As I am gearing up to write a short module to showcase Errant, I wanted to put down in writing some of the theoretical principles that I have been working out in my head.
First and foremost, you really must read this mindblowing essay if you are at all interested in scaring people in your RPG games. And while I have read this essay entirely and I believe it has an enormous amount of important information, particularly advice on delivery and structuring the story, I think that it overlooks what I think is the common thread of all terror in RPGs.
Describing the minute details of some diseased corpse will definitely repulse someone. It might even disturb them. But they are not really going to be gripped by primal fear in the same way that someone actually looking at such things would be. The abstraction of the character prevents that. While I am sure that you can indeed scare people with disturbing or unsettling imagery in your game, I feel that it is a poor substitute and that it leads downhill towards bizarre attempts at freaking people out with just really fucked up shit. And I don't want to head down that path.
I think the mistake here is focusing too much on what would scare someone if they were there. The character is there. The player is not. You can try to create a scenario that plays out in a way that goes upstream from the character to the player. But I think that oblique strategy is inefficient. I want to scare the player directly, but I don't want to make really fucked up shit to do it. So how can I scare the player?
I think the number one thing that will scare your players is the LOSS OF CONTROL.
There is a magnificent scene, one of the greatest moments on film, in an otherwise fairly slow and boring movie called Instinct, starring Cuba Gooding Jr and Anthony Hopkins. I am going to spoil this movie quite a bit here, but it is a 1999 movie so deal with it. Anthony Hopkins is this anthropologist who goes into the jungles of Africa and basically becomes an uncivilized person living with a group of Gorillas. When a game warden kills a Gorilla, he kills the game warden. Cuba Gooding Jr is a psychologist assigned to evaluate him when he is extradited to the USA. The movie is a psychological drama between these two men.
So here is the scene. Watch it.
Now in the RPG environment, it is much more clear than in the real world that you are not in control. At any moment, the GM can simply say "rocks fall, everyone dies". You live and die by their whim. Now that is not entirely true, because the GM has a social obligation to you. If they keep having rocks fall, pretty soon everyone quits the game, and it is over. But really the GM has absolute power in a pretty rigid sense. As Gygax said, "a GM just rolls dice because he likes the sound they make".
A lot of the game is about the Illusion of Control, as the scene from Instinct shows so eloquently. The player has to believe they are in control. When the GM starts adding things to the world that begin to cast doubt on the player's ability to control the outcome of the situation, they start to get alarmed.
The conventional way of doing this is simply by threatening the player with monsters. When it looks like the fight cannot be won and the players are looking for some strategy to escape. When hit points are falling and it is getting grim, that is when the fear kicks in. But that is just as cheap of a trick as putting really fucked up shit in the game.
You can also design the game in a way that outcomes can be scary. I have talked before why I made damage work the way it does in Errant because I want the player to see declining hit points as moving toward being maimed rather than towards death. But there is only so far you can go with game mechanics alone.
So what can you do to really scare the players?
Lets take my recent post on skeletons as an example. Lets imagine that the characters enter a room and it is very dark. While they are getting their bearings, two brilliant red eyes appear in the darkness and a skeleton steps forward calmly. When the Fighter swings his +2 sword at it, the Skeleton grabs the sword and laughs.
Why is this scary to the player? Well, the Skeleton has made it abundantly clear that it is totally unafraid of the characters, that it is essentially immune to powerful magic weapons, and that it has a sense of humor. Yes, I realize the last is probably the most terrifying. It signifies that the skeleton has some kind of thought process beyond "BRAINS!!!"
To borrow from Donald Rumsfeld a bit, there are four kinds of information.
1. Known knowns: Things you are sure that you know. For instance, that you have 3 gold pieces in your hand.
2. Unknown knowns: Things that you are unaware that you know; such as the account number that is on every utility bill but which you don't realize is even there.
3. Known unknowns: Things you are sure that you do not know. For instance, how magic really works.
4. Unknown unknowns: Things you are unaware that you do not know. For instance, that I am really an alien being sent here to write blog posts to distract you from the fact we analyze your rectum each night. Uh.... ignore that last sentence. That is a ruse....
My contention is that the scariest thing you can do in the game is hint that there are unknown unknowns out there and that you are about to find out about them, in a very bad way. These things dramatically undermine the illusion of control that the players have. That skeleton that laughs at your +2 sword, that is a big unknown unknown that is about to be brought right up in your face. The Troll that merely snickers when you wave a torch at it, that is scary too.
So my advice if you want to build scary worlds is to thing long and hard about how you can bring more unknown unknowns into your game. Trolls that are immune to fire is just the tip of the iceberg. This isnt about monster design either, I am just using that as an example. The NPC that is cowering the corner talking gibberish about how "it ate Bob, why did it eat Bob, oh god help me". That is pretty damn scary too. Because you don't know something and you have no idea what it is.
And one final tip. If you use clowns, you are a hack. Seriously, that is fucking dumb. Don't do it.
Stay thirsty, my friends.
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