I’ve found a lot of horror comes down to what the players are happy to roleplay. If they buy in then the unknown should be scary, otherwise metagaming and humour will win and every time whenever you try to ne serious and add horror you’ll get a silly joke. So make sure you’re party want horror.
if the party are willing to buy into the horror, then curse of strahd is a prebuilt horror campaign
an old rule of thumb is also to mix up monster stats. That way the players can’t use existing knowledge and you get an element of the unknown for both the character and player
Tell the players that you made their characters for them.
Also tell them that they are not allowed to make any dice rolls.
That comes across as more of a Terror campaign to me. If you're going to do that, then you can go the extra terror mile and tell the characters the NPCs get to do anything that has been posted on DND subreddits.
As D&D doesn’t really have the mechanics for a true horror game; How I do it is I implement the optional Sanity rules (found in Dark Dice podcast, listed in Domain of the Nameless God) and I take advantage of descriptors when explaining the horror element.
So, the trick is that much horror depends on a sensation of powerlessness that's pretty difficult to synergize with RPGs at all, especially one with relatively heavy combat that's rarely lethal for PCs like D&D.
So, okay, cosmic horror. That's got an advantage in that you can justify all kinds of weird stuff, but a disadvantage in that it leans heavily on those very un-RPG-like feelings of futility and insignificance. And if you put a monster in front of your players that they can kill, they won't be scared. If you put a monster in front of them that they can't kill, they still won't be scared and they'll be mad at you for an unfair challenge. So you'll want to try to mess with their heads, not their stats. I don't know, give them a dungeon with a shifting layout that can't be properly mapped or a cult that could have agents anywhere or an enemy who inexplicably comes back every time they kill them or maybe let them control minor characters who it's understood are probably doomed before coming back as their regular characters to avenge them or something. One of the best ideas in Van Richten's Guide is the Bagman, a monster that attacks from bags of holding (detailed as an example of how you could refluff a monster to be scarier, in this case a troll); it adds danger to something familiar, and that's always a good trick. Also try to deny (in fair, motivated ways) information; it's always scarier when you don't quite know what's going on. A long-term threat that attacks through sleep or dreams could be workable; if they can't rest, it forces them into the resource-management mindset that's supposed to provide 5e's difficulty but never does in practice.
(And it's probably best to have a real-talk conversation before trying most horror stuff because ultimately horror is going out of your way to make people uncomfortable and you want to make sure you're doing it responsibly. Horror is the spicy food of genres; some people are weeeeaaaak just don't want it or certain types of it.)
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I just started a new campaign and was looking to make it some kind of horror, any one got any tips?
Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft has plenty of tools that you can use to add horror to your campaign.
Sandy Peterson's Cthulhu Mythos gives you a bunch of rules and creatures to add H. P. Lovecraft horror.
+1 to both of these suggestions. They are so much more than a good start they are all you'll likely need!
I’ve found a lot of horror comes down to what the players are happy to roleplay. If they buy in then the unknown should be scary, otherwise metagaming and humour will win and every time whenever you try to ne serious and add horror you’ll get a silly joke. So make sure you’re party want horror.
if the party are willing to buy into the horror, then curse of strahd is a prebuilt horror campaign
an old rule of thumb is also to mix up monster stats. That way the players can’t use existing knowledge and you get an element of the unknown for both the character and player
Tell the players that you made their characters for them.
Also tell them that they are not allowed to make any dice rolls.
"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
That comes across as more of a Terror campaign to me. If you're going to do that, then you can go the extra terror mile and tell the characters the NPCs get to do anything that has been posted on DND subreddits.
As D&D doesn’t really have the mechanics for a true horror game; How I do it is I implement the optional Sanity rules (found in Dark Dice podcast, listed in Domain of the Nameless God) and I take advantage of descriptors when explaining the horror element.
What is the type of horror or the tone you are looking to introduce to your game?
A kind of cosmic horror
So, the trick is that much horror depends on a sensation of powerlessness that's pretty difficult to synergize with RPGs at all, especially one with relatively heavy combat that's rarely lethal for PCs like D&D.
So, okay, cosmic horror. That's got an advantage in that you can justify all kinds of weird stuff, but a disadvantage in that it leans heavily on those very un-RPG-like feelings of futility and insignificance. And if you put a monster in front of your players that they can kill, they won't be scared. If you put a monster in front of them that they can't kill, they still won't be scared and they'll be mad at you for an unfair challenge. So you'll want to try to mess with their heads, not their stats. I don't know, give them a dungeon with a shifting layout that can't be properly mapped or a cult that could have agents anywhere or an enemy who inexplicably comes back every time they kill them or maybe let them control minor characters who it's understood are probably doomed before coming back as their regular characters to avenge them or something. One of the best ideas in Van Richten's Guide is the Bagman, a monster that attacks from bags of holding (detailed as an example of how you could refluff a monster to be scarier, in this case a troll); it adds danger to something familiar, and that's always a good trick. Also try to deny (in fair, motivated ways) information; it's always scarier when you don't quite know what's going on. A long-term threat that attacks through sleep or dreams could be workable; if they can't rest, it forces them into the resource-management mindset that's supposed to provide 5e's difficulty but never does in practice.
(And it's probably best to have a real-talk conversation before trying most horror stuff because ultimately horror is going out of your way to make people uncomfortable and you want to make sure you're doing it responsibly. Horror is the spicy food of genres; some people
are weeeeaaaakjust don't want it or certain types of it.)Medium humanoid (human), lawful neutral