Chapter Ten: Horror Stories

Transylvania, surrounded by dark forests and perilous mountains, haunted by vampires and ghouls, is a wonderful setting in which your troupe can tell horror stories. The following advice is intended to give your troupe some suggestions on how to construct an Ars Magica Fifth Edition horror story. It is unlikely that you will want to use all of this advice in a single story, and, of course, your troupe may have better ideas for the sorts of stories that you want to tell. Please think of this advice as merely a prompt to help you think of your own stories.

Horror Plots

These are some examples of horror story plots and themes. Of course, there's no need for your horror story to precisely follow one of these archetypes, and there is some overlap between these examples. Combining elements from different plots may help you to construct an innovative narrative.

Sources

Films, books, and other media are good sources of inspiration for horror stories. For example, some of the archetypical plots discussed here are based on film criticism by K. Newman's Nightmare
Movies: Critical History of the Horror Film, 1968-1988 (London: Bloomsbury, 1988) and S. Prince's The Horror Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

Savant versus Monster

In this plot, the monster can only be defeated by the savant, who often goes out of his way to find the monster. The savant is commonly a character with specialist knowledge or skills —perhaps a magus, or a vampire hunter — but he may be privileged due to a mere accident of birth (Death Prophecy or Faerie Blood, for example). In addition to the savant and monster characters, this plot often has a number of witness characters. Usually, many of the witness characters are killed or terrorized by the monster prior to the final battle between monster and savant.

This good-versus-evil plot is very easy to implement in Ars Magica Fifth Edition. The obvious role of the magus is as the savant; his companions and grogs take on the role of the witnesses, and the monster is played by the storyguide. Knights, exorcists, and vampire hunters also make good savant characters.

Variation: The Complicated Savant

The early death (or mere absence) of the savant, which dooms the onlooker characters, is an interesting variation of the basic plot. Perhaps the desperate bystanders have no hope against the monster, or perhaps they scramble through the blood and carnage to try to find another savant.

Ambiguity over which character is truly the monster and which is truly the savant is another interesting variation. Who is the real monster? Is it the shapeshifter who cannot control the bloodthirsty urges of his animal nature, or is it the cold magus who uses his loyal grog servants as bait?

An interesting reversal of this plot is the nemesis, who is a monster, motivated by revenge, justice, curse, or prophecy, who tries to hunt down and slay the savant. Nemesis stories are often dominated by the psychoses of a disturbed savant — the actual monster is almost an incidental detail.

The Psychopath or Bogeyman

In this plot, the monster has no real discernible motivation, except possibly to eat his victims. The monster just exists to kill and kill again. A psychopath may not even be particularly good at killing, choosing to prey on the weak, such as children, the elderly, or pious monks. What is terrifying is not the psychopath's lethality, but his meaningless, irrational insanity. Faerie creatures make particularly good psychopaths, as do covenfolk driven mad by Warping.

The Horde

Here, the main characters are overwhelmed by an endless, implacable flood of monsters. Sometimes, individual monsters are relatively easy to kill, but even so, each dead monster is easily replaced by another shuffling corpse or demon. Even the Mongol invasion could function in this capacity, the Asian warriors seeming as "other" as monsters to the Transylvanians. The main characters have no hope of triumphing over the horde. Their best chance is escape, and even that hope is likely forlorn. Faeries and demons (and animated corpses!) make for great opponents in horde stories. Mundane hordes are possible, too. For example, a few lost grogs terrorized by a large gang of outlaws makes for a great horde horror story.

The Idiots

The main characters behave like idiots — they separate into small groups, break mystical wards, and trust strangers, which helps the monster to eliminate them oneby-one. Obviously, this plot relies upon the whole troupe playing along with the story, which the players may be reluctant to do with long-term characters. A useful device is get around this problem is to have the main saga characters discover a frightful slaughter. The horrific story of the slaughter can then be told by the troupe in flashback (perhaps reported by a summoned ghost) using temporary, disposable characters.

Cult Conspiracy

In this paranoid plot, the main characters are the disposable pawns of a vast shadowy conspiracy. Perhaps the characters have accidentally stumbled upon the conspiracy, and must now be silenced. Alternatively, the characters may be members of the conspiracy who have outlived their usefulness, been deemed traitors, or chosen as sacrifices to the wicked power they serve. This sort of horror story is likely to involve kidnapping and assassination attempts, but may contain direct supernatural enemies, too.

A Conspiracy of Magi

There are a large number of possible conspiracies in the Transylvanian Tribunal, including House Tremere itself. Mystery Cults, House Diedne refugees or revivalists, and infernalists may also be at work, subverting power to their purposes. However, remember that the Order of Hermes is generally quite adept at identifying the source and sigil behind magical attacks, so if the conspiracy includes magi, they will likely be reluctant to engage the main characters directly for fear of identification. Indirect attacks are also be likely to fuel the paranoia of the main characters. Of course, wellprepared cultists may be able to defeat some standard Hermetic investigative techniques, perhaps through the clever use of the Shroud Magic effect, and pacts with infernal forces.

The Madness of the Frontier

Large parts of Transylvania are wilderness. Sparsely populated and hard to survive in, the isolated terrain is enough to drive even the most stalwart characters to a desperate frenzy, and those characters exiled from the

The Horror of the Human Body

Changes to the human body are a common horror theme. An advantage of this theme is that monster characters from such stories can easily be (or become) a long-term player character. Lycanthropy, vampirism, leprosy, warping, Mystery Cult initiation, and possession are all horrific ways that a character's body can change. The changing body of a pregnant woman can also be a source of horror, especially if the pregnancy is the result of rape, and even more so if the father is an alien, supernatural creature. Unnatural changes to a growing child have much the same effect.

Nature's Revenge

In this plot, the natural world turns on the characters. Faerie or magical wilderness spirits are good monster characters for this plot. If the covenant makes use of magical servants of this kind, these servants might revolt, turning a magus' home into a horror. Alternatively, the covenant's aura, disturbed by the magi's vis harvest, may birth a magical terror to eliminate the human parasites feeding upon it.

History Repeats

Many horror stories have an element of repetition: perhaps the main characters find the remains of the monster's previous victims, or stumble across some kind of cycle for example, every seven years, the monster wipes out a lonely farmhouse. Discovering information about the previous story cycles, perhaps including how the cycle can be broken, may even help the characters to survive. Faerie monsters are very likely to be involved in a periodic ritual like this, as faerie monsters are effectively created by the stories told about previous manifestations. However, a monster from another realm might also (consciously or subconsciously) time his slaughter with a periodic natural phenomenon — for example, planetary conjunctions, or returning comets. Ghost stories frequently involve the repetition of the events and circumstances of the original deaths.

Post-modern Horror

In a postmodern horror story, some characters are aware that they are in a horror story, and they believe that, by acting either with or against genre conventions, they can maximize their chances of survival. The characters may be right or wrong about this. In Ars Magica Fifth Edition, such a story could be appropriate if some of the characters are cognizant faeries. It could also be appropriate if some of the characters are magi with sophisticated knowledge of faeries, who believe that they are dealing with faerie monsters. (This is, of course, just the sort of double-bluff that demons would attempt to contrive.)

Horror Techniques

The following techniques may help the storyguide to create memorable horror stories. Not all of these techniques will work with all troupes, so it is a good idea to think about the sensibilities of your players, and concentrate on one or two appropriate techniques.

One Time, One Place

Many successful horror stories occur in a very limited location (a ruined castle, for example) or over a limited period of time (Walpurgis Night, for example). The point of this is to create a feeling of claustrophobia, isolation, and intensity in the action. It also restricts the options of the characters. Setting the story in a location with fixed boundaries — within a regio, on an island, or where violent weather prevents travel — is a good way to achieve this effect. Of course, if the player characters have access to powerful magic, it may be difficult to restrict their travel options.

Vivid Imagery

Try to use short, vivid descriptions of characters and locations. For example, compare these two descriptions:

"As you enter the room, the vampire, standing at the window and looking in at the sleeping children, flees."

"The moon-cast shadow of the vampire standing at the window passes over the sleeping children. As you enter the room, the vampire flees, his red eyes glistening with gleeful slaughter."

The second example works better, because of the vivid images "moon-cast shadow" and "red eyes, glistening with gleeful slaughter." Of course, as storyguide it can be difficult to improvise vivid descriptions during the pressure of the gaming session. It can also be confusing for the players if they constantly need to decode new metaphors and images.

One useful strategy to get around both of these problems is to, before the gaming session, try make notes of a few different, short, descriptive images, for each of the main story characters and locations. Don't forget odors, and textures if the characters touch things. Tastes are hard to work into most horror stories, but describe them if they make sense. You can then use these descriptions whenever those characters are encountered during the story. Don't worry about repeating the images during the course of the story; if you look at texts that originally came from oral traditions, as well as more modern novels, you will find that many characters have only a few stock descriptions each that are used whenever that character enters the story. This helps the audience — in this case, the players — to clearly identify particular characters, while still allowing the storyguide to use evocative images. In the previous example, the stock images for the vampire, that will be repeated from scene to scene, were "mooncast shadow" and "red eyes glistening with gleeful slaughter."

Note that the idea here is not for the storyguide to bore the players while she reads out large blocks of carefully prepared colorful prose. The idea is to have one or two short, memorable, evocative images that can be used repeatedly for the major characters and locations in the story. These evocative images should just be descriptive phrases, not whole sentences, so that they are easy to work into the story as it develops.

Implication

Many effective horror stories do not explicitly describe the horrific events of the story. Instead, either the aftermath or the careful foreshadowing of events are presented, with only brief glimpses of the horror itself. In this case, the audience has to fill in the implied details from their own imagination, without the clumsy, clichéd mediation of the author.

This is a technique that can also be used by the storyguide in Ars Magica Fifth Edition. For example, the characters may only catch terrible glimpses of the monster that is stalking them. This technique combines well with the idea of vivid images. That is, as the storyguide, make sure that the small amount of information that you do provide to the players is precise and evocative, as this will trigger the player's own imaginations more effectively.

However, a word of caution: be wary of over-using the technique of implication. A roleplaying game works because there is an agreement that the storyguide will convey to the players everything important that the characters experience in the story. You might not have actually discussed this with your troupe, but nonetheless the agreement is there. It's needed because the players are not really the characters, and the story is not really happening, so the players aren't in control of how they perceive events, details, and surroundings.

Unfortunately, the technique of implication breaks this agreement: the storyguide deliberately refrains from describing all the important points. This is fine for the storyguide to do consciously and occasionally for effect. However, the players are likely to become frustrated and annoyed if they think that they are losing control of what happens to their characters because the storyguide is hiding important information about the story from them. The storyguide should be careful that she does not use sparseness of information as a way to "outwit" the players.

Violence

Horror stories usually involve considerable violence. Often most (or even all) of the characters in the story are killed, and those who are not are usually traumatized or tortured. However, you should carefully decide with your troupe how comfortable they are with explicit violence. Perhaps, as a rough guide, you could aim at the violence levels in the films and television shows that you all enjoy watching.

It is perfectly fine for the violence in a horror story to occur mostly off-stage, and it can be much more effective to understate, rather than overstate, the violence, allowing the players' imaginations to fill in the gory details through implication, as previously discussed. Note that, when using the combat resolution mechanics, the abstract system already tends to push the violence of combat off-stage.

Death of Player Characters

Player character death is a real problem with using horror stories in an ongoing saga. On the one hand, it makes little sense for many characters to survive most horror stories. On the other hand, a saga is usually about the long-term development of characters over many different stories.

One good technique is for the troupe to use different, more expendable characters for the bulk of the horror story. Perhaps the main saga characters only arrive late in the story, to dispatch the monster, after most of the story characters are already dead. To ensure that the players are still emotionally attached to the temporary, dying, horror story characters, try to introduce a few of the characters to the saga in an earlier game session, preferably in a non-horror story.

Inversion of Normal Conventions

Breaking the conventions and expectations of the characters (and players) is a good technique for unsettling the players and creating a feeling of unease. Perhaps a gang of children are killing off the city watch, one by one. The characters might discover a village where the people munch on grass and defecate in the fields like animals. Or they may encounter a gang of outlaws raiding a sleepy monastery, only to be captured, tortured, dismembered, and eaten by the cannibal monks. This technique is most successful when, early on in the story, the conventions expected by the players are obeyed. Establishing normalcy in this way provides a contrast when conventions are suddenly overthrown.

Broken Narrative

Breaking the flow of the story by flashing forward or backward can be a great technique for disorienting the players. This technique is also useful for revealing information to the players that helps them to make sense of the story, but which their characters could not plausibly discover. Flashbacks can also be a good way of introducing temporary characters who can suffer horrific fates without disrupting the long-term viability of the saga.

For example, if you want to tell a horror story about some of the covenant children being murdered and replaced by faerie doppelgangers, you could have this fact discovered by the magi when the children, returning from a journey outside the covenant, are suddenly repelled by the Aegis of the Hearth. After the magi have dealt with the faerie imposters, you can tell the story of the original children's gory demise as a flashback.

It is important to remember that not all horror stories need to have a blood-drenched demon, ravenous vampire, or stumbling revenant as the monster. Mundane opponents can just as easily terrorize the player characters, and may even be more difficult to deal with, depending on the specialties (or consciences) of the magi.

Mundane opponents also create more opportunities for the players to question the morality of their own characters' actions, which can be an important element of a good horror story. Beheading a werewolf or impaling a vampire might be too easily considered a "good" action, but murdering the mad wife of the turb sergeant should be considerably more ambiguous.

Props

Some troupes like to use props such as music, sound effects, photographs or drawings of characters and locations, and even physical exemplars of the weapons and other items that the story characters encounter. Props can certainly help make the story experience more immersive, for some players. However, be aware that using props requires a lot of careful thought and planning, and even the use of well-made props will not necessarily make your story more engrossing or entertaining — in fact, props can be a big distraction for some players. Whether or not props will work for your troupe is a matter for your own judgment.

Transylvanian Tribunal Horror Stories

It is by no means compulsory to tell horror stories in the Transylvanian Tribunal. Political stories, stories about mundane interference, and any other sort of story involving magi are perfectly viable. However, Transylvania has a reputation for its native horror elements. Some examples include:

Vampires make good monster or psychopath characters. A vampire who has the appearance of a dead friend (or enemy) could be the basis of a rich nemesis story.
Werewolves are common in parts of Transylvania.
Vampire Hunters make for good savant characters and are often effective against other sorts of monsters. Some vampire hunters have a parent who is a vampire, and the slaying of the parent can make for a good horror story. Vampire hunters may also make for good monster characters. For example, dhampiri vampire hunters are doomed to become vampires upon their death.
The Mongol Horde descends upon Eastern Mythic Europe in several waves during the mid-13th century, if your saga follows history. The unstoppable tide of Mongol soldiers may make good horde opponents in a horror story. See The Cradle and the Crescent for details of the Mongol horde.
Transylvania is home to hundreds or even thousands of dragons who may pose a serious threat in a horror story. See the Dragon section of the Chapter 8 on creatures for more details, including the possibility of a dragon horde.
Giants are good antagonists for horror stories. The Transylvanian brand of hedge wizard known as Storm Wizards hunts giants and could take on the role of savant.
The Teutonic Knights have a strong presence in the Transylvanian Tribunal. Knights of this military order could take the role of savant in a horror story. Alternatively, the military order could make for good antagonists in a conspiracy-based horror story. A small band of knights — whether mad or bad, or both — could also make good psychopathic monsters.
Magi from House Tremere and the wider Order of Hermes are good characters to take on the savant role in a horror story. On the other hand, magi can also take on the role of monster, particularly that of a nemesis or a psychopath. Magi are also suitable antagonists for a conspiracy-based horror story.

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Against the Dark Chapter Ten: Horror Stories

See Also