Creepy… is an EN World thread full of neat ideas for scaring your players.
Whether you’re running a horror game or just want to change things up in your non-horror campaign, there’s a lot of great material here.
Creepy Stuff for Your Game
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There is some great examples of how to do a horror session/campaign in a fantasy setting here. Thanks for linking this. I never realized maggots and little girls were so creepy.
I think kids are sometimes overused in horror, but there’s something so viscerally creepy about them in that context that it often works anyway.
Babies are great, too. 😉
I think I might be a little late in coming 😉
Anyway, I don’t have anything particularly interesting to add from my experience, but I do think this is something that Joss Whedon had down in Firefly & Serenity.
Some of the creepier things for the uninitiated (may present spoilers for those who haven’t seen it, so caveat lector):
-In the pilot the ship flies by another for a tense moment. This moment is used to introduce a recurring monster: the Reaver. Nobody knows what the Reaver is, exactly, but the best rumors say that they are men who saw the edge of space (“the black”) and went mad. Either way, they are insane, cannibalistic, and ruthless. Trying my best to quote this: “If they take the ship, they’ll rape us to death, eat our flesh and sew our skins into their clothing and if we’re very very lucky, they’ll do it in that order.” Nothing out of the ordinary in a D&D campaign, but the description helps.
-In a later episode (the third, I think), a corpse hits the ship. This leads to the discovery of a nearby derelict ship that they board to see what happened (and grab some loot while they’re there). Checking logs showed that more people boarded than could have left via a lifeboats. While searching the cargo hold they find that everybody’s stuff is still there, including incredibly valuable stuff. Then, looking up, they see the corpses of pretty much everybody hanging, mutilated.
-The creepiest Firefly moment, IMO, was in the movie, Serenity. They risk everything, including the crossing of “Reaver-space”, to get an abandoned planet and find out what happened. They land and find that, despite rumors, everything seems fine. Terraforming went perfectly and the air was breathable. Just… nobody was there. They began checking the place out and couldn’t figure it out. Then, looking in one of the windows they saw that there were people inside. Dead, but otherwise perfectly healthy, died doing their natural jobs. Preserved over the years because of air-tight sealing. Then, exploring more, they find a recording explaining that the Alliance tried to spread calm over the planet by pumping a gas, “Pax”, into the vents. It worked too well, though, and people stopped pretty much all activity, including eating, and died. Except a small fraction, who had an opposite effect. They became aggressive, insane, cannibalistic. Yes, the reavers.
Of course, in a good campaign, each of the above could be done much better, but you are fairly limited on TV & movies.
(Oh, and I never even mentioned the blue hands… meh, maybe another time)
I think Firefly and Serenity are great examples of how to effectively use horror/creepy stuff in non-horror games. I love all of the moments you mentioned, and they add a lot to the series — and like you pointed out, they’d translate well to other worlds/genres, too.