Being creeped out can be a good thing.

[Bren]

[Fallon Kell]

I like to avoid pictures and descriptions of monsters. Fear of the unknown is a powerful thing.
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Or that excessively long "Noooooooooo" was the Whining Side of the Force leaving him. - Dustflier

Complete Starship Construction System

[Downstrike]

DID THAT DEAD HORSE JUST MOVE? Sorry about hitting an older thread but I’m new to the Pit and thought about how I’m going to be running SW. Starting a new thread seemed a little more tacky then replying on this one. That being said…

Hello everyone! I watched Event Horizon too many times!

Your main bad guy is doing some super smart research into the next level of hyper drive. This thing doesn’t need a navcomputer or impossible calculations because it doesn’t travel the distance that worries about stuff in the way. It saves time because it is not a faster than light travel, it is a shorten the physical distance travel. It’s a whole new engine to get you through the known galaxy. You just have to make a quick jaunt through hell (or Ultra Sith Naughty Place of the Dead?).

In my new game I’m going to try to get that old 80s horror film feel going. I have my own sandbox moon which is a rip off of so many different things that I forget the list but as a taste: Fifth Element, Rum Diaries, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner and just a touch of the Last King of Scotland.

* players are hired by a small time environmental company to find out what happen to their archeological dig team. Players get to the sight to find that everyone is starved to death but two which are unaccounted for. None of the dig teams equipment on batteries and the like is working. As night falls, none of the players stuff seems to be working and they seem to have found part of one of the two missing, a foot starting at the ankle with the bone sticking out and the flesh chewed off to that point. The second missing person, are they dead or are they the cause? And how we going to get out of here when the ship/speeder/droid/radio is all dead? I got this from the GM screen, they had a seed about a bacteria that drains power as an ancient alien weapon. What happens when the players get it back to the main cities?

* Child or trusted native friend (anyone considered innocent) finds an exceptionally nasty Sith Holocron and it twists/possesses them overnight into super hard to stop and crazy force user. On top of that, the kid has just stole a fast ship and shot to Dxum. Players catch up just in time to find four freshly empty carbonite tablets. So you have four horsemen in Mandellorian Armor (Neo-Crusaders) and a Sith Anti Christ Child on the loose. Go get some daggers from a blind monastery or however Omen III went and go to town.

* Silence of the Droids; we all know that droids can become more than just a program so why not have them become crazy. Two ways to go with this. The droid is a serial killer of other droids and stealing parts because it fears some weird droid death which is all in its head. Probably has someone working for it, stealing the droids as it converts itself into a super huge monster of a robot. The other way to go is the droid wants to be alive and starts taking and wearing skin. I recall an Invader Zim where he is taking organs out of fear so if you want a player to wake up in a bath tub filled with ice and missing a kidney; well, that’s better than missing a liver.

Thanks for reading
DS

[Zarm R'keeg]

I'm curious... how do you creep your players out? Personally, I've always had trouble with it- I only managed it by fluke once (a Blood Carver watching the group from afar) and certainly not when playing Otherspace. I think the canvas of experiences are so broad and the player separation (it is just me sitting there saying words, after all) from events are sufficient that they're seldom swept up in the emotion... at least of that kind. I suspect it may just be that my technique is mediocre...

What techniques do you use?
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Star Wars: Marvels, the audio drama: www.nolinecinemas.com

Hard core OT, all the way!

[Edheldun]

I'm totally borrowing Gry's shipwreck setup for this weekend, but the crew is broken into three sort of factions. Grand Admiral Ishin-Il-Raz deliberately crashed the star destroyer Emperor's Will after ROTJ to preserve the emperor's New Order in his personal kingdom. He and a Compforce contingent try to run things Heart of Darkness style from the bridge. Most of the crew, Navy personnel and Army troopers, have gone nuts from being trapped with nothing to look forward to but Compforce interrogations and executions, and the few surviving stormtroopers have retreated to the other end of the ship because they're the only sane ones left.

[Lane Arroway]

I find, like when watching movies or shows, that mood music really helps. You might not even notice, but many times in tv or films, the music is the only thing keeping you interested. It's how you know the situation is tense or exciting.

This reminds me that I need to expaned my music selection.

From experience, I know this is really hard to capture in a rpg. Its also important to keep things fluid during creepy scenes(or any scene you wish to highlight) and to not be bogged down by mechanics. This has the added bonus of keeping up with the music as well. Pauses in the scene will snap players back into reality and it can be hard to get back in.
Along these lines, be as vivid in detail as possible and use all the senses if you can.
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"This job is 90% talking to people and 10% shooting at them."

[Edheldun]

I pretty much always run some sort of music during a session. I try to pick about an hour's worth of music that fits the adventure and location to just let play and have three or four tracks that I can jump to at key moments. The Battlestar Galactica (remake) and Alien soundtracks gets a lot of use for any sort of creepy environments.