Maintaining the Horror Campaign – Ask Your Doctor If a Horror Campaign Is Right For You

by jmgariepy · March 14, 2013

“Things have changed. The world has changed — and we’re going to have to change with it. Understand? Do you people still think we’re going to be rescued?! Do you?! They’re not coming!! Think about it! It’s been almost a year! We’re on our own; it’s just us and this place. That’s all we have for sure. If you still think things are going back to the way they were — Stop! They’re not! Nothing will be the way it used to be. Ever!”

-Rick, The Walking Dead

“Why don’t we do something special for Halloween?”

It was a simple enough request. The party is between adventures, and your players could use a break from the main story. It’s a good time for a side trek, and a romp through a spooky mansion fits the holiday. So you pull out your graph paper and draw a map of a large estate, complete with trick bookcases and escape hatches under the rug. After sketching the map, you fill in some details for each room… but you can’t just stock the cabinets with zombies and call it a day. Why would the players be here in the first place? Are the characters common thieves come to loot an old house? Really? What makes this mansion different than any other dungeon?

Maybe, instead, someone is hiring the players to rid the house of an ancient evil. That makes sense. Of course your players don’t like to be bullied, and they won’t be happy if you enforce a ‘no looting’ rule. What you need are some really sympathetic NPCs for this adventure. And, now that you think of it, this will all work better if the threat is more subtle than a house full of zombies. After all, the correct response to a house full of zombies is to burn the building down, or pick them off one by one through the windows. Maybe the house is haunted by a ghost? But only one ghost? How can you build a whole adventure around only one monster? What if the house was full of traps and puzzles instead?

So you fill the map with tricks, traps, puzzles and the occasional small monster to break up the monotony. As Halloween approaches, you get inspired, and swing by a craft store to pick up a few candles, some incense and a CD of spooky noises. When your players come over that Sunday, they open the door to Tocata and Fugue in D Minor. Everyone laughs and makes fun of you, but they’re willing to be goofballs, if for only one night, and speak in spooooky vooooices.

And, somehow, it works. The players have a great time. You’re having a great time. You can’t remember the last time you had fun as the game master. But, as with all good things, this too ends. You say good-bye to your players as they pack their dice. They’re still talking about the game as they walk out the door: When Pete thought everyone else was dead, and he was the only player left alive in this crazy mansion, the look on his face was priceless. When you go to bed that night, you realize the players didn’t even ask for experience points.

Next week the players come over and it’s back to the same old routine. It’s fine, but it has nothing on last Sunday. Wouldn’t it be great if every game was like that Halloween game? It’s a pity that Halloween comes around only once a year. But… well… Halloween is just a day on a calendar. It isn’t like the day itself has magic properties, right? The only difference was that the game master and the players felt it was okay to get goofy and creative, if for only one day. But why must everyone wait until Halloween before they have that experience again? What if you didn’t want to have a quick horror adventure, but instead decided to take the first steps toward a horror campaign?

Well, why not? That first adventure had a lot of plot holes. When designing the game, you were more interested in the ‘How’. But, while your players were solving the house’s mysteries, they kept asking “Why?” And to be honest, they had a lot of good ideas. You could pick up on the threads the players left behind. So what should you do first? Riff off the Halloween game and hope you can keep it up? Create a goal for where you’d like your plot to end and work your way backwards? Invent a number of interesting characters for the players to interact with? Build a whole new world from the bottom up, then take a step back and decide what your story must be?

Those are all good ideas, but, no. These things are not the first step to creating a good horror campaign. The first step would be to ask your players if they would like to be in a horror campaign.

Not every group is ready to tackle a horror campaign. For many, role-playing games are a time to loosen up from a tough day at work, or a chance to get away from the family. A lot of players aren’t interested in whatever sparkling vampire idea you’re planning. They want to bash orcs on the head with hammers. They want to loot bodies and gain experience. They want to snarf pretzels and make dumb jokes. And while all these things are possible in a horror campaign, they aren’t the focus. If you fight these players, you’ll find yourself in a tug-of-war, where you keep dragging your players back to the plot, and your players keep dragging everyone into a fight.

Thick-headed players will refuse to help the beleaguered damsel in distress. They will join forces with the agents of darkness. They will get mad when punished by the authorities, then leave town, tossing your hard work in the garbage. In many games, you can railroad these players back on target. It turns out there’s a powerful wizard in town, and, before you know it, poof . The players have been teleported to the center of the dungeon. That’s a very heavy-handed approach, but it works. Sometimes you don’t have much choice. You can either annoy players as you wing it for four hours, or anger players for five minutes, then get back to all that material you wrote down.

But railroading the players doesn’t work in a setting that asks players to scare themselves. Good horror campaigns are built around an agreement between the players and the game master. If the game master is willing to trust the players and cede some control over the direction that the game takes, the result can be an exciting and cathartic experience for everyone involved. But if the game master cedes control, and the players don’t seize on the initiative they were handed, then the game will be an exercise in futility. The end result would be similar to a government that gives a tax break to its citizens so that they can invest in the country’s mutual future, only to have to have its citizens waste their stipend on dispensable foreign goods. There’s a small period where everyone is happy, but nobody profits. In the end, we’re all a little poorer.

The thing we must remember is that those selfish players aren’t wrong for wanting a good time, any more than you’re not wrong for wanting a rewarding experience. As game masters, sometimes our ambition gets the best of us. We’re the ones filled with stories to tell and a desire to create. Our players are here to challenge their minds, or to better express themselves, or to have an experience. It’s our job to make sure the game doesn’t devolve into an endless level-grind, or a never ending search for the betterest weapon with the most plusses. It’s our player’s job to have a good time. If our players are enjoying themselves, then screw ambition, we should be enjoying ourselves, too. Our job should be to entertain. If your players want to swing axes and blast people with spells while smashing through dungeon walls like a party of Kool-Aid men, then who are you to oppose them? You’re just the television set, and the only reason why your friends are tuned into your station is the remote control is incredibly far away.

But horror campaigns can be a rewarding experience, one that your players could enjoy but have never been given the chance to experience. After all, the players may be happy getting together every Sunday to kick some dragon tail now, but, over time, the repetitious nature of the game will weary them, too. Since your role is entertainer, it’s also your job to keep ahead of your audience’s needs. Given time, they will need something about the fundamental nature of the game to change, or they will lose interest. When there’s a lull in player attentiveness, you should talk to your players about trying something different. Make sure they know that they can always return to the usual hack and slash game if horror gaming isn’t really their thing, but give them the right to make the decision for themselves. If your players are going to invest themselves in new characters and plot, they will have to do it on their terms. If they aren’t interested in taking some extra responsibility for the betterment of their game night, then instead of a horror campaign, you’ll have a campaign that’s a horror.

It’s difficult to make the jump from mauling a hundred goblins per night, to caring about a creepy scratching on a window pane. Your players may not be ready to convert from a night of tactics and buffoonery straight to a night of suspense. For entrenched players who are looking to spice up their game, it may be better to ease players into horror by moving through other involved, but less demanding genres. A solid detective story, for example, rewards players who can solve the presented mystery by untangling a web of lies and deceit. If your player’s answer to a complex series of plot threads is to cut through the Gordian Knot by beating everyone up for answers, then nothing has been lost. Many detective stories are resolved through violence: A quick look through a Daredevil or Batman comic books should give you an idea of how to resolve that kind of plot. You’ll also gain some valuable information on the player’s natural instincts, and what they will do when confronted with a challenging plot. The horror genre can, and often does, withstand constant violent clashes, but danger is often contrasted against periods of calm. If your players are attentive enough to absorb plot details, but eventually hit a tipping point where they must hit something, then you can work with that. You’ll need to take pains that your plot can withstand a fight breaking out at any time, but some game masters enjoy the added challenge of working around cagey characters.

Likewise, a game focused around political maneuvering may still lead to the occasional fight scene, but often requires other senatorial skills. The role of statesman can be a never ending quest to elevate one’s own goals, while denigrating those who pose as potential threats. Your players may scoff at the prospect of arguing their way through and around every encounter, but if you leave enough plot threads open, you will soon embroil them in a constant war of words and play on each player’s desire to be respected for their cunning, instead of their deeds. Numerous television series have been built around characters employing the machinations of a political machine to advance their agenda, with occasional action to back up their claim. A Game of Thrones, The Tudors and Battlestar Galactica all make good foundations for political games, where the internal threat is as real as the external threat, and characters are as likely to die due to ineptitude in court, than on the battlefield. Political games may be less forgiving than your basic gumshoe plot. Players who forgo consequences and pick a fight threaten to not only lose the contest, but fall from political grace setting their agendas back many stages. Still, a good game master should be able to adapt future plots to the banished from court players, or decide that the side trek into affairs of state was fun, but that it is now time to hit the dungeons again. Little is lost except for respect in court, and if the players were willing to sacrifice that, then they likely won’t mind if it remains lost.

Listen, I’m just scratching the surface over here. If what you want is a little spice to add to your adventures, there are many, many tricks you can employ. Even if the internet wasn’t teeming with good ideas, you’d be amazed at the things you can come up with if you insist that your last idea wasn’t creative enough, and you try again. A good campaign built around horror, however, isn’t something you throw into your next game and assume everyone will scare themselves because you know how to dim the lights and rattle a few chains under the table. Horror can be rewarding, but in order to reap those rewards you need to respect the genre, or your players never will. Just remember: Don’t force it. If your players aren’t enjoying themselves, then neither will you.

“‘You kill. You die.’ That was probably the most naive thing I’ve ever said. The fact is – in most cases, now, the way things are – you kill. You live.”

-Rick, The Walking Dead