I’m running a game of Vaesen at Kublacon this month, so I’m thinking a lot about horror RPGs right now. And, while on a bit of medically-enforced R&R this past week, I finally got around to playing Bramble: The Mountain King, which I snagged a while back based on some random review, and it is now my favorite horror video game ever. It is wonderfully creepy, and it has given me some new ideas for DMing horror RPG games.

In Bramble, you play a boy, Olle, exploring a dark landscape inspired by Scandinavian fairy tales (just like Vaesen!), trying to find his missing sister. It is not a particularly complex game: You do a bit of running, a smidge of jumping, a splash of platforming, a speck of clicking, a dash of throwing, a soupçon of sneaking, a touch of puzzling. Even exploration is relatively limited; there’s very little content off the main “track.” I repeat: This is not a particularly complex game.

If you consider that a fault (and I most certainly do not think it is), Bramble more than makes up for it with atmosphere. The music, story, and stunning visuals combine to create a horror experience that is as beautiful as it is terrifying. There are many different chapters, each with its own visual, aural, and emotional palette, ranging from cheerful to dreadful all the way to heartbreaking. Further, it has given me some ideas that I want to incorporate into my own horror RPGs going forward.

Game Moves

If you play D&D, then you probably imagine your options as a player to be infinite, and you also probably usually fall back on a few common actions, such as “I attack with my sword” or “I try to trick the guard into letting me pass with Deception.” Yes, you can do anything, and you tend to start thinking about what you can do based on the gear and abilities that are written down on your character sheet, because your character is good at these. And there’s nothing wrong with this! This is how D&D players tend to be trained to play, because when we’re new to the hobby, we’re presented with a Level 1 character sheet and told, “You can do all of this stuff.”

However, there’s a concept I’ve come across in recent-gen RPGs, starting with Dungeon World, that group player (including GM) actions into “moves.” Moves describe actions in terms of their effect, rather than their method. For example, in Dungeon World, you don’t attack with your sword. Instead, when you want to wound someone at melee range, you use the Hack and Slash move, because your goal is to hurt them. Then you can decide whether you’re doing that with your sword, or your mace, or the tavern bench next to you, or a particularly unlucky goblin. However, if your goal is to distract the monster to keep it away from your friend, you might use a Mislead move, instead. And then you can decide if you want to mislead them by lying to them, yelling at them, or swinging a sword/mace/tavern bench/particularly unlucky goblin at them. The choice starts with the intended effect, and then the player figures out the method afterwards. This narrows down the infinity of choices just like a D&D character sheet does, but it does so in a way that helps move the story forward in well-understood, well-tested ways.

Dungeon World gives GMs their own special moves, too, such as Show signs of an approaching threat, Use up their resources, Deal damage, and Offer an opportunity that fits a class’s abilities. I genuinely love these. These moves feel like the choices that a movie director or screenwriter makes, to prevent the story from bogging down, distilled into a single sentence that can help a DM make a quick and easy choice. Even those of us who have been GMing for a while can benefit from reading these; and for novice GMs, this list is invaluable. (This is the kind of stuff I would have on the inside of my GM screen, if I used a screen.)

Coming back to Bramble: The game uses many classic horror moves quite effectively. For example, jump scares (when they occur) never feel redundant or forced. But it also made some moves that surprised me in positive, atmosphere-supporting ways, and I want to add those techniques to my repertoire. So here’s my first attempt to adapt those ideas into GM moves and fun game mechanics for horror RPGs.

Paranoia

Bramble creates a strong atmosphere of paranoia in its second half, in the swamp and then the village. One way it does this is by playing with camera angles around windows. In the village, there are certain exploration sections where, instead of having a standard top-down or third person view of your character, you actually watch your character through the window of a house. This immediately takes you out of the role of Olle and casts you in the role of a hidden watcher, which in turn changes your perception about how safe or alone you are in that area.

In that same area, while crossing a rickety plank bridge that I’d just created between two houses, I almost didn’t see the creepy figure standing in an area that I had just “cleared,” watching me. This wasn’t actionable; I was balanced thirty feet above the ground and hoping that there weren’t any zombies waiting for me at the new house. Nor was the figure doing anything. It didn’t jump or wave or flash; it just stood there, watching. These and other such moves were really effective at keeping my paranoia up in a section of the game that was mostly platforming and exploring.

This would seem really easy to adapt to a TTRPG, right? Every GM with their salt knows that asking for a Perception check instantly sets players’ hearts racing. The problem that I’ve experienced using Perception checks to create atmosphere is that, if a player gets a success on that check, they tend to fixate on whatever they noticed. If they see a gaunt man watching them from a field, and a second later he’s gone, they don’t leave that in the background. They’ll want to walk over to the field and investigate, or cast divinations, or otherwise focus on that one spot, because they assume that you, as GM, only draw their attention to places and people of interest. Instead of paranoia, you get ten or fifteen minutes of dice rolling and question asking, while the main plot is left behind.

For my Create Paranoia move, I want to leverage this behavior. I believe (and may expand on this at some point) that what actually worries a player is the loss of their characters’ resources: hit points, spell slots, potions, etc. So what if I treat these atmospheric elements as a kind of psychic trap? For example, if a character glimpses that gaunt man and then investigates their vision, I might let them make one Investigation check without consequence. If they fail that roll or stay focused on the clue after that, I would ask them to make a Wisdom saving throw “to prevent paranoia from rooting in their brain.” If they fail, they suffer either a level of Stress (if I’m using that mechanism from Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft) or 2d6+2 psychic damage. (In Vaesen, I would ask for a Fear check, instead.)

My hypothesis, which I look forward to testing, is that this will give all of us the best of both worlds. Players will still have the freedom to investigate anything they want. And also, they’ll understand that investigating is a potentially risky activity, and they need to be selective about where they spend their limited resources. Meanwhile, I’ll get to drop in lots of atmospheric hints and details, without worrying that each one will derail our story’s forward momentum.

Create Paranoia

When a player notices something out of the ordinary and chooses to investigate it, use this move to threaten their character with a consuming, stressful paranoia. If they fail on their investigation activity or try more than one investigation activity, they have to make a check of some kind to resist a negative mental effect.

Experiencing the Horror

As I’ve already mentioned, Bramble does not shy from gore, and it works very hard to make you “experience” it. For example, when you have to wade through a chest-high pile of scrap meat, your character slows down, giving you the sense that you are genuinely wading in gore. My favorite is when you need to unpeel a dead witch’s fingers from the handle of the torture device that killed her: Bramble makes moving each finger a distinct button press, with cracking sound effects the whole time. The result is that the gameplay in these sections is very visceral and uncomfortable.

As a GM, this reminds me that I don’t engage players’ sense of touch very often. I leverage sight and hearing and even smell frequently, but touch, not so much. So I want to create a move that I’m tentatively calling Feel the Horror. (I’ll accept better suggestions in the comments below!) The move will remind me to emphasize the tactile aspects of an action or event. But how exactly will it work?

I can think of a couple of options. First, it can just be an escalation of existing fear mechanics. For example, Vaesen suggests asking a player to make a Fear 1 check if their character sees a dead body; can I ask for another check, or even a Fear 2 check, if they want to touch the body? I don’t like that very much, because I don’t see how that helps the player to “feel the horror” the way that I felt it while I held down three controller buttons, hunted for the fourth, and listened to finger bones slowly cracking. Ugh. I still shiver a bit. (In a good way!)

Another idea, which I’ve learned to do in large part from my improv classes, is to give my players more control over the story. So I could ask the players themselves to describe the experience of touching that horrible thing. If I think that their description is suitably scary, then I can accept it as is. However, if they try to describe the action in a way that isn’t threatening or scary, then I can say, “I’m sure that’s what your character would like to happen.” And then maybe I add more details, and possibly require some sort of Fear check or saving throw, too.

I like this idea because it engages the players in the creation of the horror. They are incentivized to buy into the spooky atmosphere; and if they don’t, the atmosphere pushes back. But I will have to be careful, because it essentuailly punishes a player for not “buying in” to the horror, RPGs require consent, and horror stories more than most. So I’ll need to make sure that my players understand the nature of the move up-front and can make an informed choice about how they react to it.

I’m already excited about the idea of putting more of the storytelling into my players’ hands. Will a corpse’s hands refuse to give up their grip, forcing the character to describe how they open the hand without their character hurting themself? If my players are crossing a haunted battlefield, will ghostly fingers reach up from the ground to grab at their heels, forcing the characters to either describe the experience or make a Dexterity saving throw in order to be able to move freely? Will players develop terrifying nightmares for their characters that incorporate a few story-critical details? I can’t wait to find out.

Feel the Horror

When confronted with a creepy environment, situation, or obstacle, give a player a choice of either describing how they approach or address it with as much atmospheric detail as possible, or making a fairly difficult check to resolve it, with some risk to their character. If the player chooses to describe it and their description is appropriately creepy, great! Move on. If their description isn’t appropriately creepy, say, “I’m sure that’s what your character would like to happen.” Then, supplement their description with more details, and optionally ask them to make the initial check anyway. Finally, if they choose to just make the check, have them do that, and then you describe their experience as viscerally as possible. 

Conclusion

That’s all for now, I think. I’ve got some ideas to play with, that I’m excited about. If you are looking for a fairy tale/folk horror video game that can be finished in 4-8 hours, I highly recommend Bramble. Its sticker price is $30, and I really feel that I got that value and more from the game. And if you’re looking for a horror RPG to try out, I highly recommend Vaesen. It’s currently my favorite RPG, and the rules system is much simpler to learn than D&D 5E. The amount of horror actually in any given mystery is up to you; it’s just as possible to do PG-13, mystery-heavy stories, like Sleepy Hollow, or action-heavy stories, like The Mummy, as it is to do more horror-focused scenarios.

Let me know if the comments below if you try either one, or if you have any additional ideas for the horror moves I’ve described above!