A while back, @BigGrump threw down a challenge for all of us to do more here, which has taken me a bit of time to wrap my head around how I could best contribute. Then in the prep chats for Blood Orange, I realized I had a ton of fiction side and neuro considerations I could post about on how to make characters more engaging as PC and GM. Then in my Blood Orange Gush Thread, @Shadymutha invited me to opine about Horror Gaming from my perspective as someone who spent some time writing it once upon a time.
Never let it be said that this Wordy Bastard would pass up a chance to pontificate!
And so I’ve decided to kick off a somewhat regularish set of posts here in the spirit of the blogosphere of yesteryear. Feel free to push the link to your friends and other outside sites, invite folks in to see what awesomeness awaits in ICRPG land!
This series is probably going to be a handful of posts long over next few weeks, and going to go under the main heading of Lon on Horror Gaming: so it’ll be easily searchable and linkable to the other series I hope to do.
So without further ado, I hereby christen this post the kickoff of a commitment to contribute regular —or at least regular_ish_—bits on the crossovers of fiction theory, neuroscience, and gaming.
#1. Know Your Genre, Know Your Audience.
Your first consideration when deciding to run a horror game is to know who is going to be at your table and what they think Horror means. Or, more specifically, what they think the emotional payoffs are going to be from a “Horror” game.
In the biggest sense, Genres can be broken down and further subdivided into the emotions they focus on evoking and the flavor of tension and relief they provide. Here’s a couple examples about Fantasy before I jump into Horror specifically:
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Fantasy, at the broadest possible definition, is a genre that grants a sense of escaping into a wonder-rich world ripe for discovery. It’s appeal is primarily about relief from this humdrum reality filled with contradictory and difficult to understand rules.
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High Fantasy tends to evoke a that sense of wonder and discovery, but adds in a flavor of confidence and competence and access to the higher rungs of worldly position. Adventuring is hard and dangerous, but not if you’re good at it! Not many get to interact with the King, the Grand High Mage, and the Turtle Oracle, but I do!
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Epic Fantasy keeps all those High Fantasy emotions as a light side dish to contrast with all the seriousness to come. It emphasizes an entree of gravely serious threats to entire populations or regions, dire consequences of failure, peril at every turn, and the balance of power being against a ragtag band of underdogs who—despite it all—just barely manage to save the day.
Here’s one more, just to show you how deep this “emotion as genre” thing goes:
- Mysteries are all about the emotions of the AHA! moment. Churning through seemingly disconnected facts seeking relief from the unknown, until finally… AHA! Sudden Understanding blooms and we figure out Whodunit etc.
Moving on to Horror. (At last!)
It’s the genre that explores the emotions of fear, disgust, and (usually, crucially) HOPE.
And here is where knowing as much about your players’ expectations as possible is clutch. The Question isn’t so much “What’s Horror mean to you?” as it is “What kind of emotions are you expecting? What itches are you looking to get scratched?” But those are weird questions to ask out loud, and will require a HARD Wis roll for the erstwhile barbarians to figure out. So the way to find this out is by making associations to other stuff in the horror genre.
If you are running a game with lots of time up front, ask PCs what kind of movies or books or comics they think a Horror session will be like. Look for the overlaps and play to that as much as makes sense in the course of the game.
If you as a GM want to run a specific flavor of horror (or any other genre) game, it is absolutely imperative that you advertise the game for what it is, set clear expectations up front of what kind of mood, tone, theme, and payoff the people who show up can expect. (Consequently, this is why @Shadymutha’s LFG announcement was like chum in the water for me!)
To elaborate on some of the flavors of Horror most commonly sought after, here’s how I breakdown the main horror subgenres most amenable to gaming. NOTE: These aren’t mutually exclusive or decisive categories. Overlap will be frequent and arguable.
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Campy/Splatterfest folks are looking for things like Tucker & Dale vs Evil and Evil Dead. They are looking for the fun and laughs—sick bastards!
—of dismemberment, blood spray, intestine pulling. The emotional payoff here is frequent, rapid and more obviously meta than many other subgenres. It goes like this: “Oh Gross! Hahaha! Ouch! CringeLOL” and provides plenty of opportunities to make jokes at table or in character that relieve the few moments of Awful Awful Badness just experienced or witnessed. In fact, with these genres, the relief from the fear and disgust is actually the point. [Technically, I’d really Class this genre as Comedy…the horror is just the accent tone.] -
Action Horror fans (Predator, The Purge, Brendan Fraser Mummy movies) are looking for an experience of fear and disgust that can be relieved by decisive, competent action. The message of this genre is much like High Fantasy up above: The world is a scary, dangerous place…but I’m the lucky one who just may have the right skills and grit to beat this menace.
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Survive a Monster or Monsters: (Serial Killers, Freddy Kreuger, A Quiet Place, The Descent, The Ruins, “Shoot Cthulhu in the Face” style pulp adventure) this calls for a definite, specific threat that gradually makes itself known to the players peripherally, then makes it very personal as it begins picking them off one by one. The fear leans toward terror/panic, and disgust is about having a personal connection/reaction to it. These are accented by curiosity and desperation: What is this Threat? How do I keep safe from it? If I manage to hurt it, will it stay down?
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Survive a Cruel World (Zombie apocalypse movies, much of Lovecraftian genre, The Purge could be here again, too) Here, the emotional trajectory is from Hope to Despair and Desperation, and sometimes back to a tiny glimmer of Hope. The overwhelming tone here is the idea that the world that we used to know and feel in control of is slowly crumbling out from under us. We will have to adapt because things will never be right again. The toothpaste won’t go back into the tube and on a scale that might as well be global and permanent to the PC, even if the public is unsuspecting. It’s a particular kind of fear—LITERAL HORROR (the polar opposite of wonder)—and it often pairs well with the sense of Discovery and Investigation that only increases the sense of Dread and Crumbling Security.
I welcome your thoughts, comments and questions in the comments below.
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PS I’m also working on a series of Upping Your Characterization Game posts too, so stand by for those to start rolling out on a semi-regular basis for a bit.