Summer is winding down in the leaves are beginning to change if not make their way to the earth. It is slow, but inexhaustible the coming of crisper weather, the slow dying of the light of days. The season of mortality is upon us and so are the stories that remind us that all must perish. Night is inevitable and with it comes the hunter’s worst fear: the loss of sight, that sense of all primacy to predators. That sense of helplessness and fear give rise to the stories which hold their greatest potency in the gathering gloom.
This is the season of the witching hour and the tales that make people cling all the tighter to one another. If you’re writing fiction or telling ghost stories around the campfire, this is easy to do compared to the issues roleplaying games pose, not to mention problematic structures in entertainment definitions. The problem is rooted in the confusion of terror and horror into a single genre.
From the studios’ perspective, it makes sense to conflate the two. For one, they both induce pathos in the audience. They also focus on the negative emotions that feed into our primal fears. But there’s a fundamental difference between terror and horror. Visually, terror is easier to depict. The stories are about external elements that can’t be comprehended in full nor can they be placated or mastered as a result. Hence, the proliferation of the slasher film. Terror is visceral.
Horror, by contrast, is the internal made monstrous. Horror stories are about characters with agency haunted by the knowledge of the consequences of their actions. Horror involves the character’s willingness to perform such terrible acts for good or ill. Thus, it is often contained within the character and ripples out or undercurrents emanate from the character into the surrounding world. Horror is subtle and disturbing.
Subtle and disturbing is hard to do on film successfully. The medium is too quick and the flood of imagery too intense to let the mind register every detail. In fiction, however, there’s more time to process these details and get a true picture of the horrific moments. Unfortunately for RPG players, this is hard to replicate in a game. Each person at the table has his or her own views on what should happen in the story. This makes it hard to incorporate real horror into a game. While easier, terror is also difficult to harness.
Roleplaying games have two disadvantages going against them: characters are assumed to be possessed of their own agency, and thus more capable than their fellow beings; and it’s a game, so players can walk away at any time. On the surface both of these reasons create barriers to experiencing terror and horror. They also happen to be your strongest weapons against disbelief and a slide into melodrama or camp.
Roleplaying games are interactive multimedia play spaces. If you have a group and they already know the genre or various tones in your campaign, you have several advantages going into a horror session. You can set the environment and create the atmosphere. I’m not in your home, but I did what I could do set of mood with the opening of this piece. Your gaming area is like a film set. Use it to establish mood and tone viscerally.
The next part is a little tricky. Roleplaying games borrow as much from film as literature, but you can’t force players to fit the narrative. They’re here to have fun however they define it. This is where a little knowledge of genre tropes can go a long way. For terror games, you need only to intimate that the villain is larger-than-life and overwhelmingly powerful.
Each time the characters encounter the villain or an aspect thereof, the encounter should be near fatal for at least one character. Also, these brushes with death should have something in common and intensify visually if not in ferocity or cruelty every time. Doing this will tell the players how close to losing their character they are. This, in a nutshell, is the basic formula for terror.
Horror stories are harder to implement because they are internal. Even roleplaying game that uses a lot of literary devices only go so far in letting the audience inside the character’s head. One of the best examples of internal conflict in RPGs is Wraith: the Oblivion and its use of the Shadow to develop internal dialogues everyone at the table can witness. Thankfully there are a few ways to get round this if the game system isn’t built around such a concept.
Players aren’t important in terror and horror games, the characters are. You still want to be respectful as these are your friends, after all. But the emphasis has to be on character development, not player development or maximizing the power fantasy fun. Horror is about choice and the consequences.
Good people often make bad decisions with disastrous results. This is something everyone will eventually experience. What horror does is amplify the tragedy caused by unintended consequences. The problem here is the issue of player knowledge versus character knowledge. It is also the reason you don’t want to focus on players. The players get the tropes and conventions of genres, but character should never be aware they are in a genre, though their dialogue can allude to that if it’s setting appropriate. Otherwise, how do you amplify the consequences of actions to monstrous proportions without players circumventing the genre?
You always want to give players a series of choices, but here’s how you drive forward horror games: Orson Scott Card calls it the terrible choice. The characters presented with two equally bad (or good) choices. No matter the choice, the outcome sucks. Either something equally terrible happens, or the character has to wonder what could have been. This dilemma will increase the sense of dread the players fill not knowing which choice will eventually make the nightmare end. This is why horror isn’t the prevalent form of scary films and why some writers’ stories don’t translate well.
In the next two installments we’ll look at how to get the most out of these genres at the table.