"The Atmosphere of Horror" - an excerpt from the upcoming Lurking Fear GM's Guide
The following is an except from The Lurking Fear GM's Guide, an upcoming companion to my game The Lurking Fear. The final text may change before the guide is published, but I think it is decent advice in its current form:
There are a few basic tricks to creating a genuine feeling of horror when running an RPG.
The right demeanor will go a long way. There are many styles of speaking that create an atmosphere of horror – clinical coldness, hostile assertion, excessive courtesy, and sinister familiarity work equally well. Speaking softly is extremely effective in person but doesn’t always work for online play with less than perfect audio equipment. Find a few styles that work for you - not everyone can speak in every unsettling way, but everyone can speak in a few unsettling ways. This works both when you speak as the GM, and when you voice a specific character.
Even if your adventure contains high-concept horror, you can emotionally prepare your players to feel horror by playing to primal fears like isolation, darkness, and the unknown. It’s worth taking time to emphasize how difficult it is for characters to see at night or in a storm and asking about what light sources they’ve brought. Likewise, if characters are in a remote location, you can mention how far they are from the nearest help a few times. You don’t need to include every primal fear at once, but having one or two around helps.
Tension is much easier to create than fear, and usually close enough. Build tension through foreshadowing. Subtle foreshadowing can be fun but easy to miss at the table; obvious foreshadowing is more effective. Give the player characters equipment that would only be useful in dire circumstances. Use ominous names. Foreshadow within the fiction by having characters encounter warnings of obvious danger. You can also foreshadow to the players by including references to works of horror they’re familiar with, and you can foreshadow out of character, speaking directly to the players.
On the flipside, defy expectations when possible. Uncertainty and short-lived confusion are powerful tools of horror. If a cabinet door is rattling and players think there’s a monster inside, then when they open the cabinet, it’s empty. Maybe it was a distraction that allowed the monster to sneak up behind them. Right when your players start to catch on that nothing will be as expected, flip back around and play the next scene straight. Place recurring mundane motifs, like popular songs or household items, before scenes of horror. You can have an explanation for the motif reappearing, or it can just be coincidence. Players will catch on that the motif signals something bad is coming. You can do this within one adventure, across a campaign, or even across multiple campaigns.
If there are monsters in your adventure, hide them like you’re making a low-budget film. Every minute that players spend interacting with a monster steadily shifts the monster from a source of fear into a puzzle or a character. Instead, show the effects of the monster – signs of its passing, readings on instruments, things or people destroyed by it. Let your players meet victims who have been traumatized by their encounters with the monster. Those who can speak coherently describe the monster and its actions in fearful terms. Some may be driven by their fear to take drastic measures to avoid, destroy, or placate the monster.
If you have a recognizably human villain, keep conversations with them short and use silence tactically. Do not engage in battles of words or wit with the players. An incompetent villain can be scarier than a competent one. Victims can be even scarier than villains. A character whose actions or attitudes don’t match their environment can be very unsettling and very easy to portray. Increase the sense of Agency by sometimes giving them useful weapons, powerful equipment, or even magic and unnatural powers, but don’t give them safety features or user manuals. Using magic should be at least as scary as handling explosives. Give plenty of hints that humans don’t really know what they’re doing with magic. Players should have some chance of using it successfully, but using it under the wrong circumstances or making a small mistake can lead to spiraling unintended consequences and possibly fates worse than death.
If you’re playing in person, the environment can help you. People are often more receptive to horror at cool temperatures, in dim light, and later in the day. We don’t always get to choose where and when we play, but sometimes you can time your best scenes to be after sunset.