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🎂Happy Birthday, Melissa Bonny🎂

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GT-R

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Tableskills: Creating Dread

I've often had a lot of problems telling scary stories at my table, whether it be in d&d or other horror focused games. I personally don't get scared easily, especially around "traditionally horrifying" things so it's hard for me to recreate that experience in others. Likewise, you can't just port horror movie iconography into tabletop and expect it to evoke genuine fear: I've already spoken of being bored out of my mind during the zombie apocalypse, and my few trips into ravenloft have all been filled with similar levels of limp and derivative grimdark.

It took me a long time (and a lot of video essays about films I'd never watched) to realize that in terms of an experience fear is a lot like a joke, in that it requires multiple steps of setup and payoff. Dread is that setup, it's the rising tension in a scene that makes the revelation worth it, the slow and literal rising of a rollercoaster before the drop. It's way easier to inspire dread in your party than it is to scare them apropos of nothing, which has the added flexibility of letting you choose just the right time to deliver the frights.

TLDR: You start with one of the basic human fears (guide to that below) to emotionally prime your players and introduce it to your party in a initially non-threataning manor. Then you introduce a more severe version of it in a way that has stakes but is not overwhelmingly scary just yet. You wait until they're neck deep in this second scenario before throwing in some kind of twist that forces them to confront their discomfort head on.

More advice (and spoilers for The Magnus Archives) below the cut.

Before we go any farther it's vitally important that you learn your party's limits and triggers before a game begins. A lot of ttrpg content can be downright horrifying without even trying to be, so it's critical you know how everyone in your party is going to react to something before you go into it. Whether or not you're running an actual horror game or just wanting to add some tension to an otherwise heroic romp, you and your group need to be on the same page about this, and discuss safety systems from session 0 onwards.

The Fundamental Fears: It may seem a bit basic but one of the greatest tools to help me understand different aspects of horror was the taxonomy invented by Jonathan Sims of The Magnus Archives podcast. He breaks down fear into different thematic and emotional through lines, each given a snappy name and iconography that's so memorable that I often joke it's the queer-horror version of pokemon types or hogwarts houses. If we start with a basic understanding of WHY people find things scary we learn just what dials we need turn in order to build dread in our players.

Implementation: Each of these examples is like a colour we can paint a scene or encounter with, flavouring it just so to tickle a particular, primal part of our party's brains. You don't have to do much, just something along the lines of "the upcoming cave tunnel is getting a little too close for comfort" or "the all-too thin walkway creaks under your weight ", or "what you don't see is the movement at the edge of the room". Once the seed is planted your party's' minds will do most of the work: humans are social, pattern seeking creatures, and the hint of danger to one member of the group will lay the groundwork of fear in all the rest.

The trick here is not to over commit, which is the mistake most ttrpgs make with horror: actually showing the monster, putting the party into a dangerous situation, that’s the finisher, the  punchline of the joke. It’s also a release valve on all the pressure you’ve been hard at work building.

There’s nothing all that scary about fighting a level-appropriate number of skeletons, but forcing your party to creep through a series of dark, cobweb infested catacombs with the THREAT of being attacked by undead? That’s going to have them climbing the walls.

Let narration and bad dice rolls be your main tools here, driving home the discomfort, the risk, the looming threat.

Surprise: Now that you’ve got your party marinating in dread, what you want to do to really scare them is to throw a curve ball. Go back to that list and find another fear which either compliments or contrasts the original one you set up, and have it lurking juuuust out of reach ready to pop up at a moment of perfect tension like a jack in the box. The party is climbing down a slick interior of an underdark cavern, bottom nowhere in sight? They expect to to fall, but what they couldn't possibly expect is for a giant arm to reach out of the darkness and pull one of them down. Have the party figured out that there's a shapeshifter that's infiltrated the rebel meeting and is killing their allies? They suspect suspicion and lies but what they don't expect is for the rebel base to suddenly be on FIRE forcing them to run.

My expert advice is to lightly tease this second threat LONG before you introduce the initial scare. Your players will think you're a genius for doing what amounts to a little extra work, and curse themselves for not paying more attention.

Restraint: Less is more when it comes to scares, as if you do this trick too often your players are going to be inured to it. Try to do it maybe once an adventure, or dungeon level. Scares hit so much harder when the party isn't expecting them. If you're specifically playing in a "horror" game, it's a good idea to introduce a few false scares, or make multiple encounters part of the same bait and switch scare tactic: If we're going into the filthy gross sewer with mould and rot and rats and the like, you'll get more punch if the final challenge isn't corruption based, but is instead some new threat that we could have never prepared for.

Art

[iamodst1989]

City at dusk by 褪色的洋葱

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Everything is going wrong.

Your allies are falling. Your plan is failing. Your enemies are prevailing. All seems lost.

You awake in a cold sweat, bolting upright from your bedroll, looking around to see your companions, alive and well, preparing for the day ahead. They look to you, concerned, and you begin to tell them what you saw.

All A Dream is probably going to be one of the more controversial Oracle features, but I think it's interesting enough to at least go into the first rounds of playtesting.

Basically, this is your emergency escape when shit has hit the fan. The narrative of this feature is that the day has been a dream, and your Oracle character wakes up with the memory of this one potential future where things went wrong. Armed with that knowledge, you can inform your allies of what happened and adjust your course accordingly.

It has an increasing chance of not working each time you use it. This is very much subject to change, but I think some version of this caveat is necessary to keep the feature being fun. If it's too reliable, risks start to lose meaning, and if it comes up too often then it could just become a hassle. It should be a powerful option for emergencies, and you should have to carefully consider when to use it.

Image ID below the cut.

[Image ID: All A Dream, 11th-level Oracle feature

As an action, you can cause everything to revert to the state and location it was in at the moment you finished your last long rest. You retain your memories of everything you experienced. Each time you use this feature after the first, roll a d20. If the number rolled is equal to or lower than the number of times you have already used this feature, to a maximum of 10, this feature does not function. Instead, you gain one level of exhaustion and fall unconscious for 1 minute, or until you take damage or a creature uses its action to shake you awake. Once you take this action, you cannot do so again until you finish your next long rest.

End ID]

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i know its the mets, but this is the coolest shit i’ve ever seen a human being do

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[iamodst1989]

Would the owner of a lost plot please report to the American Airlines gate...

[iamodst1989]

Bisexual Pride! 1990 🩷💜💙

[iamodst1989]

Okay. Now we're in hell. It's finally happened.

[iamodst1989]

I'll go pick up the other Banana Splits.

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“He died the way he lived. Gay as hell.”

-Rogue at the warlock’s funeral

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Men of the Harlem Hellfighters (369th Infantry), some of whom had been awarded the Croix de Guerre by France for their courage under fire, on June 11, 1918. 

Record Group 165: Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs

Series: American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs

File Unit: Colored Troops

Image description: A line of Black soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder in a grassy field. They are wearing World War I U.S. Army uniforms and narrow metal helmets. 

Transcription: 

SUBJECT: 165-WW-127-4 NUMBER EU

165 WW-127 4

Inter. Film Ser. Photographer

Rec'd June 11, 1916  Taken

DESCRIPTION:

NEGRO TROOPS IN FRANCE.

Picture shows a part of the 15th Regt. Inf. N.Y.N.G organized by Col. Haywood, which has been under fire.  Two of the men Privates Johnson and Roberts, displayed exceptional courage while under fire and routed a German Raiding party for which the negroes were decorated with the French Croix de Guerre.  it will be noticed that the men have taken to the French trench helmet instead of the flatter and broader British style.

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Johny Prayogi

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