I'm running a horror campaign and I need ideas. Will bump with ideas, stories and pictures.
Times you scared your players
Landon Phillips
Samuel Harris
Bump
James Wood
For background, I've been DMing Curse of Strahd, but I've decided to make it less hammy (turn the Frankenstein's Monsters into horrid abominations) and add new stuff to make one of my players who DMed it before interested.
It's still pretty early in the campaign, but in a haunted house one of my players looked through a book of poetry. With his perception roll, he noticed that one of the stanzas didn't fit. It said "Don't look out the window." He got someone else to do it, but they didn't see anything. He finally looked, and saw a gaunt face that mouthed things like "gut, drag, rip bleed, hang", etc.
All of his dreams are sleep paralysis, with the face inching closer towards him. One of our sessions is going to end on him seeing someone with the face, and hearing screaming in his head.
Alexander Flores
Mason Davis
A space station is infected with a virus,
the virus causes extreme hallucinations and religious feelings in humans, convincing more than half of the crew that the viral infection is akin to God.
The infected half of the ship's passengers (~500 people) bands together and decides to kill the uninfected heathens and dock the ship on the nearest inhabited planet.
You start in an the air-filtration chamber above the showers -
Rules:
>Only one of the players is a crew member (and he only barely knows the layout of the ship),
>None of you is armed with more than a metal pipe, but the enemy is sparsely armed with stun batons with the higher ups having revolvers.
Suggestions:
>Religious messages over the radio every half hour (world time).
>Several ways to destroy the ship or create contact with a nearby planet.
Nicholas Morris
Carter Cooper
Hello spacestation 13 player.
Ian Russell
Was I really that obvious?
David Harris
I put my five player party in a confusing dungeon and chased them with a mohrg for three hours. I shut the lights off, asked everyone to shut their phones off and put them aside, and just tormented them with a spooky skeleton. By the end, the one female player was crying and threatening to never come back, and the other four guys were in various states of quaking panic and utter misery.
Good times.
Andrew Wright
Oh yeah, but spacestation 13 can be some dark, dark shit if everyone plays their parts well.
Austin Roberts
Blake Mitchell
Ryan Cox
Your'e not going to scare your players in a well lit room with snacks and drinks, but you can definitely disturb and unsettle them. One of my players is particularly squicked out by body horror, so I ran a session where all of the cultist enemies were basically just sacks of flesh animated by huge parasitic worms underneath the skin. He was disturbed not just by the concept, but was also that the cultists had chosen to be that way.
Learn what your players buttons are, and push them.
Logan Rodriguez
>Learn what your players buttons are, and push them.
This. Before you start the campaign, have casual/drunk convo with players. Get them to open up and learn what fears/phobias they have.
Then when doing the dungeon or whatever, don't immediately go into the horror. Give them a false sense of security that they're doing well. Overconfidence is a powerful weapon. Once they think they have completed the objective, reveal the true story as they now have to get out alive.
Evan Collins
John Garcia
>Your'e not going to scare your players in a well lit room with snacks and drinks,
Got it, kidnap them and put them in my basement for a few day.
Gabriel Thomas
I once had a party of newbie adventurers encounter a wraith, they became pretty scared once they learned that it could drain levels.
Charles Price
Now your'e gettin' it.
Mason Sullivan
>Get really into prop usage in your campaigns
>make it where they have to take shots for celebration, or to join some mission or cult or something
>roofied shots go down smooth
>wait for them to go face first into dice
>profit
You are welcome user, post pictures in your basement dungeon.
Brody Diaz
Alexander Ward
Bentley Morgan
Honestl,y the only time I've ever really scared my players isn't the sort of classic horror scared. They were investigators for a kind of fantasy UNish organization, and they just realized that the intelligence leak they were supposed to patch was the wife of their boss, and she was having an affair with a traitor. Even just them planning in character how to break it to the guy was one of the most awkward and nervous thing I've ever seen.
Elijah Nelson
Caleb Sullivan
Nolan Bailey
In one of my first Dark Heresy sessions I pit the party against a genestealer in a space hulk. I kept them nervous by throwing red herrings and making them question every decision they made.
Brody Nguyen
I actually used that image as an inspiration to great effect.
Party are a group of traveling Exorcists that spend their days fighting monsters for money.
They receive word from a small village that there is an unsettling new addition to the population - they simply call it "The Beggar" and it sits in the streets holding out its hands. Whenever someone flicks it a coin it makes a weird noise.
Party finds the thing, attempts communication, tries everything short of open hostility. Assigns a watch to keep an eye on the thing during the night, which goes well.
Until one of the party, tossing in his sleep alone in his dark inn room, sees another one pressed up against the glass of his window fiddling with the lock trying to get inside. It lets out a shrill hiss, drops to all fours and skitters away at 120ft/round into the sewers.
The party packed up the next day, wished the town luck but said they had absolutely no interest in dealing with their problem.
Cooper Wilson
That's way better than what I had. I just had them encounter an obviously strong abomination that was immediately killed by something they couldn't see.
No one ever got a good look at the monster and the paranoia of not knowing what they were dealing with started messing with them.
Jacob Ortiz
Come up with some creative monsters that play on some primal fears. This one monster I created for my campaign was basically a creature that masked itself in shadow and would supernaturally suck put all the light in a given space. The party was in a big mansion with seven of the things. They could tell where they were generally if a place where the emergency lights should be on were off. It they couldn't see through the darkness to make out anything either.
Combining that with some good scenarios does wonders. See. These creatures I made are super sensitive to sound, so the characters had to keep quiet and stealth around, all the while carrying guns and wearing heavy armor. So while that itself was tense, they were in the basement level too and just as they were going up the stairs the one in second position slipped and crashed down the stairs and they had a fight on their hands as they just start seeing the lights flicker off one by one as this moving wall of darkness comes closer to them, the front players character had invested a good bit of points in sensing so they heard others coming from the top of the stairs so now the whole party is pincered with enemies above and below them with low moving space. They weren't scared since they had guns but after getting feedback they all told me their skin was definitely crawling.
Another thing to be careful of too is how much power your players have in a horror setting, doesn't matter how disturbing things get if the wizard can nuke it all
Camden Collins
>Look out! Kevin's boobytrapped the lightbulb and made electricity shoot out Santa's eyes!
Matthew Morris
>party is on a river in a little boat
>bad storm is brewing
>look for shelter, find cave
>get inside just as storm hits
>decide to do a bit of exploring
>hey this cave has been mined out
>hey this is going somewhere
>hey this is a giant black ebony door with intricate runes in a language I don’t recognize at all and I’m a fucking knowledge cleric
>well I’ll touch it I guess
>immediately thrown back, passes save to not get completely fucked instead just takes 1d12 necrotic
>fuckthisshitimout.exe
>rocksfalleveryoneelsedoestoo.gif
>well that hurt. Someone light a torch how far did we fall?
>oh not that far, let me just cast fly and...
>oh fuck my magic isn’t working
>what’s behind door number 1? You know what, hireling you open it I’m scared.
>short argument, eventually hireling opens door
>immediately grappled by black tendrils and pulled inside
>a bunch of shadows suddenly fly out of the opened door into the room
>giant shadowy blob wanders into the room
>bravely charge it
>bravely scream in terror as it douses their torches on touch and starts grappling at them also the shadows are attacking and there’s hundreds of them oh shit oh fuck
>torch won’t start next to creature, can’t even see it cause pitch black but the air is ice cold around it, rogue disengages and lights a torch
>some small shadows die rest dash away out of the light
>big shadow immediately tries to grapple the rogue now
>entire party just runs away to opposite door
>go inside, door won’t close, shadow blob chasing with all the little shadows staying just at the edge of the torchlight
>try to get door on opposite side of corridor open
>suddenly the roof opens up and a strong wind starts blowing and threatens to snuff out the torches
>more screaming
Man that was so much fun to run. They were shitting themselves so hard.
Nolan Martin
fuck this motherfucking gnome fucking fuck
Angel Gutierrez
>modern setting
>party looking for a killer that murders seamingly random wealthy persons
>find out it was a revenge for a old crime they all commited
>killer give victims warning before killing them sending them a lily flower
>we almost got them , next session should be final
>one of our players come back home after session and find out basket of lily flowers at her doorstep
Kayden Long
Fuck gnomes (and gnome derivatives) in general.
Jace Hughes
This wasn't me doing the scaring, but rather the DM giving us a very good scare. Was playing Dark Heresy and had to go investigate a space station and extract the Governess of the system who was stranded there when it stopped communicating. We enter and find basically nothing but discarded lasguns and blood. We continue to investigate, and eventually come to a cafeteria with some destroyed air vents in the roof. It was at this moment where I realized our DM just put us into a game of Alien Isolation with fucking genestealers. The tone was PERFECT, and we were on the edge of our seats the entire time