Horror in Exalted.

[lowguppy]

I think the times that those situations have happened in our game, it was because of something my tentacle-monster-totem lunar did.


For horror though, I like my Unknown Armies over anything. The flesh-golem we hacked to bits that kept chasing us... One hell of a holloween game that was. Losing your mind in a time loop is good fun too.


Personally, I don't play Exalted for Horror, you can, but its not what the game excells at. Exalts come with a toolkit of supernatural abilities designed mainly to fight other total badasses in the name of their deity. Horror is much more fun with patheticly weak mortals who don't know fuck all about the supernatural, and again, if I want that, I'll play Unknown Armies.

 

[Cthulhu_Wakes]

True, true, but I'm convinced if pulled off right and with a savvy ST, you can make a horrific good time in Exalted, as Jakk stated above. Know thy players.

 

[Balathustrius]

workingboy, read no farther please.


(Yes, I do trust him not to read farther - I've known him a long time, and he doesn't want to know what I'm thinking when I make GM decisions.  Whereas, if any of the rest of my players see this, the condition of metagaming is still character death.)


-----


My players decided that leaving a a group of about 10 of their followers outside of the manse would be a good idea, along with V'Neef Mahina (who got there first, and they duly found alive and insane among the broken corpses of her mercenaries).  They figured that they'd be safer there.


This deprived me of extras to kill, and I wasn't too happy about it.


I've also been trying to figure out how to handle the demons, though.  This gave me a great chance for them to re-enter the story dramatically.  When they attacked the fortress at night, while the PCs were sleeping in shifts, the lights begin to flicker as they usually do (due to essense surges), but then they melted from soft white to yellow to orange to red, because a couple of demons made it inside.  The way I described it, the lights were strobing, not burning steadily.  I wanted that effect of flickering darkness.  The attack managed to kill one of the men and drive the rest inside.  And the PCs found one demon in a room, already turning to ashes and scattering on the air currents (my personal touch).  They never connected the red lights to the death of the demon, though.


So, I killed several birds with one stone.  I trapped the characters in the manse until they figure out what to do about the demons, gave myself some extras to play with if I need to, did some creepy stuff with the lights, and emphasized that the fortress is weird as hell.


They also explored the second floor during the session, so I took the chance set up a previous-life subplot and do some aggravated damage in the maze room.  Oddly enough, finding an adamant scythe in the glass-making room inspired the character to want to use it in making his own trap.  The same one that took aggravated damage later from the adamant telescoping blade and the one that I set up the previous-life subplot with - so he now thinks that perhaps he "outsmarted himself" in a previous life - setting the adamant trap in the maze room.

 

[Cthulhu_Wakes]

That my sir, is good roleplaying there