I'm running a campaign that introduces this flesh mound and I plan to really go into detail with this thing (and I hope that my players don't see this post ahaha). I'm curious to hear what other DMs have done to really scare their players into similar tense situations, maybe get a new idea or two as well lol. Undead feel like the most easiest to describe to really get into that "horror" genre in a campaign, but what do you think?
Well it hasn’t happened yet, we’re still pretty early on in the campaign, but the spooky feywild campaign i’m running is gonna have some horrifying boss fights with (put in spoilers in case my players read this, DONT DO IT, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE MY OAK, ROAD, AND STONE PLAYERS)
(message for players if they do read this: seriously stop please)
An eldritch demonic trash cockroach demon lord that lives in the trash heaps of a fey court, which they will either have to fight and likely barely survive, having to escape instead of killing it, or help it possibly escape the servitude of the fey queen.
a gnomish countess who’s secretly a cannibal looking to eat a specific player for backstory reasons, who will start the fight by feeding them tainted food made of human flesh before grabbing her cleaver and trying to tear them to shreds like Jason Vorhees. She’ll make constant references to devouring them during the fight to make it more exciting and scary.
and another one that I’ve planned out is with a player’s relative who he had a bond with, who is basically going to try and recruit them to his side and explaining how they’re going to take over a nation, and that he needs mortal blood to fuel a giant mechanical heart keeping him alive. The only mortals around being the other players. So it’s either going to be the party vs. this guy because he’s trying to commit some horrible atrocities, or maybe party vs character and The villain. It’ll be pretty exciting.
Pretty much every aberration is so alien and strange that it should come off as horrific just on sight. Before it does anything to add to it all. You are dead on with undead, everyone has that mental picture. A little brain on legs that'll eat yours in a swap? That's worse.
You may want to talk to your players in advance and/or include an 'X' card so anyone who's getting uncomfortable can ask for a pause or shift in tone. It's a good habit!
"...stretched out of shape, something within begins to press out. edges become defined and a membrane stretches thin. sudden fluid sprays from the borders hinting at immense pressure behind the rounded, growing thing. pressure suggesting a weight of stones and eons as it is slowly, inexorably intrudes upon this realm from some other reality. from moist dark to this reticulated nest of honeyed light. robed onlookers flinch back surprised by the fury at the periphery, primal evocations like a watery halo. they are surprised but sure of purpose. eyes wide behind their masks, most of them do not flee. they face what they traveled here to witness. and in the center of that chaos presses the unworried, unworldly thing: still traveling forward slowly, inching so slowly, insisting, almost royal in its unhurried procession, and growing ever larger, that emerging thing. will it move? are we too close, if it does move? time skips forward to skilled hands now reaching into the frame of this moment. infinity aside, there is work to be done. additional hands now and nothing moving slowly any longer. quickly now hands, so many hands, a hecatoncheires of hands (but maybe the few just blur to me now, the world seen through a pin hole). they interrupt the larva, dislodging it. fluid splashes, colorless, and additional gore, vividly colored, follows like trailing luggage. scissors appear and the last tether is severed. it's dreams of freedom at odds with this new paradigm, the spawn wails... and, anyway, yeah. so i'll be changing diapers and getting no sleep for a good long while. ha ha! hope to see you guys soon!"
((but he never did see those guys again! his shelves of pre-pandemic boardgames collect dust to this day! ooh! aaah! the horror!! ))
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: providefeedback!
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
War. Right down to the sweet, coppery smells of the blood mixed with the feces from the disemboweled, and the feeling of the dust and grit that clung to their teeth and clogged their sinuses for hours afterwards no matter how many times they blew their nose or rinsed their mouths out.
damnn mortal blood to fuel a giant mechanical heart is a really cool concept, same goes for cannibal stuff those are terrifying haha
The mechanical heart is going to start beating, shaking the ground around the underground lair it’s located in, causing earthquakes and stuff. At the start of the battle, it will start to beat every round. If the heart is destroyed, so is the villain. But the villain is a lich sort of creature (a hierarch) and will eventually come back, albeit in a different plane of existence.
War. Right down to the sweet, coppery smells of the blood mixed with the feces from the disemboweled, and the feeling of the dust and grit that clung to their teeth and clogged their sinuses for hours afterwards no matter how many times they blew their nose or rinsed their mouths out.
Players are exploring a castle. They open a door and see thousands of egg shells on the floor intertwined with webs. There is one intact egg in a web moving. Starting to hatch.
They are immediately attacked by a giant spider.
After the fight they explore more into the room and the egg. The floor is also covered in ash.
The shop keep mentioned that their may be a phoenix in the area.
See where this is going? Now while a Phoenix rises from ashes after it dies I added on that they die and are reborn from both ash and fire through an egg to begin with.
So this poor Phoenix has been the main food source for the spider countless times and remembers each one. Over and over and over again.
The group I ran that with saved the Phoenix and it became loyal to them but had crazy PTSD from the experience.
So imagine being the Phoenix in the moment. Everytime it was reborn it was eaten by a spider thousands of times
Players are exploring a castle. They open a door and see thousands of egg shells on the floor intertwined with webs. There is one intact egg in a web moving. Starting to hatch.
They are immediately attacked by a giant spider.
After the fight they explore more into the room and the egg. The floor is also covered in ash.
The shop keep mentioned that their may be a phoenix in the area.
See where this is going? Now while a Phoenix rises from ashes after it dies I added on that they die and are reborn from both ash and fire through an egg to begin with.
So this poor Phoenix has been the main food source for the spider countless times and remembers each one. Over and over and over again.
The group I ran that with saved the Phoenix and it became loyal to them but had crazy PTSD from the experience.
So imagine being the Phoenix in the moment. Everytime it was reborn it was eaten by a spider thousands of times
Yup. One of my worst.
damnn!! Reading this I did not expect the phoenix to go through all that, absolutely terrible. Terribly great though, hahaha!
Oh another fun little thing that’s gonna happen in my campaign, not exactly as horrifying physically but probably as scarring mentally.
One of my players had the memories of every the face of every single person in their childhood stolen from them by someone working for the fey lord King Reynard the Fox. He’s keeping the memory in his personal collection to serve at a banquet he’s hosting soon (you can drink memories, its a fey delicacy) and so when they eventually visit Reynard, the player will likely try and get the memory back from Reynard.
Reynard won’t let them have it back unless they pay an absurd amount of gold. If they do, they get the memory back. If they don’t, Reynard threatens to throw the bottled memory off of a ledge, destroying it. He might also just drink instead, not sure. So yeah, that’ll be traumatizing for the character!
I once fought an evil dragon who had human faces instead of scales. It was brimming with noxious gas that spilled out of the human mouths all along its body and when it died all the foul poison bottled up inside of it came pouring out.
A dream sequence where the BBEG ultimately is the Patron of this particular Warlock. This takes place when they take a rest in the inn.
You wake up on a bed of leaves in the forest, it's dark with only moonlight on your face, it's cold and the leaves are ristling in the wind. You look up along the long tall tree trunks, between the branches you see the stars. You try to reach for it, but you can't. You are stuck. When you look at your body, you only see the grounds of the forest. The moonlight disappears and the stars change slowly into eyes. In a blink all eyes fixate on you! You wake up... heart pumping.
You blink a few times and look around, standing next to your bed, shaking and sweating. You walk out of the room through the hall, at a window you see a book on a ledger. The moment you touch the book there is a loud bang. The whole spaces you are bursts into green flames. You try to extinguish it with buckets of water, blankets anything you can get your hands on. But it doesn't seem to work. You are no longer in the inn, but in a familiair house.
Two figures are standing in the fire, a male and a female. The female with her head down and shoulders low, turns around en disappears in the fire. The male looks up and stares at you. You blink and the man stands very close to you, nose... against... nose. The flesh in his face is burned, the skin seems to melt, his eyes are big and black. When you look closely, inside his eyes are multiple eyes who intensely look at your. The male yells: "IT IS YOUR FAULT!"
The males face melts further en slips from his face, only a skull stays with a glowing green rock in his eye socket. The skull speaks: "Are... you... worthy?"
A skeleton hand grabs the rock and takes it out, a long elongated razor sharp pointed rock. He turns the rock around... slowly en calm pushing the sharp point into your pupil. You feel the rock cutting through the cornea, stretching the pupil out and cutting through the eyeball eventually reaching the back of the eye. The flat skeletal palm comes closer and closer.
"Time, like hope, is an illusion" - Lumalee "Time is relative" - Albert Einstein "It's a joke. It's all a joke. Mother forgive me" - Edward 'The Comedian' Blake "Do I look like the kind of clown that can start a movement?" - Arthur Fleck
A dream sequence where the BBEG ultimately is the Patron of this particular Warlock. This takes place when they take a rest in the inn.
You wake up on a bed of leaves in the forest, it's dark with only moonlight on your face, it's cold and the leaves are ristling in the wind. You look up along the long tall tree trunks, between the branches you see the stars. You try to reach for it, but you can't. You are stuck. When you look at your body, you only see the grounds of the forest. The moonlight disappears and the stars change slowly into eyes. In a blink all eyes fixate on you! You wake up... heart pumping.
You blink a few times and look around, standing next to your bed, shaking and sweating. You walk out of the room through the hall, at a window you see a book on a ledger. The moment you touch the book there is a loud bang. The whole spaces you are bursts into green flames. You try to extinguish it with buckets of water, blankets anything you can get your hands on. But it doesn't seem to work. You are no longer in the inn, but in a familiair house.
Two figures are standing in the fire, a male and a female. The female with her head down and shoulders low, turns around en disappears in the fire. The male looks up and stares at you. You blink and the man stands very close to you, nose... against... nose. The flesh in his face is burned, the skin seems to melt, his eyes are big and black. When you look closely, inside his eyes are multiple eyes who intensely look at your. The male yells: "IT IS YOUR FAULT!"
The males face melts further en slips from his face, only a skull stays with a glowing green rock in his eye socket. The skull speaks: "Are... you... worthy?"
A skeleton hand grabs the rock and takes it out, a long elongated razor sharp pointed rock. He turns the rock around... slowly en calm pushing the sharp point into your pupil. You feel the rock cutting through the cornea, stretching the pupil out and cutting through the eyeball eventually reaching the back of the eye. The flat skeletal palm comes closer and closer.
"Embrace it.... give in!"
This is a really cool scene for the reveal of the BBEG, great work lol!!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
hi my name is an inside joke please bear with me
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I'm running a campaign that introduces this flesh mound and I plan to really go into detail with this thing (and I hope that my players don't see this post ahaha). I'm curious to hear what other DMs have done to really scare their players into similar tense situations, maybe get a new idea or two as well lol. Undead feel like the most easiest to describe to really get into that "horror" genre in a campaign, but what do you think?
hi my name is an inside joke please bear with me
Well it hasn’t happened yet, we’re still pretty early on in the campaign, but the spooky feywild campaign i’m running is gonna have some horrifying boss fights with (put in spoilers in case my players read this, DONT DO IT, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE MY OAK, ROAD, AND STONE PLAYERS)
(message for players if they do read this: seriously stop please)
An eldritch demonic trash cockroach demon lord that lives in the trash heaps of a fey court, which they will either have to fight and likely barely survive, having to escape instead of killing it, or help it possibly escape the servitude of the fey queen.
a gnomish countess who’s secretly a cannibal looking to eat a specific player for backstory reasons, who will start the fight by feeding them tainted food made of human flesh before grabbing her cleaver and trying to tear them to shreds like Jason Vorhees. She’ll make constant references to devouring them during the fight to make it more exciting and scary.
and another one that I’ve planned out is with a player’s relative who he had a bond with, who is basically going to try and recruit them to his side and explaining how they’re going to take over a nation, and that he needs mortal blood to fuel a giant mechanical heart keeping him alive. The only mortals around being the other players. So it’s either going to be the party vs. this guy because he’s trying to commit some horrible atrocities, or maybe party vs character and The villain. It’ll be pretty exciting.
Pretty much every aberration is so alien and strange that it should come off as horrific just on sight. Before it does anything to add to it all. You are dead on with undead, everyone has that mental picture. A little brain on legs that'll eat yours in a swap? That's worse.
You may want to talk to your players in advance and/or include an 'X' card so anyone who's getting uncomfortable can ask for a pause or shift in tone. It's a good habit!
"...stretched out of shape, something within begins to press out. edges become defined and a membrane stretches thin. sudden fluid sprays from the borders hinting at immense pressure behind the rounded, growing thing. pressure suggesting a weight of stones and eons as it is slowly, inexorably intrudes upon this realm from some other reality. from moist dark to this reticulated nest of honeyed light. robed onlookers flinch back surprised by the fury at the periphery, primal evocations like a watery halo. they are surprised but sure of purpose. eyes wide behind their masks, most of them do not flee. they face what they traveled here to witness. and in the center of that chaos presses the unworried, unworldly thing: still traveling forward slowly, inching so slowly, insisting, almost royal in its unhurried procession, and growing ever larger, that emerging thing. will it move? are we too close, if it does move? time skips forward to skilled hands now reaching into the frame of this moment. infinity aside, there is work to be done. additional hands now and nothing moving slowly any longer. quickly now hands, so many hands, a hecatoncheires of hands (but maybe the few just blur to me now, the world seen through a pin hole). they interrupt the larva, dislodging it. fluid splashes, colorless, and additional gore, vividly colored, follows like trailing luggage. scissors appear and the last tether is severed. it's dreams of freedom at odds with this new paradigm, the spawn wails... and, anyway, yeah. so i'll be changing diapers and getting no sleep for a good long while. ha ha! hope to see you guys soon!"
((but he never did see those guys again! his shelves of pre-pandemic boardgames collect dust to this day! ooh! aaah! the horror!! ))
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
The Aftermath of a battle.
I took my own experience and tripled it.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
War. Right down to the sweet, coppery smells of the blood mixed with the feces from the disemboweled, and the feeling of the dust and grit that clung to their teeth and clogged their sinuses for hours afterwards no matter how many times they blew their nose or rinsed their mouths out.
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damnn mortal blood to fuel a giant mechanical heart is a really cool concept, same goes for cannibal stuff those are terrifying haha
hi my name is an inside joke please bear with me
The mechanical heart is going to start beating, shaking the ground around the underground lair it’s located in, causing earthquakes and stuff. At the start of the battle, it will start to beat every round. If the heart is destroyed, so is the villain. But the villain is a lich sort of creature (a hierarch) and will eventually come back, albeit in a different plane of existence.
An overly amorous troll.
Looking for love in all the wrong ways.
OH NO....
hi my name is an inside joke please bear with me
Aftermath of battles and wars are definitely really traumatic ones, also definitely one I didn't think of but is really good loll
hi my name is an inside joke please bear with me
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
The evil wizard's plan to get soldiers by feeding children to gnolls in exchange for service.
Sounds like a good deal if I were a gnoll lmaoo
hi my name is an inside joke please bear with me
Sadly I have one.
Players are exploring a castle. They open a door and see thousands of egg shells on the floor intertwined with webs. There is one intact egg in a web moving. Starting to hatch.
They are immediately attacked by a giant spider.
After the fight they explore more into the room and the egg. The floor is also covered in ash.
The shop keep mentioned that their may be a phoenix in the area.
See where this is going? Now while a Phoenix rises from ashes after it dies I added on that they die and are reborn from both ash and fire through an egg to begin with.
So this poor Phoenix has been the main food source for the spider countless times and remembers each one. Over and over and over again.
The group I ran that with saved the Phoenix and it became loyal to them but had crazy PTSD from the experience.
So imagine being the Phoenix in the moment. Everytime it was reborn it was eaten by a spider thousands of times
Yup. One of my worst.
damnn!! Reading this I did not expect the phoenix to go through all that, absolutely terrible. Terribly great though, hahaha!
hi my name is an inside joke please bear with me
Oh another fun little thing that’s gonna happen in my campaign, not exactly as horrifying physically but probably as scarring mentally.
One of my players had the memories of every the face of every single person in their childhood stolen from them by someone working for the fey lord King Reynard the Fox. He’s keeping the memory in his personal collection to serve at a banquet he’s hosting soon (you can drink memories, its a fey delicacy) and so when they eventually visit Reynard, the player will likely try and get the memory back from Reynard.
Reynard won’t let them have it back unless they pay an absurd amount of gold. If they do, they get the memory back. If they don’t, Reynard threatens to throw the bottled memory off of a ledge, destroying it. He might also just drink instead, not sure. So yeah, that’ll be traumatizing for the character!
I once fought an evil dragon who had human faces instead of scales. It was brimming with noxious gas that spilled out of the human mouths all along its body and when it died all the foul poison bottled up inside of it came pouring out.
A dream sequence where the BBEG ultimately is the Patron of this particular Warlock. This takes place when they take a rest in the inn.
You wake up on a bed of leaves in the forest, it's dark with only moonlight on your face, it's cold and the leaves are ristling in the wind. You look up along the long tall tree trunks, between the branches you see the stars. You try to reach for it, but you can't. You are stuck. When you look at your body, you only see the grounds of the forest. The moonlight disappears and the stars change slowly into eyes. In a blink all eyes fixate on you! You wake up... heart pumping.
You blink a few times and look around, standing next to your bed, shaking and sweating. You walk out of the room through the hall, at a window you see a book on a ledger. The moment you touch the book there is a loud bang. The whole spaces you are bursts into green flames. You try to extinguish it with buckets of water, blankets anything you can get your hands on. But it doesn't seem to work. You are no longer in the inn, but in a familiair house.
Two figures are standing in the fire, a male and a female. The female with her head down and shoulders low, turns around en disappears in the fire. The male looks up and stares at you. You blink and the man stands very close to you, nose... against... nose. The flesh in his face is burned, the skin seems to melt, his eyes are big and black. When you look closely, inside his eyes are multiple eyes who intensely look at your. The male yells: "IT IS YOUR FAULT!"
The males face melts further en slips from his face, only a skull stays with a glowing green rock in his eye socket. The skull speaks: "Are... you... worthy?"
A skeleton hand grabs the rock and takes it out, a long elongated razor sharp pointed rock. He turns the rock around... slowly en calm pushing the sharp point into your pupil. You feel the rock cutting through the cornea, stretching the pupil out and cutting through the eyeball eventually reaching the back of the eye. The flat skeletal palm comes closer and closer.
"Embrace it.... give in!"
"Time, like hope, is an illusion" - Lumalee
"Time is relative" - Albert Einstein
"It's a joke. It's all a joke. Mother forgive me" - Edward 'The Comedian' Blake
"Do I look like the kind of clown that can start a movement?" - Arthur Fleck
This is a really cool scene for the reveal of the BBEG, great work lol!!
hi my name is an inside joke please bear with me