New Years Horrors EditionTell us about your horror settings, games, etc. Share inspirational art, prompts, etc.>List of games:Call of Cthulhu, Chill, Cold and Dark, Degenesis, Delta Green, Don't Rest Your Head, Dread, Esoterrorists/Fear Itself+Book of Unremitting Horror, Fall of Delta Green, GORE, Into The Shadows, KULT, Little Fears, Mothership RPG, Nemesis (free on Arc Dream's website), Nights Black Agents, Silent Legions (Mostly for the tables), Stalker: The SciFi RPG, Symbaroum, Ten Candles, Trail of Cthulhu, Unisystem (All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Witchcraft, Conspiracy X, etc.), Unknown Armies, The Whispering Vault, Vaesen>Inspirational stuff:Caitlin R Kiernan, Castlevania, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Doom Watch, Fear & Hunger, George Romero, Ghostwatch, House of Leaves, I Am In Eskew, John Carpenter, Kolchak the Nightstalker, Laird Barron, John Langan, M.R. James, Nick Cutter, Old Gods of Appalachia, Quatermass, Ramsey Campbell, Remedy Series (Alan Wake, Control), SCP Foundation, Scarfolk Council, Shaun Hutson, Silent Hill, Stand Still Stay Silent, The Evil Dead, The Magnus Archives, The Secret World, The Stone Tapes, Anatomy, Thomas Ligotti, Twin Peaks, Vault of Evil forums, toomuchhorrorfictionOther News:Trail of Cthulhu 2e crowd funding launcheshttps://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/34bae629-fe97-4643-97b1-d6efc8a14267/landingCurrent Book Club Topic:N/AQuestions for the thread:>What is your horror related New Years resolution?>Do you do anything special for your horror games during New Years?>What are some good horror-focused New Years concepts?Questions for Horrorverse refugees:>Favorite New Years horror movie?>Do you have anything special you're looking forward to in terms of horror stuff for this year?Previous thread: https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/94377926/Please try to keep arguing to a minimum. Don't respond to bait/drama posts.And as usual, try and keep it alive, or at least undead
>>94708709>What is your horror related New Years resolution?I finally want to run proper Alien ttrpg campaign. Since my players are not into being spooked, I want to use all the cinematic tools and mechanics to build up tension and dread as a substitute for horror, since they are really approaching all my games, hooks and campaigns in really analytical let's-solve-this-and-get-back-home-before-dinner way. I think I can manage it with aggressive two steps forward, one step back design.>Do you do anything special for your horror games during New Years?Aforementioned Alien game. I designed campaign around frontier salvaging crew hired by shady insurance company to recoup their losses in abandoned fuel refinery outpost that is under red tape lockdown, because of industrial accident that killed lot of workers and investigation is still ongoing, yet installation is basically deserted. Plot twist: Cheap, retrofitted A.P.O.L.L.O colony management system was jury-rigged to operate small contingent of Seegson's Working Joes. Because of shitty job and cheap replacement parts, main routine was corrupted and A.P.O.L.L.O marked all workers as trespassers, mixed ore processing facility controls with fuel refinery controls and caused part of outpost to be irradiated. I have maps, stat blocks and flowchart about forcing crew to re-activate mainframe, loosing their landing craft and fending off the malfunctioning androids in heavy duty protective suits carrying various dangerous tools. Joke is that they are trying to repair ore processing facility and apprehend players. This will only cause more damage to deuterium/tritium refinery and detainment includes stripping them of their rad suits and locking them in building that gives you ten thousand chest x-rays per hour. That is my idea of horror.
>>94709837>since they are really approaching all my games, hooks and campaigns in really analytical let's-solve-this-and-get-back-home-before-dinner way. IBetter they approach it this way then as a joke at least.
Got what I wanted for Christmas
>>94708709Anyone got advice on running an alternate reality game? Basic idea is that the game starts in IRL 1920's, but players get nabbed as disposable and recordless occult peons for an overarching character of the campaign who opperates from an alternate reality. On surface glance it looks the same, but religions are slightly different, governments might be similar, but ruled by new parties or dynasties and occult is somewhat more prominent in the common knowladge (but still not publically recognized).I feel like this is a good way to do a fish out of water story in a fresh setting for the players, but I am concerned how to handle the many different derailments that could occur (or worse - not occur). Like I'd want to have the players try and figure out if they could return, and the dimension shift wouldn't be imediatly obvious (I'd want some midfuckery with them going back to their investigators daily work, but finding the workplace staffed by strangers or not existing at all). On one hand, I don't want the story to become just about them settling in or hyperfocusing on returning, because that will only ever be a campaign end goal, but I also want them to have some drama and not just be blind sheep that say "okay cool, whatever you say cult master, give us your next quest" without interacting with the alt-world beforehand.
>>94711920Good luck New Handler. Do you already have a group to put through their paces or do you need to go recruiting for your own group of Deltards?
dead
>>94713936Undead actually.
Double dead really
>>94712039You should give them time to settle and for the differences in dimensions to truly set in a bit before fully pulling them along into wacky occult war shenanigans. This can make the big moments hit harder overall.
Still going at it with the tarot cards, holidays have made it a bit difficult to work on them but im still going.
>>94717088Looking really good so far anon!
>>94712769I've been playing with a group for a while and I just like physical media more than digital.Managed to convince my freinds somehow to play.
>>94718221Thanks, still working on assigning deities to cards but so far so good (crossed ones i already drew and red ones are assigned ones)
first time doing GM and first time doing delta greentrying to make maps for the operation that's bundled in with the 'Need to Know' pdfany tips on doing maps? should I ditch colouring stuff in and adding details or should I stick with a basic black and white map?
>>94723908From someone who runs a lot of DG over VTT, you will drive yourself insane trying to make good maps, unless it is something you REALLY enjoy doing. I've transitioned to focusing less on the "accuracy" of the map and instead the "vibe" of the asset itself. Example is a map I made (in photoshop) for a campaign centered around a youth camp. I like the feel of a map being something scribbled on a piece of paper in a shitty hotel rather than something extremely detailed or hyper realistic.
>>94723908>>94724123Another example, same campaign, but a more detailed map the players wanted after collecting recon about the youth camp.
>>94724123>>94724137Thanks for the tipsI think I have a clearer image on what to do in terms of mapsI think I will try to have a mix of: building floor plans, printed out satellite imagery, a tourism/guide map like this one that I made (actual setting for my planned campaign), and those crudely drawn map on a piece of paper
>>94724246I like a mix of maps as well. I structure my VTT like relevant documents spread out on a table or using a corkboard. For precise area maps I like grabbing screenshots from this website http://mapstack.stamen.com/ and then using blend layers in photoshop to make them look more like a physical piece of paper.Skew the image slightly, add a drop shadow, export as png, ez.
>>94724504Better link to the map website: https://maps.stamen.com/toner/#14/37.8024/-122.2645They offer a bunch of different styles that I think end up looking better than your average google maps screenshot (though I do love the idea of a shittily printed google maps screenshot for an investigation asset).
>>94724123>you will drive yourself insane trying to make good maps, unless it is something you REALLY enjoy doingThis is why I bought a bunch of dry-wipe index cards for my in-person game. Fuck cartography.
>>94724123>you will drive yourself insane trying to make good maps, unless it is something you REALLY enjoy doing. This. I tried and I got sick of that shit really quickly.
>>94711920Nice.
>>94724519>>94725106>>94727777>>94724504Just my two cents for the map making. I used to draw them free hand, or use generative tools, but they rarely get usage outside of lore backdrop, for my CoC and DG maps I ended up with neat trick, that my players really enjoyed:>Bough bunch of touristic/topographic maps and city centers tourist maps>Meticulously censored large names with paper strips and tapes>Went to copy shop and made large copies, told them to deep fry it with contrast/saturation on industrial copy machines>Folded map and distress it by throwing it to washing machine with bunch of dice on spin cycle only (in pouch, so I don't have D4 stuck in drain)>Censored it bit more with black ink, added some hand written notes, coffee spills and circles>Stamped it with bunch of date/time stamps my mom had from her business>Give it to players in nice folder with other reports and handouts"Here champs, this is your intel from Agency, sorry for rough state, it was used by other cell in eighties..."I miss doing this shit, on other hand, I always flunked the story/NPC preparation, because I got stuck at props preparation.
>>94723908As someone who made a full map in blender, stick to the simple maps. Hand drawn for vibes or drawn up like a real map. Don't do what I do unless you hate yourself.
>>94730321>Don't do what I do unless you hate yourself.
>>94730291I absolutely adore this kind of stuff, good artificially deep-fried physical assets lend themselves so well to Delta Green and CoC.
>>94730321>Don't do what I do unless you hate yourself.Sounds like a challenge.
I like making fancy maps
I’m getting ready to run a Delta Green one-shot. What’s a threat you guys recommend for a party that’s somewhat familiar with the Lovecraft Mythos?
>>94737701Depends on the horror you want to go after. If you are with strangers probably just something safe and not very horrific /taxing (hound of tintatalos, star vampire, Nightgaunts, Byakee, etc). The monsters look like monstes, generally just want to feed or occassionally kill, have some obvious strengths (flight, respawning, invisibility) and some kind of obvious weaknesses . Fun for a one off monster of the weak type scenario. if you want to get into a more psychological horror (aka you want to disturb the players or actually terrify the characters) the ghoul in the septic tank scenario is pretty good from the book (the victim is already dead to give it some punch, the 'correct' action seems traumatizing) but other scenarios where the players are presented bad ends or the 'damage is already done' in some way works well here. Maybe it's not the Haitians eating cats it's TchoTcho eating people, Maybe an apartment block has been thrust into Kadath and both the locals and the residents are noticing, maybe there's a worm cult creating shitting zombiesand the PC's are already infected.Or if you want to get a little bit more mean, make the pc's fill out those relationships and then hammer on them. Have a stranger in a piss colour jumper give your wife the 'King's Gosepl', have your husband divorce you and somehow take the wrong box of odds and ends and is now lurdily reading your journal/fieldwork notes/spellbook not quite beliving it's real but saying a lot of shit outloud, have it revealed they are part of a government conjpspiracy known as project bluebook to create alien human hybrids but the greys were always just a front for the migo and now they are delta greens number one target. You know have fun with it.
Is episodic storytelling shit & do i bend to my players expectations? last session we went to innmouth, and we saw some fishmen. This session i wanted to run some "evil-robots";-- however, i realize that every one my players is expecting this stupid innsmouth and fishmen thing to keep going on. They want to injure y'hanithle over multiple sessions. I just dont feel like thats within the scope or even something i wanna run. I wanted a monster of the week with a re-occuring enemy. like Nazis, Soviets, Gmen, ETC.
>>94708709Someone add trench crusade to next op.
>>94738208>something that was rarely if ever mentioned before it became a game that also has its own general.
>>94738455Anon please understand! My slop must be forced into all threads on this dying board. Any surface level similarity from stylistic to mechanical form is good enough for me to push my slop.
>>94738512This is not dying board, its dying world.
>>94737701Last Things Last is always recommended for a reason, IMO. It's a great introduction to Delta Green as a concept, a world, and organization. It keeps the threat profile grounded and personal, but with horrifying consequences.Are you running something you're writing? Or looking for something pre-written?
>>94738540The greatest horror is that it's still experiencing growth.
>>94738208>has its own general>the mere mention of it attracts some of the worst shitposters and schizos, potentially risking the stability of these threads which have already been assraped by one particularly determined schizo for years>doesn't really offer anything to add it to the OP when you can simply talk about it here if you want to instead of forcing itNo.
So my players in my delta green game really enjoy combat so I wanna treat them with more of it but delta green characters are so squishy. I'm thinking about buffing health to 10 but I'm not to sure. Any advice? I just want my players to have as much fun and if that means throwing more combat at them who am I to judge.
>>94708709How do I do body horror creatures that can be slain right in a horror setting? Like I want to gross out my players and spook them.
>>94742592For me I just add more arms, teeth and human parts on animals. And lack of skin, that usually gets people. Look at creature concept art as well for inspo
>>94742592Unless you plan to use graphical media, body horror is hard to pull off. You are going for spook, but body horror is not there to spook you. It is there to create unease, tense atmosphere focusing on revolting, unclean feeling. If you want to play it for spooks, instead of slapping extra limbs and slimy intestine coils, go for subversion. Take something with known and expected form and subvert it:>Twist and scale parts to break understood form and proportionsIf you want to have inspiration, I suggest medical documentation of genetical damage caused by chemical agents in Korean/Vietnam war, rainbow agents caused havoc with local populations. On top of this, you can check results of industrial contamination and various infections re-shaping bodies.>Play with their understanding of something only to switch itThis is harder to do, but imagine that you see human, it looks like, walks, talks and smells like a human, but something is off, as your player reaches to shake it's hand, he feels chitinous surface or wrangling mass of something under thin rubbery layer instead of human muscles, sinew and skin>Use ordinary things in wrong contextI was once called out for magical realm, when I replaced cattle at farm with kidnapped humans, since they were treated as cattle by bunch of loonies and if you ignore the human suffering, it would be ordinary (maybe little bit outdated) farm.All in all, at the end of the day, body horror, splatter and gore is about subversion of expectations. You don't expected to see insides of other human beings, your pattern recognition gets triggered, because something that SHOULD be human/animal/car/house contains elements, which are making it something other and that should trigger you fight/flight. Tl;dr: Use pictures, it's easier.
>>94742592Something with too many arms and maggots squirming in its rotting sun-bleached skin. Mouths churn in the festering meat, opening and closing wildly as bits of it slough off from the creature's fermenting bulk.Basically, go all in on describing something as putrid and visceral as you possibly can.
>>94739992Rather than fudging stats, give them more access to armor and tactical equipment?
>>94746582Armor and tactical equipment, when you work for US based Agency.>Agents: Anon, based on these clues and our investigation, we have concluded that there is group of Wendigos in that forest, hunting and killing locals and tourists after they opened new tourist center deep in the valley.Handler: I see, well it seems that you did your job right, but how will you solve this?>Agents: Hm, let me check...>Agents: I use my requisition access and request Lockheed AC-130J Ghostrider from closest USAF base... that would be Cannon AFB in New Mexico, right?Handler: Wait->Agents: I see that our access to AFSOC is still valid, since we did not used it last session, the 105mm M102 howitzer should be capable of firing enough HEAT rounds to solve Wendigo issue.handler: Guys->Agents: I would suggest to ask for total saturation bombardment with everything on board and multiple strafing runs, just to be sure>Agents: Shouldn't we call for ATF and tell them there is bunch of short shotguns and dogs in that forest?>Agents: Certainly. And give them IR flares, so Ghostrider know where to shoot, when they all get killed.
Any of you running this? I have just started chapter 2 with my group and I'd love to discuss the campaign or hear opinions/stories.
>>94746582Should I give them tactical Armor then? The catch being they can't just wear it out and about and have to prep a little. And some more selected weapons to pick from.
>>94748106That's the fun of it, in my opinion. They need to prep, they need to make considerations on how they use or field this equipment. They want to be boots on the ground in a raid on a cult compound? They gotta scope it out, they gotta pick the time, do it under night, gear up and breach that shit themselves.
>>94742592There are two schools of thought. Either something that looks normal at first then goes absolutely apeshit (any of The Thing monstrosities for example) or you have them out and out disgusting to behold and look like they're in so much suffering and pain that running to the nearest living thing and killing it seems to be the right call.
Anybody run Gradient Descent for Mothership before? I looks incredibly cool as I'm flipping through the booklet, but I'm interested to hear how it goes in actual gameplay.
His game design takes are as bad as his polisperging.
>>94751003Except he's right?
>>94752147He's notNight Floors is a haunted house railroad, the text in the book has little support for anything else besides the "just burn it down 5 mins in" speedrun route.If you work for x years and write an entire campaign to make Night Floors less of a railroad though adding several hundred pages of content that's not because Night Floors isn't a railroad, that's you making Impossible Landscapes (still a railroad at its core but still).
>>94752186Can't have an /hsg/ without someone starting a seethe-spiral about Detwiller.
>>94752233I am going to kill Caleb as well.
>>94752250Somebody is mad God's Teeth was nominated for an Ennie.
>>94752267I will not take such insults, I do not give a FUCK what an ennie is.
>>94752308
>>94752333Donald Trump
>>94752407
Also sharing the Nodens card since i recently finished it>>94742592For me, what i like to do is mix the organic with the inorganic, you could play with a lot of the components of the body that may seem forgein (water, iron, etc) but are completly natural and use them to deform the body. You could also do the opposite and do inorganic stuff growing organic shit like eyes or organs. If you want some inspo watch shit like Tetsuo the Iron Man
>>94752333Hmm, wonder what won 1st>solo adventureThank you Table Top RPG Community™, very cool.
The high lethality of DG mechanics + scenarios goes directly against the main theme of beating your wife after the op where you saw a fishman.
>>94752233It's all so tiresome.
>>94753543Nah, the main theme isn't beating your wife, beating your wife is like the pizza party at the end of a corporate tax season. The real main theme of DG is watching your partner get devoured by a shoggoth and praying to Azathoth that you make it home SO you can beat your wife.
>>94751003>It's impossible to permit sandbox play without enforcing railroadsWhat did he mean by this? Seriously, sandbox just means the players direct the action. Does he mean that the players make their own rails and he's just being a pedantic chode?He lost the plot in three sentences, or I'm retarded. I'm willing to accept either answer at the moment.
>>94719974Would love a link or catbox of all the cards you've done so far anon>The LoversCould be the king in Yellow and one of the daughters of Cthulhu since they have a fake marriage to trap Hastur in the expanded mythos >DeathCould do that farmer family from Colour out of space, or just the Colour destroying all the flora and fauna
>>94752233Criticism of Night Floors is always warranted. Never understood why anyone recommends this especially to newer Handlers.
>Making your game actually scary, killing your players, sense of aloneness and fearI’m struggling with this. I have an irl group where we regularly play Battletech, and we run ttrpgs from time to time. I want to run a hexcrawl game semi inspired by Silent Hill, Dark Souls, Vermis, etc. Probably using Shadow of the Demon Lord. I think “being alone” definitely helps make a world feel big and scary, but not really possible in a group, besides just limiting NPC encounters. >killing your playersI want enemies to be actually deadly, is it too unrelenting to kill PCs? I’ve run DCC before at low levels, it always seems to feel bad when a character dies outright. Should I give my players some kind of checkpoint system, like bonfires/lanterns?
>>94756553Will be doing the catbox thing soon but i'd like to finish Cthuga first, as for the cards>the loversI already used KiY as the emperor>deathNever thought about the color, thanks for the suggestion
>>94753719Kek
>>94752186The shittiness of night floors doesn't effect the point he's trying to make.
>>94719974The Lovers should be Dagon & HydraThe Tower should be KadathWheel of Fortune could be the great race of YithStrength could be uhhhhh the Dholes?I've got nothing else that comes to mind, might reply again in a few hours if I think of something.
gay ass infighting has killed my delta green game. I love this. Now I gotta ether pick between to players. I feel due to resent tragic events in a players life is the main cause of it all so. So I'm just sad. We were just about to hit the cool ending. Hope they at least stick around for one more session and I'll give both of them the coolest ending I can muster. And then anything I do on can be with or without ether. I just can't play player councillor trying to fix the game, that's just dumb.
>>94743459>>94744150>>94746546>>94748443>>94752475Thanks guys! I've been thinking of the past 3 days that I think I'll go for animal/human grafted hybrid creatures or at the very least human body parts grafted together to resemble animals.Is it a good idea to make them rarities among the naked undead animalistic humanoid masses or commonplace?
>>94769290What happened? If you're gonna blog post, go whole hog, don't honey dick us.
