So, some of us have had a chance to look at RotFM now, and while it was described a few times as a horror campaign, I think it’s clear that a DM can run it as anything from a Studio Ghibli film to a straight dice-rolling slugfest.I notice that the writers’ also went to a lot of trouble to provide an opportunity to solve problems non-violently. And, ladies and gentlemen?I see you.And I value your efforts.
But what if you wanted a horror game? What if you told your players they were going be in a horror campaign and now you’re confused because it’s full of cute little Pixar creatures? Well, I think the potential is there, but it’s going to be up to the DM to sew the body together on their own. I’ve given some thought to how I’d run the campaign in order to maximize horror, starting with rating the bits I see with the most potential. In this post, I’ll focus on the new crunch and on Chapter 1: Ten Towns. In the meantime, let me put the much-appreciated non-violent problem-solving over here, by the garbage can…
Wilderness Survival Rules - These are gold.Enforce them with all the consistency, fairness and mercilessness of nature itself.When your players are double checking their equipment lists for a one hour dogsled trek, they’re scared enough.
Character Secrets - The real value here comes from every player knowing that the other players have a secret as well, which makes them suspect one another.Some of the secrets have actual horror potential and others really don’t, at least not within the feasible scope of this adventure.But the fact that they have them and keep them, benign as they may be, will create some tension among the players.
CHAPTER 1
Starting Quests - The starting quests are designed to get your characters to leave Bryn Shander (or wherever) and explore, but aimless meandering is the opposite of building tension, so we need to keep it to a minimum.Five quests is the most you get out of Ten Towns, XP-wise, so in addition to the starting quest, let’s just pick the next four best.Save the rest for a day when you’re missing players
Cold Hearted Killer - 2/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls.Regenerating enemies always have some horror potential, especially if you don’t know their weakness.I think I’d have him downplay his regenerative abilities if he saw any sign that he could encounter fire. He'd rather just take a dive and play dead and get up off the slab later. So the PCs think they killed him, even decapitated him, but he keeps coming back.And I think his calling card needs work.Maybe icicle through the eye. He's supposed to be likable, so he's not a Jason Voorhees unkillable slasher. Think up some terrible Freddy Kruger slasher jokes for this guy, instead.
Nature Spirits - 0/4 Screaming Shelly Duvalls.Since they have nothing to do with the rest of the story, I hesitate to even use the chwingas as (forgive, please) an icebreaker.Maybe if you changed Dannika Greysteel to Vellyne, you’d at least establish who Vellyne is before Chapter 4.
The Ten Towns:
Bremen - “Lake Monster” - 3/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls (1/4 if you have the monster be reasonable) - If you really want the monster to be some kind of Flowers for Algernonsympathetic victim, I guess you can, but I think it works better knocking someone overboard into the pitch-black icy water, then dragging them under the ice sheet and letting them scream themselves to death, pounding on the ice above them.That’ll teach them to laugh at grappling rules!Or the character has to do a slippery scramble up onto an ice floe in the dark and try and get their friends to come through the mist and rescue them.Think Jaws, Piranha, Anaconda, The Reef
Bryn Shander - “Foaming Mugs” - 2/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - A fight scene in a blizzard can be intense, especially if the confusion leads you to get lost in the wilderness.But this is just a fight.
Caer Dineval - “Black Swords” - 4/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - Trapped by a blizzard in a castle full of satanic cultists?Now we’re talking! Think The Shining, Green Room, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Caer Konig - “The Unseen” - 3/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - Duergar will show up later in the story, which makes this a better bug hunt than “Nature Spirits,” and they’re invisible, so it’s scarier than “Foaming Mugs.”Feckless drunken authority figure is always a great horror character.The fact that this turns into a dungeon crawl makes me like it less, but the main value I see in it is going back to Caer Konig afterwards and unleashing the rumor that the Ten Towns have been infiltrated by invisible killer dwarves.If you thought people weren’t paranoid enough before!Think Predator, Forbidden Planet, The Invisible Man.
Dougan’s Hole - “Holed Up” - 2/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - I like the town.Nothing says horror like an isolated community of sullen inbreds.Add a ring of druid standing stones and you have atmosphere galore.I want to like the intelligent killer mammoth.I do.I want a player to light a flare in a blizzard and lure Killephant (my new, much better, name for Norsu) into the druid circle with their own body and then have the other players drop a big Stonehenge rock on its head to kill it.But the whole thing with the dead giant and the wolves that are his friends…it’s an evil Pixar movie when it ought to be Razorback with a furry elephant.Good fight, good loot, not horror.
Easthaven - “Toil and Trouble/Town Hall Capers” - 4/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls.Like the hag.Love the frost giant skeleton trapped in ice. But the real money is in Easthaven, a town dripping with horror tropes.Starting off with a public execution?Always creepy. Duergar shrinking to tiny size?I have a weakness for Gremlins/killer doll horror and this does it for me.Also the Auril-worshipping Dragonborn innkeeper is a potentially dynamite character and if you don’t use her in Easthaven, you should just move her someplace else.You need a religious fanatic telling a crowd that they need to sacrifice your characters and she’s your girl.As a devout worshipper of Auril, she could also be a very good Honey Bunny to Sephek Kaltro’s Ringo if your guys manage to split him off from Torrga.The Halfling bard is an exposition dump waiting to happen and he’d be a great person to brutally kill.Add a seance and an evil ship figurehead and you’ve got hours of material here
Good Mead - “The Mead Must Flow” - 1/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls.You could maybe get something out of the bees, but it honestly feels like someone was just trying to make a Candyman reference that didn’t go anywhere.“The Mead Must Flow” is just a quest with a little comedy and politics glued on.
Lonelywood - “The White Moose” - 3/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls. I hate Nimsy Huddle and the fact that the tavern owner is a spy for Faerun’s premier bad guy, which has nothing to do with the events of the campaign, is a waste of space. Yes, this episode leans hard on horror-comedy. But I’ve seen a lot of killer animal movies, and never one about North America’s deadliest quadruped. Whatever Canadian wrote this, take a couple toonies from petty cash and go to Tim's, my treat. If you want a killer animal episode, this is superior to Holed Up. Track the creature to its lair and find the mad scientist responsible for its creation. Keep it tight and abandon the mummy and the dead sister. Think hard about the random encounters. A banshee is actually a more interesting monster than a killer moose. You don’t want a more interesting monster pulling focus from your star. Think Grizzly, Razorback, Burning Bright
Targos - “Mountain Climb” - 2/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - You know what would have been scary?Climbing a mountain, being attacked by a yeti and fleeing only to discover the body of the last person to escape from the yeti, who then froze to death on top of the mountain, and realizing that that was to be your fate as well.But that happened to an NPC.Your characters get to befriend the yetis and then find the body of the adventurer that the actually scary thing happened to.Also, more politics, in case you give a toss about the Zhents expanding their influence in the most isolated garbage place on Toril (look out, Lords’ Alliance!The Zhents have secured the Nothing concession from a place that will be frozen solid in six more months!).
Termalaine - “A Beautiful Mine” - 1/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - A teenage girl singing a song that has an upsetting rhyme scheme and nothing to do with the story?We can do better.At best, just another quest.Doesn’t help that I hear the voice of Trex as Frank Welker’s Nibbler from Futurama.
Summary
So, the quest line, for me, would be “Cold Hearted Killer” “Lake Monster” “Toil and Trouble” “White Moose” and “Black Swords” in some order.I’m inclined to end with “Black Swords” because after that the players have a new base.But I don’t want them wandering into extraneous areas.Maybe start off doing”Lake Monster” in Targos, instead of Bremen.A murder happens in Targos, maybe they’re the ones who find the human shipbuilder, dangling from the rigging, as they come in with their catch.They load the plesiosaurus onto a dogsled and take it to Bryn Shanter to sell it.Maybe they share the path with Torrga's crew.In Bryn Shanter there’s another killing and they get the job to find the killer.They have their first confrontation with Kaltro and they think the job’s done.People tell them Torrga might bear a grudge and they should light out for Easthaven.They get to Easthaven, do “Toil and Trouble,”and find another murder has taken place when they get back.If they only thought they killed Kaltro, now they find out they didn’t.If they killed him right the first time, it’s Nymetra, the Auril-worshipping dragonborn, doing a copycat killing.They chase the killer to Good Mead and get roped into “White Moose” there instead of Lonelywood.They head back to Easthaven and do “Town Hall Capers - The Chardalyn Caper.”I haven’t figured out how to make them go to Caer Dineval yet, maybe Torrga shows up in Easthaven looking for payback, or the crowd turns on them if the magic stewpot gets stolen, but they escape through a blizzard and end up at Caer Dineval for “Black Swords.”
There’s some narrative fat there.It’s only a first pass.And darn it, I don’t know if the Asmodeus vs. Levistus thing isn’t going to be one plot line too many.But I think that’s the framework I’d use for a start.
I think it's hardly a railroading exercise. He's not denying the players anything he's simply playing with a path in mind. I may do the same. I cherry pick the more interesting and fun locations / secrets by simply making them the first ones they hear rumors of or meet NPCs from. I don't remove the others I just guide the players a bit by making the ones I think will be the most fun for my players a touch more prominent or work those more interesting locations into their backstories etc. I like seeing all the content eventually.
I'll agree with your last point. We had a storm kings thunder group fall apart from that. But to the term "railroading" you have to give out info in the game in some sort of coherent order, I think labeling it as railroading just because you pick the order you present the info because you think you're players may have more fun with it may be misleading to new DMs who find this thread.
I'd call it railroading if you didn't present the other stuff or kept them in the cities you wanted with blizzards or avalanches etc...
%100 agree, to each his own. Just making sure the New DMs who come here for help don't see that feel their doing something wrong if they change the order of their quest hooks to direct the players a bit. In the end (imo) it's about rule #1 making sure you're players have fun.
I admit that D&D isn't the ideal engine for horror. Most players think more like Michael Myers than Jamie Lee Curtis. And rightfully so - you don't adopt a war-forged barbarian with a zweihander as your alter ego because you want to feel scared. But it's a flavor one can introduce sometimes to the group and there are strategies that are more likely to give a DM success.
I'd even concede that there's a little railroading in what I propose, but if one chooses to run RotFM as a horror campaign, I don't see a better solution. Horror requires pace and pace requires economy. If this were Masks of Nyarlathotep, you could let players travel to any location they liked, but some of the quests here just aren't fit for purpose, in my opinion.
I really like the first post here a lot, and have been thinking a lot about it myself after reading over the book for the last few days. There are a few quests I agree left me scratching my head a bit, and I wasn't sure I was that enthusiastic to run them. The Dougan's Hole quest in particular seemed a bit iffy with all the talking animals and their strange dynamic. The thought of TPKing a group with a woolly mammoth they're in no means ready for before they're even out of the first chapter felt a bit.. unappealing.
While I'm sure you could easily overhaul this to still be a search and rescue mission, I do think a total replacement might be better.. especially if you want to lean into some Deliverance type horror (though that's probably not the best way to get them to care about the town..). Since I mostly really want to run the "Frozen Memories" encounter of the week anyway, it could be tailored scaled to fit this task quite well as a substitute.
The town is sacrificing food, but it could be a good head-scratcher for a group to why the tavern there is also sacrificing heat?
Edit: Couple thoughts about your criticism of the nature spirits quest - I agree that it's the least 'scary' quest, but I'll probably be leading with it as one of the first three quests that my group is offered for two reasons:
Mechanically, I'd like to get them up to level 2 as easily as possible, since I don't think many level one groups could handle most of the other quests. I'll be using milestone leveling, so there really isn't an easier quest to get them over that 'peak-squishy' period.
Tonally, it's appropriate to have a little levity in horror. If things are relentlessly bleak then players can become numb to it. I think they serve an appropriate purpose in returning a little innocence back into the setting.
I think those are good arguments, particularly the fast leveling one, I just worry that one place is as good as any other to look for chwingas, which might lead to aimless wandering. And of course, there's plenty of time for chwinga-related levity when they're doing long-haul trips in Chapter 2.
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Long post - lots of SPOILERS
So, some of us have had a chance to look at RotFM now, and while it was described a few times as a horror campaign, I think it’s clear that a DM can run it as anything from a Studio Ghibli film to a straight dice-rolling slugfest. I notice that the writers’ also went to a lot of trouble to provide an opportunity to solve problems non-violently. And, ladies and gentlemen? I see you. And I value your efforts.
But what if you wanted a horror game? What if you told your players they were going be in a horror campaign and now you’re confused because it’s full of cute little Pixar creatures? Well, I think the potential is there, but it’s going to be up to the DM to sew the body together on their own. I’ve given some thought to how I’d run the campaign in order to maximize horror, starting with rating the bits I see with the most potential. In this post, I’ll focus on the new crunch and on Chapter 1: Ten Towns. In the meantime, let me put the much-appreciated non-violent problem-solving over here, by the garbage can…
Wilderness Survival Rules - These are gold. Enforce them with all the consistency, fairness and mercilessness of nature itself. When your players are double checking their equipment lists for a one hour dogsled trek, they’re scared enough.
Character Secrets - The real value here comes from every player knowing that the other players have a secret as well, which makes them suspect one another. Some of the secrets have actual horror potential and others really don’t, at least not within the feasible scope of this adventure. But the fact that they have them and keep them, benign as they may be, will create some tension among the players.
CHAPTER 1
Starting Quests - The starting quests are designed to get your characters to leave Bryn Shander (or wherever) and explore, but aimless meandering is the opposite of building tension, so we need to keep it to a minimum. Five quests is the most you get out of Ten Towns, XP-wise, so in addition to the starting quest, let’s just pick the next four best. Save the rest for a day when you’re missing players
Cold Hearted Killer - 2/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls. Regenerating enemies always have some horror potential, especially if you don’t know their weakness. I think I’d have him downplay his regenerative abilities if he saw any sign that he could encounter fire. He'd rather just take a dive and play dead and get up off the slab later. So the PCs think they killed him, even decapitated him, but he keeps coming back. And I think his calling card needs work. Maybe icicle through the eye. He's supposed to be likable, so he's not a Jason Voorhees unkillable slasher. Think up some terrible Freddy Kruger slasher jokes for this guy, instead.
Nature Spirits - 0/4 Screaming Shelly Duvalls. Since they have nothing to do with the rest of the story, I hesitate to even use the chwingas as (forgive, please) an icebreaker. Maybe if you changed Dannika Greysteel to Vellyne, you’d at least establish who Vellyne is before Chapter 4.
The Ten Towns:
Bremen - “Lake Monster” - 3/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls (1/4 if you have the monster be reasonable) - If you really want the monster to be some kind of Flowers for Algernon sympathetic victim, I guess you can, but I think it works better knocking someone overboard into the pitch-black icy water, then dragging them under the ice sheet and letting them scream themselves to death, pounding on the ice above them. That’ll teach them to laugh at grappling rules! Or the character has to do a slippery scramble up onto an ice floe in the dark and try and get their friends to come through the mist and rescue them. Think Jaws, Piranha, Anaconda, The Reef
Bryn Shander - “Foaming Mugs” - 2/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - A fight scene in a blizzard can be intense, especially if the confusion leads you to get lost in the wilderness. But this is just a fight.
Caer Dineval - “Black Swords” - 4/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - Trapped by a blizzard in a castle full of satanic cultists? Now we’re talking! Think The Shining, Green Room, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Caer Konig - “The Unseen” - 3/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - Duergar will show up later in the story, which makes this a better bug hunt than “Nature Spirits,” and they’re invisible, so it’s scarier than “Foaming Mugs.” Feckless drunken authority figure is always a great horror character. The fact that this turns into a dungeon crawl makes me like it less, but the main value I see in it is going back to Caer Konig afterwards and unleashing the rumor that the Ten Towns have been infiltrated by invisible killer dwarves. If you thought people weren’t paranoid enough before! Think Predator, Forbidden Planet, The Invisible Man.
Dougan’s Hole - “Holed Up” - 2/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - I like the town. Nothing says horror like an isolated community of sullen inbreds. Add a ring of druid standing stones and you have atmosphere galore. I want to like the intelligent killer mammoth. I do. I want a player to light a flare in a blizzard and lure Killephant (my new, much better, name for Norsu) into the druid circle with their own body and then have the other players drop a big Stonehenge rock on its head to kill it. But the whole thing with the dead giant and the wolves that are his friends…it’s an evil Pixar movie when it ought to be Razorback with a furry elephant. Good fight, good loot, not horror.
Easthaven - “Toil and Trouble/Town Hall Capers” - 4/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls. Like the hag. Love the frost giant skeleton trapped in ice. But the real money is in Easthaven, a town dripping with horror tropes. Starting off with a public execution? Always creepy. Duergar shrinking to tiny size? I have a weakness for Gremlins/killer doll horror and this does it for me. Also the Auril-worshipping Dragonborn innkeeper is a potentially dynamite character and if you don’t use her in Easthaven, you should just move her someplace else. You need a religious fanatic telling a crowd that they need to sacrifice your characters and she’s your girl. As a devout worshipper of Auril, she could also be a very good Honey Bunny to Sephek Kaltro’s Ringo if your guys manage to split him off from Torrga. The Halfling bard is an exposition dump waiting to happen and he’d be a great person to brutally kill. Add a seance and an evil ship figurehead and you’ve got hours of material here
Good Mead - “The Mead Must Flow” - 1/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls. You could maybe get something out of the bees, but it honestly feels like someone was just trying to make a Candyman reference that didn’t go anywhere. “The Mead Must Flow” is just a quest with a little comedy and politics glued on.
Lonelywood - “The White Moose” - 3/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls. I hate Nimsy Huddle and the fact that the tavern owner is a spy for Faerun’s premier bad guy, which has nothing to do with the events of the campaign, is a waste of space. Yes, this episode leans hard on horror-comedy. But I’ve seen a lot of killer animal movies, and never one about North America’s deadliest quadruped. Whatever Canadian wrote this, take a couple toonies from petty cash and go to Tim's, my treat. If you want a killer animal episode, this is superior to Holed Up. Track the creature to its lair and find the mad scientist responsible for its creation. Keep it tight and abandon the mummy and the dead sister. Think hard about the random encounters. A banshee is actually a more interesting monster than a killer moose. You don’t want a more interesting monster pulling focus from your star. Think Grizzly, Razorback, Burning Bright
Targos - “Mountain Climb” - 2/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - You know what would have been scary? Climbing a mountain, being attacked by a yeti and fleeing only to discover the body of the last person to escape from the yeti, who then froze to death on top of the mountain, and realizing that that was to be your fate as well. But that happened to an NPC. Your characters get to befriend the yetis and then find the body of the adventurer that the actually scary thing happened to. Also, more politics, in case you give a toss about the Zhents expanding their influence in the most isolated garbage place on Toril (look out, Lords’ Alliance! The Zhents have secured the Nothing concession from a place that will be frozen solid in six more months!).
Termalaine - “A Beautiful Mine” - 1/4 Screaming Shelley Duvalls - A teenage girl singing a song that has an upsetting rhyme scheme and nothing to do with the story? We can do better. At best, just another quest. Doesn’t help that I hear the voice of Trex as Frank Welker’s Nibbler from Futurama.
Summary
So, the quest line, for me, would be “Cold Hearted Killer” “Lake Monster” “Toil and Trouble” “White Moose” and “Black Swords” in some order. I’m inclined to end with “Black Swords” because after that the players have a new base. But I don’t want them wandering into extraneous areas. Maybe start off doing”Lake Monster” in Targos, instead of Bremen. A murder happens in Targos, maybe they’re the ones who find the human shipbuilder, dangling from the rigging, as they come in with their catch. They load the plesiosaurus onto a dogsled and take it to Bryn Shanter to sell it. Maybe they share the path with Torrga's crew. In Bryn Shanter there’s another killing and they get the job to find the killer. They have their first confrontation with Kaltro and they think the job’s done. People tell them Torrga might bear a grudge and they should light out for Easthaven. They get to Easthaven, do “Toil and Trouble,” and find another murder has taken place when they get back. If they only thought they killed Kaltro, now they find out they didn’t. If they killed him right the first time, it’s Nymetra, the Auril-worshipping dragonborn, doing a copycat killing. They chase the killer to Good Mead and get roped into “White Moose” there instead of Lonelywood. They head back to Easthaven and do “Town Hall Capers - The Chardalyn Caper.” I haven’t figured out how to make them go to Caer Dineval yet, maybe Torrga shows up in Easthaven looking for payback, or the crowd turns on them if the magic stewpot gets stolen, but they escape through a blizzard and end up at Caer Dineval for “Black Swords.”
There’s some narrative fat there. It’s only a first pass. And darn it, I don’t know if the Asmodeus vs. Levistus thing isn’t going to be one plot line too many. But I think that’s the framework I’d use for a start.
Great work, I was thinking of some horror elements I could add to the campaign and this has given me some ideas.
"Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced"- Soren Kierkgaard
"Whatever Canadian wrote this, take a couple toonies from petty cash and go to Tim's, my treat. "
~you sir are my hero. made my morning
I think it's hardly a railroading exercise. He's not denying the players anything he's simply playing with a path in mind. I may do the same. I cherry pick the more interesting and fun locations / secrets by simply making them the first ones they hear rumors of or meet NPCs from. I don't remove the others I just guide the players a bit by making the ones I think will be the most fun for my players a touch more prominent or work those more interesting locations into their backstories etc. I like seeing all the content eventually.
I'll agree with your last point. We had a storm kings thunder group fall apart from that. But to the term "railroading" you have to give out info in the game in some sort of coherent order, I think labeling it as railroading just because you pick the order you present the info because you think you're players may have more fun with it may be misleading to new DMs who find this thread.
I'd call it railroading if you didn't present the other stuff or kept them in the cities you wanted with blizzards or avalanches etc...
%100 agree, to each his own. Just making sure the New DMs who come here for help don't see that feel their doing something wrong if they change the order of their quest hooks to direct the players a bit. In the end (imo) it's about rule #1 making sure you're players have fun.
I admit that D&D isn't the ideal engine for horror. Most players think more like Michael Myers than Jamie Lee Curtis. And rightfully so - you don't adopt a war-forged barbarian with a zweihander as your alter ego because you want to feel scared. But it's a flavor one can introduce sometimes to the group and there are strategies that are more likely to give a DM success.
I'd even concede that there's a little railroading in what I propose, but if one chooses to run RotFM as a horror campaign, I don't see a better solution. Horror requires pace and pace requires economy. If this were Masks of Nyarlathotep, you could let players travel to any location they liked, but some of the quests here just aren't fit for purpose, in my opinion.
As always, to each his own!
I really like the first post here a lot, and have been thinking a lot about it myself after reading over the book for the last few days. There are a few quests I agree left me scratching my head a bit, and I wasn't sure I was that enthusiastic to run them. The Dougan's Hole quest in particular seemed a bit iffy with all the talking animals and their strange dynamic. The thought of TPKing a group with a woolly mammoth they're in no means ready for before they're even out of the first chapter felt a bit.. unappealing.
While I'm sure you could easily overhaul this to still be a search and rescue mission, I do think a total replacement might be better.. especially if you want to lean into some Deliverance type horror (though that's probably not the best way to get them to care about the town..). Since I mostly really want to run the "Frozen Memories" encounter of the week anyway, it could be tailored scaled to fit this task quite well as a substitute.
The town is sacrificing food, but it could be a good head-scratcher for a group to why the tavern there is also sacrificing heat?
Edit: Couple thoughts about your criticism of the nature spirits quest - I agree that it's the least 'scary' quest, but I'll probably be leading with it as one of the first three quests that my group is offered for two reasons:
I think those are good arguments, particularly the fast leveling one, I just worry that one place is as good as any other to look for chwingas, which might lead to aimless wandering. And of course, there's plenty of time for chwinga-related levity when they're doing long-haul trips in Chapter 2.