Tips for creating a stressful atmosphere during an adventure

An important aspect for creating a creepy or anxious vibe for modern campaigns would be to create isolation somehow. Cell phones or radios stop working, the vehicle they came in is disabled or missing, etc...

Or, for non modern or any settings, simply trapping the players so running is not an option and the only way to escape is to confront the mysterious force is good as well.

Or you can put them in a situation where cell phones won't help or will hurt. Something freaky go down in an abandoned building?
Yeah you could call the cops, but you better hope they believe you, and don't charge you with trespassing. Best case scenario the freaky thing bides its time, and kills everyone off individually (slowly enough for the rest to try and react) while they're isolated and away from the group. Worse case scenario it kills the cops, and now everyone else thinks anyone that survives the encounter killed the cops.
Nothing's more isolating than the threat of social isolation.

Also known as jobbing. Shit gets old fast.

Put on the 3d glasses nerds, this one's coming at ya'.
Spoiler as next post because I never needed/bothered to learn how even after all this time. And I'm out of post size.

>town players arrive at has problems for the players to solve. Trivial shit like investigate the well/river for whatever is making the townsfolk's faces/mouths numb.
Probably lead with the water issue so the DM doesn't have to fake a speech impediment or slurring for all the voices he'll be faking.
>Midgame can have them investigate the headless bodies showing up, having been dumped by the big bad.
Common theme with the bodies will be smooth flesh where the necks should be, like a calling card so they know it's all due to the one menace. Will whet their appetites for the final fight as they go along through the campaign.
>Endgame will have the town trust them enough to tell them of the dangerous dungeon and the location of it's entrance.
Good for a sense of progression and mounting accomplishment, improving the lives of the townsfolk and maybe making their futures look brighter due to the Players help.
>trade outpost near dungeon entrance or trade cart owned by twitchy/shifty fellow that's obsessed with pinching people's cheeks. Anyone and everyone with no exceptions, every time he meets them.
Players will likely find the practice sort of odd but really who would have an actionable qualm with that? Besides he can dole out some freebies once the party has let him go around the group pinching. Maybe the DM should do it for real for the immersion.
Players can be warned by townsfolk that he's not to be trusted but he has some real goodies that he's been looting from the bodies or the dungeon.
And so the players don't just try murderhobo at him the npc can have a bag of holding's worth of golem-summoning gems, and the ability to craft more or something. Fiat the gems to only work for him so they're not even more incentivized to rob him.

Instead of wolverine regen make it slow and unstoppable regen.
Make the dude go down each time they fight, but later he just shows up again and again even if the players try really hard to make him stay down.
Also make him continually scale with the party in just raw combat power, maybe even slowly outscale them as things go on.

And if they try to move out of town or hide have him just find them like motherfucking Hagrid tracking down Harry and the Dursleys.

I've often found that the best way to ramp the horror factor is keep the stakes for the PCs high. If they get into a fight, make sure onr of them comes out hurting, so the party knows that fighting the source of the horror will end poorly, even if they score a victory over it.

Make fleeing difficult, or problematic. Highlight the urgency to avoid conflict, where at all possible - even if it gets back up again, a lot of things lose it's fear factor when you realize that you can put it down, even if only for a few rounds.

Search for the martian expedition gone wrong. That DM was crazy. I get a hard on remembering this tale

>Be annoying with voices
>Actual mystery
>Suddenly dungeon
>Even more annoying npc outside of dungeon with ridiculous fuck off powers

Why?

Are me so there aren't any accusations of samefag or whatever.

Anyway, I forgot to mention that the npc from my idea shouldn't be allowed to help the players, due to him being an untrusting hermit or kind of a loony toon. This way they don't scream about some kind of OP dmpc. He's the fukken secret shop from dota or whatever.

Anyway here comes the juicy hook from downtown, in reverse order and for good reason.
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Npc dude isn't the big bad. He's just trying to stay alive and safe.
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Dungeon is delivered 100% straightforward with an appropriate or somewhat disappointing endboss. Legit end-of-campaign loot doled out but no exp yet.
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Killing the endboss deactivates the trader's golem gems, his best defense. The other stuff he had to sell/trade turns to ash, excepting stuff that the players already got from him. He runs away screaming about how the players have brought true horror upon them all, even killing himself if they keep him from leaving the area. Maybe he gives them a vague warning of what's to come as a parting gift. He was pinching cheeks for a very good reason.
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The bodies aren't/weren't corpses. They're actually like mimics in that they act like traps and all of them don't appear or detect as anything other than corpses until the dungeon is cleared.
Once activated they'll keep playing dead until the next time a player gets into grapple range, then the sprung mimic tries to rip their fukken head off and wear it.
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If a player dies and the mimic succeeds in wearing their head they become a copy of the player, only hostile and strong enough to give the rest of the party trouble. Think Jeepers Creepers 2 at the bus scene.
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The entire town is actually said sleeper mimics. The real folk murdered and replaced, their real bodies consumed or even fed to the players over the course of the campaign. The numbness that the players fixed? Just the mimics gaining full control over the stolen heads.

Going with the monster hunter thing, it could be fun to have a monster hunter carry the party through some tough fights up until the party is cheering about how cool the hunter is. Then have the hunter killed in the middle of the dungeon and have the party make their way out.

Wasn't that the one where the ending is pretty much a "I was just pulling shit out of my ass and that entity at the end wasn't even anything but a spoopy 'rocks fall everyone dies'.

samefag

C'mon dude. Over 4000 characters typed/retyped out on the phone and you gotta do me like that?

I was just kidding...

Your ideas are also shit if that makes you feel any better.
Or they'll just shriek about the hunter being a dmpc because you're amazingly uninspired show of power requires an extended time of showing up the players.

Yeah but you didn't address the two blog posts I shat out instead of going to sleep on time, and that stings more than even a sarcastic 'samefag' despite the free (you).

If it makes yah feel better, I screenshot your posts to use on my players later.

They already have a joke about everything in my game being a mimic, so this will make a good culmination.

>Or they'll just shriek about the hunter being a dmpc
I think you can balance between the character being useful and being good at everything. You can make the fights fun for players while still making your hunter useful (have monsters with very specific strengths and weaknesses, have the hunter exploit and explain these, then the players have to utilize that themselves).

I've always been tempted by the idea of unorthodox environmental hazards.

Filling the monster's lair or the escape route with radiation or asbestos or something similar. Go in, and you probably won't live past your fifties, even if you survive.

If your group has a player you trust and will work with you, give one of the pcs the monster hunter experience. That ways its one of their own freaking out. Eliminates dmpc/jobbing accusations.

For the wolverine question, I had two implacable enemy situations for my players.

One was the monster goes down, but now has a revenge hardon for the pcs and starts tracking them and murdering their loved ones, burning their homes, etc, always leaving clues to its nature. Every time they killed it, they got more and more inventive with their methods of disposal.

The other basically agent smith'd from body to body as they killed it. They got super paranoid and jumpy after the fighter got pk'd while boning his npc girlfriend who smith'd and broke his neck. They increased their murderhoboing until it dawned on them that the more they murderhobo, the more likely a valued ally would get smith'd instead of a random passerby.

Nobody falls for that shit. They'll 'kill' him, then bury him alive or weigh him down and drop him in the sea or chain him up in a box somewhere and leave him.

An immortal that gets subdued every fight generally ends up suffering forever rather than becoming a returning villain.

Trap your players in your basement and visibly place a gun behind the DM curtain. Tell them that anyone who dies in game dies in real life.

>First
Horrible DMPC insert that is everything wrong with DMPCs.

>Second and Third
Massively cliche and used to death.

Sorry user, you ain't got it.

Allow me to reference Every Frame a Painting and call myself a huge fag: the good guys start on their knees.

In our last session, my party was sailing a small longboat into a storm because (???). The part consists of a high elf cleric, a halfing bard, and a gnome warlock. As the only member of the party wearing heavy armor, the cleric strapped his armor to the boat so he wouldn't drown. He rowed while the smaller members tied themselves to the mast and performed other tasks. The boat was caught in a maelstrom and the party faced off against a water weird.
The cleric had no armor, and the halfing and gnome were still tied to the mast.

Make the Wizard's apprentice PC write their postdoc the night before it's due

Skin necked headless people is good, spooky stuff. Bodyswap thing is good, as is the reveal that way more people than they thought have already been body swapped. Cheek pinching weirdness is good.

Everything else is horrible. Why does everything turn to ash? Why is the dungeon clear relevant, etc.

This is actually great. You can even implement it without iimplementing it. Remember how 2e D&D had all the age modifiers that no-one ever used unless they whined to the DM to start as a geezer and min-max int and wis?

Just tell players that after this adventure the negative mods from aging are doubled. You have mechanically represented and reinforced that they are forever changed, without significantly altering game balance in the here and now.

It's more of an interesting concept to me because it's a fear people can actually relate to. You've got a pretty good idea how awful dying of lung cancer is, and the addition of a realistic element can increase immersion.

In Half-Life the idea of wading in irradiated sewage was really unappealing.

Read through Death Frost Doom, all the stuff up until the bronze doors to the crypts (the pdf will be in the trove in the OSR thread.) Insane atmosphere, with almost no actual 'encounters.'

Missing the entire point. The GM set a really damn good atmosphere for his players.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12130366/

The cheek pinching is the npc dude checking to make sure people aren't mimics if that wasn't already clear. I made the dungeon clear the mimic trigger so that you can make them the hardest thing that the players have encountered in the campaign. Maybe fluff them to really have been tied to the dungeon boss anyway, like he was making the mimics and that his death activates them. Or if you wanna go full silent hill make the endboss come back as a mimic doublenigger or whatever.

The npc trader's wares turn to crap so that the players can't just off him now that his golem gems are bricked. Justify it by saying that the magical material came from the dungeon and is the same stuff that the badguy used in his creation of the mimics or something like that. Just trying to offer ready-made fluff that links everything together. Its so you can tie it all up in a bow so the players can feel safe once they kill the rest of the townsfolk that start screaming and beelining for the party once the first one is killed.

Airtight stories that mesh together like clockwork are great for a good spook, I'd contend. Work with me here.

I DID lead with the suggestion that stuff be modified since I know not everyone will think the idea is great fresh from the tin.

But that's why it's so weird that he keeps finding them 4d4 days later or something. Maybe the harder they try to keep it dead the longer it takes to come back but you can make it always return unless the party kills the big bad. Or hell, give it a phylactery on a random beach or something retarded like that so there's a real way to kill it for good.

I realize I didn't properly address the stuff turning to ash, but what I meant to write is that it's so that the players can realize the trader is useless against the mimics along with anything else he could've given them to help fight the mimic town. Or yeah, so they don't just try to stab him and clear out his inventory of goodies like murderhobos would.

>RANGER!

It was

I hope you're not speaking from experience

Nigga you can just have him break out or escape.

Or have them be buds/mass produced

You sound like absolutely newbie GM who thinks game is some sort of short story or an essay to read aloud

They'll fall for it once or twice. What you're suggesting are the actions of insane people.

Now if you really want a stressful regenerator, what you do is have it be rapid, and violent. I'm talking the second they hurt it flesh just starts whipping around. Have it violently purge arrows/bullets with all of the enthusiasm of a fleshy pressure washer, have it grab hold of melee weapons with the wounds they make.

It's big weaknesses being that after a certain amount of punishment it will just be a big angry blob of hyper cancer and easily escapable (give it a few hours to reform properly completely unscathed). You can also limit the total amount of damage it can regenerate which works really well with blunt force trauma (maybe it can take like 4x the normal pain, but can only make use of body horror powers if it's actually been opened. A good impact will shatter bones only for them to snap back into place with a sickening crunch, but it's better flesh torpedoing you with an exposed bone).

Then you or your players can come up with a nice clean environmentally kill for your next encounter. Maybe have a cliff nearby for the first for a convenient (we need more time) solution.

A good way to set the tone is adverse weather conditions difficult terrain for travel. Impress upon to party through description that getting to where they're going has been frustrating and difficult.

I once started a one-shot of a dungeon-crawl turned survival horror with prose-ish bit about how they'd been walking through cold autumn rain for three days straight, that since none of them own a wagon or an ox they had to carry all their shit on their backs and it had all soaked through, that the shitty riverside path they were taking was choked with thick mud and fallen leaves that made it really fucking difficult to walk, and overall every player fell right into step with the direction that description pushed them, aching and whining about how sick of walking they were before they found the spot they were looking for. The characters were already sick and tired before the shit hit the fan, and the stress of being in a bad situation at less than your best compounds.

Hit to fade tactics, players can't easily rest or heal.

But still, shit spooked me the night I read it.

This but use the regeneration more. Have the guy blitz them from out of the shadows, get him hacked up and run off, only to repeat the process again.

Make note that it looks like the same guy but they aren't sure. It raises the question if there are clones/copies at play or if he's regenerating.

Apply some sort of additional pressure tactic from this thread to really grind them down.

Horror is about immersion. Your players can't be afraid if they don't want to be afraid. The best you can do is build a set up and hope they play along.

Use atmospheric music, dim the lights, use details and extensive use of disturbing imagery. Apply anxiety and the real fear of character death to ramp up tension.

But if your players view the game as just you guys sitting around, they're not going to feel afraid of what is going on.

I assume your campaign is in a medieval-esque setting, so I'm wondering how the hell this all-metal ship got made if no weapons can pierce it?