EldritchRusk

 Halloween is coming up, and I am a big fan of running seasonal one-shots. They both allow you to try new game systems, and also flex some muscles with new DMing techniques. Last Halloween I ran a western horror one-shot, using the Alien RPG game. And I loved it! I thought I could tell you about it. First up, mood is very important in Halloween games! We went all in. Low lights, candles, creepy western music (the Hateful Eight and Bone Tomahawk soundtracks are excellent for this). It was great! For the adventure itself, I retrofitted the example adventure from the Aliens rules: Chariot of the Gods. Yes, a sci-fi adventure run as a western. It was surprisingly easy, but a lot of things had to change from the original adventure. However, the Alien world is pretty much just a western in space with some added horror. The key ingredients in the Alien movies are: a remote location with no chance to call for help, an unknown and weird danger that hunts people, rivalry and betrayal within ...

This contains some small spoilers for parts of Curse of Strahd. If you are a player in said campaign, you should not read past the "examples from my CoS game" section. TLDR: The GM and the players should agree to build the tension. Horror only works when both parties agree to it. Use the different aspects of horror. Make it scary, make it creepy, make it disgusting   A band of fools fight against the horrors of Barovia The following post is based on my own experiences with running Curse of Strahd. In addition to the write-up on building horror in the start of the adventure I would also recommend getting your hands on the Heroes of Horror supplement from 3.5e. Although the game mechanics parts of the book is not that relevant for 5e or OSR, the book has some good advice on creating horror. Scare the characters, not the players Trying to scare the players is much harder than actually scaring the characters. Most likely you are sitting around a table or playing via Roll20 (or si...