These rules can be powerful options, and you do not want to create something that drains the fun out of a campaign for your players. When adding these rules for the first time, I recommend keeping them to shorter games and discussing them with your party. It also goes into more details on Fear and Stress, offering mechanical options to represent the rising tension horror can cause. Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft has the “Seeds of Fear”, fears that the player can have their character react to in return for a point of inspiration. Grievous wounds that can be a limp or broken rib, or as lasting as a missing eye, arm or hand. This outlines options for making combat leave lasting marks on your players. The DMG has the “Lingering Injury” table, which I find especially interesting. The original core trilogy of books has some great options. You can run horror in standard 5e just fine, but there are a ton of optional rules that can help you really play up certain elements of the horror. This keeps the horror scary, but not something that makes your players want to leave the table. I keep these between each individual player and myself, so that anything a player might be uncomfortable bringing up at the table stays between the two of us. One one I like is here but there are many ones out there. These will help your players privately let you know what topics they are okay with, what topics they are fine with in small amounts, and what items they want completely avoided.

Consent Sheets are perfect for figuring this out. Horror Focused games can touch on these subjects more frequently since a lot of horror has to do with elements that scare or make people uncomfortable. While you may know some of your players pretty well, there may be certain subjects they want to avoid entirely. Areas that need to be treated with caution or entirely avoided. RPGs ‌have the possibility of touching on subjects that players may be sensitive about. It helps to have some examples of what elements they will experience, such as gore and other graphic descriptions.Īnother item that helps early on, Consent Sheets are a valuable resource I include at all of my tables. Making sure the party knows what they can expect in the coming game will help make sure that players are prepared and enthusiastic about this type of atmosphere in the game.

Running a Session 0 is a crucial step in communicating with your table. Once you have the potential players, reiterate this during your Session 0. When trying to get people interested, mention “this will be a Horror Game” or “this will include Horror Elements”. When you want to run a horror game, one of the first things you need to do is communicate that to your potential players.

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