How I Horror

I finally ran some Mothership with other real humans, and it's making me think about how I run horror games.

Large Raccoons and Horror

I think one good thing to keep in mind is the Large Raccoon Rule. Basically, if you have a monster or a group of monsters, and they could be replaced with a raccoon - or group of raccoons - your monster needs more going on. A gimmick. A way that it reflects the horror of the universe, the way it reveals the cosmology, the way it breaks the rules. The thing that makes it wrong.

Though I haven't conformed to the rest of those rules - I have a highway drive with some clues about what's going on, but there's not a huge lead-in before The God of 11B comes along. But at least they're seeing dead people worship it and reanimate around it. That's something a raccoon cannot do.

Art by Karl Sisson

Describe and Never Name

Another one I swear comes from Falsemachine but I cannot find it anywhere - describe, don't name. If you see in the dim of a tunnel you're in, at the far end, silhouted by a lone red emergency light, the figure of a person, but small, like a teenager, which then ducks and dives and is gone. Then later this blur of pallid flesh and snarling sharp teeth charges you, and you see its too-large eyes and blue veiny flesh and it smells of rotten meat, it screams and tries to bite you with its jagged teeth - all that can be scary, or atmospheric, or at least it _makes sense_ when after that there's a fear or even a sanity save. If you just say 'a goblin charges you' then you don't, as the GM, earn that save. 

So describe things in as much detail as the PCs want but don't tell them what the things are. This can be hard in scifi - everyone thinks space travel means there must be some infinite universal wikipedia that you can image-search with a sanity-blasting photograph. But shoggoths are corporate secretes! They're not going to let that be out on the public web, you'll get cease & desisted, possibly with force. Comms channels aren't compatible, data networks attack one another like viruses competing for too few hosts. The center has not held and mere lack of solid information is unleashed on the universe.

Not Always a Monster

You can have the environment do something unusual (blood rain) that doesn't really cause any issues... not especially. And have the normal people in town start a freakin cult and start hunting down left-handed people or refugees or whatever out-group they manufacture. Get all Hellstar Remina. It makes zero sense that killing Remina will make the planet of the same name go away and not eat Earth, but hey, it's a horror game. NPCs don't have to be loyal or rational.

You could have corpsec drop smart-mines that ambush people and wound them horribly. They're targeting everyone not in the corp-sec database, did you happen to pay the monthly 10kcr fee?

Limit Resources

Mothership is fantastic in that there are rules for stress and panic, and 'not being stressed as hell' is a limited resource, the way hit points are for first-level PCs in B/X DnD. Oxygen is a limited resource. Food is a limited resource. Money is a limited resource and you owe a lot of it on your ship.

So those are fantastic mechanisms. What is Mothership missing?

The World Eats You Slowly

I like something Mothership's A Pound of Flesh has: 'storylines' that are effectively 3-part countdown timers. Locations and NPCs have notes for, say, phase 1, 2, or 3 of a given storyline. They also have a 20-point 'deadly encounter' chart that you roll a 1d10 to summon encounters. You add 5 if you are on part 2 or +10 if you are on part 3 of one of the plot charts / countdown timers, and everything above 10 is basically the storyline trying to destroy the PCs. The random encounters get weirder and more dangerous as things advance - maybe instead of teamsters drunkenly looking for a fight or local Corpsec being shit, you encounter a giant Eye that opens in the wall and blasts your sanity with its gaze. Maybe mouths open up in the floor and sing and try to chew you up. Maybe the Teamsters strike and Tempest (the local corporate security) is breaking heads.

So in addition to thinking about People's Inhumanity To People, and a cosmic cosmology of horror, and giant racoons - you always have to think of how things aren't stable, how they can get worse, and how that should reflect in everything - the once-familiar locations, the encounter tables, the gossip.

You Don't Get Better

Lots of games are about numbers going up - hit points, attack bonus, proficiency. You arc up to bigger and better things, and the things that used to be dangerous are laughable.

Just as the world of a horror game needs to rot, the PCs need to rot, or at least, rotting is on the table. They could get mind-fried or resleeved in a worse body or lose some of their sanity save in exchange for a psi power. Their hit points don't really go up, because you don't get better at getting shot over time. They make some gains but there's always room for some damage, because you're attacking that entire character sheet.

And It's Fun

Why play a game like this, intentionally bleak? There's that tension at the table, where it feels like Things Matter. The players get invested in seeing if they can, despite everything, succeed. Because they still can - they just might not get everything they want at once. That is a great feeling, and worth pursuing.