How to Use
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
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
This is the one that will be more 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. Even if all they can do is run, at least that is an action for them to take. In the opening scenes, literally anything they do might be a mistake, and they have no way to prevent it.
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. As I’ll discuss below, you don’t want to leave your characters with no way to survive, which means that they need to have actions that they can take, which then take the focus off the horror.
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.
Progression of Hurt
This rule states that the players should be forced to contend with a needed, but limited, resource that is in danger of running out.
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.)
While this progression is perhaps a little more optional than the other two, with many books and movies not using it, it is still a very good idea for a TTRPG. Books and movies have an easier time making the stakes feel high, and they can portray the horror as almost impossible to defeat. In D&D, the fact that it’s a game hampers both.
With this, as with the other two, it 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
This rule is actually no less important than progression of horror. The idea is that 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 the players feel (correctly or incorrectly) that you’re shifting events to help or frustrate them, they won’t feel the same tension. After all, if we’re following a predetermined script, there’s no reason to worry. It’s out of their hands anyway. While some amount of help is ok in a normal game, it’s worse in horror.
Summary: To do horror well in a TTRPG requires carefully planning out the session. The story has to be simple, keep moving, and ideally the players should feel a tension as they try 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.)
Differences between TTRPGs and 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 how they don’t truly alternate.
- Books/Movies don’t depend as much on progression of hope: That is because books/movies use the characters’ reactions to their situation. If the characters feel hope, we take out cue from them to feel hope as well, even if we don’t see why the situation isn’t hopeless. In a TTRPG, you don’t have this, so you’ll need to utilize the situation instead.
- Books/Movies can make the situation seem hopeless, even in the characters’ eyes: They can do this because the book/movie pushes us to continue (especially the movie), and so we won’t be in the situation of hopelessness long enough for it to kill the tension. By contrast, anybody who was ever a DM will remember plenty of times when what was meant to take 2 minutes took 2 hours instead. It’s too risky.
- Books/movies occasionally end in a situation of hopelessness, I.E. with the heroes losing: True, at the end of the story you no longer need to maintain hope, as there is no continuation. That said, there’s a different reason why you shouldn’t kill the PCs or have them lose unless it’s their fault, and I shouldn’t need to spell out why.

Other Tips for Horror – Outside the Game
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.
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-Game
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.
Foreshadowing ideas: 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.
Horror Combat Encounters:
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.
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