Terror Twists

[Nothere]

Usually as October rolls around I ask what was the scariest thing you ran into in your gaming. Lets try something a little different. Have you every made or run into a horror element twisted from what you'd expect? A mummy accountant? A werebeaver? The creature summoned by the mystic ritual wants to give out candy?

[TheQuestionMan]

The Super-X Undead Girl Friend/Wife

[Crusher Bob]

The werewolves of Hamburg:

 

A bunch of former Hitlerjugend who were infected with lycanthropy in the last days of World War 2.  These days, they are just a bunch of everyday German retirees who all meet up in a certain nightclub every full moon so they can be locked in,ensuring their transformations won't hurt anyone.  Except now, someone if hunting them down and killing them... 

[Lord Liaden]

A couple of times I used Scott Heine and Steven Holmes' classic Champs mini-setting, "The House that Jack Built," from Digital Hero #18. Once I ran its included scenario, "Just Desserts," in which a malevolent spirit had possessed a raspberry jello fruit salad, animating it and growing to enormous size. Gelatin pseudopods, grape eyes, pineapple-chunk teeth in a maw frothing with Cool Whip, spawning smaller "desertling" duplicates every time a piece of it was cut or blasted off. Extremely hard to hurt, except when the PCs discovered it was Susceptible to being eaten.

[Hadmar von Wieser]

I just started a Justice League Campaign. Lex Luthor is running for president, wearing a ridiculous blonde wig although everyone knows he is bald.

[winterhawk]

I used the Monster a couple of times...as the embodiment of Fear itself.  Did the classic horror bit where the heroes thought they had him stunned and he disappeared, only to reappear somewhere else.

[DShomshak]

Well, in one of my Keystone Konjuror campaigns (playtest for the Ultimate Supermage/Ultimate Mystic books), things often slid between horror and deranged comedy. Sometimes it even happened deliberately.

 

At the Emperor of Babylon's Halloween party, the PCs went through the House of Horrors run by... the Boogyman. He got a scare.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

Who got the scare? The PCs, the Emperor, or the Boogyman?

[Lord Liaden]

I used the Monster a couple of times...as the embodiment of Fear itself.  Did the classic horror bit where the heroes thought they had him stunned and he disappeared, only to reappear somewhere else.

 

Some interesting past discussions around here about what the Monster is and how it could be used:

 

http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/2223-cu-the-monster-story-ideas/

 

http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/83768-how-have-you-used-the-monster/

[DShomshak]

Who got the scare? The PCs, the Emperor, or the Boogyman?

The Boogyman managed to scare the PCs.

 

Then some of the PCs *should* have given a scare to everyone else attending the party, when the two PCs who had Activation Rolls and Side Effects on their magic were tapped to do a spur-of-the-moment  magic show. And when the son of Archimago, who is smarter than his dad and has been to the Ultimate Planes has an oopsie, the result is... interesting. I made sure of that.

 

When the PCs know their characters well, sometimes it's fun just to give them an open-ended social situation and see what they do with it. In this case, the results were extremely silly.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Oh, and another instance where traditionally horror/Eeeevil things turned out not how the players expected: At one point, the demon lord Mulciber (the Descending Hierarchy's greatest artisan; see Paradise Lost) sent his minion Sagana Liefeld (one of the briefly-mentioned members of the Sylvestri clan in various supplements) to kidnap people close to the PCs. The PCs get to Hell and confront Mulciber... who announces that he has drawn them there to obtain their help in defecting to Babylon. He feels unappreciated and thinks the City of Man would suit him better. As an archdevil, though, he is obligated to do everything in an Evil way. Once he gets to Babylon, he will no longer be so bound. (And in fact he wasn't.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[Steve]

In my current campaign, I did a bit of a fake out on my players for Halloween, letting them think a mass zombie uprising was about to happen to Millenium City. The MCPD came to consult the team, looking for their help in unraveling a mystery of missing corpses that began some days before Halloween. Bodies were apparently digging themselves up from their graves and wandering off... somewhere.

 

They eventually tracked down the zombies to a single mortuary that had embalmed all the recent dead that were now rising. They found Celtic monsters and stolen VIPER weaponry, apparently to arm the zombies with.

 

And this all turned out to be a diversion from what was really going on... which they are currently in the process of unraveling in Las Vegas, trying to figure out what DEMON is up to as time ticks down to All Hallows' Eve.