a dude who is perpetually on fire, or it still causes technology to glitch and short. Maybe there's some kind of uncontrolled telekinetic effect on certain types of object.

Consequently, you can set up a situation where the party need the ghostie with them to assist with some stuff, but the ghost itself is eminently likely to cause some sort of major catastrophe by disabling the electronic door controls they need to escape a spooky room, or accidentally brushing the wall of the highly flammable plaster room they're in at any moment.

Another option is to have it be a deadly-ass fucking melee machine, and have there be something out there which hates the players and which definitively can mind control ghostyboi if it shows up.

It's all about making them feel really uncomfortable and worried (Even just OOC) about having it hang out so close to them even if it is a cool guy.

Depends on your setting, really. I'd go for making the ghost completely alien in ethics. The fear of death makes us human, he does not have it, he stops thinking like a human.

Watching this was pretty horrifying so it can't be that hard.

>phallic objects
So anything longer than it is wide?

It has to posses corpses to interact beyond a spooky decoder ring or weegee board.

Freud was a clever man.

> (OP)
>Every now and then just appear by the people or show up as their dead body looked on accident. Will just walk through a wall randomly for one reason or another.


Or have them randomly posses people.
Wearing the old skin suit for a bit but they are recognizable in their new ( borrowed, not for keeps) bodies due to mannerisms, movement and / or speech patterns. ( The "ridden " people have no memory of this which can lead to humorous or tragic results.) .

Or transparent hotties in pre-revolutionary (semi-transparent ) French fashion.
Or watch the first Topper movie.

Don't make it obvious that it's actually helping for some time. Make it kill off some npc that was pretending to help the party but was a baddy. Have another bad ghost to confuse the party.

Don't allow the ghost to communicate with your PCs directly.

While this ghost may be trying to help your PCs, they're stuck in this shadowy limbo world and your PCs might not immediately associate this frightening specter and paranormal activity with the help they receive.