Skull RPG: Game Masters Tell Your Story

 Hey Storytellers,

One way to amp up the suspense and terror is to put your players into a "closed-loop" scenario. If you ever watched any movies from the 1980s or before it was very common to have this happen to your heroes. There is a storm, the phone lines are cut (and cell phones don't exist yet), everybody is trapped in one location like a mansion or hotel. Queue lights turning off for less than a minute and then one person is killed. Queue lightning crash. Shocked gasps.

Ok, that is harder to do if your players have teleport or many forms of magic. Stuck in a room, "I cast stone shape." But here is a scenario where it works.

Your players come into a town. They can start to notice that fashion and language sound odd. A "knowledge Local" or similar knowledge will reveal the language is about 200ish years old. That is odd, but maybe the players ran into the RPG equivalent of the Amish.

I won't get into all of it here in the description, but we lay out many possible ways for the players to discover that there is a wizard who is going to perform a grand experiment in the next X days or hours. The issue is the experiment failed and it locked everyone in time.

Over the next hours or days, your players are slowly becoming a part of the story and are less and less able to affect it. If they can't stop the wizard from doing the experiment they will be trapped in the story forever. Of course, there are consequences to stopping the wizard.

This builds on the ideas of psychological horror and choice, as well as using a timeline to build suspense and terror. These three concepts were handled in earlier episodes not that long ago. 

 Hey Storytellers,

So many times the party moves at the pace of the wizard in medium levels. I know that DnD 5 helped with this problem from earlier additions, but still, there is a way to bring in suspense and terror (if that is what you want) in your game.

What if the party cannot rest? What if they just cannot stop safely or they are interrupted just at the moments that they need to do to refill their spells? Whether that is praying to their god at sunset or sunrise, or uninterrupted rest for a long period of time.

One of the best cinematic shows for this was an episode of the new Battlestar Galactica (as opposed to the one from about the time I was born). It is called 33 and you need to know anything about the story. Every 33 minutes the enemy jumps to their location and they have to scramble fighters until the fleet can charge their faster than light drives, which is like 45 minutes. The issue is the thing chasing these poor people are robots. After days of this, humans are physically falling apart, because drugs can only do so much. They only have so many fighters and fighter pilots. They are making mistakes. Time is killing them. The suspense is crazy.

You can do this in your game and I will show you how - take a listen. 

 Hey Storytellers,

Do you have one of those players that obsessively read the monster manuals? They know what the monster is by the beginning of the second sentence of flavor text.

But that isn't the worst part, is it? No, they immediately tell everyone at the table how to fight it, the monster's strengths and weaknesses. This would be fine if they rolled a knowledge roll, but no this person is playing a fighter with no knowledge ranks, yet seemingly their character literally knows everything in the entire pantheon and to defeat it.

How? Well, they are metagaming. They are pulling in outside information that their character cannot know.

Two ways to take care of this: 1) Talk to them outside of the game about it and have your other players watch for it if need be, 2) Change some of the standard monsters to be immune to fire instead of acid if that could make sense or maybe silver doesn't do double damage now cold iron does. 

 Hey Storytellers,

I have played some of the great DnD games that were converted from DnD Version 1 or 2 into 3.5, but after you play through the Temple of Elemental Evil or Castle Greyhawk or even the Tomb of Horrors can you really reuse these?

The short answer is yes, but not with the same story, traps or monsters, most of the time. Take the city of Greyhawk for example. You can use this for any major metropolitan city in your world. Change the names of the quarters if you want.

The same goes for dungeons. Frankly, I find creating a dungeon to be the most time-consuming thing I have to do. So much in fact that I will create them off the cuff if I can with just a list of traps and monsters and have a handful of rooms for my mini-boss or my Big Bad. The other way to do this is to grab dungeons online and then replace the story, monsters, and traps with my own designs. Remove the flavor text and plugin what I need. 

Hey Storytellers,

Gothic horror uses elements of death heavily, but sometimes has romance included as well. Poe was well known for this and Dracula by Bram Stoker is a classic in this genre.

So any game with the typical undead ghouls, ghosts, vampires and the like could fall into this genre.

One other area that I like to think about is if the plane of existence your players find themselves in is working against them. Imagine that every day or week your players are active in this environment they have to make a will save. Maybe it occurs anytime they do a violent act. If they fail they get a corruption point, and then when they wish to not do violence (or stop violence on another) they have to roll a d100. The save is the number of corruption points they have. On a fail the storyteller (that's you) chooses for them (evil grin).

You could combine these concepts where the world of the living is being corrupted by a Vampire Demigod and corruption is really servitude to it. That explains the corrupted paladins and clerics serving this beast. 

Hey Storytellers,

If you have ever played the Witcher III you know exactly what this is. If you haven't, go pick it up on gog.com it is worth the cost.

Regardless, psychological choices is when you give your players free choice to make a decision that will have a lasting impact on the gaming world in which they are playing.

You can make these decisions a choice between two seemingly bad or good choices. I will say that it is easy to choose between a good vs evil choice, but what if you have to choose between saving a person with something that could kill them or letting them die? That is a minor side quest in the Witcher III. If you choose to save the girl, you find out much later while randomly walking into an army camp that she is alive but non-verbal and unresponsive. Her husband wishes you had let her die and one day he may have to kill her to be free. It is a gut punch.

Listen to find out other ideas of implementing this into your game.

Hey Storytellers,

Psychological horror is my favorite genre of really anything, except maybe a good mystery. Of course, combining the two will always get me to take notice.

Here we talk about how you can use psychological horror in your RPG. This genre focuses on mental, emotional, and psychological states to frighten, disturb, or unsettle its audience. This could be the village of Innsmouth in Lovecraftian fiction, the odd characters that Scooby-Doo encounters while trying to solve the mystery or any number of things.

Explore how you can use this subtly or overtly in your gaming world. You can use this in non-horror genres and will see it creep up in Star Trek quite often actually. 

Hello Storytellers,

In a game, we are playing right now with our guest storyteller, which is the DnD 3.5 adaptation of the DnD 2.0 Temple of Elemental Evil.

We found a pair of bronze doors and of course we are now collecting things to build a tavern when we take that fateful arrow in the knee.

We are expending resources into this endeavor, which has absolutely zero to do with the game.

So the question has to be asked do you as our storyteller just break down and throw us a bronze door or something cool for the tavern every once in a while or follow the pre-built module to the letter?

As a storyteller I always ask myself if side obsessions like this are ok or are they indicating my players are bored. There isn't an easy answer to this, but by asking the question you can make your game better, even if that means you work with the players to build their tavern near the end of the campaign.

Hey Storytellers,

Here is another creature that you can play in your next gaming session.

This one is a psychic water breathing monster that can dominate people with a lower will score.

The players come into a town that feels a little creepy because most of the important and strong people have been dominated by an Abolith. Eventually, they will figure this out and come to a cave that leads down to the ocean. It is there that the monster stirs. What are its intentions - listen to learn some options for your game table.

Hello Storytellers,

Today we explore the numerous subgenres of horror. Some of these I would never work into my game without express permission from my players. You never know what people's buttons are and horror is the one that will push many buttons (known or unknown).

Of course, some elements of horror can be used in any major genre. The abandoned town, ship, or space ship. The killer that is picking off people one by one and you are in a "closed-loop" situation, which means that you are stuck in that place with no escape for some reason.

Or the monster horror genre that is RPG to a tee, except most storytellers miss the opportunity to build up the suspense around their monster until the final conflict (think the first Alien movie).

Regardless of what you choose, come explore the many different types of subgenres of horror to see if one or more might liven up your next game session.