T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
PC Hardware is Toast
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Why I Hated Resident Evil 4
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
In general, spooking an RPG player takes creativity and lateral thinking. The chtuluesque monster with torment-boils wouldn’t do it either, it’s too in your face.
The problem with horror in RPGs is that players think about everything in terms of “do I have the weapons to kill this thing, and if not, how do I acquire them”? You have to play on phobias other than “a big scary monster”.
Indeed. With horror, it’s usually a case of slowly building up the dread, offering just enough hints and glimpses of the monster (if there is one) to let the players’ imaginations do most of the heavy lifting. Cthulhu campaigns can get away with more than most, because they can always lean on the possibility that the character experiencing these events is simply hallucinating it, but still, there’s nothing quite like the DM experience of something like:
DM: “You all slowly file into the decrepit hall, small puffs of dust billowing around your feet as your torchlights dance around the room. It is deathly silent; nobody must have tread upon these floorboards for at least 50 years. As you begin to look around for some signs of the mystic text of the Druids the old antiquarian told you about, Dave… You are the last person to enter the room, and as soon as you do, you are horrified to see a hideous THING crouching in the far corner, like some gangly twisted bundle of too-long limbs and dark, leathery flesh not quite a beast and not quite a man. As your eyes fall upon it, its head immediately whips around to face you, eyes like two deeply sunken pits filled with green flame bursting into life as it lurches to its feet.
The rest of you, you see Dave straighten up in shock, his eyes wide with terror as he stares over at the room’s far corner… But there is nothing there.”
So… Is Dave simply imagining all of this? Or is there really some invisible alien horror in the corner only he can see that’s preparing to attack? ;)
Some of the most effective horror I ever wrote wasn’t intended to be horror…it was supposed to be interesting and funny. But I had basically a ghost appear separately to all of the players. It was made clear the ghost was interacting with them from a distance, but no one else could see the ghost.
I think I may have got things off on the wrong foot.
I also find that rather than making the horror threatening to the PCs, it’s often more effective to make it threaten NPCs the players care about (see Shamus’s article about how actually killing the player in a video game is not scary). PC deaths trigger new character creations. NPC deaths do not, they are actually lost.
That’s not enough, of course, it needs to be part of something that’s also otherwise scary.
And you can’t overdo it, or the players will never stop trying to bubblewrap all liked NPCs as though they’re 1hp elven commoners.
And it requires that there are NPCs the players care about, which is clearly not the case in the DMOTR campaign lol
Jeeze, that’s spooky.
That eldritch monster wouldn’t do much for me, either. But take almost anything and add a relatable human element to it…
Critical Role once memorably had a scene where they were invited to dinner by an NPC from a party member’s past – specifically, a powerful wizard who was very influential in the setting’s government, and also his abuser. The guy was genuinely scary because he was just so believableas a character, with the layers of lies, fear, and intrigue he’d built up around himself – as well as the evident power (or even supposed; he thrived on people not knowing what he was capable of).
Completely outshone every single monster they fought in that campaign, at least for me. Take away some of the surface details like ‘magic’ and he’d fit right into the real world.
Similarly, there’s an author called China Mieville who merges wildy imaginitive ideas with cynical human calculation, which makes it all much worse.
There’s a monster that looks like a severed hand; if it clamps onto your body, it takes you over and uses you as a puppet.
That’s scary by itself, but then you learn that the city goverment actually hires (or breeds!) these things deliberately for use as secret policemen…
I have a question. Is this description lifted from somewhere or did Shamus write it.
Shamus mentioned writing the text for Gimli in the comments on the original comic, when he said he hasn’t actually played Call of Cthulhu.
Well, that is some awesome writing.
Oh, 100%