D&D: Make Your World Full Of Eldritch Horror With These Five Tips

It takes more than just putting tentacles on everything to make your campaign full of eldritch horror – but here are some helpful tips.

Eldritch horror is one of the most frequent add-ons to D&D. Look at any oft he most popular campaign settings from 3rd-party publishers and you’ll see “eldritch horror elements” wherever you look. There’s something fascinating about the otherworldly, unearthly horror that lends itself to being put in a place with castles and elves.

And if you, like many DMs, want to incorporate elements of eldritch horror in your next campaign, here are a few elements to consider besides just “tentacles and slime.”

A Sense Of Loss

Let’s pull out the big guns, right away. The reason that we keep coming back to cosmic/eldritch horror is how it confronts us with loss in a way that gives it a physical form. And I don’t just mean ,’ |,’_’ .

Think about some of the best examples in the genre. Bloodborne, for example, is a game all about loss. Loss of humanity, loss of control, loss of a child, loss of innocence. All of these are represented in the game by horrible tentacle monsters or weird blood guys that take you ten hours to learn how to kill.

One of the reasons people keep losing their minds in this kind of horror is because the idea of losing your sense of self is kind of scary. But it could even be something mundane as losing your memory or losing your autonomy – or even just the pain of loss. It’s much trickier to try and work those in as monsters. But with loss as a campaign theme you have a good jumping off place. Maybe a troll is the idea of someone who’s lost their ability to die – and that stretches into undead monsters and maybe is a curse that turns people into some kind of horrific husk when they can’t ever truly die. Just take an idea and riff with it.

Enticing Mysteries

There’s also got to be something tempting for good eldritch horror. We don’t just fear the unknown, we’re drawn to it. Enticing mysteries are a fantastic element for any campaign of eldritch horror. It’s the idea that there are some truly powerful, dangerous secrets out there.

And you can work this into your campaign by showing the PCs people who have pursued those secrets – and the price they’ve paid for doing so. Just like how in a cosmic horror story, we often see occultists and scholars who have paid some horrific price (body transformed into a slime creature, eyes on the inside and outside of their heads, etc.), you can sprinkle that in to your games.

And here’s the other important thing – think about what people have to gain. There’s often a sense of exhiliration in these kinds of stories. In The King In Yellow, one of the protagonists of the first short story becomes elated as he pulls further on the thread that eventually unravels – but the idea that you’re learning some kind of secret should be exciting, exhilirating, almost ecstatic.

After all there’s a reason people keep pulling on the threads of reality. And there’s lots of ways to make it matter. Maybe you’re gaining power – psychic abilities, visions of the future, magical might, physical transformations that make you unstoppable – whatever form it takes, there’s something beyond mortal just on the other side of the mystery.

Another thing good eldritch horror does is hold up a mirror to humanity. In stories set in the Lovecraft Mythos we frequently see the lengths people are willing to go to gain just a small fragment of power. In other stories, we see humanity’s willingness to turn a blind eye to suffering turned into a plot device.

The best horror shows us ourselves in a way that makes you squirm. Now it’s going to be different for everyone, but pick some aspect of humanity to embody and warp and twist and you’re on the road to some good cosmic soup. People’s casual cruelty might become physically manifest. An excess of empathy might lead to the breaking down of mental and physical barriers between people. The list goes on.

The Alienation Of The Familiar

Of course, thinking of metaphors is a lot of work. It’s not hard, but you have to figure out how you’re going to represent it in the game. And that’s all good, even fun stuff to think about. But if you want something a little more actionable – take a familiar mechanic and make it work a little weird. You don’t even have to make it bad – I’m not saying get rid of healing spells. But you can make something like a healing potion into alien blood that you can harvest from your enemies.

Or maybe when you cast spells, the world around you warps in some way. My favorite for a game like this is having something change on the end of a Long Rest. Maybe someone gets an extra eye, temporarily. Maybe whenever you spend a hit dice to try and heal during a Short Rest, the hit points you regain are represented by an ablative layer of alien flowers that bloom on your body or whatever.

Take the familiar and make it strange. Start with mechanics you use but don’t think about all that often and you’re golden.

Mind AND Body Horror

Okay. Yes. Tentacles. But tentacles with a purpose. Tentacles that reflect and mean something. One of the things about eldritch horror is that it gets real visceral. I like to think of it as magic through muscles. If you’re doing superhuman things, you should look inhuhman. Again Bloodborne is a great example of this – people with all sorts of weird eyeballs manifest on them to reflect their ascension towards understanding the Eldritch Truth.

But – one of the best ways to make this work is to also have some mental horror. And I don’t mean hallucinations, but like seeing things that no one else can see – which are real and meaningful and dangerous.. Trying to convince someone that something is both factual and bad when there’s no immediate evidence to the contrary is one of those frustrating, powerless things that can make even a D&D character feel the helplessness of a good horror story.

And eldritch horror has a lot of transformation at its heart. Focus on what happens as you descend into the depths of whatever mysteries are unfolding and you’ve got a good lens on the genre.

Happy adventuring!

Bell of Lost Souls Staff Writer and DM, J.R. covers RPGs of all stripes and on occasion eats sandwiches. You can ask him about either at [email protected]

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