Friday, May 8, 2015

Discussion: Creepiest Monster You've Made Recently?

GMs are frequently good at making demons and nightmare creatures that come way out of left field and do a great job of making a player shudder in revulsion. Sometimes the GM pulls from their own fears. Sometimes the GM pulls from a fear of the player's, or of the character in question. Today I want to ask what was the creepiest monster/encounter you've made recently, and how did it go over with your players?

For me I think it was a relatively small thing. In my L5R game the players were attacked by a corpse. They responded by cutting its head off. The head rolled towards someone and exploded while the body kept fighting. So they cut the limbs off. The limbs kept fighting indvidually.

However, while that was happening the head wasn't done yet. The explosion had impacted bits of bone against the back of one of the PCs. Which then became weird when the PC felt those bits of shrapnel crawling up her back. Then felt something long, warm, and slimy against her collarbone/neck gripping to pull it up. The corpse's mouth - jaws and tongue - was still moving and coming for her.

The player visibly squirmed. They continued to do so through the entire encounter as they had to deal with a corpse's mouth. Such a simple thing, but it went over very well.

How about with you?

3 comments:

  1. I used a creature that was a man that was elongated and made of cloth. It could travel through pictures using a knotted calendar that had matching blood on it.

    The first time they encountered the creature was after a char noticing a redish spot on the canvas of a painting. The second time was when they got put in jail. The creature killed their arresting officer by reaching through a picture, of the officer's wife and children. I feel like my players were more afraid of quipu and the pictures than the creature.

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  3. I ran a Call of Cthulhu game a while ago and my players were extremely freaked out by a statue of Pan that moved around the house they were stuck in. They heard it running,saw movement out of the corner of their eye,but never actualy saw it moved.It just popped up in different rooms. After a very short while, they tried to shoot it on sight. It regenerated. It did a greatjob of distrating them from the actual monster in the basement until it was pretty much too late.

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