Elemental Reductions

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 charac...

This post is part of October's Blog Carnival theme of Horror and Fantasy , hosted Timothy S. Brannan's The Other Side Blog "Another zombie.  Ho hum.  I'll kite it, you stick it with arrows."  Zombies by liftarn, under CC0 There is nothing horrific about zombies.  Here, look, courtesy of Basic Fantasy RPG: Zombie (undead) AC : 7[12] HD : 2 Attack : 2x +1/weapon or swipe (1d8) Mv : 20 ft.   No. Appearing : 2d4 (4d6 in the wild) Save : F2 Morale : 12 Treasure Type : none  XP : 75 It's basically a slightly worse gnoll that never retreats.  This has been a chip on my shoulder for a long time.  Here's what I propose:  First, every undead creature should be freaky: they utterly violate the natural order of the world.  They should be described with that in mind.  Play up the disturbing appearance of their decaying yet animate corpses and their putrefying stench. Mechanically, we might reflect this character reaction i...

  Note : There are a lot of external links in this post. None of them should be affiliate links If they are, please let me know . Note2 : This has been bouncing around in my brain informally for a while, but putting it to pixel was prompted by Rook’s post on names on Beneath Foreign Planets as part of the RPG Blog Carnival .  There’s a lot of great material that comes from these prompts. I encourage you, dear reader, to check that out. Note3 : Link to the GDoc version this post was originally composed in. On Names One of the holes new Game Masters fall into while playing D&D-esque games is names. I’ll start with random NPC names first, to get the subject out of the way:  Make a d20 or d100 list of names for each gender, and for families.  Either stick it on the fourth panel of your DM screen, or pre-roll five of each, and stick those lists on your fourth panel. If you need a list of real world names, use an onomastikon .   Onomastikon “What is an on...