FeaRPG

What makes something scary? That is a complex question and something I’ll never be able to break down fully. Scary means different things to different people, somebody with a fear of germs may be fine at the top of a very tall building, but may struggle more when it comes to cooking meat with vegetables for fear of food poisoning. Fear, where does it hit you? Are you feeling it in your stomach, or has your skin just tried to peel itself off? Maybe it’s the emotional fear of not reaching your aspirations and falling short. Fear and what’s scary come in all shapes and sizes, but in this post, I’m mainly going to be talking about the stomach churning and skin crawling kind (though the emotional does have some input here). 

A brief note on language (just because it came up in a conversation recently). I want to distinguish between horror and scare/fear. There are RPGs out there that address horror and fear such as Dread and Call of Cthulhu, each one taking a very different approach in game style. But would anybody actually call it scary or fear-inducing? The conversation I had was two people butting heads saying that they could make Pathfinder a horror game and that being misinterpreted as scary, half an hour of circles later we got to the bottom of it. 

Horror can be brilliant in roleplaying games and definitely has a place, horror and fear do have an overlap, but nine times out of ten, the player characters are usually the scariest thing entering the room, especially if you’re sat at the table with DPS monkeys and the cantrip light. Sorry vampire fans, even after the Twilight saga has died down, vampires still aren’t scary. 

So, what makes something scary? This is where our vampire friends can help us out. When you break Stoker’s Dracula down to its core components, it is a story about how scary the Other is. In this case, the Other is foreign, has strange rituals like drinking blood, and looks different. The Other is a common theme in a lot of literature and media all the way from The Odyssey’s Cyclops to modern day portrayal of foreign nationalities (I won’t go there in this post though). The Other is the difference from self, difference is scary. 

The Other is unknown, they don’t fit into the conventions that we do. Cthulu and co. can’t be known, they’re indistinguishable by nature. This flows into most media and where a lot of horror media falls down. Humans are problem solving machines, you give us an unknown and we’ll try and solve it. If there’s something we haven’t seen, we’ll find a way. If there’s a monster, we’ll find a way to understand it (well, more likely kill it). If you’re following my The Monsters in our Pockets series, you may be trying to work out the two elements used in each short story. This is where humans contradict the motives of horror. As soon as you understand it or properly see it, it becomes less scary. 

Taking this into film, compare The Babadook with The Woman in Black. Both start strong, hinting at the idea of something physical being there and never showing it, a glimpse in the corner of the screen, out of focus, in the dark. The Babadook conceals the creature the whole time, snippets of shadow, a question as to whether it exists or if it’s a figment of the main character’s imagination. The Woman in Black starts by putting her in the background, giving moments where she could appear, and then doesn’t. This film does falter at the end however, giving a full shot of the woman and explaining why she’s evil. Showing and understanding the evil, makes it less scary. Compare the first Saw movie to any of its sequels and you’ll see how it changes from being suggestive and intense into a fetish gloop-splatter of a film. Let the player’s minds do the word and they’ll make it their own worst nightmare. 

Funnily enough, inverting it can create a different kind of horror, but one that’s harder to pull off in a table top scenario. 

It’s black, and I’m crumpled. The air tastes like burning and I’m pressed in a box. God, no, a coffin. I can just about stand, head pounding. I can hear the insides of my ear, feeling moving down my neck, tendons trying to pull themselves. I take a deep breath, and I feel something drift down my face, in my eyes. Sand, coming in quick. I push back and it starts to come quicker, covering my feet, boots gone. I clutch at the hole and sand falls through. Breathe, breathe. It reaches my knees, I lift one and it collides with wood, harder, harder, again, again, and I scream, my leg at an unnatural angle and flames filling my knee cap. I lift my arms, catch the knife tucked in my belt, can just about pull it out, and start lashing at the wood in front of me. It falls heavier, I suck it in and start to choke, headbutt the back of the wood which bursts and grains cover my elbows, arms lifted but going under. Breathe deep, exhale, breathe deep. It covers my neck and slides down my shirt, mattes into beard, forces itself into my mouth, into eyes, into ugh.. 

In this form of horror we’re presented with the inevitable and with limited resources. Arguably not scary, but still fear inducing, maybe playing with phobia (being buried alive is a popular one). Sand itself isn’t inherently scary, but with this case, it creates a clock, something to fight against, and a sense of claustrophobia. 

Video games are good at producing this kind of fear, and a couple of examples are the old Resident Evil games (more so the remakes, sorry, no Jill Sandwiches here) and Condemned. Both of these games make sure that every encounter you have is lethal and that every bullet counts. Condemned has a weapons system in which you have to scrounge things from the floors and walls, such as electrical conduits, that break regularly. If you get a gun, you’ll be lucky to get a third bullet for it. Add that to a dark room you just saw a shadow run across and it can make you twitchy. You can take this a step further with (everyone’s favourite Let’s Play game) Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Here, you have no weapons to defend yourself with, and looking at the monster makes you go insane. 

This then goes in two new directions. Isolation and weakness. In these games, you’re on your own. If anyone’s there to help you, it’s through a voice system or flashback. Losing all of your support can lead to despair, loss of control, and not knowing where to turn. Here, you get that sinking feeling in your stomach and have to overcome it. Being weak reinforces this fear. Bioshock starts as a horror game, in shadows, an overwhelming world, and things with hooks for hands. As soon as you get your first plasmid, you become a super hero and suddenly you’re throwing bags of potatoes at people. Doom is arguably a horror game but at no point is it scary or fear inducing. A good measure of weakness vs power is how much control and how many options you get in a game and how good all of those options are. 

Taking a side-step, we move into the world of the uncanny. The uncanny, in modern terms, is described as something unsettling that is almost as it should be. A common example are robots designed to look like humans where an element is ‘off’. This can move into other areas though such as animatronics moving in almost human ways. Mine tends to fall into the territory of misshaped or exaggerated bodies/facial features (such as Chris Cunningham’s work or some of the SCP containment breach creatures). 

Creating the uncanny can also be tricky as it works differently for different people. It’s also difficult in a TTRPG as the uncanny takes more time to uncover than with an image; an image giving the instant realisation that something is wrong. The uncanny though can create that stomach squeezing feeling, that ‘oh god, what’s coming?’ kind of tension. This will tend to come out in the way that you act if you’re GMing. This is easier to do when you break the fourth wall a little as well. If the players move into a room with a single door, they open it, and inside is the same room again, they open that and it’s the same room yet again. As a GM, you can push that line of what would seem normal and what’s you as a person just going a bit strange. 

So, with a short discussion on what scary is and how media portrays it, why is it borderline impossible to do it in a table-top environment?  

Starting off, we have to look at the RPG being played, and the characters. If you take an RPG like Dungeons & Dragons, every character is a weapon first and a person second. Most feats are about maximising damage and combat effectiveness. This also comes with a mentality that if you’re not the most powerful you can be, you’re doing it wrong. Why play option A when option B does the exact same thing but better. Here you end up with a play style counter-productive to fear and dread. 

Within these worlds, you tend to deal the extraordinary too. If you’re fighting devils and demons on the regular, you then need something scarier by comparison, something otherworldly. Something being scary is usually based on comparison to the norm. 

Call of Cthulhu on the other hand takes a step back, goes for the horror of existential dread and the unknown. Unfortunately, I’d argue that Cthulhu is a bit old hat now and a bit overdone, but the premise of being human allows milder things to become scarier. In Dracula,  Lucy’s window being left open spells death and fear. In a hero-based game, that’s just a regular Thursday night tavern quest. 

Game mechanics can also get in the way of something being scary. You can build up an atmosphere, get ready for the reveal, but as soon as you say the phrase ‘roll for initiative’ your whole set-up goes out the window. Turn-based RPGs suffer here more than free-flow RPGs.  For turned based games, it becomes about mechanics, optimisation, and working out the best plan of action. It steps away from fight/flight response, which is where humans turn when actually scared. Fear will actually benefit from less mechanically; there’s less between the player and the scary entity and it gives them less time to process and comprehend the thing. Insanity mechanics might sound like a good idea, the more you witness, the more insane your character goes based on their wisdom score. What this becomes is another HP pool and resource to manage, another step away from the action, and another thing to mark. If you have sanity, make it quick and make it brutal. 

Not so much of a mechanic, but a secret rule in almost all RPGs: don’t split the party. This makes sense, trying to control separate events happening at the same time is a pain. This means that players can no longer be isolated, the unit being stuck together. It can’t me vs world, it becomes us vs the game master. Power Ranger assemb- maybe I’m going too far…but players need to be divided. 

The last detail I’ll go into is the human one of investment and laughter. If you’re invested in the fear of the game you’re running, all of your players also need to be invested. Even just one player can break the immersion. This may also be involuntarily; a natural response to fear is laughter. Mix this with an environment that they’re uncomfortable with, such as mood lighting and sound effects, can actually hinder the game as well as set mood. Removing distractions is also important (that means phones away, you know who you are). 

So with this said, can we make table-top games scary? LARP, sure, but table-top? Here are some factors I’d look at if it came to making a scary game 

Be niche – This applies to both the type of horror and the theme(s) in your game. What form of scary are you trying to instil into your players? High suspense or uncanny? 

Themes should also be limited and concentrated. If you’re making it about zombies, make it about zombies. It doesn’t then have to encompass vampires and werewolves and aliens because you think people may want to play them. Keep it as refined as possible. 

Keep players limited in who they are. In fantasy games, humans usually get a bad reputation for being boring. Most players will scramble for the newest and most exotic looking race and use that as their personality. By restricting the players, they have more energy to focus on the scary elements of the game. (Could you imagine the film Alien with the cast from Guardians of the Galaxy?) 

Quick and Easy – Let the players get as close to the action and fear as possible. You don’t want players getting bored waiting for their turn to act, or to plan out intricate actions. You also don’t want to have players reaching for rule books mid-session. 

Being closer to the action allows players to tap in closer to that fight/flight response. Getting players to play themselves would also make it easier for the game to flow. ‘They’ are against the ‘thing’, not a created entity. 

Another option not really used is to give players limited time in real life, 6 seconds to decide what to do. This can break quite easily though and you’d want a table comfortable enough to go with the flow. 

Make it human – Keep players limited in who they are. In fantasy games, humans usually get a bad reputation for being boring. Most players will scramble for the newest and most exotic looking race and use that as their personality. By restricting the players, they have more energy to focus on the scary elements of the game and you’ll have less to complete with. (Could you imagine the film Alien with the cast from Guardians of the Galaxy?) 

Play with your players – This is more of an abstract rule, but go off the radar, make them feel like anything could happen, inside the game and out. (Just don’t ruin any friendships or alienate yourself by doing something tooooooo weird). 

A couple of ideas that come to mind to explore fear in TTRPGs would to be to do something akin to John Carpenter’s The Thing. A GM, a player as the monster undercover, and everyone trying to work out who they can trust. 

Another would be something based on grim histories. GMless, each player has a dark past they’re trying to hide and a sinister motive hidden from the other players. A real focus on human darkness and reality. 

Prepare to see some bad horror RPGs coming your way soon!