Sinking a Horrific Hook

I talked last week about the idea of unease being the gateway into horror. For Shadows over Vathak, there is no shortage of uneasy elements upon which to play. Whispers of the Plague of Shadows in Ina'oth, or the terrible Spawn of the Old Ones surfacing in southern Vathak and swallowing entire villages can make great backdrops to the horror elements closer to home, but they serve only as window dressing.

The frozen backdrop of northern Grigoria can be a bleak setting suited for setting that hook.

Image courtesy of Rick's masterful art in my own Faces of Vathak: Survivors.

In order to get your players truly embroiled in the horror that their characters are experiencing, you need to find a good way to set that horrific hook. It's about finding that hole in the armor of your player characters and exploiting it in just the right way as to get them invested in something that might not otherwise care about.

Horror is a delicate art that can quickly sweep too far to either side of the balance. Lean too much in the favor of direct problems with hit-points and you get a "horror" romp that is solved with standard murder-hobo antics. Too far into a narrative "everything is spooky!" bent and your players feel powerless or uninterested. After all, what is the point of being fantasy heroes if they cannot use their fantastic powers to solve these problems?

To add an extra level of complication, effective horror requires that you not only know your player characters, but the players behind them. Knowing what things unsettle them without going too far and crossing boundaries they're uncomfortable with only amplifies the balancing act you need to perform as a GM.

 

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Setting that hook, then, is about appealing to the players you know in a way that their characters might care about. To return to the frozen wilderness of northern Grigoria, cold and darkness provide excellent tools for setting the scene. But what happens when those start acting unusually? When darkness comes too soon, or the winter winds cut through even early autumn? What about when an NPC the players have interacted with comes staggering back from the forest, aged a half-dozen years and without any of his companions--and, perhaps even more troublingly, without a clear memory of what happened?

Setting that hook is all about building upon the mundane aspects of horror and fear that we all know, then twisting them into that uncanny, uneasy territory where horror dwells. Finding that mundane detail upon which to drive your narrative knife and twist, however, is masterpiece that only you can create. No author knows what makes your players squirm better than you.