Horror Prologue Gameplay
So you want to run a TTRPG adventure that evokes the feeling of a horror movie. The easiest aspect to add are stock characters–the psycho killer (e.g., Michael Myers from Halloween), the entity (Pennywise from It) or the final girl (e.g., Sidney Prescott from Scream). What is more difficult are the structures that don’t translate well from a passive, linear medium like movies to an active and radically non-linear medium like roleplaying adventure games. Too often, adventures that explicitly aim to ape the horror movie end up foisting a railroad onto players which inevitably feels less like exploring a haunted mansion and more like buckling up and riding the one in Disneyland. The goal should be to preserve what makes horror movies thrilling but adapting it to be gameable. You’re playing your characters, not just watching them. When you think, “Don’t go in there!”, you are able to make it so.
One module that infamously and explicitly “attempts to evoke an atmosphere of suspense and tension” “like a horror movie” is Vecna Lives!, the first adventure to prominently feature the famous lich. Vecna Lives! is a 1990 module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition by David “Zeb” Cook designed for player characters of 12th to 15th level but best played using the highly integrated pre-generated characters included in the adventure. Before the adventure is sketched out, the module takes pains (and a few spreads) to advise the prospective referee in how to run the adventure like it is a horror movie, claiming that the referee is like the director of a movie and that “[e]ncounters can be edited just like scenes in a movie.”
More than just pacing and mood, it also claims to be a deadly adventure, warning the referee from the beginning that “this adventure is meant to kill characters” and claims the emphasis on player character death is to make Vecna Lives! a “nerve-wracking, even terrifying adventure.” This stands in contrast to the reason that death often looms large as a possibility in P/OSR-style adventures. For the P/OSR, the possibility of death promotes player agency by providing meaningful consequences to player choices. For Vecna Lives!, the certainty of death (more on this when I discuss the prologue), is just to set the mood. There is little concern with player agency to be found here. This is on purpose as the adventure goes to pains to stress that, because “[e]ach encounter is like a movie scene”, the exact sequence of the encounters is necessary to set the mood of the adventure, leading the overall experience to lean too far into a movie in game form than a game with cinematic elements.
As full disclosure, I ran (or attempted to run) a few sessions of Vecna Lives!, but fell off it as my players, to their immense credit, increasingly steered away from the railroad the 95 pages of adventure laid out for them. Importantly, I played the adventure’s prologue very by-the-book. It was during the first few chapters of investigation that we begun to spin our own yarn. If you are interested in our experience with the module in play report form, those have been posted to my Patreon back when I ran those sessions. Even from the start, the obviousness of the railroad wasn’t lost on my players. As my colleague, Marcia of the Traverse Fantasy blog (a player in the session featuring the prologue), reports, it “was a boring adventure on rails until someone polymorphed a spider into a human woman,” helping to jerk it off the proscribed track.
The Prologue Problem
What makes Vecna Lives! infamous is its most daring break from adventure writing techniques of the time: its prologue. You start the game by playing as the storied Circle of Eight wizards. Even if you think you don’t know who these NPCs are or if you couldn’t tell your Greyhawk from a bottle of Grey Goose, you know these wizards’ names if you’ve played any of the official editions of D&D: Bigby, Drawmij, Nystul, Otiluke, Otto, Rary and Tenser. Each has a handful (and in the case of Bigby, I use “handful” quite literally) of spells with their names attached. And in this adventure, not only do you play as them, you die as them.
Vecna Lives! doesn’t give the players a sporting chance to live. It advises that the referee will give out the powerful wizard pre-generated characters and “almost as quickly, kill off the entire party”. The lead-in for the prologue section admits that “this seems extreme and unfair” but that it accomplishes two unique goals for the module: first, the “prologue sets the mood and tone for the rest of this adventure” and, secondly, it makes “a very clear point to your players–this module is dangerous!”
I agree that it sets a mood for the module, but I’m not sure it sets the right mood. Does Vecna seem scary when he kills all of the wizards, or does it just seem like GM fiat? Especially when that is exactly what it is. The module’s guidance makes it clear that the players must lose. It isn’t enough that Vecna’s game statistics be overpowered, the referee is told to fudge dice if they must to not spoil the linear narrative of the prologue: “It is strongly recommended that you secretly roll the dice and then announce the attack [by the player characters] had no effect.”
Because of the unsportsmanlike manner of the prologue, it doesn’t signal the adventure is necessarily deadly either. It just signals that we are on rails from the very start, so you are going to die when the module’s text tells you to die and you’re going to like it, damn it!
My players and I aren’t alone in being let down by Vecna Lives!’s prologue. Not only does the adventure suggest that “players are likely to be in shock over the swift, ruthless nature of their party’s demise,” and that the referee should “blame the designer of this adventure if they must.” Matt Colville has similarly remarked on the prologue:
“It’s awful. It’s a great idea, terribly executed because essentially the dungeon master railroads all your characters into dying purely by DM fiat.”
So is there a way to accomplish something like the prologue to Vecna Lives! that accomplishes all of the stated goals of the prologue but in a way that takes advantage of the medium of tabletop roleplaying games? Yes, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. If Vecna Lives! is drawing on the tropes from horror movies, it is worth looking at how some of the best horror movies execute on a similar concept.
Vecna Screams!
My critique of Vecna Lives! is totally unfair because it came out six years prior to the movie that would provide a blueprint for the most effective horror movie prologue in cinema history: Scream. This isn’t a movie blog, so I will let Collider elucidate how effective the opening scene of Scream was:
“In 1996, when online movie spoilers weren't yet a constant string of potholes to be avoided, it was a shock to a lot of filmgoers. At the time, Barrymore may have been the most famous person in the cast. The actress says it was her idea to play Casey, and there’s no question the gambit worked. By killing off one of its biggest stars in the first 13 minutes, Scream immediately sent out a warning to the audience: Any one of these characters can die at any time.”
Killing off Barrymore to start the movie was a bold move. In moviestar terms, Drew Barrymore is the equivalent of a Drawmij or a Bigby. By using audience expectations, it set the tone Vecna Lives! attempted to set with its prologue: it sets the tone (horror) and previews how deadly the villain is.
Movies have different sets of tools around perspective than TTRPGs. Scream’s prologue is largely in Casey’s perspective as she speaks on the phone with Ghostface. However, the way the camera follows her, almost as if she is being stalked, puts the viewer just as much in the perspective of the killer. It is only in the very last moments of her life, as she has been stabbed and is looking voicelessly at her returning parents, that the frame is truly from Casey’s perspective. Then, as her body is being dragged away, we are in the perspective of Ghostface, just slightly off screen. This type of blending of perspective would be difficult to do in a TTRPG where the normal mode of play is for each player to embody a particular character in the world. However, there are some games (typically in the more story game sphere) like Microscope, where the players all zoom out of any particular character and act more like writers in a writers’ room for the events unfolding as part of the game.
An Effective Prologue Method
In a horror movie, it is typically the monster and not the victims who are in the driver’s seat and who have all the agency. In roleplaying games, the player characters are similarly in the agent position–this is why they are the ones entering the dungeon and not typically the characters defending a dungeon from intruders. Being the intruder inherently involves more agency. In this way, player characters are typically somewhat of monsters (there is perhaps a reason they are called murder hobos), and the NPCs are the victims of their various schemes. In an effective horror adventure, this is flipped. The player characters are no longer necessarily the hunters; they are being hunted.
My solution to the horror prologue conundrum: let the players play the monster. At least for the prologue, perhaps just a single combat encounter to open the session. This way, instead of having to fudge dice to keep players from succeeding, the referee can just get out of the way and let the players play. The more they “succeed” as the villain, the more deadly the result is, and perhaps the bigger mess their characters will eventually have to clean up.
That is a quick solution, but it presents two immediately obvious problems: the multiplayer problem and the spoiler problem. These have a number of solutions. I have my preference of which are best for the kinds of games that I run but will walk through all of them because I know the way I run games (with more emphasis on collaborative creation between the referee and players) is not everyone’s cup of tea.
The Multiplayer Problem and Possible Solutions
The multiplayer problem arises for this method when there are multiple players but only one villain for them to play as in the prologue. Typically, each player plays their own separate player so may not be used to having to share. There are a few potential solutions, and the one you gravitate to depends largely on your gaming preferences. (1) You could take a writers’ room approach and let all the players deliberate on each of the villain’s actions and decide collectively what it does each round, (2) you could keep the one player-one character expectation and let one player play the main villain and others play its minions or allies, (3) you could divide the monster into different aspects and have each player play a different aspect, or (4) you could Everyone is John it.
Applying these approaches to the Vecna Lives! example, option 1 would just involve having a discussion of how Vecna goes about defeating the powerful wizards round by round. Option 2 is also fairly easy to imagine since the adventure already gives Vecna a number of gargoyle minions for the showdown with the wizards. Option 3 is trickier, but one idea would be to let one player play Vecna but not any of the powers associated with the Eye or Hand of Vecna, another would be in command of the Eye of Vecna derived powers, another in charge of the Hand of Vecna, and any remaining players are the gargoyles. For option 4, you simply play Everyone is Vecna, using the rules from the aforementioned (very silly) RPG. In each instance, the referee runs the wizards.
Option 1 is by far the easiest option and likely the approach I would use, but it relies on players who are more open to playing more collaboratively, which doesn’t work for every table. For tables that want to each have their own buttons to press and don’t want to have to share and deliberate, options 2 and 3 are possible. The drawback to these, particularly option 2, is that there is a huge disparity between being the player that gets to be Vecna and the ones who are just his gargoyles. That’s like if D&D involved one player getting to run a character using a typical character class and all the other players playing as their various animal companions. Option 4 is my least favorite unless you are going for something very silly, since Everyone is John is an inherently silly game, which might undermine the entire point of setting the tone for a horror adventure.
The Spoiler Problem and Possible Solutions
The Spoiler Problem is simply that letting the players see the stat block for the adventure’s villain spoils the mystery of the villain and also poses the risk of undue metagaming. After all, wasn’t the shark in Jaws so effective because of how sparingly it was used? There are two primary solutions to this issue: (1) give the players a redacted or otherwise incomplete stat block, (2) the players describe what they want the villain to do but the referee then decides how it is mechanically accomplished.
In the first option, how much information would need to be redacted depends on the villain and the exact situation, but at the very least any of the villain’s weaknesses or resistances would need to be hidden. For instance, if the villain is a vampire, you would need to cover up how devastating sunlight is or you’ll reveal a reliable vampire killing method to the players without the player characters having earned it. Although the example of the vampire maybe shows that this problem isn’t as big of a deal as it might seem at first blush; many people go into Castle Ravenloft knowing what weaknesses vampires have just from familiarity with folklore or movie vampires. The difficult part is actually finding a way to defeat the castle’s vampire, not in learning that he hates garlic.
For the second option, the referee would generally describe the capabilities of the villain to the players (e.g., “Vecna is a powerful lich with access to many wizard spells, including some that can alter reality, and the ability to paralyze others with his touch”). Then each round the players tell the referee what they would like the villain to do and the referee interprets their desires generously and does their best to accomplish that using the villain’s stat block. The referee will still call for the players to roll for the villain, but the referee will add any relevant modifiers and determine whether the actions succeed on their own, narrating only the non-mechanical aspects to the players. This keeps the players in control of the villain’s actions without opening the hood too much so that they know what buttons to press when they are fighting the villain instead of running it.
If Vecna Lives! started out by having the players run Vecna and kill the famous wizards, it would be just as iconic as having the players run the famous wizards being killed by Vecna. Either way sets the tone that anyone could die in this adventure. However, letting them play as Vecna would be far less frustrating and would actually make it feel like Vecna himself killed the wizards and not simply the module’s author.
Of course, just as all horror movies don’t open with prologues, not all horror adventures need to either. For instance, Ty Pitre’s Swineheart Motel drops the players immediately into the spooky roadside hotel (with some potential adventure hooks) without the need for a throat-clearing prologue. And even those that do may open with something different than Lichface stabbing to death Drawmij Bigbymore. For instance, Luka Rejec’s Let Us In (which I have also run) opens with a very short vignette as each character has flashbacks to strange things they’ve seen on their road trip to the adventure location. This type of opening would be more appropriate for a moodier and less big-bad-evil-guy focused horror adventure.
In its opening pages, Vecna Lives! claims that a referee who is doing their job as a pseudo horror director “should be exhausted at the end of each gaming session.” I certainly think one could be exhausted after reading or running Vecna Lives!, but there is no reason it should be. Instead, considering how to translate horror tropes in a way that respects player agency can make running a horror game as easy as running any other type of adventure. Let the players be the monster, so they understand why they should be scared.
