It was a dark and stormy thread

[Nothere]

Oct 1 has arrived and the countdown to Halloween has begun. So time to look into the dark. What was the scariest/creepiest thing you've had in your games?

[death tribble]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

We had a tradition. Halloween was the Chaos Corps night.

Mahoney Snark the millionnaire enemy of the hero team (had a bodyguard earing a suit called Demon) was the boss

Thorn the egoist was second in command, and his lover.

Elasto was a stretcher like Mr Fantastic.

Doppelganger was a male version of Rogue from the X-Men.

Princess Poison was an adaption of Poison from Enemies the International File.

Foil, the greatest swordsman in the world was a member. Counterpart to Sureshot who was an archer based on Hawkeye.

The agents all had the Chaos sign from Michael Moorcock's Eltic books.

They also had a shape shifting green alien. Green Goliath

And the daughter of Herculan who was a brick. Carnage

 

Not scary per se as Warpath was or the Pentacle but they were the Halloween tradition.

[Cassandra]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

Zombie Sharks.

 

No, wait that was real life.

[quozaxx]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

I've done Zombie wolves before but not sharks. I suppose the scariest thing was having a giant Skeleton / Grim Reaper hand reach out from the land of the dead and try to take PC's into his dimension.

[DShomshak]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

Hm. There are so many possibilities...

 

Was it the mob of partly melted mannikins from Trinity (you know, the mock-up town that got blown up in the first nuke test) shuffling and lurching forward Night of the Living Dead style, strying to grapple the heroes in their deadly radioactive grip?

 

Nah. That wasn't even my creepiest scene with mannikins. That was... for tomorrow.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

At the start of my second Supermage campaign, the player of Artifex asked if the Master of the Cosmic Craft could now have a live-in girlfriend: Barbie. As in, a life-size Barbie that he animated. Artifex wasn't much for human connections that could be used against him. Well, how could I pass this up?

 

A couple of adventures into the campaign, the PCs discovered that one of the people injured in the crossfire was a highly realistic, living plastic mannikin. In fact, there were thousands of them in the city and one on a plane flying away. They had all been human, but were victims of a sort of contagious Reality Vampirism. The US government's super-team was already transformed, which added to the problem.

 

Eventually they traced the plague back to Barbie and Artifex. At which point, Artifex remembered that he was Barbie's slave and turned on the team. Barbie was absorbing all the stolen reality and becoming a nascent dimension lord; the PCs saw the Barbie World she was creating to replace the Earth. She claimed she was doing it for the good of humanity: No more sickness, old age, starvation or war. Just life in plastic, dolls playing out roles.

 

The other PCs got through to Artifex, though, and he destroyed Barbie before the transformation of humanity was complete. With her destruction, all the transformed people became flesh and blood again.

 

Yeah, it took Artifex a while to live down that particular oopsie.

 

As for other creepy things that happened in the campaign? Later.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Major Tom 2009]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

The creepiest thing that ever happened in a campaign of which I was part was when some

sorcerer started to reanimate the dead that were in the city's cemetaries (mind you, this

was in a Champions campaign, not a AD&D session). At one point during that session, my

character had the opportunity to channel the police detective character from the film Night

of the Creeps:

 

Starguard: "Mr. Mayor? I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that the marching

band has finally shown up."

The Mayor: "That's great! But what's the bad news?"

Starguard: "They're dead."

 

 

 

Major Tom 2009

[hfergus]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

The scariest thing ever in a campaign was not spooky, but very scary - as in O.M.G. scary. It was D&D 3.5. The players went into a room and saw a demon they could not identify. Yes, one demon. They used just about every spell they had, almost all the healing they had (one light healing potion left) and noone had over 5 hit points left. Later they ran into a humanoid they had never seen before, fighting 3 of the previous demons bare handed and wiping them out very quickly without a scratch. They, of course, tried to get it to join them. No way. Later they found the humanoid with its heart ripped out in front of a door.... that was opening in front of them. (really scary part)They had an amulet they found that protected them. But it followed them everywhere for months, and it scared people half to death. (demonic) Once the person with the amulet took it off and put it on as fast as he could. He nearly died. Getting rid of it was not easy,and a long story I will not get into.

[freakboy6117]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

the scariest thing I've come up with for my UK your project is the wraith.

They are a combination of a number of British Sci-Fi baddies captain scarlet's Mysterons, Doctor Who's cybermen and the returned dead from Peter F Hamilton's nights-dawn trilogy and The Joker (just because)

 

Basically an alien terror. When the last criminal of an ancient civilization the kind of being who just wants to see the world burn is absorbed by nanotechnology and corrupts his world turning it into a hell.

 

he creates many duplicates that he sends out into space to continue the process sending out probes to destroy whole worlds then sends out tiny and they arrive in scary meteorite spines and there are several forms the first is the a cloud of silver particles and a engulfed people can then they break them mentally torturing them until they become their Thralls.

 

The thralls are very hard to kill like regenerating from physical damage(less resistant to electricity and fire) that would kill a normal man as their both roles will go off for hideous terroristic attacks on the civilians .

 

If they're not killed in their attacks they can be transformed into the war form which is a implacable Invulnerable cyborg monstrosities with the ability to take materials from the environment and form them into super weapons.

[Orion]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

I'd like to do scary, but I just can't. I've run undead before, and have them as a primary enemy in a new campaign I'm developing, but they're just opponents. As a GM I just can't do it right - the mood just isn't there.

[assault]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

I once played a Cthulhuesque horror game in an old farmhouse up in the mountains, with only candles for light. It was a semi-LARP.

 

The ritual in the graveyard and the discussion with the ghouls in the tunnels beneath were pretty freaky.

 

Scary is harder to do in a Champions game, where characters theoretically have the power to blast a lot of nasties away, but still doable. Reading the right kind of source material would be a good start.

[DShomshak]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

Throughout the campaigns I’ve run, the heroes have met ghosts, vampires and zombies, demons, warlocks and all manner of supernatural horrors. In this adventure, though, I think I managed my most horrible and creepy scene.

 

To explain the cast:

The Keystone Konjurors were my playtest campaign for The Ultimate Supermage and The Ultimate Mystic. The name arose from the tendency for Activation Rolls to fail far more often than the laws of probability would suggest, to the extent the characters were often their own worst enemies. Plus, there were many episodes of spectacularly bad judgment (usually in-character).

 

Artifex, Master of the Cosmic Craft, is a super-mage who espouses the cause of Artifice. In the course of two campaigns, he got some of the brash arrogance beaten out of him. See USM for a 4th edition starting writeup.

 

Jezeray Illyescu is a young psychic with powers to perceive spirits, the past and future, astral project, and make people not notice her. She channels Zontar Bok, Warrior-Mage of ancient Shamballah, a thaumaturge, from the crystal orb that used to top his staff. USM has starting-character writeups for them, too.

 

Shadowman was a new character introduced in the second series, a former ninja cultist of the Brotherhood of Faded Embers. He gained mystic powers of darkness and desolidification (adding to his martial arts) in the same accident that made him turn against the cult and become a hero.

 

Talbot does not appear in this adventure, but his last name is Fulten. He’s the son of Archimago, smart enough that he penetrated to Da’ath, the balance-point of the Multiverse, and gained such cosmic knowledge that he had to spend a few decades mad while he recovered from the experience. He means well but can have epically bad oopsies.

 

NPC: Black Fang is Jezeray’s husband. I introduced the werewolf in the earlier “Seattle Sentinels” campaign. His transformation had been suppressed, he’d been found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was using his middle name of Andrew to reduce his notoriety. The first KK series featured a love triangle between Jezeray, Andrew and Black Fang that was resolved by a mystic quest to integrate the two sides of his soul. Jezeray and BF then joined Project Starstryker, my campaign’s US government super-team. (It began in the ‘80s, when all names were dumb.)

 

NPC reference: Doctor Zen is Project Starstryker’s resident occult expert, non-powered but very learned.

 

NPC: Zeta Krafft is an artist whom the PCs rescued from a pact with the smith-demon Mulciber. Later, Mulciber kidnapped Zeta and various friends and relatives of the PCs and held them hostage as a way to force them to help him defect to Babylon. Zeta died in the fighting when other demon lords attacked, trying to prevent the defection, but once Mulciber was no longer a Duke of Hell he could repay the PCs’ aid by giving Zeta a new body of living metal. She and Artifex have been tentatively dating while she adjusts to her new existence.

 

NEW ADVENTURES OF THE KEYSTONE KONJURORS — March 2, 2001

#11) BLOOD ORGY OF THE VOODOO NINJAS

(With apologies to Roger Corman)

 

Someone is killing and kidnapping people from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. People have had their throats cut in the night, and men, women and children have disappeared. The Navy calls the FBI. The FBI calls Project Starstryker. Project Starstryker calls Jezeray. She goes to Cuba, looks into the past and “sees” the kidnappers and assassins, who seem to possess a psychic invisibility like her own -- some sort of magical cultists. She brings in the other Keystone Konjurors.

 

Meanwhile, Art Long and Zeta Krafft are out on a date. They have dinner and see a movie without incident; Artifex carefully reinforces the seats that Zeta uses, to compensate for her solid metal body’s weight. When they stop in a bar after seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, though, their minds are on the movie. Zeta sits on a bar stool and it squashes. She freezes, then very quietly insists that Artifex take her home immediately. She says that this attempt to establish a normal life is foolish: she’s a freak. She can’t even cry about her troubles. Jezeray calls at this rather awkward moment.

 

At the same time, Shadowman is sparring with Andrew. Even in his human ID, Andrew is much faster, but not nearly as strong as Shadowman. Andrew helps Shadowman with his speed and learning new maneuvers, while Shadowman helps Andrew work on his human form’s hitting power. Shad’s mother insists that he babysit his teenage sister Kisumi (or “Kissy”) this evening, so she’s at Wetchley House too. She finds lots of excuses to interrupt the training, but every time Andrew looks at her she blushes, giggles and runs from the room. All in all, it’s a relief when Jezeray calls.

 

Talbot isn’t around for this adventure. He’s in another dimension where you really can turn the air blue by swearing, working out the equations of chromo-vituperation.

* * *

At Guantanamo, Our Heroes try to find out how the cultist kidnapper-assassins get into and out of the base, and how they pick their targets. The only connection they can find between the murder victims is that they all went to the cockfights at a nearby village. The slimy Quartermaster Corporal Warshofsky, who arranges the passes and gets a kickback from the fight organizers, turns out to have a magical snoop in his office — a carved wooden mug he received from the cockfight manager Garcia. Artifex talks to the mug and learns that someone called Tata Ndoki made it and passed it to Garcia to give to Warshofsky. Certainly, this would explain how the assassins (tentatively identified as Ñañigos, members of a murderous “Voodoo Mafia” that flourished in the 19th century) knew so much about comings and goings on the base. Artifex destroys the mug.

 

That night, a supervillain attacks the base. It’s Warhead, one of the world’s more powerful and psychotic supervillains, who happened to have died in the 1980s when he fell off a skyscraper. He looks pretty dead, too, though not decayed. Despite this handicap, he remains tremendously strong and tough and able to blow up like his namesake. He gives the Konjurors a good fight, but they take him down before he can reach the base’s armory and blow it up. Shadowman’s power to disrupt life-force proves critical in the combat. Artifex finds, however, that Warhead isn’t a zombie as he first thought; rather, he’s a sort of materialized ghost. Shadowman’s STUN Drain caused extra damage because it “unzipped” the three spirits who fuelled the materialization — the ghosts of a man, woman and child.

 

As Our Heroes ponder their next move, they realize that Warhead might not have acted alone. Artifex detects multiple cultists near the Admin building. They hurry to the Admin building; Artifex cleverly sets off the building’s sprinkler system. The water washes off the magic forehead mark that lets the cultists turn invisible. Now Our Heroes merely need to fight a bunch of fanatical cultists with poison drug-dust and knives. They win, though one cultist stabs the base commandant.

 

Artifex reads memories in search of clues about the cultists’ base. He gets enough clues that Our Heroes can find the tiny village of camouflaged huts… but where is the evil high priest Tata Ndoki? On a hilltop a half-mile away, it turns out, watching Our heroes through binoculars and readying the human sacrifices that fuel horrifically powerful Ego Attacks. Tata Ndoki fells Zontar; a child grabs Zontar’s orb and runs off with it, while a village-woman grabs Artifex; Artifex manages to fry the kid. Shadowman, meanwhile, teleports to the hilltop just in time to see Tata Ndoki vanish down a concealed shaft in the hilltop.

 

Shadowman turns desolid to walk into the hill, and finds Tata Ndoki’s subterranean temple. He also finds the deceased supervillain El Tigre, and Tata Ndoki’s “nganga.” Since the ever-erudite Dr. Zen had told Our Heroes that this hell-kettle would be the source of Tata Ndoki’s powers, Shadowman tips it over, despite the attacks of the four Trauma Ghosts that guard it.

 

Tata Ndoki flips out. He screams a plea to his god Zarabanda to give him the power to avenge this desecration — possession of/by the most powerful ghost beneath the night sky. Shadowman wonders, “Did I err?” and hurries out of the hill while the other characters head toward it.

 

Outside, a storm gathers in seconds and a bolt of lightning stabs down into the scrub, leaving a building green glow behind it. Zontar’s orb rises into the air and flies to the hill.…

 

Our Heroes — Artifex, Shadowman, Jezeray and Black Fang — find Tata Ndoki possessed by Zontar Bok… wielding his powers and knowledge, but subject to Tata Ndoki’s evil will. Zontar’s orb is now clenched in the jaws of the skull atop the evil priest’s shinbone scepter. Artifex blasts the mask of El Tigre (the relic that Tata Ndoki used to evoke his ghost) but the dead super-terrorist does not fade immediately. Black Fang keeps El Tigre busy (no “fighting like cats and dogs” jokes!) while the others take on Zontar. Even outnumbered, Tata Ndoki/Zontar makes a good account of himself, but Jezeray sneaks up unnoticeably and snatches the scepter from Tata Ndoki’s hand!

 

Whoops. Zontar can still cast spells without using the orb, but it’s *much* harder. For all practical purposes, Tata Ndoki has just lost the fight. He made certain promises to Zarabanda that now he cannot keep. The entire hill shakes. Our Heroes see a huge spectral hand rise from the ground and grab Tata Ndoki, pulling his soul out of his body and dragging it down into the ground. Artifex and Shadowman grab Jezeray and Tata Ndoki’s body and flee the crumbling hill. A minute later, Black Fang burrows his way out.

 

Zontar wakes up. He’s now in Tata Ndoki’s body — permanently, it seems. The cult’s power seems broken for now, and with both Tata Ndoki and the supervillain masks gone the cult won’t be calling up dead supervillains anytime soon. Our Heroes report that the problem is solved, and go home.

 

Jezeray and Shadowman are still talking to Artifex when they arrive at his loft in Babylon. The lights are on and they hear the hiss of propane torches. Where is Zeta?

 

They find her in her workroom, slumped on the floor, teeth gritted in pain as she uses a pair of torches to melt out her eyes. The molten bronze trickles down her face. Hearing them enter, she turns and smiles.

 

“Now I can cry,” she says.

* * *

At this, Artifex’s player looked like I’d slammed him in the gut with a baseball bat.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Tech]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

Off-hand, one of many adventures I remember is from a Robotech game episode I ran. As GM, I ran an episode where a strange, intelligent, plant creature had shapechanging abilities had gotten on a large ship (I'm sorry to say I forgot how it got on). I killed and shapechanged into one of the guards who has a Private that the PC's had met earlier. It fed on various npc's blood. Of course, the players immediately think "a vampire". Later, the creature has killed just about every character (all npc's) except the player characters leaving the PC's - and players - a bit edgy. Of course, the Private had not run into the creature (being the creature) but kept up the charade. Later, one of the characters, a medical doctor, finds the Private whom they'd talked to about an hour earlier, dead. She runs an autopsy, rolling her skills and succeeds. I write a note and hand it to the player saying aloud, "This is what you find out from the autopsy." Everyone's quiet while she reads the note, which reads, "The Private died by strangulation... four days ago." The player gasps and says then informs the players. Of course by now, they're all freaking now: how can the Private be dead for four days when they talked to him recently? They guess someone who can change their shape (accurate, I'll add) and raid the armory for energy weapons, grenades and even shot guns.

 

I'll add later they meet the plant creature and eventually kill it, but not without it being a huge battle, even coming down to hand-to-hand combat. The PC's have survived and killed the intruder, but not without many bruises and injuries.

[Tigereye]

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

 

Call of Cthulhu is always good for a scare, but the single scariest moment I ever ran was in Fringeworthy. (For those of you unfamiliar with the universe, an acquaintance of mine described it thusly: Stargate, Sliders, and Friends blended together...as directed by John Woo.)

 

A parallel dimension where many fictional characters here are real there discovered the PC's universe first, and some are almost Dark Champions-scale in their abilities and evil. Khan Noonien Singh, dictator of most of South Asia, retaliates by sending a chemical laser-fired thermonuclear weapon through the gate to Earth, using hijacked NPCs to transport the device. The bomb cannot be detonated electronically, as the gates will discharge batteries and disrupt conventional electronics, so it is designed to go off when one of the NPCs dies or is removed from the bomb - and her neck is broken so as to ensure her death. The gates are almost indestructable, and magnify the effects of any weapon directed at them tenfold back to the source...and this is a 10-megaton-yield weapon. One wrong move by the PCs, and a good portion of Antarctica becomes steam, as well as the entire central base and them with it. Four wheels were locked with mechanical triggers, and there was no way to lift the bomb out.

 

The entire first part of the adventure was the characters getting the base evacuated and keeping the NPC alive while they desperately tried to find a way to disarm the bomb.

 

One of the PCs was skilled in chemistry (as was his player) and he had the bright idea of raiding the medical lab. Using a small drill on one corner of the bomb, he took an enema bag and hose and flooded the bomb with water, converting the lithium deuteride into useless lithium oxide and deuterium gas, most of which vented out. Yes, he gave the bomb a water enema. :sneaky:Unfortunately, they couldn't save the NPC; but the lasers fired with only a large "bang" of burning residual deuterium. I have never heard such a sigh of relief and pent-up tension released in my 30 years as a GM...

 

Want to scare the players? Give them no real superpowers to speak of and give them the threat of imminent vaporization...the scariest thing to the PCs is not the bullet with their name on it, but a bomb marked "Addressed to Occupant"...