Thread: I want Scary Monsters!

I wasn't arguing with you Umbran; I think that you are both correct, and that your opinions are not mutually exclusive. __________________ [A]ny good dungeon will have undiscovered treasures in areas that have been explored by the players, simply because it is impossible to expect that they will find every one of them. - Module B1, Page 24 Check out My Website ! ! RCFG - My free mostly-OGC OGL game! RCFG is intended to be a fusion...

Quote: Originally Posted by Raven Crowking I wasn't arguing with you Umbran; I think that you are both correct, and that your opinions are not mutually exclusive. Yes. I'm agreeing with you.

You don't think east European aristocrats are nasty looking.

Quote: Originally Posted by Umbran The quote is directly from the text, and I think it speaks for itself. I'm familiar with the text; I've read Dracula three or four times. I think the takeaway I get from it is that Dracula does not look like any old eastern European aristocrat. There's always weird quirks about him; a pervading and ubiquitous sense of wrongness, that Harker is always trying to discount and blow off, because...

All the advice in this thread can be surmised in one sentence: read the Ravenloft Black Box. There's an entire section devoted to instilling fear, horror and dread on the players as well as the characters.

Quote: Originally Posted by Quickleaf Completely unknowable and inhuman monsters have little for the PCs to touch base with - there is no hope of understanding them - they are an unsolvable mystery. I think a scary monster is scary because there is the potential to (at least partly) understand its motives, its reason for being, how it came to be. And something about that agenda, drive, or background has to be astoundingly terrible. I'm...

There's something about the walking dead that humans find particularly scary. I believe we have an innate fear of human corpses, which has evolved because of the risk of disease. The greatest horror writer ever imo , MR James, invariably uses humanoid terrors, often undead. But he never humanises them, we have no insight into their thought processes, if any, so they are always somewhat alien. It's possible the many European folk...

I think it depends a lot of the system, using WoD or GURPS even a big dog can scary the players to death... :P Some combat intensive systems, such as D&D, can't do the trick very well, because the players mostly know their characters won't die, killing and looting instead... and no good description can 100% alleviate that meta thinking...

Discribe them that way.

Quote: Originally Posted by Hussar You don't think east European aristocrats are nasty looking. As someone who lives in Berlin and works regularly with Opera patrons, I am reluctant to confirm or deny this as truth. I will say this though: The Aristocrats who still circulate do, indeed, have an otherworldly quality.