Bears Are Not (That) Scary
It’s the Halloween season, so we return to that old chestnut: fear. I’ve talked a little about scaring players before, or more accurately, getting players to be willing to let themselves be scared, but let’s talk about fear itself. Rumor has it there is nothing else to fear.
There’s pretty much two breeds of fear: fear of the known, and fear of the unknown.
Fear 101 is that fear of the unknown is always the winner, because your imagination is your worst enemy.
Say there’s a bear coming at you. Rarr. Are you afraid? Yeah, probably. You’re afraid of a known threat (the bear), and you’re envisioning a fairly obvious outcome (the bear gets a snack). Now let’s try a different scenario. You’re sitting there, reading this post, and whoosh, the lights go out — your computer too. It’s pitch black (if it’s daytime, play along and pretend it’s night). Lightning flashes outside! In the flare you see a face reflected in your monitor… but it’s not your own! Boo!
Scary, right? But why? There’s no clear threat at all. You’re afraid of the big unknown, of all the possible things that might come get you, and your imagination is doing all the work. Fear of the known just can’t compete. Sorry Mr. Bear.
“Hell no, I’m not going back to the Standing Stones…”
So it stands to reason that if you want to elicit fear in a game, you’ll get more bang for your buck if you stay in the unknown fear end of the spectrum rather the known fear. With the known, you have to do all the work. With the unknown, everyone else does the work for you.
For example, take this thread: “How can I make a Mi-Go city seem dangerous?” The upshot (if you haven’t already clicked the link) is that the PCs are sneaking into what should be the alien domain of an otherworldly Cthuloid race, but it’s falling flat. There’s no fear.
The discussion mostly revolves around ways to make sneaking more challenging, to ratchet up the tension and make the players afraid they’re going to get caught. Which would make sense, in most scenarios. But these aren’t kobolds or Imperial stormtroopers. These are inhuman fungi from the voids of space, otherworldly terrors who defy rational thought. Unspeakable horror is the objective.
In other words, we want to instill fear of the unknown, not a mundane known fear like getting caught and subjected to claw/claw/bite, because at that point getting eaten by a Mi-Go isn’t any scarier than being eaten by a bear.
So let’s take the sneak-into-the-city challenge and turn it on it’s head:
First let the PCs sneak and sneak and sneak. They may see strange figures moving in the distance, but they avoid detection. Hey, they’ll think, this is working! We can totally get away with this!
After much meandering (it’s a big city), the investigators enter a large hall covered in strange carvings. One wall has a freshly-chiseled mural — in fact the tools are still sitting there and chips of stone litter the floor, as though the work was abandoned a moment ago. But the thing that catches their attention is that the mural shows them, the PCs, sneaking into this very city. Their faces and clothes are unmistakable: they’re dressed just as they were an hour (or so) ago when they first entered the city. Even the buildings are recognizable, but in the mural the sky above the city seethes with watchful eyes…*
and/or
As the investigators hug the shadows in yet another canyon-like avenue, something catches their eye. Far above them, alien figures line the edges of the balconies and parapets. Hundreds of them. Staring down at our heroes. Chittering among themselves quietly, but doing nothing. They’ve been watching you all along…
* For bonus points, the characters’ carvings are perfectly realistic facsimiles, out of place among the otherwise alien etchings… except for one of the investigators. That person’s face is strangely distorted, Picasso-like: the features twisted and out of place, seeming to slip to the side of the head rather than the front. One eye is larger than the other, a scribbled oval looking off into madness…
That’s called pulling the rug out from under them. All this time, the players thought they were engaged in a particular challenge (avoiding detection), and hey, they thought they were winning! but lo and behold, that’s not what was going on at all.
They always knew you were there. They were always watching. They’re watching right now. Why aren’t they attacking? What are they waiting for? What’s the real threat? You have no idea, so you have no idea how to save yourself. Insert fear here.
The Climax Is Anticlimactic
Freaking out waiting for the other shoe to drop is suspense. When the shoe drops… well the fun is over. Things shift from suspense to action, from unknown fear to known fear. You may jump when the chainsaw maniac jumps out, but after that it’s just running and running and blah blah blah. The tension has left the building.
That’s the trick really: continually giving the impression that the hammer is about to drop — that there even is a hammer, though you can’t see it — but then never actually doing it.
The pitfall is the looming threat that overstays it’s welcome long enough that everyone stops being worried about it. “We’ve been wandering in this alien city for hours, but they’re not doing anything! I’m going to walk up and poke one.”
If you try to bring tension back in by dropping the hammer… well no one’s afraid of that particular hammer anymore, so that’s not going to work. You’ll get a little action, but no buy-in. If you’ve waited too long, your best option is to twist again: just as in the alien city, the players find out that they’re worried about the wrong thing, you can reveal that the danger the players are worried about isn’t the problem at all. It’s not the Mi-Go: the very stones you’re walking on are watching you! They’re slaves to their alien city! But if you already elicited fun fear once, don’t draw out this new threat. That’s probably asking too much. Push for a climax in the action, relieve the renewed tension with action, and be done. Until next time…
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I should add that one of the characters in the campaign had a deathly phobia of bears. Funny, that.
I’m of the opinion, actually, that the hammer *must* be dropped; if you don’t, it can imply that there never really was anything to be afraid of, especially if you use the kind of psychological tactics you describe on more than one occasion. In the mural example — an excellent idea, by the way — there must must must be some encounter with the Mi-Go or else in retrospect it would become The City of the Kooky Artists. I think the trick is to drop it in such a way or place that the PCs have an out — preferably a desperate, panicked dash out.
Here’s an example: Say you run your set of set-piece stealth challenges, and one of the possible paths out of the city takes the party through a spore chamber where they encounter an obviously immature yet still sentient abomination, some soft spongy shrub of eyes and sensory fronds, and it starts to make an eerie sound at the bare edge of hearing. The sound is obviously increasing in volume and will give away their position — so does the party run before checking how to continue? Do they try to stop the spore from raising the alarm? If they kill it, how far do they have to run before they can even begin to consider that they may be safe for a time? The spore itself isn’t dangerous, but it maintains the unknownness of the adults while at the same time cranking up the tension.
In any case, you want to make it possible for the party to survive, unscathed if they’re clever and resourceful and lucky enough, but they have to be left with the impression that the wrong choices *would* have resulted in TPK; that there was never any protection on your part.
From a campaign I ran, not even horror-centered: the party was scouting an old orcish stronghold now occupied by goblins — themselves something of a comic relief element, but vicious enough and in large enough numbers to be a real threat. One foolhardy PC got herself captured, the test of the party went in to rescue her, and then a Something wreathed in blackness emerged from a side tunnel a little ways away. Cue panicked dash through pitch-black tunnels.
It later turned out that the Something was a sort of extraplanar dwarf using the goblins to look for a magical artifact; he contracted the PCs to find it for him, and on completing the mission they spent a long time arguing IC about whether asking him for a reward would get them all killed. That moment when he first appeared would have been perfectly suited to the Mi-Go mission as well, I think, without creating potential Fridge Logic issues like “If they’ve been watching us all along, why aren’t we dead yet?”
In short, I believe that there are plenty of ways to drop the hammer without (necessarily) smashing the party and losing the mood, and that dropping it skilfully can ensure that the fear is maintained even after the fact — that “We could all die!” becomes “We could have all died!”
@ Scholz: pulled the arms and legs off some teenager… Not as impressive as it sounds. Once you get the first arm or leg off, the rest are easy. Plus, I’d wager Atmospheric Scientist versus ursus any day. You were perfectly safe!
On Bears. Many years ago I visited a fledgling Atmospheric Scientist at his observatory in the mountains near Tucson. We knew there were bears, in fact one or more, had broken into his parents vehicle the night before, and eaten their groceries. Pesky vermits.
Still, bears.. amiright? So we walked cautiously between the lodge and the telescope. All at night because, you know looking at Venus and all.
Next day we heard of a bear attack. Well you know the local press, always making more of something than it warrants.
The Ranger came by to give us a heads up. I tried to be cool with the “their more afraid of us than we are of them.” The ranger corrected that impression by describing what the press did not say. Basically, the black bear (the smallest of the American Bears) pulled the arms and legs off some teenager.
….
The fifty yard dash between the lodge and the telescope seemed like D-Day.
Hey Ben, very cool.
You just made one mistake. Bears are always scary (no exceptions). Remember every time you go outside, you might be attacked by bears. You might not see a bear right now, but make no mistake by the time you see a bear, it will be too late.
Hehe. Anyways, twisting and inverting player expectation is a good way to keep a game exciting.