The drums quickened. Stephanie huddled against me. I must confess that I took some pleasure in it.
Only now did she see me as anything more than a face in the crowd.
The embers of our extinguished campfire painted her face in a dark, angry red. The pounding grew louder. Perhaps they were closer; perhaps they were past us. At this time of night, it was impossible to tell what was happening beyond the tree line. Please, be past us. Please.
Something rustled in the underbrush. I drew her closer, trying to savor whatever moments we had left, but that sinister rhythm invaded my thoughts. Twisting the syllables of her name to the beat.
Then they ceased, and all was still…
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Watch your players the first few times a difficult pull is made. They may take a moment to congrat-ulate the puller, or otherwise celebrate the victory.
This, too, is okay. It is a natural release of all the tension built up under the stress of the pull. But, if you want to capture that energy, and draw it back into the game, you should start describing what the pull accomplished right away. Don’t fight with your players over the moment. Just start the story back up and let them fall back into character on their own.
When designing your own stories, consider the ultimate horror you wish to reveal to your players a gift. Wrap it in deception, knowing smiles, and red herrings. They are not to open it until the final act, and even then, only if they are ready. Tease them with hints of what awaits, but keep them in the dark as long as you can.
In practical terms, try to wait until the opening of your third act before the true evil in your
story is
re-How long have you been driving illegally since your license was suspended? You’ve battled your alcoholism fairly successfully vealed. Even if there is no question what the char-acters are up against, you don’t want them facing it in all its hideous glory until the last third of the game. Of course, this gives the tower enough time to become unstable (and thin the herd of characters in the process), but more importantly, it gives the story a chance to build.
If the players know what they are facing from the beginning, then there are a couple routes you can take. If it makes sense, you can still keep this men-ace at arms’ length, lurking in the shadows for the first part of the story. A group of military specialists sent to hunt down and destroy a pack of were-wolves can end up playing mouse-and-cat with the beasts for quite a while. The wolves attack in the cover of darkness, hitting and running to prevent sustained combat. The soldiers can only make out heat blobs on their night-vision scopes while sol-dier after solsol-dier is dragged into the night. Then, when the den is uncovered, it’s a full-on assault, and the survivors witness the savage might of the pack up close.
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Chapter 6: Suspensetheir characters with each other. Even if you spell out the entire plot in questions, they shouldn’t real-ize it until nearing the end of the tale. Ask straight-forward questions like, “Why are you certain to-night is your last to-night to live?”
As hinted at in the sec-tion on Suspense and the Tower [p. 50], dur-ing the game the host’s job is less about builddur-ing suspense and more about protecting it. Children wake early on Christmas morning, rush to the tree, and fervently tear open their gifts, all because of the energy generated by the anticipation. Your players should be no different. The only problem is that this energy, like water, flows along the easiest path.
Humor tends to be one of the easiest paths. This can be helpful or harmful. Keep your eye on it—if things get too relaxed, you will have to turn up the heat a bit.
Otherwise, you can direct this energy by introduc-ing different parts of the story when you feel the suspense start to ebb.
Your voice is also a great tool for setting the mood and sustaining the suspense. Slow your speech a bit, and lower the volume on your voice—not too slow, and not quite to the point of a whisper—just to the point where the players won’t be able to hear it over their own. Typically, everyone will follow suit. The hushed tones will have the same power-ful effect experienced by anyone who has ever told a ghost story at a sleepover or by the campfire. As the volume lowers the expectation that something is about to happen will grow, and that expectation brings suspense. Just remember not to break the spell with a shout or other sudden noise. The goal isn’t to make them jump; the goal is to get them ready to jump when that tower falls.
Or, you can twist the ending with an altogether different sort of horror. The dead have risen and zombies pour into the streets, consuming flesh.
The characters begin in the thick of things, fighting their way to safety. The action is immediate and the danger is apparent, but the suspense grows over the internal arguments among the survivors instead of the act of survival itself. The third act opens with one craven soul in a pick-up truck stranding the others in a sea of dead because he refuses to risk his life for those who never took him seriously anyway. In this case, the tension builds towards a moment of evil in which the walking corpses are no different than the water engulfing a sinking ship.
Whatever you do, try not to design the story so that your whole hand is revealed too soon. If the players manage to figure out the ending before you planned, don’t sweat it. That is a thrill in itself.
Before the story even begins there are op-portunities to lay the groundwork for suspense. Sneak questions into the questionnaire that will have your players thinking about the directions you may take them. Merely asking what wild animal savagely attacked them as a child will have them thinking about the creature any time you lead them into the woods.
The questionnaires are the foundations of the story as well as of the characters. Previous chapters dis-cussed using elements of the answers in the story.
When you do this, think about how this might clue the players into what is in store. Ask what gives them nightmares, even if you don’t intend to shape your story around it. Instead, you can use these an-swers to flavor the clues. If one character is terrified of needles, put tiny puncture wounds on a corpse, no matter how it died.
Don’t be afraid to be blatant with your questions.
In general, the players shouldn’t share too much of
over the years; why did you have a drink last week? Why do you feel your last promotion should have gone to someone else?
Suspense and the Questionnaire
Suspense and the
Host
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A
great many horror stories revolve around the supernatural and the unexplained.And why shouldn’t they? The unknown is terrifying. Ghosts and the shambling dead freed from the grave, alien intelligences and gibbering horrors from beyond the stars, madmen and their unholy experiments gone awry, ancient rituals and evil words that shift and bend reality, lost prophe-cies and inescapable century-old curses, missing links and reptilian beasts from black depths—all these and more make up the nightmare worlds of the uncertain and unnatural.
In this chapter we will discuss the presence of the supernatural, in all of its manifestations, in your stories.
Keep the unknown hid-den as long as possible.
The less mysterious your supernatural world becomes, the more dif-ficult it becomes to make it scary. Dragons, by all
How did you get your nickname? Who do you look forward to seeing the most at your high school reunions? What is still accounts, should be terrifying creatures to behold.
Giant lizards with vast leathery wings and infer-nal breath—what’s not to fear? Yet, it would take a considerable amount of work to make a Dread story in which your players confront a dragon and feel anything other than the thrill of battle. This is due in part to how much is understood about these mythical beasts. No matter how dangerous its breath, a creature loses its power to instill fear once it is well known.
That is, unless you pull the rug out from under the players and drastically alter the nature of the beast.
This can be an effective way to reinvigorate a clas-sic horror monster that has lost its edge, such as the vampire or werewolf. Keep the suspense chapter in mind; when dealing with the supernatural more than other themes, it is vital to keep the players guessing about what they’re dealing with.
Some stories may allow the players’ characters to wield supernatural powers of their own. In this case, the players will often want at least a rudimen-tary understanding of how it works. Indeed, you