GURPS Horror
Roleplaying with fear... or humour
It's a warm summer night. You sit on the floor watching a television turned down low. Just low enough to hear the soft, eerie background music surrounding a high school cheerleader as she opens a car door at night and calls out, "David? David, this isn't funny." You know she's going to get out of the car. And you know she's only going to find what's left of David before the same fate befalls her. But you watch anyway, oblivious of the eyes from outside your window watching you.
Welcome to the world of horror role playing, where you can play the role of a character meeting the world of the supernatural, or perhaps just encountering a guy in a hockey mask. Whatever your forte, the point of Horror gaming is to interact with the story. Whenever you said, "Of course the killer was in the kitchen! I would have gone out the window!" while watching a slasher flick, you wished you could role play that character.
There are a few tricks to running and playing a Horror game. The first would be that the players have to get scared, not just the characters they're playing. You can send werewolves and zombies after them in any number you want, but if they get slaughtered miserably (or worse, they slaughter the large group of monsters with a laugh) then the aspect of the Horror story is lacking.
So, how do you scare the players? This takes a bit of psychology and a bit of ingeniousness, and a lot of deviousness. You have to know what scares the players, and then let it slowly creep up on them so they don't exactly know what it is at first. And through the game, the characters will probably be spending most of their time just trying to figure out what it is that's after them (especially if you throw a couple of corpses in their path giving the message "this could be you" in a subtle way).
Other than role playing techniques, there are some other ways to make the setting scarier. Play in dim lighting, just enough to see by, such as by candle light where the shadows become part of the story's background even while the characters are suppose to be in daylight. Then set up some music, the type you would hear being played in the background of a horror movie (perhaps a soundtrack from one), don't just play chainsaw and cackling sounds during the game.
Next, use lots of props. Rubber mice and fake spiders next to the dice, you could go for it all and wear make-up to pale your face with a dab of fake blood (not on the corner of the mouth, that's done to death, maybe under the eye or from the nose to make things ... odder).
And, remember this: a good horror story will have familiar characters, each with their own quirky personalities, accents, styles of dress. Make sure that shrewd businessman shows the PCs contempt and that the PCs likewise give him the cold shoulder. It will make it all that more interesting when he and the PCs are the last survivers of the demon-owl's attacks.
Horror is a difficult subject for a role playing game because it is caught between two different points. On one hand, you may really want to scare the players. On the other hand, you want to have a fun time playing a game. If you sit there and describe every creak and shuffle in the dark, there won't be much in the way of dice rolling, as they would detract from the mood. But if a character is attacked by skeletons, or everyone has to make a lot of Fight Checks, the sound of the clattering dice and the pause before you say, "You fail the Fright Check, you're stunned for two turns" takes away from the scary setting. Of course, you may be having fun in this different type of setting with the usual die roll. It really is up to the GM and his players to set their own story.
A very good way to combine the two, on the other hand, would be to do pure role playing for long stretches of time (even if a character trips over a corpse, don't make a Fright Check, no matter how tempting, simply have the player role play how his character would react). Then, when the role playing is done and dice rolls are called for, switch to that mode until the zombie is vanquished, or whatever.
The best Horror game I had the pleasure to play involved all the characters as teenagers in a mall. They worked at a video rental store and were all into horror movies, except for a pretentious NPC named Rebecca (who insisted on being called "Becky"). The whole beginning of the game simply involved the characters role playing and interacting with everyone else up until the mall closed. At that point, Becky went home as the sky got dark. All the characters had planned on watching horror movies in the store (since they had the keys) and having fun since it was Friday. That was when the weirdness began, but the role playing continued. Becky's tires had been slashed and as the characters went to look at the car to her pleas, a funny animal was spotted scampering about from car to car. It was too hard to see because it was getting dark... could it be a cat? A dog? My character isisted it was a badger, "Watch out, they have bad tempers!" It was nothing any of us thought they would ever see...
So, have fun, and make it scary!