Adding Horror to your Game

Today I'm going to talk less about procedural topics like campaign building or monster design, and instead I am going to talk about something that even I haven't worked out all the way yet: Being scary with your game. Turning a roleplaying game into a horror game can be tough. Like reputations, it takes a while to build up good horror, and it can be ruined with a single off-hand comment. To this end, I will share my experience with horror, and 5 tips to making it work in your game.

1. Turn up the Tension

When planning to run a game with horror elements, this should be the first thing you look at: turning up the tension. Start off by making sure the players understand they're going into a dangerous and scary place. If you are lucky, you can have them on edge before they step foot in that haunted castle. A few well-placed NPCs telling the players about dangers that lie ahead can set the players up for a scary adventure.

Once the meat of the adventure starts, there is a shift the players go through. They go from "narrative mode" to "adventure mode." In short, they stop looking at the story and instead look at what monsters they'll fight, what loot they'll find and when their next extended rest will be. You, as DM, need to verbally smack them for this and stay in narrative mode. This is important: Ignore the dice, ignore the character sheets, ignore the rulebooks. The players want to check out the room for traps? Great, describe it. Don't have the players roll detect traps skill check, just tell them what they find, using all five senses if you can. "You don't find any traps" is so much scarier when you tell it like this: "You slowly creep into the room to check for traps, but pause as you feel a gust of wind come up from behind you when you cross the threshold. The wind chills your exposed neck, and carries intelligible whispers with it."

2. Misdirect Attention
How many times have you seen in horror movies where the hero is examining the closet only to have the creepy bad guy jump down from the ceiling? Its so common its almost a cliche. Even so, this is a solid tool in your arsenal for scaring your players. While the players are examining the area, and you're giving your thorough and vivid descriptions (you were doing that, right?), try and secretly draw your players' attention to some strange or unique part of the room. Maybe you describe it a little more colorfully, or dramatically pause when talking about it, but the idea is to make the players focus on one thing.

Once you have that attention you can do pretty much whatever you want. The players focusing on a pile of rubble? Shadows start moving behind them on the other side of the wall. Is your focus a thick mist of miasma? A minotaur charges out at them, only to vanish inches from trampling the players. The point here is to make the players focus on one thing so you can exaggerate something else.

One of the best examples of this was from a D&D 3.5 game where I was a player. The DM described a room with the floor covered in yellow mold, but in the center was the haft of what looked like a sword sticking point down in the mold. I was so intrigued at what kind of sword would be here that I stepped through the mold to the sword. What happened? Turns out the sword was actually a molding miner's pickax, and the mold was poisonous and debilitating. The DM didn't roll an attack, or use game terms, he just said "you start choking at the poisonous spores, feeling your limbs grow weak." I didn't know what that meant, but it was scary!

3. Keep the Mystery
There's a reason you don't see the shark in Jaws until the very end of the movie: The imagination will ALWAYS concoct something worse that reality. Keeping the monsters hidden at the edge of sight causes the players to imagine something worse that it actually is. Especially since most monsters in D&D are mere stat blocks, and once the players know the defenses and attacks of the skeleton, they won't be as afraid.

This is a fairly simple and easy-to-implement trick: Have monsters just out of sight. If you want to see the effect this can have, watch the video above. Just remember to make the monsters feel tangible and real. Hearing footsteps behind them, or the sound of heavy breathing can be enough, but if you want to REALLY make your players wet their pants, wait till bullet point five and we come back to this.

4. Keep the Players Guessing
This is something of a given, and goes with a lot of the other points, but the best way to keep the players guessing and on edge is to make every decision feel important. Nothing scares a player more than the DM asking "Are you sure about that?" Are you sure you want to move those rocks? Are you sure you want to look behind you? Are you sure you want to toss a torch into the dark pit? If you use this sparingly (read: VERY sparingly) it can make the players feel uneasy, and will shadow all of their decisions. I recommend asking this question the first time their choice seems big (as in, not when they open the first door, but rather, the first time they inspect something that's clearly alien and wrong, like a corpse, or a strange piece of furniture).

The next step is making sure that sometimes the players will find nothing. They can get all worked up trying to examine that mutilated corpse, but ultimately it leads to nothing significant and they breath a sigh of relief... For now. That's the real trick: getting the players worked up over something that, ultimately, doesn't hurt them. The players hear breathing coming from behind them? The first time they look, nothing. The second time they look, though, they see a dead corpse walking towards them. They try to fight it and it disappears without ever having harmed them. These kinds of visual clues can drive a player crazy if paired with the 3rd tip; they won't know what to fight, and when they finally find the REAL monster, they'll wet their pants after finding out its not going to disappear.

5. Metagaming the Metagamer
Metagaming can be a real downer to a horror game. Here are a few tips to getting the players drawn into the game.

• Music. DON'T use real music. Use ambient tracks instead. Unless you're a spoony bard, characters don't march into combat with a theme song. Instead, take ambient sounds, like water droplets or footsets or wind, and play them on loop. Protip: use music editing software to put several ambient sounds together into a mashup of scary. 
• Notecards. A common tactic for DMs is to write notes on notecards and give them to a player when only that player knows something. A trick I figured was to give each player a notecard with the same secret note. If all 6 players get "You hear the wail of a little girl", but each of them thinks that they're the only one that heard it, you'll get some interesting reactions.
• Along with the notecards, before the session, prepare a stack of them with little horror elements like "You see your shadow move differently than you" or "You feel someone touching your back", and then hand them out throughout the session, mostly arbitrarily. Be careful, too much of this and your players will catch on. To fix this, make some of the notecards actually have effects (maybe there IS something touching that character's back).
• When drawing a map, or informing your players to draw a map, make the map purposefully impossible. Have hallways double-back on themselves or rooms that occupy the same space. It will weird players out, and hey, it's another plot hook.
• Take the players' character sheets. Maybe before you take a break to get some water. Deftly steal all the sheets and hide them. Don't give them back until the players need them.

Hopefully this helped some of you horror fans. Sorry for the long post, this one was fun to write though, and I've been due for a DM advice post. In any case, happy gaming!