Evoking Horror in Old School Games

This post is part of October's Blog Carnival theme of Horror and Fantasy, hosted Timothy S. Brannan's The Other Side Blog

Trigger warning: this article talks about horror and how to evoke it.  It covers evoking horror through disasters, monsters, and psychological tension.  While it doesn't go into detail in any of them, they come up.

    Along these lines, before using any of this at your table, make sure your group is accepting of content of this type by using safety tools like Lines and Veils and The X Card, especially if you don't know the players at your table really well.  Information for these and other social safety tools is available here.

    Or don't use them, I'm not your father, and you presumably know your table.

Das Geisterhaus by Harald Hoyer, under CC BY-SA 2.0

    Old school Dungeons & Dragons and the games that sprung forth under its cultural umbrella generally assume your characters are at best marginally competent thieves at the start of their tomb raiding careers, and at worst ne'er-do-well losers who are just trying to get a good score before they retire or incredibly unlucky normal folk trying desperately to deal with a bad situation.  

    Let us compare the definitions of horror and terror using my preferred dictionary, Meriam-Webster:

Horror

noun

1a: painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay

b: intense aversion or repugnance

2a: the quality of inspiring horror: repulsive, horrible, or dismal quality or character.

b: something that inspires horror.

Terror
noun

1: a state of intense or overwhelming fear

2: violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion

a regime that rules by terror especially: violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands.

     The difference seems to be that terror is about reluctance to face violence, while horror has an element of dread.  They both invoke fear, but terror does it with the full knowledge of brutal violence as a consequence for some action, while horror suggests not knowing the exact cause or exact consequences of that fear.  

    Remarkably very few creatures are so terrifying or horrific that characters can't just attack them or execute plans without becoming emotionally or mentally overwhelmed.

    From the AD&D Monster Manual, there are a few exceptions:

1. Adult or older dragons instill panic in weak creatures that see them in their full majesty, either flying overhead or charging.
2. Ghosts,  liches, and mummies, upon being seen.
3. Androsphinxes, upon roaring.

    That's not much.  I would expect that to the inexperienced and unexposed masses, skeletons and zombies would be just as terrifying as liches and mummies, and ghouls might possibly be more frightening.  Certainly, undead are the only category that has an element of horror rather than fear.

    In another vein, Palladium Books introduced something called a horror factor.  Each horrific creature gets a rating, which is resolved in a way similar to saving throws.  I can't remember the details beyond this, but the basic concept stands: save against the horror of this creature, or be frightened.  This is fine, but requires us to generate a new number for creatures that might be considered horrific.

    As I recall from playing back then, this didn't in itself generate horror, but did represent a tactical consideration.  To paraphrase: if the save against horror factor failed, the character affected had no initiative that round, and could not mitigate the first  attack from the cause of horror that round.  At some tables, horror factor is checked each round until the character overcomes their horror.  

    In most games, no attribute or training could improve horror factor resistance.

    This caused players to look for every means possible for their character to be horrified before they got close to a monster, so that the character would have time to recover from their horror.  While this simulated dread, it wasn't the same as horror.

    Notably, from what I understand, monsters had a horror factor, but situations didn't.  For instance, coming across a gruesome crime scene, or walking through a minefield didn't trigger that response.

    So, what can be done?  

• First, realize that the best horror comes from presentation, not rules, and that presentation comes from juxtaposing normality against the horrifying thing, whether it's a monster, or just a completely bizarre situation.
• Figure out what the source of horror is.  It could be as simple as monster horror, it could be the psychological horror of realizing the real monster is the perfectly normal human next to you, or it could be a general horror of realizing that you have no control over the situation you are in.  
• Monster horror is tied to a particular scary creature.  
• The first exposures player characters should have to it should be odd stories relayed by others, either misidentifying the monster based on incomplete information, or relaying something odd that happened that didn't have a significant negative consequence.  
• Meanwhile, something ominous or horrible should be happening in parallel, independent of observations of the creature.  
• Each following exposure should provide a little more information, and start to suggest that the ominous events and the monster are related.  
• The first direct encounters should be of the creature leaving another ominous event, and the player characters just catching a glimpse of it.  The monster should be fully revealed only in the penultimate encounter, in which it demonstrates some truly distasteful or revolting behaviors and their consequences, while also demonstrating how overpowering it is in its element.
• The final encounter with the monster should be one where the players either choose to hunt the monster down, or choose to run.  If they run, the monster should be shown to be capable of tracking them down, without necessarily immediately revealing the means by which the monster does this.  Ideally, the monster's ability to find its prey should be telegraphed earlier to dissuade running, but the player characters have free agency to try anyways.
  
• There are only two ways to end a monster threat: to destroy it (as in Terminator 2, where the terminator is melted in molten steel, in Jaws, in which the shark is dispatched by getting it to swallow a scuba tank, and then shooting the tank in its mouth, or in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where vampiric Lucy is destroyed after feeding on a child by decapitation and stuffing her mouth with garlic) or to trap it somehow, as in Aliens, where the xenomorph mother is trapped, but probably not destroyed in frozen space.
  
• Psychological horror movies don't have a "monster", or rather, the monster is a human being.  Examples of this include Seven, and Misery.  In these movies, the "monster" is often identified early on by subverting a normally kind action (rescue from a devastating winter car accident, in the case Misery), the "monster" is someone bent on completing some quest (as John Doe does in Seven).
• The "monster" is introduced as normal, possibly even in passing, at first.
• A situation occurs which gives the "monster" power over the characters, allowing them to make a choice: co-operate to drag things along, or face punishment.
• This can become a "railroady" situation, as the player's degree of freedom is limited.
  
• This continues until the player characters can find some way to overcome the "monster".
  
• Disaster horror is about situations in which some calamitous event threatens to impact the world, and how society responds to it.  
• These sorts of situations are potentially campaign changing, in that it resets the status quo of a campaign's environment.  
• Generally, the status quo first needs to get established.
• With that set, the imminent doom--either locally or globally--is foreshadowed somehow with very minor versions of the calamity, for example: some zombies prior to a major zombie outbreak, or falling starts prior to a meteoric impact.
• Investigation of the cause of the minor occurrences, either by the player characters or by appropriate NPCs foreshadow a risk of some greater danger.
• The threat is revealed, either through diligent investigation or inevitability:  If the players aligned resources to help investigate the threat, they should be rewarded with more time to deal with the threat. 
• Through great effort, the players either avert or destroy the threat, or they learn to survive it, establishing a new status quo.
  
• A note on "jump-scare horror": while this works in movies and campfire stories, it doesn't work well in books.  I haven't found it to work in RPGs.  The attempts I've seen just distract too much from immersion, either causing anger or laughter, and either way disabling further tension building or general immersion to the point that I find it an anti-pattern for tabletop RPGs.  
• A friend of mine suggested that it can be done at actual plays with a sound board, with the buy-in of the other players at the table. 
• If someone has a method, or at least advice on that, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
• Set up normalcy first, and then set your horror in contrast to that normalcy by hinting at it.  In adventure games like old school D&D, I think the best way to approach this is to add something horrific but unexpected to a perfectly normal situation.  
• While dragons are terrifying, they are rarely horrific, they're usually just overwhelmingly powerful.  Smaug in The Hobbit was terrifying in that he destroyed an entire dwarven hold in hours, but not really horrific.  After all, they mostly just want loot, sleep, and to be left alone.  The ones that are horrific are the ones that want something more, usually just wanting to play with their helpless prey. 
  
• Liches move in the direction of terrifying, but again, they are usually just terrifying in their power, without wanting to do more than kill off all the living.  Encountering a lich, like undead in general, might be horrifying, but they're just another world-ending threat.  Vampires are more horrific, because it's not that they want to destroy the living, it's just that the living are just cattle to them, and because they have ways of bending us to their will.
  
• Aboleths are just octo-fish with delusions of grandeur, right?  Well, maybe, but take a look at this take on Aboleths from Yami Bakura: OSR: The Aboleth.  This take is horrifying, because it talks about the destruction of a normal setting, due to a world-changing event: the summoning.  It acts as a great model for any sort of cosmic horror scenario.
• Disasters--manufacture, natural or supernatural--are potentially a good way to build horror, especially if the player characters are in a situation in which they are trapped.  Flooding, volcanic eruptions and lava flows, and mud-slides, landslides, or avalanches are potentially excellent ways of evoking horror: the personal horror of being stuck or trapped in the path of these things, or the horror of seeing a town they have built or contributed to, or the homes of loved ones threatened by these events.
• Game specific things that work in almost any game:
• Things that emulate the horror factor mechanic, although I would call it a madness check, and I would only do it for things associated with some form of unrelenting horror:  extraplanar creatures such as demons, devils, angels, or godlings in their true forms, cannibals, xenomorphs, the more extreme aberrations, extreme and gruesome deaths, either individually, or on a mass scale, or unrelenting onslaughts of bleakness, such as after a steady hours-long artillery shelling or having to walking through a minefield, to use modern examples.
• fair warning: I haven't tested this mechanic.
• The chance should probably be 2-or 3-in-6 for a particular creature, reduced by 1 for each previous encounter the character has had with them.  

  

  Ophanim By Ikitenshi under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

• This is the part I like least, because the character sheet now has to have bookkeeping on the madness inducing creatures a character has fought.
• On the other hand, it's just a matter of three checkboxes.
• The affected character can do nothing more than defend themselves or run away from the horrific thing until they roll above the success threshold, but the player chooses which.
• Each round the character is affected by madness, they have
• a 1-in-6 chance of dropping anything they are holding.  
• a 1-in-6 chance of permanently losing a point of wisdom or charisma (50/50 chance)
• When resolving saving throws that involve multiple party members, resolve them from the member most likely to succeed to the one least likely to succeed (I think I got that from the Retired Adventurer, although I can't remember which post that was).
• When hinting at horrors, be quick and tentative with your descriptions.  Don't lie about what they saw, but suggest that maybe what they saw was something normal, combined with a trick of the light or some other environmental factor. Then proceed to describe other things.  Make your players ask you about what they saw.  For example: "As you force open the door, you think you see something shoot up into the rafters, but maybe it was just a shadow. The door rebounds off the wall, and the contents of the room are the same as they were last time you were in here.  At least, you think they were.  Dust particles reflect in the intense light of your lamp...."
  
• When describing revealed horrors, be detailed and wordy with your descriptions.  Use lingering metaphors.  "The beam of light from your lantern illuminates something that at first looks like a black bull's hide, black and short-furred.  Then it turns, and an enormous eye's pupil constricts in response to the light.  It blinks twice, and then two pairs of long fur-covered tentacles unfurl up either side of the creature like strange tendrils of a growing plant.  the inhuman eyelid narrows, causing a chill to run up your spine.  Roll for madness, then if you succeed roll for initiative."
  
• Normally, when describing a room, I provide a rough idea of size and the most important feature in it, then I describe the creatures in the room briefly, so that the players quickly have context.  I still follow this pattern, but after setting context, I drag out my descriptions of the horrors they face.