Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, is said to be a horror campaign, focused on "modern horror" as opposed to the gothic horror of Curse of Strahd.
While I think there's a lot of ambiguity to the notion of what, exactly, "modern horror" entails (though I'm going to guess Cosmic Horror is a major element of it) I was thinking about ways in which to make a campaign feel really menacing and dangerous - to get players to feel like they've got to really fight to survive.
Naturally, a lot of this can be established tonally. While your average fight against goblins or orcs out on the roads can be felt in the sort of bloodless combat one sees in much of the Lord of the Rings movies (not always, of course - you often see Orcs getting totally chopped up and spewing blood everywhere in those movies) if you want to drive home the notion of horror, a great way to do that is simply by establishing the creepy tone - being very descriptive about the horrific elements of the monsters you're fighting. For instance, if your party is taking a rest and they pass the perception check to see the monster before it can attack, you can make the monster's strike scarier by only slowly revealing the danger it poses - a rustling branch, a dark shape in the shadows, and then the glint of eyes - all giving the player time to warn the party and actually face the monster in a safer way, but building the sense of horror with this anticipation.
Stephen King (kind of an expert on the subject) describes a difference between horror and terror. By King's definitions (though frankly, just from my own connotations, I prefer to flip the two,) horror is the sensation of panic that fear causes when something massively disruptive and obviously dangerous occurs, but terror is the creeping dread and ambiguity over whether there is a threat or not - being stuck in that moment before choosing fight or flight.
(Again, I really think I'd flip those definitions, as I think of terror as more the "I'm already running for my life" kind of emotion, and of course associate it a lot with terrorism - and yes, I'm aware of the coincidence of mentioning that on this date - whereas horror, more connected with the genre, feels more associated with that pit in the gut, suspenseful feeling.)
(The point, though, that I think King gets spot on, is that these are two related, but distinct emotions, and what he calls terror and I call horror has a lot more potential for nuance and complexity.)
But D&D being a game in addition to a storytelling medium also allows for you to make things scary via difficulty.
Now, you could just dial up the difficulty to be unfair and brutal, but I think that's A: uninteresting and B: could wind up just making it impossible to have fun with if you're a player. It's true that a game like Call of Cthulhu is sort of built around the idea that player characters are going to die, and you can have fun with that, but I think a game like D&D - especially given that the full potential of your character doesn't unlock until after you've vanquished many a foe - means that just making it brutally difficult kind of ruins the game.
However, there is wiggle room in what kind of difficulty your players can face.
So I'd suggest having a fairly open world, with breadcrumbs to lead the players to certain places, but uncharted locations on the way that have a range of threats and monsters. You need to get the players to buy into the notion that there are some fights they should just run away from (though my Curse of Strahd party - one in which I'm a player, not DM - managed to just stick around and kill the Shambling Mound in the basement of the Death House at level 2 thanks to a few lucky rolls.) So I'd suggest that you have the area your players are exploring have encounters that are balanced for a wide level range - meaning they might find a monster that's a reasonable challenge for a bunch of level 7 player characters when they're only level 3.
I think another way to ratchet up tension is to disrupt rests. Resting in D&D is the way players recover their resources, and when you mess with that, you mess with the math that they do in the encounters they face - you might blow all your spell slots on a monster if you think that the next thing you'll be doing is hitting the hay, but if the DM then makes it impossible for you to do so, you're going to be scrambling to survive with just your basic things like Cantrips. Health management, then, becomes a real challenge.
I think another thing to play with, and this can tie into that disrupting rest, is to take places that are established as safe early on and in some way deprive the party of them. Maybe they find a friendly inn with some sympathetic staff early on, and they think of this as a home base to return to. Maybe, then, they come back to find the inn has burned to the ground. Or worse yet, they come back and it looks normal, but then they find out that the staff were monsters all along, and this time, they're taking the opportunity to strike.
Messing with perception is also a really great way to make things scary. Letting individual player characters see or hear things the others don't can both provide fun RP opportunities for the players, but also start messing with their sense of the scenario's reality - they'll probably assume that the one getting the visions is having hallucinations or illusions inflicted upon them, but maybe you flip that by proving that the "vision" was actually the objective reality while the rest of the party was deceived.
The final thing I'll suggest to truly mess with the party: invite a player to conspire with you.
Now, you have to use a light touch here, and you should only pick a player who is really going to follow your lead and not game things to be especially mean. But there's an implicit trust within D&D groups that the party will cooperate, even if the characters themselves are shady (this might not be with every group, but it tends to be in mine, which is part of the reason why, to both mine and the player's shock, my Ravnica group always trusts the Rakdos Bard despite the very clearly established fact that the guy's a chaotic evil serial killer.) But if you can break even that trust, it can induce a real sense of paranoia (still, use this sparingly.)
I'm really excited to get my copy of Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I'm really eager to see how this measures up to Curse of Strahd in terms of creepy scenarios and adventures.
No comments:
Post a Comment