Tempting, dangerous choices, clear rewards with unpleasant surprises–that is the key to helping PCs to simultaneously feel fear and agency, I think. This is the ‘mess around and find out’ post in this series on fear in adventure games.
I mean, who wouldn’t throw those dragon teeth?
The Quantum Horror: Fear vs. agency
Fear is fueled by three main things: uncertainty, surprise and loss of control, and high stakes. If the PCs care about failing, and are properly uncertain from foreshadowed danger, then all it takes is an overwhelming surprise to make them afraid.
If you were running a horror game, that’s all you would really need.
But in a game focused on heroic adventure, players expect to make choices that matter, to have “agency” to drive the narrative. No matter how well they foreshadow it, if a GM inflects terrible, fear-inducing events on the PCs, those events preempt player choice. The PCs may feel like the GM is using them to tell a pre-ordained story, or that the GM is unfairly not allowing them to flee the horror. For example, no matter what PCs do to avoid Strahd, their choices don’t matter: they have to kill the Count to leave Barovia.1
I call this conundrum, the Quantum Horror.
The Mothership Warden’s Operations Manual2 states that “Horrors occur because at some point a line was crossed that wasn’t meant to be crossed.” They name this event the "Trangression", which wakes the Horror from its slumber. It goes on to state, “Usually, your players only realize that they have Transgressed by the time it’s too late.” This is typical for the genre: the Transgression often does not result from player choices.
Horror RPGs and modules work because player choice comes in upstream--this is what they signed up for. In adventure games, GMs need to allow player choice before inflicting Fear or Horror. So how to get PCs to actively choose Fear3, and avoid this Quantum Horror problem?
The Beauty of Temptation
If you are part of my weekly game and crew the good ship Murderbucket, please stop reading, some of the examples below will be spoilers.
The main trick I use is temptation. I know my magpie players well enough to guess where they will do, and what shiny objects might attract them. So I place those shiny objects in their path (I follow the nicely stated philosophy of the “Quantum Ogre Reborn”, but you can do this with blorb prep as well). Just like adventure hooks, I put out a bunch of shiny “fear hooks”.
A fear hook has just enough information to tell players that something bad might happen, and just enough reward hinted at to make players interested. The fear hook might be a literal shiny object, like a treasure chest full of gold that fell out of the enemy airship as they fled. Or the fear hook might be a difficult but beneficial choice, like helping the elves forge an alliance with vampires to destroy the orc legions.
Although they are similar, the main differences between an adventure hook and a fear hook are expectations and outcome. In general, players expect that they will survive an adventure hook presented by the GM, and that the eventual outcome will be a reward for completing the adventure hook.4
With a fear hook, the reward is clear and and often immediate, and the expectation is a possibility of real danger. Fear hooks are an attractive short-cut: sometimes the risk pans out and you get a new magic sword. Sometimes it doesn’t, and you get a flaming sentient pyromaniac axe who burns down your ship. But because fear hooks are tempting, shiny objects, they invite Transgression.
When a player bites and interacts with the shiny object, they get both rewarded and cursed. The curse might be literal, like the mimic measles inflicted by opening a suspect treasure chest. Or the curse might be metaphorical, a bad deal or reputation that will come back to bite them, like their vampire allies luring them into Barovia after the final battle. Either way, just like the Road Runner, the players are slow to learn because the reward is worth the cost. Even though they know there are no free shortcuts to power, they take them anyway. On that road, they don’t mind the imposed Horror, because their poor choices clearly caused it to arrive. This is the critical difference between running a horror RPG and running a fear-driven adventure game: player choice is paramount.
Trick #3: Tempting Dangers, Beautiful Curses
“Temptation is the fire that brings up the scum of the heart.”
–William Shakespeare
Before I go further describing tempting fear hooks and curses I have used, I should say that neither Identify nor Remove Curse work perfectly well in my home game. Remove Curse and Identify are some of the worst spells in any fantasy RPG. You take curses–magical, wonderful, terrifying, incredible calls to adventure–and make them all fixable with a 2nd level spell any tin-pot cleric can cast. Similarly, Identify takes magic items–mysterious, mythical objects that bend reality and beg for quests to know them fully–and turns them into a 3x5 notecard filled with lore and game-rules that you hand to the player.
Taken together, that’s some serious lost-opportunity, let’s-play-it-just-like-Gary-did-because-we-don’t-want-to-lose-players Grade A bullcrap. It’s 2026, we can hack a better game.
So when my players get cursed? Remove Curse is for Lesser Curses like grumpy weapons and having your hair fall out. For the real stuff, that spell is a balm, not a cure: Greater Curses piss on being removed easily. Identify tells you everything about normal magic items, but sentient magic and serious Curses can hide their full powers, or twist what it says. Nothing is truly safe, until players take the leap of trying it out. Foreshadowing can hint at danger (and should!), but if they want to take the negative-energy Artifact for a spin, they will reap the whirlwind.
Treasure-curses: actual shiny objects
At this point, there are so many entertainingly treasure-cursed PCs in my weekly game, it’s a badge of honor. Good curses play on classic fears: death, the dark, disfigurement, abandonment and so on. One PC is cursed with rapid vampirism and has a magical sword with a ghost chained to it. Another wakes up every week to a new dead body, chopped up into bits at their feet. One has lost their father inside a magical scroll, and a fourth exorcised the mimic measles only to attract the enduring attention of a Greater Mimic, whose colony is spreading through their hometown. All these curses are pure adventure fuel: annoying enough for them to search for a cure, but not debilitating enough to make gameplay less fun.
When they find a magical item, they don’t know how it works right away. They can experiment, try it on for size, use a spell, etc. But Identify can mislead them–one beloved example is the Ring of Animal Friendship that Identify said would let them speak with animals. What was left out is that the spell requires a check, and if they fail, they only speak that animal’s language for the rest of the day. They love it when a player can only bark and point for half the session.
Poor choices: metaphorical shiny objects
A player should know they are making a poor choice as they make it. A poor choice is most obvious to a player, especially in retrospect, when it follows fictional or real-world expectations: easy treasure is often cursed, friendly strangers bearing gifts should not be trusted, complicated or stupid plans will fall apart, bad deeds will out, karma is an asshole, heroic deeds require heroic sacrifice, and so on. Poor choices are also obvious when each option is a bad one, but a choice still must be made. Do you ally with the vampires to save the elves, search desperately for another option, or try to go it alone in fighting off the orcs?
If every choice has a drawback that is clearly seen by the players, and they choose the one with a clear immediate reward (the vamps can save us!), a fear hook has been set. Then player choices, both the difficult ones and the truly bad ones, can come home to bite them.
That time they robbed the dragon when he was away? Turns out that dragons home in on their gold like heatseeking missiles. When they tried to use that fact to take out all of the other problems in the valley (planting dragon gold in various lairs)? That plan backfired because they made poor assumptions. The young pickpocket they reflexively killed? His friends await their return, sharpening their knives. The time they heroically saved a dragon egg and refused to give up an evil artifact to interested parties? They are now hunted by two armies.
At every step, the bad bargains the PCs make give the GM room to inflict Fear and terrible events on them. Their choices matter, and I like to make sure they always find out exactly how and why their karma bit them in the butt. I also like to scale the consequences exactly to the degree they should have known better, or worked harder to find another solution. I think a curse is a choice-robbing bag of no fun if it comes out of nowhere–I want them to be half-expecting the blow they know they deserve for doing something so ill-considered. Which brings us to an oldie-but-goodie in the game of inflicting fear, jump scares.
Jump Scares: courting danger
Normality, then break. Comfort, then loss. Security, then danger. It’s changes in rhythm that can really drive an emotional response. Jump scares are an old horror movie staple, and the movie characters often initiate it–they go into the creepy house, they swim in deep waters, and they check the fallen body.
To replicate that experience for PCs, use fear hooks. Maybe the ‘fallen’ enemy was carrying a magical wand: is she really dead now? Maybe there’s a magic sword they need in the cursed house. They can only find the black pearl in the deepest waters, but they are haunted by ghost octopi. They enter the pirate lord’s treasure room, expecting traps, and disturbing the clearly magical pile of rubies in the middle causes the door to slam shut as the room fills with water.
Fear hooks and jump scares can be used to fix lackluster encounters. Late-acting poisons, sudden changes in environmental conditions, the arrival of deadlier or magical enemies. One session my PCs were running through a cursed tomb (with three undead knights), and finding all of the encounters easy and not threatening.5 The end-of-session vibe was kids in a candy store, next session we loot everything. I had wanted the tomb to be spooky, and had failed miserably.
Between sessions, I had an idea6; What if I placed three tempting magical crystals in the empty tombs, one for each buried knight? The first two were quickly snatched up and revealed to be stone-scrolls (i.e., spells in Mausritter, ported to DnD). The third crystal was glowing7, in a room by itself–clearly special in a haunted tomb.
And when a brave PC picked it up, I pulled on the fear hook. The lights went out and the groaning voices of the defeated knights could be heard, rising again. Darkness had been cast on the tomb: the PCs banged into random walls and quickly began to be strafed by the undead knights they thought they had destroyed, claws and swords flashing out of the dark. Now, with the tables turned, they RAN, leaving a retainer for dead, hoping they could run the right direction and, in the end, barely making it out alive.
Jump scares are immediate payoffs to fear hooks, and work well when the Transgression is obvious.
Combat as Fear Hook: Losing Control
“I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.”
-Darth Vader
I run an OSR-flavored 5e game each week. And of all the OSR principles, ‘combat as a fail state’ is hardest to enforce with 5e mini-superheroes. The players know their PCs are hard to kill, and monsters have to earn their respect. That said, this problem is not uncommon with high-level OSR games either–that’s why Tucker’s Kobolds exist, after all. Combat SHOULD be scary.
Unsurprisingly, I find the most common poor choice my 5e PCs make is a frontal attack on a superior foe8. They see a reward, they see clear and present danger, they still go for it. Instant fear hook.
It’s important to note here that a given group of enemies may, or may not, be a real danger to the players mechanically in a fair fight (see, Tucker’s Kobolds). The point is, combat is a fail state and all enemies are dangerous, no matter how weak-seeming. So, when my players misjudge a foe that they should be running from, rather than mechanically bolstering the foe on the fly, I instead pull on that fear hook. Taking advantage of their choice to enter combat, I change the game under their feet.
A big part of fear is losing control of the situation. In a combat arising from a fear hook, every round some new surprise awaits the PCs that makes it harder. The mob begins throwing stones. The undead monstrosity bursts into the city above, gobbling up bystanders and getting stronger. The guards of the ancient city are protected by a mythal: anyone casting magic on them is lit by faerie fire and has to deal with wild magic after-effects. Reinforcements arrive. Water floods the room. And so on. I keep the surprises coming, and I slowly spiral events out of their control. It’s to their advantage to end things, quickly, and to never give the enemy an even break–just like real-world violence.
If and/or when the players survive (and regain control), they are going to feel like real heroes. Proper heroes run away when needed, and eventually win because they survive, make clever choices, and keep pushing down dangerous paths. Fear makes their choices matter, all the more.
_______________
The Landscape of Fear series so far:
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 RPGs often fail at this task.
Part 4: Next, foreshadow overwhelming danger: immediate and future.
Part 5 (this post): Place attractive rewards/traps in their path. Keep the surprises coming, slowly spiral events out of their control.
Part 6: The center can hold? How to encourage both failure and recovery from failure.
1 Strahd is the ultimate Quantum Ogre. Although Ravenloft is a popular adventure, it only works because players know the deal before they start. Imagine being excited to save the elf kingdom from orcs, then walking through some mist and ending up in Barovia week after week because your GM likes vampires.↩
2 Even though it is a sci-fi horror game, the Mothership Warden's Operations Manual is one of the best how-to GM guides I have ever read. Every adventure game GM should check it out.↩
3 Don't get me started on how Daggerheart does this, it's good design, but consider this more broadly--Fear empowers enemies in Daggerheart, but I am talking about taking the stupidly dangerous path, not mechanically suffering when you rest.↩
4 Few GMs actively try to tempt their PCs to go fight a monster many times stronger (not without tons of clear warnings first, anyways), or let the PCs earn nothing in return for questing.↩
5 Not an uncommon experience when running 5e: between Darkvision, turn undead, and superpowered PCs, it's hard to scare them into running from low-level undead in a dark tomb.↩
6 Dungeons are scary places and should feel so. The lack of darkvision for PCs in Shadowdark RPG (and its ubiquity for monsters), and the emphasis on torches underground, is designed to generate an atmosphere of fear. So I thought, what if I could do that for vanilla 5e?↩
7 True to my Quanturm Ogre Reborn prep, I had originally placed the crystal in a glowing sarcophagus, but the PCs chose not to open it. So I moved the glowing crystal to a nearby room, no one the wiser, and they picked it up there. They still wonder was was in the casket.↩
8 Current game culture for 5e enables this sort of behavior by removing tough monsters from your game (only level-appropriate encounters allowed!). One way to fix this is to choose really tough monsters, so that they absorb all the party’s damage without blinking and then hit back like a truck. Another way, and one I prefer at my table since I like monsters to be real-feeling, not auto-scaling in difficulty with PC level, is to simply present PCs with a range of challenge difficulties.↩
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