Nath has larped for the last thirteen years in six different countries. He run about fifty larp events, including being an organizer on the international larp Dragonbane. He's contributed articles to Knudepunkt books for two years, including the Bristol Manifesto, which had strong simulationist leanings. He writes his passing larp reflections as they happen on live journal Larp_Musing. He's also been published in TT RPG supplements for D&D 3rd ed and Ars Magica 4th ed, and worked on the PC strategy games Gangsters & Cut-throats. In real life he has degrees in Computer Science and Psychology. He works for the UK civil service by day. In this series of articles, starting here, he'll be setting out some of his reflections on larp, leaning towards issues of concept and design.

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Horror goes back a long way in the RPG industry. Call of Cthulhu is one of the oldest RPGs of all, published back in 1980. A decade later saw a very different type of horror in the form of Vampire:TM. In terms of published larp books, it's the major genre after the 'heroic adventuring' one, with Cthulhu live in it’s third edition and too many MET sourcebooks for me to count.

Running horror in larp is hard. It relies on creating a strong atmosphere and emotionally unsettling situations. By extension it requires players willing to allow themselves to be emotionally unsettled rather than stonewalling or defusing the situation with comedy or inserting reminders it’s not ‘real.’

Horror is in my view an overloaded term. I broadly divide it into two types:

• Personal Horror; Horror about one's personal situation relative to others, either as a guilty actor (e.g. vampire) or as a victim.
• Cosmic Horror; horror about one's position in the cosmos. (e.g. Cthulhu)

Stating my own bias I find personal horror to be more emotionally moving than cosmic horror in my experience, so I’ll be focusing on this here.

Victim based personal horror or ’slasher horror’ on the face of it looks easy to do in larp. Put in some weapons or monsters and people to suffer, and stand well back. Actually, I think it's one of the hardest styles to do. Larpers are used to using violence to try to resist violence, and slasher horror easily turns into straight up combat. Running it relies on the characters understanding that getting injured is a terrifying thing and pain hurts which is not normally represented in larp hurts. It also relies on players remembering the mental trauma of causing injury to others, something few people have the real first hand experience of to fully understand and runs contrary to their ‘kill the orcs’ style in heroic fantasy larp.

Guilty Actor personal horror is also extremely hard to do in larp. Having power and the ability to assert it easily drifts into the 'dark superheroes with fangs' problem that many vampire games do, rather than the dramatic tension of guilt at one's own actions. This may be because being ‘cool’ and exerting power is more ‘fun’ in the immediate sense than immersing in heavy feelings such as guilt. Running it requires very careful crafting of the situation and/or constant narrativist twsting of events to create situations where characters do bad things, and then have time to reflect on them. People don’t stop for angst in the middle of combat.

I guess the underlying point is that horror is a difficult genre to present in larp, and it requires conveying the desired mindset. Ideally this can be done with briefing material, but if need be can be hardcoded in with rule mechanics, which might be particularly important to manage gamist player tendencies.

Heroism does have its place in horror - even the original short story Call of Cthulhu ends with Cthulhu suffering a temporary defeat at the hands of the hero. However, if too many characters are being heroic, and if the game balance is too much in their favour, the horror disappears.

One way to maintain horror is to ensure human frailty is included (important both in cosmic horror and personal horror for the victims). Five characters taking on a monster, killing it and being fine the next morning is an adventure story. Five characters taking on a monster, one being killed and three being maimed for life before the monster is driven off for now ... is a lot closer to being a horror story.

In the interests of playability, I'd suggest 'actual death' be relatively infrequent, but serious injury be it physical and mental be very hard to avoid without constantly cowardice. This means being heroic and trying to fight the monster really is heroic since you really are putting your character in a high risk environment. Compare this to a ‘heroic’ larp setting, where the actual risk of death is minimal.

One way to implement this is to separate short term and long term medical care in game mechanics; an idea featured in the original Bab5 TT RPG which I wish was more common. Allow a surgeon to patch a victim up to allow them to function, and allow even the badly wounded to stay conscious and roleplay being in pain. However allow for badly injuried characters to die at the end of the event or afterwards as the wounds go bad - and be upfront about this risk to characters. Suddenly going from 'alive' to 'dead' or 'unconscious' after being caught by a monster isn't as dramatic as being clawed, left for dead, having a surgeon patch the victim up to give them a few hours to live to last dying statements and speak of the horrors they have seen.

In summary then, we’ve looked briefly at horror larp in general and personal horror in particular, what the different kinds of horror are, what some of the common pitfalls to trying to run a horror event are, and in particular how to address the problem of handling injury in a horror game. Horror is a difficult atmosphere to invoke, and requires careful managing of player expectations.