Hello dear Hivers!
Answer of who I am is written in this post, and I added my previous post to the bottom of this one. So I can continue with my new topic.
Horror is the most difficult genre to apply in almost every categories, except literature. Written literature is always based on the reader's imagination, which means, if you use correct words, that would be enough to effect your reader. But, when you make a horror movie, or horror video game, you will start to feel the struggle.
People think they have to get scared by watching a movie, tv show or video game, and this is the wrongest approach ever to the genre. Maybe it was something like that back in the days, like 50's or 80's maybe; but, with the evolution of technology and increased rate of education, lots of tabu in people's mind are broken now. That means, scary things and scary ideas are not scary anymore. Economically and politically, the world goes worse and worse, and that causes people to be scared of the most realistic scenarios. Like famine, unemployment, daily violence on streets, getting killed by a robber, or drunk, or I don't know, a protestant maybe. Because, feeling that real life threatening is a daily situation. There are still racism, discrimination, hate speech and other bad stuff. So... In a reality which has these everyday horrors, how can we apply horror effectively in our games? (without not offending anyone, of course)
Let's take a little look onto Dungeons & Dragons (because I heard that "one can not simply apply horror into D&D" claim like more than a thousand times). You know, Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy-based dungeon-crawling game. For those who don't know what dungeon-crawling, it shortly like this: For some reason you end up in a dungeon, face with monsters, roll your dice to beat them, search for and pass through some traps, face with end-level-boss monster, beat it and loot the treasure. No deep and story-driven elements, or just cheap ones. Everything is based on your numbers on your character sheet. And also, D&D has lots of "scare-chaser" elements. Like if you have zombies or ghosts around, your cleric can use Channel Divinity, your paladin can use Divine Smite, and other characters have their magical stuff to shoo horror away.
D&D (and some other RPGs) have some certainty. Like when you face a goblin, you can predict that it has 10 to 13 AC (armor class) and +1 to +3 on its attack rolls. Or if your party's average level is 3, you can expect to face creatures with Challenge Rating of 3 or lesser difficulty. And you know what, when you break that certainty, horror for Dungeons & Dragons begins!
I'll give you some examples about it:
When party encounters with a creature that doesn't appear on Monster Manual (or another monster statblock book), the horror begins for them. When players cannot predict enemy's attacks, damage type or hit points pool, they will have to try something new, or guess what should they do. They will feel desperate and it will thrill them.
When party's spells don't work as they intend, for example a paladin summons a Nightmare instead of a white horse or a divine mount with Find Steed spell, they will start to suspect their capabilities.
The concept of "unknown" is the key element of applying horror into any kind of RPG. Make your descriptions as weird as possible. Don't let players to draw the whole picture in their mind. Give them some certainty, but not all. This will also improve the players' creativity. They will start to learn how to think outside the box.
Another example of applying horror is playing with the concept of reality. If you can make players ask themselves (or each other) "was that a real thing, or just my character's imagination?", you are doing it right!
The point is, using "horror-vibes-elements" like zombies, or ghosts, or vampires will not work on players, nor the characters aswell. Players/characters should feel themselves useful in general, but, at random moments, they have to feel that their imagination and the reality crosses over and creates confusion.
I run most of my games in horror/mystery genre, even if they are not. Sometimes I create dream sequences to make them feel useless, sometimes I apply some random outcomes they cannot resolve with their known abilities. They get the thrill, and the fear. That's how you use horror on a D&D game.
There are lots of different game systems (probably more than you can imagine) with different genre. Some of them are more suitable for horror. If you want to use both horror and fantasy, you should be looking after "dark fantasy" sub-genre. If you want to feel some reality in your games, you can pick any variant of Call of Cthulhu (I prefer Chaosium's classic version) or something like KULT.
In my next post, I will introduce Call of Cthulhu and KULT without going deep, and will try to explain why I picked KULT on Call of Cthulhu. If you're interested in my posts, you can check the list below: