Accessory - Dragon Magazine #234, MAGAZINES, Dragon Magazine
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Boo!
t the right moment, that’s all it takes to scare someone. Or
something like, “You didn’t have a black Nissan in the park-
ing lot this morning did you?” That’ll scare ‘em. A scare is a quick
triple-shot of adrenaline. It wakes you up, makes you shriek.
Scares are easy. They work on the player and have little to
do with the game itself. Fear is a whole ‘nother animal. Where
a scare widens your eyes, fear squeezes them shut. You don’t
want to see what frightens you. Scares evoke a shriek; fear
swallows your voice.
Donna played in our campaign mostly, I think, to be with
Rick, her fiance. As a relative newcomer, she was the one I tar-
geted for the scares. When Donna’s elf wanted to pull a ring
from the finger of a limed-over skeleton lying in a subter-
ranean pool, I laid my arm on the table and said, “Show me
how.” You know what I did, of course. When my fingers
clasped her wrist, her shriek nearly summoned the police.
Bruce Nesmith wrote a number of truly frightening
R
AVENLOFT
®
tournaments. His theory was that the only way to frighten a
player is to threaten the thing he most cares about in the game
— his character. Bruce must have something there, because his
tourneys frightened hundreds of people (including me) at con-
vention tables, a decidedly un-frightening environment.
But scaring the newbie is cheap and easy (though it was fun,
and I’d do it again in a heartbeat). Scaring a veteran player is
different.
Fear has to be more than that, though. You fear the things
you can’t see or that you don’t understand. The worst fears are
indescribable.
Every Halloween, we’d play a horror adventure. While DMing
the game, I liked to sit in the window sill, partly for the cool
October air, and partly so I could see everyone in the big group.
Mike, one of my housemates and a veteran player, thought it
would be fun to slip outside, sneak around the apartment, and
lay a cold hand on my neck from outside. Unfortunately for him,
I saw Mike slip outside, listened carefully for his feet upon the
gravel, then gently dropped a hand in front of his face just
before he’d have rounded the corner and gotten to me.
His shriek was magnificent.
Of course, it isn’t fair to tell on Donna and Mike without
telling on myself. Those Halloween sessions almost always
transformed into story-telling sessions, often with me sitting
alone on the couch, facing the six or eight players who gradu-
ally huddled closer in the dark, airy room. Another Mike, much
smaller, slipperier, and just downright sneakier than the other
one, managed to get out of the room without my noticing. Just
as I was getting to the most tense moment in the Bear Story,
inhumanly strong fingers clamped my ankles from under the
couch. I flew up with a terrific shriek, scaring
the hell out of all my players, who
I didn’t manage to frighten my own players very often. The
only time I can remember seeing real fear in their eyes was
when I described not their dragon enemy but the scars he’d
left in a stone wall for them to discover. That one worked, I
think, because there was so little for them to visualize.
Everything else came from that vague pool of imagination that
spawns the night terrors that leave you cold, damp, and trem-
bling — but which you can never remember.
How do you frighten players when the most frightening
things are indescribable? I resort to tricks these days. One of
my favorite is to seat all the players so that their backs are to
an open window. At night. In October.
Try this one. If you don’t have a window, open a closet, or
any door behind the players. Just be sure to leave the lights off
in that other room. And don’t let the players look behind them.
Make ‘em look at you. Then while you describe what their PCs
can
see, they’ll be wondering more about what’s behind them,
what they can’t see.
And they’ll be afraid.
joined me in an unholy chorus that
would have shriveled Great
Cthulhu itself.
Dave Gross
Publisher
TSR, Inc.
Associate publisher
Brian Thomsen
Editor-in-chief
Pierce Watters
Editor
Dave Gross
Art director
Larry Smith
Associate editor
Michelle Vuckovich
Editorial assistant
Lizz Baldwin
Subscriptions
Janet L. Winters
U.S. advertising
Cindy Rick
U.K. conespondent/aduertising
Carolyn Wildman
Printed in the USA
D
RAGON
#
234
3
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