Originally Posted by H.P. Lovecraft

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

For the initial part of this discussion, I intend to elaborate on elements that Lovecraft discusses in his Supernatural Horror in Literature article.

Lovecraft truly hit the nail on the head with this statement. Whenever time is spent contemplating the true nature of fear, the road inevitably leads to the unknown. There are greater philosophers than I who have elaborated on this point, and Google can bring up many papers devoted to this very subject. I'll simply state that, more often than not, the root of fear grows from the observer just not knowing.

With this concept, we can start playing with the silly putty of fear in our campaigns. Call of Cthulhu is a horror genre game, but when you start working through the mechanics and details described in the various manuals another element quickly becomes noticeable. Call of Cthulhu is a game about mystery, and this is not a coincidence. At the root of every Call of Cthulhu game is an element of the unknown, and it's up to the investigators to dig that black heart out.

Our culture of the Horror Movie inspires us to prop up the central horror at the beginning of the story, and then lead the characters through a merry chase as they try to find the correct method to defeat the villain. This works well for action packed stories, and is how Horror has embraced Action in the time limited framework of a show or movie. However, as a tabletop RPG and even more so as a VTT RPG, we find ourselves able to play without the artificial constraints of time. In this sense, the techniques that movies teach us start to fall apart. These techniques work for movies because they must convey to us a full and rich story within a very short time frame. On some level, we as viewers recognize that and allow them to use blunt elements to provide recognizable depth without investing as much time into it (i.e. the heroine falls in love with the hero because he's the hero). I firmly recommend that we abandon the fast paced timeline of the movie and adopt the creeping stories of the written horror.

One of the reasons that I prefer slow starts to my game is because it provides a framework for the characters to recognize the "natural world". It's one thing to say, "This is the real world, and here's how I'm breaking the rules for horror's sake." within the first hour of the game. It's another thing to allow your players to explore the world with their characters, to experience how bureaucracy operates in the timeline, to witness how NPCs interact with each other, and then tear the veneer of this normal world with the brutal murder of the meter maid just because he happened to look to closely inside that car. In order to give the players a sense of the abnormal, it is important that we not skimp on providing them the normal first.

A trap that I witness many a Keeper fall into is the attempt to define exactly how horrific a scene is. Many have fallen from describing horror to describing camp when attempting to give fine details. This is not because they lack skill in writing or description, but because they lose sight of the fear of the unknown. You may know exactly how to describe a scene that leaves you shaking on the verge of wetting your shoes, but your fear of the unknown is not someone else's fear of the unknown. Tabletop RPGs are a game of imagination, and precise descriptions tend to turn off parts of the imagination. It can be more effective to simply describe the steady dripping of blood rather than the grisly tears in the victim's flesh, or the scrap of skin on the wall instead of the pile of mutilated meat in the center of the room. Consider the following:

The bones of the victim have been bent 90 degrees against their natural flex, and tatters of skin flayed from the muscle to tie the bones into these unnatural angles. Irregular drips of blood fall into the puddle of liquid that should have been inside the corpse but instead forms a pattern too horrific for your mind to process. These remains are so twisted beyond the normal that you can't even make out the sex of the victim.

I have described what would be a truly horrific scene to me. However, which part of this stands out as something to really be scared of, and naturally draws you to want to know more? For most of you, that would be "forms a pattern too horrific for your mind to process." While I have described a grisly scene, by not giving a description that pattern takes on a life of it's own in your head. What kind of pattern could be like that? Why couldn't you process it? How bad could it really be? All of this leads you to want to have your character take a closer look, perhaps justified by an attempt to follow the plot point, but at the heart of your desire is the need to dispel the unknowns in this element. To dismiss the fear so that you can remain in control. Unfortunately, while this fragment is powerful, the fact that it's the only vague element can be seen as the Keeper baiting the character into following a rigid plotline. Let us now consider:

The bones have been twisted into an eldritch pattern that should have toppled long ago, but remains upright. It's hard to tell what is skin and what is muscle as both are tattered off the bone and woven together into an indecipherable covering hiding portions of the grisly mass. Irregular drips of blood fall into a puddle that seems too large for the remains to have contained, but now form a pattern too horrific for your mind to process. Attempting to determine the identity, or even the sex, of the victim gives you uncontrollable shudders as your mind contemplates how a human body could have been rendered into this..... thing!

In a sense, I have given far less detail about what exactly is going on here. However, what I've done is used descriptors that force the player to construct the scene in their own heads. By leaving out the details of the actual subject, I have invited the player to construct the scene for themselves. This construction introduces the personal fears of the player into the scene. One player may find torn skin to be more disgusting than bone, and this description allows them to construct a scene with their personal disgust in the forefront. One player may consider the psychology of emptiness a personal affront, and this scene triggers that offense with the concept of being bled out. The deliberate dehumanizing of a corpse tends to affect a large number of people, many of whom might not have known that this bothers them! By leaving the actual state of the subject vague, I have constructed a scene that more widely inspires fear in the group than any kind of detailing I could have laid out. I have played up to the unknown, and the human nature to conquer the unknown through defining it. In addition, focus is drawn to many elements of the scene, leaving the player to find their own plot hook as they pry out details through their character interactions with the victim.

In the interest of sparking new discussions, I've decided to start the conversation with how to create horror in VTT. Many of you know a variety of techniques to scare your players, from appropriate music and lighting to the inevitable "BOO!" moment around the table. Unfortunately, many of these techniques do not translate well to the VTT environment. How do you use mood lighting when all you can do is control screen color? Where does the "BOO!" come from if you find your group limited to only communicating through chat (if your Teamspeak server crashes, for example)?

I have been finding myself interested in the dynamics of horror in the VTT environment ever since I first started playing with the demo version of Fantasy Grounds a couple of years ago. We live in a time when our concepts of horror have been built upon movies. We have grown on the musical score of Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. We've learned to deal with the leap out at you moments from Paranormal Activity. Visuals that turn our stomache like Cannibal Holocaust are a dime a dozen on Google Images. Evil Dead's campiness is prevalent and even the unknown has become a formula demonstrated by the Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. All of the techniques we find in the movies of our age are easy to adapt and replicate when we sit around the table playing our RPGs. However, the ease of these trappings falls away when we lose our control of the environment and easy contact with our friends. How do we reclaim the creepiness of Lovecraft when our players are sitting under the bright light of their computer room?

As I've been building a modern campaign for Call of Cthulhu featuring the players as students at Miskatonic University, I've found myself thinking more and more about the true classics of horror. Before the big screen, there were the stories. Many a scary book has been written which has managed to creep me out as much if not more so than the movies ever have. Lovecraft himself wrote some of the best stories for raising the hairs on your head. In my opinion, our solution lies in the classic techniques of the written word, not the flashy ease of modern cinema.

In my opinion, crafting a true horror campaign in a VTT environment such as Fantasy Grounds is an opportunity to really grow as a Keeper and as a writer. There are ways to incorporate the table elements we have found ourselves relying on, such as piping appropriate music over the voice chat. However, it should be seen as an achievement of honor to manage to creep your players out using only the written word. To that end, Lovecraft provides an excellent treatise entitled, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" which should be considered a must read for the Keeper starting to craft true horror in Fantasy Grounds. Lovecrafts insight has guided a century of horror crafters ever since he penned his words, inspiring the written word, musical pieces, and even cinema itself.

Once you've managed to get a tenuous grip on Lovecraft's inner workings, it would behoove yourself to take a look at the latest modern technique for generating a sense of horror. There are the big names out there that should be recognized as masters of the craft, such as Stephen King, Clive Barker, or Richard Matheson. However, as brilliant as the big author's are, their techniques are better suited for the linear tale rather than an RPG. They require the lead-in of the novel to bring the fruit of their horror to full bloom. While their techniques should be recognized, understood, and utilized to a certain extent, I consider another source to be better suited for modern inspiration of table top horror.

Have any of you ever heard of the phrase Creepypasta? An Internet Meme, creepypasta consists of short and micro stories written primarily on forums with the intent of invoking feelings of disgust, fear, and revulsion from the reader. Many of the attempts are trite, but there is some true genius there. In particular, I invite everyone to consider the fact that creepypasta attempts to invoke intense versions of those feelings in a handful of paragraphs! More importantly, many of them succeed! A story that delivers these intense emotions in only a few paragraphs is flexible enough that it can be adapted to player input on the fly, without losing the core of the horror. creepypasta.wikia.com is a website that catalogs a variety of creepypasta stories that stand out above the crowd (be careful, there are some NSFW stories in there). The Suggested Reading page is a good place to start, although I recommend Genetic Experiment X2E, Gateway of the Mind, and the Russian Sleep Experiment. While they are much longer than traditional creepypasta, the Humper-Monkey's Ghost Story and the multiple Fifty Foot Ant stories that follow are an excellent read from Tim Williard, an author who has also published the Year of the Zombie material for the d20 system (caution, that third link on the word "Ant" is generating a "Malicious Link" warning in Kaspersky tonight, but I've ready it without incident at that website last month - proceed at your own risk though).

As for my campaign, my personal style has always included a slow start to the campaign. I feel that it gives the players time to feel out both their new characters and also the world that I'm crafting for them, as well as gives me an opportunity to observe which parts of my world grab their interest so that I can better develop those aspects of my campaign. To that end, I'm blending some of the long techniques from the modern authors for my overall story-arc, but I'm also including elements from creepypasta as short term arcs to keep the player's attention while the longer arc develops. My long arc revolves around the characters gaining immortality at the price of surrendering control of their bodies every time they "die" to the being giving them eternal life, with the climax being centered around forcing the characters to choose to allow the otherworld being unfettered access to their world in exchange for eternal life, or to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to deny the being access to their world (with end game consisting of either an epic conclusion to their character stories, or a rapidly escalating story of trying to fix the wrongs they have done similar to the plotlines of "Friday the Thirteenth the TV series"). While that long arc develops, the characters will find themselves in various situations revolving around horrific science experiments (Russian Sleep Experiment) and locked in scenarios (the first and second Fifty Foot Ant stories).