Lost Anchorage - A Retrospective on D&D Horror

 

My intention was to run a pirate ghost story but not your standard Flying Dutchmen ghost story. How I got there was a bit convoluted , while doing the world building research for the D&D Pirate campaign, I read a lot of books on the 17th century Caribbean and one of the stories that particularly caught my attention was the 1692 earthquake that destroyed Port Royal, one of the principle ports of the region. The first hand accounts were chilling and epic, and all I kept thinking was "can you imagine the ghosts all that must have created? And thus the seed was planted.

It also seemed like a great way to start to introduce some of the Shadowlands concepts that I was homebrewing, in addition to some of the backstory for the long dead Empire of Annwyn, both subjects that were going to play a major role in the campaign. 

And so the former Imperial port of Lost Anchorage was born. Cold, desolate, remote and abandoned, well off the major shipping lanes, a haven of last resort for a ship blown way off course by a huge storm. And haunted to hell and back.

The Lost Anchorage story arc ran over the course of 3 months and 8 x four hour sessions. I think it came out pretty well but I also learned a LOT running it, especially about running horror themed D&D campaigns. 

The purpose of this retrospective is to share with other perspective DM's what worked, what didn't and what sources I found useful

Once I decided to do a ghost story, I started researching the narrative structure and other storytelling techniques for such. There are some really excellent sources out there, the best I found was Heroes of Horror by Watt. Marmell and Suleiman. This book doesn't seem to be available for purchase anymore so I think there is no harm in saying it's available as pdf if you look for it. If all you do to prep for a horror campaign is read this one book you won't go too far wrong. 

Note this campaign was penned prior to the Ravenloft source. I have since bought that source book and found it far inferior to Heroes of Horror (except in places where it more or less directly plagiarizes the earlier source book). So don't think of Ravenloft as a substitute, or even as a particularly good source. 

The first thing I learned reading these books was that horror and TTRPG's are a hard thing to pull off well. The nature of table top gaming is social and irreverent, and my group is a humorous bunch. Humor is the enemy of horror. We were also playing this during the height of Covid, the remote setting did not help, it takes away a lot of the control a DM has over atmospheric elements like lighting and background music for instance, and also limits the impact of terrain builds. The last couple sessions of this game were played in person and were noticeably more effective.  

So basically I was not setting myself up for an easy task.

Counterintuitively I found while doing research that the screenwriting articles were generally more helpful then novel writing. A couple of theories about why this might be true, screenwriting pays a lot more attention to things like pacing, ambience, lighting, etc, the length of a feature film fits better into a D&D session and especially the 9 act feature film narrative structure seems to be a more natural match for the flow of an RPG story arc.

Here are two of my favorite articles that really changed how I built this campaign

- A simple overview of the 9 act structure

- Really good article on Horror Pacing, which is one of the most divergent and difficult elements of horror story telling. 

Also during my research it became obvious that just saying "horror" wasn't enough, what kind of horror? There are many kinds of horror stories. Since Annwyn very specifically had a Regency mood and theme, Gothic Horror seemed like the most natural match. I took heavy inspiration from the usual suspects here, Shelly, Byron, Poe, etc but Dante's Inferno and Emily Bronte / Wuthering Heights also snuck in there a good bit as well. Also there is more then a little Tim Powers crawling around in the underneath of some of these characters. 

But I blame Emily Bronte for how I ended up with a strong flawed female lead, and ended up telling a parallel story about the Lady Ophelia and how she was not very pleased with the role her society had assigned to her in life. I.E. look pretty, marry who we tell you to, and have lots of boy babies for the Empire. 

Which brings up I think the most important point for horror. The antagonists are not evil per se they are flawed. They are complicated. They slide down a slippery slope of doing bad things for complicated reasons. Spend time on your characters. Make them interesting and nuanced, in this style of story more then any. 

At this point I sat down and started building the physical setting for Lost Anchorage. It may seem strange to start building the set before you have more then a rudimentary idea of the story you want to tell, bit it turns out it makes a surprising amount of sense. 

For one thing, it takes a LONG time to put a complex set together so in a way you have plenty of time to design the story while you do it. Ten major buildings, three ships and two copies of most of those (ruined and not-ruined), plus tons of ghosts and skeleton pirates and other things that go bump in the light. And then the whole forest build. Took a couple months to paint it all even though I outsourced some of it to a buddy who is a far better painter then me.

The thing that I did horribly totally utterly wrong was to not pay much attention to lighting until near the end. Sweet baby Jesus that was so so dumb. Don't be dumb like me. Buy some external colored light panels a spotlight and some led's for inside the terrain build. There are a bunch of videos out there on how to do it and trust me it’s a game changer.

However another really interesting things I and several other people have noticed is the extent to which scenery can drive story and vice versa when planning campaigns. I think this is almost a unique thing with regards to TTRP, since it alone of the various narrative forms combines the physical scenery and story creation inside the head of the author.  

Trolling through the various sites for buying scenery, painting it, decorating it mixing and matching, the story grows as the town grows, all intertwined not at all independently. "Who lives in this tower I wonder? What happened to this church?"

One big ah-ha moment that came directly from the scenery was the concept of the town's transition from a ruined state to a whole state, illustrating the PC's gradually falling more and more into the Shadoworld. The idea that buildings and whole cities can leave ghosts of themselves in the land of the dead is not a new one (going back at least to ancient Egypt). But it didn't really click that I could leverage that mechanic until I ran across several 3D prints that had both ruined and non-ruined versions.

 

"Oh boy I can do that pretty much everywhere!" I thought and one of the major story points was born.

At this point we have the major skeleton of the plot.

And as the town took shape the story took shape

Another element that really helped this all jell was music. I often try to introduce variety in each major story arc I run, even inside the same campaign. Dungeon of Doom was clearly a tactical puzzle solver.  Hightower  Bay was more of pulp adventure with a dash of slapstick. Lost Anchorage is Gothic Horror. I generally listen to music that matches the theme while designing the adventure, and it really helps me maintain a mood. 

I've often struggled with how to introduce this music effectively into the actual game. I've had some limited success with background soundtracks but it's been disappointing overall. While, putting together the first chapter (On the Heels of a Storm) I need a dream sequence scene that provided some clues, backstory and foreshadowing and it occurred to me "maybe this could be a video"? Turned out it could and it worked rather well.

Note, I generally send these videos out in-between sessions, as I don't want to interrupt the flow during actual gameplay. They work great as dreams or visions and also help remind people wth is going on in between sessions (since we only play every two weeks).

In general I think this was one of the most successful experiments. 

Playlist of videos here

I experimented some with spoken narrative as a video as well, we have a player who is a great voice actor. But that seemed to be overall less effective, my players are fast readers and prefer to just consume the wall of text directly. Still for some groups that might be a good idea.

One of the things that video + music + scenery really solidified was the emotional themes I was trying to convey. And low and behold it turned out my subconscious may have been up to some hijinks during that whole process. This campaign was created and run during the depths of the pandemic as a means for myself and my friends to not go insane.  After the whole thing was over and I shared some of all this with an artistic friend of mine, she said 

    "So you decided to make a D&D campaign about how the pandemic made you feel"

    "Uh no."

    "So your major themes are sadness, loneliness, isolation, darkness, death and abandonment right?"

    "Uh. Yes?"

    "You actually BUILT an empty abandoned ghost city in your basement. You were complaining just yesterday about how empty and abandoned San Francisco feels?"

    "Uh"

Ok so point taken. Minds are tricky things.

Even with all these tools horror is HARD and we only rarely achieved it during these sessions. So I am an engineer and one thing we learn is if you suspect failure will be common, plan on how to fail gracefully. An acceptable failure state for horror is mystery. They go well together and mystery solving is very easy and natural for table top and core to most groups. If you lose the mood or start to devolve into, god help you, comedy, fall back on the mystery. Retrench and try again later. 

The way I talk about comedy you probably think I am super serious and hate a joke. It’s not that , you can be funny in games and you can even be funny in serious games. But what you can’t do is be funny in horror games and still have them be horror games unless you are very very careful.

The pacing article explains this pretty well. One of the goals of the storyteller in a horror game is to manage tension. Comedy relieves tension. So they only place it fits is when you want the tension relieved. Which is rarely (though not never as constantly ratcheting tension isn’t sustainable either). If I had one do-over I would have explicitly had that conversation with my players and then asked them “do you even want to play a horror game given this”. Hindsight , 20-20

Alright so now that we have the general feeling and an idea of the plot and characters, how to structure it? 

One call out is horrors game tend to be more linear then most. There is general a Bad Thing Out There with an agenda and a timeline. The tension game discourages sandboxes and side quests. The environment is generally so fucked up that if your players had a choice they would just leave.

That doesn’t mean that you settle for a game on rails but it does mean that you need to think carefully about how you are going to introduce choices and branches that actually matter. 

I heavily used the nine act structure linked above and then I thought very specifically about how branches and choices could be supported in each Act. I'll walk through each act and show how the story flowed and how well the nine act structure works. Here I will lightly summarize, but if you want the details you can read the individual blog entries linked.

Act 0: Someone Toils Deep into the Night - The Parallel Narrative

Lost Anchorage is two narratives. The first is the story the PC's are living through. The second is the events of 500 years ago that led to the destruction of the town, and the stories of three major characters that experienced those events. The second narrative explains the "bad guys" though really there aren't any in this story there are only flawed-guys. Even the Big Bad at the End isn't so much bad as harmful-for-humans.

The nucleus of the parallel narrative was inspired by a painting and the story behind it, called "The Unequal Marriage" by Vasili Vladimirovich Pukirev.  Pukirev appears at the far right of the canvas (possibly as best man), giving rise to the story that it represented an episode of lost love in his own life.

Whenever I look at that painting, I think of what that young woman was feeling and how pissed off she probably was underneath that calm demenour. Mix in a little Wuthering Heights and that is where the Admiral and Darcy and Ophelia love triangle came from.

The parallel story is gradually revealed in two ways, one through visions and dreams that Ophelia and Darcy are channeling to the PC's (represented as short music videos). The second is through a series of three journal entries the PC's discover through the course of the adventure. 

Understanding of these characters is tested at the conclusion of the campaign and provided a major plot fork, are the PC's going to fight the end boss, or the end boss and a relatively powerful wizard and warlock (Darcy and Ophelia)?

Act 1: Open with an establishing shot. On The Heels of a Storm

One of the places where real terrain builds really help is setting the stage. I could spend ten minutes describing the ruins and it wouldn't work half as good as the shot above or this one

Act 2: Something Bad Happens: On the Heels of a storm

This was the act that establishing the seriousness of the threat and quickly ratchetting up tension. The heroes explored the ruined town and discover that resupplying their ship was going to be more difficult then anticipated. I also directly attacked something they loved, taking the NPC cleric / safety blanket off the board for most of the adventure. I tried to employ both the advice on pacing and also much of the excellent foreshadowing and creepy occurrence advice from Heroes of Horror

While I don't it out in each chapter, that list of "random creepy shit happening" in the Heroes of Horror book is golden. I used it continually, every time i wanted to build some tension.

Act 3: Meet the Hero: Wist with the living dead. 

In a movie this would establish the principle protagonist and his/her bonafides. However in a D&D campaign the principle protagonist are the PC's and they already know who they are. I chose to use this act to remind the PC's of their heroic nature by giving them a challenge to overcome. A challenge that also revealed elements of backstory and the overarching narrative. 

Act IV: Commitment - Shadows Lengthen

The PC's start to learn and little of how the town works, and realize that in order to accomplish their goal (resupply their ship) they will have to interact with the various spirits of the town. 

They realize they really need to dig in to the ghosts that live here if they are going to accomplish their goal.

Act 5: Go For the Wrong Goal -  The Music of the Spheres, Interpreting Dreams

In order to leave, the PC's need to resupply their ship. The undead Admiral of the White has agreed to assist them in this, but asks a favor in return, that the PC's check up on his pregnant wife Lady Ophelia who he has not seen for awhile and is concerned about. 

The PC's worked several resupply angles while following a set of clues as to the location of Ophelia. They meet Vangeline, Ophelia's daughter, and several other ghostly characters but have no luck locating Ophelia herself. While doing this, they are exposed to more backstory via the journals of the Darcy the Sea Mage, and get more and more foreshadowing that something strange is going on with Ophelia and Vangeline. Stranger then just being ghosts and haunting the town that is.

They also gather considerable information about the island, the major ghost npc's and a bit of general cosmology. They receive unexpected aid

Finally they receive a confusing vision of disconnected images which is Darcy attempting to tell of his and Ophelia's doomed love affair. 

Slowly they are putting the puzzle pieces together, of what exactly is going on with the town and with themselves.

Act 6: The Reversal - Into the Shadows

This act went off track a little honestly which is one the realities of running a player driven story. What I expected to happen was the PC's would manipulate the various ghosts to the point where they were resupplied and then attempt to leave the island. 

After all they had no reason to stay once they had accomplished their first goal. They would then suffer the reversal, when they discover they cannot actually leave, that they are already trapped in the shadowlands and have been since the moment they set foot on the town. They would then have to commit to lifting the curse in order to free themselves. 

However the damn PC's got interested in what was going in the town and the druid decided that all of this was "unnatural" and he needed to fix it. So they just committed to solving the curse out of curiosity. It was actually not until a bit later where they realized "damn we couldn't have left even if we wanted to".  Oh well, plans meet reality.

This act has a major upping of the stakes as the veil between the shadoworld and the real world weakens to the point where shadow creatures actually cross over and attack the player characters.

The reversal itself happened when the last of Darcy's Journal entries is reveled. The heroes have been gradually slipping into the land of the dead for the last few days (which is why all the buildings are starting to look unruined and repaired, it's not the buildings getting fixed kids, it's you getting broken). 

They now know they cannot leave because Darcy tried and couldn't. They know something bad is happening "deeper down" because Darcy went to stop it and didn't come back. They know something bad is about to happen, because Darcy was scared of it, that the haunted island is about to slip entirely into the shadow, on the anniversary of it's original destruction  They learn Ophelia is not here. She is deep below in the shadowlands and is somehow responsible for all this. And there is something very very odd about her child Vangeline, she was born stillborn and should not be a seven year old girl running around. 

Act 7: Go for the New Goal - Into the Underworld, Wood of Suicides Part 1 and Part 2

The heroes realize they must descend into the land of the dead and find Ophelia, and convince her to leave. That her refusal to obey her orders and her duty has doomed the entire town to everlasting undeath. The last piece of information , "how did she become powerful enough to do all this" still eludes them.

They descend into the Underworld through the ruined lighthouse and enter the Wood of Suicides (thank you Dante). Here they confront various obstacles and challenges, encounter various strange creatures some of which prove helpful as they make their way through the physical manifestations of Ophelia's psychological defenses, to finally confront her.

This episode is frantic and action packed as the PC's penetrate deeper into darkness, constantly attacked and threatened, while gradually being worn down by the cold and despair of the underworld

Near the end the also manage to rescue their cleric from the spell that had sucked his soul into the underworld. Now, weary and wounded, but whole once more the party moves to confront Ophelia

Act 8: Resolution - Going Home

The heroes enter the pocket dimension where Ophelia has exiled herself. Darcy is unsuccessful at convincing her to return. Each one of the PC's gets the opportunity to remind her of the real world, which she has almost entirely forgotten. Bonus points are awarded for anyone that actually payed enough attention to her backstory to surface something relevant. Finally, Fantastic Freddy the Bard manages to win her over by playing her a song from her youth in far away Annwyn. 

However in the final reveal, we learn the source of Ophelia's power, how at the moment of her death she made a pact with an ancient and powerful supernatural creature called an Atropal. Hungry to experience life, he has granted Ophelia great power in return for the permission to live vicariously through her daughter.

This presents the PC’s with a quandary. Would killing the Atropal also kill Vangeline?

I was a bit disappointed here that the PC's didn't figure out that the Atropal hadn't actually done anything bad. Admittedly the half life he inflicted on Vangeline was weird but it was (arguably) better then being dead. All of Ophelia’s issues were self inflicted. All the poor guy really wanted was a day in the sun. 

It was conceivable that the PC's might have settled the situation non violently, but I guess when you see a gigantic deformed embryo with a black umbilical  attached to a little girl, rising up out of the darkness hissing necrotic energy the natural response is to kill it. 

This was still a better outcome then if they had failed to win Ophelia over and tried to force her to leave. Fighting that thing plus a 11th level warlock and a 9th level wizard would not have gone well and I imagine the next set of PC's to wander by would have had a new set of ghosts to get to know. 

A final climatic battle occurs, the Atropal is defeated, both Ophelia and Vangeline are saved (though there are foreshadowing of complications with Vangeline as RicMo seems to have taken over the Atropal's symbiotic role in some way).

Ophelia returns to the living world and the entire town boards the ghost of the ship Eliza May and sails away to their afterlife.

Conclusion and closing

Horror is hard. Even if you do everything right. But failing at it doesn't have to be a disaster , it can easily be downgraded into mystery solving. Overall it can be a nice change from stomping monsters and I think in general it is something the entire troupe will get better at with practice.