Exchange of Realities

One thing that often shows up as a source of fear is the inhuman or supernatural. It’s easy to see the proximal cause for why; they’re different, and different is scary. But what’s the ultimate cause? Why is being different a fear trigger?

People tend to base their dealings with others on the assumption that some qualities, wants and fears that they themselves have will be shared by others. A system of internal rules, as it were. “Getting hurt is to be avoided.” “Behaviors have reasonable causes.” “People die when they’re killed.” This allows them to come at every confrontation with some sort of plan, whether it’s as tailored to the situation and the context as “I’ll call in a favor from him, try to pay him off if that fails, and if nothing else works threaten his offspring” or as universal as “I hit it until it stops moving.”

Picture by plrang of stock.xchng

But then in comes an inhuman or supernatural creature, and they try to deal with it according to their rules. But the strategy starts running into problems, like the fact that many undead are exceptions to “People die when they are killed!”, or that the Thing in the Bushes only gets scarier rather than being worn down when it gets hurt, that something can exist in two places at once or that a certain creature values the destruction of everything more than resources or reproduction. People have trouble with things that deviate from their normal rules; their standard responses don’t work, and they have to come up with new ones, usually without enough information to do so. This scares them. The greater the difference between the rules of the world as they see it and the rules that apply to the creature, and the less they know of the creature’s rules, the more scared they are.

So in some cases, we create something with entirely new rules. For some people, the key is using very obviously inhuman creatures, like quasi-demonic creatures or near-invincible oozes. Other people aren’t as impressed by the alien; for them, you might be better off with something that looks like it should work by the character’s rules, or at least by rules the character knows, and then doesn’t.

For people who are semi-inured to the innate fear reaction caused by a certain class of creatures, one thing to do is to vary things up further. Take vampires; they used to be fearsome due to mystery, but now they’ve gone downright mainstream, and there goes the panic-reaction. Everyone knows they have trouble with sunlight, feed on the blood of the living, and can be killed with a stake to the heart; while it’s not true of all types, most people expect that they might be unable to cross running water, could have problems entering homes uninvited, and may or may not be prone to obsessive-compulsive counting of small granular objects strewn on the floor around and in front of them. It’s pretty easy just to turn this into a set of vampire-rules, then find ways to figure out whether the opponent is one or isn’t. But what happens if you break the aforementioned rules, like having a vamp who explodes into a cloud of biting insects when staked instead of dying? Even breaking one and just not giving opportunities to test the others can put people back on edge.

Another fun thing to do with rule-breaking creatures is to make them particularly intelligent. Just because those silly people trying to stand against it don’t know its rules doesn’t mean it can’t know theirs. Nor does it mean it can’t know theirs at least as well as they do. The end result is something that isn’t as confused by its opponents as they are by it, and that can bring out a lot of fear just by existing.

This is also a reason why, if running a game and trying for a horror atmosphere, one should avoid telling the players what they’re fighting. Identified creatures probably have stats, and someone probably knows those stats. With unidentified ones, it’s hard to be sure.

So change a few rules, and watch the opposition quiver with fear. Isn’t it fun?

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