Dungeon Setup

As noted, I've been running Seekers of the Ashen Crown for my players, and they seem to be enjoying themselves.  So far, they found an old tomb complex while searching for a tangle of kruthik warrens.  In the tomb, they found an artifact that attracted the notice of just about everyone in town.

Before that point, however, they are looking for the kruthik egg chamber so they can destroy the kruthik eggs and eliminate the kruthik problem in the slums.  The kruthik egg chamber is a darkened cave.  Kruthiks secrete mucus as a way of nesting, so the chamber has eggs, slime, and sheets of mucus strewn about.  The mucus sheets act as walls, providing cover and blocking line-of-sight, though they are destroyed either by attacking them or simply by powering through them.

While reading through the encounter, it became pretty obvious that erasing walls on a battlemat would be pretty tedious, so I made some terrain.  Eggs were just pennies, areas covered in slime were represented by numbered tokens, and the walls were composed of wax paper and tape affixed to toothpicks (broken in half, because a whole toothpick was pretty unnecessary) with Sculpey bases.  Pictures of the setup (during the battle, mostly) are available after the jump.

Setup at the beginning of the fight.

Setup at the beginning of the fight: second shot.

Closeup on the cluster of PCs and kruthiks.  Also: beer makes everything better.

Second closeup on mucus wall, PCs, and kruthiks

Wider shot of the board, post-fight

Closeup of the board, post-fight

Unfortunately, the PCs kept movement to a minimum, like good Spartans, so only a single wall was destroyed during the fight.  Still, the effect worked, and the players were suitably shaken by the intricate setup — obviously, this fight is important somehow.

Fortunately, though, the fact that so few walls were destroyed means that I can use them again.  A fight in a Japanese-style tea house, perhaps?

Can I Interest You in a Slightly-Used Velociraptor?

My new players are starting to evolve into the psychotic little monsters I'm used to GMing.  I feel so proud.

A touch of backstory: as part of a campaign, I'm running Seekers of the Ashen Crown.  The original takes place in Eberron; my game is not set in Eberron.  As such, I've had to make some changes, but I do have a few nods to the original setting.

So, the PCs run into a hobgoblin gang that wonders why they've been poking around the slums.  Some of the gangsters are riding a type of mount called a Clawfoot, an Eberron creature that is essentially a domesticated velociraptor (by which I mean Deinonychus, but who cares?).  Combat occurs, ending with all the hobgoblins dead, an escaped Clawfoot, and an unconscious Clawfoot.

The PCs decide they're going to use this as a mount, but when it awakens, it tries to murder them.  They quickly subdue it, ask around for the going rate of a Clawfoot (they find that the things go for 680 gold), and decide to sell it.

As an aside, the hobgoblins tried to ambush them (or talk to them — nobody's really sure because the PCs attacked first) as they were exiting a dungeon — so the PCs are covered in blood, muck, and kruthik slime while they're discussing this.

The bard decides to take a bath, but the others go to the local stables to try to unload this Clawfoot, waiting for the bard to do the talking.

Then they all meet at the stables and try to unload a Clawfoot.  The beauty of this scenario is that the strongest men are carrying a bound Clawfoot covered in wounds and angrily snapping at the air.  It's been knocked out twice, and currently does not see its masters.  As the stable master says, he'll have to expend a lot of time and energy to try to prevent it from killing him, and then he'll have to sell it to make a return on his money.  They finally talk him up to 60 gold and call it a day.

Though they think they might try repurchase it later, after someone else has gone to the trouble of training it again.  Especially since it will probably never go for full price.

Provoking and Maintaining Horror

I've seen a lot of things about how horror is hard to create and maintain, especially in certain settings.  And that's true.  However, most of the advice about running horror doesn't focus on those challenges.  It caters to horror's strengths.  That's not bad, but it misses out on some opportunities.

Even if you don't play horror games, most gamers have experienced horror.  It might be very slight — sure, everyone is laughing and rattling dice in a well-lit room, but there is a sinking feeling of dread when it looks like everything is about to go badly.  From the Game Master's perspective, you see it when things start accelerating.  Suddenly, the players are talking at once, as if screaming actions the loudest will somehow save them.

Chances are good that this wasn't a horror game.

A couple of weeks ago, I was running Seekers of the Ashen Crown when the players came upon a trap.  They're pretty well prepared for this dungeon, but they didn't necessarily know that.  All they knew was that the trap would attack every round until it reset, and they didn't know how long that would be.  While the party escaped more depleted than when they entered, they left the trap alive and without any long-term dismemberment.

That's a big part of horror gaming: as the GM, you know what's happening.  The players don't.  Even if they are experienced with the setting at hand, they don't have to feel comfortable.  Rely on description rather than identification.  Maybe the characters have seen (and defeated) eighty goblins, but in a darkened, shadowy hallway, it's "a small, loping shape, half-hidden in the shadows on the walls.  You think it's humanoid, but it's hard to tell.  What do you do?"

Another important technique is to use the characters' strengths against them.  This isn't something I would recommend all the time — players tend to get annoyed when they can't play the character they signed up to play — but it's sometimes effective to show characters in a fantasy or science fiction setting that their abilities may not be enough to save them.  This is particularly effective if their abilities are useful, but not as useful as they would normally be.  Maybe a race of beetle-things has taken up residence on their ship; the beetle-things' armor isn't impervious to their bullets, but they can take enough hits that one beetle-thing could probably take out one fully-armed space marine.  This forces everyone to conserve resources and plan the attack a little more carefully.

Basically, if the outcome is in doubt, but everyone feels reasonably confident, it's action.  If the characters and/or players aren't confident, it's horror.  Use that to your advantage.