Hello fellow Gamemasters!

I'll be running a horror adventure soon in which the player characters will have to unravel the mysteries of an abandoned theater with a tragic past. The place is going to be filled with stressful moments such as seeing spirits, hearing noises, things moving without anything there etc. I want the adventure to be a rather stressful experience, both for the players but also for the characters!

Gaining stress is a good way to represent the player characters slowly getting more and more distressed, but would this work in an adventure such as this? The rulebook says you recover from stress whenever you finish an encounter - example encounters in my adventure would be a battle with skeleton actors as well as some entaglements with angry spirits. It makes no sense that you suddenly recover stress after one of these encounters are over. They are still in a haunted building and have encountered something terrible after all!

I'm also thinking about forcing the players to take Discipline checks when something really strange happens, such as seeing spirits for the first time, or hearing voices. If they fail, they gain one stress.

So how would you handle stress in this adventure? Should I just not allow stress to be recovered until they are out of the building? Or perhaps ask for a Discipline check each time they should recover stress, and if they are successful, they recover one stress for each success?

Would love to hear how you guys and girls would handle this!

I'd think about running it as a series of acts, with Rally Steps in between each bit, instead. Perhaps have some pre-set stages that the PCs can reach which act as encounter-ends for the purpose of de-stressing. But certainly, if they're still inside a spooky place they shouldn't recover their stress until they leave or reach significant events.

A simple way to do it under the rules if you care about such things is simply write a location: 'Haunted Theatre - A PC does not recover stress except through the Rally Step, until he leaves this location.'

Fwiw, I wrote a similar sort of spooky happening table for a similar sort of adventure:

Vague Creepy Response
Basic
Intuiton (Int)
Used by: PCs
Effect: Everyone witnessing the vague supernatural event can test to see how it has affected them.
Special: The GM can add extra Challenge or Misfortune dice at his discretion
Axe: Something is noticed and the vague supernatural-ness gleaned
Axe Axe Axe: The weirdness is very clear and the character can get some insight into its nature
Boon: A supernatural detail is noticed
Bane: Hairs on the back of the neck stand up, 1 Stress
Bane: A funny feeling it might be one of the others, 1 Party Tension
Bane: Heebie geebies, stunned for 1 round
Chaos Star: Spooky! Character must make a Fear 2 test
Chaos Star Chaos Star: Oh My Sigmar! Character must make a Terror 3 test

I'd love to see this haunted adventure.

Another thing you could do is give them a certain amount of permanent stress points while they're in the theater, like maybe 2 stress points. So, even when they recover stress after an encounter, they can't get rid of those permanent stress points. I think that's how I'd handle it.

Thanks for the replies everyone! I'm not yet 100% sure how I'll handle it but you have given me quite afew things to think about!

Sinister: I'm afraid the adventure is in swedish!