Horror at the gaming table, part 2: How do you make it work?

[macmoyer]

A month ago I wrote about how and why the feel of horror fiction is tough to capture in a horror RPG. It felt a bit like I was trying to explain that good horror roleplaying is impossible, but that's not really true. I'm the sort of guy who likes to outline the problem before I go looking for a solution, and that's really what I was doing.

Comments

[gwyd]

I seen Mage do some pretty excellent horror, possibly because even though the Mages can be powerful, they are usually underpowered vs what they are facing. The evil they are fighting is big enough to do an investigative approach similar to Chuthulu.

As a WoD GM, I've had my moments. Likely this is because instead of relying on WoD source books for enemies, I tend to sneak stuff into the cracks in the background where weirdness is allowed to live. This way, my players never really know what they are facing.

I've seen the turn players concept work well in both Chuthulu and paranoia (long story), and it is very much something I'd like to try again.

One of the best horror GMs I've had is my roommate SquirrelMH. he was running an indie take on a long out of print game i am now forgetting the name of. he definitely rewarded us for abuse of our own characters and between us and him, it got very amusingly grim for our poor characters. It is an excellent way to work psychological horror specifically. When we did char gen he had us answer all these questions, including us inventing a dark secret for our characters. Oh did he play on that. there was a system involving stones we could spend for stuff, but i am now forgetting the details.

some other excellent horror cross over stuff I've seen involved Star Trek/Chuthulu cross over. take a ship full of bright, three colour star wars characters and slowly feed them to a shoggoth. Somehow the contrast between the genres and the darkening of the exploration tropes, really touched me somewhere good. (Likely with a tentacle. ;)) This is what i was thinking of when you mentioned my dark take on the d & d tropes.

Of course, I'm the bastard who once tricked a pack of Garou into participating in Genocide in north Africa. Have I mentioned I routinely refers to my players as "The mascocists?"