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Haunts and Other Spooky Stuff (Pathfinder)

   
Actually there's a surprising amount of Lovecraft in D&D, which you'd expect, given that they pinched their monsters from all over the place (I'm genuinely surprised there's never been an official D&D version of the Dalek with just enough changes not to get sued). Sahuagin are HPL's Deep Ones from "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Ghouls are directly lifted from several HPL stories, notably "Pickman's Model". Gibberlings are from "The Lurking Fear". Aboleths are from "The Horror at Martin's Beach." And Mind Flayers, while not inspired by any particular story, are obviously Lovecraftean. Incidentally, although it's by no means his best work, HPL's "Herbert West - Reanimator" is a straight-up zombie story.

I think of zombies, but in a game focused around letting players slash them to pieces, they do tend to lower the threat a little. Unless you just swamp players in zombies, in which case, that becomes an entirely different kind of scary. When you see a lone zombie wandering through the halls of a derelict mansion and it seems to actually be fleeing from you... that's when it gets creepy.

Lovecraft can also be spooky... at times. But it seems more based on insanity, not being able to trust your eyes, and similar things. To me, that stops being scary once you figure out that you can't always trust your eyes.

I've been reading through the Hangman's Noose and it has a lot of different ways to scare players, the chief being, atmosphere. Obviously, being PbP, atmosphere around here would be a tad hard. Doable, but kinda hard. I've actually written articles in college (when I knew everything :P) talking about game mechanics, and a couple things I discussed was getting the player involved outside the game, and the idea of the dick move (ie. the game developer vs. the player).

In short, a game designer can really mess with a player when they design things to take into account that their is another layer to the game; the player's perception. Or rather, the player as the character. This is why having a monster that's just a tiny bit off, enough to be creepy, is... well, creepy. Players have no doubt seen an endless number of zombies and dispatched or dealt with them in some way that they're used to the shambling roadblocks. Yet, they can still get a scare out of folks, partly because they can be threatening... but only if you screw up getting around them, or dealing with them. Then, the danger lies not necessarily with the zombie, but with you, the player.

I'll use The Cradle from Thief: Deadly Shadows as an example. You spend a good third of the level just wandering around in the dark; nothing's there, you fully expect it to be, but as time drags on, nothing shows up. That alone unnerves a player, because with such a level, you're expecting something to show up around any corner and jump out of any shadow. And the longer it doesn't, the more suspicious you get.

Then, you turn on the generator to the place and you can hear it rattling throughout the entire place. If there is something in here, you probably just woke it up. Plus, you've got light now... and you'd desperately like it to go away so you can hide in the shadows again. You worked hard to get those damnable lights on, but now, you'd give anything to have them gone again. And as you wander around, you see some lights start to flicker... and you suddenly realize why. Those creepy, shambling, twitchy puppet zombies. You can't kill them, if you knock them down, they'll get back up, and they will hunt you down... if they see you. That's the thing: you can hide... but you don't really know if they can see you. They'll wander right up to you, stand there twitching for a bit, then turn around and walk away, making sigh in relief.

After a while, you start to feel like the entire environment is out to get you, like The Cradle is not just a level, but an entity, bent on knocking you around for it's own amusement. That's what a GM can do. Heck, that's what the GM is! It's all in how you manipulate things for your players. Every corner could have a trap, even if it takes multiple times to cross over it. Every item can have a sneaky trick. Every enemy should be memorable, detailed, a nemesis for your characters to beat, even if they aren't directly interacting with them.

...whew, that was a lot.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vinegar Tom View Post
Actually there's a surprising amount of Lovecraft in D&D, which you'd expect, given that they pinched their monsters from all over the place (I'm genuinely surprised there's never been an official D&D version of the Dalek with just enough changes not to get sued). Sahuagin are HPL's Deep Ones from "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Ghouls are directly lifted from several HPL stories, notably "Pickman's Model". Gibberlings are from "The Lurking Fear". Aboleths are from "The Horror at Martin's Beach." And Mind Flayers, while not inspired by any particular story, are obviously Lovecraftean. Incidentally, although it's by no means his best work, HPL's "Herbert West - Reanimator" is a straight-up zombie story.
there is a good reason there alot of lovecraft in D&D
You see, in the first game book, there was a many of quest to due with cthulhu sense, well, lovecraft works was just getting to the point of being the hail as "great works" around the same time of D&D was made

D&D maker later found out there was a copy right on his works and were told to stop with making Cthulhu mytheos quests

anyway: Herbert West- Reanimator was a great book, one of my first reads of his works. It actually on of the big thing i'm inspired by for my WW1 horror game that still in the works.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vinegar Tom View Post
Sahuagin are HPL's Deep Ones from "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Ghouls are directly lifted from several HPL stories, notably "Pickman's Model". Gibberlings are from "The Lurking Fear". Aboleths are from "The Horror at Martin's Beach." And Mind Flayers, while not inspired by any particular story, are obviously Lovecraftean.
True - though I'm not sure about ghouls specifically. They're pretty well-known in folkore (especially as we see reflections of them in the vampire and wendigo, and other beasties).

But pulling the monsters is not quite the same as pulling the tone. Heroes of Horror is actually pretty interesting read on some of this stuff. Anyway, I would certainly pull from Lovecraft, but "haunted whatever" speaks of undead and the like rather than "things beyond the ken of mortal man" or tentacles horrors from Beyond the Stars. The two can overlap, of course, but if you're thinking things like zombies, ghosts, possessed people, mad fairground stuff and creepy wells (actually, the latter in particular could be made pretty Lovecraftian) I just think that conjures up a slightly different vibe. But whatever.

@TheFred: Yes indeed, the basic Lovecraft vibe is that whatever the protagonist discovers is too much for his mind to bear. This isn't really a D&D setup at all, except of course for creatures like the very Lovecraftean Mind Flayers, which in later editions come from another planet. D&D can never become truly Lovecraftean, since the PCs know perfectly well that all manner of frightful creatures and unthinkably powerful beings of pure evil really do exist, and it's a basic fact of life. If you lose your mind when you meet one, or even panic for a round or two, it's because game mechanics give them a power that makes that happen, not because you're truly shocked into madness by the revelation that such things exist.

In a D&D context, none of these things are frightening in themselves. If a horde of zombies lurch into town, the players will casually estimate the CR level before deciding to be a bit scared if they think they'll be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Zombies are intrinsically no scarier than goblins, and even if the idea of walking corpses is supposed to be extra-nasty, the party probably has at least one member whose job-description includes being extra-good at killing the kind of monsters that appear in most horror movies. In that scenario, horror has to come from a deeper level. You need to make the players uncertain about what they're facing, probably in such a way that it's nowhere near as dangerous as they think (otherwise you're looking at an automatic TPK, which is no fun for anyone), but dangerous enough to be a real challenge.

Traps probably aren't the way to go here. A trap is by definition a mechanical (or magical) thing that goes off and does something bad to you unless you avoid or disarm it. The players know what they're up against, and even the most ordinary traps are fairly horrific when you think about it - pits with rusty spikes at the bottom appear in loads of horror films, but also in every bog-standard dungeon ever, so a gimmicky trap with a supernatural theme isn't really any scarier than a big rock that falls from the ceiling. Now, a heavily-trapped dungeon with a mysterious and extremely elusive Big Bad whose capabilities the players can't figure out, who's smart enough to decoy them into the traps that happen to be there - that could get scary!

PS - I did know that "ghoul" is not a word invented by either H. P. Lovecraft or Gary Gygax. I even knew that it was derived from Arabic. And, as that dismal stub of a wikipedia article informs us, this means that ghouls have a very distant connection with Batman (it wouldn't seem like a real wikipedia article if they didn't drag in Batman somehow). However, the extremely vague folkloric term "ghoul" can, as you say, mean all sorts of wildly different things. HPL's ghouls are bestial humanoids with rubbery skin and semi-canine features. They only come out at night, and they live in underground passages beneath cemeteries or otherwise allowing them access to corpses, because that's what they eat. And most, possibly all of them used to be humans, who can turn into ghouls in some unexplained way just by spending too much time with them (obviously, normal people consider one second too much time to spend with a ghoul), so apparently it's a contagious disease. That, I think, is a pretty good fit with the D&D ghoul!

Aha! To pick up on just one of things you said - uncertainty. Of course, this is great for any horror or spooky vibe. In PbP specifically, you can do some great things with the private tags and the like.

For example, telling only one PC that they see something, and not having them know whether their (privately rolled) Spot was simply better or worse than someone else's, or if they are seeing something not real.

Hell, even if you say "roll a Will save" - they know they're rolling one, and they can use various abilities or whatever as appropriate, but they don't know why they're rolling. And don't tell them the DC, either.

Something with illusions or similar, a la that creepy torch, might work really well. Like, a house of mirrors or something, where all the PCs get split up (because splitting the party is also great).




 

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