I'm a little late to the party. But I wish to share a story anyways. While DMing a high fantasy home brew, I put my players in a place outside of their comfort zone. They were in these mines deep beneath a dwarven city, these mines were sealed away with explosives and the surviving miners were all driven mad. In there, my players found themselves clinging to a torch for dear life while they move from one lit spot to another while they hear the shambling horrors all around them in the dark. These things feared the light, but with the light ever so slowly dying, for the first time since I started DMing, I was so happy to see my players hold their breath. They found a safe spot where they managed to salvage a lantern but barely enough oil for it, and that's when they thought they found a survivor, this dwarven miner was on his belly on the floor and the moment their healer pat him to see if he is asleep or dead, her hand was latched to its skin, and the "dwarf" laid motionless while from its belly emerged tentacled and insect-like limbs which slowly dragged her towards the darkness. My group disbanded not long after that due to real life circumstances, but I still remember that session.

I wrote my own 1 shot last year that is a much more simplified blend of DnD and Call of Cthulhu. Great for new roleplayers. The game was mostly narrative based. It went incredibly well and was extremely creepy and engaging. These were the key takeaways I had. 1. Make sure the characters are contained in the setting. Make sure each character has some motivation to see the whole scenerio through. Also physically keeping the characters in the setting (Horrible storms, locked building, disabled vehicle) creates the uncomfortable feeling of being trapped. It also prevents the characters from just running away. 2. Limited resources is key. If your group has access to weapons, keep it at a minimum. Also try to figure out how to prevent the group from just calling in backup/police to solve the problem. You want them to feel alone. 3. Creepy ambiance noises and music is key to setting the mood. It really does wonders.

I've realized that something a lot of people overlook in regards to vampires is the tale of the original Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sunlight didn't kill him, it simply rendered him mortal so he could be killed. Just imagine the look on your players' faces when they bring in some sort of daylight spell... only to realize that this vampire is not burning up in the daylight and is just as deadly during the day.

I rewatch this EVERY time I have to run horror, especially the example at the end to get myself in the right mindset. This is such a GREAT video.

Many years ago, I ran a Shadowrun game where the characters had to travel through a sewer. I turned off the lights and gave the players flashlights to see their sheets. It was spooky. They found a little girl and their lights passed through her translucent form. After running away, they found the target facility and broke in. The laboratory was deserted and the only lightning was red. I switched on a lamp with a red bulb for light. As they explored, I described the carnage around them of the biohazard experiment gone wrong...

One of the horror focused thoughts I had was to get a high level monster that roamed the level 1 to 4 areas. You pick one that’s immune to normal attacks and maybe most spells. It always approaches with a distinct sound or smell. All the other creatures are on edge as well. There are signs of it in rooms and along corridors. The concept is for the magic to defeat it becomes the quest. Maybe they travel for information on it. Maybe no one knows and you face the monster with a new ability and die. Then a devil or demon cuts a deal with a PC with the power to kill it. And it works to corrupt the PC for ever after. Either they die and add to the rumors of the dungeon or they become heroes for defeating it. It goes against the normal DnD advice because they should only run away from this creature. It is not an encounter they can win to see it means death. My thought is to use a golem or golem like creature. Something immune to mundane weapons and magic.

Is it safe to come out from underneath my +1 security blanket???

4 yrs ago but still relevant! I'm about to start my zero level adventure in Shadow of the Demon Lord with my veteran D&D group. Watching all the horror tips I can as I'm trying to get a Lovecraft/Howard vibe mixed with original Brothers Grimm.

Using Aquelarre (a spanish game with system similar to Call of Cthulhu with a historical but folklorish medieval setting. translates on "Coven") i can assure you a vampire or a werewolf can be made amazingly scary. the point wasn't try to confuse your players, but make very very clear what were the steaks and how helpless they were in comparison.

There's a KZfaq channel, Horror Babble, where the narrator, Ian Gordon, reads aloud literature in that lowered octave you mentioned while speaking at a slower pace than is generally conversational, as he eerily conveys that sense of remoteness and dire consequences looming just out of sight. In any case, great video, and I am once more going to borrow your descriptive dialog as the heroes descended into the crypt. Like, word for word! Cheers on 50, and I await the next anxiously!

The hardest part for me in my game with close friends is that one of them has a tendency to always crack a joke. He doesn't mean harm, he just can't help himself sometimes. Usually not a big deal, but when you're trying to build tension or dread, man can it undermine the atmosphere. Great video with awesome tips! Thanks

A good example of the ideas you are discussing.. raising tension, never seen the monster until the end is the black and white movie called "the Curse of the Demon". In the original version, the director didn't include the end scene, which apparently was insisted upon by the producers and shows sort of a stop motion monster, but even then, this is the very last scene!

The cell phone observation in spot on!

I follow and have followed a quite a few RPG KZfaq channels over the years. Dungeon Craft is for me the best and most professional. (Not surprising from a Dungeon Master Professor 🤓) I have learnt more in the last few weeks from this channel about running a game than I have in years of watching other channels. (Don’t get me wrong, I love and respect the amazing RPG community we have now and there are a lot of great RPG channels out there, but as Professor Dungeon Master unleashes his years of gaming knowledge on us, I know I am becoming a better DM.

I used to watch Mattew Colville's channel for RPG insight and ideas. Ever since he was mentioned on Critical Role and picked up 200k viewers overnight, the community there has gotten very "Critical Role". I now come here for RPG ideas and advice. You're doing a fantastic job, I have watched every video and subscribed from the beginning. Thank you for your time.

Probably my favorite video to date, though I appreciate many. Thank you! I am running a 2-session Strahd for Halloween. The sense of hopelessness and easy death discussion is really great and timely.

We are starting our first Call of Cthulhu campaign today and this really helped to smooth the edges a little. Thanks :D

Found your video purely by accident but oh how we have enjoyed it. Watched it twice and bookmarked it as a precursor to our next horror game. Thank you. Stay well, stay safe. Helen with Kat and Terri with Robyn (Eastern UK Fenlands)

Awesome video Professor. I love injecting horror into my D&D game (and my in-laws love playing Dread). Looking forward to implementing your advice.

Congrats on 50 good sir. You nailed down something here that I never could really put my finger on, that being the horror aspect of d&d is missing (at least for high level characters). It’s still the best rpg on the market. That go too ol hat that just fits every occasion but it certainly has its faults. I think chalking up those faults rests primarily on that lack of scary, worrying aspect of what makes players clutch those dice and pray to whatever god their players worship. You mentioned distractions and things that deviate from the experience. It’s a good point, my favourite sessions have been an all in approach from the players, jumping into survival mode, thinking of ways to beat their surroundings and keeping the dm’ing fast and loose. Anytime dice get in the way, players asking to search every nook and cranny or ask to sense motive every single interaction with npcs it all just Boggs the experience down. What are the skills you allow your players to ask for and what are the ones you typically do not, if any? I know from my experience most of the social skills are rolled behind screen, by the dm. It seems you also do a lot of rolling (perhaps fake rolling) for these Horror sessions and keep the story going more than giving players too many choices at bogging down the flow of painting the scenes. Would you say the goal of a horror campaign is to make it as close to a choose your own adventure book as possible but still give the illusion the players are making choices? As always, thoroughly enjoy your channel, many great insights into making D&D better. Cheers! PS. I know I’m pushing it here but what’s your take on core d&d vs supplements? I myself remove all supplements and stick to core, as I see them as means to allow for more munchkin characters, with spells, feats and tactics to best every occasion, removing more of that horror aspect that d&d is missing.

This is why I love running low-level D&D, preferably with players who haven't memorized the monster manual. I gave a new player a real fright yesterday with just a ghoul and a dark night, some atmosphere and creepy descriptions. I never said "its a ghoul"... just described it. They had to take a break afterward to calm down, muwhahah.

It can't be easy to put out a quality video every week, so thank you. The only bad part of watching them is knowing, I will never get to play in one of your games.

Looked this up for pointers since I'm running a horror game soon. Horror is a very challenging genre because you have to get your players to surrender their sense of agency or being in control. One of my favorite horror GMs gives a talk before he starts letting his players know that his game isn't fair and it's not meant to be. I love what you said about the players not being heros bit victims... Best way I've heard that said. Of course the key to RPGs is the sense of your choices mattering but the consequences need to be different in horror. It shouldn't be "do I win or face a setback" it should be "do I face a setback or die?" My game I'm planning now will have empowered characters but the powers won't help them and are likely make the situation worse a kind of twist I borrowed from Stephen King and Lovecraft... You might be psychic...but that just means your mind is so much tastier....

Well, guess I'm running a horror game now. You've convinced me to finally do it.

Agreed with all of this....the unknown is the scariest part of any horror game and the fact that your character could be snuffed out easily. Another thing to play up on the relatable terrifying experiences....like being confined in a tight space, the darkness, or just terrifying nature of humans in some regards.

Werewolf gag. Years ago someone at my game store made a card board duck tape dog head that could fit over a person's head and cover it with cheap stuff animal fur and spray painted it ugly. Then they sneaked up on the play group during a werewolf fight. Well, .. it did get a good jump out of everyone. After wards it was kept in a bag and pulled out when people get bored and don't " feel " the horror of the game. Watching a movie on a tv screen is one thing, the person is in control and in a safe place. But when you see a really big dog head in your face out of the blue. Fight or flight sets in, there is the horror or shock value. As for White World/ World of Darkness: Vampire, Larping, new players get prank with someone walking into the playing group cover in a sheet/ blanket, or ski mask wearing a name tag saying " Wraith." And all the old players pretend that person " Is Not " in the room with them. Then the Wraiths/ ghost turn their featureless faces at the new player and stare at them with low groans & moans, with deep quite throat growls for creep effect. Then they surround the sitting player, throw a bunch of dice on the table follow by lifting the chair off the ground/ or just shaking it. New guy is usually nervous as hell at this point. Or old time players new to the shop is " loving " every moment of their .. initiation. A couple of guys bought a few cheap fake long hair fur coats/ throw rugs and made a two person/ two headed werewolf custom. One night at the game shop with a dozen people playing VtM. Guy runs into the room disrupting the game, " Listen up everyone, the werewolves are in the city ! " Random person yells, " .. Why the H*LL do you F**King bring here with you !" A few players just sat in their chairs in stun silence, oddly enough only one woman peed herself. Two guys had a " jump scare " wetting their pants leaving one guy just sitting in wet pants. The shop's owner wife put a " house " rule into effect after that, any player that has a character Failing their Will/ willpower save versus Fear/ horror/ terror/ shock is left " Stun " standing or sitting in place for 3d10 rounds. Cause some of the people were unable to respond for close to three minutes. Others were cool as ice, funny a couple of them just missed it all together. Did they fail their Spot/Alertness rolls or did their brains just refuse to aknowledge what they just saw ? Please take into effect of anyone with heart conditions.

This is a really interesting topic, and you're absolutely right--Stephen King said it is very difficult to inspire terror, even though this is usually his first goal, and if he can't achieve that he will horrify you, and if that's a fail too---he's not proud. He'll go for the gross out. One of the things King does so effectively is combining mundane horror and supernatural horror. You want to see monsters? turn on the 6:00 evening news--you're bound to see monsters a-plenty right there. His super natural villains pray on the character weaknesses of the communities he creates, turning them into monsters--whether it's the local barber surgeon suddenly turning serial killer, or a group of boys who are goaded and bullied into exploring the joys of tying lit tapers to a stray cat's tail. Let's say you're running a vampire---always a crowd favorite. How many of the towns folk are going to be under the Vampire's charm when the characters first arrive? How many more will just be on his payroll? Don't overlook payroll henchmen. They are actually really good because detect evil and detect charm won't be terribly revealing. Your wizards won't pick up anything beyond greed and other attendant petty vices from these NPC's at first. Think of Larry Crockett from Salem's lot. What would detect evil have picked up from him other than he's a greedy, lustful real estate salesman? Yet, think about how much harm he cause his town by not only selling the Marston House and local wash tub to Barlow through his man Straker, but also by covering up the murder and sacrifice of Ralphie Glick so Barlow could come take up residence in the Lot. It doesn't take Barlow long at all to turn the reality for the whole town of Salem's Lot inside out. This is where the horror lives---the terror lives the players fearing for their character's lives. Also when things happen for no reason at all. Say they are in a village--they know something here is corrupting the land, but they've only just arrived and seen some evidence of what is happening--pumpkins filled with maggots instead of seeds--milk goats succumbing to disease and instead of giving milk, it's blackened blood that comes out when a teat is pulled and the goat shrieks in agony from both having overfull udders and from the act of draining them. When nature starts going wrong, little by little always getting worse until it's way wrong--you've effectively undermined their reality. And when they realize this isn't something they can just swing a sword at, you will have unsettled them.

Have played many RPGs over the years including horror RPGs. GURPS Horror was one of my favorites, because it could be ANY monster/creature. I LOVE the "small table" idea. I am going to try that this year in October when I run a horror game. Thanks for the great video!

I love horror. All of our games eventually devolve into some type of Lovecraftian horror. Thanks Professor!

I love horror games, and this really had some great tips. I'd probably have a hard time convincing my players to do it, but it's still something I'd like to do.

Horror works when you have tension build to the breaking point and then have a release. Comical release a NPC says something along the lines of " well....that's something you don't see everyday." when the giant tentacle bursts from the grave yards moldy unkempt soil. Constant tension becomes numbing after a while. Build it...break it...build it again.

These are amazing tipps. I can't believe I learned so much from a single video *_* I'd have never thought of using a smaller table than usual. And the way your voice and the music work together is seriously amazing, I hope I can pull that off half as good when the time comes.

You officially creeped me out reading that scene. Awesome work

I appreciate your work here and the insights you provide. As I was watching, I was reminded of an older movie called "The Curse of the Demon" wherein some supposed demon is haunting certain people throughout the movie, but it is never shown, though several very creepy scenes have other strange and portentous events transpire to lend building tension. The corpses of the supposed victims are always found in locations that suggest that the massive amount of damage could easily have been the result of regular, mundane causes. Eventually, in the American version of the movie, they finally were forced by the studios to add a final scene wherein a terrible demon-like monster attacks the villain on a train track, though the original script called for nothing of the sort. Either way, even in that version, the monster only shows up to confirm its existence at the very end of the movie. Thanks again.

Great call to incorporate smells in the first couple sentences of the scene! I have a line in all my game notes to remember sounds and smells ever since Kenneth Hite mentioned it in a video somewhere.

Great Work, Professor! I'm currently playing a game of Cthulhu 7th Edition as DM with my friends and your video really helped alot in further thinking all of this through. Creating effective horror is a walk on a razors edge. So easy to mess up.

Crowd Control The best way to add fear to a 5e game is to add crowd control elements such as pits, nets, blinding dust, running water, nauseating smells, anything that means the character is at a disadvantage and not just fighting some creature in front of them, but now needing to desperately climb out of this pit before it fills with water or get out of the net before more goblins grab the ends and pull the helpless adventurer to the ground and tangled up. All traps should be survivable regardless of rolls. Good game play should get them out of the situation especially when the characters give up something valuable like weapons and shiny gold as a distraction in order to run away, an element that most players never experience. Running away with little more than their lives should be something nearly all adventurers experience at some point. Coming back to try and rescue whoever was captured adds to the story. Being captured adds to the story. Using NPC's as fodder is a good way to show your players how dangerous a place is. Cocky ones that run off on their own should die not because they have low HP (They should be just as tanky as the fighter) but because they made bad choices and are getting ganged up on, knocked down, disarmed and well, disarmed. Players earn points for keeping NPC's alive one way or another. Even in online games like League of Legends, the characters that are terrifying to go against are ones with effective crowd control. It's one thing to get obliterated quickly, sigh and look for counter items against that character. It's another to watch a circling champion with crowd control options move around and prepare their horrifying abilities such as grabbing you and pulling you to their team, knocking you up, slowing you down, blinding you or in any other way robbing you of your usual toolkit of abilities. Throw in a goblin that does 1d4 damage but has a blowgun who's toxin causes a weakening effect, forcing all rolls to be made at a disadvantage for a few hours, and they'll fear the moment you tell them they hear a *Fwoop* and a dart from the darkness fly right past one of them or they see one or two goblins with a blowgun. Crowd control means reducing their toolkit and options, and they should know when to run away.

Wow. That narration was incredible. He should do trailers

I really enjoyed this. I needed to get into the right mentality before running curse of Strahd - I enjoy your perspective on heroes v victims

Speaking of Warhammer, I know you play/played the RPG but did you ever get an army? I’m a big High Elf fan in the classic Warhammer Fantasy game, and (big surprise) Eldar in 40k. I also like Lizard Men in Fantasy and Necrons in 40k. Oh and on the topic of horror I think that yes D&D horror games will always be different from Call of Cthulhu... but you can still get a very different, more horror like game by adapting in certain horror tropes and creatures, similar to what the Ravenloft setting did. Sure it will always be more of a cross between high fantasy and horror than pure horror, but it can still be a fun alternative. And there is nothing to stop you from adopting unknown, Lovecroftian horror creatures into your D&D games.

Really nice work. Been DMing for 38 years (on and off) and learning a lot from this channel.

i agree with the part where you say that the party should not be able to damage the monster. I'm currently playing fatal frame 2 and in the start of the game you have nothing, you start to see visions and ghosts and you can't do anything to stop them, but as soon as you put your hand in that camera you feel like the hunter, because now you have a weapon, as soon as a ghost appear you will want to kill it, so the tension ends.

I see a DUNGEON CRAFT video, i give a like. Great video! looking forward to campaign part 3

Congratulations on 50 videos!! I've watched every episode, can't wait to follow the next 50! Again, great delivery and great information. Also, my Frostbitten and Mutilated hardback just came in the mail today! It's packed full of so much!!;

GD it, as soon as he said "you enter your ancestor's tomb", my brain went "Darkest Dungeon!!!!" Spot on, good sir!

Coming to this quite late, but really enjoyed it. Funny you describing Alien. I re-watchex it recently, with my partner watching it for the first time. Having grown up in Iran, she knew nothing about it. Sad to say, she didn't find it scary, and I realised that for a modern audience there is actually too much of the alien in it. For the time, it must have been scary, but now we're used to such fast and complex special effects, it seems like when we see it, it just stands there doing nothing for a while. I'd love to see an edit where for every 20 second shot of the alien it was cut down to 2 seconds.

I have a few criticisms of this. Death: Death shouldn't be common in a horror RPG, death is by far and away the least interesting thing a party can face in horror, simply losing a character is not that big a deal compared to instilling the *dread* at the thought of *potentially* losing a character. It's a bit like the old bandaid analogy only reversed, you want to slowly peel it off, without ever reaching the point that you actually remove it. The players, however, should always think you're just on the verge of removing it. Weakness: While the players should feel weak, and definitely be often powerless, you shouldn't assume that they should *always* be ineffectual. Giving them a gun but making it worthless can oftentimes shatter player immersion. If you have tools available to them, those tools should do what is expected, otherwise the players can lose interest as it may feel as if you're just putting them in a bad spot, and "railroading" them by giving them tools, but not letting them use said tools. Besides, giving players hope is the best way to take it away later. D&D: Yeah, don't run horror in d&d, this I wholeheartedly agree with, but I have an additional point. Any game system that has initiative-based combat is terrible for horror. The second you have people rolling initiative and going into tactical combat mode, immersion is broken. The monster manual comment is also pretty valid. Horror Monsters: Vampires and Werewolves can be scary despite being common, you don't need raw mystery to scare people. The unknown can be VERY scary, but don't assume that a vampire or werewolf can't be used in horror correctly, don't assume that you have to be trying to be completely novel in all of your creatures. Familiarity can be used to enforce horror, since the players can "expect" the bad things that are going to happen. It feels like you're trying to put horror *movie* logic into horror *games*. Many of the tropes don't transfer well as you don't have the ability to "force" characters to do a thing in the way a director or writer does.

Ruin has come to that family. Also, as far as music goes, the label CryoChamber (on Bandcamp) releases absolutely outstanding dark ambient music. To borrow your phrase: I don't get a kick-back; I just think they're great.

Honestly this sounds like Mothership, great TTRPG

I run a weird west game based on Stephen King's Dark Tower, which is more like Horrific Fantasy than pure horror, but this actually helped a lot!

I always think horror movies with no-name actors who are not widely known always work better. If they are not famous actors, they seem like real people. On another note, I ran a game over the weekend for my homebrewed horror system (They Came from the B-Movie) where all the player characters were elderly people in a retirement home called Shady Grove. They were part of a trial testing a new Alzheimer’s drug. Turns out the drug unlocked heightened dimensional senses in the human mind allowing the PCs to see creatures that exist all around us, but that our normal senses cannot perceive. There was a monster that fed on the minds of humans, draining their memories and mental energy (and elderly have a life time of memories) and making them seem like they are suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia. So the elderly residents were the prey, but only the PCs could see the creature preying upon them. I ran it like Cocoon meets Call of Cthulhu and made the creature ("The Mind Sucker") really alien and nasty. In addition, all the PCs had physical caps for their stats because they were 65+ years of age. They also had to have a flaw, like "This damn hip" or "my arthritis" or "grumpy", because you do not get old without some flaws. The players had a really good time. They had to deal with not only the monster, but the staff, which was a real challenge. And even if the monster drained their minds (which happened to a few) no one would still believe them because it was seen as rapid, onset dementia.

Thanks for this. I'm gearing up to run a horror game soon after a long break and this advice is very helpful.

One thing that CoC players don't ever seem to note is that Lovecraft and Co. NEVER actually used the same monsters more than once. Most of the references weren't for actual USE, they were for off-hand references to be made to create a sense of connection and context.

Refreshing to see other people around the world play ttrpg's, horror is my go to as well.

Best channel ever.

I do think goblins and known monsters can be scary. The issue is a lot of things have made them cute. Even the minis you use have a cuteness. If you have them skittering around in the shadows and attacking unseen they become scary. Your description of them can be scary. The environment they live in can be disturbing. You make them more primitive and if you do that you connect them to some primordial evil force. Maybe keeping the grub theme they connect to swarming insects and plagues of infestation. I like to pull my goblins back into a magical creature. A mystical fog rolls in and they cross over to the mortal realm. They can enter from any point in the fog so it blows passed the party and they attack from behind. They can teleport at will and turn invisible. They are part of the unseelie court. They have connections with death and winter. Their goal is to bound you to service of their queen. You can also make goblins of the seelie court. They are life and summer. But particularly life run rampant. Swarms of insects, diseases plagues. Swealtering heat and anything horrible in hot places or summer. One’s touch my dehydrate you. You fix the problems by making things more mundane and turn them into humans. Which is kinda the love craft angle in a way where the abomination you’ve been hunting is your relative. My strategy is often to make things less grounded. The benefit of making them more mundane is you don’t have to change as much. Mystical creatures needs powers and you might accidentally make them too tough but that could be ok.

For other music i also recommenced Nox Arcana, one of my favorite albums is Blood of the Dragon. Very fighting for spooky and Dark Fantasy themed stuff.

The PCs of my party are very powerful and my brother is very good at convincing villains, so I decided that the villain will be a kind of mold that plays with their minds. Their flashy powers won't help and ya can't argue with mold. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic we will play by call. I think it kills the mood, but there's no way we'll break quarentine.

I have a couple of problems running a horror game. First, all of my players have seen movies like Young Frankenstein and The Addams Family. A standard joke is: "You see a trail of blood leading down to the dungeon. You are armed with a nightgown and a candelabra. What do you do?" Second While it's all great fun to have the heroes all die in a story, the people are playing a *game* and would like to win. While death should come more often than in a standard D&D game, you can't serve it up every week. Finally the setting, sure blue lights, candles, fog machines and eerie music might be possible at home, a lot of games are played in school cafeterias. Most security people and janitors take a dim view of that sort of thing. I actually *do* run Call of Cthulu, but we play for fun (mostly)

Thank you professor, picking up a lot!

Great advice, back in the 90's TSR released 2 modules 1 for Planescape And the other Ravenloft , both can with a cool CD that helped DM's run the module, give backstory, and provide sound effects/ music it. It was an awesome idea I wish they would have explored in greater detail , the plainscape one was actually set up to be a Minor that answered questions about Sigil. Im not sure 100% but I think drive through RPG had the sound files available for download. I agree with what you said about not revealing the monster until the last moment, that's what always made Lovecraft so effective ( and sadly why making a movie based on his work in horror so hard to do correctly). However there is no reason why the classic monsters can't inspire dread ! My favorite D&D supplements have always been the Vanrichten monster guides, I picked up his guide to the created when it came out the year I was 14 I think and was blown away. Each one described how to make custom monsters that seemed real , and just as important a real threat! I don't know why but I have yet to find anyone talking about them on KZfaq when it was extremely well received and the IP loved!

It's like Martin Sheen is teaching me about DMing. Great video :)

I’m running Curse of Strahd right now and I realize that the sessions where everyone truly feels the horror vibe is when I spend a lot of time before hand working on descriptions, weird visions, shadows and false sightings. However, the players are now level 5 and their power level is pretty significant - it’s getting harder to scare them.

Great advice! I always thought that my Call of Cthulhu games kind of dragged. Now I see why :-)

Amazing video with great info. Thank you for your wisdom

I’ve personally found horror to be more atmosphere and giving players a goal that isn’t “kill the monster”. The best horror session I’ve done was when my players were in a dungeon doing a trial for a god of the heavens and cosmos. The last stretch of the trial that they’d picked was pretty simple “walk down the hallway”. I basically ripped the gibbering mouthers’ confusion effect and slowly turned up a looping gibbering the further they got down the hall while having said hall melt and warp into it’s true form. By the end the players understood that too many fails and they’d be swallowed up, one even nearly was and if it wasn’t for their fellow players bravely running back and nearly dieing, they’d have been swallowed up and lost to the mass. Horror works best at low levels, but at higher levels, it’s a matter of reminding players that no matter how powerful they are, they are but ants in a tube compared to the vastness they float in. Sometimes mechanics get in the way of that, so just play it fast and loose with powerful monsters. Make a theme and the. Make up mechanics to fit that them on the spot, after figuring out ac and hp of course.

YES! my pcs are nearing the end monster and it’s all about the slow simmer through the whole campaign... If every encounter is supposed to be horrifying then by the end it’ll be boring and pcs will be numb to it. Slow but surely build up the weird just like an orchestra building up to a tense moment. I can’t wait to unleash it on them

I am currently running a fantasy/horror game in the Dreamlands outlined in Lovecrafts “Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath.” Dnd is a more practical game in this context where the two genres are more balanced. I’m also assisted by Andy Sandersons “Cthulhu Mythos” supplement for dnd 5E. Lots of fantastical and horrific things take place beyond the wall of sleep.

I really enjoy this channel

i discovered this channel shortly after starting to play rpgs. I've found all kinds of great ways to run games for my wife and kid. Actually, I find i'm now not very good as a 5e player, because I only have a sketchy grasp of the actual rules

Excellent advice.

Great advice! I got a lot from this.

Keeping the monster unseen or merely glimpsed at the edge of the fading yellow light of the torch... Not showing is why the film "Cat People" (1942) works as well as it does. Fortunately, none of my players are plugged into the horror fiction of HP Lovecraft or Clarke Ashton Smith as I am. Even if I described an Elder Thing or a Flying Polyp, they'd have no idea what it was. Moreover, if there were Ghouls, they might have an idea of its abilities, but its stats would be a complete mystery.

8:31 "... even if you just wound it ..." -- The Professor "If it can bleed, then it can die." -- Dutch, /Predator/

I love you in so many levels

Every time I come back and review this video, the plaster incident is one of the biggest signs of whether or not the players trust the dungeon master. The reason why that's so important is that the players need to be able to trust the dungeon master when they say there's nothing here or nothing else of significance and nothing special going on with the plaster. But it's important for the dungeon master to say that the character with the highest perception or knowledge about buildings should be able to foretell that the floor above them is compromised. There was another video a while back regarding traps in dungeons where if the players don't check for traps and you spring a trap on them then they will then slow the game to a halt by checking everything for traps. My opinion as a dungeon master is that the character that is most knowledgeable and skilled in that category should automatically detect it. What that does is it makes that player characters importance in the group critical when dealing with situations or trying to investigate. Otherwise they might be victims to traps.

But none of the words scrolled on the screen when you said they would

In my D&D tyle games, the horror monsters do Charisma damage, not hit point damage. And they can do 2-3 points a hit. Your fighter's 85 hit points don't mean sh*t. That's horror. And its kind of cool, because the bards and sorcerers are suddenly the strongest ones.

Excellent advice. I love a good horror RPG. 😎

If you like horror RPGs like Dread, you'll like Ten Candles.

Really good video

DnD 5e. Five players. Level 12. Two fighters, a monk, a halfling wizard, and a drow warlock/bard. We were promised a sauna episode at a hot springs inn. Our DM scared the everloving shit out of us. We saw some shit that night.

*Please cover more Call of Cthulhu & Warhammer stuff .*

Great video - I've watched it several times to help me with conveying the right atmosphere for the more scary scenes in my standard D&D game. Quick question - at the end of the video, you mention scrawling through a list of commonly-used terms from HP Lovecraft (eldritch, blasphemous, etc.) but I didn't see the list. Can someone help me find it?

Lustmord is perfect for horror mood music. Dark and ambient.

My friends run DnD and I’m the horror friend. It’s always fun watching the shock after we have come off of a DnD campaign and they forget what it’s all about

Thanks to some of your advice, I have a better idea on what to do when I do inject a bit of horror into D&D. My plan is to go more atmospheric with the horror rather than victimizing the characters. What I plan to do is have someone that the players care about taken by the local Annis Hag (Basically the D&D version of Baba yaga) and all the way up to her home I plan on describing how the landscape starts getting more gloomy and eerie. Fetishes and signs made of flayed child skin marking the territory and an unnatural silence is meant to mean that she knows they're coming long before they ever arrive at her home. I also randomly generated some of her minions, I forget off the top of my head what her muscle creatures are but she has Quicklings for servants. The cool thing about Quicklings is that they are practically The Flash but the size of a small elf child because they are special fey that have to move as fast as possible all the time. I plan to use them to make the characters paranoid about being watched.

11:43 damn, dude!

HP Lovecraft's writing is all public domain, and was such in 1978 when ALIEN was being shot. No "royalties" needed to be paid on that property, ever.

I highly recommend Chronicles of Darkness. You're just a person in today's world dealing with supernatural things that are unknown. Even vampires are incredibly powerful and different. The system uses Integrity which feels a lot like CoC's insanity to me. Half to most of the weaknesses on vampires are just pop culture and don't work. You have no idea what they can do. They are truly overpowered compared to humans.

Great tips in this video! Near the end, Prof DM mentioned a vocab list of Lovecraftian terms to borrow. That would be neat, but I didn't see it on screen, or in the vid description either. Was that something we could look at?

I used to run Chill. & played in buddies CoC game. I like the feel & drama of a good horror game. I love going to a horror movie and being tense, if not out right scared. I dont like gore. Gore is not horror. Let your mind do the work. Lighting, quiet ambient music or sounds. Fear is in the mind. When you can feel the tension in the room. Then your telling a good story

From Oe through 1e Dungeons & Dragons, the game by design works for horror as one plays the non-heroic game, 0-level normal men, 1st level veterans and as high as 3rd level - if anyone survives that long.

if you want to run horror in dnd, make the party level 1, have them traveling with a caravan, and have a werewolf attack and kill the horses on a full moon night. every night it comes back to pick off an npc or player.

(I hope late stories are welcome.) A way I build dread is to threaten the characters with peril the players are unsure how to confront, escape, or control. Consider games like SCP - Containment Breach, movies like RINGU, or short stories like "The Double Shadow" by Clark Ashton Smith. Even if a monster’s general form is revealed, its deeper nature remains mysterious. Telegraph the uncanny in how the peril appears to operate - something that is not quite in line with what is expected of the reality of your world as established up until this point. I ran a weird fiction game where the party was marooned on an island with an old, abandoned wizard's abode. The party came upon an otherworldly creature of light (that was never outright identified), pinned to the ground, impaled by an inhumanly large spear. The NPC hireling cleric suggested it was an angel from one side or another of a heavenly battle, but as an angel, fallen or not, it could not lie. It pleaded for them to free it, but they felt to do so would be like using a monkey's paw. They learned from the creature that, come nightfall, the isle swarmed with chuul who would drag anything of interest they could extract down to the depths. This was scary mostly because the party wasn't sure it would survive a fight with one chuul, and it effectively gave them a time limit to go to these creepy places and interact with things they found there in order to find an escape from the isle. The party found doubles of themselves in glass tubes in a dark backroom. Their lantern was promptly blown out and they heard glass shatter. These dopplegangers were unusual; sometimes a deep gash would become a large, toothy mouth, a hand cut off would regrow as a long, bony spike. One person's neck just erupted as their spinal column extended 10 ft to bite and constrict the others around it. When the lights came on, many of the corpses still looked human, and it wasn't revealed until later that one of the NPC hirelings had been replaced by a Thing. Feeling clever for discovering a secret door and solving how to open it, the party didn't expect a ghost to emerge from the other side, bleeding black from her eye sockets, or to find her huddled corpse therein amid the treasure. In a small room there was a gem on a pedestal that glimmered dimly with its own light. The remains of varied creatures lay still reaching for it exactly 3 feet away from it on all sides. The party met a mummy, a meek servant of the wizards; it related a story about a strange artifact the wizards discovered that was unfathomably old. Something the mummy could not quite explain happened to them while studying it, but the artifact was still in the next room. The artifact was a perfectly-formed metallic pyramid that cast a shadow not in line with the light cast from the room's window, and in response to the door opening it slowly rotated (not smoothly, either, but as if it existed at a lower frame rate than the rest of the universe), and its shadow accordingly moved across the wall, threatening to eventually fall upon the party like a doomsday sundial obeying a hidden sun. It was the simplest thing, but the party was the most terrified of this room. (As DM, I determined what these things were and how they worked, but I didn't tell the players any of it; I only described what the PCs sensed.)

What do you say about rewarding the players for defeating the monster? My friend is currently running a local horror like system, and he placed an eldrich hunter after the party, the thing is we recently managed to kill the beast (a fight that cost half the party), and after a moment of silence for those that died the npc says "he will be back", we were felling pretty bad as it felt we suffered for nothing. I admit that I was not that happy, but since it is a horror system, I accepted, but the rest of the party were sad to the point the DM retconed the "he will be back" part

The vocabulary never scrolled😨

Hey Prof. Dungeon Master, on the topic of asking cell phones to be turned off or not used during the game, that wouldn't really fly with my group. Most of my players wouldn't have a problem with it, but there is one problem. He's my best friend of over 7 years, and I love him and everything, but he always uses his phone constantly while playing. Sometimes he'll even watch a video on it. It's always bothered me, but not enough to mention it. However, in a horror type game, it's very disruptive to the environment. He's an extremely stubborn person, and I can't imagine telling him to turn off his phone would yield any useful results. How would you deal with this?

I would like to know your thoughts regarding the new D&D's adventure, Ice Wind Dale. Not sure if its been released yet. It is supposed to be more horror related.

I didn't find horror to be difficult to run in dnd. Had a mission start in a haunted mansion (ghosts were made dangerouse, the manipulated traps in the house), had a dank cave below filled with (deadly/modified) undead, the cave opened up to a shoreline with a Dilapidated Pirate ship (which only showed it's true terrible nature once they got out to see), and when the survived that ordeal they "Washed up" at a castlee that was run by a vampire lord and ghoul serfs. Campaign was divided into 4 parts, easily divided Mansion/Cavern/Ship/Castle Castle I designed the mansion to challenge level 3-6, cave for 5-8, ship 8-10, castle 10-12. (2nd Edition). You don't have to be able to kill your players in one hit to scare them, you simply need to convince your players that there is a chance that they "might" die in one hit. AND, never forget to describe the surroundings, and "set the mood".