A long article (1200 words) about Dimension 20: Neverafter and horror, and how to create a horror D&D campaign.
*Spoilers*
Preface: I really enjoy Neverafter and have the utmost respect for the players and Brennan. This isn’t a critique of them, their actions or the season, but an analysis and thoughts on how it could better conform to the horror genre. These may be ideas to consider for your own D&D horror game.
As a D&D game Neverafter is what we’ve come to expect from Dimension 20 – excellent players, a fantastic DM, amazing miniatures, interesting combat and mechanics, high level improvisation and lots of comedy. However, it was billed as the horror season, and that’s what I’d like to discuss.
Despite being marketed as a horror season of Dimension 20, it would be more accurate to say Neverafter is a D&D game with horror elements. Below I'll discuss the ways in which Neverafter effectively uses horror and the ways its ineffective if viewed as an outright horror story. Following that I'll discuss some ways to create a horror campaign.
Why does Neverafter only occasionally work as horror?
Three of the most effective pieces of horror this season have been the body horror of Rosamund’s introduction, the D&D equivalent of a jump scare when the wicked fairy ripped her eyes out at the sight of the stepmother, and the existential horror of Ylfa’s backstory. Despite using different horror elements they accomplish their goals in similar ways. These scenes put characters up against a wall with no easy way out. They can escape but it will come with a cost. There’s a reason horror confines its characters or makes the danger ever present and too close for comfort, always there, biding its time. In comparison Neverafter as a whole is too open and too large in scope without being unfathomable or existentially unsettling enough to be cosmic horror. Even when the setting is expansive in horror, the setting should be used to make the characters feel trapped; characters can be trapped in a house or trapped in a vast tundra, but they need to feel as though there is no way out. In horror not only is the setting claustrophobic but the plot has to be as well. Horror plots are submarines taking on water—you’re only goal is getting out alive and most of you won’t make it.
The pacing gives us and the players too much breathing room. Breathing room in horror has two primary effects: it creates a false sense of security or it is used to further isolate a character (e.g. nobody believes the character when they say there’s something evil stalking them). In Neverafter there’s too much time to decompress and to get in all the bits, which as a comedy show is understandable but not effective horror. Once the horror starts it can’t retreat so far into the background. It has to ramp up in pace and escalate in intensity. There are too many side quests and too much downtime role play. In order to sustain the heightened levels the role play would need to be focused on the task of escaping the horrible circumstances and as they get closer to the end it seems less and less likely they will. The pace needs to build up so much momentum that by the climax the ending feels inevitable.
The tone needs to be consistent once the horror starts. Use classic horror story structure—establish a tone at the beginning then disrupt it with the introduction of horror. Then the tone is set in stone and you reinforce and intensify the tone in the same way you do the pace until you reach a point where all hope is lost. Until it’s not. (The structure of horror tends to roughly follow Joseph Campbell’s monomyth inasmuch as at the end the characters return to the world they know having changed.) However, Neverafter is tonally all over the place, which is fine for a D&D campaign but not for horror.
The stakes need to be more immediate and less philosophical. Horror thrives on the digestible metaphor. You have a philosophical point to make? Find the metaphor. What does the monster represent? What do the characters represent? What dichotomy is presented? How do those who survive best represent your argument? Neverafter has too much grey area and too many sides, and the characters have to form a competing philosophy. This isn’t effective as horror because horror comes from a fear of our mortality, what it is to be a living breathing human being. That’s why the characters’ only goal is preserving their lives. By the time we’re into the meat of horror, it’s too late for anymore nuance. While the world ending is fine as stakes, the immediate stakes need to be life and death. Not in an “If we don’t succeed the world ends!” way but in an “I’m fearing for my life every second we’re here!” way. As such the characters and their demise need to reinforce the danger by being brutal and most of all permanent. And if they’re not permanent they need to have an escalating hook like every time they die they come back with less and less humanity until they are the monster. Characters have to be at risk of losing something significant and it has to stay lost.
What would I do differently in a horror campaign?
Simplify everything. Introduce the characters, the setting, and their status quo and then disrupt it. Example: Five college kids are travelling to a resort in the desert but get lost and make the foolish choice to stay the night in a ghost town? Guess what they’ve angered the crazed bloodthirsty Manhattan Project mutants. Now, survive.
Make the campaign no more than six sessions. Have only the first session be a role playing session ending with rolling initiative. Set it in a single primary location, have one concrete horror monster/killer/alien (or many weaker ones) that expresses a metaphorical sociological, psychological or philosophical fear, make the characters increasingly vulnerable and make death permanent with no backup characters. I’d start the characters at a higher level and make a mechanic based off their choices which causes them to either level up or down each session; whereas the killer’s challenge rating increases each time it kills. The worse the character’s position, the lower their level and the easier they are to kill. And the weaker the group, the more vulnerable they are and the higher the odds are against them.
Using Neverafter as an example, I like the folklore and fairytales but I’d narrow the scope. I’d centre it on the idea of the stepmother as an archetypal figure and the monster and create the basis of why she’s doing what she’s doing. Set it on the anniversary of her death. Put them in the home where she lived with her family and provide clues about how she devoured her daughters and sneak in a weakness she has (she’s sensitive to bright lights or she’s afraid of cats or whatever) in the first session. At the end of session 1 the PCs realize they’re in trouble (cars and phones don’t work, only road is washed out, there’s a dangerous storm outside) and they’ve got five episodes to get out, defeat the stepmother or survive until morning.
I hope this has been an interesting look into some of the ways Neverafter successfully and unsuccessfully utilized horror in the campaign and gives you some ideas on how you could make a horror campaign for your table.
