Running Horror In Your Game
Posted inDungeon Master's Musings Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) Raventloft

Running Horror In Your Game

I’ve been running a lot of horror in my game lately, mainly due to the fact that my current homebrew campaign is a 4th edition rendition of 2e Ravenloft with a touch of my personal flavor.

Sure almost every homebrew I’ve ever created has had a lot of horror elements in it, whether it was rife with undead or a vampire posing as the main antagonist, but never before have I created (or in this case used) a world where everything is dark.

We are six sessions in right now and while my players and myself are definitely highly enjoying it, I cant help myself from picking my own work apart already. One thing I’m always trying to do is analyze my own GM’ing habits to then self prescribe a way to improve them. So I thought I should share with you some of my follies and triumphs in running the campaign so far – bear in mind this is definitely an art form I’m very new to but I’ll try and share my shiniest pearls of wisdom.

All Show is No Show

While when you think about a horror campaign you often think of writhing zombies, skeletons, vampire bats, werewolves and all that sort of thing, but what you don’t often ponder is “how often should these things will be showing up?” The photo montage of awesomeness in your mind shouldn’t be an instant replay of every game session.

These are climactic moments in your game, and if every time your players turn around they are faced with something extremely gorey, depraved or outright horrifying they’ll soon grow numb to your ‘shock effect’. One thing I learned in desktop publishing that I believe applies to all facets of life is the phrase “all show is no show”.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Unprotected Delving with Multiple Encounters: Saturday Night Delves
Posted inFourthcore

Unprotected Delving with Multiple Encounters: Saturday Night Delves

Original Artwork by Taylor Bennett www.deckofmanythings.net

Greetings fellow readers, today I’m here to tell you about that very cryptic something that’s been taking up a majority of my free time lately. For once I’ve been absent from blogging for reasons other than my dayjob, life in general, or pure procrastination and I’m really excited to tell you a bit more about it.

I’ve been working with Sersa V from Save Versus Death and a handful of other very talented individuals on a project of somewhat epic proportions, a little something we’re calling Saturday Night Delves.

Saturday Night Devles (SND) are a series of one shot adventures for 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons set within the fourthcore vein, our aim is to recapture the fun and excitement of dungeon crawls of yore. Aimed at actually being able to pick one up and run it on any given night where you and your group have a few free hours, SND’s also come with all the materials you need to run the game along with optional tournament rules for competitive play and scoring.

SND adventures are challenging, innovative, deadly, evocative and most importantly – a ton of fun to play. Saturday Night Delves are not for the faint of heart, they will test both player and character skill as well as the DM’s. If you’re not familiar with what fourthcore is, I can give it to you in a nutshell; it’s a high risk – high reward, over the top challenging and often bleak playscape where ‘step and die’ rings as loud and clear as death bells themselves.