Thinking about Horror

and writing adventures, because that's my jam.

I don’t particularly like horror movies. I don’t like jump scares, and I’m not into seeing gore.

But I love scary stories. The kind that draw you in and keep you hooked and all of a sudden it’s 2 am and you’ve gotta get up for work in 3 hours but you need figure out what is going on and your eyes feel like they are bleeding but you just can’t put this book down yet and oh my gods what is even happening why would she do that don’t go in there just run!

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Inside

• Thinking About Horror

• September Production Update

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Thinking About Horror

As a genre, what is horror? What does it take for a piece of media to be classified as horror? How do TTRPGs create horror stories? How can we design horror experiences for TTRPGs?

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

H.P. Lovecraft

Horror as a genre of storytelling.

At its root, a horror story — regardless of the medium used to tell it — is about eliciting in the audience that base human emotion: fear. As not everyone is afraid of the same things, there are as many sub-genres of horror as there are ways to be frightened. For instance, someone with thalassaphobia might look at the poster for the classic movie Jaws and start to sweat but find themselves laughing at a tropey slasher flick like Friday the 13th.

Let us quickly review the basics of a horror story. Fortunately, we have an entire subreddit dedicated to the most basic horror stories: r/TwoSentenceHorror (a note of caution: these stories may be quite graphic and there is no obvious way to filter particular topics). Read through a few popular posts, and the following structure becomes apparent:

1. Set up a realistic situation which harkens to real-life experiences of the reader. To do this in one sentence, the author usually attempts to invoke a scene that the reader may have personally experienced, or at least can easily connect with as a real-life scene. The more connection this has with the reader, the more jarring the second half of the story will be.

2. Take the story in a direction completely opposite from where the reader’s experience tells them it should go. Usually this also includes some type of violence (be that physical, psychological, etc.).

In longer-form horror, additional components become important, such as the setting and tone of the piece. The more a story can set up that “yes this is a normal person in their normal house” while at the same time adding an undercurrent of “something is seriously wrong here,” the better the eventual horrors of the story will land with the audience. Generating tension or unease really sets up the horror.

For example (spoilers incoming for a 44-year-old movie) if in the movie The Shining, everything had been perfectly fine until ghosts started turning up, it might have jarred viewers out of the story. But from the initial encounter between Danny (the main character’s son) and Halloran (the hotel chef), in which Halloran tells Danny about the shining, the audience is clued in that something strange is afoot. They are then left to wait in increasing unease for this strangeness to play out.

Horror and TTRPGs.

Horror has a long history in TTRPGs. With D&D released in 1974, the first edition of Call of Cthulhu came out 1981. The 1980s saw several more horror releases, including Chill: Adventures into the Unknown, which focused on fighting monsters and introduced the idea of an organization for which the PCs were working (S.A.V.E., a secret society dedicated to destroying evil), and GURPS Horror.

What makes a TTRPG a horror game? Sure, you could take D&D and write a haunted house adventure and call it horror. There are plenty of undead monsters in the Monster Manual to fill that module. But something would be missing. Something that I’ve talked about before as driving good storytelling: character change.

Call of Cthulhu added Sanity as both a stat and an important check to be made in the face of the unknown. Chill added Fear Checks. GURPS Horror added a Fright Check. Each of these mechanisms serves as a way to test the characters as they are exposed to the horrors that they confront during these games, and failing these checks has important implications for how the characters change over the course of the game.

More recent horror games include Mothership and Liminal Horror. Similar to their classic counterparts, these games include mechanisms to show how exposure to the horrors presented in these games changes the characters (Stress/Panic in Mothership and Fallout in Liminal Horror).

Designing adventures for horror TTRPGs.

With this little bit of background on horror media and horror TTRPGs, let’s look at how we can approach writing adventures for horror TTRPGs. I’ll include notes from my module On The Hill to illustrate how I approached each step in this process.

1. Start with the familiar. Construct the scene with building blocks that are familiar to the players (and ideally the characters). This is the first sentence of your 2-sentence horror story. On The Hill is set on hiking trails in a state park, all things that both the characters and players will have a reference for.

2. Create tension/unease. Start adding in little hints that something is amiss. The players and characters should know something strange is coming, but not know what it is or when it will happen. The Clues and Horrors events give hints that strange things are happening on The Hill; the Doom Clock ensures a slow progression toward the ultimate conflict of the module.

3. Create opportunities for character change. Just like with all of our adventures, we want to create situations that lean into character change. This will depend a bit on the system you are writing for, but be sure to give ample opportunities to test the characters (Stress, Sanity, Fear, Fright, etc.). The Horrors events as well as many of the Monsters will force the PCs to deal with Stress.

4. Make the final conflict violent. This could be physically, emotionally, or psychologically. This is the second half of your 2-sentence horror story, and this is your chance to shock the characters and players. This comes in the confrontation with the Old Timer, especially in his transformation during the fight.

5. You don’t need to explain everything. One thing that many horror stories do that makes them different from most stories is avoiding satisfying conclusions. Let the unease that you generated earlier carry into the post-game period. Leave the players wondering how and why the horrors were happening. The exact relationship between the two major enemies, and the mere existence of some of the smaller enemies, in On The Hill is never fully explained to the characters.

That’s about all I’ve got. I hope you found this little breakdown helpful, or at least interesting. You’ve got some chances coming up to flex your horror-writing muscles as The Lost Bay RPG All Flesh Is Surplus Jam kicks off, followed by the Liminal Horror Field Guide to the Americas Jam.

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September Production Update

Things have slowed down a bit, but I’m still chipping away at some of my bigger projects. Here’s the most recent production schedule:

Again, I have added a line to the schedule only to have it immediately filled out. One Hour Photo is a pamphlet module for Liminal Horror, written for the Twisted Classics Jam. I will be re-releasing both of my entries to this jam (One Hour Photo and On The Hill) next month in the upcoming Lost Bay Jam All Flesh Is Surplus (both will be adapted for that system, of course).

I have been plugging away at UHF Grimoire in the interim. I’d say the overall structure is pretty much nailed down, and somewhere between 50 and 75% of the book is drafted. There’s still a lot to do, as this is a much larger project, but I think I’m easily on pace for a first quarter 2025 Kickstarter campaign.

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Thank you!

That’s it for this issue of Ink & Dice. Thanks for reading! Next time will be Part 2 of my solo play report of Fruit from the Vine (check out Part 1 here). And then we will be into October, and I’ll have more to share about my involvement with The Lost Bay RPG and its first digital convention.

—MAH