Horror in Exalted.

Cthulhu_Wakes

Cthulhu_Wakes

Black Sun in a White World
Horror in Exalted. Just what the title says. Aside from the typical cthonic gods and what not, is there anyone who has had a truly disturbing/creepy moment in their Exalted game? One where your players simply stared in shock, got grossed out or got chills for days? I've tried my hand at this before using some of the Deathlords and once using the plague hullfv from old Hollow.


Has anyone else any truly creepy moments they've had in their games?
 
I had a heroic mortal that got mixed up with some solars that went ghost hunting. The ST weeved a tale that was horrific in terms of haunted house stories to the point that I personally had nightmares for a few days after wards.


It was kind of your resident evil style theme with those things that suck your head off floating around the ceilings and such, only exalted style. It was not fun, on the bright side my mortal exalted into a dawn caste haha
 
Hmm. It's not as straightforward to do horror in exalted as people typically are so insanely powerful that they can just beat the horrors into a pulp. I've come to be be really annoyed at the sentence: "I light up my anima banner." But well, if I were a solar I would probably also light that thing up all the time.


As I see it there are two ways of making your exalted setting horrific. First you can present horrors that your players can't entirely figure out, see or understand. Secondly you can present horrors that the players can't beat.


I used the second one to great effect, when they were ambushed by the local Deathlord. The whole campaign have been focused on the dead from the start, but they haven't actually seen more than small units of the dead untill now. Around a 100 zombies at most at the same time. All along I have let them know in different ways, that they were outnumbered and outsmarted and they have been withdrawing and hiding with what living humans there are left in the region. Recently I have let them know, that the dead were building an army.


Then one day outside the village of one of the characteres an army of 500 stand. Theyve got skeleton horses and stand perfectly still, so of course the player assumes they are zombies. He has got around 100 able warriors at the time and there are around 200 people in the village all in all, so he thinks he is screwed. The other characters are at that time unable to come to his help. But he decides to make a stand (viking solars, yay!) and attacks them. As the battle progresses he discovers that he is not fighting zombies, but possesed humans and they are all too easy to kill. He and his men are gripped by a strange bloodlust and when they come around, dazed and confused, they have slaughtered all five hundred enemies without suffering more than a few bumps and bruises.


At that moment the already death-tainted land around their battlefield gives in and becomes a Shadowland and an insanely huge army of strange bodycrafted creatures, war ghosts, zombies and other bizar creations appears and marches out into the night. They blatantly ignore our hero and his men, marching instead for the nearby forest at a high pace. The solar realizes two things: that he is hopelessly outnumbered and that he is cut off from the rest of the circle.


That day my players said they'd got chills. Nothing like a job well done :)
 
I tend to roll out with the psychological nasty than dripping, creeping horrors.  There are nasty critters galore, things that meep in the darkness, but in a Mythic setting, monsters aren't horror.


Terror and horror are differnent things though.  Anne Radcliffe tried to explain the difference in 1826, in her essay "On the Supernatural in Poetry", terror comes from the anticipation, of dread, of the psychological weight of doom, wheras horror comes from its sickening realization.  The difference between hearing the skitters in the dark, and meeting up with the 8' cockaroach feasting on human flesh.


There's another way to look at it though.  Build tension with terror, then go for the payoff in horror.  Both are useful, both have their place in fantasy--because fantasy and horror fiction are two sides of the same coin--the literary children of Faerie tales.  Horror fiction serves the exact same purpose of teaching and creeping as the original tales--horror fiction tends towards a heavy handed morality in that same sense--while fantasy has veered more into the realm of science fiction, only without the science.


Plenty of room in Exalted for horror though.  And certainly for building terror.  Look at the classic fantasy of Howard and Burroughs.  The odd and weird have always had a strong place, as has the psychological horror of Things Man was Not Meant to Know.  Old Gods and cults have a strong place, and those are great fodder.  


I might suggest taking a look at the excellent collection, The Dark Descent, edited by David Gl Hartwell.  Perhaps one of the best and most definitive collections of horror fiction to date, looking at the history and evolution of the genre.  Mind you, while the collection is fantastic, it's not a light volume, and I've used it as a text book for lit classes.  It's really that good.


Me, I like to build terror.  I like to involve folks in the building of a really good villain, to quietly getting them into the head space of a truly disturbed individual or group.  Get them to realize the dread logic behind their plots, and if I can even get them to see some reason it's even better.


Not just killing and ripping out of guts, but getting them to agree, that maybe that was the best option.  That there were worse things, and  that the PCs could even precipitate those options is payoff.
 
Lovecraft, read Lovecraft.  Horror does not always have to use blood and gore.  Solars and other Exalted have always had to deal with mind-numbing horrors.
 
*Ahem* Obsidian, read my name, and read your statement over again ^_^ I've read almost everything he's ever written. I have a lot of it on my hard drive. *snicker* I think Jakk made the same mistake once.
 
I've had my players "scared" twice ever :P


First time was playing the Invisible Fortress; THINGS kept happening... "I'm SURE I left my sword on that chair... now it's on the bed... okay...  never mind... now where's my comb?" repeat... all the damned time.  It really sets people on edge when you play with the fundamentals of their universe.  Exalts EXPECT something that breathes fire and shits acid to come screaming down the corridor at them.  In fact, one of your players probably even has a speciality in fire breathin/acid shitting monster killing.  But Exalts are not expecting that they're gonna come back to their room and find that their pack has been torn open and gone through, despite the fact that the only people IN the giant fortress are the circle... so who was it?  It's a great way to make players scared of other players and hell, even scared of themselves.  I had characters who went insane because, as far as they could understand, they were the only one who could have possibly gone through their bag... despite the fact that they don't remember doing it!


The second time was guts and gore all the way.  I took an immaculate temple, huge enough so that, even when they flared their anima up, it still left a hella lot of shadows (yes... I KNOW it says up to a spearcast away... but I'm the ST damnit!).  Then the found the completely eviscerated corpse of a woman spread across the altar and words scraped in blood across the walls of the belltower.  Then, once only one of them was left up there, the COMPLETELY insane Abyssal showed up, nabbed the Dawn caste's daiklave, explained to him how killing that person only made sense :P and then just left.  My Dawn was pretty damned scared.
 
I'm currently STing the Invisible Fortress.  The group has made it to the fortress, and if anyone has any pointers or good ideas that worked for you, I'd love to hear them.


And if you're one of my players reading this, and you use ooc knowledge, I will find out a way to caste Rune of Singular Hate upon you.  And you know, what better place to do that than The Invisible Fortress?
 
Well, a good thing is to do what was said above, things out of place and all that. But make it eerie, creepy, even add a little bit of humor and pomp to offset it. Let your players get comfortable, let them settle in just a little, start out small. Like the things moving and getting out of place.


Confuse your characters, have the Guardian quickly become their friend, their only friend, watch The Shining. Now THAT'S a way the Invisible Fortress can go, just minus the elevator of blood ^^; Make it eerie in it's own ways. Especially if they find the Retreat, seeing the word 'safe' written all over the walls by a knife and then clawed out with fingernails would scare the shit out of anyone.
 
If I may step in and offer just a tad of advice on this particular subject, without suffering the Rune of Singular Hate, I have a little something to say on the subject. There was one time I was running a MERP game and the characters stumbled into the sacrificial caves of a cult to Morgoth. The main thing that got my players scared was description. Detailing eloquently the cold water leaking down the cave walls, or how the shadows bent away from their torches and pooled in the corners, or how the wild glare in the eyes of the sacrificial victims told exactly how they felt during the moment of death really got the whole party creeped out, and so when something actually happened they bolted in terror.


Trust me, a few well placed words can have the characters jumping at shadows, real or imagined, for hours.
 
It also doesn't hurt to cheat a little bit.  


If you know your players, then you can use that.  To really instill a good dose of horror, you sometimes have to tailor your boojums towards the players, not just the characters.  My ex-wife was a great player, but often in her head instead of being in character at times.  To counter that, I often used what I knew creeped her out to intensify nasty situations where I wanted a good creepy feeling.


When you can couple that with what should bother characters as well.


Say that Jakk is in a deep mine shaft, on a tiny ledge, over a chasm that falls into the inky black.  Me, I hate heights--don't mind as much if I've got a rope attached, but even then, I'm none too fond of them.  Couple that with caves, dark, dripping, and chitters in the dark, and you've got Jakk's attention as well as mine.  When you put that together with low moans and the clank of chains, and you use the description to remind Jakk, the character, of his days as a pit slave, it gets a little hairier.  Now then, you throw in a wail in the distance, of someone obviously being maimed, shrieking in terror and pain, and Jakk can't possibly know which direction to take, and in fact, is quite limited to even going down the shaft, and the character is more than on edge, he's already close to a Limit Break--wanting to defend the innocent, unable to, and in the dark, alone.  It couples my own heebies with Jakk's and a good ST knows which buttons to push. Some, are off limits--and a good ST should know which ones those are for his or her players--but that doesn't mean you can't use what you know will genuinely creep out your players with what should bother their characters.  It helps them get into the spirit of the thing.


The key is to help their minds make connections with your descriptions.  The whisper of bone dust under their feet, the scent of cloying blood, sweet like broken dreams, lead them a bit with the descriptions, help them make the extra connections.  Don't go overboard, and roll into high melodrama, because then you get into the zone of camp, but a heavy enough touch, to help them build things up in their own minds, make their own assumptions, that's your task in a good horror situation...
 
Thanks for the advice, everyone.


I warned the players about how crazy the place was going to be, and quoted the book "This is a horror story, not an adventure yarn."  As a result, they've been uncooperative and overly careful.


One of my player's characters is insanely perceptive with an array of awareness and investigate charms to back it up.  There are a lot of creepy things that I can think to do, but I worry that his charms will allow him to reconstruct the scene exactly as it was - and there's nothing that kills horror and suspense faster than in-depth logical exercise.  This guy can get 8 - 10 successes, so he's carefully smelling the air for stray dust particles and painstakingly examining the floor for microscopic wear and tear.   It's pretty difficult to slip anything by him.  So the question that I want to pose is this:  At what point is a "legendary success" useless?
 
Balathustrius said:
At what point is a "legendary success" useless?
Click to expand...
At the point a player starts using out-of-character knowledge to foil your attempts to run a game.


Now, ok, the character's got those charms anyway. But they're not infallible, and the fortress knows a lot about Solars. Introducing irrelevant evidence can foil the perfect reconstruction charm. Also, because the fortress uses puppets and dupes, it doesn't reall yhelp the character to know who killed their companion. Awareness charms can work against a character if they only see misleading things.


And you really should feel free to just rule that, whatever the dice say, the roll failed because you are trying to build a sense of horror and success on the roll would make it too hard to run the story. I'd never fudge dice rolls like that to kill a player, but to add to the gaming experience? Just do it.
 
The only time I was really freaked as a player was during, believe it or not, a Shadowrun campaign. We'd been hired to track someone down and the trail led to a A Quiet Town in the Midwest. Completely abandoned, of course. We set up shop there and after about a week put enough peices together to determine that our quary had mutated into Something Awful. He left notes during periods of lucidity that led to more clues, and eventually the disovery of his corpse. He had basically eaten himself to stop the madness.


So, we contact our employer with the news, but the employer demands we find out what caused the mutations, so we look some more. We find more journals and signs of people dying in various horriffic, usually self-inflicted ways. Eventually, we determined the mutations were caused by the water supply that we'd been drinking for nearly two weeks.
 
wordman, that sucks.  I mean, really, that sucks.


Palm, my inclination was to do just as you say - focus on the storytelling (since, as it's repeatedly pointed out, Exalted is a cinematic game), and let the rules come in second place.  There's only a slight problem with thatt - the characters have gotten to know the rules pretty well (one of them introduced me to Exalted) and will try to call me on things that don't seem right to them, especially since this is my first time GMing Exalted.  But I can just tell them to shutup because I'm the GM, threaten to use the Golden Rule of Thumb, and keep going.


If anything happens that makes my group go "oh shit" I'll post.
 
Exactly...you have the power of the Golden Rule dude. Make it so mysterious or just a bit more than he can handle. The Guardian is very, very sly. He's been killing and getting people paranoid for nigh fifteen hundred years. He's done this about every fifty years, drawing people in.


Besides, the FIRST AGE Solars who inhabited the place slowly twisted him, getting him into the game of killing off people and sucking their essence dry by letting them turn on one another. I'm sure Bax, Larquen and the others had better charms than your investigator, and I'm sure by the end, he had'em beat.
 
Actually I disagree. Do not start an arms race storyteller vs. metagame knowledge. That's highly unenjoyable and completely unneccessary. Tell the metagamer to stop or to look for another storyteller.
 
Another possible solution is that you make the perception rolls. If a player makes a roll and gets 8 successes, he knows the information the ST gives him is pretty much bang on. If he doesn't know how many successes he rolled, then he has to take the information at face value, and base his actions on the information you gave him, rather than on the knowledge that 'I got 8 successes'.....
 
One thing I think has enormous horror potential is the Wyld. Two things that can scare me half to death is 1: knowing that the area I'm currently walking through doesn't obey any of the natural laws of Creation, and 2: that it spills into me and has the ability to mutate me. Now, pair that with some kind of "I have to be here, or Creation will come to an end" kind of plot, and I would be scared. A side bonus is that I love having the Wyld descriped. These scenes are simply great, mainly because they challenge my imagination and twist my head to see Creation differently all the time.


Jeppe
 
There's also the matter of doing what you do as a culture jammer.  Spam the Perceptive Wonder with detail.  Lots of it.  Let him know exactly how screwed he is.  Give me him the details on how much blood and brains are spread about the place.  How many scraps of clothing.  Shreds of nails.  Whisps of hair and scalp.  Maybe a few teeth.  The faint and lingering stink of intestines.  How about scratches in the floor, faint but your perceptive wonder should be able to ferret them out.  Faint warnings etched into surfaces.  


Take a page from Call of Cthulhu.  The more intelligent and perceptive you were, the easier you were screwed and the faster you went insane.  That you understood the full import of how bad things were about to get.  It was often far better to just be a lunkhead who wandered around looking for toejams and wondering where everybody went to.


So, your super investigator knows that something's up.  That's good.  He can know just how bad things are going to get.  Give him not just a few clues, but reams of them.  Lots of clues to sift through.  Same as when you want to be super anonymous, and you send back every damn flier and mailing list you can think of.  Choke him on details.  Give him enough details to recreate scenes, the stink of fear, the stench of horror all around.  Let him know what they're in for, and then let him wonder what could create so many signs, but leave no trace of itself...only its handiwork.


That is how you freak the little bastiche out.  Or at least the character...
 
*snicker* Yeah, my PCs in Call of Cthulhu DID know far too much. So much that one of my PCs went completely insane and drew he and his cohorts into a Mexican standoff of sorts. About a minute later, they were all dead. Think one of those oddly ironic endings where everyone weilding guns doesn't truly work out. They all shot each other in the middle of a laboratory in England after learning far...too terrible truths. But then, isn't that the last thing most investigators find to be the death knell?
 
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