Few styles of rp are as fun and rewarding as an excellently run horror game. Whether you’re taking your players through a zombie-ridden post-apocalyptic wasteland or plumbing the depths of a Gothic nightmare, striving for atmospheric chills and creeping out your players is as worthy an endeavor as it can be hard to achieve. Nothing will electrify your players as a truly terrifying session, and nothing is more memorable than scaring their pants off. However, running this kind of game can be incredibly challenging: what do you need to do in order to succeed?

First, you need to distinguish between two fundamentally basic styles of play. When it comes to a horror game, you can opt to either strive for terror or horror. Don’t see the difference? It’s simple: terror is what occurs when you achieve a heightened state of psychological fear, while horror comes from revulsion and disgust. Wading through a room that’s hip deep in moving body parts would elicit horror: it’s gross, it’s unnatural, it’s full of blood and flesh and very physical. Being haunted night after night by an unknown spirit would elicit terror: the fear is that of the unknown.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to choosing your style, and you can switch between them if you are careful of how you do it. Just remember that the basis of horror comes from realizing that we are mortal, that our bodies are just bags of flesh and blood that can be torn apart, and that there are monsters in this world that would delight in doing just that. Think of movies such as Hostel or Saw; these ‘torture porn’ movies are about how each character will die, and how gruesomely, not about whether they will all survive.

The basis of a terror game comes from mankind’s oldest fear, which is fear of the unknown. This game is infinitely harder to run than a horror game, because as the DM you must strive to build up the terror with mind games, descriptions and atmosphere, and not by simply throwing blood at your players. The goal is to use the player’s imagination against them, to give them enough gruesome clues to allow them to conjure up the worst possible scenario, and then reel them in with a sense of inevitability to the terrifying climax.

While you should pick a basic style to follow overall, there is no reason you can’t switch from one to the other occasionally to further your needs. A long, drawn out game of psychological terror can descend into horror in the final scene as everything becomes physical, just as a game of physical horror can be made all the more terrifying by inserting long moments of dread and suspense. What you can’t do is mix them up randomly; finely drawn out moments of terror will be undone by shambling corpses, just as hour’s worth of hack and zombie slash will make it very difficult to transition into a moment of fine tuned terror. So pick your overall mood, and then use each scene and scenario to further that very theme. Being clear sighted about your objective will help you immeasurably in accomplishing it!

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Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: horror game,dungeon master basics,dungeon master,terror,fear,rpg,role playing,dming, d&d,ad&d