Shadows ahead: How I foreshadow Danger (LoF, part 4)

Today, foreshadowing danger.  The next few posts in this series are my take on the path of fear for adventure games: how GMs can threaten and surprise players, maintaining player agency even as they lose control over events.  

Dread and uncertainty

Fear is fueled by three main things: uncertainty, surprise and loss of control, and high stakes.  If you have already pulled off the first trick, making them care about failing, then all you need to do next is arrange some mood lighting and cheap tricks to sell the upcoming horror.  To arrive at uncertainty, foreshadow strangeness and terrible danger. 

Trick #2: Foreshadowing threats

“Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

–William Tecumsah Sherman

“You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears." 

–Winston Churchill

I think, as an adult, you have likely seen a horror movie.  So you already know that, to make players afraid, a GM should be hinting at Bad Things To Come.  Both in the next room, and at the End of the dungeon, and stuff coming several months (maybe) from now.  

Think of these as the little touches of the unknown, signals that tell PCs that the out of ordinary is occurring.  A GM should make players uncertain about their relationships, their choices, and their understanding of the world.  Good examples are Omens in Mythic Bastionland (done sequentially, starting with mysterious Signs and often ending in battles), encounter chains, or a crowd of NPCs that mutter and go quiet when the PCs enter the inn.

Foreshadowing works near and far.  Have local NPCs drop disturbing facts, and PCs run across signs of scary monsters regularly.  In addition, show distant glimpses of pursuers and dark events.  Near threats heighten tension, and faraway threats give players time to choose how to react.  A party should always know its enemies are out there, hunting them, waiting for a time to strike.  

If the PCs are exploring, make the terrain unfriendly and unpredictable.  Resource depletion can create dread, if the GM foreshadows the horror of running out of food or torches or air.  When traveling a desert, they find a merchant caravan, dead of thirst.  Random corpses are great object lessons, and disgust and pity are a GM’s friend.  

If the players are not reacting to GM hints, they should give them another sign of dark events, coming closer.  If they don’t respond, we escalate with a hint closer to home.  Still no response?  We attack them with a distracting force at the front, and send in a raid to the rear, to steal or damage something they like.  Hit and run.  Pull them into the story.  Put them at the center of the action, and light a match to the long fuse of the powderkeg.

A example where I pulled this off: 

In my current 5e game, my players robbed a jewel from a tomb beneath a giant statue.  As they exited, it stood up, shooting lasers at them.  Immediate foreshadowing: the eye rubies began glowing.  Near-term foreshadowing: as they escaped, dodging laser fire and flying over the jungle, they heard it crashing through the woods.  Long-term foreshadowing: It followed them through the night, to the beach, bursting out in the middle of a three-way fight.  They sailed away, only to see it walk towards them, down into the water.  To this day, months later, they continue to expect it will pop out like the Kool-Aid Man.  Oh yeah!

An example where I failed to pull this off:

In my first time as a DM, the players saved the Mayor’s daughter from some goblin bandits.  She wasn’t a nice person, but they hadn’t a clue.  Then, when she was safe at home, she betrayed them, telling the Mayor that they made advances towards her.  The players were banned from town: they found it funny, instead of feeling threatened by a sign of things being Amiss.  They went to the next town and moved on.  

Takeaway—how best to get players to notice and respond to GM foreshadowing?  

Good foreshadowing is

• A CONTRAST to normal events (birds flying backwards, fish fighting each other to death, a trail of maggots through the woods).

• HARD TO IGNORE (the ground shakes violently when you poke it, the monster is thundering after you, the mayor’s daughter doesn’t have a shadow).

• REPEATED REPEATED (at least 2-3 times until they pick up on it, preferably several different hints).

• UNSETTLING (a light touch of powerlessness in the face of ominous events). While the players can interact with the foreshadowing element, they can’t easily stop the horror from advancing–visions dissolve, NPCs mysteriously get away when chased, and thundering giants appear invincible (at first, anyways).

One more: foreshadow truly terrifying things.  Titans, mighty spells, vast conspiracies, body-stealing brain eaters, mimic plagues, cannibalism curses, soul-sucking revenants–shit that the players are NOT ready for.  SHOW THEM these things wreaking havoc, on NPCs and landscapes and anything they care about.  

A GM should foreshadow all sorts of threats, from small irritants to dread menaces the players think they can't handle. They should talk up the small threats and let the big threats speak through their footprints, to avoid using fear to push players towards or away from different courses of action. When my neophyte players offed the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, they crowed for weeks.  They 'knew' the dragon was beyond them–it broke the bitter hunter at the tavern, destroyed the witch’s garden, and stalked the forest, leaving behind destroyed trees and poisoned ground.  Inspired by this excellent starter module, I fill my weekly game full of kaiju and terrible threats that the party has to avoid or overcome, by hook or by crook.  That’s what makes them heroes.  

Do it right, and players will thank the GM

It’s been said before. Players need information to make meaningful choices.  Meaningful choices don’t have obvious solutions.  Once players choose, their actions must change the world.  Never gate a hint behind a roll or an expected action, and never give a hint that demands the players do one specific thing.  

By giving players frequent hints about upcoming dangers, distant and near, and by giving them space to respond as they see fit, GMs both support player agency and heighten their fear.  Even more than in horror RPGs, players in adventure games expect to have the ability to choose their response.  So if they run, it must be their choice, not an expectation.  They will enjoy choosing to flee for their lives.

GMs can go too far with hints, in that they accidentally tell the players what will happen through repeated or obvious hints, and players feel they have no control over the outcome.  So, when providing omens and hints, GMs should practice a poker face, be vague and inscrutable about events (what does three fish fighting in a pond even mean?  Is the statue invulnerable?), and keep players guessing.  

If a GM makes a hint and the players guess what’s coming, they should change it up sometimes.  Maybe the Goblin King doesn’t make an appearance.  Maybe the Mayor’s daughter is just fine, and the PCs have been tricked.  Maybe the island IS a titanic bullette, but it ignores the party as the tsunami of its rising washes them away.

Things that (will) make them run

If the GM’s foreshadowing fails to impress (or be remembered), the PCs should always be free to turn and fight, or to strike out into the dark without a torch, or push on into the desert.  A GM should keep it fair, but remember they warned the PCs about the risk. They should be ready to allow the dice to kill the PCs, or, if they want to send a message instead, to batter the party down and leave them for dead.¹      

Nothing teaches a PC to fear faster than to be treated as an insignificant bug, when terrifying foreshadowing is allowed to pay off.  Maybe they are buried by a sandstorm, or bouncing off walls in the dark, or left for dead by a foe’s massive strike, not even worth finishing off.  Maybe their character sheet has been attacked, and they lost something precious for their temerity.  Maybe one of them is dead. Any way that they reap what they sow, players will quickly learn to feel threatened.  They will tremble at the thought of a giant statue, steadily walking under the ocean towards them. 

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Want to read more? This is an accidental series on building landscapes of fear around players in adventure games, which is distinct from building fear in horror games.  

Part 1: Fear of monsters is central to society. If NPCs fear, the players will too. 

Part 2: Fear is an easy shortcut to player engagement.

Part 3 The first step to fear: making PCs care about failing.  OSR and traditional RPG play cultures often fall short at this task.

Part 4 (today’s post): Foreshadow overwhelming danger, both immediate and future.

Part 5: Place dangerous, tempting choices in their path, reward dangerous choices with unpleasant surprises. Then keep the surprises coming to slowly spiral events out of their control.

Part 6:  Allow failure, and recovery from failure. 

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1 This latter option is especially useful, and fair, when the GM is unsure that the players remember the foreshadowing.^↩

Curse-swords

Let me tell you a story about the old Reeve.  He was a hard bastard, taking all we could give every season and shoving our faces into the muck whenever we didn't hop to the line.  One time there was an old blacksmith who couldn't make the lord-rent, a drunkard for sure but a kind one, repairing tools for poor folk for free when he should have charged.  Come harvest day, Reeve took his shop away, took his tools away, and cast him into the street, beaten.  

He lay there in the cold, one eye swollen shut, and then got up, grey and tall and too thin, and limped straight out of town, by the eastern gate.  They say he headed to the old quarry, because the guard there saw him near the bottom, a ragged figure touching the Line.  The blacksmith wasn't seen again for a year.  

Next the town knows of it, its harvest day again and the blacksmith comes limping and wild-eyed back into town, bruised as he left.  He's dragging a long stick behind him, and asks for the Reeve, claiming he has payment for his shop.  Well, the Reeve comes along, thundering with mud in his eye and his billy to hand, intent on seeing this fool set to rights.  Lo, the blacksmith cracks that stick on the ground, and a wood scabbard falls away from a great long sword, keen on one edge like a great dull grey hunting knife, rough and jagged and half-finished.  

"This is my life's worth," says the blacksmith, "An' I expect you to pay it!"  With that, he swings for the Reeve.  That great mass of a bully, no stranger to battle, easily blocks the blow with his club.  

And that would have been the beginning of a bloody beating, at best, except for one thing.  The old blacksmith's sword doesn't stop.  Well, it did, but keep in mind I heard this direct from young Andry's grandfather, Nat, who was there--it also does.  

The sword broke when the billy club hit it, like ice, into so many shards Nat couldn't see them all.  And those pieces kept going.  Into the Reeve.  

They say that when that sword was done, the Reeve was cut to shreds, smaller, that the sword shards ate him and then blew away, grey smoke on the breeze.  "Sure enough," the blacksmith spat, dark red spittle on the Reeve's body, "My curse is spent: rot in a mazed hell until the sun dies and the stars go out."  Then he too fell, stone dead.  

Curse-swords: Curses as swords, terrible thoughts given form by an Enchanter, all vengeance honed down to an edge.  Magical +1 sword.  Comes in three main forms: 

Traitor's blade: A white blade blinding, of new snow and broken promises, can do an extra 2d8 damage to a target when broken. Does not miss after breaking.  Will reform in its scabbard under the full moon.  Old, tricky.  Wants: to serve the will of the dead.  

Oath blade: A black blade of darkness and misplaced loyalties, can hit without missing three times before breaking, does 1d20 damage in its final break.  Does not reform until the loyalty is mis-pledged again, at the new moon.  Tired, angry.  Wants: to enforce summary justice.

Life blade:  A gray revenant blade, made from a heart's dark desires and Line iron, crafted to kill one being.  Only can be broken against the target.  When broken, deals 8d8 damage, but also inflicts that damage on its wielder.  If the target's Name is known, it deals exactly the damage necessary to kill that being, to target and wielder both.  One own's voice, twisted.  Wants: to kill the One it loves most.

Curse-swords are awake: they know their purpose, and their history.  If their purpose is not being met, they will push.  hard.  

Making PCs care about failing (LoF, part 3)

Let’s talk about fear of failure and player investment, in both traditional and OSR games. 

This was originally intended to be one post on building landscapes of fear around players in adventure games.  I, uh, underestimated the size of this topic in my head, so this is now a series. 

There are various tricks to make PCs afraid in adventure games.  For me, they boil down to a simple foundation: making them care about failing. I think the exact solution differs across different adventure game cultures. Traditional games need more threat (and death) to create caring.  OSR games need quick, unique character creation to foster caring.

Okay that’s the idea in a nutshell. Keep reading if you want the longer version.  

It’s not horror: fear in adventure games

I wrote this series before doing research on what others have said about fear in RPGs, and then edited each post afterwards.  Existing advice on how to run horror RPGs is solid (see the Alexandrian’s “Running Horror”) and parallels what I say here.  

But horror games are distinct: it takes a different set of tricks to use fear as a tool in an adventure game where dread is not built into the game rules or culture.  The first difference is emotional engagement: non-horror adventure games have their own unique challenges in that regard.

Trick #1: Make them care about failing

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”

—Nelson Mandela

“Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose”

—’Me and Bobby McGee’, Kris Kristofferson

Few like to fail.  Death is a form of failure in RPGs, but there are many others.  You can fail to defeat evil, fail to save others, fail to learn, fail to grow, fail to achieve any number of goals. Knight at the Opera has a really good post about the different ways in which players can fail, short of death.  

It is only human to desire to insulate ourselves from failure: experiencing it is often not fun, especially if it is all we have as a takeaway.  After all, RPGs are emotional gambling, and going broke sucks.

Two relatively distinct play-cultures have emerged in adventure games as a response to this desire.  In the first, in traditional games like DnD 5e and PF2e, the risk of failure has been minimized.  Creating a character is a major time investment.  Total Party Kills (TPKs) are a failure state, ending campaigns.  As a result, PCs are powerful and players in general expect that encounters will be level-appropriate—keeping them challenged, but ‘safe’.  There are countless traditional adventures with carefully calibrated dangers.  

In this traditional play culture, players care from the start about their characters, and by extension, their characters failing–they identify with them, and want to succeed.  Getting them to care more about the game world is just gravy: you already have the potatoes.  The only problem here is that players expect their heroes to survive and win, so they are not really ever afraid of failing.  This problem grows as characters level; it’s truly hard to kill a 5th level PC in 5e without smashing them against impossible odds.  Even players new to the game quickly figure their superheroic status out–they often default to fighting enemies, rather than running away.  

In the second play culture, what I will call the OSR, failure risks remain high, level-appropriate encounters are not guaranteed, and no one is a super-hero (not until very high levels anyway, which few reach).  Player death is expected, and so character creation is rapid, to get sidelined players right back into the game.  

The main drawback of this approach is that, for most people (Murkdice excepted), the lower personal investment into their PCs (at least early on) lowers their fear of failing.  If they die or get injured or cursed, they can always quickly roll up another PC. Instead of minimizing risk, they have instead minimized the sting of failure, like Red talking to the parole board in Shawshank Redemption:

Now, there are RPGs out there with a long character creation process and a high risk of death (Cyberpunk 2020, Burning Wheel, Traveller, and so on), and loving them takes a certain…commitment?  Hey we all find our own fun, and honestly dying during character creation (Traveller) sounds hilarious.

But focusing on these two play cultures, the first needs more fear of failure.  If a PC dies, GMs risk “going bust” in emotional gambling, maybe even losing a player.  The stakes are too high.  The second needs more caring about failure.  GMs risk players “playing slots” in emotional gambling, never investing and laughing it off.  The stakes are too low.  So if you want them to live in a landscape of fear where every choice matters, victory is hard-won, and all the sweeter for it?  You need two different things.  

When the solution is death: traditional games

To conjure fear in traditional games, the solution is both simple and hard to pull off.  It’s easy to state: stop doing level appropriate encounters all of the time to avoid the risk of PC death. Eventually a powerful monster will kill a PC–resurrect them ASAP, make it expensive in some way (money, favors, a quest), and in the meantime they can play a random NPC ally, or as a helpful ghost who can attack undead and scout ahead.  Don’t let them sit on the sidelines.

Other kinds of failure (loss of money, evil wins, and so on) can occur in traditional systems, but even there it can be challenging to defeat a party in combat without killing a PC, or to stymie over-powered utility spells that make obstacles a snap. More on that later in this series.

With this approach, PC death and failure is more an out-of-game emotional challenge than an in-game challenge.  I have an entire homebrew ruleset on how I pull this trick off in my weekly 5e game, and that’s an upcoming post on death (to avoid even more mission creep in this series).  But even in the absence of homebrew, spells and scrolls of Raise Dead explicitly exist to promote this kind of play!  The key is managing player expectations for death at the outset, respecting their choices, and clearly communicating danger.   Just pull the level-appropriate band-aid off, and your game will be 10x better.

When the solution is life: OSR games

To evoke more fear in OSR games, quickly make each character unique and cool, from the get-go.  Not shilling here, but that’s why I homebrewed quirks and feats to create unique characters quickly for my Shadowdark one-shots (I am trying to convert my 5e group to SD, we will see if it works).  Pirate Borg does something similar with tons of excellent tables to quickly roll flavorful traits and gear for new PCs.  In the Dark Sun setting, I like that each player has a random wild talent, and love the mutations in Vaults of Vaarn and other post-apocalyptic games.  

In all of these set ups, if you die, you don’t get to play that quirky, unique character again.  They will be dead and gone, which makes them worth fearing for.  

This solution comes with a caveat, one that affects many OSR games with quick character generation tables.  If it’s too easy to roll up a unique PC, then player investment in their new homunculus is still limited–you have moved from “oh well” to “aw, shucks” when they kick the bucket.  There are two possible solutions I have seen.¹   

One is to make insta-characters very detailed, combining powers with flavor so they feel uniquely badass and distinct each time. You can see a progression towards this approach in Chris McDowell’s Bastion-verse series, from arcana in Into the Odd, to failed careers in Electric Bastionland, to uniquely powerful Knights in Mythic Bastionland.  This is also a theme in games like Pirate Borg that have random starting classes, powers, and traits (although picking your class/powers is a common house rule that lowers character uniqueness).

The second solution is to do standard character creation (preferably in a system with lots of great chargen tables), and ALSO ask each player to add one unique thing about their PC.  This idea is swiped wholesale from 13th Age, and their SRD lays it out better than I could: something unique in their story, not a mechanical advantage.  Each PC is special.

I use this add-on rule in every OSR game I run, and it works well.  I pair it with games that roll up unique characters (Pirate Borg, my hack of Shadowdark, etc.), turning that dial up one more notch, for instant character investment.  

Fear is the mind killer

As I wrote at the start, failure encompasses more than death: PCs should care about failing their quests, about getting cursed, about random NPCs and pet donkeys and undead parrots.  But all of these other fears are supported and enhanced by an underlying fear of character loss.  Mortality is the first, easy step on the road to fear. 

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Want to read more? This is an accidental series on building landscapes of fear around players in adventure games, which is distinct from fear in horror games.  

Part 1: Fear of monsters is central to society. If NPCs fear, the players will too. 

Part 2: Fear is an easy shortcut to player engagement.

Part 3 (this post): The first step to fear: making PCs care about failing.  OSR and traditional RPG play cultures often fall short at this task.

Part 4: Make them feel threatened, without stealing agency: foreshadow danger and foreground dangerous choices. 

Part 5: Tempt them, surprise them, spiral events out of their control.

Part 6: Allow them to fail, and to survive to succeed one day.

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1 Actually, now three ways, if you want to risk paying for snacks! ^↩

Why Fear is Good (Landscapes of Fear, part 2)

This is part 2 of a series on landscapes of fear (Part 1, Part 3): today I am going to talk about why it’s important to build a landscape that evokes fear. But before I get to that, one announcement:

– This is not sponsored and is entirely unasked for: Tales from the Tape Deck is launching soon on Kickstarter.  It’s a “tabletop role-playing game that fits in a cassette tape case. Each Volume contains a new setting, character options and rules.”  Today’s post is partly about why you should check it out.

 Landscapes of Fear: Why Fear?

 "...love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails."

    --Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1513) (trans. by Luigi Ricci)

Artwork © Nicolas Samori.

Before I dive into the various tricks I use to make my PCs afraid as often as I can, I want to pause and talk motivation.  I am still learning how to be a good GM, and I struggled with this post this week.  I had to pull the reasoning for my current playstyle out of my gut, and examine it in the light of day.  At the end, much of what I have to say is standard OSR advice for GMs, just hopefully reframed and connected in a useful way.  

So, why make your players afraid? 

If you are playing Mothership, this isn’t even a question–fear is a game goal.  So first, some context: my weekly game is DnD 5e in an OSR style: it’s not horror or even grimdark (we are not into hurt kids or adult themes, its seven dads drinking beer and being heroic).  Despite that, I consider making my players afraid very important, for one simple reason.

I had to go look up the psychological term for what I am about to say, and it’s not going to be a surprise to any veteran GM out there: “emotional arousal” (engagement).  When we feel one emotion strongly, our physiological response causes all emotions to hit harder.  Our attention narrows, our heart speeds up. Joy feels bigger, anger feels sharper, sadness feels heavier.  And most importantly, when we are emotionally aroused, our memories are more vivid.  

That’s what I want our game to be: memorable, emotional, fun.  Full of narrow escapes and hard choices, excitement and sweet victories.  

Emotions lie at the heart of storytelling: we feel emotional resonance to a good story or to a friend’s fate.  An echo of their reaction, kindled in our hearts.  Emotional engagement is central to both the sandbox and railroad styles of GMing: regardless of whether the GM wants emotion to emerge organically, as a result of players making meaningful choices (sandbox), or they want to tell a story that leads players into emotion (railroad), their goal is an emotional reaction.  GMs want players to be excited and having fun, to tell stories later about their session.

A good GM lays the groundwork for their players to feel emotional resonance: they create a landscape of emotion. There are lots of emotions a GM can draw upon: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, Surprise, Wonder, Sadness, Contempt, Trust, Anticipation, Pride, Embarrassment, etc.  Sly Flourish is an advocate for evoking wonder through fantastic places, for example.  

A good session should cause a diversity of feelings, with positive emotions hopefully dominating.  If a session feels flat, with inattentive players (been there)--they are not emotionally engaged in the outcome.  This may be because they feel they have no agency in driving the story, no attachment to the story of the world or of their character, or many other things.  Pulling on their emotions pulls them back into the game–they will want to meaningfully respond to what happened.  If the GM gives them agency to do so, they have achieved a virtuous cycle of Emotionally Engaged GamingTM (see my gorgeous diagram below).  

So why focus on evoking fear, amongst all the emotions? 

Because, to quote a great blog post, adventure RPGs are “emotional gambling.” Players can’t help but invest emotions, to a greater or lesser degree, in the PCs they role-play: creativity, pride, affection, empathy, joy.  Our player characters are small extensions of our identity.  When these fingers of our self are threatened with death or harm, however fictional or remote, we feel the stirrings of fear.  

By risking loss or harm to our character, we gamble our emotional state.  The return is emotional engagement, and more intense joy when they survive and we win.

It’s no surprise then that many fantasy RPGs, 5e included, have conflict as a big part of the core rules and play culture. Combat, by indirectly striking at a player’s mental well-being, creates fear and emotional engagement.  If one can ‘win’ the game of DnD, if at all, it’s by not dying in combat.  To quote Jared Sinclair’s excellent blog post on win conditions in role-playing games: 

“One can be said to win combat if one makes it out alive: "One ought not to die," then. A loss condition is as good as a win condition for instantiating a value system in a game. We could go further, and observe that these parts of tabletop role-play where an implicit win condition pops up (such as "one ought not to die") are also the places where the rules take on a shape more akin to board games or video games.

Even disconnected players value not dying, because dying feels like losing, like punishment.  In other words, fear of character death and diminishment is a shortcut to getting your players to care about playing the game. 

Triggers of fear: you have to be willing to kill your darlings

"...the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear."

    --The Princess Bride (1987)

Nothing I wrote above is a surprise to OSR players: they have long maintained the importance of having a real possibility of character death, it gives the game stakes (i.e., emotional engagement).  We have to address the serious challenge of a lack of player risk in many adventure games (and especially 5e), and the downsides of death in OSR games–I am going to talk about that in part 3.  But, before I end this post, I think we can learn something by examining this framing a step further.  

Common GM advice is to engage players by using all the senses when describing a scene.  Emotional engagement often occurs via a trigger, appearing through one of the senses.  Thus, it’s important to involve all the senses not only when giving room descriptions, but also when designing a RPG session or a RPG game.  Touch, for example, is one of the reasons I think Mausritter is so popular–consider the visceral emotional trigger of physically accepting a condition card and having to pick up and remove a beloved item card to make room.  Another example: dice pools are popular, because who doesn’t like throwing a lot of dice to find out what happens?  Another: the jenga tower of Dread RPG. 

RPGs are predominantly a visual- and hearing-dominated medium.  It’s hard to conjure up taste or smells, but increasing the diversity of visual, audio, and tactile experiences can aid engagement. Music, props, bowls with dungeon dice, doom tokens, visuals, minis–yeah yeah I can feel the collective eyeroll of you readers.  We KNOW this stuff, this is why the hobby is like it is, why it starts out cheap and can snowball into half your disposable income if you let it.  A diversity of stimuli works up to a point, that point being the distraction of your players with too many stimuli (and/or the insanity of the GM trying to prep all this stuff).  As always, season to your taste.

But it helps me, at least, to finally connect all the disparate means-to-an-end (tips and tricks) suggested to me as a GM, with the ultimate goal (emotional engagement).  It encourages me to experiment for greater emotional arousal, and move beyond my personal default gaming set-up.  

What’s more, not all ‘experiences’ (or ‘cues’) translate into strong emotional triggers.  If they did, we would be so overstimulated we couldn’t function day to day.  The key to running an engaging RPG is to regularly elevate a cue into a trigger, just often enough to keep your players hooked.  Boring combat won’t do it, and combat is boring without a risk of failure.  If you want your PCs to emotionally respond to a cue, they have to believe it comes with a consequence.  

For your words and cues to matter, they have to be backed by action.  At the right time, you must follow through at least once when there is a cue–that’s what makes it an emotional trigger.  When they make a mistake and you have clearly communicated the danger, maybe they survive this time.  But at some point, you must kill your darling PCs, hurt them, curse them, ruin their day, tear down their character sheet piece by piece.  All so you can cheer them on later.  

Best to do it early, so you can train them in the ways of fear..  A cautious player, about to do something dangerous so they can be a hero, is living their best life.

I want to close this part of this series by giving two examples of successful emotional triggers in my recent games.

In this light, looking at my last session, I made a mistake.  There were ‘translator crowns’ that PCs were encouraged to put on to communicate with the denizens of a strange city: they were mind-enslavement devices, of course.  I SHOULD have gone to Burger King, gotten some paper crown props, and handed one to each PC that put them on (two did, my players rock).  Visceral touch would have increased the player’s horror at their mistake–they were plenty chagrined, but this would have brought it home.  I had crafted a solid emotional trigger of fear and horror, but no associated stimulus.

Also in this light, I now know why I had the greatest game of Pirate Borg ever when Ahmed of Suffety Games ran ‘Into the Maelstrom’ for us at PAXU26.  Without spoilers, we were on a mission to save some imprisoned friends, represented by a playing card dealt to each of us, and every time a bell rang, the GMs around us (this was a multi-table tourney) removed one of the cards as a PC’s prisoner died.  But Ahmed went one step further–he picked up the card from in front of the affected player, and ripped. it. into. pieces.  This was some top-level GM emotional impact!  It turned what was an annoying cue for other tables, the bell, into an visceral experience that made all of us wince with regret.  By doubling down on a cue, diversifying it, he turned it into an fearful emotional trigger.

It also led to absolute hilarity when we later found a random Relic and Ahmed rolled…a resurrection stone.  Every time we used it, I kid you not, he went through the pile of ripped cards, trying to find a fragment of each prisoner to return to us.  The next day he was in the main hall, a fragment of each of our cards in his pocket: just in case he ran into us, he wanted us to have a souvenir.  

Best. GM. Ever.  Ahmed clearly knows the value of visceral emotional triggers in creating emotional engagement.  

Not coincidentally, he’s designed a new role-playing game that is literally set to a cue, music–Tales of the Tape Deck.  Talk about setting the mood–I imagine emotional triggers galore, the music pounding out and coinciding with dramatic events.  If this sounds like something you would like, Ahmed has no idea I am pitching the game here, I am just a random player he had at a con.  Go surprise him with a Kickstarter follow!  If you tell him it’s because of Velocitree, he will be bewildered.

Now, during this post, you might have been thinking this all sounds too pat, too easy.  How do you kill characters in 5e without going emotionally broke and losing players (I’d call this a ‘bust’ in emotional gambling, when you wager and lose)?  Conversely, how do you get OSR players to even care enough about their low-level characters to flinch (I’d call this ‘playing slots’ in emotional gambling, not willing to wager big)?  I’ll get to that in Part 3, when I talk about how I and other GMs build landscapes of fear around players.  

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Want to read more? This is an accidental series on building landscapes of fear around players in adventure games, which is distinct from fear in horror games.  

Part 1: Fear of monsters is central to society. If NPCs fear, the players will too. 

Part 2 (this post): Fear is an easy shortcut to player engagement.

Part 3: The first step to fear: making PCs care about failing.  OSR and traditional RPG play cultures often fall short at this task.

Part 4: Make them feel threatened, without stealing agency: foreshadow danger and foreground dangerous choices. 

Part 5: Tempt them, surprise them, spiral events out of their control.

Part 6: Allow them to fail, and to survive to succeed one day.

Before I go:

–My first RPG zine, Shadowfeats: OSR Feats and Quirks for Shadowdark, is out now! 130 even-level Feats. 135 Quirks. Grounded options for Shadowdark that give characters texture and teeth. May your PCs be unique before they die.