Whatsamatter? Scared?

When former D&D Brand Manager Keith Strohm came to work at TSR in Lake Geneva, he and I became fast friends. He was really looking to get into a D&D game, but (although it seems strange to me now) I wasn't running one at the time. Then I was getting ready to run a Call of Cthulhu game. I was looking for players who would really focus on roleplaying, and I could tell Keith would fit that bill.

(As a digression... the current Another Rant has made some readers think that I advocate treating all gamers equally and letting anyone into your game and respecting them no matter how they play. Nothing could be further from the truth. I'm terribly picky about who plays in my games. I only want to game with certain types of people. I don't criticize those who play differently than me -- but I don't want them anywhere near my game table. End digression.)

So I invited Keith to join in the game. He, on the other hand, was very leery. When I asked him why, he said that he didn't like the idea of a horror roleplaying game. He didn't think that a game could be scary.

Heh heh heh, I thought. Fresh meat.

I convinced Keith to join in anyway. By the end of the first session, Keith was so unnerved that he had trouble sleeping that night. Now, at the time, I lived in a 100-year-old church next to a graveyard (no, I'm not making this up). Keith lived a fair distance away, so he would stay with us on game nights and go straight to work the next morning (technically he stayed with Bruce Cordell, who also was in the game and lived in the basement that we turned into an apartment, but now I'm rambling about my personal life and you don't care).

It wasn't long before Keith started telling us that he saw and heard strange things in the house at night. While I'm not a complete skeptic, I suspected that these experiences had more to do with the frightening nature of the game than anything actually supernatural going on.

The point is, Keith quickly became a believer. Games can be scary. (I have many memorable Cthulhu gaming stories from over the years -- most of them involving Keith. Maybe I'll share some of them in later columns.)

Fast forward to today. For months -- almost a year, in fact -- I've been working off-and-on-again on d20 Call of Cthulhu. Before that, I played the original Call of Cthulhu game all the time. I took people through one-shot adventures as well as running two campaigns; one lasted about a year, and another closer to two years.

I'm still surprised, however, at how many gaming professionals I've spoken with about CoC who don't believe a game can actually be scary. They contend that the best you can hope for is to get a group of players who are good at roleplaying and will pretend to be scared. They contend that a group of adults, sitting around a table, laughing, eating chips, and drinking sodas in a nice, bright, warm home can't possibly get scared. Getting scared would mean they believe what's going on is real, and everyone knows that only a lunatic would believe the events in an RPG are real.

Hmm. A good horror movie can scare you. A roller coaster can scare you. But you know that those things aren't real, and that they present no real danger, right? You can achieve the same sort of thing with a game. Remember when you were a kid, and you sat around a campfire, or in your bedroom at night with only a flashlight on, and someone was telling a ghost story or one of those urban legends about the guy with a hook for a hand? Remember that feeling? A game master can indeed instill that feeling in players.

Here are a few very basic tips on how to instill a mood of horror:

Turn off the lights. Play with only dim lighting or even by candlelight. Avoid making it so dim that players can't read their character sheets or are encouraged to nod off (you laugh, but it can happen).

Make the players sit with their back to an open area rather than a wall. You can accomplish this simply by not closing the door into the room you play. Make sure that an area behind them is dark. Every once in a while, glance into that area or through the door as if you saw or heard something. Do this subtly, then go back to whatever you were doing. Don't do it so much that the players actually ask you what's wrong. Do it so that they unconsciously start to wonder what's going on behind them.

Do something sudden and dramatic when things are at their creepiest. After describing what the PCs see as they wander around the old warehouse, examining the strange things they find there, SHOUT the appearance of the monster. Blow out the candles or turn off the lights. Drop a book on the floor. It's a cheap scare, but it'll produce dramatic reactions in your players. They'll also start to wonder what you're going to do next to scare them -- and that will scare them all by itself.

These are only a few suggestions. But they'll get you started. And remember, you don't have to play Call of Cthulhu to introduce horror aspects in your game. You can make an evening of D&D or Star Wars or whatever game you play one of creepy tension by incorporating one or two of these techniques.