Little Pieces of Horror

Ok folks, just a few moments ago I had an idea that I feel I really should go ahead with, play with, make reality and so on, but to do this I need little stories of horror. It doesn't have to be visceral, it doesn't have to be supernatural, it doesn't have to be gore, it doesn't have to be long, but it does have to be horrible. Be the sort of thing that might make someone sensitive ill-at-ease (minimum). So, anyone feel like volunteering a Little Piece of Horror?

"The crawlspace extended beyond the house." "... like... six shots from a revolver." "Thought you were dead." "I was."

"clawing sounds behind the wall, wait, it's in the wall." Thump, drag, Thump, drag - looking out the door reveals a boot with a chain shackled to it but nothing in the boot. coming around the corner of a dimly lit moldy decayed hallway, you spot eye glow peering out of some cracks and they blink.

Stole this from another story I read some time ago...don't remember what story it was. A Nobleman has his daughter kidnapped by evil creatures. Players take on contract to go into the creatures den and destroy them. They are aided by someone who gives them a map that the creatures made of the tunnels/lair. (or alternatively they find the map) At some point the players will realize that the map is made from the skin of the daughter.

Quoting from Unknown Armies : Planes do not actually fly. It is a very elaborate hoax created because the general public does not understand or trust quantum physics. A mysterious man is often seen observing a spot where an exceptionally tragic accident will happen. He stands on the sidewalk for hours watching the street, smoking a cigarette and checking his antique pocket watch from time to time. Then a moment after he leaves, cars come crashing into each other and people die. Every single president of the United States has had a glass eye. The same glass eye. The final scores of every year's Superbowl are part of an ever-changing numerology formula that can start and stop wars. There's a prison in the mid-west where there are no guards yet the prisoners are too afraid to try and escape. The interstate highway system was actually laid out as a giant magickal glyph to enable the summoning of a demonic legion in case of a Soviet attack. Aliens from Proxima Centauri have been living among us now for years, but in the last few months they've all started leaving. My ex-wife use to sing at a karaoke club where the spirits of dead musicians were trapped in the karaoke machine. After midnight each Saturday, a few would come out and jam. Most people's morals and sense of authority comes from a psychic parasite living in their corpus callosum. You have to worry about the people who don't have the parasite. You can spot them easily: they're the ones with bad dress sense. Certain prolific authors -- hacks, in other words -- put spell in their books. When you read these books, the books are reading you, and worse. One of these authors wrote over a thousand dime novel stories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Once his stories have been read enough times, the accumulated power (taken from the readers) will activate the spell embedded in his stories and he will be resurrected. Holiday Inns are sentient beings, tied in a large collective mind, with their own agenda. The people working in Inns are just pawns. People sleeping in Inns are sometimes warped in subtle ways, sometimes untouched, sometimes just disappear. Maybe it depends on the rooms, maybe not. The fate of the world rests upon the shoulders of seven honest and devout ordinary men. If there are ever less than seven, God will destroy this earth. The telephone system is alive, and has been ruling us -- in a limited fashion -- since 1943. The introduction of the Internet has cemented its hold on us. Seven colors in the rainbow. Seven chakras in the Sanskrit texts. Seven varieties of Barbasol shaving cream, if you count the discontinued Wintergreen gel. Do I have to draw you a picture?

Full night of sleep, but yet he felt no rest. In his dreams she came to him, again and again. Until one rainy night, he stepped into an inn-side bar. He saw the dark-haired girl, and knew it was her. He approached her, without a care in the world. Actions were to be praised and thinking for the weak. A brief hesitation gripped him, a flash from a story long past. He shrugged it off in a moment, and from there it was a blur. In a dimly lit room, he ripped of her cloak. Bat-like wings shot out of her back and like two giant fans blew the small candles out. He tried to call out for help, but his mouth was muffled by hers. And then his body relaxed as his last breath was drawn out.

I well help you with your quest Mr. Asaram and quoting Brian .... Quoting from Unknown Armies : Planes do not actually fly. It is a very elaborate hoax created because the general public does not understand or trust quantum physics. A mysterious man is often seen observing a spot where an exceptionally tragic accident will happen. He stands on the sidewalk for hours watching the street, smoking a cigarette and checking his antique pocket watch from time to time. Then a moment after he leaves, cars come crashing into each other and people die. Every single president of the United States has had a glass eye. The same glass eye. The final scores of every year's Superbowl are part of an ever-changing numerology formula that can start and stop wars. There's a prison in the mid-west where there are no guards yet the prisoners are too afraid to try and escape. The interstate highway system was actually laid out as a giant magickal glyph to enable the summoning of a demonic legion in case of a Soviet attack. Aliens from Proxima Centauri have been living among us now for years, but in the last few months they've all started leaving. My ex-wife use to sing at a karaoke club where the spirits of dead musicians were trapped in the karaoke machine. After midnight each Saturday, a few would come out and jam. Most people's morals and sense of authority comes from a psychic parasite living in their corpus callosum. You have to worry about the people who don't have the parasite. You can spot them easily: they're the ones with bad dress sense. Certain prolific authors -- hacks, in other words -- put spell in their books. When you read these books, the books are reading you, and worse. One of these authors wrote over a thousand dime novel stories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Once his stories have been read enough times, the accumulated power (taken from the readers) will activate the spell embedded in his stories and he will be resurrected. Holiday Inns are sentient beings, tied in a large collective mind, with their own agenda. The people working in Inns are just pawns. People sleeping in Inns are sometimes warped in subtle ways, sometimes untouched, sometimes just disappear. Maybe it depends on the rooms, maybe not. The fate of the world rests upon the shoulders of seven honest and devout ordinary men. If there are ever less than seven, God will destroy this earth. The telephone system is alive, and has been ruling us -- in a limited fashion -- since 1943. The introduction of the Internet has cemented its hold on us. Seven colors in the rainbow. Seven chakras in the Sanskrit texts. Seven varieties of Barbasol shaving cream, if you count the discontinued Wintergreen gel. Do I have to draw you a picture? The first thing I thought when you said "unknown armies" was "OH LOOK, A WW1 horror wargame system" and then when I read into it...."OH LOOK, A D100 WTF RPG SYSTEM"

So far so good it seems, thank you all for these little bits, they will come in handy. (hopefully there are even more of them out there, soon to be posted... :P)

Blatant rip; but shiver-worthy if you REALLLY think about experiencing it: He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing... The fury of the Time Lord. And then we discovered why... Why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons, why he'd run away from us and hidden... He was being kind. He wrapped my father in unbreakable chains, forged in the heart of a dwarf star. He tricked my mother into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy to be imprisoned there forever. He still visits my little sister once a year, every year. I wonder if one day he might forgive her, but there she is... Can you see? He trapped her inside a mirror. Every... mirror. If ever you look at your reflection and see something move behind you, just for a second, that's her. That's ...always her. As for me, I was suspended in time. And the Doctor put me to work standing over the fields of England, as their protector. ...We wanted to live forever, so the Doctor made sure that we did.

Oh yes, that one, I remember it well. That episode wasn't the best, but that little piece near the end significantly improved my impression of it :)

I'm just curious, what are you collecting these for?

One of the best collections of "little pieces of horror" I've ever seen is found at the SCP Foundation 's website. SCP stands for Secure, Contain, Protect. They're a special group dedicated to finding those little things that don't belong in the world the rest of us live in, and making sure we never, ever find out about them. The stories told here, even the bits we are allowed to see, are disturbing to say the least. Some are interesting, some are frightening, some are even humorous. But they're all disturbing. Read. Enjoy. But don't say I didn't warn you! -Phnord, aka SCP-#█████████

Well, I got a bit bored doing maps, and also ran out of things I wanted to make for them, so I decided to make something else, still graphical, but very different in nature. Once the first part of it is done (by next week I suspect, Thursday maybe) I will post a link here and people can offer their criticism :) As for SCP, interesting site, thank you. Plenty of Little Pieces of Horror there indeed.

Cool, I look forward to seeing the final piece.

Stmpeng MK.1 tankman said: The first thing I thought when you said "unknown armies" was "OH LOOK, A WW1 horror wargame system" and then when I read into it...."OH LOOK, A D100 WTF RPG SYSTEM" Any game which has a legitimate school of magic called "pornomancy" (in which it is taken completely seriously and has interesting lore to back it up) is worth reading into. =) There's also: Amoromancy (emotion), Annihilomancy (destruction), Bibliomancy (books), Cliomancy (history), Cryptomancy (logic), Dipsomancy (booze), Entropomancy (chaos), Epideromancy (self-mutilation), Iconomancy (stalkers), Irascimancy (anger), Kleptomancy (theft), Mechanomancy (machines), Narco-Alchemy (drugs), Personamancy (identities), Plutomancy (money), Urbanomancy (cities), and Videomancy (television).

Asaram said: So, anyone feel like volunteering a Little Piece of Horror? One of your reflections in a tunnel of mirrors doing something different. This one is a bit hard to explain. Have you ever put your face against the glass wall of an aquarium and looked up at it's lamp shining down through the water? You get this weird optical affect, caused by diffraction obviously, that looks like semicircular void bordered by a rainbow. What if something suddenly, and impossibly, appeared in that void? Not very good ones I'll admit but these were things that used to spook me as a child.

Lovecraft nuff said

Mr. Farlops said: Not very good ones I'll admit but these were things that used to spook me as a child. Not lame at all, I've had the very same thoughts, but with the "dark" parts you get when you look at the edge of a glass pane. It has a certain creepy appeal, something existing within an area that you know isn't actually there, just an optical illusion.

as an idea for light horror, try "Don't starve" out for size

Have you heard of Lovecraft's Commonplace Book , the link has 221 story ideas he jotted down. The game Eversion was inspired by one of them.

Anything and everything from <a href="http://www.scp-wiki.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.scp-wiki.net/</a> . Betrayal at House on the Hill. And so forth. Some of the story "seeds" in the side boxes of some supplements. Little tiny ideas to build on. From a "off the cuff" standpoint: Pick something, and add some element of the absurd to it. There's a thin line between the funny/absurd(Not meeting expectations of reality) and the horrific(Again, outside normative reality...). The funny or kooky can become macabre and scary as hell rather quickly. Planting "hooks" far in advance can be fun too. One of my players has actually FORGOTTEN he was carrying around an accursed dagger. The moment it reacted(Months later) in response to demonic backlash, there was a moment of silence in the room. He checked his inventory. And then got visibly nervous. On a larger scale: Elements of the unknown are really important. Players tend to start supplanting their own guesswork(If only to figure out how to deal with an untenable situation/conflict effectively...) as to the nature of your horrors. Each time their suppositions are proved wrong, it adds an "Oh crap, it's worse than that" feeling. "Potential solutions" are also "Potential aggravating factors". Paranoia and infighting can develop. It starts to add up, over time. As an example: My GM has been running "The Empty Room"; a room that everyone is pulled into randomly, where they are inexorably trapped. Initially for 30 minutes(? or something like it, time's difficult to put a finger on)... later.... for god knows how long. No clues initially within the room. No clues in popular culture, government records, hospitals, or immediate occult history. Items are not all making the transition into the room, and there are no supernatural/magical powers. Player imaginations run rampant, and there's a depressing feeling of unknown doom. It could have been used as a random "spooky thing" in a larger campaign, as compared to a standalone scenario, I think. It's from the World of Darkness "Mysterious Places", a book of horrific story seeds.

Jason Z. said: Have you heard of Lovecraft's Commonplace Book , the link has 221 story ideas he jotted down. The game Eversion was inspired by one of them. WHERE WAS THIS BOOK ALL MY LIFE!?

Holy crap. That book reads like the text messages I get at night. Whenever I have a weird dream I text it to myself. I don't remember writing the resulting texts, but they're generally freaky shorthand reminders.

Would it be entirely impossible for you to change that to mails instead and adding me to the mailing list...? :)

Well, since I'll be having some work done in my mouth later today (minor surgery) I suspect I won't be posting here for a day or two, and the first part of this work will take a bit more time than expected but should be up by Sunday I think. (I'm half done already) Thanks for all the ideas/suggestions so far! :)

call of Cthulhu: the wasted lands A ww1 tactica RPG\wargame Hybrid based in the lovecraft mytheos

Brian said: Stmpeng MK.1 tankman said: The first thing I thought when you said "unknown armies" was "OH LOOK, A WW1 horror wargame system" and then when I read into it...."OH LOOK, A D100 WTF RPG SYSTEM" Any game which has a legitimate school of magic called "pornomancy" (in which it is taken completely seriously and has interesting lore to back it up) is worth reading into. =) There's also: Amoromancy (emotion), Annihilomancy (destruction), Bibliomancy (books), Cliomancy (history), Cryptomancy (logic), Dipsomancy (booze), Entropomancy (chaos), Epideromancy (self-mutilation), Iconomancy (stalkers), Irascimancy (anger), Kleptomancy (theft), Mechanomancy (machines), Narco-Alchemy (drugs), Personamancy (identities), Plutomancy (money), Urbanomancy (cities), and Videomancy (television). yes, i did read it but a bit on Wikipedia, I like some of the themes of it but also, it a d100 system, though are a bit of a "What the sh-" kind of things that make non-RPGSer and non wargamers have weird thoughts about table top games