Dragon Encounters

In this article, we’ll discuss various methods of bringing horror into your D&D game. Among them, giving the players hope of victory, slow unveiling of the horror factor, how to foreshadow, and how to set up a horror-style battle.

How to Use

DnD Shadow Dragon as Horror Monster

Dragons are a race of creatures that inspire terror in their foes. As the apex predator, they don’t live quiet lives. Rather, they flaunt their name, and let the fact that the surrounding land is under their reach be known far and wide. While metallic dragons might choose to be known as benevolent as well as powerful, they are still creatures that expect a large amount of respect as their due.

The shadow dragon is an exception to this. They are creatures of the shadow, figuratively as well as literally, and they won’t choose to reveal themselves more than they have to. While the dragon is the classic creature of fantasy, the shadow dragon is more a creature of horror.

It follows that before I can go into the particulars of the shadow dragon, it would be worth going to some of the particulars of running horror. This article will be devoted to horror in dnd, and the shadow dragon article will follow, hopefully later this week.

How to Run Horror In a TTRPG

There are any number of tips for running horror, and I will go through a list of them below. However, there are three items that are absolutely necessary when it comes to running horror, and I’ll start my discussion there. They are the progression of horror, the progression of hurt, and the progression of hope.

Progression of Horror: Building Tension by Pacing Fear

This is the one that will be familiar to most people. This rule states that the horror can’t become static, stationary, or it will quickly lose its effectiveness. Rather, it has to slowly reveal itself to the players and characters more and more.

Pretty much every horror book or film starts with a foreboding atmosphere. Not only does this help set the tone, and gets our nerves on edge, it’s often more nerve-wracking than the confrontation with the evil itself.

The reason for this is that by the time the evil reveals itself, the characters have options available to deal with it. Fighting back shows at least a little mastery over the evil, and diminishes it. When the evil is unknown, literally anything the players do might be a mistake, and they have no way to prevent it. In other words, they are helpless before it.

Pacing Fear in a TTRPG

Keeping the scene where the main character faces down the evil from becoming an action scene instead of a horror one is actually a bit tricky, and will be worse in a TTRPG. A story requires the charachters to have some ability to take action, and game much more so. Keep things too vague, and the danger will feel like empty bluff. Reveal it, and the players will fight back.

For mid-game or mid-story battles, the solution is to reveal only part of the horror. As long as there is still worse to come, the feeling of overwhelmed is still there, or can be brought back.

That said, make sure you actually have something waiting in the wings that is worse.  Unless you have truly astonishing acting and/or narration skills (literally, equivalent to Matt Mercer or Stephen King), your players will be able to tell if you’re bluffing. In addition, even if you do get away with it once, you’ll risk shooting your creditability for the future.

The Three Types of Hidden Horror

There are three ways to play this, of which two work for D&D. A sufficently powerful monster can do this, provided it has interesting ways to threaten them without they being able to effectively fight back. My Shadow Dragon article is an example of this.

A much easier way is a area of evil, such an island, mansion, or forest afflicted with some form of horror. There has to be a theme, but it still gives you much more freedom to use different monsters. Winning battles in this scenario is okay, as the main problem is still looming over their heads.

The third way is a setting that was supposed to be safe, but things are going from bad to worse, and they can’t figure out why. This one does not fit D&D very well, as D&D combat is too empowering (it makes players feel powerful, not helpless) and D&D is too built around combat for most groups to be happy with having it removed. What it needs is an investigation type scenario. (Incidentally, traps are still fine, as long as they’re kept to a reasonable amount.)

 Monster Types for Horror Scenarios

The rule of horror taking strength from the unknown is something that should factor into how which monsters you use. Undead are often not the best choice of monster, as people are used to skeletons and zombies by now, rendering them less scary unless you can find some way to make them new. Blights, by contrast, are a great choice. Most people won’t be familiar with them, and they look both human and different enough to be weird and scary.

Progression of Hurt: Grinding Down Player Resources

This rule states that the players should be forced to contend with a needed, but limited, resource that is in danger of running out.

The reason for this isn’t so that you can pressure the players, although that is a nice bonus. The reason is to signal that this is a game where they can lose, and where mistakes matter. Even if you tell them that they can lose this game, it won’t be enough without this. They need to feel it.

Resources to Grind Down 

In the levels that your players will necessarily be at when facing a shadow dragon, I would suggest that you make it impossible for them to take a long-rest, most logically because don’t have a safe place to rest. The resource running out will be HP, spell-slots, and all other limited use abilities.

If running horror for low-level players, an easier resource would be time. They have to complete the mission before a certain amount of time passes. Ideally, the reason will be connected to the horror. Perhaps a monster that will obtain its full-strength or completely escape its prison if they take too long. (This will obviously be scarier than a time-limit where they have to collect a medicine before a sick NPC dies, or any time limit like that.)

Recovering HP Mid-Game

This doesn’t have to be strictly linear. You can let them recover a bit. (I didn’t say not to let them take short rests.) The idea is that they should overall be running out of the resource in question. You can even let them discover a few potions, spell scrolls, or other treasure that can help them out, if really necessary.

I will add that right after they did well or badly is the worst time to help or hinder. It will be obvious that it’s in response to their recent victory/defeat, and then they’ll rest comfortably, knowing that the DM is manipulating everything. Try to do something else in between, so that the connection is less obvious.

Of course, this thing can’t be something else causing them to need help/hinder, or you haven’t gained anything.

Progression of Hope: Creating Stakes that Matter

While this seems like the last rule you’d expect in a horror game, the rule is no less important than the other two. We only have feelings of dread because we’re still hoping to win, believing we can survive. If we feel that it’s completely hopeless, we no longer have motivation to keep trying. Awaiting unavoidable death isn’t so much terrifying as boring, frustrating. (In fiction, anyway. I do not presume to talk about actual life here.)

While any game can benefit from clear, strong, attainable objectives, with horror they are practically a requirement. If the objectives aren’t clear, discussion of choices will likely take you right out of horror mode. If they don’t seem achievable, the players will relax into “Going along with the ride” mode, and the tension will be gone.

Be careful about shifting the objective further or closer to their reach. While doable, if it’s done too often, or to a too powerful degree, the players will feel (correctly or incorrectly) that you’re shifting events to help or frustrate them, and they won’t feel tension. After all, if we’re following a predetermined script, there’s no reason to worry. It’s out of their hands anyway.

Summary

To do horror well in a TTRPG requires carefully planning out the session. The story has to be simple, keep moving, and the players have to feel a tension to achieve their ends before running out of time. (Running out of time being literal, or happening due to running out of HP/spells/limited-use abilities, or any other way that they can lose due to making too many errors.)

The Three Progressions in books/movies

For those that are interested, here are the main ways in which book/movie horror alternate from the ideas I suggested above, and why they aren’t really different.

• There is at least one other way to keep the characters helpless, and that is if the evil is overwhelmingly strong, and they need to run/hide from it. There are books and movies that use this structure instead, or alongside with, fear of the unknown. It can be used in a TTRPG, but not in D&D unless you homebrew the rules to such an extent that you’re basically playing a different game. At that point, just play Call of Cuthulu or something similar instead (which do support it.)
• The central theme of Progression of Hurt is making sure your players feel the stakes. In books and movies, this is often done via killing characters. In a TTRPG this doesn’t work, as a dead PC is replaced so as not to boot the player from the game, and NPCs are sacrificed freely in every game, horror or not. Killing more of them won’t seem significant.
• Books/movies use the characters’ reactions to their situation instead of progression of hope. So long as the characters feel hope, we take out cue from them, even if we don’t see why the situation isn’t hopeless. In a TTRPG, characters don’t have to depth needed to make this work.

Other Tips for Horror – Beyond the Table

A few of the other tricks you can use to create an atmosphere of horror include:

Asking for cooperation:

I believe Van-Richter’s suggests talking to your players beforehand, discussing the fact that you want to run horror, and asking for their help in maintaining the right atmosphere. Unless you have incredibly cooperative players, I would instead suggest approaching the player or players that you think will be most likely to listen, asking them, and accepting if they say no.

Don’t discuss it at length (unless they initiate it), don’t give them a list of instructions, and don’t stress how important it is to you. These all tend to end with them feeling pressured into it, and resenting you for it.

Accept that they might not deliver. If they promise to cooperate, and then at the game table they’re joking around and not helping at all, just accept it and move on. All you can do is aim for horror, and if it doesn’t work out, you’ll still have a good game. A secret of happiness is learning to live with what you have, even if it isn’t exactly what you hoped for.

Darken the Room:

Darkness makes everything seem scarier. If you told your players that you want to give this session horror vibes, maybe they’ll be okay with a little less lightning. That said, don’t go too far. You’ll create expectations that you won’t match, you’ll likely make adult players feel silly, sitting around in darkness like children, and they won’t like not being able to see their character sheets.

I have contemplated suggesting that you make it dark without telling them what you’re doing. If it’s your own house, and if your spouse doesn’t mind, maybe flipping a fuse or unscrewing a bulb from the lamp so that some of the lights don’t work. (Note, I’m not an electrician. Consult someone who knows electricity before playing with it, if you don’t want your horror game to end with real tragedy.)

The above ideas will only work if you are certain that you can lie with a straight face. Even then, be aware that you can only try, you can’t guarantee success, and if your players come up with a solution to the lights that makes the room even brighter than it is normally, or insist on moving the game, know when to fight and when not.

Try to Minimize interruptions:

This is probably the most significant of my out-of-game suggestions. Interruptions kill the mood. Obviously, you can’t control everything, and your players will need to take breaks at the worst time to use the bathroom, but minimize what you can.

If you’re getting pizza, this would be a good night to order a delivery rather than send someone to pick it up. Even better would be to have it ready when your players arrive, so that it doesn’t interrupt the game. Do what you can to minimize other distractions likewise.

Even more, try to complete the scenario in the space of a single session. I know that this is extremely challenging, and may not be possible, but you’ll lose almost all the atmosphere when your players go home and come back next week, or even next day.

Foreshadowing in Dungeons and Dragons

The idea of foreshadowing is giving hints as to what is coming. Done well, it enhances a plot by making it not random, but something that was moving to completion for a while now. It can also make the threat more significant, as it provides a way for the threat to be something that they know is scary, and have heard tales of how scary it is, instead of being a random fight with a monster that they didn’t know existed before.

Horror uses foreshadowing even more than other genres, if possible. After all, one of horror’s most basic tropes is the hero being afraid of the danger, trying to avoid it, and being drawn in anyway. That, and the fact that we’ve been warned off of an area making it all the scarier.

In a TTRPG, you have to be careful how you foreshadow, especially how you foreshadow it as scary. Warning players off of an area generally encourages them to go there, in search of treasure and XP. The first and foremost piece of advice I’d give is not to stress any point too much. If you aren’t sure if your players heard you, just go on. Repeating yourself and trying too hard to draw their attention to a piece of lore almost always backfires.

Practical Ways to Foreshadow

If you anticipate the quest a number of sessions in advance (ideally ten or more, but you can make do with less), then you can drop hints that a certain area is extremely dangerous. Don’t do this by warning them not to go there, as they’ll take it as a challenge and/or insult, rather look for more subtle ways.

Have an NPC take time to reach them because they insist on going around, let them know that they don’t have to worry about a villain coming (or fleeing) through that area, have NPC villagers make a warding off evil sign when the area is mentioned, and let them hear rumors about the evil.

The rumors should contain useful information, to encourage them to listen to them, which means that they should be mostly true, but distorted. For example: A story about how someone went near the area for a dare one afternoon. He returned home, and everyone thought he’d escaped. Then, that night, a dark creature swooped down on him in his village and bit him in half. This reveals that the monster prefers to hunt at night, and that it can fly.

A rumor about the night coming alive can let them know that the monster has the ability to hide. If you’re placing a special location there, or if you want the evil to be as the result of a past tragedy, let them hear the story, and exaggerate the darker elements. They’ll distort is nicely on their own.

One simple trick that I like to use when writing plots is to combine two elements. If, for example, there is a temple that became corrupted by dark energy, as well as the shadow dragon, then you can drop quite a number of hints. Your players won’t know that there are two elements, or even if they catch on, they’ll guess wrong about which rumors go with which element, and you can give quite a lot of information out without spoiling the plot.

Creating Combat Encounters for Horror

A general rule when using horror is that you don’t give the heroes major fights that they can win outright. They can score victories, but those victories should be of the type that let them obtain objectives, not that let them kill enemies, especially important ones. Doing so makes the enemies seem weaker, and lowers the overall horror factor.

There are a few ways that can achieve this. Using enemies too strong for them will work, although that is hard to get right, as you need to avoid wiping out your players. Other ways used are to provide enemies that are impossible to kill, generally because they’ll come back to life after a few minutes/hours, or overly large amounts of enemies.

It’s worth noting that both of these allow the players to fight back. If the enemies regenerate, that can still give the players the advantage of getting to an objective, or getting a head start on escaping.

If the enemies are too numerous, you want them to be arriving gradually, so that the players can grab what they need and run. Also provide a way for them to get away, preferably several. Bringing down a mountain pass behind them so that the enemy can’t quickly follow, or escaping in a way they can’t follow, cush as by boat, are common ones.

To be continued, with specific ideas for the shadow dragon.