Four perfectly crafted statues of the player characters are sitting around a table playing a local game of cards or some such. Each is frozen in poses of amusement or laughter. If the players damage the statues a retaliatory illusion is cast on them to perceive the attack from the statue's perspective.

Not really horrifying but all I got right now.

Start it out empty.

Their exploring a crypt or whatever. It's empty and desolate. Nothing around.

Have them go through a few rooms like that.

Creeps them the fuck out.

keep track of everything they sell or use, have an enemy collect it all and neatly organize it. Build a flesh golem out of their dead family. Look up a gray Jester, beef it and then have it send hundreds of one hit die children to kill them.

metagame the shit out of them. Have creepy feeling ambient music and make sure you have dangerous areas for them, ie a floor pit trap that falls out from beneath them (ala Indiana Jones)

Compound those with dark creatures like zombies and add an element of pure evil to it (like a local cult is trying to summon an eldritch horror into the physical plain and if you want to take it a step further, have a town on the outskirts that have lost people recently and have the PCs find the corpses on darkened altars devoted to the horror.

If you want to have fun after that, make them lose, or have the villain run away and have the demon be summoned and terrorize the town and have the PCs find a deus ex machina to return him to his own realm.

>>8570515

I'm looking more for a dark feel for the thought process for it rather than a "Omg mechanics say this shouldn't be right. Where are all the traps?"

>>8570515
This.

Pace.

Long periods of nothing, combined with quick heavy-hitting attacks.

>>8570515
this, then start having the walls fall open and zombies or something pop out and start attacking. Cheap scares are great, but have it able to be Listened to so it's not completely gay

Childrens laughter. Creeps me the fuck out. Get a clip and play it at opportune moments on your phone/laptop. Also a rhyme or such in a childs voice descibing their impending gruesome death.

When they go through a particular door, they enter a party of high-up nobles. Have them surround a large clock, with everyone talking about the "main event" coming up in an hour's time.

Have everyone brush off the idea that they're in a dungeon.

It's not an illusion, they're real, no explanation as to why they're there. If the PCs attack them, they die fairly easily and try to escape (but not deeper into the dungeon).

15 minutes in, everyone and everything barring the PCs start rotting away, and realise it - they start crying out to the PCs to help them. Nothing can be done, and all their flesh rots away, the food disintgrates, jewellery ages and turns to powder, all that. All while they ask help from the PCs.

The "party" is left with just piles of dry bones on the floor.

No explanation is ever given.

>>8570603

This is awesome, thanks Anon. More ideas please?

>>8570603
better yet, the clock is the floor on which the table is set. The chairs are on the hands of the clock so they're always rotating.

I also suggest that the PCs are required to re-route back through that room only to find everything gone. Room is completely clean and devoid of everything they saw before.

Have disappearing torches, random dark moments with giant eyes, hot breath, and then nothing... It's meant to scare the PCs out of their leggings

deep in a lower level of whatever sick, twisted dungeon you can think of, a room colored in pastels, with two tiny feather beds perfectly made up, toys that look worn and well-loved sitting in neat, orderly rows on the shelves and floor, not a speck of dust anywhere. looks like a very young boy and girl might live there, except that there are no signs that they have been there for days and nothing is out of place or even slightly messy.

as the party enters, the door slams shut. opening it, they find the exact same room on the other side, and cannot exit either room. faint noises of child's laughter begin to breeze through the room once they try to leave, and each time they go through the door it gets louder.

as the party passes back and forth, other differences start to appear. in one of the rooms, the toys begin showing up in different places, scattered around the room with obvious signs of wear and play. the beds look more and more disheveled as though someone has been using them. the sounds of laughter increase and the party will begin to spot glimpses of the children out of the corners of their eye.

in the other room, dust shows up on the furniture and toys gradually. frayed edges, dry rot, worn and warping shelves. the place looks like it's rotting in place, weeks and months of age appear each time the party re-enters this room. the air is eerily silent on this side of the door.

in time, if the party goes back and forth enough, they will see the ghosts of the children clearly in the room with the laughter. the young boy and girl will be playing with their toys, sleeping in the beds, or carrying on like they were living and normal. in the other room, the party will eventually be able to see bones, two tiny skeletons. the smaller one is missing its arm. the missing arm bones are being clutched tightly by the other skeleton, hunched over in a corner as if in time out.

if the party disturbs the skeletons or tries to touch the ghosts, the entire room vanishes and becomes another featureless cavern, the door is gone and they can exit with no resistance.

I would like to make a suggestion, but I would like to ask OP are you in the middle of a campaign or are you going to start one from scratch with new characters and all?

Water. Dark, still water of indefinite depth. Shit, scared myself there.

>>8570625
Pretty much unexplainable shit that's not a combat situation will either scare people (if you get the mood right), or piss them off (if you do it wrong or too much).

Think of some stuff yourself.

...After a combat situation, something invisible and intangible starts eating the corpses and mortally wounded (people in negatives) people in front of the PC's eyes. Bodies are picked up, giant bites start appearing on them, rending through armour and flesh and simply vanishing. Once again, there's nothing to directly hit, it's just the bodies are being eaten by something that they can't see.

If a player's below 0 HP, make him roll every few rounds after the fight to see if he gets eaten - and do it if the other players dick around trying to defeat this invisible monster.

They keep hearing noises, and any corpses that they leave alone for a few minutes vanish, clearly having been dragged away into tiny rooms with no exits, if the bloodtrails are followed. This continues after they leave the dungeon, only the bloodtrails lead to boulders and trees before they abruptly stop.

All scrying spells are "jammed" Only vague noises that could be screams, laughter, or just talking can be perceived.

The dungeon is dark, and the only areas lit by phosphorescent fungus almost invariably have a mouldering corpse lying in the light. The corpses are unremarkable, though the teeth, nails, and hair are all long and grey.

Just my two cents.

>>8570702

Its a start from scratch thing. But the characters are required to write an extensive background written in the Ravenloft setting.

A dismembered hand, or maybe head. Singular.

>>8570738
Jamming scrying is a dick move, don't do it. Instead do an even more dick move and whenever you scry someone is watching you back. A weird wraithly being that notices you on the first scry, walks over to you on the second scry (no matter what you're scrying) and on the third scry it's right in front of you, and stabs you in the eyes (take a few hit dice of damage that won't kill the player).

It'll dissuade them from scrying further hopefully.

A perfectly clean room if a house, or carved and polished cave, in the middle of an otherwise ruined area. Have weird things happen, etc

>>8570809

Or just have the scry come back as black after the figure has been close enough. IMPLICATIONS!

>>8570809
KNIFE EYE ATAAAAAAAACK!

But your idea of punishing scrying rather than just blocking it is much better.

(This may or may not work depending on your plot)

Party meets a seriously weirded out and injured party going the other way. They tell you that there are some seriously dangerous traps up ahead. Once again, they're wholly normal if fairly dangerous as an enemy (just normal adventurers a couple of levels lower than the PCs).

One of them lost an arm in one of the traps, apparently - the stump is bandaged up and the guy is delirious. Make sure the guy is wearing some distinctive, damaged clothing. Like a red hide suit or something.

Later on, the party comes across a bunch of skeletons in an already-triggered trap (blades swinging, crossbow bolts etc). One of the skeletons has a fresh arm with a red hide sleeve on it. The fresh arm is scrabbling around aimlessly.

Eye-stabbings get the point across much more clearly. Scryings going to black is hardly threatening, while points in your eyes are much more scary.

A room with a few sets of clothing, each fallen in a pile as though the person inside simply disintegrated.

Catching glimpses of things, seeing someone turn a corner, but when you look they aren't there, seeing things like a hacked up corpse piece itself together and walk down the hall like its no big deal

just some crap off the top of my head

What about concepts, anything for that department? I mean these are some scary events but does anybody know something that just makes you shudder at the thought of it.

A small child keeps appearing at intersections, running away as soon as the party gets close, disappearing whenever there is a long hallway. Get them nice and lost. Start little kid giggling whenever they try and find their way back. When they try and turn around have the hallways be changed around on them, only allowing them in one direction.

Have a room that appears to be a family sitting down to supper. The family doesn't notice the party, even if the party attacks them. As they eat they begin to have slash marks appear on them, bleeding out without ever stopping eating.

by entering in a room the entire party is transported into a tavern,

if they ask around they'll know that 2 years have past and that they have created an organisation to fight the bgg organisation,

at some point someone tell one or two players to kill another player "according to the plan they have set" because proof have been made that he is a traitor selling them to the bbg

when madness pvp and shit start to happen (best if at the moment someone die) everything goes black and they wake in the dungeon room

and, of course, no explaination

PCs walk into a room with a few sets of skeletons around, and spikes on the ceiling (only mention this if they look).

When they're about half-way across, all through the corridor UNDEAD ZOMBIE HANDS REACH OUT FROM THE FLOOR AND GRAB THEIR LEGS OMG OMG OMG

Except they don't really do much damage, perhaps a couple of points if they don't have armour on.

After a couple of rounds, gravity inverts and everyone who has cut away the zombie hands from their legs fall onto the spikes and take significant damage. Those who didn't get free get slowly lowered to the ground.

The doors are still on ground level for some reason.

I'm a bit tired so sorry if this sounds simple, I just came up with it when I read your OP.
Anyway, the idea is like this. You run a campaign as normal, lets say they meet at a tavern, sharing a couple of beers, make a point of mentioning how extra special the beer tasted. make up a few good spirited scenarios. The players rescue a town from goblins, they aid a cleric of pelor or whatever the D&D good god is called and some other thing, you make it up.
Then at some point the players find a mysterious artifact, portal, potion or whatever, just make it so that they'll use it.

When they've used it item you go on with something like: The barmaid taps you on your shoulder "Sorry to bother you guys, you seem to have nodded off, we're closing soon and you need to pay your tab."
And then the campaign goes on in the same fashion as when they started, of course the players won't act the same but the NPCs will.
Now you start sneaking in some disturbing stuff at your own digression, maybe while the townsfolk are begging the adventurers to protect them from the goblins there are horribly deformed people eating the innards of a slain man they saw in the village the first time around, but everyone treats it like normal and they will just ask the players what they are doing if they slay the monsters, but they will never sound displeased with them, they are just happy whatever happens.

Maybe you see a mother carrying her baby who is ripping chunks of flesh from her face and eating it, she doesn't seem to mind though, nor does anyone else.

The cleric of pelor asking for aid have decapitated one of brothers and placed the head on the altar, he still asks them for help to find the lost book of rituals so that he can keep blessing the needy peasants or whatever though.

Something like that, until they reach the same thing that took them back to the tavern again, but this time it doesn't, everything seems back to normal again, but is it? Was it ever?

>>8570489

four words :

furniture on the ceiling

>>8571099

nice mindfuck

>>8571099

yeah... let's just hope his players never played oblivion riiiight ?

>>8571176
what?

Let me tell you a story.

In my university's library, there is a chair. If one falls asleep in this chair, one has trouble...waking up. By that I mean you think you wake up, but it is just another iteration of a great dream. You think you wake up, you get up, walk out the doors of the library, and wake up. You walk to the elevator, and wake up. You wake up, and wake up. You walk to your friends, talk to them, walk to class, sit down, and wake up. You are stuck in this dreaming loop until you can will yourself out of sleep. You can go through dozens of iterations before you truly wake up. Interestingly, you feel really really tired the SECOND you sit in the chair. In theory, one could get trapped in it. Everyone I know avoids that chair.

I seek it out and try to beat my previous records of waking from the Dream. Granted, I often have an alarm as backup.

>>8571254
Le gasp! Not the... really comfy chair?!

>>8571282

It is a wooden chair with reddish cushions. It sits on the third floor, in a row with other chairs that overlook a balcony. It is the fifth in the series of chairs.

>>8571328
>>8571254

Where is this? Sounds awesome.

>>8571344

It is at my university.

>>8571254

Do it 10 times and you get +1 to your will saves.

>>8571328
You poor bastard. You're going to wake up one day and realise you can't wake up.

That chair gets around. I thought we wrecked it.

This might not work for you, but this went over well on one of my campaigns. A room literally covered in mirrors, mirrors on the walls, on the ceiling, on the floor. Everywhere. The only two features noticeable ae a fireplace with almost burned out embers and a red leather chair with somebody sitting in it.

Upon further examination of the mirrors there will be thousands of demons and dark entities on the other side staring at the PCs with hungry eyes and wicked grins.

There is a person sitting in the leather chair, a young woman with long, greasy and unkempt black hair and her clothing is just some rags. They will probably try to either talk to her or look at her directly. If the try to speak to her she will motion for them to go away. If they get in front of her they will be able to see her. They will see that the woman has a torture device on her face, forcibly opening her eyes and a steel brace on her jaw stretching it out to disturbing lengths. She has something in her throat (an amplification device) and if she is forced to look any other direction other than that fireplace, (if they try to force her attention, if they try to rescue her, that sort of thing) she will see the mirrors and she will scream a bloodcurdling scream.

The mirrors will shatter and glass will fly. The PCs need to make a high reflex save to avoid the damage from this, and if you want...throw in some demons coming out of the broken mirrors to attack them.

In the end the room will have been destroyed, and the woman ripped to shreds from her terror. She was trying to focus on the fireplace to keep herself from being overwhelmed by primal fear from seeing the horrid creatures in the mirrors. The PCs will understand that they are the cause of this innocent woman's demise, and this may bring a crushing guilt to them. Especially...if it is someone important...

SUDDENLY SPIDERS!!!!!!!!

Seriously, you can make anything creepy by adding a spider or two when the players don't expect it.

Have an indefinitely regenerating zombie follow them through an entire empty village, frequently ripping through walls and bursting though floorboards when they least expect it. Make it start grapples whenever it can and try to hold them and steer them away from the local church. In the end it turns out that he/she was simply trying to save the party from the horrors in the churches catacombs, but it's actions are forceful enough for it to be considered a threat to the party.

Another basic idea is any sort of timelooping area, where everything except the party is reset at midnight with all the locals continuing with their lives as usual (except they do the same thing every day). To add a twist make it so one person dissappears every loop, with the locals behaving as if they never existed, and the entrance/exit to the place is sealed and legends say it will be unsealed "tomorrow".

>>8571370

My record so far is seventeen iterations, down from upwards of forty. I'm making excellent progress.

>>8571410

Most people see such a situation as something to be avoided, not a contest of wills against a cursed artifact.

>>8571447

Yes, well, I am not most people.

>>8571405
Just to add to the timeloop idea, the exit could also be used to seal a great evil of some sort, and the timeloop was created so that "tomorrow" is delayed as much as possible, but the ritual requires lives to be sacrificed every time as maintenance.

OP, if you're still around, download Libris Mortis and look at the monsters. Angel of Decal; people w/in 30ft or it rots. The Wheep: Nails in it's eyes and mouths on its hands like Daolong Wong from Jackie Chan. Some crepy little kid: Killer lolis! Best of all, I believe the Wheep is CR 11, and the Angel is 15, so it could be a boss monster.

A great fire burns in a tower atop a castle.

As the party explores, the weather seems to turn unseasonal. Snow falls and covers everything in the vicinity. Further examination reveals the snow to be ash.

There is no coal, no wood, nothing to burn. What is being incinerated in the tower?

OP, play Silent Hill 1 or 2. Then you'll know. A lot of the ideas in this thread reminded me of that (a single severed head in an especially odd place, furniture in strange positions and places, etc.)

This has already been mentioned in this thread, but it bears reiterating, because it works:

You need pacing and plot that will make the characters feel confused and powerless, as if all their leveling and awesome equipment just isn't helping, and that this campaign is going to be the last one their characters do.

You need parts where they have to crawl through waist deep water, in pitch black.

You need moments where they walk through a room, through a door, decide to turn around back through the door, and the room they just left is now completely different, like filled with gore or something.

You need puzzles and riddles that could potentially have dire consequences.

You need an enormous room that is just an expanse of nothing but dirt floors and silence. The farther they get to the middle of the room, the louder a sound of heavy breathing gets, even though they can see that there's absolutely nothing in this room.

Are you getting the picture, OP?

>>8570515
Excellent idea, but make sure to describe each room's dark features with eerie detail.

>>8571471
You forgot the Atropal Scion, otherwise known as the fucking aborted god fetus.

Add planar breaches all over the place, making some of them almost seamless. Freak the players out with gravity changing or different rates of time flow within the same room or corridor. Outsiders that cannot be banished or are simply banished a few meters away can freak players out, as can meeting shadows of people they killed a couple of minutes ago.

>>8571517

Fighting an unborn god...

Time for Operation Coat Hangar.

>>8570515
How empty, like "cobwebs and some light detritus", or "perfectly even layer of dust" empty?

A small idea is to have happy and laughing, and organic copies of all the players standing there suddenly infront of them. If touched, they simply fall into literally thousands of little chunks.

>>8571493

Can't second this enough. Don't worry about trying to frighten the *characters*. Frighten their *players* and they'll almost always start roleplaying appropriately, refusing to go on through fear of losing their character or whatever.

>>8571529
Unless it's a +8 adamantine coathanger of fetusbane, I don't think it's going to do much at this point.

Do a dungeon that is inside a large living creature (maybe make it an entire plane, so there is no "surface" to this creature). Parts of it can even be fossilized, decaying or even skeletal to mix things up. Hacking away at the walls can lead to bleeding, causing possible drowning of the party.

There's a few books out for DMing horror campaigns. The only one I can think of right now is "Book of Vile Darkness." It also has stuff for characters who want to be especially evil (cancer mages ftw)

Remember the 3 types of fear:

dread: the fear of what is coming / the unknown
terror: the fear of what is happening
horror: the fear of what has already happened.

in an rpg, terror doesn't really work, and horror is only slightly better. Only dread retains it's capacity to scare.

Maybe try something like this: as the players go through the dungeon, have them find evidence that another party has gone through just a few days ahead; they find sprung traps, busted doors, dead monsters, and notes scribbled on the walls like bread-crumbs. By reading these notes, the players come to know the personalities of their predecessors.

And of course, the notes start to get weird. They heard something stalking them through the tunnels. Their torches started casting less light and dieing randomly. They heard children whispering somewhere ahead, but never found the source. And then one of their companions fell behind, out of the circle of torchlight, and they never found him again. Soon the notes are being written by only one hand, and they're hysterical and terrified, and then they're gone. And then the player's torches start to flicker.

>>8571569

>+8 adamantine coathanger of fetusbane,

...I want one.

>>8571566
Sorry, I meant to say players, not characters.

Dream chair man, how do you know you're not stuck in a dream right now?

>+8 adamantine coathanger of fetusbane

Use as directed with Womb Dagger?

>>8571772
Because I never sat in the chair. I burned it. I burned it with my own two hands after seeing it claim its share in blood.

>>8571813

And now it is back, and it is being farmed by a batshit insane lunatic who sees it as some sort of challenge.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/5978922/

Late in the game, but here's a thread that turns into one.

>>8571552
Open door. See teeth in ceiling, tongue sticking up from middle of room. Bile gets vomited at them from the opposite door.

Not cool, mr.dm. not cool.

>>8571791
>>8571912
Wombdaggermind

Fuck, maybe I'm just trapped in an endless dream, and you all don't really exist. Maybe it's the other way around! FUCK!

A marsh full of fog with no life, no towns in vicinity. Only dead trees. As the players wander through, they occasionally run across huts. The huts have nothing in them and are rotting. When they reach the middle, it starts to rain. fat, heavy drops of water fall from the sky. Wherever a drop lands, an eye appears. If a drop lands on bear flesh, then the player is able to partially see out, with the knowledge that they are sharing the vision with something else. If the drop hits an npc, the npc starts howling and crying, begging "it" to leave. after a few days, the eyes get smaller and smaller, until they dissipate permanently, leaving behind only a spot as pale as the moon where they were. that spot will never tan or change color, regardless of where the players go or do.

There was a good thread about horror during Halloween. I will just post what i had saved at the time.

HALLUCINATIONS, HAUNTINGS, AND OTHER BULLSHIT

-The players find an old cassette tape in a shoebox. When put into a tape player, they get only a few seconds of heavy, wet breathing before it cuts out. Upon inspecting the tape afterwards, there is no magnetic strip inside.

-One of the PC's shirts is bloody. It starts off as a small stain, but over time gradually covers a wider area, as if they were bleeding. This begins at dawn and ends at dusk, and the effect persists no matter how often they change clothing.

-When on board the elevator, scratching sounds and deep toned incomprehensible whispers can be heard. If examined, the elevator shaft is empty.

-A puddle on the road has a drowning woman hammering on the bottom of the surface as if the water was solid.

-A large puddle appears after a rain storm. if you look down into it you see a full town submerged underwater.

-The sound of a whetstone sharpening a blade not far off can clearly be heard, yet neither the direction nor location can be discerned.

-A PC's Holy Symbol begins to weep blood from nonexistent wounds.

-PC discovers pieces of the last monster or person they killed mixed in with their rations.

-For one night, there is an extra moon in the sky. It's fully visible and pockmarked with craters. It's gone the next night. The pc's have dreams of this moon the night before it appears, and for one week after.

-When walking down a hallway (mansion, hotel, whatever) the players suddenly notice a set of bloody footprints being imprinted on the carpet, passing from one wall to the other, as if an invisible person just walked through one wall and continued across the hallway through the other wall.

Implications.

No, seriously. Go look for any aspect of the game that seems perfectly normal at first glance, but becomes something horrible when you think about it for a little while.

Any thread of logic that makes you say "now wait a second" gets pulled and unraveled as far as it can go. For an example (albeit not that horrible a thing), the issue of gelatinous cubes. It makes no sense to have a creature that has evolved to fit in a world of 10' by 10' foot corridors, right? And it was pretty much a joke?

Well, you're looking at it the wrong way. The gelatinous cubes didn't evolve to fit the map squares. The corridors are 10' by 10' because the gelatinous cubes are what carved them in the first place. All of them. Everywhere.

>>8572047
-The character is asleep in his bed, and he wakes up to the sound of drops falling on water. He looks around and the bedroom floor has turned into a black ocean in which he can see things moving underneath the surface...black, tentacled things (and they're not octopi).

-Player wakes up with no shadow. Shadow returns inexplicably 24 hours later.
Twist: An extra shadow of a person, acting as if it was part of the group.

-Call for a will save from all players once in a while, and those who fail will begin to hear a low whispering chant that repeats a few times. "Sath Ar Kathool. Ie mthach Agh-Mnyorliathep." (This event works well if you use it frequently during a game.)

-A PC awakens hearing chewing noises inside their bed, with no sign of what had made them.

-One of the party members feels scratching and poking in their sleep. When they wake up, they find that they're stuck inside of their mattress.

-One of the PC's awaken with a black line tatoo'ed onto their arm. Every day, another line is added until MINE is spelled out.

-During a particularly dark and stormy night, upon looking up at the sky during lightning flashes, huge shapes can be seen moving behind the clouds illuminated by the flashes.

-All the clerics and paladins in the land vanish, but reappear a month later with no memory of being gone, in fact they can recall everything they've done that month including interacting normaly with everyone.

>>8572087
- A sound like a thousand plates wobbling on a floor comes from the next room over, but there's nothing there, let alone any plates.

- Your players exit a room, as soon as the door closes behind them they hear horrified shrieking and violent thumping, and possibly see blood pouring out from under the door, despite their attempts to get in the door remains locked (even if its not possible for it to be locked), suddenly the shrieking stops, the door unlocks and they're able to enter again, when they do they can only find blood pooling from their side of the doorframe, everything in the room is in place and it looks like absolutely nothing happened.

-Upon searching the library of a large house or mansion, the players discover that every single book in it is blank. If they begin flipping through the pages anyway, a word shows up here or there, in a way that makes them think they missed it before. If they continue flipping through the books they will encounter essays and stories about people that sound remarkably similar to them. If they keep investigating, the books start dropping their names, and eventually addressing them directly.

TOWNS
-After a few hours in a new town, it slowly dawns on the PC's that there are no children.

-Everyone in a town the PC's are passing through stops what they are doing and intently stare at the PC's. If questioned the entire town continues moving, working, having conversations etc. and act as if nothing ever happened.

- The shadow on a particular sundial in a town is frozen and refuses to move with the sun or moon. If questioned about the sundial the townspeople become flustered and will not speak of it.

-The party comes across a town void of people, but in the places where they would normally be working, their clothes are very neatly folded and piled.

Anyone here ever run Trouble at Blackrockfor d20 modern? That was a really good run for my group

>>8571835

Only he could troll a malevolent cursed artefact so.

>>8572104
-The party comes across a town with architecture featuring a lot of marble or other high-quality stone. This is because they are near the remains of a vast city which was turned to stone by a great curse, and they’ve been “quarrying” it (perhaps if the curse that turned the town to stone is reversed all the stone taken will turn into blood and flesh).

CREEPY DUNGEONS AND OTHER PLACES:

-When the PCs return to the dungeon, all the dead bodies left over from the fight before hand are now propped up against the wall, and their faces sowed into smiles. All of their heads facing the entrance.

-The pc's enter a dungeon, ahead they see shadows of horrible beats and the like, but upon rounding the corners, they find nothing but house cats that quickly hiss and run away, a few may hang around the adventurers in a friendly manner. Further delving finds the dungeon filled entirely with house cats, but shadows of horrific beats still lurk around corners. Upon grabbing the dungeon treasure and heading out, suddenly the cats are gone, and in their place, horrible monsters casting shadows of cats around the corners.

“I had a DM that would put furniture on the ceilings of rooms. We kept running into it, and at first it became kind of a joke, and then we tried pulling some of it down and as soon as we let go it fell straight back up the ceiling. We no longer considered it a joke and became completely paranoid.”

-The woods are completely silent. Utterly silent. And empty, for that matter, even of mosquitoes. As a counter: the woods are filled with chirps, and the sounds of thriving life. But every creature seen is dead, and in a fairly advanced state of death.

-The pc's discover a chest in the woods. Upon opening it, they find a painting of the party with an unknown marks painted on their foreheads, each with a different mark.

>>8572133
-The party turn the corner into a fairly long, nearly empty corridor, with occasional bits of furniture. As they walk down it they see spectral figures approaching from the other end. If they stop, the spectres stop as well. The closer they get to the centre, the more clear the figures become: they are the parties own reflection, in a sheet of glass, placed innocuously, near invisibly at the centre of the corridor. when a player get close enough to examine this, the reflection glares at the player, grabs a nearby chair and hurls it through the glass, causing it to shatter completely.

- The party is traveling in the open wilderness. They are miserably slogging through a colossal rainstorm, and they are hoping for some shelter, but there is no sign of civilization or even a cave for miles around. As night falls, they stop and make camp on a small hill. The hill has no unusual features. The moment the sun sets, call a Spot check. Those that succeed, inexplicably discover that they made camp no more than thirty feet from the front door of a handsome inn, firelight radiating from the windows. Those that fail, cannot and will not see anything, and assume its a sinister enchantment, or that the other PCs are making some kind of joke, . Those that see the inn may stay inside if they chose, and get a nice meal and warm bed. The rain stops, and at dawn, all PCs awake on the ground, with no inn in sight. A Spot check may reveal that some of the PCs, and/or a large area of ground, are, inexplicably, totally dry.

-Tell the party that they come across a small clearing in the forest when they're about ready to set up camp. In the morning have them realize that the clearing is a perfect circle with their campfire in the middle. If they decide to investigate the campfire they find bones mixed in with their firewood, and maybe either one of the character's possessions or a small likeness of one of the characters.

>>8572157
-Writing on the walls and floor of a dungeon that look like a child's play. A little girl's bedroom found neat and clean inside most wicked dungeon.

-Bright, well lit dungeon that has maps posted at each corner, with no monsters. Supposedly there's a huge amount of gold at the bottom, but there's absolutely nothing. Have your players roll spot checks every minute to freak them out.

INSANE PLOT SHIT

.-One of the pc's comes across a kid who looks remarkably like them when they were that age. Upon closer inspection, the area is very reminiscent of where the pc grew up, and further, he recalls witnessing this event from the child's perspective..

-After a fun night in a tavern on the trail of their adventure, one of the PC's discovers a diary hidden under one of the beds. Each page describes the same series of events that the PC experienced that night in exact detail and in their handwriting, over and over again, each time described different (ie: not the same paragraph over and over) The last few pages have additional stating "I can't tell how many days it's been, we have to break free of the cycle before the sun rises or it'll start again!"

>>8572172
-In my campaign I induced extreme paranoia in my group after they followed my DMPC, who was a sea elf paladin who took them to an underwater temple of Dagon. I played the Paladin in an especially annoying DMPC manner with him coddling the much lower level PC's. Once I established the mood that the characters would be ok because I was busy semi railroading them around that when all of a sudden a tentacle snakes down from the darkness above and lifts him up screaming into the unknown. Now my players suddenly realize that they have been led to an underwater temple to a demon lord with no way of escaping without the paladin and now a nagging sense that they will not survive without him...
>The DMPC isn’t really dead- this is actually the start of a totally crazy campaign story with lots of timeloops and railroading- but it’s a fine move if you take this post in isolation. Full thread: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/4326876/#4328750

-While at a manor or other place of residence for the rich and noble, there is one room they are forbidden to enter.

Every night, at midnight, they wake up at the exact same moment, and hear two footsteps. each night, their one step closer to the room. Once they reach the room, they footsteps come from inside the room, and they hear a scream; when they go into the room, they find a sickly noble girl, scared out of her wits. She tells them that the footsteps have followed her all her life, and noone else could hear them until now. She desparately asks them to get her out of there, to take her away. When they try the door, its locked and apparently barricaded. Next midnight, a pale man flickers into being, takes two steps towards the girl, and touches her arm. She dies instantly. The door is unbarricaded and the PC's are freed, asked to never mention this to anyone.

The following night, the PC's hear the footstep. Far off at first, but every night coming one step closer...

>>8572184
-Every time a PC wakes up, they find a flayed corpse at their feet. Nearby (written in blood on the wall, burnt into the ground or even carved into the chest or face of the corpse) is the message "I BROUGHT THIS FOR YOU".
This happens even if the PC is just knocked out during combat, and the other party members will see the corpse and writing simply appear out of nowhere. If the PC in question dreams, it will always be of vague terror and desperate feelings of insane love and they will awake with peals of mad laughter still ringing in their ears.

Bonus dickery:
The PC gradually becomes aware that something is trying to help them, but it's ideas of 'help' differ greatly from their own.
A 'simple' (read: clearly as dumb as a brush) country yokel sitting on a fence jokingly pokes fun at the PCs strange attire, but when he gets to the 'chosen' PC he cracks a joke and then goes down in a spray of blood as he is horribly gutted by some unseen force.

The PC is moving through an area that is extremely cold and the party is forced to make camp for the night. The PC thinks he's in for a hard night but sleeps surprisingly easy, dreaming that he's being held in the warm embrace of a loved one. When he wakes up he feels a hand stroking his forehead and his face is wet and covered by a warm blanket; on removing the blanket he finds it is a human's skin. There is no sign of anybody for miles, but the PC senses a pleased presence nearby.

>>8572192
While walking along, the PC senses constantly that there is someone behind him. If he looks around, there is nobody there, no matter how fast he turns. However, if he stops suddenly or otherwise moves backwards, he bumps into something and falls over.
If he does neither of these things, something treads on the back of his shoe and he feels a burst of sympathy from somewhere.

OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK

-The party finds a new spell and the wizard transcribes it. The first time he prepares that spell, the corresponding pages in his spellbook go blank, replaced by the words “Now I’m in your head.”

-A group of screaming men, all wearing street gang clothing carrying knifes, guns, etc. Their legs and arms are all bent out of position and erupting from their faces are long, bloody, bone-colored stalks that have remnants of their faces wrapped all around it. They make noises as though they were starting a fight or shouting obscenities, though they not speaking any human language.

-There is a knock on the door, when opened there is no one there. if this happens 5 time in a row the 5th time there will be a note saying "we are all inside now.".

- Players find an old video camera left recording. Although the room is completely empty, the camera display shows that the room is full of people in the middle of a lively party. As the players watch this, the party guests take notice of the players watching them.

- The players heard the sound of a screaming baby inside a flat and entered the room, in a post-apocalyptic campaign. I said in plain English that when they entered the room, they saw a gigantic, filthy parrot with a blood-stained beak standing on the edge of a cradle, over an infant's carcass, mimicking its death-cries.

>>8572208
WAT

- If any of the PCs have a spiked chain, or shackles, fail, or any other chained weapon, the next time they use it in a fight, it collapses into a pile of metal links as the final enemy flees or falls. Inspection will reveal none of the links are broken.

-All the pc's flesh and muscle suddenly fall off leaving bone. Only one PC notices. The others don't notice a thing and can't be brought to notice it. The flesh and muscle, as a big pile attacks the one, and he must fight it.

- When the PC fires a round from a gun, he is thrown back 10ft with a "noisy cricket" amount of recoil, and the gun spews out a massive, pressurized gout of blood.
Damage for the shot is tripled. Later analysis of the blood reveals that each individual cell is from a different species of creature.

-One of the PCs inexplicably find the first magical weapon or object they ever possessed. If they still possess this item, choose some other appropriately nostalgic lost piece of equipment that would be easily recognizable. The item should be found in a place where it should not be, such as a chest that has been locked for hundreds of years.

-The players befriend a shy, agoraphobic girl who says she can help them. She claims to be in love with an Angel, but being in an asylum its likely that she is just insane, that it is just a split personality or method of soothing her trauma. She escapes from the asylum after something particulary upsets her (a new uncaring counciler, the players doubts, etc). The players eventually find her in an abandoned, run-down house. A shadowy, tentacled being is holding and caressing her tenderly as she cries tears of relief.
>Not necessarily rp-related but strikes a chord of profound creepiness. And possible /d/iety.

>>8572184
>Every night, at midnight, they wake up at the exact same moment, and hear two footsteps. each night, their one step closer to the room. Once they reach the room, they footsteps come from inside the room, and they hear a scream; when they go into the room, they find a sickly noble girl, scared out of her wits. She tells them that the footsteps have followed her all her life, and noone else could hear them until now. She desparately asks them to get her out of there, to take her away. When they try the door, its locked and apparently barricaded. Next midnight, a pale man flickers into being, takes two steps towards the girl, and touches her arm. She dies instantly. The door is unbarricaded and the PC's are freed, asked to never mention this to anyone.

What's to stop them attacking this pale-faced man?
>The following night, the PC's hear the footstep. Far off at first, but every night coming one step closer...
How do they know it gets one step closer? Is there a measuring device?

>>8572221
-One morning your characters wake up to find the world veiled in a coloured haze in hues of blue. This becomes more and more prounounced over time until the whole world is blue. Themselves, the sky, the clouds, everything is a differnet shade of blue. Except for one red rock in the middle of the road.

The rock never moves, never reacts to them, but no matter where they go, that same red rock is onscene.

The next morning, everything is back to normal. Their very next random encounter, though(should be with something weak like goblins or kobolds) the first one they kill, instead of dying, shatters into dozens of identical red rocks. The other goblins scream in abject, soulcrushing terror at seeing this and flee screaming somethinga about "not letting in the colour".
>The last five words of this made me shudder and I’m not sure why. “Don’t let in the color”. I think something incredibly creepy would be rewritten from this.

-When an enemy (should be a normal cultist, thug, etc.) misses a PC with a gun, roll damage as if it were a critical. Apply the damage and ask the player to make the massive damage save. The damage should be enough that the player fails. Describe in detail the bullet passing through the character's head. Then the process reverses. The PC can feel the flesh, tissue, and bone being put back together at high speed. The bullet flies out of the wound and leaps back into the gun.
Time restarts. This time, the gun jams and explodes in its owner's hand. The man is killed. Seconds later, the PC falls to the ground and begins to vomit. The mass contains, blood, shattered bone, and brain tissue. If this is run through a lab for testing, it is found to be an exact genetic match for the PC...

>>8572236
DM ADVICE:
-Weird rewards. A slave chained to the chest of gold. A magic apple that can make anyone sleep, deathless, until woken by a kiss. A delicate and beautiful magic doll with a elaborately carved key to see if the PC will wind it up.
>Courtesy of Rival Wombat

-Real scares people, in my experience. Combat especially is a parade of disgusting and terrible ways to die. In a horror game nothing 'dies' or 'drops', it bleeds, cries and whimpers. It crawls for the door. If you want to kill whoever it is, you're going to have to give it a good proper hit when it's down - a cold blooded finish. You're not 'at -1 on all rolls', your kneecap is pouring fluids onto the floor and you're in shock. Your tongue feels dry and you can't understand why you keep crying.
These are the situations which movies and games ignore or stylize because thinking about them realistically makes people uncomfortable: ending life is serious, scary and horrifying.

-I have mini-sessions for each player inbetween the main sessions, then leave it up to the players to explain (In character) what they've been up to since the party last met. They never tell everything and everyone thinks someone else is double-crossing them. Which everybody is.

>>8572250
-Make them go places they don't want to go, filled with threats that put them at a severe disadvantage. Make them crawl through waist-deep, murky water that might or might not have a fucking huge monster in it. Make them shimmy through a very narrow tunnel, and then tell the last guy in line that there's something crawling up the tunnel behind him.

-Try being subtle. Not everything creepy will be obvious to the pc's, some will be minor notes in your descriptions. Some pc's will recognize it, some will just let it pass on, until eventually things keep occurring and they realize that this whole time some fucked up shits been going on around them. The realization that you've been completely unaware of something/someone creepy as shit for a very long time is good to get them unsettled.
>A lot of the best creepypasta uses this device. “All he saw was red”, “We don’t have a clown statue”, etc. There’s a little evolutionary alarm in our heads that tells us to shit ourselves the second we realize that log is really a crocodile.

-Describe things with a visceral tone, not with an artsy tone. It might sound accurate to describe something as "nebulous being, covered with disorienting and gibbous protuberances, loathsomely begrimed", but that doesn't invoke disgust or fear. It's just a sentence with long words to most players. Fluff. Now, if you instead describe something as "a blurry figure covered in shit and filth, with wriggling blood-slick tentacles that flick out of the darkness to bury into what surrounds it-- making it hard to tell where it ends and where the mound of meat it sits on begins.", you invoke both disgust and fear. You want to get revulsion from your players and maybe instill a bit of healthy respect for it by demonstrating its powers through scenery or a lead-up to the creature itself showing its victims.

>>8572263
-When mundane things are changed in a way completely different and different then they're supposed to it can really upset a person: People without faces, Cats that scream like a person. Or strange things that happen happening more frequently: fish jumping out of fish tanks, birds hitting windows.

-If your players are anything like mine, they will not be into their characters if their characters are essentially doomed. Try to lighten things up every once and awhile or they'll try to get a different campaign going because they just aren't having fun anymore.

- Give them hope, give them lasting rewards, better chances, let them beat something once in awhile...sometimes only by luck, to make sure they know they aren't in control, just trying to survive.

- Things should be kept small so the PC scare the shit out of themselves. The less the PCs see going on the more their own imagination will scare them. One time I accidentally scared the hell out of a group by putting them in a city in the clouds. The party was mostly neutral and they worked themselves into a frenzy thinking they were on some outer plane filled with bad ass CR30+ angels ready to rain flaming sword death on their heathen asses. It wasn’t my intention, but in a foreign environment the PCs felt separated from what they understood and their imaginations ran wild.

>>8572275
-Players need to WANT to feel fear, which means that you need to make it worth it.
If you destroy everything the PCs like (simply because they like it), they will feel helpless, and complete helplessness makes fear pointless. Why should they get worked up if they can’t make a difference anyway? This goes for their own safety as well- players who constantly feel like they’re at the DM’s mercy will pass into apathy
Instead, reward their fear and anxiety by making their actions count, or at least have a chance of counting. Additionally, make the world at least stable and sympathetic enough that they CAN grow attached to things (including their own characters)- it can’t be all horror all the time.
Apathetic players are worse than complacent ones: not only are they not scared, they’re not having fun either.

-When the PCs are in a facility, expecting resistance from guards, give it to them. When they're in a place with only one exit, which they came in from, and just outside the reactor or virus vault or whatever, have the last set of guards die violently or step aside to let them pass, anwering any questions or violence with a headshake. If the party is expecting resistance, a clear path for them for no reason will really throw them off.


-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.

>>8572283
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.
>Courtesy of Claudius

-You can always strike them with uncanny stuff they cannot influence - like as far away as seeing people dance on distant roofs or on some distant hill at night. Or as close as every person on the street turning and laughing at them for no apparten reason. Maybe some villager will tell them about a two-headed sow that's been born somewhere, they decide to take a look at it for the lulz and end up in a colours from outer space-type-situation.

-Go into an elaborate description of a room, but add a brief description of an NPC or Monster half way through your description. If your player(s) ask you about it, profess ignorance.

>>8572298
"The room is filled with dust, simply opening the door sent enough into the air to make a thick, if temporary, fog. Only a small amount of moonlight filters in from the room's only window, hindered slightly by the thin moth-eaten drapes. The scant lighting makes it difficult to make out the details of any of the room's paintings, or the face of the crying child in the corner, and in fact the small amount of light may account for the way the mold growing on the walls seems to shiver and crawl ever so slightly. Across the room is a door with a small bloody hand-print which seems to be beckoning you."
"Alright, I'm going to approach the child cautiously with my hand on the hilt of my sword, and ask her what's wrong."
"What little girl?"
"The... The little girl crying in the corner?"
"What the hell are you talking about?"

Only try this one once or twice in the course of a campaign, it's pretty risky and hard to pull off properly.

Bonus dickery: Show the party a page you "read" the room description from (obviously, it does not contain the information about the little girl)

Even further dickery, courtesy of Random Death Star-Sized Sapient Disco Ball of Tzeentch:
The DM should insert pleas for help and the like into his normal descriptions, preferably without a tone to emphasize it. For example:

"You walk into the library. Everywhere around you, you see dusty old books, covered in dust and mold, the wear and tear of ages help me covering the undoubtedly valuable- yes, what? I'm not done yet."

>>8572303
"What was that you said?"

"What?"

"You said help me."

"No I did not."

More points if the rest of the players heard it too, and you convince them that either they're all going nuts, or you have. Even more points if you say this after the 'little girl' thing; make the players think you're possessed or something.
>I’m not sure if this would actually work- as anon has noted, they’d probably just think you slipped up and told them something you didn’t mean to reveal yet.

http://www.lapetiteclaudine.com/archives/011196.html
Lovecraft’s “Commonplace book”- a collection of random ideas scrawled in a notebook then later tidied up. Obviously, if you want ideas for lovecraftian adventures, this is THE place to go.

And that's what I've got; add to it or comment as you see fit.

>>8572309
Courtesy of a DM who used this one.

PC's are invited into rather opulent mansion deep in the wilds. There are numerous windows and mirrors throughout the mansion gilded in silver and platinum. Each room is opulently outfitted, but the whole mansion is very precisely designed, each room is perfectly symetrical (each room has furniture in sets of two, if it has One piece of a certain furniture, like a bed, it will be exactly on in the center as though on a dividing line). The more Astute PC's will begin to realize that the mansion is populated with Twins (ie, the maidservant and the NPC Baron's wife are identical, the Baron himself looks like the Stable boy, etc... all except the very pale and silent daughter who wears an extravagant choker on her neck.)

The PC's may, as they explore and converse with the staff, receive money, food, or other supplies. Regardless, the PC's will eventually go to sleep. When they awaken, the mansion is gone. They are in an empy clearing in the woods surrounded by thousands of shards of broken glass. All of the supplies they received(money, food, everything) is made of blown glass.

At the center of the Clearing is massive (10ft by 40ft tall) mirror that has been partly shattered, the glass slamming down onto the neck of what looks like a woman's skeleton. On the other side of the mirror, the PC's will find a perfect woman's skull made of pure glass.


And that was all that I had saved from last Halloween, hope it can help. All I would say for myself. Detail, you need to describe thing a lot to bring the creepy out of anything, it's not a horrifying crypt until you've described it likewise to your players, details you can always use more.

After every kill, say something about how two rusty hooks on chains shoot out from the darkness, latching on to the corpse and dragging it in to the darkness. As the corpse goes away, faint laughter is heard. At the end of a dungeon, a massive flesh golem made up of everything the party had killed. As they fight the golem, it will run deeper and deeper in to the dungeon, corpses falling from the golem and reanimating (one hit kills). When the golem is killed, it crumbles in to a mass of corpses which slither away lifelessly and as if they had no bones. Have them slither up walls or melt through cracks. As the party exits the dungeon, it seems to take twice as long, and when they reach the outside, whispers echo behind them as two rusty hooks lash out and drag a large boulder in the the entrance, forever sealing it.

>>8570603
I did something like that once...they were in a seaside town where nothing was right, people always gave answers that were slightly off, like if they had been programmed for that... They enter the tavern, some people are dancing, but nobody's drinking, the barman offes them a drink and the barbarian takes it, enrages and starts killing every single dancers. They force the barman to drink and he melts. They run away and meet with the other party members. All they find when they get back is a heap of butchered mannequins... etc (that game was a lot of mindfuck)

For some childhood horror ideas, I bring you a thread from /x/.

>>>/x/3785190

This thread is nightmare fuel

>- The players heard the sound of a screaming baby inside a flat and entered the room, in a post-apocalyptic campaign. I said in plain English that when they entered the room, they saw a gigantic, filthy parrot with a blood-stained beak standing on the edge of a cradle, over an infant's carcass, mimicking its death-cries.


Mind = fucked.

Thanks for the nightmares, asshole ;_;

Here, OP. A contribution.

There's something wrong with the shadows in your dungeon. They aren't always in the right place; sometimes they're on the opposite side of an object from a light source like they should be, but most of them are disconcertingly off from their proper position. When the players investigate this phenomenon, probably when you let them know that their own shadows are just as off-kilter as all of the others, they will eventually realize that the shadows all point towards the same place, somewhere deep within the dungeon.

The moment the players state this out loud, they should start hearing an odd, whispery sound at the edge of their hearing, as if countless feet were quietly shuffling in the distance. The closer they get to the spot at the apex of all of the shadows, the louder and closer the sounds become. And then, when they get to that spot, to the apex of all of the shadows in the area... the noises stop.

And the only thing the players see in that room is a simple table, a nightstand almost, with a single scrap of paper written on it. What the scrap of paper says on it is this: "A shadow can only exist if something is there to cast it. If you're reading this note... THEN THERE IS SOMETHING THERE."

And just as the players realize what this means, the noises start again, deafeningly loud and very close now.

And then the room goes dark.

At one point, have them collapse, or camp, to go to sleep. They wake up at the start of the dungeon. Or, rather, they think they have, but it's trapped to all hell for some reason and ever so slightly different. IT WAS ALL A DREAM. Except the dream dungeon has things in it required to progress in the real world.

The players hating you is just like scaring them ,right?

The further in they go, the more they change. Strength increases. Int goes higher. But they start to feel a cold, alien presence riding in the back of their minds. Just.. watching. Learning. The further in they go, it gets worse and worse and worse and worse. Until they reach one little spot where.. pop! It's gone! Their stat increases stay. Then they turn the corner, and find a perfectly ordinary man sitting cross legged, and smiling. Behind him, six dopplegangers. The man is a polymorphed Aboleth.

>>8572283
The cabinet one reminds me of something I did to a player of mine a while ago. He was alone in a mayor's office, and on the desk was a note asking for help. It's barely legible as there's arterial spray all up the desk. There are three locked drawers on the desk. The character is well-versed in breaking into things, so he flips up the desk and smashes through the bottom of the bottom drawer with the butt of his pistol. In it was a note that said only "Thievery is a sin".He continued on anyways. In the top drawer was the mayor's severed hand, still holding a monogrammed pen.

When the players walk down a set of stairs, their footsteps echo. Except that the echoes continue for a few more steps after they reach a landing, as if there were a few extra stairs.

Set up a few tables so that you can do this one on the fly: invert the dice the PCs are rolling. They roll a d20, consult your chart to see where they rank on a d4. They roll a d4, consult the chart to turn it into a d20. And so on.

Have the PCs come across an well-stocked larder and kitchen. Preferably, do it just before they camp for the night, and let them make dinner there. The next day, further in, they run into goblins, ones that go down much easier than they should. When the players loot the corpses, they notice that all of the goblins are incredibly malnourished, to the point where they would have died from starvation in a day or two anyway. Everything else the players find in the dungeon is like this, despite easy access to ample food stores.

...Goddammit... I'll never have players who would take this...

..fucking archived

>>8573526
Well, in that case, let's get some more contributions going.

it's a good thing that my DM doesn't lurk on /tg/ much

>>8572476
That thread was awesome until someone told a story ripped off from John Dies at the End. Then I raged and stopped reading.

>>8573526
what's the title

>>8570649
How about a torch that lets out less light as something gets closer to it, letting out none at all when someone or something's next to it?

>>8573526
you did that to early, nothing new will be added to the archive unless someone tries to archive this thread again near then end

If the adventure is taking place somewhere with people you can pull what I did back during my first horror game (which is all that I really run now). The party comes across a person on the way to somewhere (In my case it was a Nurse on their way through the hospital as they were coming to see me in the hospital after a car wreck) They say high ask questions generally seems like a nice non threatening person. When they come back around later the person is dead their skull has been severed at the base of the spine and the jaw is still dangling to the front. The lights flicker and the air grows cold you hear a loud noise coming from the hall behind you. The next time the players attempt to investigate the corpse they find it missing with blood foot prints walking from the pool to right in the middle of the party before stopping. Add giggling.mp3 for effect.

Here's another idea.

Have a dungeon full of creepy invisible things. Enough that the players finally give in and invest in some goggles of true seeing, which you will have conveniently provided them.

And then, when they wear them, they still are getting affected by invisible things. Things they can't affect themselves. Things that turn visible when they take the goggles off. And that they can affect at that point. Except that sometimes, they would have to have walked right through those things while wearing the goggles.

Have this effect keep happening, even if they use a different source of true seeing. If they get the goggles checked out later, they work just fine.

The thing that isn't working, apparently, is the world. Because an unsettling number of things in it... aren't actually there. They just think they are.

Come on people, we're going to be losing an hour tonight! You'd think that the inherent creepiness of that would inspire more posting here!

A phone call from deceased party members. "You left us Jon... you left us to die. But we'll never leave you hehe he hahaha haha..."

>>8573770
...which one was that, exactly?

>>8574570
The one with the screeching cat penis in the soy sauce vial.

If you have a TPK, or one PC dies and the rest of the party goes elsewhere for a while, or anything like that, have the players encounter the consequences of the character death. Like the loved ones they left behind, or the village that wasn't saved, or anything else like that.

And in general, set a timetable for your villain's plans, and just make alterations to it based on what the characters do. So if they fuck around for too long without messing up his operations, he finishes whatever it was he was doing that the players were supposed to stop. And now they get to live out the consequences.

>this thread

>>8574787
Every room has a statue. A really creepy statue, like from the "we don't have an angel statue" creepypasta. If the party members leave a room and come back, the statue in it will seem to have moved slightly. Changed expression a little bit. Something like that.

Except for one room that doesn't have a statue. This room is, preferably, where the PCs will bunker down for the night. Unless your players are REALLY good sports, you'll want an NPC accompanying them into the dungeon. Because of the next bit.

In the morning, when they wake up, one of the party members is gone. The NPC if he's included, a random PC if he isn't. All of that character's stuff is also gone.

Sitting where that character was sleeping is another one of the statues. It has faint reddish marks around its mouth and on its fingers. As do all of the other statues in the dungeon. And the dungeon is now one room larger, and that one room doesn't have a statue in it.

Yet.

>>8574965
I am stealing this SO HARD

>>8573078
>>8574029
>>8574731
>>8574965
Poster of these ones here. I could use a little help, as thinking up this shit creeps me out even more than reading it.

BUMP FOR THE BUMP GOD!

POSTS FOR THE POST THRONE!

A slow lumbering death toll, I had a pyramid headisqe nurse with no lower jaw and bonesaws for arms who would slowly chase the party around the hospital while they tried to find clues. It nearly killed 2 players but they had some lucky rolls. But anything that slowly but surely will kill you if you don't solve the mystery.

If its a crypt, have all the religious icons that include images of whatever the angels or equivilent in the setting are come to life and silently plead for them to turn back. Except only the party members that follow that religion can see it (send the player a card, preface the card with "If you show the other players this card, you get no xp for this adventure"). Have this effect not come up under any form of magic detection whatsoever.

When they cast spells, they can feel the energy for the spell being ripped out of their physical form. The whole place is cut off from whatever Astral plane analogue supplies magic in the setting; whenever they cast spells, use magic items, or use any Supernatural effects, they take subdual damage. The farther it goes in, the nastier it gets. They cast a spell after being in there say, 20 minutes, and they get minor bruising. 40 minutes, it causes blood blisters under the skin. 60 minutes, it wrenches muscles and causes deep tissue-core bruising. Anything more then 2 hours, and they start internal hemmoraging; they lose half their health, and start intermittenly bleeding from the facial orifaces and lower orifaces.

The rub is that the dungeon is an illusion maze; in order to get out you NEED to be able to detect the illusions somehow. But you almost kill yourself every time you cast a spell by the point you realize this fact. There are no obvious creatures, but alot of "poultergiest" activity, suggest movement in the corners of their vision, in the shadows. If they try to rest to replenish health, imply that they'll get attacked and ripped to pieces in their sleep.

I kept a party in one one level dungeon set up this way for like, 7 hours once (but it was Ravenloft; they knew what they were getting into).

>>8575798

Slight edit: 7 hours real time, while they tried to figure it out.

>>8575819
That made me think of another great idea.

Have that one dungeon run at realtime speed. No encounters, obviously, just traps and other time-sensitive trickiness.

To up the ante, make sure to have mentioned previously that this dungeon is known to have something unpleasant happen on a regular basis; for example, levels 2 through 7 are known to flood with magma every hour on the hour. This, of course, also operates in realtime.

And when they leave the dungeon, they've spent far more time inside it then they've spent outside it. Gauge this one by figuring out about how long it takes the players to finish a round of combat, then using that as your conversion factor from dungeon time to rest-of-gameworld time. As in, if they normally take about ten minutes realtime to finish a single six-second round of combat, then every six realtime seconds in the dungeon equals ten minutes outside of it.

A half decayed skeleton floats slowly through the corridor, glistening with ephemeral power. The cleric raises his holy symbol to blast the dreaded spectre into oblivion, and then scream in agony, writhing as his hand slowly dissolves, skin peeling away from the flesh and taking on the same glistening sheen. He falls to his knees, his hand hverign in the air as his gaze falls into nothingness. One of the other heroes grabs his arm and pulls it back, only to discover it is held fast by the strange aura of horrible destruction that surrounds the ghastly spectre....

Until they realize that their cleric tried to turn the corpse that is suspended in a gelatinous cube.

Near the end of the dungeon there has to be an old man that walks by, incorporeal, and asks you if you've ever thought that maybe you've died already, and that this is what hell is.

a door thats had its door nob replaced with a sphere of annihilation

>>8574965

So it sounds like in this dungeon, you need to make sure that you...

...don't rest your head.

bump

Another possibility for the dungeon.

Quietly start rolling will checks for all of the PCs, or alternatively just draw up a list of how long each PC can spend in the dungeon before they start to fail by comparing their Will save against the DCs. The more they fail the save by, the more horrible and disturbing things get.

The twist? Passing a Will save doesn't mean that you've held off an illusion or the onset of madness. It means that you can still disbelieve the reality of the dungeon. The longer you spend there, the harder it becomes for your mind to keep filtering out all of the stuff that you "know" should not exist.

A simple way to further screw with the players here, at least while some of the party is still passing the Will checks, is to have the hideous monsters here appear as people, and the people as hideous monsters. Feel free to leave it an open question as to whether this is because the players were simply being misled by the effects of the dungeon when they first came in, or whether it's because that really is how things look to the aberrations whose vision the players now share.

Anybody else got any creepy shit to add? Original or particularly worthy pasta, either is fine.

Best semi-unintentional horror?

In order to psych my party up for The Underdark, I ran a mini-Underdark campaign where they played as a small party of Drow. One of the plots was a growing Mind-Flayer incursion into contested regions of the Underdark.

The final quest they undertook had them stumble upon a Mind-Flayer staging area and they were ambushed. Total party wipe.

I did it all so that they would take the Underdark seriously. They'd spent a year leveling up these characters and I wanted them to be more cautious so I had to show them what could go wrong if they made poor choices. It also was a quick way to bring the players up to speed on their first time in the Underdark.

It was then after this that the main party descended into the Underdark... and after a long bit of questing.... they stumbled upon a Mind Flayer raiding party... .and I took particular care to mention the details and characteristics of the Drow Slaves accompanying the Mind Flayers......

They were very unsettled.

>>8584569
So they stumbled across their old Player Characters being used as the mindless thrall of Mindflayers?

I can see how a player might feel a little violated by that.