Thread 96399087

Reminds me of a ridiculous fear I had as a little kid. I had imagined a creature called "The Dark" (essentially a shadowy horror that resembled a rotting humanoid raven dressed in black druid robes) lived in the deepest, darkest woods, but also spied on little kids from the edge of any wooded area.
I had nightmares for months that it was trying to bite me through my bedroom window at night.

This inspired me to design a horrific fallen angel for 2E AD&D Planescape. It killed of the entire party.

What inspirations have you had for spooky monsters?

>>96399087 (OP)
The best monster by far I sprung on players was a szarkai (albino dark elf) assassin with the abilty to slightly change her facial features. We played an evil campaign and the party was supposed to infiltrate various small towns and villages that usually had a majority or whole population of elves. This effectively stopped any attempt at murderhoboing as they were afraid to stumble upon the szarkai. From my angle she was running pararel missions along with players. They were the outside influence, she was the inside influence. I ran the campaign for 2 years and players were effectively scared of her and behaved even thought later in the game they could've dogpilled her and killed her if they wanted, but by that point they were scared enough not to try anything stupid. She was effective because players never had proper information on her and they knew she had some evil intentions for her dark elven clan but couldn't directly confront her because it would blow up their own cover.

>>96399087 (OP)
Wrote a scenario I've run a few times, where the 'monster' drifts between
>pre-Native American spirit using a rural radio mast built in it's residence hollow to propagate insomniac delusions
>deviant boot's gross Iraq war trophies hung on rural radio mast coalesce a 'vengeance entity' that drives local de-mobbed Ham radio club members psychotic

The core idea is that something is poisoning the 'souls' of a semi-secluded rural town, and the 'poison' is the clash between a nasty ancient/traditional force, and modernisation rolling over it.

>>96402481
Unsettling.

>>96399087 (OP)
Ever since I looked up the Mantic Goreblight I've always been fascinated with the concept of reused carrion flesh of the dead reanimated into hulks of undead animated flesh constructs.
Hopefully from there inspiration comes to ya.

>>96402481
I did a thing with one of those numbers stations in the middle of nowhere suddenly beginning to broadcast two alternate histories that was slowly corrupting reality around it.
Radios are cool, and it's relatively easy to make some "props" just with audacity and a decent microphone.
It seems like my take on it had less of a theme going, but even then my players enjoyed it.

>>96402481
Oh this is a neat idea. Any specifics on how the corruption progresses?

I've always been terrible at running proper horror myself, though I love playing it. A cool monster I did run accross once as a player was a kind of psychic headless monkey (mostly called that since it had four arms and climbed around) that ate fire and protected itself by projecting it's emotions to everyone nearby.
Basically it kept targeting the party's torches and light sources while making everyone vomit or pass out from agony if it got hurt. Not really scary to encounter in itself once you figure that trying to harm it is a bad idea, but after we let one stick around it's psychic influence started making people really want to light fires and stick burning stuff inside their own mouths.

Gay as fuck. Figures from /tg/

>>96399246
elf sexooo