3 ways to do horror in D&D right (and 2 ways to do it wrong)

Another thing is, in the wise words of Pointy Hat, have your monster involved in a story. A scary monster is fine…but a hag that uses children to manipulate a town or a woodland spirit that kidnaps and creates false children of surrounding villages is so much scarier than Ned the Nothic

I liked the bone puns they really tickled my ribs

I once accidentally achieved it by designing a final "trap" for a dungeon next to the artifact the players were seeking that was designed for guilt tripping. It was just an auditory permanent illusion of multiple people in agony begging whoever gets in to not pick the artifact. It was only the sounds, so they couldn't locate the source. One character attempted to detect thoughts to locate whatever is making the voices...... I replied "it doesn't have a mind". All my players lost it XD.

I forget where I read this but it's always stuck in my head and I generally use it as my formula for pacing my Call of Cthulhu sessions or horror one shots. The Cycle of Fear 1) Establish Normalcy (Things are much scarier when contrasted with a baseline of normalcy) 2) A Sense of Unease (Something is off, like NPCs going missing or a door is open that wasn't before) 3) Signposts of Dread (Seeing a bulky shadow move in the closet, ragged breathing, or a scream heard close by) 4) Disarm (It was only a cloak moving in the wind, an NPC makes a joke, or followed by a much calmer scene) 5) Repeat cycles of dread and disarm in increasing severity as the pressure builds 6) Terror (Explicit signs of immanent threat like a growling monster approaches in the dark, or the smell of blood as you're about to enter the room of an NPC you were looking for) 7) HORROR (The terrible thing you've been afraid of happens, quickly and shockingly) Note: Once the horror happens the tension also goes away for this particular moment. You can do a few things to make player characters squirm afterwards by your descriptions but nothing will top that initial horror. That's why I like to conclude the horror parts quickly such as with a rapid fast paced combat (don't give players time to strategize or think. This is horror we're talking about! They have 5 seconds to declare an action or they're toast!) or shift the scene rapidly after. You can then begin the cycle all over again for another threat or build upon the last one to make it even greater.

Once I DMed a full, 3-sessions-long (we usually make sessions of 3 to 4 hours) of an investigation around a series of murders. Quickly, the villagers starts to accuse each others and the PCs, paranoia takes hold both within the NPCs and the PCs, and chaos spreads. The murderer was in fact a Doppelganger, taking the appearance of villagers to cause havoc in the village.

My biggest difficulty thus far has been trying to keep scary stuff consistent; my players just start talking amongst each other when I’m describing a room and enemies and it’s beginning to become really frustrating.

Theres currently a kickstarter from the LoA team called "Crooked Moon" thats all about dark folk horror, for any one interested

You have the best ad reads ever (btw your house is totally getting egged by that pumpkin)

Today I saw a short that inspired a new character: the minstrel-hating sword bard who doesn't realize his own class. Listening to you introduce your horrifying mother, I heard my bard panic, prancing in place as he tries to fan the tears back in his face. "Guys," he sobs, "I think we're in a horror.... No, you don't understand... I'm the pretty one and the pretty one's always the first to die!" A sign of a great story teller is when an introduction can bring a rando's character not only to life, but to an existential crisis.

D&D is also a tricky system in that the players by default are often combat focused and powerful. You really have to play to ambience and themes to get the effect, rather than the monster itself.

Concerning the last point, I think a good balance in horror games is for the players to feel strong but also very vulnerable. There’s a special kind of tension when something is working but it feels like it could go off the rails at any time

I don't remember if that session was during halloween, but I wil never forget the tension at the table. Our DM had us on an island to retrieve an artifact for someone. There was fog. Dimensional fucking spiders. But that was fine. What was not fine was the traveller sitting in their cloak near a campfire, their back to us. Like all was normal, despite the fog and spiders popping in and out nearby. Our fighter went to talk to the stranger, and the moment he touched them, the thing stood up tall, had no face but a gaping hole of a mouth to breathe in... something from us. It was the first time that our characters could potentially be crippled (I hadn't ever heard of strength or int or wis damage before, I didn't know something could lower our stats). The thing walked slow but had an aura of paralysis to force us to stay put until it reached us. And it never stopped walking. It kept going after us for our whole adventure on this island. Our characters couldn't stop for a break, or it would catch up to us. And of course, we also had to face our characters' fears down in the central dungeon. With that thing behind, after us. We really, really had that tension at the table - the DM even found a way to tell us it was coming without having to say it, he just tapped its footsteps on the table. To this day, tapping a slow rhythm on the table triggers uncomfy smiles and giggles amongst us. The player who played the fighter even chose to give his character a new deep fear, the fear of that thing specifically. Fun times!

My most successful moment in running a horror campaign was built around an NPC who was with the party. Her mother was a hag, and throughout the adventure she kept having more and more uncomfortable "hag thoughts." "I wonder what that kid tastes like." That sort of thing. The NPC was very uncomfortable with this, and it only got worse when a fight with some ghouls left her infected with ghoul fever, a disease that causes cannibalistic insanity and death. She had to try really hard not to eat parts of corpses, and towards the end of the adventure, she was a sobbing, nervous wreck. Right before the final boss, she snapped and tried to run off to find "Mother," but the party incapacitated her and tied her up before they went to fight the boss. I can see ways in which such an NPC could frustrate or annoy players, but in this case they really connected with and sympathized with her. It probably helped that she was a Cleric who was otherwise helpful much of the time, so they got attached before she started becoming more of a burden. But I think having this character undergo a mental breakdown in front of the players really got them in the mood of the insanity-type horror of the rest of the adventure. And, as a bonus, it made the bit of the ending montage after the final boss was defeated when the NPC was still tied up but sleeping peacefully feel really nice. The players knew that THEY did that for her.

A trick that I used recently is the stacking effect. In the RPG setting that we play in, rats are the "holy" animals of the nameless, the god of pure evil. So I created a battle against time where things got worse and worse. They encountered a village where people get slaughtered by some animals. One of the villagers helps them to learn more about the animal here. That villager turns out to be a really nice, sympathetic and helpful bloke, eager to help the heroes. They soon realise that their foe is a lycanthrope. Little do they know that the critter is none other than their new friend! This is where the stacking comes in. 1. They're hunting a really dangerous and vicious monster. 2. The monster is their friend, who obviously doesn't know what he's doing. 3. He turns into the monster before their very eyes! 4. The only cut is it's death. 5. They thought it would be a wereWOLF... but it turns out to be a wereRAT! Remember? The rest being the critter of the nameless? Horror, on top of horror, on top of horror, ... Stacking effect!

Great timing with these tips! Working on a one shot for some friends the week of Holloween. I have most of my background for the story and significant characters worked out (just need some names) setting it up to possibly work as a story hook into a longer campaign. I need to work up some descriptive "reminders" to use for some characters and locales. Wonderful and insightful as always! Thx

I had somewhat of a horror session recently, my players had to deal with a hag who disguised as a beautiful woman. I told them to get in their character’s heads and picture the absolute peak of beauty. One player could kind of see through the illusion, and so I gave hints every now and then of the horrible hag that was underneath; A polite smile turned into a hideous snarl for a moment, and a manicured hand shaking theirs was suddenly a multi-jointed claw. Got some fun reactions from them :)

Our table had a great genre awareness moment during our horror session when I described a lonely, dilapidated cabin in the spooky woods surrounded by fog, not long after they had already encountered a shadowy figure with one glowy eye that ripped an NPC apart and disappeared into the fog... One of the players went "we're going to go to that spooky cabin, aren't we?" And they did the stupid thing by going up to the cabin, but then they did a smart thing that I didn't expect, by opening the door from a distance and throwing in a rock that the artificer infused and using an animal to look into the cabin, and therefore avoided the horrible scene of walking in and looking up to see dozens of baby Ankhegs sleeping on the ceiling. Needless to say, they found a different way to progress the adventure after that! No less spooky, but full of character agency.

Pacing is also incredibly important for horror. This also applies to how you speak, slowing down to build tension speeding up when the action strikes.

Ambience and scary music is great but when you combine it with silence, it's chef kiss! Have music and ambiance during the build up, get your players use to it and then when you present the threat, hit them with silence turn everything of. It's super effective. The players know that shit just got real and their terrified. It worked wonders on my group atleast 😊

All incredible advice as always. Atmosphere is paramount when it comes to horror. Something I'll add is that word choice and description can make a big difference as well. The forest doesn't sway, it creaks. The tower doesn't rise, it looms. Candles that would shine, now gutter and flicker. As mentioned, D&D and other TTRPGs are played in the imagination, so anything that can be done to make the imagined space as foreboding and ominous as possible only contributes to the atmosphere. And the reminder on content boundaries is always appreciated!