Shit sucks, to be honest.

I mean - fuck - what the hell? What kind of shit is this? They just have to get out of a hotel with crappy little 'traps' like those?

Seriously. Start over, man. Start over.

>>922855

Not precisely. Their car will be more or less destroyed when they get out, entire area is covered in fog, and beyond the little highway rest area there's blank farmland for miles.

And the highway will have zero vehicles travelling on it. It's supposed to be somewhat scary.

>>922862
Unless your PCs are chicken-shits, it won't work.

"Huh. No cars. All there is is farmland for miles. Well guys, I suggest you check the hotel for food, and if there is none, go raid a local barn for some pork or something. Let's just get the fuck out of here, kk?"

>>922864

Hmm, damn. Any ideas for making it scary, other than adding zomgzombies?

Maybe I can convince one of the players to act as a villian, like he lured them there to kill them while playing the friend.

If you want a Silent Hill campaign, don't be a pussy and throw some fucking Hell at them. If you want to be subtle, have one person dream or hallucinate the monsters and whatnot.

I disagree with the other anons, it has promise, but uhh.... what's the payoff? What the hell made the whole bloody chains thing happen?

I gotta tell you, if I played a game that ended like a lot of modern horror movies (It was all a dream, YOU"RE THE KILLER) I'd slug him one.

>>922872
send things they don't expect.

Have them spot things just barely visible in the fog, only for the 'thing' to run away when they try to get closer to investigate.

When they sleep in a building, have shadows of things peer at them from the window, only to scurry away when they see it.

Then have one of the players dissappear (work it out with them ahead of time), only to come back later, doing the same things the mystery creature did.

>>922876

Hm, how's this sound:

The 'baddie' is a malevolent poltergeist that can't be harmed but can't directly harm the PCs. Ideally the PCs would find the way to exorcise him and clear the area haunting.

If you want it to be mindfuck-ish and not just like the DM is being a jackass, I would recommend writing up some backstory for why all this shit is going done, and have there be ways for the PC's ingame to discover this stuff if they take their own initiative. otherwise its just like ZOMG SHITS HAPPENING.

>>922881

That's a good one. Maybe doors slamming shut and locking one PC in a building away from the others. Shit randomly turning on.

I.E. Silent Hill meets Saw?

I hope you know your players, cause your average player will likely get bored of a rp with no confrontation... With the right group and the right ambiance it could have potential, but like I said think about your group first, if you have the "Can I hit it with my axe now?!!!?!!??!" guy your campaign is doomed to fail by default.

>>922890

The last campaign I ran with this group was a political RP with 4 factions trying to assassinate a king and take control of a nation, so they're fine with sporadic to no actual fights.

But the idea is that not being able to fight back = scary. Or did I get that wrong?

Make the fog thick - seriously, you can't even see three feet in front of you probably. Besides, there must be some other residents. Imagine this.

Bob: "Right. I've searched out the final building, I think i'll try and make my way back to Jack."
DM: (He botches a 'Navigate' roll.) Right. You arrive at your destination. You see the outline of your friend.
Bob: Cool, I walk forward and say that I didn't really find -
DM: As you walk closer, you discover it is one of the residents, skinned and impaled on a pole.
Bob: ... Well, shit.

>>922899

More like annoying. Make sure that the players get a reward from every encounter, like a plot point, a clue or just random information about what they're up against, since otherwise it will just be an exercise in frustration.

>>922907

No residents, so substitute dead bodies in still-warm yet destroyed vehicles. Or behind the counter in shops. Hmm.

>>922913

Oh yeah, have the players find a diary with cryptic hints concerning what happened in the town.

The concept of having nothing but traps oppposing your players is one of those "good on paper, not so much in reality" ideas. There are only so many ways you could describe a trap corrrectly - hinting to the players that it's there, without blatantly giving it away.

How about making the traps center around a slowly revealed story? You could give hints about what happened to this place. If the players fail to act on these hints correctly the "punishment" could play out along the Silent Hill theme. The area they're in gets dragged a little deeper into the netherworld, a monster starts following them and gets closer everytime they screw up, etc. That way you could start out with an empty space and fill it up with some really scary shit.

So, yeah. Players will get bored with traps and the Silent Hill setting won't carry itself. That's not to say you couldn't do anything with this setup, though. It just needs something more.

>>922909

Book containing information on how to subdue poltergeist, shredded with a new page or fragment being found after each encounter. Throw in some fake ones to screw with them.

>>922913
A pitstop, without residents?

Well, shit. Were they stupid enough to invite themselves into some abandoned building?

You could have the pcs discover shadowy ambiances of the previous residents, like a shadow in the fog, and have them gain primary plot points therein, but keep it still confusing. Perhaps have one of the shadows be a potential, yet confusing ally. (just throwing ideas out)

1: Watch The Mist
2: Do everything it tried to do
3: ???
4: Profit

>>922886
This. Creating a story is everything in this kind of setting, otherwise they will just start walking down the road out of town, they gotta hit something eventualy.

What you need are story telling elements without needing actual NPCs. Make Some Meta-NPCs, have half a journal laying around and make sure it's pre writen. make most of it blah blah but have a part near the "end" about lseing her mommy, now daddy is gone too, now I lost my dolly. Try to mention a discarded child's doll in the genaral description of some area before hand so maybe someone can remember it and go back and find the doll which could lead to another clue. Lets say when they pick it up they hear a little girl screaming behind a nearby door, and if they kick it in it's an empty room with no other ways out and the doll's head sitting in the center facing them.

If the only thing keeping them from Getting TFO is the car, you need to give them something else to look for.

>>922919

Well I was planning on doing stuff resembling the following:

DM: You enter the warehouse in a group. It's a fairly small warehouse, with a good third being taken up by an office. The warehouse is more or less barren and completely grey and empty. The lights in the warehouse are flickering, and the light in the office seems to be flashing.

enter office

Entering the office, you see a wooden desk facing the window, with blood smeared over it. The overhead light is swinging back and forth like a pendulum and flickering, and scattered papers litter the ground. There's a water dispenser and a file cabinet on the back wall, along with several blank picture frames. The exit door to the back of the warehouse is to the side.

exit office

As your group exits the office, the door slams shut immediately after (2nd person) leaves. Metal shutters clatter down the interior office window and the interior door audibly clicks, leaving (3rd and 4th people) alone inside the office. The swinging light overhead begins to flicker.

>>922921

Afaik dont most of the people that work at the highway pitstops commute there? I can't ever recall seeing housing when I fill up at some random gas station in the middle of nowhere.

While all the people who say you NEED combat are fulla shit, the big problem we all have is that you are talking about a game that is literally nothing but you yanking their chain for the whole night.

>>922936

I'm really not sure how else you work survival horror RP, though.

>>922931
Mindfucks are fun. I'd suggest creating some limits to the force they confront's power. Have them be able to do things that weaken it or give it strength.. as an example, maybe staying in one room and talking about it, believing in it, makes it worse when they start to move again.

Being destructive or angry might feed the force, conversely if they can remain calm and resist the urge to smash up windows and try to bulldoze a way out it weakens the force.

You know the crustaceans in resident evil 4 where you have to pay attention and react fast, or they can kill you? Try taking a page from that book and make the attacks by the force potently lethal, not just all mindfuck cut scans.

>>922931

You neeed more descriptions of the warehouse. Things moving in the shadows, maybe. Broken car parts formed into wierd contraptions. Messages written on the walls, maybe in strange language. Disembodied voices speaking to the PC's. Why did they enter the warehouse in the first place? Have the journal they found (hidden inside the Gideon's Bible that is ubiquitously found in every hotel room) tell them of something that happened in the warehouse or whatever. Atmosphere, man.

An immortal being that is bound to a certain area, has almost unlimited control in that area, and the PCs are stuck in that area.

They must leave that area.

There is no taking an axe to the being. There is no shooting. The being is eternal, ever-living - the only way to escape it is to escape the surrounding land. But will it let you?

>>922937
Have payoff.
I did the exact same thing you did, but put a morhg behind it. Players were freaked, managed to gather clues, corner the beastie and move on.

The plot was taken directly from the shitty 90's horror movie "Ghost Ship". I told them not to download the movie and watch it, because that's what the game the following week was gonna be based on. Of course they all did just that, so I switched around who was a helpful ghost and who was an enraged demon soulcollecter and it surprised them nicely.

>>922942

Well yeah, I was just describing a potential 'encounter'. Like, what would happen there if the players didnt have a sledgehammer and break down the door is that the light would go out and one of the PCs inside would be spontaneously replaced by a bloodied corpse. The PC would reappear asleep in a bed at some point in the future.

That sort of thing.

>>922931
Make sure to have things not quite add up. If you make something bloody, make it a huge bloddy mess, but leave something(like then next plot point) untouched. If you total the car, have it blown out and semi burnt to a crisp, but the ground under it and area around it looks like nothing happened, no glass or oil stains or scortch marks or anything.

>>922931
Not bad. I wouldn't make it a lethal trap though, as that would frustrate your players, while a "you lose x hit points" if they fail to escape kind of kills the tention.

Here's what I would do. Tell the players that they can hear each other through the wall very faintly (So you don't have to seperate the group and run two encounters). Make the whole point of the encounter for the two players to escape (of course), but give them a secret time limit. If it take the players longer then say, 10 minutes real time to figure it out they get punished.

Have the office open on its' own, with no immediate effect on the trapped players. Later on, you could hint that one of the trapped players has been posessed by a vengeful spirit or that the monster responsible for the office killings came back and caught their scent, something of that nature. Just throwing out ideas, though. I hope some of this can help you.

Oh right, perfect. I remember someone else using this.

How about each PC writes a number on the back of their character sheet, and each time one of them is 'victimized' by an encounter they knock one off that number? I remember someone doing this to measure sanity level or something like that in another thread.

>>922957

And ofc the players don't actually know what the numbers mean, as I'll randomly ask them to add or subtract from it as well.

Alright, so here's what I've got so far.

Highway. 3 lanes both sides for 6 lanes total, crossed by a bridge. West side of the highway has a small motel (think Motel 6) with the starting room, PCs will likely find the motel master key in the first encounter and sweep the motel with random crap in each room (nothing, bloody stains, one room will be covered in maggots). Across street from motel is gas station and fast food shop, gas station filled with destroyed cars and dead bodies in them, fast food place brightly lit and powered but with no food or people inside it.

Across the highway there's a sit down restaurant with cadavers frozen in place (cadaver waitress serving cadaver dinner guests), two abandoned gas stations, a grain distribution warehouse, and a few outbuildings.

While crossing the highway you hear a heartbeat that gets louder as you come closer to the highway median.

>>922985

Again, what's preventing them from just getting up and walking down the highway?

>>922985
What happens if somebody gets sassy and walks right up the median?

>>923000
I'm assuming the same thing that happens in vidya games. They can walk as long as they want, the town in the background remains the same distance away.

>>923000

Think the infinite staircase in mario.

>>923004

Heartbeat becomes deafeningly loud, and character starts hearing voices. Stay there too long and he passes out to awaken in a random location later. The other PCs will just see the fog move in and make him vanish.

Knock a point off that number on the back of the charsheet.

>>922919
YOU ARE KILLED BY A MANTICORE

Ghosts are probably a bad way to go, they're good for effect but what you'll want to maximize creepiness is a creepy, lurking, hidden race that they don't necessarily understand or know. That do things, maybe not inherently violent but something creepy altogether.

Maybe make your town a bit bigger, with a pre-planned point of resolution within the limits of the city/town. The outer barn land should be a bad idea to go through just because its where something bad lurks or would generally kill them long before they had a chance to find civilization.

You don't necessarily need a BBEG but you do need a villain, something for them to gain some resolution with.

And I like the idea of something slowly getting closer and catching up to them the more they fuck up on things. If and when it does catch up to them it should probably be the most horrific thing you can think of, make it capable of knocking a nice chunk of HP off, might give them the illusion of a challenge.

>>923019

The villain could be the person leaving diary notes and cryptic hints all over the place. As the PC's solve the mystery they bring his JUST AS plan closer and closer to fruitition...

Have the world change incredibly while they are not in contact with it - for example - there's a highway? Okay, they fix up a car and drive it towards the highway. Suddenly it's blocked with the largest highway disaster ever seen.

Make a DMPC - a person who is also stuck there. However, this 'person' happens to be the being. An immortal creature with absolute control over the land that he is bound to. He can make highways extend for eternity. He can create and remove obstacles wherever he wants. It's up to the PCs to fool him but the problem is - they don't even know he's the cause of it all, to start with.

>>923030

Wouldn't a DMPC be really really obvious? Gee, everyone else is dead except for this one guy, and us.

Have a small anorexic kid with a mask turn them into lil tree people, and then they have to solve the mystery of the town by doing chores for people while everyone hints of some tragedy in the east, and they have to solve all this IN THREE DAYS or the moon falls down ontop of them.

>>923037
I'd expect them to figure it out early on and butcher him. Then, he reappears later on, leaning against a wall, blowing smoke rings out of a cigar and commenting: "Still here, chuck?"

Inquiring minds want to know OP: What's the motivating force behind all this? *drumroll* the antagonist is...

>>923049
Professor Screweyes

>>923049
Dr. Lucky

Have a phrase or sentence occasionally repeat on radios, tvs, intercoms, that kind of equipment. The players can turn the tuning knob on the radio to get rid of it, turn off the intercom/PA etc, and it goes. Keep this up for a while. Then a player who is nowhere near any of those things hears it.

And yes, it's plaigiarised, but I think it's a nice touch.

>>923049
Dr. StrangeLove

or alternatively

Mr. Merkwürdigeliebe

Have the radios end on something importantly concerning them.

"We've just had reported that the AK47 highway has just been - *TURNED OFF*"

and then it's on a completely different subject when turned back on.

AK47 highway = example.

>>922882
see

>>923049


And we're just doing something somewhat more lighthearted than our last campaign, which culminated in several simultaneous assassinations of political leaders including the PCs and the sacking of a city.

Another pointer (if you don't do this already) when rolling spot checks write down each of their bonuses and you roll their spots for them (don't let them see the dice) and give then conflicting messages depending on their rolls, that way you don't get the (well I rolled the 2 so lets go with yours) problem. Also this way you can feed them conflicting information to increase group tension.

>>923116
This is your idea of "more lighthearted?" Shee-it. That last campaign must have been something else.

Also: Shoggoths. Abandoned areas full of creepy shit and cryptic symbols need shoggoths. Tekel-li! Tekel-li!

>>923124

Last campaign was filled to the brim with GRIMANDARK, lots and lots of poisoned food, random slaughters in sections of the city controlled by certain factions, you've got a single LG king trying to do good to a city with a bunch of LE advisors who were trying their best to kill him.

Wandering around fog is comparatively lighthearted to rolling each morning to check if you ate something poisoned for breakfast.

2 cents:

tabletop games conceived as video games/movies don't work. As said above, GM descriptions only go so far, and no matter how cool the scene looks in your mind, your friends just see some dude sitting at the table describing a dream or a movie you saw or something.

But, if you do decide to run it, don't use save points. The one time we let this guy run, he started our characters in a huge multi-level building from which there was no escape, and there were "magic crystals that when touched make a copy of your soul so if you die you reappear next to the crystal" floating in pretty much every 5th room.

Pic sort of related.

ok, where are the people that run the pitstop? Why are they not there?
How about a chemical leak from a military transport. Blew into the area and fucked up the locals. Players got lucky and the stuff didn't leak into there room. The whole area is off limits till the military can get in with special suits. The stuff lingers in the air creating a sense of paranoia for the players but not messing them up like the rest of the people. Think spooky hellraiser stuff. The locals Don't feel pain, Like to hurt others in wikedly bad ways. Cut up themelves, each other, the pets and now moving on to the visitors. Blood on the floor, bits of fingers laying around. An ear. It makes them not like the light too.

OP sounds like SH4, pic related, although probably already mentioned, thread was tl;dr.

Better yet, have the fog bank clear with them winding up in Ravenloft. What better way to fuck with your players heads then going from a d20 modern campaign into a sudden Ravenloft experience

I think you should cut the gore. Corpses are not scary. The unknown is scary.

Wherever should be a corpse, just put a bloodstain and a piece of paper with a charcoal drawing of a person. Or maybe smear the blood like the corpses has been dragged off. Just make it mysterious.

I ran a short(but sweet) game of All Flesh must be eaten where the two PC's were kids in an elementary school. It was a normal day at school, then they go to the bathroom(at their own volition, I was looking for a moment to do it, also Was making this up as we went along)in the 5-10 minutes they were in there, the world died. Or something, we never got far, but I managed to make it actually creep/scare them with no actual zombies and mostly just atmosphere.

Good effect I've used in creepy situations is to have a cabinet or some equally flimsy storage device held closed by a chain of some rare metal; Platinum or Gold, for instance. When the players get near it something starts slamming into the door from the inside of the thing so hard that the entire room practically shakes. Enough force that the container should be instantly splintered, but isn't. Have incomprehensible roars in some language that the PC's can't understand start emitting from the thing too.

If they are stupid enough to open it, have absolutely nothing happen, except the interior is covered in scratches as if from huge claws and has dark stains that cannot be identified.

Occasionally from that point on have them hear laughter or the whispers of that same language, as if from great distance, just out of normal hearing.

The best time I used it was during an All-Flesh campeign, and the next time the PC's passed a Radioshack, a single TV turned on with crystal clarity (the power had been out for oh, 3 months), and a man in a fine suit and tie thanked them politely, wished them the best of luck, and then the TV turned off suddenly.

And the glass of the tube melted.

Freaked people right the fuck out.