i need YOUR opinion. First of all, i always dreamed of having

>>49200594
>Have YOU ever managed to accomplish this?
step 1: kidnap your players
step 2: lock them in your basement
step 3: inform them they will not be able to leave until they finish the session

>>49200617
lol

>>49200594
i think it could work, I'm not sure exactly how, but for starters you need to have a goal or objectives for the players.

-Find the aliens craft
- investigate scene of abductions
- see the result of abductions, mutilated mangled corpses maybe if you want easy, if you want to freak them out think weirder.
- stumble across one of their labs
- discover they are among you
- later on have the aliens learn of your interference and try to eliminate you, scary having aliens hunt down the players

i honestly thought of X-COM and Destroy All Humans, check those out for some inspiration.

I think it can totally be done. call of cthulu, but less eldritch and more ayys

>>49200617
no matter how many times i see this its still funny

I've ran an alien abduction game before, it went so well one of my players refused to walk home alone and when he walked back with his friend he refused to look at the sky,
The rest of the group sat and watched John Cena videos for two hours until they recovered.

I set it in a 1990's hunting trip in the forest.
Started off finding scorched trees and metallic smells in a strange clearing.
Then their food tasted odd, then they shot a deer and found it was running from a similar clearing with weird burn marks and found a surgically mutilated deer. Their walkie talkies started splurting babbling small voices.
Then as they settled down to bed, the lights appeared. One went to investigate, never came back.
Then an alium watched through the window, then left. Whilst it was watching the deer carcass started to vibrate and its blood dripped upwards.
The rest went to look for the missing guy, and their car broke down. The aliums looked through the window, they split up and ran. Two of them went into the light and got abducted, never to be seen again. The other guy found the missing guy who had no memory of leaving and was covered in burn marks.
They went back to the cabin and the morning dew was dripping upwards. Their cabin was already occupied by the aliums who were rummaging around. One guy straight up shot himself as the aliums looked at him, the other guy mercy killed the burnt guy and then shot himself.

Somehow managed to achieve total terror. Aliums are the best horror.

Bump for this awesome idea.

>>49200594
Horror one-shots are much easier than horror campaigns, in my experience.

Some common tips:
>You need to have the right group of people in the first place
If you bring jokesters and people who don't afraid of anything to your table, it will ruin the mood. You want a group or people who take things relatively seriously, can connect to their character, and who enjoy playing more than they enjoy winning.
>Atmosphere is everything
Turn down the lights, turn on a low level of spooky music, bang on the table every now and then when your players get complacent.
>Ask yourself why your players can't just escape a bad situation.
Better yet, have your players tell you why they have to keep going into darkness.
>Isolate, separate, pursue
>The unfamiliar is more terrifying than the known.
If it has a name, don't use it. If your monster has a well-known weakness (e.g. vampires and sunlight), subvert it. This plays on the first bit of advice; genre-savvy players are going to anticipate what you throw at them. The best compliment I ever got while running a horror game was when a player, after seeing part of the horror, said "I have no idea how I'd react to that."

>>49200594
That image is stupid but terrifying at the same time. I can't explain it.

>>49201604
This is fucking beautiful. More info needed though, like what system was used, blah.

>>49200594
There's a system out there called DREAD, which uses a Jenga tower instead of dice or anything else and was meant for horror and survival.
The tower becoming more and more unstable leads to a constantly growing tension. It really makes the players stand on their toes and will work for any goshdarn setting you can think up. I'd provide the PDF, but I'm not on my home computer.

>>49202308
holy shit i'll love to use that. Thanks a lot!

>>49202371
Call of Cthulhu and Fear Itself are also excellent systems for running horror. I hear good things about Eclipse Phase but have never tried it myself.

>>49202308
mind to share the rulebook?

>>49200594
Run a Call of Cthulhu in the age of Delta Green, all characters are friends or family of victims, make them care about NPCs, and then risk said NPCs.

>>49202308
how do values work in gameplay oriented in jenga though? i mean, you can't upgrade any values and skills your character has, making it less likely or more likely for the jenga tower to fall down, right?

>>49202615
The idea is that all skill checks fall into three categories: automatic failure, chance of success, or automatic success. You can also borrow a mechanic from Fear Itself where the first success in a scene is free for the right character (e.g. a character with psychology skills manages to get a trauma patient to tell them about the night they disappeared) but subsequent investigation would require the player to pull (e.g. trying to identify the building the trauma patient describes).

What I don't get is how you keep playing after the tower falls.

File: horror thread.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

1B, 486x500px

Dread - one shot horror with few mechanics

Dead of Night - one shot horror with more mechanics

Call of Cthulhu 7 - generic horror (literary)
Nemesis - generic horror (psychological)
AFMBE - survival horror (action)

>>49202615
A character in Dread is made by answering a custom questionnaire.

The idea is that the player invests creativity and emotional tension so that the character matters to them and isn't just cannon fodder.

But in those answers, competency gets mentioned, sometimes intentionally, sometimes in passing. This counts as a skill.

So when there is a challenge and the player has to draw blocks from the tower they can look at their answers and alert the GM to any mention of implied skill toward the challenge in question. This will lower the number of blocks to draw, possibly down to zero.

It's still GM's reasoning. A character that mentions vastly different skills in every other sentence just to cover all the bases might get 1 less block while a character who can do 3 things can be assumed to do these 3 things pretty well for more rebate on the blocks.

It's not a game about skills. It's a game about tension. But it doesn't treat every character the same.

>>49203291
>horror thread
http://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/48739416
(There's PDFs)

Watch Dark Skies and The 4th Kind.

Pretty fucking spooky.