Somewhere in the Core Book it advises GMs to avoid 'non Star Wars' elements like horror.

I think the idea of a horror based adventure or at least some horror elements cropping up to be a great addition to the genre. Anyone feel the same.

I have a denizen of some old mining tunnels that is absolutely a horror type monster and I plan to run it that way. Doesnt seem out of Star Wars character to me.

Thoughts?

Isn't that the Prequels? .................****runs for the exit****!!

^Hilarity.

@OP: It's not. The Siege of Lothal in Rebels treats Vader much like a classic horror movie monster, for example. Then you have a flora and fauna throughout the galaxy that may well be from the imagination of HP Lovecraft doing lines of cocaine with Frank Herbert. The important thing about horror is to remember that there are plot elements in Star Wars that work well with it, especially the dark side and relentless psycho-killers like, oh, IG-88 or Vader, and elements where it doesn't fit at all. You could easily put in some System Shock/HAL 9000 shehanigans into the setting without breaking it, too. Equally, what you're planning works perfectly well regardless of setting. The PHB doesn't (and shouldn't) have all the answers. You know best what works for your group

Look up GM Dave's Ice Station Zulu. While yes on average horror is not a good idea. I think you can do horror occasionally.

Aren't there a pair of Star Wars horror novels?

Red Harvest and Death Troopers are the most current ones. Horror's been a thing in SW almost from the get-go, though. Arguably, books as early as Splinter of the Mind's Eye contain horror elements, even if they're not full-blown horror stories.

Horror elements, yes! Zombies, may the force forbid it no!

Believe me, nothing can ruin the game faster for some players, than introducing zombies. If you want horror in star wars do somethig like this.

Though ancient sith "cyborg-skeletons" are also a nice addition to any sith lords tomb or an ancient Sith beast, that stalks their expedition on a small moon. But never introduce something like Xenomorphs or a Zombie plague. In the long run, your players will probably leave because of stuff like that. They came to play Star Wars, not the Call of Sithulhu. Horror as an element is okay, but it should never be the main focus.

Of course if your players want something like this, do it, but if they never aksed about it and you start introducing it... well then I can't guarantee for the game.

Sorry if I come across as overly defensive, I once ran that adventure I linked, and it pissed one of my players right off. That was back in the WEG days. And we hated the Zombies novels.

Another thing was when an Ex-GM of us was introducing horror elements from Shadowrun...

I could see the body horror and transhumanist stuff working in Star Wars as long as you don't go overboard with it. Cybernetic lobotomies to increase productivity come to mind (There's a Rebels episode that touches on that, come to think). I'm assuming you mean the Cthulu-stuff, though? 'cause THAT I wouldn't run in Star Wars either. God forbid! It does sound like an amusing story, though...

Short answer: "Yes, the game is your canvas - paint what you love".

Slightly longer answer: Certainly, but I would suggest you work WITH the system as much as possible. It's a system designed for action games and the PCs are capable of some very impressive things. Whatever style of horror you work to create, it will need to accommodate the fact that the PCs are gun-toting, speeder bike riding heroes. And the players will need to mentally adjust to horror or things could go horribly wrong. For example...

You: "A dark creature the size of a speeder slithers up out of the water, it has one central eye yellow and unblinking, its body a damp brown sack of tentacles..."

Player in Call of Cthulhu game: "Eek! An inhuman monster - I try to run."

Player in Edge of Empire game: "Our next combat! I shoot it with my repeating blaster."

The point is not that the player in EotE has a repeating blaster, the point is that they think this is a fight scene. The monster might be entirely immune to blaster fire for all we know - doesn't matter, the PC thinks this is a combat.

So you're going to need to clue the players in about what sort of adventure this is. Now you can do that explicitly by telling them: "this will be a horror game". Or you can sneak it up on them by playing with their expectations. E.g. I am giving them level appropriate enemies - they're at war with some enemy force, but something is picking apart factions on both sides with apparent ease. Predator style in a way. Now they know that whatever is out there is way more dangerous than those squads of enemy soldiers that are out there and have to work on the mystery of what is happening, rather than just think "new monster - combat".

All this assumes that you're meaning actual Horror, not just gore and zombies (which I personally find very dull). Also, to the poster that said you shouldn't do Xenomorphs in EotE:

http://1drv.ms/1FwDLTV

You can, you just need a good grasp of the rules. For example, I did two versions of them to reflect Alien and Aliens. The first is a slinking horror. If anyone has ever played Alien: Isolation (terrifying, brilliant game), that's what it's meant to be like. The second is actually a minion. A minion? For the xenomorphs???!!? Well actually, yes. As I say, it's about having a good feel for the rules. Minion doesn't mean weak, it means generic. Now that correlates, because the weakest opposition in Star Wars are usually faceless goons. But it's not what it's about - Minion status is a GM tool to streamline multiple opponents who are all the same. The Minion version of the Xenomorph has plenty high Soak, but normallish WT for a Minion. What that means is that they're hard to hurt (like Vasquez shooting at one with her pistol in the air vents), but they're either alive or they're dead (more or less). Which is what you want when you're running an ambush scenario with them. Nemesis status is as much about letting things escape, have moments of dramatic glory (fighting on with a broken arm), than it is about power per se.

So with the above you could do both Alien and Aliens, just with minor adjustment of how you implement them. I'm not saying do Alien(s) for your game, btw. I'm just illustrating the nuances in the rules you take advantage of when you're doing a horror game depending on what you want.

Also, don't forget there are Fear rules in EotE. They're core and you're supposed to use them, but most people overlook them and forget about them. If you're going for Horror, it's pretty much a must.

If you've browsed the forum in the second half of october, you'd have got the impression every other GM had been scrounging Halloween Special ideas from each other. I presume everybody, my players included, had a lot of fun.

I believe you're referring to the sidebar on p294: "[...] The GM should limit or avoid plots that run counter to expectations. Horror, for instance, is not normally a part of the core Star Wars experience. Gruesome scenes explained in graphic detail are not expected. That isn't to say they could never be used-there are occasional graphic moments in the movies-but they should not be the norm. [...]"

To put it short: Once in a while is OK, just don't overdo it! E.g., Entering an ancient Sith tomb or temple without Horror would be just lame, wouldn't it?

And, I have to agree to Knasser (sometimes we don't, very passionately even), the Fear rules do scream for a horrific encounter now and then.

I use the fear rules not only for creatures, but also for the horror of the battlefield. Let's say your players just finished their mission to destroy a slave convoys escort, when suddenly an Immobilizer jumps into the system, complete with an ISD escort. Now let them do a fear check, this is where squadron leader talents shine.

As to KnasserII I agree that the basic concept of Alien and Aliens could work... but I eant it literal: Leave the Xenomorph at home.

I would personally leave the table at once, if someone introduces something from another franchise. I really like Alien, I really, REALLY do! But it and Star Wars don't mix well imo.

Back three years a player using the old WEG D6 system at a con invited me to play and I happily agreed. Then halfway through the game I left when he started introducing the Borg.

If you specifically want to do such a crossover, then warn your players beforehand.

...that's kind of awesome on a macabre level. I mean, the old EU introduced Tyranids, but the Borg is a new one

General advice when running a horror scenario, though:

Never, ever name your monster. Describe it, be vague about it, depict tricks of the light and illusions of the mind's eye as "real". If you've ever been out in the woods or in a bad part of town in the middle of the night, you know this already: The mind plays tricks on you. Your eyes will see things that aren't there. You'll get the feeling you're being watched when the street is completely empty. Those rare lit windows will start to look like eyes, watching your every step.

(In a very memorable DSA session, I had my players fight a...Moorleiche? Basically a corpse preserved by a bog that was entirely mundane and inanimate, which they found out the next morning when things looked normal again. In the middle of the night, though, their own movements made it look like the thing was moving )

Which actually brings me to another thing: Build preconceptions sometimes. The unknown horror can be effective, but the suspense, the scare comes from having this vague idea something is out there. If you know a part of town has gang violence, you may expect to be jumped and look at things with more fear and trepedition. If you know a swamp has undead, that branch over there might look like an arm. Even when not leading to a horror scenario, a bit of world-building about local legends and ghost stories or whatnot else never hurts either. It makes a planet seem more alive ^^

I think you can certainly have monsters and such and highlight the terror of a situation, but to me there is a difference between Horror compared with Fear/Terror, and I don't mean mechanics. To me Horror is more of a kind of Fear or Terror that implies the unknown.

In Star Wars between the 20,000 years of hyperspace and 'I've flown from one end of this galaxy to the other' kind of experience level of people, Star Wars just doesn't illicit that unknown/unexplored feeling for me. You can insert it into the genre for sure, but at the end of the day that just feels like something that doesn't fit has been plugged in. It just doesn't feel like Star Wars.

Agreed. It's a common problem in most settings, actually. It means you have to take something known and figure out how to use it to creep your players (and by extension their characters) out with it. I think it's perfectly fine to cheat a bit there, dim the lighting and put on some creepy music or start the session outside at midnight by the campfire. If you think about it, though, sometimes, something is scary because we know exactly what it is, but it just freaks us out. To do that, you kind of need to know your group rather well, though, and which buttons to push.

Horror can be a tricky thing to pull off, especially on a consistent basis.

But that doesn't mean it can't be done in Star Wars. Way back in the Saga Edition days, GM Chris ran an adventure for his Alternate Universe campaign that had the PCs essentially trapped on a space station near Taris, and having to deal with rakghouls (who themselves are very much like zombies with some extra body horror tossed in). And his players were pretty freaked out, especially his wife whose PC was trying (in vain) to treat someone that was in the final stages of infection. I ran a similar adventure for a group of friends, and they were also freaked out, with some definite panic and concern in their expressions and voices as their characters (who'd they'd been playing for several adventures already, so they'd grown attached to them) tried to hurriedly escape veritable zerg rush of rakghouls.

As noted, the novel Death Troopers generally does a pretty good job of being a horror story set in the Star Wars universe, with the major negative (for me) being that the presence of two "guest characters" nerfs a lot of the suspense since you know those two are going to survive the book's events.

Even from the films, the Rancor was something of a horror monster, being so much larger and monstrous than our hero Luke, who was stuck in the beast's lair without his primary weapon and potentially could have been killed were it not for some quick-thinking (and the power of plot being on his side).

Just be sure not to confuse "horror" with "gore," which sadly is something a lot of modern so-called horror films have done, settling for making the audience nauseous instead of actually being scared. As Alfred Hitchcock once said, "the terror is not in the bang, but in the anticipation of the bang."

Interestingly enough, all of the popular "don't go there" scenarios here (Xenomorphs, zombies, borg) are all subversion entities. The terror comes from their "one of us, one of us" power. I don't have a particular point, I just think that's interesting.

I think that's secondary to the familiarity effect. They're so well-known they're instantly recognisable as something foreign and out of place. I think you could do the subversion horror with the Sith or even the Jedi, though.

I think that's secondary to the familiarity effect. They're so well-known they're instantly recognisable as something foreign and out of place. I think you could do the subversion horror with the Sith or even the Jedi, though.

True enough. Depends on how you wrap it. I played in an old d20 campaign that involved Borg knock-offs - an Imperial R&D officer went off the deep-end working on a cybernetics program. He ended up slaving the neural implants to a droid controller built off schematics of the old CIS models. The intelligence behind the droid controller started spreading itself by 'acquiring' new subjects from the research staff. Our games tend to tiptoe around heavy use of the Force, since the Sith/Jedi thing tends to get overdone and overshadows a lot of stuff.

All things considered though, I have to agree. You have to change enough to make it a new thing, even if it is heavily inspired by another franchise.

SWTOR has several horror moments. Ancient Rakata technology is quite creepy.

Somewhere in the Core Book it advises GMs to avoid 'non Star Wars' elements like horror.

Meh, FFG hardly follow their own guidelines. The adventure that comes in the GM's screen is a straight-up horror scenario. The players investigate a creepy station where everyone has been horribly murdered, except the droids, who are whistling innocently. In some cases, the dead bodies have even been arranged in dioramas, which is about as macabre as it gets. It was an interesting scenario for our resident 'droid rights' character.

There's all kinds of horror inherent in some scenarios - Cratala experimenting on nexu in 'Beyond the Rim', the entirety of the adventure in the F&D Beta was pretty creepy.

And there's all kinds of horror - in the F&D Beta adventure, the female PCs were sent on a vacation to a holiday lodge on the outer rim, a crumbling and deserted resort right out of 'The Shining'. The other guests were all young, good-looking guys; after some flirting (and more), they decided to hunt the PCs like some 1980's slasher flick. Unfortunately they didn't have lightsabers and Force powers; the PCs did, and decided to hunt them, picking up on all the disturbing vibes the place was giving them, and dispatched them in ever more gruesome ways. So sometimes the horror comes from the PCs (some of whom have fairly creepy backstories, like the bounty hunter who lost control of her powers as a girl at an Alliance training base, killed everyone telekinetically and supressed both the memory and her Force powers, now believing she is 'possessed by demons'...)

As a girl, I used to read 'Misty' (a horror comic for girls) and the Star Wars monthly. The latter had several very unsettling stories (set after ESB, Lando was prominent) as I remember. There was the Cody Sun-Child story which stays with me even today, and another creepy one where the 'big bad monster' was a little monkey with a skull for a head, which basically mind-raped its victims with horrible illusions. Anyone else remember these? This was all well before WEG or the EU.

Anyway, horror is no more or less suited to the game than any other genre. You're not restricted to PG13 unless you want to be. We play a very 'grindhouse' universe while still trying to keep to the essential themes and motifs of the films, just with a harder edge because we're not kids any more. As long as you get your players on board and don't directly plagiarize from obvious sources, it should work fine.

Hidden Depths has the makings of a horror story, too, if you count the giant spiders and the hallucinations visions.

Your the GM, write the stories you want to write, as long as you're fairly sure they're also stories your players will enjoy playing.

I've written stories that are Horror, Western, Cheesy(er) sci fi, vigilante justice, whatever. As long as everybody is having a good time just write your story.

Got one sentence rakghouls on a creepy derelict ship sending out a distress signal. You want horror use the monsters of star wars oh and enter the unknown gives some tips on some techniques.

Maelora,

Good point about "Debts to Pay" (the EotE GM Kit adventure). I ran it for my FaD group, and there was certainly a horror feel to the adventure, including freaking out the PCs when the badly decomposed body of one of the miners surfaced in the oil bath.

Yes, good point Donovan. I ran it with my 'light-hearted scoundrels' group and it freaked them out what happened to the 'meatbags'.

I'd been running the whole 'droids are a poor oppressed minority' angle pretty strongly for a while and this turned it on it's head. There was even some distrust of their droid friend after that.

It's a good, effective horror scenario, because it defies expectations and relies on an unsettling atmosphere rather than just blood and gore.

The genre isn't totally inimical to Star Wars - I remember I winced when Luke cut Vader's head off and saw his own face...