I have just finished a two game scenario where the players found one of the Katana fleet dreadnoughts (the nav computers were wiped when they first went to hyperspace and after a set time the hyperdrive blew up and took the coms out with it).

So the players decide to poke around and went to the bridge via one of the emergency exits and stumble on a cross between Event Horizon and a Warhammer 40K Choas ship. It turns out that after a few months with no hope of rescue military discipline broke down and it turned into small factions and petty fiefdoms.

It made the players realise they were very reliant on technology and how would they react if they found themselves stranded in space with no hope of rescue?

I like both of the above posts and the ideas within. May I shamelessly steal them, pretty please?

Great stuff guys, thanks a lot!

Here's an old thread about SW horror for Halloween:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/188419-horror-game-ideas-for-halloween/page-4?hl=halloween

If you really want some horror stories for the Space Opera genre, take a look at 'Mass Effect'. The games shamelessly borrow from Star Wars and so it's no crime to steal some stuff back. Off the top of my head, I can think of loads of good scenarios to borrow, most of them not even relying on the Force:

- the characters find a ship abandoned in space, with the crew missing and one crewman brain-dead on life-support. They are being hunted by something sinister; eventually finding the ship's logs, they discover that it's the wife of the man on life-support. The other crew knew he was clinically dead and wanted to turn him off; his wife - a powerful Force user - objected by killing them all and now 'protects' her dead love zealously. SHe's not only powerful but also knows every inch of the ship...

- some corporation opens a place called 'Sanctuary' to help those displaced and homeless after the galactic civil war. Unfortunately, it's all a front for performing horrible scientific experiments on the refugees...

- the droids at a research facility have turned murderous and nobody knows why. Running a gauntlet of creepy situations involving dead meatbags, the characters discover the lead scientist had wired up his autistic brother to a central droid control system, using the 'Speaks Binary' prodigy to network all the robots. Unfortunately, his poor treatment drove him insane. The brother, David, is an innocent man abused by his mistreatment and ideally the characters want to save him, not kill him.

- an attractive middle-aged rutian twi'lek Jedi asks the players for help in tracking down an apprentice turned serial killer. The student is addicted to feeding on the energies of her murder victims. As a complication, they learn that the student is also the Jedi's daughter...

These all off the top of my head. The loyalty missions for Jacob, Mordin, Garrus, Jack and Miranda all have very Star Wars-y elements and significant horror that is either supernatural or man-made in nature. The Reaper Ship mission is very Lovecraftian while still being firmly in the Space Opera genre.

I've actually done the droid amok run in the past in WEG. It was rather interesting because the party had a very principled MD droid whose poor little droid brain was blown by such gross violation of core programming from other droids. It made what could have been impersonal and just creepy into a very personal horror trip, which I didn't expect going in. But many, many props to the player for really getting into it like that and amping up the panic

I've actually done the droid amok run in the past in WEG. It was rather interesting because the party had a very principled MD droid whose poor little droid brain was blown by such gross violation of core programming from other droids. It made what could have been impersonal and just creepy into a very personal horror trip, which I didn't expect going in. But many, many props to the player for really getting into it like that and amping up the panic

Iplayed the droid like the Xenomorph in alien. Always hiding offscreen in the ducts and side corrodors, cutting the light (he had remote control) and picking the NPC's off one at a time. My players had some NPC' crew. Let's say they had to hire some work back at port after the litle rogue asteroid incident. They were a smuggling crew with an Action VI transport. I think I'll do that adventure again someday with the new rule system...

Call me a purist, but I very much disagree with the idea of trying to put horror in Star Wars.

Fear is of course an integral part of the genre and is absolutely necessary--you can't have stakes if nobody's afraid of the bad guy--but actual horror is all about being rendered powerless, whether physically or mentally, and that runs pretty counter to the romantic heroism at the core of Star Wars.

If that seems confusing, here's an example:

In Empire Strikes Back , Luke finds himself face to face with Darth Vader. This is the monster who murdered his father, his mentor, and his best friend. This is the creature who captured and tortured his friends just to lure him out. This is the Dark Lord of the Empire. Luke should and on some level probably is terrified, but he still puts on a brave face and draws his lightsaber to face Vader.

In a horror situation, Luke wouldn't have had the saber. His only real option would have been to flee like a cluefree college kid from a slasher villain.

Horror is the feeling that comes when you are stripped of the agency to act on your fear. Star Wars revolves around characters who are afraid but rise to the challenge and act in spite of their fear. The two don't really blend together.

I don't agree that horror has to always require total helplessness of the protagonists. Providing the PCs have some doubts and weaknesses, actually fighting back is an option in horror scenarios. It would be hard to argue that Resident Evil wasn't horror, and here the heroes fight, and win.

HP Lovecraft certainly emphasised helplessness in his stories (with the exception of Dunwich Horror, in which the heroes battle the monsters and kill them) but - say - Brian Lumley's take on the Lovecraft Mythos was to have meaningful protagonists (like the sorcerer Titus Crow) who were able to take on the Mythos and beat it.

And there's personal horror too. If Force and Destiny deals with the extremes of one's behaviour, that has potential for player-driven horror. As I mentioned above, on the Beta adventure, my players had weapons and Force powers, and they ended up taking the Freddy Kreuger role against their would-be tormentors, picking up on all the creepy 'Shining' vibes the resort was giving them. One of them really fought it. You could say that their victims deserved it to some degree, but it was still an intense and unsettling reversal for the players, a grim reminder of how powerful they really are compared to mundanes.

After 'Debts to Pay', the party didn't really see droids as helpless victims any more, and some even distrusted their droid friend. Seriously a horror scenario for the droid player, whose impassioned exhortations to her fellow robots fell on deaf ears. This wasn't just droids being programmed to fight against their will, it was droids making a conscious moral choice to do evil. Quite creepy.

Then there's the horrors of war. As great as they are, the movies tend to gloss over the loss of Alderaan, or what it means to kill lots of living people by blowing up the Death Star. I wouldn't personally let the latter be trivialised if it came up in play - that sort of decision would surely haunt you, like the pilot who dropped the atom bomb on Nagasaki. Sure, the Death Star had to be destroyed, but that doesn't change the fact that you're now a mass murderer.

The struggle to fight a just war (against foes who have absolutely no compulsion to do so) is a central theme of our AOR game. Of course, Lucas wasn't telling that sort of story, and that's perfectly fine; you can play the FFG game that way and gloss over all the hard choices. But it's not wrong to bring these things up in a game for adults either. My players aren't kids anymore and it's legitimate for them to question the wisdom of, say, blowing up such a huge structure over Endor...

I agree that the "PCs are helpless victims" angle of horror wouldn't work for a Star Wars adventure. The PCs are a cut above the galactic norm in multiple ways. So when faced with something that would leave your ordinary person a quivering/gibbering wreck, the PCs should have the opportunity to punch Cthulhu in the face; doesn't mean they won't break their arms in the process, but they can at least take a swing at his tentacled puss.

While it's really more of an action movie, Aliens is a decent example of a horror film where the protaganists are fully capable of fighting back, being heavily armed and combat-capable, a stark contrast to the cast of the first Alien (which itself was more of a haunted house style of horror story).

There's also Predator and Predator II, in which the main villain is effectively a slasher movie villain, but the protaganists are once again fully capable of fighting the bad guy and potentially winning, especially once the Predator's visual camo effect got neutralized.

Over on the Force and Destiny section, a poster suggested an encounter idea with an Inquisitor using the Misdirect power with the Duration Upgrade to hound and harass one of the PCs, which itself would be a horror-themed encounter.

But as I noted earlier, doing a purely horror-themed campaign in Star Wars is very difficult, mostly as the people playing Star Wars have a general notion of what the setting and be extension the adventures undertaken in that setting should entail. The occasional foray into horror can work, as the experiences of Maelora's group with "Debts to Pay" illustrates, but the core elements of horror are such that they don't really mesh that well with the core elements of Star Wars.

So when faced with something that would leave your ordinary person a quivering/gibbering wreck, the PCs should have the opportunity to punch Cthulhu in the face; doesn't mean they won't break their arms in the process, but they can at least take a swing at his tentacled puss.

There's just something magical about the phrasing here. Sterling Archer would be proud.

That said, my thought for the day regarding this: Star Wars has flame projectors. It is well known scientific fact that flame projectors are the bane of anything creepy, crawly, and/or terrifying.

To be fair, the inimical part of building horror is to take that which is expected and normal to the viewer and change it to something sinister and unexpected. This has nothing to do with the inherent power or powerlessness of the viewer - rather it is the act of removing one from their place of safety. Rather than speak to the power of the protagonist or viewer it is more appropriate to speak of the viewers exposure.

While some use the removal of defenses and protection to evoke this, it certainly isn't the only way. Alien, for example, had a capable and able protagonist engaging the unknown. The terrifying aspect of this was the ease with which the monster evaded confrontation until it chose to reveal itself. You never got to prepare for it, so it was always a scenario of quick wits and skill to survive. Ripley was never powerless, but was instead pushed to the very edge of her power. The horror of it was that she was not able to control the situation - that she was forced to react. She was required to exert her power outside of her comfort zone, and through this grow in capability and power.

I think this is the greatest advantage of horror in the Star Wars setting is the ability it has to grow the characters in maturity. While the adventure I did for Halloween was far more about tongue in cheek samhain fun, I have often introduced more contemporary horror scenarios into my games.