Halloween is nearly upon us and while I have spoken about horror gaming in the past, I thought I'd talk about something more specific to D&D-style games as opposed to systems like Call of Cthulhu. More specifically the undead.
Undead monsters are pretty much a trope in fantasy RPGs. Whether it’s a crypt full of animated skeletons or a barrow full of wights, the unliving are as common as the gossipy barkeep or the blind beggar on the corner.
Therein lies the problem. When you look at the stories that inspired these monsters, the undead were, well, monstrous. The idea of meeting a walking corpse or entering a haunted house was supposed to be terrifying. It’s the whole basis of ghost stories after all. That something dead is in fact not.
In later years, the undead in fiction became more fodder than horrifying. Certainly many a fictional character was taken down by the zombie horde or strangled by a mummy, but the wrongness of it -in that which is dead moves, threatens, and kills- was lost through continuous exposure. Ask any Call of Cthulhu GM and he’ll tell you, scaring the players (not the characters) is the hardest part. At least partially due to overexposure.
Usually in a monster movie, the protagonist is an every-man. He's a regular Joe -maybe with a bit more sand than the next fellow- who finds himself in an extreme situation. He must dig deep and find a way to overcome the evil that faces him. This is the classic trope we see time and again. Ash in the Evil Dead. Van Helsing in Dracula (the original, not the Hugh Jackman version). Brendan Frasier’s Rick in The Mummy. The list goes on.
But in fantasy games like classic D&D, the characters are heroic. They are a cut above the crowd. It’s an adventurer’s job to go out and fight monsters. That crypt full of skeletons isn’t all that different from an orc lair. They all fall to the swing of a sword or the magicking of a missile. Classic D&D style games don’t generally include rules for things like PC insanity, so there isn’t much there to daunt the dauntless PCs.
Another feature that can make dealing with the undead blasé is the cleric’s Turn Undead ability. The rules as written are sadly silent on the penalties for failure or how often this power can be invoked. Unlike a spell, turning is not “fire and forget.” Granted, the more powerful undead are harder to repel, but you can see my point. If a dozen skeletons can be chased off by one PC holding up a necklace, they are bit less intimidating.
If you’re a GM like me, you’re always looking for ways to make the game fresh and interesting for you and the players. And if you are planning to run an undead-themed campaign, adventure, or even just one such encounter, you may be trying to decide how best to ramp up the tension and excitement.
You can always make a monster more dangerous. You can boost hit dice, add special abilities, or even just increase the number appearing. This will have the effect of making the encounter(s) more difficult, but that isn’t necessarily the same as scarier.
How do we make the undead frightening? Without using a lot of house rules to mechanically affect the characters, here are a few general options to consider:
1) Scarcity: Whatever creature or creature type you want to be scary, use it sparingly. If there are zombies in every room or behind every tree, they become prosaic. You’re fighting an uphill battle with such iconic monsters already. Don’t make them common in your adventure or campaign. If horror is your goal, the world has to seem almost boringly normal, until it's decidedly not.
2) Environment: The location can be your friend in several ways. First, visibility. Broken tombstones block line of sight. Darkness makes it hard to see them coming (rulings vary, but infravision might be useless against room temperature corpses). Don’t send a handful of skeletons shambling down a long corridor at a party that has continual light spells blazing away; have them suddenly pop out of secret doors or around corners or at the bottom of pits the unwary fall into. Perhaps an eerie fog makes it hard to see them until they are practically on top you. Remember, the undead don’t need to breathe, so maybe they lie in wait at the bottom of a pond or pool.
3) Tension: Build toward the encounter. Pace yourself. Like a ghost story or horror movie, the monster doesn’t appear right away. Increase the tension a bit at a time if events allow. Perhaps there are clues that something wicked this way comes. A glimpse through the shadowy trees, perhaps? Maybe the hirelings are growing increasingly nervous before they finally break and run (frequent morale checks)? If you can arrange for an NPC friend or cohort to be snatched or killed by surprise, it can add to the immediacy of the situation.
4) Rationale: Why are the undead in this place at this time? Unless you are running a setting that follows very different concepts, the dead usually stay dead. For a deceased person to rise as a mindless zombie or a foul vampire or anywhere in between usually has a cause. Is there a curse on the ground he was buried in? Was he bitten by a vampire? Did a necromancer cast Animate Dead? Is it a viral zombie outbreak? Why is this happening? This can add mystery to the story. In a dungeon crawl, if undead are just one of the things the party fights and there is some power creating them, could that mean other monsters that the PCs have already bested rise to fight the party again? Perhaps the restless dead are merely a symptom. Sure you can hack the zombies, but will that stop the real threat?
Intelligent or sentient undead have their own motives. Sure a vampire wants blood, but longer term (he’s immortal after all) he should have plans. Like a dragon, smart undead who have been around for a while should have taken steps to protect themselves and be advancing their agenda. This may include mortal servants as well as things like zombie minions. Vampires and specters are not good random encounter material -they have long-term goals and consequences. Nor will they work for another monster or NPC without a very good reason!
How does this make things scarier? Well, it doesn’t necessarily, but it adds depth and mystery to the monster and therefore the encounter, both of which makes building tension easier.
5) Variance: I included this option last because I said I wanted to avoid house rules, and while this isn’t exactly a house rule, it isn’t strictly by the book either.
Mix things up with your undead (indeed, with all your monsters). Skeletons whose bones glow and burn like embers. Zombies that carry rot grubs inside their decaying entrails. The purpose of altering the “standard entry” of the monster doesn’t have to be to make them more lethal. It can also be used to simply make them more alien.
As an example, one of my favorite variants are peat bog mummies. Players (and their characters) won’t be expecting mummies in your setting’s equivalent to foggy Scotland. You can run the creatures mechanically identical to regular mummies, but their appearance and locale can give a party a nasty surprise! Another fun one is animal skeletons.
Most of these suggestions can be easily applied to nearly any encounter to make it more challenging and more memorable. Not every combat is going to send chills down a player’s spine, but if any creature deserves the chance to do so, it’s the undead.
Undead monsters are pretty much a trope in fantasy RPGs. Whether it’s a crypt full of animated skeletons or a barrow full of wights, the unliving are as common as the gossipy barkeep or the blind beggar on the corner.
Therein lies the problem. When you look at the stories that inspired these monsters, the undead were, well, monstrous. The idea of meeting a walking corpse or entering a haunted house was supposed to be terrifying. It’s the whole basis of ghost stories after all. That something dead is in fact not.
In later years, the undead in fiction became more fodder than horrifying. Certainly many a fictional character was taken down by the zombie horde or strangled by a mummy, but the wrongness of it -in that which is dead moves, threatens, and kills- was lost through continuous exposure. Ask any Call of Cthulhu GM and he’ll tell you, scaring the players (not the characters) is the hardest part. At least partially due to overexposure.
Usually in a monster movie, the protagonist is an every-man. He's a regular Joe -maybe with a bit more sand than the next fellow- who finds himself in an extreme situation. He must dig deep and find a way to overcome the evil that faces him. This is the classic trope we see time and again. Ash in the Evil Dead. Van Helsing in Dracula (the original, not the Hugh Jackman version). Brendan Frasier’s Rick in The Mummy. The list goes on.
But in fantasy games like classic D&D, the characters are heroic. They are a cut above the crowd. It’s an adventurer’s job to go out and fight monsters. That crypt full of skeletons isn’t all that different from an orc lair. They all fall to the swing of a sword or the magicking of a missile. Classic D&D style games don’t generally include rules for things like PC insanity, so there isn’t much there to daunt the dauntless PCs.
Another feature that can make dealing with the undead blasé is the cleric’s Turn Undead ability. The rules as written are sadly silent on the penalties for failure or how often this power can be invoked. Unlike a spell, turning is not “fire and forget.” Granted, the more powerful undead are harder to repel, but you can see my point. If a dozen skeletons can be chased off by one PC holding up a necklace, they are bit less intimidating.
If you’re a GM like me, you’re always looking for ways to make the game fresh and interesting for you and the players. And if you are planning to run an undead-themed campaign, adventure, or even just one such encounter, you may be trying to decide how best to ramp up the tension and excitement.
You can always make a monster more dangerous. You can boost hit dice, add special abilities, or even just increase the number appearing. This will have the effect of making the encounter(s) more difficult, but that isn’t necessarily the same as scarier.
How do we make the undead frightening? Without using a lot of house rules to mechanically affect the characters, here are a few general options to consider:
1) Scarcity: Whatever creature or creature type you want to be scary, use it sparingly. If there are zombies in every room or behind every tree, they become prosaic. You’re fighting an uphill battle with such iconic monsters already. Don’t make them common in your adventure or campaign. If horror is your goal, the world has to seem almost boringly normal, until it's decidedly not.
2) Environment: The location can be your friend in several ways. First, visibility. Broken tombstones block line of sight. Darkness makes it hard to see them coming (rulings vary, but infravision might be useless against room temperature corpses). Don’t send a handful of skeletons shambling down a long corridor at a party that has continual light spells blazing away; have them suddenly pop out of secret doors or around corners or at the bottom of pits the unwary fall into. Perhaps an eerie fog makes it hard to see them until they are practically on top you. Remember, the undead don’t need to breathe, so maybe they lie in wait at the bottom of a pond or pool.
3) Tension: Build toward the encounter. Pace yourself. Like a ghost story or horror movie, the monster doesn’t appear right away. Increase the tension a bit at a time if events allow. Perhaps there are clues that something wicked this way comes. A glimpse through the shadowy trees, perhaps? Maybe the hirelings are growing increasingly nervous before they finally break and run (frequent morale checks)? If you can arrange for an NPC friend or cohort to be snatched or killed by surprise, it can add to the immediacy of the situation.
4) Rationale: Why are the undead in this place at this time? Unless you are running a setting that follows very different concepts, the dead usually stay dead. For a deceased person to rise as a mindless zombie or a foul vampire or anywhere in between usually has a cause. Is there a curse on the ground he was buried in? Was he bitten by a vampire? Did a necromancer cast Animate Dead? Is it a viral zombie outbreak? Why is this happening? This can add mystery to the story. In a dungeon crawl, if undead are just one of the things the party fights and there is some power creating them, could that mean other monsters that the PCs have already bested rise to fight the party again? Perhaps the restless dead are merely a symptom. Sure you can hack the zombies, but will that stop the real threat?
Intelligent or sentient undead have their own motives. Sure a vampire wants blood, but longer term (he’s immortal after all) he should have plans. Like a dragon, smart undead who have been around for a while should have taken steps to protect themselves and be advancing their agenda. This may include mortal servants as well as things like zombie minions. Vampires and specters are not good random encounter material -they have long-term goals and consequences. Nor will they work for another monster or NPC without a very good reason!
How does this make things scarier? Well, it doesn’t necessarily, but it adds depth and mystery to the monster and therefore the encounter, both of which makes building tension easier.
5) Variance: I included this option last because I said I wanted to avoid house rules, and while this isn’t exactly a house rule, it isn’t strictly by the book either.
Mix things up with your undead (indeed, with all your monsters). Skeletons whose bones glow and burn like embers. Zombies that carry rot grubs inside their decaying entrails. The purpose of altering the “standard entry” of the monster doesn’t have to be to make them more lethal. It can also be used to simply make them more alien.
As an example, one of my favorite variants are peat bog mummies. Players (and their characters) won’t be expecting mummies in your setting’s equivalent to foggy Scotland. You can run the creatures mechanically identical to regular mummies, but their appearance and locale can give a party a nasty surprise! Another fun one is animal skeletons.
Most of these suggestions can be easily applied to nearly any encounter to make it more challenging and more memorable. Not every combat is going to send chills down a player’s spine, but if any creature deserves the chance to do so, it’s the undead.
OD&D/Holmes/BX is basically survival horror if you play Btb with encumbrance, torches, strict time tracking, death at 0 hp, etc. It's a good to remind us all that undead are so spooky and terrible that they are one of the main focuses of one of the three (four) core classes.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely! If you are really playing up the resource management aspect of the game, then just being in a dungeon should be terrifying.
DeleteI've read (and give some credit to) those who say the ability to drain levels is so damn frightening to a player that this gives some undead a whole new level of threat that simple physical damage monsters don't have. However, I think you are right that Turn Undead as written makes dealing with undead a lot easier than it should be. 3rd and 5th editions both limit the number of times per day a cleric can turn undead.
ReplyDeletehttp://geekechoes.blogspot.com/2012/03/up-or-down-drain.html :)
DeleteI like these ideas, as well as temporary level drain - not as scary as permanent level drain, but still bad!
ReplyDelete