Hi. I am looking for suggestions on how to make the following RPG scenario more suspenseful and scary.
The scenario is this: the PC is an engineer, 1 year into a 3 year stint on an undersea, automated, mining base on a distant planet. His fellow coworkers are going to slowly begin disappearing one by one to be replaced with alien doppelgangers. Eventually the aliens will try to “replace” the PC as well.
I would like to make this as suspenseful as possible. Perhaps making it subtle enough that the PC doubts his own sanity, at least at first. Thanks for any useful ideas and suggestions!
Make the threat as vague and ill-defined as possible. Give misleading clues (the obvious inference is wrong), red herrings (weird stuff unrelated to the actual threat), incomplete information (no overviews or summaries). Require the player to make important decisions before they have enough information. Showcase bad decisions, but also make correct ones look bad.
If the doppelgangers are good at imitating people, perhaps they are not perfect. But people acting under stress may, themselves, start acting oddly. Perhaps one of the other coworkers starts to fray under stress, is suspected to be a doppelganger, is killed (or otherwise grievously hurt) and turns out to have been a normal human after all.
That’s basically describes my favorite scene from The Thing:
In addition to other suggestions above, start to introduce progressive acts of sabotage. Have an NPC die a gruesome ‘accidental’ death or suicide after asking the player character if they think something is off about another NPC, only to be revealed as possibly deliberate murder. Have communications cut out, or food spoiled, or medical supplies pilfered. Best of all, create some kind of ticking bomb scenario with a critical system like air or power failing unless repaired, requiring that the seek the aid of NPCs even if they cannot trust them. Have an NPC go insane with paranoia, accusing all of the other characters including the player character of conspiring against them. Watch The Lighthouse for cues.
The Chaosium game Call of Cthulhu has a Sanity metric, in which a character facing a shocking, gruesome, or incomprehensible sight is tested against their Sanity characteristic and will lose some amount of it if they fail (and sometimes even if they succeed), which renders them progressively more likely to lose additional Sanity and suffer mechanical effects such as exhibiting a phobia or suffering reduction in abilities. It is basically another way to have a sort of countdown clock that pushes the characters to be circumspect about peaking into dark corners, although how much effect it has on actually making the gameplay more suspenseful is questionable as the intent is most to replicate the progressive insanity of the protagonists of the typical Lovecraft story.
You could introduce something similar, like a token or level mechanism in your home-brew system which causes the character to suffer ability penalties as they become increasingly paranoid, or even have an ambient effect like dimming the light. Or you could introduce flashbacks, Solyaris-style, where they have to relive to previous traumas that the player character has suffered without realizing they’re hallucinating. Messing with their sense of time, jumping back and forth or having time pass the character while they are in a fugue state, is also disorienting and disturbing.
Remember that there’s a difference between the player being scared and the character being scared. Encourage introspection by asking him questions about how his character is feeling and reacting. Ask him to justify his decisions and reward him for making suboptimal choices if his character is too panicked to think straight. Stuff like that.
It’s more or less impossible to really scare players in a tabletop setting, but you can create suspense-by-proxy by ensuring that they empathize and identify with their characters.
It is certainly possible to build an atmosphere of suspense and uncertainty about the plot and events in the game by describing unsettling scenes or unexpected events, using a manner and tone of voice that suggests seriousness, dimming the lighting, et cetera. A gamemaster should not, however, aspire to actually frighten, repulse, or otherwise seriously distress the players, and in a horror game or one that presents horrific or gruesome events should be aware of any issues the players may have (e.g. past trauma, personal dislikes, et cetera) and make sure the players are okay with the tone and material that will be presented.
One thing to consider is that while a lot of gamemasters seem to think that they are ‘telling’ the story that the players are in (and some even compete with the players), tabletop roleplaying should really be a collaborative effort of collective storytelling in which each of the characters is the protagonist of their personal story. Trying to trick or fool the players by, say, unexpectedly changing the genre of the game from adventure to existential horror or ‘killing’ a player only to make it all a fever dream, or similar narrative tricks that are often used in novels where the reader is a passive observer do not generally work well in TTRPGs because it essentially removes the agency of the players in controlling their characters and actively contributing to the story. It’s okay to do squirrelly things like that in a game like Paranoia because the focus of the game is specifically about subverting the tropes of standard roleplaying and literally pitting the players against one another, but in general your players should be aware of the tone and general content of adventure and agreeable in playing into it, not just puppets for the gamemaster to manipulate.
Some of the best games I’ve played have been sandbox scenarios with minimal directed plotting, where the characters are actually creating plot developments through their actions and the gamemaster has to extemporize around their choices with the elements and locations in the sandbox. In such cases, it actually helps to have the players narrate scenes or describe locations given some basic information (e.g. “You walk into a nearly empty diner after midnight; who is there and what are they doing?”) which makes them very invested in the game versus just railroading through a structured plot with an essentially pre-determined ending. It’s more fun for the players and frankly more fun for the gamemaster (provided they are prepared to work off the cuff and have done some minimal preparation to accommodate the players like having a folio of generic NPCs to draw from and adapt).
Oh, no, I got the joke, and the “keep the players on their toes with a no-consequence die roll” is an probably the oldest trick in the book for unsettling the players and make them think something is going down (and it still works every time.) I just took the opportunity to [over]exposit over the difference between scaring the players and keeping the mood suspenseful. Every time I see a GM overpreparing some gag to startle the players or worse, upset them, I feel like they are missing the point, which is not to harass the players into feeling like they are the characters, but rather to collaborate with them in telling a collective campfire story in which the characters are primary actors who are, after all, driving the story from their points of view.
One problem I have with a lot of games, and in particular Call of Cthulhu, is how many scenarios are written and played with a specific ending in mind rather than letting the characters make their own decisions and adjusting the events and setting accordingly. It becomes tedious for the Keeper, who is constantly having to feed the investigators pointed clues or shepherd them back onto track rather than letting them explore, and if the investigation goes off the rails, extemporizing to keep the story flowing, and also often uninteresting for players whose actions are negated.
I once had a game in which the investigators went completely off track and ended up in the Pine Barrens chasing the (in-game mythical) Jersey Devil and blowing up a completely innocuous peat bog while unbeknownst to them the actual threat they were supposed to deal with completely took over Atlantic City, and when they returned (with one character sacrificed and replaced by a ‘Piney’ because of the unnecessary tussle the characters got into) they found themselves in an alt-history post-apocalyptic world in which Deep Ones freely roamed around the boardwalk led by hybrid ‘John Barron’, a 1920s real estate magnate with bad hair and a taste for trophy wives that would disappear and be replaced. (I used to read a lot of Spy magazine in the 'Eighties, and they devoted a lot of pages to mocking Donald Trump who even then was a ridiculous figure.) Anyway, it was a great game despite the fact that the entire party went indefinitely insane and the Star Spawn took over a chunk of the Eastern Seaboard which became forever known as the ‘Forbidden Coast’, even in totally unrelated games.
You could describe the various NPCS and mention different behavioral quirks or distinctive habits in their work routine, then let the PC catch them doing or saying something “out of character”. (Not by making the player use some sort of Perception check. Just casually describe in passing something they do that contradicts what you stated previously.) If the PC confronts them on anything, they can deny knowing what the PC is talking about. If the duplicates realize they are under suspicion, they could start questioning whether the PC or other originals are the ones acting oddly. The crew’s medic could stop by for an impromptu checkup and remind the PC of the symptoms of nitrogen narcosis in a pressurized environment. Try to get the player to start questioning whether their own PC is the one acting weird. Have the food start tasting strange (the duplicates are adding unusual ingredients for their own nutritional needs) but when the PC has the food tested, the duplicate running the tests says everything is fine. If you use sabotage as part of the plotline, the duplicates could frame the PC and other originals for the sabotage, to keep them from trusting each other and therefore be less likely to take effective coordinated action against the duplicates.
In the medieval siege combat game Conqueror’s Blade, if your health drops too low (like <5%) the color drains out of the visuals and a very loud, slow heartbeat noise rises to nearly drown out all the other game noises. It very much starts your own heart beating sympatico and produces a disorienting dread where, of course, the more agitated you become the less likely you are to make it to safety and heal up.
In Call of Cthulhu, when challenged by some horrific scene, creature, or some kind of psychologically taxing experience such as a prophetic dream or reading some ancient tome giving them insight into “the things man was not meant to know”, they have to roll under the SAN attribute (which is a percentile statistic); failure to do so means the stat is reduced by some value (usually a roll of some other die), which means that successive Sanity rolls are more likely to fail. In addition, there are mechanical effects for losing too much SAN in one roll (over 5) or losing too much SAN in one game day (one-fifth of maximum SAN) they suffer various effects. Depending on the type of scenario this can be rapidly overwhelming so sometimes the Keeper has to adjust rules to keep all of the characters from going immediately insane by the end of the first act.
For your homebrew game, you might try something more simple that doesn’t require as much bookkeeping, such as making some kind of characteristic roll (say, against Willpower, or perhaps for Intelligence where success in the roll means the character understands the nature of the horror and therefore suffers from insanity) and then add to a stack of chips or cards in front of the character with successively more debilitating effects to indicate the progression of mental instability. As I noted above, this is really intended to be kind of a ticking clock, forcing the player to both take action and be wary about opening doors.
Here is a good system-neutral summary of how to run a tabletop RPG horror game:
In case anyone wanted to know, the first session went well. The player rolled up his PC, which ended up being: very sane, fast and strong but also ugly, unlikable, unobservant, extremely unintuitive and pretty dim. Well, at least he can run away quickly when he finally figures out that he is in danger.
So, I started things by trying to establish normal relations on the base and introducing some ordinary interactions with his coworkers.
Then I ramped up the action a bit when a routine, outer maintenance mission was interrupted by an attacking sea creature. A coworker had to flee in his minisub but he came back 2 days later after hiding in a cave.
The alien parasites that came back with him are so far unnoticed. But a person has already fallen victim to them and has gone missing (for now). There is no suspicion or panic yet. Just a query: “Have you seen so and so? He is not answering his communicator.”
