October Country: It's the Little Things

I'm still consolidating the Secret Antiquities material into the Society of Torch, Pole and Rope. This first appeared on October 23rd, 2010.

Standing on line last night for a haunted house attraction, a discussion arose regarding preferences for horror films. It quickly became obvious that, of our group anyway, the preference was on “less is more.” There were no gore aficionados amongst us. I’ve stated on a previous occasion that my favorite horror film is the original The Haunting because all the heavy scare work is done by your own imagination and not CGI or foam latex appliqués.

This morning, I watched The Grudge for the first time. In doing so, I found myself getting caught up in the minutia of the film: the little things that, when placing myself in the same situation, I found more disturbing than all the creepy dead-eyed children and stray follicles. I thought that things like the dropped phone outside the sister’s apartment or the tiny faces tacked to the closet door were much more disturbing because they merely hint that something is amiss.

I touched a little bit on this topic in The Dungeon Alphabet in my entry for “W is for Weird,” but that intended for fantasy genre. Although the October Country does veer into that terrain, it’s more horror & wonder than sword & sorcery. Time for some new entries of high weirdness and subtle terror. So, with that in mind, here are a dozen little things that would make me pause if my PC came across them during the course of an adventure:

1) A tiny spot of blood on a pristine white yet empty crib.
2) A house where all the phone handsets are missing.
3) A desk with a hundred blood-stained staples driven into its service in a seemingly random pattern.
4) A dark basement where the lights don’t work yet the dryer is running. The appliance is thumping as if off-balance and the sound of something heavy banging around inside it is heard.
5) The sound of a radio playing in the middle of an empty field. It seems to be coming from under the ground.
6) A baby book filled with nothing but small locks of delicate hair.
7) A wedding ring half-buried in the sand below the high tide mark on an empty beach.
8) A length of rope tied to a support and leading into a dark hole under a stretch of broken concrete.
9) A bare tree with a half-dozen old fashioned lanterns swinging from its branches.
10) A set of clothes lying discarded next to a still and seemingly empty swimming pool.
11) An open box of razor blades on an immaculate kitchen counter in a silent house.
12) A swarm of flies buzzing around the entrance to a dark doghouse.

The October Country: Torn Letters

In a quiet Chattaquogue neighborhood, not far from the water, there is the secluded street of Salt Thatch Lane. It is not a particularly notable road. The houses might be a bit more expensive and private, hidden behind high hedges and shady stands of trees, but that’s to be expected of waterfront property on the South Shore of Long Island. In spite of the lane’s seemingly normal exterior, there is something strange going on here.

For more than a decade, letters, or more specifically fragments of letters, have appeared along this road. Often found amongst the fallen pine needles or blown against a high privacy fence, the missives are all handwritten on aged and usually water-stained paper, looking as if they had been left exposed to the elements for several days. The letters are most often torn, and only a small portion of the message is found despite efforts to locate the rest of the page. The letters are always written by the same two individuals identified as Clarissa and Malachi.

At first glance, the letters read a simple love letters, ones exchanged by lovers separated by great distances. The fragmentary nature of the pages makes it difficult to comprehend the entire subject of each letter, but exchanges of affection dominate the message. However, every so often, an unsettling line is legible amongst the affirmation of love. “…found the child’s leg torn to pieces…”, “…leaning there with holes for eyes…,” and “There will be death again when the moon…” are some of the most recently discovered and unnerving snippets.

The most unnatural facet of these letters is that they vanish. An early morning walker who finds one and puts it in her pocket arrives home to find that pocket empty. Curious children put a found scrap into their treasure boxes only to have it missing the next time they peek inside. One local artist attempted to make a collage of photos taken of the found letters. When he developed his film, the entire roll was blank.

So far the knowledge of these mysterious letters has been kept inside the neighborhood. Despite the fact that some alternative news sources would pay a small sum to learn of this phenomenon, the residents are inclined to keep it a secret. Whether this is to keep their quiet streets from being overrun by cranks and lunatics or if it is because of some desire to keep the two separated lovers’ poignant letters private remains unknown.

From the October Country: The Flesh Sempstresses

Atop a wave-swept tower of rock on the shores of the Cold Dim Sea stands a foreboding edifice of granite. Block-like and unadorned, this building looks as if the wind and rain carved it from the adjacent stone. Aside from the glimpse of a lit window amidst the perpetual storms or a blood-chilling scream doused by the howling wind, the structure shows little sign of occupancy.

This is the home of the Flesh Sempstresses, the feared tailors of Nightmare who dwell outside that realm’s borders so as to have close access to their preferred medium of creation. Harvesting unwitting travelers and wayward animals alike, the Sempstresses make unsettling patchwork creations born of the sliced flesh and severed appendages of their victims. Using methods unknown outside of Nightmare, these couturiers make unique monsters for their own pleasure and to export back to the Terrible Places. On occasion, either by accident or design, one of the Sempstresses’ projects escapes their towering abode to wreak havoc on either side of the barrier.

Few have seen the Flesh Sempstresses in person, or rather those that do seldom survive the encounter. The witnesses that do live through their meeting with the skin tailors report that they dress in antique gowns of lace with leather (or another preserved hide) accents and disguise their visages with painted china masks. They are never without at least one of their horrific amalgams of human and animal parts trailing close behind.

Scholars in the October Country suggest that there may a connection between the Flesh Sempstresses and the skinners, but this is likely due to the craftwork shared by the two groups. If this is not the case, it may be that the Flesh Sempstresses were once skinners and rose to their current role through practice and longevity. It could be just as true that the first skinners were failed Flesh Sempstresses or were created by the macabre tailors long ago and now seek to imitate their makers.

Although the Flesh Sempstresses never leave their domicile, their creations can be encountered almost anywhere. It is widely believed by the commoners of the October Country that jaded and decadent nobles procure the Sempstresses creations for their own debased menageries or blood-stained arenas.
Here on Earth, the Pope Lick Monster of Kentucky is widely believed (by those aware of the autumnal lands, that is) to be an escaped--or perhaps a released--creation of the Flesh Sempstresses who crossed the barrier. The current location of the creature, or indeed if it still lives, is unknown.

From the October Country: Skinners

Have you ever found yourself talking to a stranger, perhaps one seated next to you on a bus or at the bar, and noticed that they seemed a little…off? If so, you might have met a skinner and you should count your blessings you’re still breathing.

Skinners are one of the apex predators of Nightmare, birthed from one of the maelstroms of hate that seethe within its borders. Having honed their murder skill on the lesser denizens of that place, Skinners look out past the barrier to the choice pickings to be had in our world. But such an monstrosity would be easily detected and destroyed if it set foot across a vestibule without taking precautions. To blend in, they wear suits: people suits. Ones made from 100% real people.

Such a macabre masquerade would almost be humorous if it weren’t of so gruesome an origin and oh-so effective. Despite the ill-fit and obvious gore stains a skinner’s suit has, the creature’s own innate chameleon power blends with their grisly trophy to make them indistinguishable from ordinary folks. It is only by their odd turns of phrase, alien tics, and nervous habits that they can be detected---and very few people would attribute these tell-tale signs to the skinner’s otherworldly origin.

In a culture were murder has become entertainment, it’s no surprise that skinners have found 21st century Earth more accommodating to their tastes than ever. More and more have been crossing the barrier to walk amongst us. The scary thing is that, even with an increase in their numbers, they’re too few to have an impact on the nation’s murder rate—that increase is of completely human origin.

Most skinners operate across the barrier for short, intermittent periods, almost like they were on safari. Once they bag their share, they retreat to the October Country to revel in their trophies and flaunt them amongst their own kind. In time, the call of the hunt sounds once more and they dress up again to hit the town with a few days to kill. Very rarely, a skinner decides to take up permanent residence on this side. These expatriates establish a murder dynasty, taking human deviants as mates to found a bloodline of killers. Although this is rarely successful, a few backwoods clans, products of a skinner patriarch, assuage their bloodlust for decade before coming to light. Although unknown to most people, the few in the know suspect that Ed Gein might have been the descendant of an expatriate skinner.

I've Never Laughed Harder While Being Terrified

Thanks to Jim Ward for sharing this on Facebook. I'm on record stating that the alien from Alien absolutely terrifies me, but I heartily endorse this sort of prankery. If more people thought like this, the world would be a much more magical place.

They were Gods in those Days

Jeff Rients recently wrote two posts regarding the wild and zany antics the boys in Lake Geneva got up to back in the early years of this hobby. Inspired by those anecdotes, I wanted to share one of my favorite old war stories from years gone by. This one was recounted by Roger E. Moore in an editorial on fear that appeared in Dragon #156 (April 1990)

I was in a GAMMA WORLD game that Jim Ward ran a few years ago. It scared me to death. Jim has a habit of rolling huge numbers of dice of damage at the snap of a laser, and his campaign was full of amusing things such as Cthulhu-size lake monsters and deathray satellites that diced up ground targets with impunity. But his most famous creation was the subtly named Death Machine, a nice little military relic of the Social Wars of the game’s background.

What’s a Death Machine, some of you may ask. Here’s a story: A few years ago, when I was in the Army, I told everyone in my gaming group to each pick his or her favorite deity from the AD&D® game, and prepare to role-play that deity in a special scenario I had developed. The next hour was spent in feverish excitement as a large assortment of gods and supermonsters met on a deserted plain and awaited their opponents. Suddenly a huge space-time warp opened up in front of the incredible assembly . . . and out of the alien warp came three brand-new, fully armed, fully powered Death Machines on random programming.

Two gods died in the first 10 seconds of combat, each taking over 700 hp of damage. A third god died before the minute-long fight was over, and two other gods (including Demogorgon) fled the battlefield in utter panic. All the rest of the deities were pounded with atomic missiles, lasers, bombs, rockets, shells, bullets, force fields, and death rays. Thor bent the nose of one Death Machine with Mjolnir but took a nuke in return. If I had not used random attacks, all of the gods would have died in 30 seconds, no sweat. It was wonderful.

I think we need more of this sort of thing. Thank goodness there are still referees who indulge in these sort of antics and keep the wild and wooly days of yore alive.

“You awaken in a cold sweat…”

The dream your PC had last night was:

1-Your comrades were sitting around the campfire, gnawing on cooked human limbs. Their meal interrupted, they looked up at you with eyes that shone like a cat’s. Putting down their gruesome meal, they began crawling towards you as you struggled to free yourself from your bedroll. Wound as tight as a shroud, your arms were pinned as your friends stalked ever closer…

2-You were lost in the fetid halls of an ancient dungeon, one you’ve never encountered before. A thunderous rhythm, like a demonic heart, filled your ears as the shadows gathered about you. Turning a corner, you found yourself confronting the leering skull-face of the first companion you ever lost. With a rictus grin, he beckoned you to join him down into the dark…

3-You were enjoying a lavish banquet meal in the hall of a strange king. The provender was good, the wine excellent, and the companionship superb. A tickle in your throat interrupted your dining, stubbornly resisting all attempts to clear it. Then, the first of many small, hairy spiders began to climb from between your lips and onto your plate. This trickle quickly became a torrent, followed by your skin splitting as a horde of skittering arachnids broke free from their nest inside you…

4-You stood alone on a rocky strand, the waves breaking against the unnaturally sharp rocks that lined the water’s edge. A clump of pallid kelp rocked on the tide, coming closer with each breaking wave. As you watched, the kelp rolled over, revealing it to be the water-logged and crab-picked visage of your mother. Her dead eyes stared at you accusingly and her sodden lips worked silently, mouthing accusations of your past faults and failures. Soaking arms grappled you from behind, spinning you about to face the barnacle-spotted face of your father, his beard strung with dead anemones and jellyfish. He leaned in to kiss his favorite child…

5-You stood atop a craggy promontory, perched hundreds of feet in the air. Before you lay a wasteland of fire and ash; in the air above it, great black birds with yellow eyes and tattered feather rode sinister thermals and their hoarse cries croaked loudly in your ears. The sun glared hotly, revealing the picked bones of a thousand nations in the sand and soot below. You had the power to stop this, but your fear would not let you do what needed to be done. A shadow, like that of a titan rising from his restless slumber, blots out the landscape, shrouding you in night. SOMETHING approaches from behind. You feel its talons reaching for you, but you cannot—will not—turn to face what can only be the agent of your deserved punishment…

6-The ground gives way as you walk down a narrow forest path. A sound like ice breaking in the spring thaw hits you ears immediately before the pain explodes from your legs. With legs broken by the fall, your arms flail, struggling to keep yourself from sliding deeper into the earth as you grasped for plants that ripped free from the ground as gravity continued to claim you. Then, the first pair of fangs stabbed into your legs. You disturbed a nest of vipers in your fall. Your legs and waist became targets for their knife-like fangs as they struck again and again, pumping searing venom into your calves, thighs, and groin…

Pleasant dreams.

Looking for a Specific Weird Adventure Seed

The fog of age seems especially thick this morning; perhaps you can help.

I vaguely recall an adventure seed that appeared is some modern horror rpg supplement from the past five or six years. It involved the discovery of a pale, almost feral girl in the foothills of a local mountain chain. She gets brought back to civilization, gets examined and tested, and ultimately escapes back into the wild. It later turns out that she is a survivor or descendent of a group of school children who got buried in a cave system or fallout shelter in the mountains—and there’s a whole passel of them still out there. Does this strike anyone else’s memory bell?

I thought it appeared in White Wolf’s Mysterious Places, but a quick perusal of that didn’t find it. It might be in another WW book or in a modern CoC supplement, but I can’t remember for certain. I’m pretty certain I didn’t make this one up on my own—it’s a bit off the beaten trail even for me—but I could be wrong…

EDIT: It's "The Girl from the Snow" located in the back of WoD Asylum for those playing along at home.

October Country: The MacReady’s Farm

I won’t pretend to utter any profundities when I say that I have no true understanding on how the creative process works. Much better artists than myself have tackled this topic to little or no avail. When writing, some projects are unwieldy beasts that need constant battle to wrestle into submission. Others spring fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. Most fall somewhere in between these two extremes.

I do subscribe to the belief that sometimes an idea needs to put down on paper as soon as possible, if only to clear out the creative” In Box” for more suitable material yet to come. At other times, an idea needs to be written down in order to perform a creative exorcism; a way to keep it from haunting me and allow me some control over its ultimate fate. Over the past weekend, I encountered one such mental ghost that needed to be put to rest.

I can’t be positive where the idea came from but I suspect that it was a form of mental rebuttal to both Stonehell and the One Page Dungeon Contest entries that I’ve been eyeball deep in for awhile. It has little resemblance to what’s become my normal workload. It started simple enough: a very clear mental picture of a sleepy, upstate farm house underneath a grey autumn sky. But the more I turned the picture around in my head, the more the oddities of this farm became clear. First, I got the impression that the farm was located in some land where it is always autumn. The seasons never change there and the rustling of dead leaves is ever-present. Secondly, I saw a windmill protruding from behind the two-story farmhouse. It was an old thing, battered by the years, but the most striking aspect of it was the nimbus of lightning or some other energy that formed around it. I had no idea what this all meant so I undertook the task to find out by writing about it.

Firing up the computer, I sat down and, over the course of a couple of hours, wrote a four page description of the farm in a role-playing game format. The writing process was completely stream of consciousness. I didn’t break to ponder what certain things meant or why they were there. I just wrote them down as I encountered them. The end result was a very fantastical locale – the sort of place one explores in a dream, only to awake with half-memories of their encounters. An aura of melancholy and the slightly macabre pervaded the whole piece, which added to this unreal feeling. The next day I went back to paint in a few details but left the piece almost completely unchanged from its original and abrupt birth.

It’s not a traditional adventure or location by any stretch of the imagination. There are no monsters to fight; no traps to overcome, and no treasure to be gained. I’m not even certain that a game system exists that this could be used in. Perhaps some weird homebrewed game or experimental game system from the New School might suit it, but I can’t imagine what sort of game world would easily embrace this weird farm.

I went back and forth on whether to let this piece molder quietly in the folder of unused game ideas or to make it available for others to read. Ultimately, I thought that maybe, someone, somewhere, might find this of interest so I turned it into a .pdf and uploaded it to Orbitfiles. You can download a copy of October Country: The MacReady’s Farm here. There is no map accompanying the piece. Try as I might, I couldn't quite get what I had in my mind to jive with what I could produce on paper. Those interested with doing more with the farm will need to provide their own layout.

At the very least, the piece might give the reader some insight into what thoughts play around in my head when I’m not focusing on dungeons. Armchair psychiatrists will have a field day with it, as would my therapist, if I had one. At best, it may help me avoid being pigeon-holed as “the dungeon guy,” a title that I sometimes feel I’m in danger of acquiring forever.

For the record, let me state that I’m not certain what everything in the piece means or why things are the way they are. The title “October Country” is of course a reference to the Bradbury book by the same name. It has a certain beauty and mystery that felt appropriate for a land in which the winter never comes.

A Touch of Fear

I wrote a little bit about fear and the role it plays in gaming sessions last week with the promise that I’d share a few of the tricks and methods I’ve used over the years to help instill that sense of fright into my players. Having had some time to review my past game experiences, I’ve come to the realization that, when it comes to scaring the players, I don’t have a set bag of tricks from which to pull from. Like many referees, I often rely on improvisation and the taking advantage of unplanned developments to serve as a launching pad from which to get under the players’ skins.

In all honesty, I can only think of two referee tricks that I’ve used in the same exact method more than once to try and frighten my players: one cheap and tawdry by refereeing standards and the other potentially clumsy but effective. I’ll quickly cover those two and then cover some of the improvisational methods that have had success.

The cheap and tawdry one is a hoary, old chestnut which doesn’t so much instill fright as it does induces a unconscious flinch of the nerves; the game master equivalent of hiding behind a door and jumping out to yell “Boo!” Anyone can do it and even if the players know it’s coming, it still works. It’s a simple matter of allowing your voice to slowly drop in volume as you describe the game environment. As the characters creep from room to room, you speak softer and softer - not quite whispering but with much less volume than you normally use. Then, when the monster strikes or the body falls out of the closet – BAM! –suddenly you raise your voice and perhaps slam your hands down on the tabletop; startling the players and hopefully making them jump. It’s the role-playing game version of the “spring-loaded cat” that haunts bad horror films. As I said, it’s cheap, tawdry, and perhaps beneath those who consider themselves exceptional referees but effective nonetheless.

The other trick, which for lack of a better term I’ll call “Ten Little Indians,” is dependent upon one’s usual method of game mastering. If you don’t do what I do, you might tip your hand to your players that something’s afoot by this perceived change in your game descriptions. When I’m running a game, I’ll usually confirm the players’ actions in the course of the descriptive narrative in one manner or another. For example, if the adventurers decide to investigate the wizard’s library, I’ll usually begin the description of the actions by saying, “The party enters the library to the west” or “Arthur, Beryl, Casper, and Dorian (the characters’ names) head into the library.” I use both the individual names of the characters and the collective term alternately in game sessions so my players don’t suspect anything when I use one rather than the other.

On two occasions, I’ve confirmed the characters’ actions in the narrative but left out one of the characters’ names, saying (to use the above example), “Arthur, Casper and Dorian head into the library.” On one instance, the party immediately noticed the missing name and alerted me to my “error.” I responded, “That’s strange. Beryl is nowhere in sight. You’re quite certain she was just here a moment ago,” and then smiled. On the other occasion, the players didn’t notice until several minutes into the exploration of the next room, which left the time of “Beryl’s” disappearance slightly more uncertain. In order for this trick to work, you either need an NPC which can be removed from the party’s ranks without the need to rely on a lot of secret dice rolling or make arrangements with one of your players who agrees to be the temporary (and perhaps permanent) sacrificial goat. Understandably, using an NPC for this trick is much easier.

That’s about the extent of rote trickery that I’ve used consistently. I have noticed that I tend to speak with a slightly lower timbre to my voice in “scary situations” and that I use much slower and shorter descriptive sentences when fear is lurking in an attempt to keep the players on the edge of their chairs until the hammer drops. I may be overlooking some other tendencies that I do unconsciously and anybody who reads this blog and has had me as a referee is free to comment if I’m missing something.

For the most part, however, it’s the improvised little things that suddenly leapt to mind during game sessions that have been the most memorable and the most effective. I can’t rightly call them tricks or offer them as suggestions other than by example.

I remember one case in which I was running a player through his prelude for a Vampire game. We were gaming down in a finished basement that had the lighting on several switches and a row of square columns covering the house supports. Since the location of the prelude took place at a carnival after dark and involved the character being slowly led into the forest surrounding the fun fair, as the prelude continued I began shutting off banks of lights as the character plunged deeper and deeper into the woods. The further in the character proceeded, the darker the room got until just a single set of lights remained to simulate the moon (and allow us all to see our notes). Additionally, the figure that was coaxing the character into the woods was only appearing at the edge of his vision and was using the trees for concealment. For this, I stood up away from the table and placed the room’s columns between myself and the player to replicate the fleeting glimpses he caught of his mysterious quarry. It was very effective but obviously not the sort of thing that could be easily applied to any gaming session. I certainly didn’t think of it until the prelude had begun and I became aware of the basement’s possibilities.

In other games, I’ve used the materials at hand to set the stage. A big handful of dice slowly rubbed together has served as the sounds of the clattering bones of skeletons and the chitonous legs of giant insects. I’ve riffled the pages of books against my thumb to create the sound of fluttering wings and made harsh scribbles with pencil and paper to simulate the scratching of a deranged lich’s pen. Use what’s around you to whatever ends you can.

This is by no means a comprehensive study on the topic of fear in rpgs, being merely an account of my own experiences. A few useful links have been provided by commentators in the previous two posts and game masters looking for a starting point should consider tracking those sources down for inspiration. It is a wonder, however, how much fear you can instill in your players with a just a little bit of effort and a modicum of creativity. Here’s hoping that your players are in for a few frights over the course of their game sessions to come.

First Time Fright

I’m generally not inclined to post gaming war stories but I have been known to take requests. To gratify one such wish and to perhaps give you a clear idea of what I find frightful in a role-playing game, let me tell the tale of the first time that I can remember being unnerved by the events of a friendly game session.

Many years ago, I had a friend who lived in a house situated on a road that is about as close as one gets to rural in my neck of Long Island. That road is just over a quarter mile in length and is bordered by undeveloped woodlands to the east and has a total of five properties situated along its western side, most of which are set back some distance from the road. Those five homes are each separated by a distance of no less than a hundred feet and stands of thick woods are interspaced between each property. The first of the houses along that road had been abandoned for many years and the road, which resembles a tunnel overhung by tree limbs, has no street lights whatsoever. The road is also a single lane street; cars meeting abreast on the road must pull to the verge to allow each other passage.

One afternoon, I found my way over to the home of this friend, Steve, and there, accompanied by his older brother, Bill, and two other mutual acquaintances, ended the day with a session of free-form role-playing. It was a thrown together session, much of it improvised on the spot, and we were only vaguely using some D&D mechanics to run it. At the time, I had no exposure to Call of Cthulhu outside of seeing references to it and ads in Dragon magazine, but we were basically playing CoC in an unstructured form.

The setup for the game was very basic: Bill was running the game and the rest of use took the roles of four longtime friends who gathered weekly for a night of dinner and poker at each other’s homes. That evening, in the game, we’d gather at the home of Steve’s character, who lived in a house situated on a narrow, wood-lined road very similar to the one that ran just outside the window in real life. Steven’s character had a neighbor, an addled older gentleman, who lived in a home which exactly resembled the abandoned house that stood, in reality, some hundred yards away from where we were playing. That old man was considered mostly harmless by us four friends, although he did have the tendency of requesting our assistance in all manner of onerous chores (moving furniture, cleaning out his gutters, running his errands) from time to time.

As the game progressed, our dinner and poker night was interrupted by a phone call from this old gentleman. It seemed that he required our presence at his home to assist him in some unspecified matter. Since the call came in the middle of our poker game and we were certainly loathe to leave the poker table prematurely, Steve’s character assured him that’d we’d be down as soon as our evening’s entertainment was completed. A few hours past in game before we, grudgingly, decided to see what the old crackpot needed now.

A short walk down to the geezer’s home concluded with the four of us rapping upon his door several times without answer. Knowing that the old man was not inclined to lock his door, we ventured in to see if perhaps he had injured himself or otherwise was unable to answer our call. Our exploration of the home turned up nothing amiss. Even the old elephant gun the man kept on the mantelpiece of his hearth was untouched. The only oddity that we found was in the basement.

It seems that the old man had been doing some excavating in his cellar. A large section of the cement floor had been broken up and a dark pit, with a ladder thrust into its mouth, yawned before us. A camera, rigged with what appeared to be a homemade electric-eye shutter trigger, was aimed at the hole. A quick search of the house turned up a flashlight, which we shined down into the dark, thinking that perhaps the man had tumbled into his dig and injured himself at the bottom. The flashlight’s feeble beam revealed that the hole opened into what appeared to be a natural cave system, one that none of us had the slightest inkling of existing. We called to the old man, thinking that he had gone below for some bizarre purpose, but our cries remained unanswered.

After some deliberation, the four of us decided that since the hour was late, we had no reason to know for certain that the man had gone down into those caves (the man owned no car, travelling by taxi or offered rides, so we had no idea if he had gone out for the evening after he called us), and that none of us had any desire to become embroiled in yet another one of the old man’s troublesome “favors,” we’d depart the premises for the time being. We all agreed that we’d call upon the man in the morning to see if he was unharmed and to perform whatever task he needed. Thus, the four of our characters went our separate ways for the evening.

The next morning found us on the old man’s porch and, like the night previous, our knocking went unanswered. Venturing into the home again, we found a somewhat different scene before us. The elephant gun was no longer above the fireplace. Instead, it now lay on the carpet of the living room. The barrel of the gun had been twisted into almost a complete U-shape and an investigation of the weapon proved that it had been fired. There were no signs of this discharge in the walls and ceiling of the room, nor was there any blood to indicate the gun had found its target. In addition, a search of the home revealed that many items and pieces of furniture were askew, as if someone had made a mad dash through the home, knocking things aside in their flight.

Now very much concerned, we descended into the basement. There, we found a strange, viscous substance on the cement floor that seemed to originate from the mouth of the pit. Checking the camera and its automated shutter system, we found that several pictures has been taken sometime during the night. Again, our cursory examination of the pit and our cries of the old man’s name turned up nothing. It was obvious that something occurred in our absence and we promptly called the police.

Bill, the referee, invoked the classic horror movie cliché of the uncooperative authorities (there was no body and no blood at the scene, so the police ruled it a missing persons case and would take no action until the obligatory 48 hours had elapsed), leaving the four of us to solve the mystery on our own. Our first action was to get the film developed to see what clues the pictures might contain. Thanks to the one-hour Photo Hut, we soon had our answers. The pictures revealed the terrified old man emerging from the pit and running towards the stairs. The next image showed something rising from the hole. The picture was strange as the image of whatever it was that followed the old man was blurred, although the rest of the basement visible in the picture was crystal clear. We could only get the impression of huge, distorted, bulky form. The last picture showed the thing again, this time descending back into the hole with the old man’s inert body being dragged in its wake.

Since this was a horror game, we four of course decided to go in search of the old man, who was hopefully still alive somewhere in the caves beneath the house. Equipping ourselves at the local camping & sporting goods store, we returned to the house and climbed down the ladder into the unknown cave system. Luckily, one of the characters had some experience spelunking and my own character was an army veteran who had seen combat duty, so we thought ourselves not completely unprepared for the challenges that might await us.

Our exploration of the cave system revealed that it was much larger than we had expected. As we sojourned down its tunnels, we unearthed several relics that proved we were not the first to pass this way. Some items dated to the current day. Others seemed to be relics from the colonial period. Lastly, we found items that could only have been dated to the years before the European arrival in the Americas. Then, we found the door.

Carved from solid rock, this Cyclopean portal opened into the tunnel in which we had been traveling. The door stood ajar, although we would have been hard pressed to open it ourselves even with all four of our efforts combined. On the floor next to the door, we discovered a soft stone disk that bore the carving of a five-pointed star with some obscure glyph in its center. As I said, at the time of this game I was unacquainted with Lovecraft or Call of Cthulhu so I didn’t identify the stone as an Elder Sign, but I knew enough about horror that a five-pointed star always meant bad mojo was afoot.

As the four of us examined the stone and the massive portal, we detected a sudden drop in temperature around us. We could see our breath begin to fog in the gleam of our lanterns and, quite soon thereafter, the air began to reek with some horrid stench. Desperately, we scanned the darkness around us with rifles in hand and our flashlights picking through the gloom.

And that’s where we stopped the game.

We all agreed that it had been a great gaming session and planned to return to game to see what horrors awaited our characters in the caves. Unfortunately, time and schedules never allowed us to pick up that game again and, for all I know, my character is still down there in the dark, waiting to meet his fate. I said my goodbyes and started home - down that dark, wood-shrouded road. The one whose doppleganger had featured prominently in the game we just finished. The one which had an abandoned house in the exact same location as the old man’s home in the game. The one where a quarter moon had looked down up it and the shadows stretched across the decaying asphalt, much like the one on which I currently made my journey.

I’m not saying that I ran past that abandoned house on my trip home but I will admit to a light jog, at least until I reached the main road with its streetlights and homes whose glowing windows hinted at signs of human occupation. Sleep was a little dicey that night too, once I got home.

That game night was twenty years ago and, as you can no doubt tell from the clarity of my recollections of it, it made quite a deep impact on me. There are games from a month ago I can’t remember that well. Over the space of two decades and with more experiences with horror in role-playing games from both sides of the screen, I’ve pinpointed the three reasons why that game night was so effective.

One was the immediacy of the setting. There’s a good reason why most campfire stories begin with “In these very woods, on a night much like tonight…” It immediately drops the audience into a place they can quickly identify with and picture in their minds. Bill’s use of the very same spooky road that ran just outside the door was a masterstroke. There was no need to waste time with trying to paint a vivid picture when we were all familiar with where we were in the game and could imagine it from our own knowledge.

The second reason is the direct opposite of the first. Although the location was familiar, the events of the game were not. By this I mean that since I had no previous experience with Lovecraft or Call of Cthulhu, I was unable to place the events and occupants of the game session in delineated categories. What’s more frightening: “a faceless, black monstrosity with wings like that of a great bat” or “a nightgaunt”? One is all imagination; the other a recognizable thing with stats and associated literary baggage. This game wouldn’t be quite as terrifying to me now, but innocence is something we all lose with time and it’s difficult to go home again.

The final piece of the terror puzzle is the factor that I spoke about in an earlier post. It can be argued that “nothing happened” in that gaming session and that is true on some level. But, in my mind, there were terrifying events. Bill just left the heavy lifting of picturing those events up to my own internal horror machine. I could envision the frenzied flight of the old man as a horrible thing lurched after him. I could see the shapeless bulk and the nauseating form of the creature, even though my character and the camera couldn’t. I knew what was lumbering through those dark caves towards us. I scared myself that night and did quite a good job of it. That’s my preferred way of doing so and, if I can scare myself, I know I can use what frightens me to get under my players’ skin.

So there you have it. The somewhat overlong tale of my first scare in a role-playing game. I’ve learned a few tricks about how to create such an experience from the other side of the screen and I’ll touch on those is a later, hopefully much briefer, post. Until then, don’t go into the basement…

A Quiet Fear

I’ve been thinking about fear as of late and what role that most primal of emotions plays in this hobby of ours. Part of this rumination has to do with me trying to explore new ideas in role-playing outside of the standard sword & sorcery genre. Another reason is because I’m currently working through a crop of movies and reading material of the horrific nature in order to try and switch the gears in my head to another setting. Maybe James Raggi’s post on D&D as a Horror Game fed the fires a bit too.

Let me preface these mental meandering by providing full disclosure. Up until the age of fifteen, I was a big baby when it came to horror. I remember having a slew of bad dreams from just catching a glimpse of the coming attractions for Friday the 13th whenever channel 11 would air it (the scene of zombie, hydrocephalic Jason Voorhees jumping out of the lake was the apex of terror for me). I made the mistake of reading a collection of Lovecraft’s revisions (revisions, mind you. Not even pure H.P.) while spending a week at a lakeside cabin in the wilds of Maine and that pretty much ruined that vacation. Even such clichéd claptrap as a darkened room and a camera in “murderer P.O.V.” was enough to make me change the channel, simply because I knew bad things were about to occur. What can I say? I was a sensitive child gifted with an abundance of imagination. Does that description sound like anyone else out there in this hobby?

As I grew older, I lost much of that fear and began to enjoy the occasional spooky movie or scary novel. I’m not what some would call a horror aficionado or a “gore geek” but I do like the emotional response and release that a well-done piece of high spookatude can produce. But the problem is that it has to be well-done and what I consider “well-done,” like most views on art in various mediums, is subject to some highly personal criteria.

Gore and viscera doesn’t throw my switches. I have a few friends who are fans of the splatter on the screen and I’ve picked up a little knowledge about how those effects are produced. Now, like seeing a magician after you know the tricks, all I see is foam latex and corn syrup when the gore splashes across the celluloid. Psycho killers, who usually appear in such gore extravaganzas, also do nothing for me. I remember someone once pointing out that, according to the FBI, there are roughly fifty active serial killers in America at any given time. With odds like that, one is more likely to die in the shower by slipping on a bar of soap and breaking one’s neck than by Norman Bates giving you the old butcher knife handshake (and that blood by the way: chocolate syrup. The movie is black and white after all). I did go through a period where zombies gave me the heebie jeebies but I got over that and with good timing. Zombies are apparently the new vampires in horror literature and films.

If you want to scare me nowadays, what you need to do is give me just enough information for me to do the job for you. I know for certain that I have a special effects shop inside my head that can crank out much more frightening images than Stan Winston, KNB or ILM ever could. Case in point: My favorite horror film is The Haunting (not the remake, the 1963 original). It’s easily one of the most frightening movies to ever have been made and it has one special effect. Everything else is either done with sound or the intimation that something truly and utterly wrong is taking place. The Blair Witch Project, once you get past the marketing hype and the “is this real?” factor, is another truly frightening piece of film. Many people were disappointed because “nothing happens.” Yes, that’s the point. Nothing happens that we witness directly. It’s up to you to fill in the blanks.

This is the same reason why role-playing games can be an excellent medium for telling scary stories. Not an ideal one, but an excellent one. The role-playing game isn’t that far removed from the campfire stories we heard and told as kids. Those stories, like the movies I mentioned above, generate their emotional response by purposely giving us just enough information to scare the crap out of us. Think about the campfire classics for a moment. How many of them actually feature a dead body? The only ones that come to mind is the one with the scratching on the car roof and the dead roommate in the “dog licks the hand” tale. In the other stories, it’s what the characters (and therefore you) didn’t directly witness that strikes a nerve.

When I’m behind the screen and there’s a need to start making the players (and their characters) unsettled, this is the same path that I follow. When it comes to fear around the gaming table, a little is often more effective than a lot. Give the players enough of a tease, even if it’s a clichéd one such as a tap upon the window pane, and make them do your job for you. It’s not always successful, as many factors can derail a good scare before it gets a chance to build of steam, but when it works, scaring the hell out of your players is one of the most rewarding things a referee can do.

James points out in his post that the players don’t get scared but they start worrying about their characters in a game if the referee is doing his job right. I see what he’s saying but I’m of a different state of mind. I think players can and should get scared if that’s what the referee is going for. Hell, getting players to worry about their characters is easy. Any level draining undead is going to get them a little worried, especially if they’ve been playing that PC from 1st level. I believe that a referee isn’t doing his job right unless he can scare the players without even bringing their characters into the equation. Any referee who gets a phone call the morning after a gaming session and has a player admit that he was spooked on the drive home or as he lay in bed that night has most certainly done his job correctly and can take pride in his skills.

The problem with this skill set, like a lot of referee skills, is that it can’t be easily taught. It must be learned through trial and error and by knowing what can get your players worked up. That’s pure on the job training, although some role-playing games (the Ravenloft boxed set, the White Wolf titles) do present some basics from which to start your experiments in horror. It’s a talent worth cultivating if you’re serious about this whole game master thing, though.