Horror is one of the oldest roleplaying game genres. Spearheaded by the success of the Call of Cthulhu game, it’s been a steady presence in the hobby for a long time. But, as with all things, people try to bandwagon it and put horror into games where the mechanics aren’t necessarily the strongest to support it. Fortunately, there are some workarounds we can use as GMs. So, let’s dive into having fun with horror!

Background

Horror is a natural genre for roleplaying games. With its tonnes of subgenres, options for the opposition, and ability to blend with other major genres like sci-fi (Mothership anyone?) or contemporary fiction (looking at you Vampire!); it’s easy to see why people like to add some horror to their games. The challenge is that not all systems treat horror the same way because of their mechanical realities. Where some systems, like Breathless, Year Zero Engine, or FATE can flex easily into the genre, others, like D&D and Pathfinder, struggle a bit. Why?

Horror Hates Heroes

Now, to be clear, horror does not hate heroics. It loves last stands, defiant final confrontations, and sacrificial actions. What the genre doesn’t like as much are heroes, or to be specific, powerful individuals capable of facing whatever the source of the horror is with equal or greater power. And the genre hates them because they aren’t afraid. For a team of dungeon delvers, a vampire or ghosts or mutagenic ooze-powered zombies are just a variation on Tuesday. Even fan creations like the False Hydra can lose its horrifying edge if not applied carefully and subtly against heroes of an appropriate level.

Horror Loves Stress

A huge component of horror as a genre is stress. And in a roleplaying game, that does just mean narrative stress from the story. It means mechanical stress applied through the tools provided by the game; something that has lukewarm acceptance at a lot of tables these days. Horror THRIVES on counting down ammo and other resources. It loves breaking up or straight up preventing rest cycles to prevent proper recovery. It needs to push the characters in it out of the comfortable spaces they’ve inhabited and into ones controlled or influenced by the horror. So as a GM, you need to be on all this stuff

Horror Appreciates Creativity

Few genres love desperate player characters coming up with the most unhinged solutions or plans as horror. And this is a feature, not a bug. Horror places its characters in situations outside the norm by a wide margin, and loves an atypical solution to the situation. Players need to flex their creativity past the usual constraints, and should be encouraged to do so.

Horror Has Consequences

The thing about horror is that it’s not a one-and-done scenario. Horror reveals dark truths, buried secrets, and awful realities to the light of day, and doesn’t leave the world in the status quo it held prior to the events of the adventure/campaign. And this is important. Even if the characters are ejected from a pocket dimension back into their reality upon the successful defeat of whatever the horror was, they carry that knowledge with them.

Horror Likes People Who Play Along

This sounds counterintuitive, but a horror game is a lot more fun when the players “act the part”. Instead of struggling against the genre by being tough, stoic, academically analytical, and implacable in the face of the rising horror, it’s actually more fun to let the characters be scared. There’s seldom any mechanics applied to roleplaying out being a scared, tired adventurer on the edge. So as players, we can play into the situation and make it a memorable time as opposed to a palette-swapped regular session.

Horror Has Options

Horror is an incredibly flexible genre, and there’s a lot of great inspirational sources for it that match well with game systems that aren’t otherwise geared well for the genre. Some examples are:

• Left 4 Dead (videogame series): this is a bullet counting, teamwork dependent, shoot’em up dream. L4D and L4D2 (and their spiritual successor, Back 4 Blood) are good examples of how a combat heavy game system can still provide some horror with carefully created enemies and resource scarcity.
• Resident Evil (videogame series): coming into the modern age, these games give us a mix of resource scarcity, isolation, and societal collapse. They also get into some biopunk and other subgenres.
• Silent Hill (videogame series): more the earlier entries in the series, but the idea of switching between worlds that are steadily bleeding together, combined with limited access to weapons and increasingly dark mysteries? Solid stuff.
• [●REC] (film series): remade in the USA as the “Quarantine” series (the originals were better), these movies are a great look at how to take existing, competent characters and put them in situations where they’re at a disadvantage. 
• Outpost (2008 film): What happens when characters are completely outclassed by a threat they were completely unprepared for? This movie is all about it. Complete with desperate attempts to use technology they don’t understand to fix the situation.
• The Bunker (2001 film): A solid look at how to leverage narrative horror and let the player characters fill in all the blanks themselves without having to have an actual fight or even truly expose the source of everything. 

Horror Is About Consent and Prep

I cannot stress this enough, but horror genre gaming is about CONSENT. Not everyone has the same tolerances, and if they have red cards, hard lines, or other limits on what they can deal with, both GMs and other players need to respect those. No one is showing up to a game to have their boundaries exceeded by a GM who “wants to push the envelope” or to be abused by players who like watching them squirm. Safety tools and a solid Session Zero are absolutely essential to making horror gaming the best kind of scary, stressful fun it can be.

Final Thoughts

Horror is a fun genre to play, but it comes with its own challenges, especially when you’re not playing a purpose made horror game. So pay attention to the strengths of the system you’re using, work together as GM and players, and let the tools in the system that can add stress to the situation do their work. And above all, CONSENT. Use those safety tools so the horror stays at the table and doesn’t go home in someone’s head.