Introducing Horror to a Game with Ivan Van Norman 

so... Brennan played Bill Seacaster in his brother's game? haha. given that he also mentioned Hallariel and Sandralynn as elves in the game he dmed as a kid, this all makes me think Fantasy High is truly just the kids of Brennan's OCs.

Can't help but notice how it always comes down to informed consent. 😄

I have the SAME problem: new players can't get out of "board game" mode. 12 sessions in, about 100 NPC including monsters they've encountered and still NO role playing in character, NO writing a back-story, NO character goals, not even a description of what their character looks like. My solution? Next session, I have a soundboard rigged with audience sounds. I'm going to open the session with them not in Middle Earth, but IN a talk show complete with applause, laugh tracks, intro music, and a cheesy host played by me. I'm not breaking character for the whole thing and will only ask questions to their characters. No matter what they say, I will respond in character until they finally succumb to the fun madness and start RPing a little. I'm hoping this over-the-top ridiculous RPing will get them to elicit some facts about their characters. Any other advice?

What happened to the playlist?

i think a big factor in horror is the players knowing they shouldnt do a thing.. but also being in a situation the thing might be their best option.. like i was playing in a zombie game, there was a hospital, so every fiber was saying no way should we go in there. the problem was we didnt really have a choice.. well we did but the alternative wasnt good.. there was a storm, there were zombies closing in and we needed medical supplies.. so.. in we went to face what ever horrors might be lurking inside.

"Ah, Sicilian Dragon Defense..." Pure gold.

the biggest whiplash was the first minute of hearing ivans laugh and act silly and then realizing that this guy is a horror genius....

Can I just say- I am absolutely in love with the amount of passion in this episode. Like, I can actually feel the intensity of their conversation, and just the way they're continuously bouncing off of each other's topics and discussion? I'm blown away

I think the best description of "evil" in D&D that I ever heard was from my first DM before I started DMing, and that was just "self-serving." Changed the way that I thought about CE characters forever

Having just gotten to the section where they're talking about how "magic can take a lot of power away from horror" I actually remembered vividly a part in my previous campaign where my Paladin had, through the Deck of Many Things, made an adversary of a powerful Devil, who wanted the soul of my Paladin so they could turn me to their service. I never actually ended up confronting that Devil in the campaign, but it repeatedly provided reinforcements to the foes we were already fighting. One of the most terrifying moments was when I made a risky gambit to take down an enemy spellcaster and went down to a Circle of Death triggered by slaying the spellcaster; as I was on the ground one of the chain devils in the fight were getting ready to come and execute me on the ground. I remember the sheer terror of thinking "if I go down to one of these devils, that's it. My soul will be taken and I'm fucked." I don't think it was ever even stated that my soul could be taken that way but the idea of death putting me beyond the reach of my party had me terrified. Luckily, our Bard swooped in at the last minute and gutted the devil who was gearing up to take me out and I stood back up on my next turn.

everyone using a nintendo ds as a chat device really sent me to another plane of existence that's so funnyy

I used Horror to great effect in my campaign, and this is the element that I used: Take something familiar, possibly harmless, and twist it into something alien and unfamiliar. The reveal that the little girl that the players were helping was actually a flesh eating, power hungry Frost Hag was priceless. Bitterwhistle will always be in my top ten. Or take something primal that removes agency. Players crave agency. So a large flea-like bug that scoops out your brain and puppets you around like a zombie was terrifying to the players - to the point where they were willing to fireball their own location if one appeared. Great topic!

Only problem with having a dropout account is that I can't comment on the videos unless I come to youtube.

I've had such a huge nerd crush on both Brennan and Ivan separately, and seeing them together is just 😍😍😍

really loved them talking about pc betrayal- because i was a player that got betrayed and it ended up completely killing my enjoyment of the game. i thought i was going to get a cool arc for my character, but it ended up getting completely quashed by another character's betrayal. I was really really upset and didn't feel like i could trust the player after that. if they'd just talked to me then it would have turned out so much better!

Eventually I want to run a horror campaign that involves a traitor within the party and run an NPC or two that are completely not remotely related to the horror itself, but just suspicious enough that everyone can think that it is one of them when it is a single player that I have talked to beforehand and trust, lol.

(Quite a bit late on the uptake here) but Norman's discussion about how zombies aren't scary, zombies are boring, it's what people do responding to zombies that's interesting was exactly what I did for one of my own D&D games. Undead apocalypse, zombies, skeletons, whatever, but most of that undead stuff doesn't instill horror--it was the cities where leaders forcefully took power to make moves, or where an entire population of refugees was under threat of starving, or how you have to break through awful people and bureacracy just to save people's lives that made a truly impactful story.

I've been brain storming a "good faith" chaotic evil PC. He's a Rakdos Fiend Warlock Circus Ringmaster whose long term goals include making his circus the best in all of Ravnica. He's probably going to be a Tiefling who grew up on Innistrad hating vampires and all the other run of the mill monsters there. One day he ended up on Ravnica and fell in love with the spectacle and pageantry of the rakdos guild. The important aspect is his evil leanings will drive him to keep the party alive and together. If his toys get broken then he can't play with them anymore. This will be especially true if there are any LG paladins in the party. If he can get a devotion paladin to fall, become an oathbreaker, and join the cult then his circus will have a leading act that might even draw a standing ovation from Rakdos himself.

I know I am extremely late for this, but to me chaotic evil means that the character will help themselves despite the law. It doesn't mean they are the Joker committing murder because it's fun, although that is certainly an option. It could be a fighter who will use underhanded tactics to win a fight, a wizard who will conduct evil experiments to make themselves immortal, or a sorcerer who cheats at cards to make money.

A trick one of my friends likes to use for horror against magick, which i think comes from "shadowrun", is considering that in places where atrocities happen magickal traces are left and when they accumulate too much, people who feel magick will be assaulted by it and eldritch monstrocities will appear. The spellcaster knows something bad is up, the team hears it, the ominous tone is rapidly set. The spellcaster's concentration will be perturbed which makes their magick less reliable but they also are the person who knows what's up. They're both particularly vulnerable and important in those scenes and if something happens to them, the team will be blind.

I really think that the line Ivan has constructed between "horror" and "monster bashing" is something that he constructed. I do not think those two themes are incompatible and I love to use both of them in conjunction in my games. A character can be powerful in the sense that they are good at killing zombies but powerless in other, sometimes more profound and disturbing ways. One of my favorite methods of achieving this is using a corruption system. Symbaroum, a Swedish dark fantasy ttrpg, while not primarily a horror game contains significant elements of horror to its setting and mechanics, including my favorite corruption system in any tabletop game I've seen. Sure, your character can indulge in addictive, consumptive powers to wipe the floor with some zombies, but how many times can they do that before they are consumed by the very power they exercise and become another mindless, hungry monster themselves? The influence and symptoms of corruption that your character has already accumulated also casts a shadow of dread and inescapable doom to every "victory." My favorite character that I've played exploring this concept was a blackguard in a horror fantasy game who got his magic and supernatural power from a nascent, dead demon of numbness, undeath and stagnation wanting to return to life, grafted to his soul, slowly assimilating and consuming the parts of him that are still himself. He dreaded this irreversible eventuality and would prefer to die as a human, essentially making him sort of lowkey suicidal, which was the real reason he was so often able to act "brave" when diving into the jaws of death. The horror becomes worse, however, when you realize that the nature of his powers, which granted him incredible resilience to conventional means of harm like a zombie might have, created one inevitable conclusion if he wanted to die as a human: anything that wants to kill him would have to do so in a way that destroys most of his entire body, like a meat grinder or an inferno. If he really wanted to go out as a human after the terrible choices he made, by necessity it was going to be painful and ugly. There was no other way.

Anybody else rewatching this interview to get more hype for Neverafter?

I'm late as can be, but speaking of horror it reminds me of a really fun little campaign I ran. I was with a group and I asked everyone what they wanted to play privately. Everyone was cool with high fantasy but kinda wanted to try horror. So, in open deliberations we "decided" to play high fantasy, but secretly made a horror game. So, game starts with level 1 dnd characters being lead through their first dungeon by an experienced member of a local adventuring guild, it's full of goblins and the PC's were struggling, as expected, and being kinda hand held by the experienced guy. Cut to fighting the leader of the goblins, an unexpectedly big hobgoblin who quickly, and in an ultra violent way destroyed the experienced adventurer. PC's were, as expected, horrified by what happened and the objective changed from "kill the goblins" to "escape the goblin cave." Afterwards everyone had a great time and really loved the heel turn into horror. Still a personal favorite game of mine and my players.

Another way to have a traitor in the party without ruining the other PCs' fun is to have the traitor kill an npc. None of the PCs have their agency taken away, and there's still that element of surprise

I loved this episode so much and it was *definitely* necessary for my research for my sequel campaign. Thank you so much Brenna and Ivan 🙏🏽 Sidenote: Ivan, you good bro? You were breathing heavy the whole video 😅

This is actually a super interesting conversation not just about horror but about genre in general and the subtle things both players and GMs can do to shade the vibes toward one genre or another

Take a Shot every time Brennan says "100%"

Sesion Zero suggestions are great. My son ran a game with our family. I had played D&D 30 years ago, but my wife and daughter were newer players. My character died. My wife and daughter were more upset than I was, because they didn’t realize that was possible.

I'm a bit late to this video but the conversation about PC vs PC and talking with each person involved brought to mind something I learned performing at the Ren Faire: Surprise the character, not the actor.

So, something I ran recently in my homebrew game: A city in the game had a city-wide effect that essentially put everyone under it into a cohesive whole, more agreeable and likable to the other people within the city and whatnot. All of my PC's failed the save when they first entered the city, but later on one of them threw off the effect, and I really enjoyed narrating to the other players that something about this one PC was horribly off and watching them play through that.

Great video 👍 … I wonder how many people didn’t get the reference to the auto cannon ammo countdown in Aliens, as this is only seen in the Directors Cut

I personally like the idea of having a DM first build a story as though the players weren’t there. There are things moving, pieces in play already and a certain story would happen without the players even being there. This allows for players and the DM to them feel like the players are actually changing the story. It is then built for the fantasy of “I can make a difference, and my actions matter”.

My DM has trusted me to play a chaotic evil character and I've been working on ways to make it so my character is in fact CE, but not to the detriment to the party. What I've come up with is my character is a sadistic, narcisistic bard necromancer with ambitions of becoming a lich (more specifically the Intoner, created by the youtuber Pointy Hat, highly recommend him). The thing is she's not stupid about it. She enjoys killing people, but only does so when she knows she can get away with it (i.e. not killing people that are important to the party or will create an unnecisary obstacle). She also realizes that her goal of becoming a lich will be easier if she works with the party to get the information/fame she needs. She may end up being an antagonist down the line, in say a one shot epilogue. But for the duration of the campaign, her and the parties goals will be alligned.

Me, in quarantine: "Oh god Brennan no don't high-five!"

I played in a really fun Trail of Cthulhu game where I (and the rest of the party) was betrayed by another player. Was super fun and even had a crazy PVP encounter follow

Honestly, "winning" as the DM to me is when players are truly enjoying the game. I loved playing the old Mansions of Madness game as the GM, because my mission wasn't to defeat the players; it was to make the game as close as reasonably possible. I had a few games where literally everybody was leaning over the table to watch a die roll, because that die roll was the difference between winning and losing for the players, and I've struggled to make something like that degree of tension, elation, and/ or grief happen in another rpg.

i make DnD maps where i have 2 friends that i play with 1 on 1 at different times and oe of them was a king deffending against bandits and one was a bandit fighting an opresive ruler edit:sorry for the speling errors

...The GoT hating fairy tale endings is something that DOESNT get talked enough about...! Big bad demon of the north, DIES at the hands of his nemesis , the bastard king of the north , redeeming his name and claim to the.. NOPE! Dies to a slip of a girl! The evil queen, a villian by the measure of any, will face her most just reward at the hand of those sworn to end her,.. NOPE! Brained by a boulder to the bean! Her brother has finally allowed himself the peace to live without her wretched....Oh wait, no, he was right there beside her. The exiled queen, brought down to nothing,, shall overcome all adversity, Raise herself as a champion for the downtrodden, retake her birthright....and turn into a maniacal psychopath... The Hounds story went well I feel.... :D

Not horror: paladin killing zombies horror: the man you helped several adventures ago catching you off guard as he turns around you notice an old friend is now a new zombie enemy

Did you think you could just hide that this guy is the IRL basis for Riz Guckacks character model?

Instead of the normal examples of a hidden enemy like Jaws or the Xenomorph, Brennan Lee Mulligan uses Grendal, from the oldest English story ever. Also did one of those usernames make anyone else super uncomfortable? One of them sounded an awful lot like Spetznazi....that just sounds like spetznatz, that's just a Nazi name...

You can't fool me! I could tell that was Taliesin Jaffe with a Disguise Self spell. Didn't change his mannerisms at all and barely changed his voice.

And I oop

Brennan and Ivan seem like weird transfigured facsimiles of each other. It’s like Bertram and Stewie except moderately less hostile

Ivan Van Norman looks like actor James Spaders chill half-brother. Lbvs. Imagine Van Norman inviting James Spader to a dinner party, one will be intimidating af and the other would be cracking jokes.

Brennan, read Noel Carrol’s “Why Horror?”

Ivan Van Norman is so good at horror games I am so excited to watch this video!

I don't think I will ever get how to run horror, but this was a fantastic interview with plenty of general, roleplaying advice :D Awesome stuff!

It is bizarre how alike Brennan and Ivan look

THis guy is the best at what he does.

That guy who's ready for monster bashing in a horror game will learn fear by his third character.

Hey now! The "Sicilian Dragon Defense" is one of the most powerful tactics in D&D. How dare you insult it so by taking its name in vain.

I've been watching a lot of these Adventuring Academy vids, and this is my favorite one so far. lots of great general DM tips here, even beyond the focus of horror

Opp, did the thing again. Misread honour when it was horror

Feeling Evil just have a Snickers 😂

I dont know who this person is, but cool!

"There is now a traitor in your group" _I wanna say it..._ *_I wanna say iiiiiiiiiiiiiiit_*

Y'all really just take a question from a dude named "spetznazi"???

Smoothie of Death full series come on we all want it

Loved this episode, absolutely golden advice, but man could I hear Ivan breathing

Lol I like your Chaotic Evil thing but even the Joker doesn't kill everyone!...........👍

Loved this!

My good characters will sometimes kill people who betrays him. Regardless of age and sex. That is not evil.

Been binge watching and only have one note: Brennan, you may want to limit yourself to one “100%!” per interview. “Totally!” “Utterly!” “Completely!” “Indubitably!” and “Well done, that man!” (or woman) are good subs. Besides that little verbal tic, you are incredibly well-spoken and creative and your NPC voices and styles are amazing! (On second thought, ignore that first part. Tic away. You are allowed to have the math equivalent of “um...er...” with all your other over-and-above skills. Think binge watching makes me annoyed with stupid sh*t that I’m only supposed to marginally notice if I were to mete out episodes over weeks. But I’m a greedy bastard and do so enjoy watching your magic. Cheers!)

Honestly, throughout the episode those mutton chops really grew on me