Genre Police: Warning, Content

I’ve told this story before, but bear with me; I’m going somewhere new.

Once upon a time, I was kind of known as the GM who did horror. Not just in horror games. I was a little renowned for taking a game to dark places. I’d try to spend ages thinking of moments to present to players that would unsettle or unnerve. And, largely the players I had enjoyed that sort of a game. But as I ran more and more games and my player base expanded beyond that player base, I continued to include graphic content in a splatterpunk style. I didn’t take a moment to think ‘do these players want this?’.

Eventually, I had a moment where a player confided in me that they’d been through something I put in a game, and it had made them uncomfortable, it coming up unexpectantly. Thinking back to the moment of pure shock on the table’s faces when I uncovered the moment, I realised that it had most people uncomfortable.

At the time, I’d been trying to ape the feeling of the ‘Iron Age’ of comics in a superhero game. But really what I’d done was go too far for shock value.

The moment, which now I look back on it was over ten years ago, changed the way I presented games and content to players. I rethought my way of delivering, where my horror came from, how it was generated. I went on a hell of a journey. And to be honest, my reputation has changed. Now I’m known as a GM who is Trusted to take a game to dark places.

Here’s how I changed what I was doing in order to put people at ease with the darkness and deliver it in a way that chills.

The Slide

You see, the difference I made wasn’t in backing off on the content. It was about how the impact of that content is delivered. I’m not carving up player characters or interrupting expectations of safety, art brat style.

Those are effective tools in generating a feel of unease and terror in players. But nowadays I much prefer a slower creep. A game slowly slides during a conversation or scene towards darker content, often with players themselves filling in the gap where the dark should be.

Recently I had players in conversation with a society than believed itself to be perfect. The conversation with the leader of that society fairly clearly was a monster who had brainwashed his immortal child soldiers. The players talking to him slowly became aware of exactly how horrible the place they were in was. Anything that wasn’t part of his mission was crushed and gone. Emotional and spiritual development, doing anything apart from work was seen as pointless and petty. No one ever did anything in a way that wasn’t efficient. There was no joy in undertaking. Anything that served the person rather than the group goals was bad, but also the groups goals were the maintenance of the status quo. It was all cold. This slow realisation of how far from the human experience these people had gone made the players not want to stay in the settlement for any amount of time. 

This wasn’t horror of graphic content or even normal horror standards. This was players having to encounter a place devoid of hope or change. To people who are usually the agents of change in a game, this place being so resistant to agency horrified them. It was a real world horror, one of workplaces and housework, where we are pushed by our own minds to keep going and feel guilty if we take a moment for ourselves. 

I love doing this, taking an idea or philosophy and ramping it to inhuman levels and then letting players discover it through conversation with the person who has pushed it to the extreme. Players come out the other side of the conversation feeling like they’ve gone to a dark place that left them dirty without ever having to touch on anything actual graphic description.

About that description

I’ll save my graphic description for moments that might need it in order for the players to understand what is horrible about a scene, filling them with more description than they want, having to listen to mangled bodies or inhuman creatures.

Taking time to really show the way something is truly alien or made by a thought process outside of human reasoning is well worth the effort. But when it comes to an actual real world thing players can imagine (a butchered corpse, a graphic assault) I’ll often cut the description short and crisp or just hint at what’s going on. I’m not forcing players to confront something they might have seen, instead I’ll deliver what is almost businesslike and then they can fill in the gaps.

It gives them an option to decide to just imagine it in a ‘fuzzy’ way or not. Then if they choose ask questions to fill in gaps, I can add layers on top or not. In my current vampire game set around the Sabbat, I’ll often use this technique – give an almost boring or background quality to some atrocity to really send home how steeped in gore that faction is. Thing that I would, in some games, use to horrify are different here. In fact, they are not even worth giving emotion content to.

It blunts the impact of the act and then later players will be like ‘Oh Gods, I’ve looked back and that thing was horrible, wasn’t it?’ like they suddenly realised how far they are from standard morality. And that after realisation is a sort of quiet horror that a player is free to process or not. In the long term, it feels more unsettling than delivering yet another graphic shock.

Strike at the worst moment

Look, I’m not saying never go hard. I’m just saying pick the moment. Don’t just have your players say. Knocked out, captured unexpectedly and tortured by a psychopath. And I mean, I used to do that beat often. And it felt like good horror, one player even ate his own eye in order to escape. But in the end it wasn’t as effective as the sort of developing terror where players realise they could have avoided what came…but they didn’t and now it is too late.

Wait, watch and when a player fails a roll or makes a regrettable decision in a moment of tension, GO HARD. Don’t let up.

Think of the worst thing and make it happen. Puncture arteries, shred flesh, go for the damn jugular. Make sure the moment you break from the moment of creeping dread into the bloodletting is just awful. 

Then the darkness comes because they decided to make enough noise for them to notice it. And keep on them, don’t let up until they’ve fought their way out of it. If it takes ten minutes of game time or three hours, once the tension has built its way to ramp point, just keep throwing things at them until they get clear. Give no quarter.

I hope that demonstrates some of how my delivery of dark content has shifted into a different space and where you can take your dark content in new directions. I’m going to be staying on this path and looking at evil in games for a while, so feel free to buckle in.

Creative Commons credits: Smile by DedBunisCollections,  Seriously Scary v2 by steelgohst, and a pale horror by Istrandar.