Exchange of Realities

I spent the last week or so discussing fear, and how to bring it forth in the audience. This wasn’t a coincidence by any stretch of the imagination.

My game has been running for several years, so the player characters are extremely powerful. This not only means that it’s hard to challenge them with normal situations, but also that they’re rather tricky to get strong emotional reactions out of. Offhand, I can think of only two times I’ve gotten any subset of them to run away, and one time it wasn’t even deliberate. But I gave myself a challenge. Using only words and a Ventrilo server, could I get this party of experienced players with powerful characters twitching?

The enemy was the Blob’s scarier cousin—it doesn’t get much more inhuman than this creature. Specifically since the group knew very little about it: that it was silver in color and acidic, that it was enormous, that it could create and control copies of anything it absorbed. This alone wasn’t enough to stop them, though it might have given them a bit of pause.

Photo by rosym of stock.xchng

Then I came to the setting: a dank, colorless swamp (imagine the above picture with less living things, and you’re getting close). Now we’re talking. Swamps are practically made for messing with the audience’s senses: you can’t see your own footing (really bad if you should need to fight or run, as you can’t take the time to feel your own footing either); just about anything moving, even twigs falling, will make a noise; the mist that forms at night gets in the way of vision. This one had a couple special bonuses: an overpowering scent of rotting organic material (so strong I let them pick it up before the magic by which they reached the swamp had even taken effect), and a complete and utter lack of color and near-absence of living creatures that weren’t crows or mosquitoes. And when they arrived, they got on the right footing immediately—or rather, the wrong footing, as the first step left them ankle-deep in sludge.

Then I added music. This being last week, I was in a bit of a hurry and hadn’t planned ahead, but I had a secret weapon: three soundtracks worth of anime scored by Kawai Kenji. (Four, technically, if you count each season of Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni as a separate soundtrack.) Let me tell you, when what you need is dark suspense, it’s hard to get much better than this.

So there they are. Creepy location, creepy music. And as night fell, I finally got around to introducing the enemy. (Letting people stew in their own juices for a while: very useful technique. The imagination will fill in a lot.) The first couple sightings of it were things that might not even be connected, like a thickening of mist (acid hits water!) in one place, and something vanishing smoothly into the water somewhere else. When the foe is mostly liquid, a swamp is a terrible place to be; it can blend almost perfectly into the murky water. Where else do you hide something the size of a lake?

And then there was the thing with the crows it constructed. Settle down above the group, start cawing at them; one of the group members chucks a knife at one, and they all disintegrate into silver ash.  Set a couple people on edge.

Then they discover it’s intelligent….