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Surely gentlebeings, we can do better...for Halloween is rapidly approaching

kafka47

kafka47

SOC-14 5K
Marquis
On my constant quest to find a way to merge my love of Horror with Traveller... I came across this:

Deep space and eldritch horror... two great tastes that taste terrifying together! Dark Stars is a generic guide to injecting Lovecraftian horror into your favorite sci-fi game, or spicing up your horror game with a sci-fi one-shot. It draws from a diverse array of source material, from Hollywood movies to the Cthulhu Mythos, and can even stand on its own as a fully functioning, rules-light RPG.

For more information check out this web page

For a self proclaimed Author Review of the product...check this out...

I ask you gentlebeings, this close to Halloween...surely we can come up with a better solution to my quandry...how to achieve the Horror & Traveller mix. If not for this Halloween, maybe next...we ought to find ways to resolve it...
 
BTW, to above is not an attempt to offend the above mentioned author but surely, we as the CofI can indeed do better...
 
You just need to define some horror tropes, and then plonk it into a scifi setting. You have isolation (in a spaceship in the middle of nowhere. Something happening in Jump Space would be REALLY good for this), confinement (er, in a spaceship in the middle of nowhere), something unknown that wants to kill you (or worse) in said location. A limited number of people (the crew of the ship)...

Heck, just get some inspiration for all of the above by watching things like "Alien" and "Event Horizon". Or even the excellent haunted sub movie "Below". ;)
 
May I recommend the CT Adventure, Death Station? It's got that "Alien-esque" feel to it that, if properly run, gives you that Horror In Traveller experience. I've run variants of it for both my home group and Con goers, and it's always been a hit.

Hope that helps,
Flynn
 
Yeah, but surely every Traveller group out there has done the "trapped in Jump Space with a maniac/killer robot/cyborg assassin/alien predator/Ancient doomsday device" or "trapped in Jump Space while something OUTSIDE tries to get INSIDE!!!" plot at least 3 times each! There's got to be more to Traveller sci-fi/horror than just these themes.

That said, the first time these themes are used are always the best, and usually some of the most memorable! What are the Traveller horror scenarios YOU remember?
 
Well, what is horror?

The tropes I mentioned are pretty common ones, so it's not surprising they're cliched.

You could also have a scenario where you land on a planet that seems OK on the surface, but something sinister lurks just beneath (some dark secret like the fact that they eat some of their visitors, and the PCs are next on the menu).

I think horror is about either tapping into primal fears (There's something out there that wants you dead - gruesomely - and you don't know where it is, or when it will strike, or if it's watching you RIGHT NOW) or taking something that looks normal and changing it so it isn't, in a disturbing way.
 
I personally like the Dead Tombs approach. In which, players dock with an Alien Space vessel that has been dead for a long time in which one could have either an escaped xenomorph or TNE Virus waiting.

But, surely, there must be more ways to do horror. What about using beings that nominally inhabit this universe and begin to leak into this one through the spaces between Space & Time? These were called Gods or Demons in past eras but in the Traveller Universe, they are still unexplained phenomena. Here I was thinking of adapting the Cthulhu Adventure: The Stars Are Right! Has anyone else done something similar or have better suggestions?
 
Well, if you want that sort of thing, the Fading Suns RPG is rather good for it
- Plenty of "dark between the stars" stuff there...
 
Presentation and atmosphere are big factors in successful horror stories.

If your players have never encountered Chirpers, they can be unnerving, especially with their psi ability to be invisible to sophants.

I second the recommendation of "Death Station." I've run it for my home group, and I've played in Flynn's game at GenCon. The element of the survivors having feasted on the dead bodies of their former co-workers can be pretty creepy when presented with the right atmosphere. And not knowing who will attack them, or what causes them to attack -- fear of the unknown is a very big part of horror.

I also have run the classic adventure "Shadows" with an Aliens element to it -- the temple had been turned into an Alien nest by a Queen. I had dropped little hints, but they didn't encounter any of the aliens until they entered a chamber on the bottom floor that had a field of the leathery little eggs in it. The expression on the players' faces when they figured it out was priceless! They completely panicked and were scrambling to get out of there fast.
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As a sequel to that adventure, I ran a derelict space ship encounter in which the cargo ship was an alien nest with another queen and eggs. The players were freaking out again.

If anyone's looked at d20 Future book, it offers as one of its campaign ideas the same demons-as-creatures-from-another-dimension idea that Kafka mentioned above. That has a lot of sci-fi horror potential.
 
Originally posted by Paraquat Johnson:
I also have run the classic adventure "Shadows" with an Aliens element to it -- the temple had been turned into an Alien nest by a Queen. I had dropped little hints, but they didn't encounter any of the aliens until they entered a chamber on the bottom floor that had a field of the leathery little eggs in it. The expression on the players' faces when they figured it out was priceless! They completely panicked and were scrambling to get out of there fast.
file_23.gif


As a sequel to that adventure, I ran a derelict space ship encounter in which the cargo ship was an alien nest with another queen and eggs. The players were freaking out again.
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Tsk. Naughty players, not separating player knowledge from character knowledge. First time the characters saw them at least, they shouldn't have had a clue what they were and cheerfully wandered into enthusiastic face-hugging. ;)

But yeah, I think horror IS largely down to presentation. And foreshadowing - to borrow from Alien again - before they even find the facehuggers, they find the Space Jockey, whose ribs have been exploded out from the inside. That alone makes you think "what the hell does that?!" and keeps you edgy and nervous. And then you find out...
 
End Time

Cthulhu Rising

I always thought exploring new worlds creepy enough if played right, "dead" civilizations optional. Lovecraft had several stories along this line set in remote parts of Earth, at the Mountains of Madness the most famous, and Clark Ashton Smith several set on Mars. Smith chews up his protaganists more, which is about right for a Traveller horror session. ;)
http://www.eldritchdark.com/misc/cycle/index.html

Off the top of my head, a new sensor that allows the viewer to "see" into J-Space*, a "reanimator" regen that goes wrong, the group telepath receiving a signal from something alien that lies dreaming parsecs away, a visiting time travelling alien, the “Ancient” artifact that is actually older than the Ancients and decidedly more devious. All except the last are adaptations of Lovecraft stories though The Haunter of the Dark does involve an ancient alien artifact.

edit-woops got HotD name wrong

Casey

* which could take place anywhere. It works better if it happens somewhere not in jump already, preferably on a nice, safe, stable planet. ^_^
 
I always thought a TNE/Dark Conspiracy crossover campaign would be very cool. Gives a whole new meaning to the term "Black Curtain"...
 
A few of my favorites from Halloweens past:

Colony of the Corn - players find a derelict ship with several dozen children in low berths; the children all have very high psi ratings and are psionically linked; once one or a few are awoken, they work to free the rest of their brethren and take over the ship; they manipulate the crew with stories about painful memories, missing their parents, rumors about treasure on board the derelict or at their final destination, sabotage and conspiracy, scheming by other crewmates, etc., all the while murdering NPC's and PC's alike in incredibly gruesome and painful ways. (I think evil kids are excellent horror villians)

Imperial Research Station of the Living Dead - players are hired by Imperial Intelligence to deliver supplies to a research station on a large planetoid; the station has been researching counter-agents for Solomani bio-chem warfare weapons; unfortunately, the station's latest experiment has gone totally wrong; the retro-virus they've developed creates brain hungry zombies from dead subjects; and now the crew has been exposed to the virus too!

The Dark Prince of the Void - players are chartered to ferry an aged xeno-historian (who will only pay when returned home) to a center of learning for an impromptu conference; a belter found a strange alien artifact in the system's cometary belts, an artifact still pulsing with power; inside the artifact are nano-machines programmed to build a dimensional gateway from whatever materials are available; they are also programmed to protect their creation by any means possible including possession of sentients; the nano-machines call to be freed, communicating with any computer used to probe the artifact but the markings on the artifact warn of danger; once freed, they go about their business building the gateway, a gateway that provides an escape to whatever un-named evils are imprisoned in the Void of J-space.

Always play music from John Carpenter movies, keep the lights low, set the air conditioning on high, and roll a lot of dice for no reason!
 
Imperial Research Station of the Living Dead
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If you get the Transhuman Space adventure "Orbital Decay", you'll find it's is pretty much exactly that scenario. ;)

Then again, it's a cliched one too - I think one of the preview adventures for the d20 Dragonstar RPG was the same sort of thing. Except everyone was fused into a big fleshy blob in that.
 
There are/were a number of "epic campaigns" for Call of Cthulhu that involved ... wait for it ... travelling all over the place to solve some dark eldritch plot, or go insane and get eaten trying. I'm thinking here of "Horror on the Orient Express", "Masks of Nyarlathotep" etc.

These were similar in some aspects to The Traveller Adventure in that there was a lot of travel from one location to another, each location was fairly detailed and was the setting of some crucial stage of the overarching story. It seems to me this would be an ideal form of hybrid Traveller/horror campaign.

Perhaps an NPC - an aging scholar, a specialist in Ancients lore - assembles a party of hirelings (the PCs) for a jaunt to a suspected Ancient site deep in the weird jungle of Jesedipere (Aramis 0601). Let's see, he needs a couple of heavies to make sure the team is safe (ex-military?), perhaps a lovely assistant or two (scientists?), maybe a small craft pilot (ex-scout?), and a wilderness expert would likely be handy as a guide (hunter?) and could perhaps provide transport there ...

Once there they uncover, as the professor's somewhat eccentric studies have led him to expect, a great cyclopean edifice of unnumbered years and inhuman provenance. After days of probing within the structure, a final vault is breached and within, amongst a lost culture's rotting detritus, a rather crude but somehow disgusting idol is found.

The discovery sends the professor and his assistants into a frenzied spasm of field research, but alas, the requisite materials are either back at the professor's homeworld, or can only be found at a hermetic redoubt in another system. Two clues only does the rude object offer: it is made of a type of stone unique to the waterworld Heguz (Aramis 0306), and is inscribed with a terse formula that, though written in an ancient, devolved Vilani script, cannot be translated by the professor.

At this point, a number of options appear. Travel to Heguz? Return to the professor's university library at Regina? Perhaps a journey to the hermits of interdicted Huderu (Rhylanor 0704), to make use of their linguistic knowledge, is in order? In any event, as the team files out of the imposing ziggurat and into the Jesediperian rainforest, they can't shake a feeling of being ... followed.

What follows could be a whirlwind tour of the Marches, aboard the hunter's safari ship, or perhaps - after a disturbing mishap in jumpspace that renders the jump drive, and the engineer, inoperable once the vessel returns to normal space - aboard an elegant liner plying the mains. Every opportunity to explore desert worlds and strange cities, uncover creeping terrors aboard ship in the last, eternal hours of jump ... And finally, for the survivors, to uncover the secret first hinted at by the idol, beneath the surface of a tide-locked moon in the cold, dark outer zone of a long-ago-inhabited system.

The flow of subsequent events should be determined by the referee.
 
Annic Nova, Chamax Plague, Horde, Marooned, Werewolf and Shadows all invoke horror elements. Some disrturbingly well...

And Prison Planet is another type of horror all it's own.

And then, of course, there's hunting for Dragons on Wypoc... 44TON flying Pouncer from the hilands... they EAT people. And air rafts... and if the ship is toast, you can have a situation not dissimilar to Pitcch Black!
 
The first time I ran Kinunir we were also heavily into CoC, so the logical thing to do was to try to scare the players witless.
They heard lots of old spacers tales about jump space demons eating ships' crew, sub-standard engineering being covered up and making ships death traps, jump space psychosis turning people into Jasons, misjumps leading crews to turn canibal etc.
To cut a long story short, when they found the Kinunir they were very nervous about what they would find inside.
What they found was...
file_23.gif
 
I know there is a subtle difference between true horror and a gore fest, but here's another fun adventure I dusted off recently:

Cattle Drive of Death - there is a growing famine on a failing colony world and the players are contracted by the local government to run emergency supplies into the system; as they achieve orbit, a huge agricultural transport jumps into the system but doesn't respond to hails; it carries several thousand head of live cattle destined to feed the colonies's starving population; it's trajectory has it impacting near enough to the colony to render a death blow to the surviving population; the players are dispatched by the local government (under threat of reneging on the lucrative shipping contract) to go to the ship and find out what is wrong

The players arrive at the ship to find it seemingly abandoned and all the cattle onboard covered in thumb sized orange maggots; the stench is almost overpowering; cries over internal comms indicate there are several crewmen trapped in the sublevels below the cargo decks (i.e. lots of winding crawl spaces, pipes, and steam); the surviving crew beg to be rescued; meanwhile, an inspection of the bridge finds it overrun with strange insectoid lifeforms hatching from the carcasses of the ship's command crew, still strapped into their chairs; the bugs are still hungry, the size of your hand, and can eat through a vacc suit; they prevent any access to the ship's controls

Will the players save the trapped crew? will the players prevent the monster vessel from plowing into the planet? will any of the players survive the waves of ravenous insects searching for food? will the players make their rolls against vomiting as maggots erupt from corpses strewn throughout the ship? and what about the crewman that harbors the swarm's parasitic queen (cue dramatic and disgusting transformation scene)?

I always ensure everyone gets a stomach full of cheese doodles before we get to far into this adventure.
 
Gorefests are a subgenre of horror... one particulary suited to RPG's, too...

Horde is a bit of a gorefest. Handled poorly by players or GM, several of the above could be.
 
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