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Heighten Your Horror!
23 Plays5 months ago
In this special Halloween episode of Tabletop Tune Up, we explore how to craft immersive horror experiences that leave players trembling. Discover how to set the mood with ambiance, sound, and props while building suspense through subtle hints of unseen threats. Learn to limit planning time to maintain urgency and use dice sparingly to enhance emotional impact. We’ll discuss tough choices that elevate stakes and the strategic use of splitting the party to amplify fear. Finally, master vivid descriptions that engage all senses and create a truly terrifying atmosphere. Join us for spine-tingling insights into heightening your horror RPG sessions!
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Transcript
Chaotic Scene in Scotland
00:00:00
Speaker
Everywhere I went, it felt like they were watching me. Fish-white flesh, puckered by the Highland breeze. Tight eyes peering out for fresh meat. Screechy, boo-soaked voices, hollering out for a taxi to take them halfway up the road to the next all-night watering hole. A shatter of glass. A round of applause. A 16-year-old mother of three vomiting in an open sewer. Bands looking on, chewing on potato cakes. I ain't never going back.
00:00:29
Speaker
never
00:00:34
Speaker
My aunt lives in Scotland. She says it's quite nice. Well, she's wrong.
Horror Film Recommendations
00:01:08
Speaker
Welcome everybody to the Tabletop Tuna. My name is Mark and I'm joined here by my buddy Ben. How you doing, Ben? I'm good. It is Halloween week. This is going to be a lot of fun. and um like god Hey, ah have you been watching any of those films that Chris has recommended? I am glad to report that under the encouragement to terror and horror and whatnot from our interview guest last episode, Chris Rochard. I have in fact gone out and watched the two chapters of the IT movie that came out in 2017, 2019, Bill Skarsgard. Great experience, enjoyed that a lot. And and by the way, I've heard that as the one to watch too, the 2017 is the, ver because there's like four different versions of IT.
00:01:54
Speaker
That's interesting. i'm The only other one I was aware of was the Tim Curry miniseries from 1990 or somewhere, somewhere back there. And I think it might be actually interesting to go watch. But the other one that I watched recently is John Carpenter's The Thing, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
00:02:10
Speaker
Awesome. That's great. You know, my wife and I are watching a few movies ourselves where we're kind of every October, we just kind of binge horror shows for the month.
Focus on Horror Themes
00:02:21
Speaker
It's it's kind of a lot of fun. But, you know, today we're going to be we're going to be talking about some horror.
00:02:25
Speaker
That's great. Do you, I was gonna say before we move on to that, do you have like a go-to ritual horror movie that you watch every year? I think for my wife and I, it's Young Frankenstein. Young Frankenstein. Um, not really. Uh, sometimes we'll go back and watch an old favorites, but we don't have a particular like go-to horror movie that we we we' enjoy. We just kind of, wherever the whim takes us.
00:02:48
Speaker
but um we got an entire episode packed with horror and ah in fact so much so that we're not going to be doing a tune-up at the end of this this episode because I think we need every little bit of time to talk about this topic. So Ben, why aren't you why don't you get us kicked off here?
00:03:03
Speaker
Well, so here's what we're going to do. I want to basically tell you guys a whole bunch of stuff we're not going to talk about because we either talked about it with Chris, and we think that's a really great episode. And you should go back and listen to that. Or it's just not relevant to what we're after today. So let me give you a quick recap of that interview with Chris Robichaud.
Interview Recap: Buy-in and Vulnerability in Horror Games
00:03:21
Speaker
It's our last episode. So the first thing we talked about was buy-in and how important it is to get players to buy-in because vulnerability is a big part of these kind of games in the genre.
00:03:32
Speaker
the Sensation of suspense and horror is something that in order to feel that, your players need to feel that their characters are vulnerable, something horrible could happen to them. If your characters are superheroes, that's harder to do.
00:03:46
Speaker
One of the things we also talked about with Chris was red herrings and misdirects and all the fun little things you can do to use that toolbox that we have as GMs and get the players not quite knowing what's going on, help them get disoriented. This episode, we're going to talk about a number of different things we can do to help your players feel that vulnerability and to feel that suspense.
00:04:09
Speaker
We'll talk a little bit more about limited information. We'll talk about splitting the party.
Creating Player Vulnerability in Horror
00:04:13
Speaker
We'll talk about how to make even powerful players feel vulnerable because you're threatening somebody else maybe. The last thing I'll say before I hand it back to Mark here is horror is something that's different from a monster flick or a creature feature. You can have a ah game where you include vampires and werewolves and aliens and all those kinds of things.
00:04:33
Speaker
But that's not the same thing as having the experience at the table where you feel that vulnerability and you feel that threat. So what we're not going to necessarily talk about today is how to do monsters and things like that. We're going to talk about how, maybe with monsters, you can create those feelings by enhancing people's sense of vulnerability. So to get started on this properly, Mark, we need to set the mood.
Immersive Horror Experience Techniques
00:04:55
Speaker
Tell me about how we do that. Oh, yeah. You know, just like getting together with your your loved one, you've got to set the mood, right?
00:05:03
Speaker
Well, musical candles. Is that the idea? Yeah, exactly. we're go So we're going to set the mood for this horror game. Setting the mood is essential. ah You're going to want to dim those lights, light those candles, throw in some of those ah subtle you know props at the table. Music may very well be your ally here if you got some good creepy ambient you know music tracks, eerie soundscapes. But even like cutting those out when it's appropriate, having that silence, these visual and auditory cues are going to let the the people at your table know, hey, we're in for something new. We're in for something intense, something immersive. This is not your typical game. I want you to think of it like when you were a kid and you're telling camp stories with your friends,
00:05:51
Speaker
ah You got that flashlight under your chin. that's That's kind of the vibe we're kind of going for here. You just said something I thought was really an interesting distinction here, which is that a lot of games we play the power fantasy, right? But what we're going for here is not so much the power fantasy because vulnerability matters. We're going for immersion. We're going for as much as we can activate of the senses.
00:06:11
Speaker
going to help you feel that mood and get into that mood. So if you want players to buy in, you've got to give them something to hook on to, something to buy into. One of the things that's going to help them buy in as well is suspense and anticipation. And the way that you do that is you don't let them see everything all at once.
Maintaining Suspense with Information Drip
00:06:29
Speaker
You don't give them a lot of information.
00:06:32
Speaker
You want to drip feed information in order to create that suspense. You want to give the players just enough that they start freaking out. You don't want to reveal the threat too soon, otherwise it's going to lose any kind of mystery or power. Your player's ability to imagine that instead is going to be something that does more for you if they have to fill in a lot more.
00:06:50
Speaker
so Just show glimpses, a little something that went by the creek of a door that you could barely see ah a shadow or maybe a strange center decay. Mark, you've probably been in games where a ghost shows up and and all of a sudden the temperature of the room goes down and you're like, oh no. They have little hints here and there. I was thinking about Alien, the classic. you know we we we We all kind of know how slowly they do to reveal that creature by the end of it.
00:07:15
Speaker
But there's also lots of little other hints. There's a moment where one of the characters, they find the skin of the thing that's been shedding and molting. and And it just makes your imagination go, what is going on here? yeah Those are little things about limiting information that Ben's talking about. And I think you're dead on with that.
00:07:33
Speaker
So that's not the only thing we're going to limit. We want to limit their time. I don't want my players to sit there and linger and plot and plan. Strategic planning is ah is a big part of RPGs, but horror games, they're just a different beast. You know, we need them to be kind of more impulsive.
Keeping Tension with Limited Planning
00:07:49
Speaker
We need them to be more reactionary. So if you give your players just too much time to sit and plot and plan, that tension is just going to deflate out of that balloon. You want to have that tension built up nice. So keep a firm hand on the pacing.
00:08:03
Speaker
Planning is a kind of control and you don't want the players to feel in control. You want the players to be reacting as you say, not proactively getting through this. So like the longer they want to sit and plot and think about things, that means the creature is that much closer to the door that they're safely behind. We're going to limit that time. We're going to keep things going. We want them to be short bursts between encounters. We want them to act quickly. We want their hearts to be beating rapidly.
00:08:32
Speaker
I love that the ah one of the things you're doing is when you want to limit time, if they start to take extra time, you're going to make it cost something. Yeah, exactly. That's a great strategy. Well, so the other thing to do in terms of also making things move faster, ah things tend to slow down when we actually start rolling dice and we get into structured time and things like that.
Enhancing Tension with Dice Mechanics
00:08:52
Speaker
So one of the things to do here is to think about dice in a different way.
00:08:57
Speaker
Dice in this kind of a game have to serve mood. They've got to be there to essentially create tension. So you remember Mark, the rule of cool, right? Oh, yeah. So the rule of cool is when, you know, we might not do dice rolls because it doesn't even matter. We want that cool thing that the player came up with to happen. Well, horror has a different version of this, where you want the dice to serve anticipation and suspense. Maybe you won't have the player's role something that they normally would roll, because that's not what's important in this kind of game. I don't necessarily want them to roll a normal pick-locks roll or something like that. I want them to roll in those moments where if they don't get this right, there's a consequence.
00:09:38
Speaker
So that dice is like an icebreaker. It is a resolution of all this tension you're building up. Does that sound about appropriate? Yeah, it's the thing you do to release this and resolve something. Think about what would happen if you had dice that were used for all the normal things everybody uses them for. You'd be pretty much letting the tension out of your game because people would, again, they'd feel in control. They'd feel like the dice were there to support them.
00:10:04
Speaker
And what you want to do is you want to make the dice feel like they're there to decide whether things get bad or worse. Yeah. That's that's great. On that note, and I 100% agree, I think the dice are just, they can just really amp up your game if you if you use them properly.
00:10:22
Speaker
So let's talk about real quick about being in the moment because horror games, like we so like we said earlier, we want them to be reactionary.
Reacting and Maintaining Tension as GM
00:10:29
Speaker
We want them to be like on their toes. So as a game master, you you need to stay present in the story. You need to react to the player's decisions and you need to maintain that that tension. It requires nibbleness on the part of the GM. You're going to be reacting to their fears, their emotions, and you're going to be doing this in real time.
00:10:50
Speaker
We don't wanna get bogged down by mechanics. We don't wanna get bogged down by dice. We wanna focus on them, what they're feeling, what their emotions are, and we wanna try to pace ourselves to kinda what's going on with them. You remember last week, Chris talked about how horror has a sense in which it's on rails, but then also a sense in which it's very much more improvisational. Yeah.
00:11:11
Speaker
And so that bit about kind of being on rails, is the sense of inevitability that these things are going to come get you, right? Yeah. But the improvisational part is what I think part of what you're talking about here, it's like. because you're trying to create a feeling in the players, right? It's less about, can I hit all the narrative marks I need to hit? It's rather, can I make these people feel scared? Yeah. Can I can hit the emotional marks that I'm trying to hit? That's a really great way of putting it. Well, I think we need to go to the table and we need to show at the table kind of what this might look like and what this might feel like. So Ben, let's make our way over to the table. All right. Let's see what happens.
00:11:49
Speaker
The ship groans, metal twisting somewhere deep within its hollowed guts. Sparks flicker overhead, casting shadows down the length of the narrow corridor. The two of you case and series stumble forward. Your lungs are heaving, gasping for air. Every step is slower than the last as the atmosphere leaves. Behind you, you hear it. Some... something. It's a sound that's too jagged, too visceral to be anything mechanical. It's a kind of scraping punctuated by a slithering hiss. You round the corner and there you see, with relief, salvation. But wait.
00:12:23
Speaker
There's four escape pods lining the wall, but you realize your chances are grim. The first three pods are gone, and there's nothing but a blinking red light where they were docked. Now the fourth one's got a steady blue light, but as you get closer you see that There's no hope in that either. Through the narrow viewport, you can look out and see the interior of the pod, a warped, twisted seed, straps shredded, and beyond that, the endless void of space where the back half of the pod should be. The jagged remains of the pod are drifting in open space, and there's tendrils of debris caught in orbit around the ruin. It's docked, but it's destroyed.
00:12:59
Speaker
Your eyes flicked back down the corridor, the monstrous shuffling scrape echoes closer, the sickening smell of charred flesh from the accident, and the stale recycled air is thick in your nostrils. There's only one place left to go. There's a hatch at the end of the hall. And as you haul it open, your heart plummeting, and you see what lies beyond. Nothing. You glance at the storage room. Walls with shelves, stocked with metal crates and tangled cables, lit by the faint blinking emergency lights. It's a dead end, though. The walls are pressing in on you.
Suspenseful Creature Encounter
00:13:29
Speaker
It's a claustrophobic trap. The door of the storage room will buy you time, but maybe not much else. What would you like to do? Oh, well, first thing I'm going to do is slam that hatch shut and wedge myself in against it. All right. And, uh, series? Uh, I got to look around. Is there anything in these crates, these shelves? What do I see? Okay. So the maintenance room is basically about a 10 by 10 room.
00:13:53
Speaker
And it seems to close in around you with a faint hum of distant machinery. You can feel the shutters of the engines giving through the hole. Shadows are clinging to the shelves that line every wall, stacked with cleaning agents, various tools, water packs. It's kind of a utility space with mops and brooms and a couple of tools. There's a faint whir that draws your eye to a service vent that's about 10 feet up. It's got a grated cover that's corroded and slick with dust and maybe something else.
00:14:22
Speaker
This is the moment where, as you're bracing yourself, Case, the metal door begins to shutter violently. Bang. And you can feel the impact in your back. Bang. It hits again. And there's a kind of a relentless assault as you can feel this scratching on the other side of it. Teeth and claws are working on this door. Your hands are pressing harder, white knuckled. And you can feel each blow bang through your bones as you strain to hold it shut. Only your weight and pressure are between survival and whatever that thing is.
00:14:51
Speaker
ah Is this like a submarine hatch, like I can spin a lock on it? Like, is it really tough? It's an interior bulkhead. So it's probably not even as strong as the shelves, the escape pods you saw shredded. You might not have a lot of time. Player two, what are you doing? Well, I'm going to be looking around with these crates and everything. Could I build a little staircase up to that vent that I saw? Yeah. So you could pull some of the shelves together and you start scrambling up toward the vent and your hands are kind of slick with sweat and a bit of blood from the last teammate you lost.
00:15:23
Speaker
And you're fumbling around with this Warren screwdriver. Each time you kind of work with this thing through that corrosion, this is a reminder that there's so little time available. And then the vent cover finally clatters loose.
00:15:36
Speaker
You manage to squeeze into that shattered cavity, and there's a cold, cramped space in there that could swallow you whole as you vanish into the ship's underbelly. As you look down, you see Case is braced against the bulkhead door. His every seeing you is straining to hold back the thing on the other side that's trying to claw his way through. And you can see already his boots are starting to slip against that slick floor.
00:15:57
Speaker
The metal is groaning under his weight and cracks are splintering through the alloy. The creature's appendages are banging incessantly on the other side of that door, relentlessly trying to get through. And you know that without him, it's going to shatter. If this thing outside comes into this room, there's a slim chance at life. But this vent gives you a slim chance at life.
00:16:18
Speaker
I'm gonna spin around, I'll put my legs into the cavity and kind of brace my legs against the backside of the wall, but then I'm gonna reach out and shout to Kaze to take my hand. Alright you guys, it's time to roll some dice.
00:16:34
Speaker
Let's talk about what we just saw and what we just heard. This creature was coming at them, put them in a really tough position where there really was some tough choices to be made there. We didn't give them a lot of time to plot and plan. Creature was right on their back.
00:16:50
Speaker
In that description, there's ah there's a pretty heavy narrative description that moved them into that yes whole maintenance room area. We didn't spend a lot of time going like, hey, what do you want to do? Here's what you see around you. And and part of this could be the podcast ah that we're trying to just get this scenario out there for you guys to hear. But also, like when you're playing these types of games, you want to be quick with your descriptions. and You want to be on the spot and move them fast, particularly if the speed of which that creature is coming at them warrants you to kind of move quickly.
00:17:20
Speaker
In some sense, also you'll notice that we didn't rush into like a structured time situation. There was no moment where it was like, okay, roll initiative. Yeah. We're not going to break down at the, into that time. We only need structured time when we really, really need it. And that's more of a game mechanic thing. And usually that tension could very well been broken at that point, but for right now, we want to build up that tension to what inevitably would have been that last choice. One of the players could have left, they could have ran. Maybe they could have saved themselves. Yeah.
00:17:50
Speaker
But the player, they reached out their hand. They made their own path. They made their own option. So we're we're limiting their time. We're using those dice sparingly. We could see that. There's a lot of things, Ben, you could argue that maybe a strength check could have been used to kind of hold that door. Would that have served anything? Like if they failed, what are the consequences?
00:18:14
Speaker
yeah I think there's a good note there, right, which is if you do have people roll dice, whatever a failure means in that context, you better know what that's going to be ahead of time and what's going to cost them. If he had failed a strength check to close that door, the creature would have opened the door and shredded him.
00:18:30
Speaker
Let's also talk real quick about glimpsing the threat. I mean, we didn't even really get into the description of the creature. I still don't know what that creature really is. I mean, I think in some sense, right where they heard it or vamping on aliens a little bit, but like yeah it's still it would be its own thing.
00:18:44
Speaker
They kind of put their back to it. They could hear it coming down the hall. ah Maybe earlier in the in the session, maybe they got a little description of it. But for right now, we're not going to give them that because they are not facing it face on. They're not looking right at the threat. Just like in all of these horror movies, the only time you really ever see the thing fully is kind of near the end. The players are either going to defeat this thing with whatever they've managed to scrape together or it's going to just shred them and they're going to be done.
00:19:13
Speaker
So let's let's go to let's go to the second part of this scenario. Then we can have a much bigger conversation about these two elements and what we're we're trying to show here. All right, here we go. So this is example number two.
00:19:28
Speaker
Latimer stands alone on the bridge. His hands are a blur as he fights to bring the systems back in line. Emergency lights pulse, red flashing like a heartbeat across the fractured bridge. Panels are sparking and darkened, going on and off, blinking error messages the ship shudders beneath the relentless gravitational drag of a nearby star. That thrumming pull is digging deeper into your bones, each passing second, and the temperature is rising as the ship drifts closer to its final incineration.
00:19:57
Speaker
Sweat beads down your face as you toggle through the security feeds. You're looking for your friends. And for a moment, you see only empty corridors and deserted storage bays and vacant crew quarters and the mess. And then wait, there's a quick blur of movement.
00:20:12
Speaker
You freeze, your fingers hovering over the consoles, you zoom in on the feed. Case and series, where were they? They were sprinting through some dim hallway and now you're trying to trace their steps and follow them on the different feeds. Another camera angle catches your eye and you see barely some kind of a distortion down the corridor from them, some kind of a shimmering thing in the darkness, darker than the shadows surrounding it. It's shifting and twisting.
00:20:37
Speaker
You kind of think you see maybe the faintest hint of claws or maybe it was glinting teeth. It's difficult to determine the feed is blurry with static as you get closer and closer to that star. Then you recognize them on one of the feeds. Case and series are turning sharply and disappearing into a room. Your stomach drops as you recognize the layout. That's a maintenance storage clause. There is nowhere for them to go from there.
00:20:59
Speaker
In the dim glow of that screen, you watch the creature approach. Its form is obscured and blurred by the static. It's getting worse and worse moment by moment. The camera's shaking with each thud of its body against the sealed doors. It tries to break down the maintenance closet door where case and series are hiding. That door won't hold. It's only a matter of time before the claws punch through that alloy. Latimer, what are you doing next?
00:21:21
Speaker
Ah, that's not good. um Let's look at that video feed. Is there and anything in that hallway or anything around him, the the creature? In the hallway that's adjacent to the maintenance closet that Case and series are in, where the creature is, there are four escape pods in that hall. Three of those, you can see the red lights that indicate that those have been launched and those are sealed.
00:21:49
Speaker
There's a fourth pod, but then you kind of notice on the exterior feet as you're looking at the hull of the ship that the front of that pod has been affixed to the portal, but the rear half is torn open in tatters, exposed to the vacuum. So much for trying to lead them there. um The fourth light has the green light on, right? The blue light, yeah, that's right, that says that it's still something you can manipulat manipulate.
00:22:13
Speaker
So it still thinks it's engaged. It still thinks it has a pod there. Could I i open the door from here? No, let's roll some dice and find out.
00:22:25
Speaker
All right. Welcome back. That was, that was something. Wow. Okay. We don't know how that's going to be resolved, but the dice of course do. Yeah. That's a dice roll that I would be dreading. Yeah. If you get that wrong, I mean, think about how you could complicate things from there as a GM, right? Maybe you do vent the creature out into space, but that creature shredded that door and that door gives way. And now case and series are going to get drawn back into that space. And maybe they're going to get vented out into space too, if we're not careful.
Latimer's Attempt to Help: Isolation and Pressure
00:22:55
Speaker
I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of ways you can go with this but look at how pivotal that dice was it just felt like the weight of the game was was right there and that's an exciting place to be for a horror game. One thing I do want to mention that I thought you did really well is in your description you didn't really show a whole lot of that creature even on that that second scenario the monitor is fuzzy it's blurry so you can kind of imagine in your head the scene really well it paints it it paints a picture Looking at the big picture on both of these exercises, really what we're trying to do is we're trying to help the players feel vulnerability. um In this second one, on the bridge of that ship, you feel helpless. There's very little you can do. Yeah, we split the party, but we we want we need to give that person who split from the group something to do. We can't just let them be not be actors in this the story. Well, and just like a good horror movie, there's the opportunity for you as a GM right when there's a key moment of pivotal
00:23:54
Speaker
Something what's gonna happen and then alright, let's go over to the other person and then they have to sit there in that suspense Exactly. Now. They're waiting. What's what? I haven't rolled my dice yet or or or maybe the results of that dice roll they rolled They don't know what that is Rule the 12. Is that good? I don't know. Exactly. Let's talk real quick about splitting the party because this is ah an important trope of of horror games. Anybody who's watched Scooby, do you know that they split up right away? It's considered kind of taboo in RPGs, right? But like in horror games, it's a trope and we need to embrace it. It's a goldmine for tension.
00:24:29
Speaker
um You just want to do it smartly. You want to give them something to do. If a character is going to go down in that basement to turn on that power, the other player might have to be upstairs in case, you know, the jukebox comes on and they got to turn that thing off. You got to make sure when you're splitting the party that there's a reason why.
00:24:47
Speaker
In general, the reason you don't split parties when you're playing normal adventure or fantasy kind of stuff, right, is because as a GM, it's a pain to try to manage two different groups ah doing who knows what at the same time. As players, you know that you don't want to get isolated. You're more powerful as a group.
00:25:06
Speaker
Well, as a GM in a horror game, you don't want the players feeling powerful. Also, you have some extra great effects you can get when players are split up and they don't know what each other are doing, they can't coordinate their actions together, and they may end up complicating each other's situations by that separation.
00:25:23
Speaker
Hey, one other thing, Ben, too. I do want to touch on, you might think, oh, the GM's maybe talking too much. Maybe he's being too descriptive. This is a horror game. You're a storyteller. We are telling campfire stories. You want to be as verbose, as detailed as you can with your descriptions, and you want to get that in return for your players. You want them to give something similar back to you.
Shared Buy-in and Emotional Expression in Storytelling
00:25:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a really good note here about that kind of shared buy-in that we have. In this case, it's different from a lot of other games we play where we're playing heroes who always triumph over evil. Here, the thing that we've all, somebody agreed to, is that you players, if you survive this thing, it's gonna be by the skin of your teeth, eye as a GM. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to give you this suspenseful experience. I'm gonna do everything I can to help you feel that immersion. And in return, I need you as players to play into that, to express yourself emotionally in ways that seem authentic to the fear that we're trying to create.
00:26:25
Speaker
right on ben i think that's 100 right there well i'll tell you what this this episode for me led to some fun results ben so i love talking about horror games i love running horror games and i hope you guys get some inspiration and you run a horror game of your own and if you do i want to hear about it could you please send us the email at tabletop tune up at gmail dot.com or leave a message on the youtubes
00:26:54
Speaker
um We want to hear from you. We want to see how your experience has been with the horror game. Yeah. Highly rewarding if you've ever loved telling, as Mark says, those campfire stories that chill the blood. Okay. Well, I think that's our episode for this week. Until next time, keep those dice rolling.