So I am dming a game for a few of my friends, and I want to send the group to a derelict space ship to investigate it. I want to do a slow build of the horror stuff, I could use any suggestions. please and thank you!
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So I am dming a game for a few of my friends, and I want to send the group to a derelict space ship to investigate it. I want to do a slow build of the horror stuff, I could use any suggestions. please and thank you!
Because A, B happens. Because B, C happens. Extend to length of desired intrigue and don't give the players A, B, C etc, just the final steps.
So, [Osuliuke] is our elder god, who is shown worship by [body horror trope here]. For sake of example, lets say extending bones, dissolving ones own skin and injecting Substance fluid into your eyes.
A cultist is on board of the ship, and he fights for his right to religious practice, despite how horrifying it sounds. The captain rejects his request(s).
Cultists starts spreading the word, and requests for a purchase of Substance Fluid is promptly denied.
Portions of the ship start getting converted into temples/shrines. These shrines are hidden amidst the ship due to the forbearance of practice.
Etc etc etc...
The desire to practice has to be measured against the benefit, and this is where you start getting into the surreal odd ball stuff. The players will start to uncover clues as to what happened, and it feels like it all should fit together, but the players never actually have enough pieces to figure everything out. This is your source of tension, and it will claw in the back of their minds and push them to dig deeper.
Oh ... have it be on a generation ship instead. Have the shrines be ... like Narnia: Turn a corner, or open a closet, or visit some random storage room on sublevel 3, and *bam* you're in a shrine that logically should not, and cannot, be there. Have more and more openings into the alter-dimension over time.
As people go mad - either becoming cultists themselves, or losing their minds because reality is breaking down around them - leave subtle clues that maybe things aren't what they seem. That maybe there is no alternative hellscape rubbing shoulders with the ship, and no portals leading into it; maybe it's all illusory, in your minds.
Finally, have the players discover that the real culprit is some sort of tentacly deep space entity that has latched onto the hull of the ship, and is growing larger and stronger the more psychic terror it's able to leech off the crew.
I should have been more descriptive when I meant derelict ship. It's not only run down and just floating in space, but when they find it, it will appear to be abandoned. I don't want there to be any npcs until a bit later in the story. So meeting cultists won't work quite well for early game ideas.
Start with small things that seem just a bit off. Out of the corner of their eye, a PC sees a sign that says something horrific "He is Coming" or something. But when he goes for a direct look, it says "Heat venting" or something innocuous but similar. Tentacles wrapped around a pillar become conduit or tubing.
After they've been there for a bit, they start getting the occasional clanking. Once or twice they can verify that it's resonance - they step on a floor plate and a panel on the far wall vibrates - and they can trace the physical path traced by the vibration. Other times there's no explanation.
Can you have fluids dripping? Regular drips, then a pause, then regular drips again. They find a 'balanced' bowl that slowly fills up then dumps as a possible explanation, but again, most of the interruptions seem to have no explanation.
Eventually the signs take a bit more active 'disbelief' to turn back into regular signs rather than eldritch scribblings. It's suddenly very hard not to see a skull in that Official Notice poster. Eventually you see a "Heat venting" out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn to look, it clearly reads "He is coming." And that conduit bundle is definitely writhing!
What kind of things can they find in the Ship's Log? The Maintenance log? Are there any human remains on the derelict? What was the derelict hauling? How long has it been derelict? Could there still be rats or other vermin alive? Some of the stuff Son of a Lich! mentions would be good to include in the captain's log. Records in the infirmary indicate scalpels and 'eldritchly-useful' drugs and chemicals have gone missing, again depending on just what has been going on and for how long.
I'm running a space opera campaign with an eldritch-horror-lite element. One scenario i have in the works may give you some inspiration:
The ship is as you described with no life signs detected, etc.... When they board they are overwhelmed by the sight of gore and viscera. Just indistinguishable chunks of meat and limbs strewn about. Alternatively, the ship could be completely without the blood and gore depending on how you want to run it. There is... something... on board, however. They can hear it stalking the halls, see it's shadow from around corners, and so on; bottom line is give them the impression that it's huge and intimidating. My version of the creature is a monstrous form build out of the blood, bone, & muscle of what was once the crew (hence the super gory ship, or the empty ship; either would seemingly work with this creature). Seeing it and/or getting it's attention is terrifying and easily requires a fear or sanity check (whatever is applicable for the system). Fighting it head-on is probably suicide, but a crafty team capable of using their own equipment, the stuff on the ship, and a little luck might be able to take it down without confronting it directly.
Not true Eldritch horror per-se, but definitely a solid horror scenario. A little GM magic and you could easily tie it into some kind of greater plot involving said eldritch guys. My only fear with this scenario is that the party might say screw it, leave the ship, and toe it into the nearest star's gravity well to wash their hands of the creature.
I actually ran something similar to this recently, though mine was a malevolent AI with a bad case of "A God Am I" on a space station instead of a cosmic horror on a derelict ship. Some thoughts from my experience (some of which are mentioned before as well):
1) Finding logs and "human" elements from the ship's former occupants can make it feel like the place was lived in beforehand. This is important because if your players don't have a sense of normalcy initially, it's much harder to erode it over the course of the adventure.
2) Making the ship feel alive, despite all evidence to the contrary, can evoke eldritch horror. Make it seem like the players are being watched over time, such as having the elements that Lord Torath suggests. This is especially effective if you can keep a straight face and tell the players that the doors are really not powered, that the ship is for sure shut down. I don't normally advocate for gaslighting, but in the terms of your players' characters' perceptions, this is an appropriate time to break that out. "Maybe you did leave that door open after all? Oh, you blocked it off? Huh, strange. Well it's open now, at any rate." Depending on your players, they'll likely make themselves paranoid.
3) If you're aiming for the sort of eldritch horror which revolves around an uncaring intelligence so far above comprehension as to be unknowable, it is best to keep yourself from explaining too much. If something happens and it doesn't follow the rules of the universe, ensure that your players understand that whatever happened is outside the realm of possibility... but also that it still happened.
4) Give them some amount of space to prepare for whatever happens. If you take away the safety of every single action they take, they will become demotivated and stop being invested in staying safe. Instead, let them become used to certain precautions before providing an out-of-context problem that forces them to come up with new solutions. A good example would be if the players start holing up in the hangar with their shuttle (or something like that), have that work a few times. After they have gotten used to it, rip the hangar doors off and depressurize the hangar. As they are trying to fix that, establish that their safe refuge is no longer as safe as they thought it was. (Maybe introduce monsters that come in from outside or something.)
One thing my DM did for horror was to use the same phrase, in the same tone of voice whenever anything eldritch was happening; "It's very strange.", said in a hesitant or questioning tone. Ex. "It's very strange, but as you go deeper into the ship, the floor seems... damp, less solid, almost squishing under your feet... when you reach down to touch it, it's slightly sticky." "The water line is still full, but as you touch the switch that controls it, it is alarmingly hot, almost scalding."
Some of the strongest tension I've felt in-game has been when in a horror game, my character doesn't know what's happening (or that they are in mortal danger), but I as a player do. This is what this line of description triggers; I as a player know from the description that Something's Up, but the phrasing of the description is such that my character can assume a totally non-magical or mostly harmless explanation.
The usual setup was:
-We go somewhere with some set of expectations
-Something slightly off or odd appears, prefaced by "It's somewhat/very strange/odd...", but in vague enough terms that our curiosity was piqued.
-If we investigate, something more bizarre happens; if we don't (which we did on occasion), nothing happens... for now, and we were usually provided with a mundane explanation for what happened, or it was dismissed as "not that important".
-When we did investigate, there's always something that provides new information, and it's often dangerous. It was very rare that there were truly safe avenues of investigation; we were terrified of tipping off the threat.
-Until we did something triggering them, things were usually unlikely to attack; however, there was usually some kind of approaching deadline involved.
-Resting was usually safe, but with a sense that time would run out if we waited too long; in the case of a derelict, an example time limit might be the total power failure of the ship (ex. "It's surprising; as you take your first steps into the derelict, the lights flicker on. Strange. You would have expected the batteries to be depleted by now."... "As you step back into the ship, the lights take longer to turn on than they had last time. Some don't come on at all."), or whatever horror they've identified growing (ex. "As you step back into the ship, it's very strange; you can see that fungus has grown in your footprints. You must be bringing something in on the outside of your suit that it needs to grow.") There's no fear that our place of rest will grow unsafe, but if we take too long to solve the problem, something bad will happen (even if it's just our luck running out).
Make sure there is something on the ship that the player characters absolutely must - or want very badly to - retrieve intact so that they aren't tempted to just blow the whole thing up at the first sign of trouble. Maybe it's a shipment of medicines, urgently required to combat some plague at a distant colony, medicines that the ship was meant to deliver and that would take too long to manufacture in sufficient quantity to replace. If you want to be a bit clichéd, you can put the McGuffin at the very heart of whatever it is has gone wrong on the ship - by which I mean not that it's responsible, just that that's where it can be found.
If there is an AI-ish computer, such as might be found on starships in Star Trek or a not-quite-sentient HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, you could have the computer drily recount the gradual disappearance of the crew, unable to explain what happened to them, should the PCs be able to restore it to some minimal level of functionality.
Have doomsayer-like messages scrawled on bulkheads. Bonus points if they grow in intensity and madness as the PCs draw near to the centre of the corruption, the lair of the beast, what have you. (Extra bonus points if you throw in some Bendy and the Ink Machine references in the messages.)
As a motivator for staying on the ship, "the ship seems intact and you might be able to literally have a second ship" might be a fine motivator on its own- ships are pricey.
I'm generally against big overt "this is dangerous" signals- Scripten mentioned gaslighting, and as a player I can't understate how scary it is to have the DM grin at you as they say "That's odd... You thought that door was closed all the way, but it's cracked open. Huh." Mysteries are scary. Having the DM out-and-out tell the players that something spooky is going on, but a) not knowing what it is exactly, and b) not being able to communicate the spookiness to the character is powerful.
Also- a lot of fear goes away when a combat drags on; consider having monsters that retreat when wounded or losing, and also static hazards that players think their way through.
Honestly, you could do something like this in a game with zero combat or ever really encountering a living soul or conflict. The fact that this is expanding your universe to include some... thing that is beyond their glimpse of the world you created is unsettling in it's own right.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hyena-Princess
I'm going to echo the Bendy and the Ink Machine recommendation and also couple it with Five Nights at Freddy's for an example of a story that is never really told but has to be dug into. What we know of FNaF is that some dude likes to kill kids in rabbit suit. Why? We're not really sure. But he is relentless, and everything put in his way is some how bypassed for him to continue his killing spree. It has a ritualistic pass to it, he kills kids in groups of 5 for example, and they possess robots, but even if that is a by product of his killing spree or the intent of the Puppet, it's not really clear.
It feels like it all fits together, but we are always missing critical pieces to put it together.
For any kind of horror game, one small change can be "death saves are rolled privately by the DM".
Oh! I was just reminded of another tactic for horror games: making the players do things that they know should be bad ideas. A very good example of this would be from the game Silent Hill 2. Early in the game, the player comes across a section where they have to have their character stick his arm all the way into a hole in the wall to grab a key. There's no way to know what the hole leads to or what else is in it. No person in their right mind would want to do this, but it needs doing so as to progress at all.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/...20091009200352
There are lots of opportunities to pull this kind of stunt. Stick a necessary item into a vat of steaming liquid. Put the players in a corridor where the wiring, dead at the start, could come to life at any moment. Make them walk through a room full of empty space suits that nonetheless seem to be standing like there are people inside them.
Oh, and one important tip: make sure that you lead into this in such a way that the players know they are willingly making this decision. Put the power in their hands to say "nope", but make the alternative worse. I like to give mine at least three options, each bad, but progressively less desirable the further they go from the "intended" action. (This is not something I do in adventure games, but a lot of horror inherently comes with a sense of powerlessness.)
What system are you using for this, by the way?
It's actually for a game my friend is making. Shi wants some to test it as a dm, and I volunteered. I wanted to do horror, because I feel it would be a good test for hir game.
Nearly abandoned ship with incoming eldritch horrors?
I think you're playing Event Horizon.
The key to slow burning horror is to only reveal information in small amounts, and very slowly. The players should be spending more time trying to figure out what's going on than actually fighting off whatever threat it is. I would recommend you avoid many of the classic eldritch horror tropes that would clue players in on what's going on (looking at you, tentacles). Focus on the fear of the unknown and the way the lack of knowledge disempowers the characters to effectively fight back.
For an excellent example of this in literature, Dracula does this well. Although the modern reader knows what's up due to cultural osmosis, his involvement in the plot as a whole is very hidden, and the characters can't do anything to fight him until they've pieced together his entire plan
And in the vein of the Dracula example, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is another case of classic horror framing itself as a mystery to create the slow burning effect.
It begins with a man being callous and rude, after which the witnesses find they hate him not just for what he did, but something about him was deeply off. They ponder if he was disfigured or deformed, and have a hard time remembering his features, but can't point out anything that would actually provoke that kind of instinctual disgust. (Something very Lovecraftian for predating Lovecraft.) But the majority of the plot is about investigating this strange, seemingly disreputable man, and the upstanding local man who seems to be connected to him.
Play things like a straight mystery at first, and then allow the horror to slowly seep in, before the true scope of the situation is finally revealed.
these are some awesome ideas, thank you everyone!!!