Running a Game in Darkness - GM Tips
I’ve grown a new appreciation for darkness ever since people were forced to go online. I’ve always liked the darkness, but only in an RPG where I know what is in the dark and I’m running the game. I don’t like being scared. In addition, I also have strong opinions that people rarely think about the darkness that exists beneath them in real life. Those dark caverns and subterranean passageways that cut through the stone miles beneath our existence. Occasionally, sinkholes open up on the world and we are reminded of the horror beneath us.
Like many people across the world, this year has largely consisted of playing tabletop games over the internet. Some have learned they hate those virtual tabletops, some use a strange combination of webcams and chat rooms, while others have fully embraced the online space. While I like playing in person, there is something unique that you can take from those virtual tabletops. Every player is constrained to their screens, if you send them down into the darkness, they can only see what their character can see and the players begin realizing the dangers of darkness.
No longer can they sit around a table, a map fully revealed to them, them able to plot every 5-foot square in another room they aren’t in yet. Instead, they are forced to ask their teammates for help, to ask for light when the bumbling human realizes they sold all their torches because they could just rely on the rest of the party and hope the DM didn’t ask the one player without darkvision how they were seeing in the darkness.
Today, we are exploring the darkness and how a DM can drop their party in the darkness and remind them that just because you can see somewhat in the darkness, doesn’t make darkness trivial. The darkness is horrifying, there be monsters beneath the world, and it’s up to the DM to remind the players of that fact.
Light
Before we truly begin, I want to talk about light. Everyone likes light, it illuminates the world and allows us to walk around without stubbing our pinky toe on the dresser. It guides us through our days and provides us comfort during the dark nights. Mankind has gathered around light because, deep down, we are all scared of what might exist just outside its reach.
Dim Light
I’m not going to talk about bright light, our worlds default to bright light. From our interactions in the real world to our assumptions in the game world, we think there is always light. Unlike our modern times, our ancestors wouldn’t have such assumptions though. Once the sun went down, fire was relied on to create their light. We imagine taverns with roaring fires and torches burning in sconces, but if you think about it, that just wouldn’t be the case all the time.
Torches aren’t reliable. They burn up quickly, and even if you do keep it burning for more than 10 minutes, you have the other problem with all the smoke they produce. Putting torches in sconces just creates a situation where the smoke pools at the ceiling and slowly drifts down over our heads, suffocating everyone but the halfling and gnomes. Also, burning enough torches to provide even a bit of light would be extremely costly and very few would want to spend so much money on light when they had their bellies to think about.
After torches are the great roaring fires, and I’m sure that people had fires, but how close would you want to be to one? In the winter, probably as close as you could get before your bear-coat would catch on fire. What about the summer? If you get a fire big enough so that it provides sufficient light, you are making something that is going to be pushing out waves and waves of heat. I’d wager that fires, at least during the summertime, would be large enough to cook food and provide dim illumination to a room.
Which brings me to my point, our ancestors lived in a world of light and darkness. They were exposed to not only the bright light of the sun but also the darkness outside. They didn’t have street lamps, they had the dim light of the moon and a lantern if they had money to spend. Once the sun disappeared, their world descended into either dim light or darkness, and the dangers that that held.
Using Dim Light
If you ever walked around when the sun is setting, in one moment you can see easily and the light is all around you. The next moment, you realize it’s getting hard to see, that addresses are hard to read on mailboxes and that colors are becoming difficult to discern. You are experiencing dim light, and, if we are being honest with ourselves, we can feel a bit of that primal fear beginning to rise its head. We scurry to points of light, turning on the lights in our homes, going to downtown locations with street lights, anywhere with light we gather.
But how can you use that in your world? When describing this to your table, how do you get them to feel that sensation? An easy way is just increasing the difficulty of noticing things, and if you play a game like Dungeons & Dragons, it even has some simple rules on it. You gain disadvantage on certain checks while in dim light. But that doesn’t envoke the feeling of dim light as your players can just sigh heavily and say they hold up a candle or cast light. They just want to ignore the dim light, but we can’t let that happen, not if you want them to feel the darkness.
Instead, when you describe the scenery around them, pick those elements of dim light. Describe the faint warm light disappearing under the horizon, that it’s getting hard to make out individual colors, that the streets are getting emptier as the taverns get fuller. Describe individuals quickly moving down the street, fearful that they might get caught outside in the dark, that the wind grows colder as the sun no longer warms it. Take those elements of dim light and feed it into your scenery.
At this point, the monsters are just now waking up and the world is beginning to grow hostile. The only protection is the bright light that can at least calm our anxious minds from the horrors that we know exist just beyond that radius of light.
Darkness
The real danger that haunts all of us, even those who claim the darkness doesn’t scare them. Get dropped into a forest in the middle of the night, strange and new noises echoing around you. Or find yourself in the middle of a cave network with no light, blindly stumbling forward. We are all scared of the darkness to a certain extent, those with more active imaginations, I would assume, more scared of it than others. A world, which typically exists in bright fluorescent light, is suddenly hidden from us and we must rely on our senses.
A creature might claim they have darkvision, and a foolish player would think that means that there are no problems. That isn’t true, far from it. Darkvision simply provides dim light for a limited distance and that ever-encroaching darkness is at the edges, hiding something from you. I understand though, it’s a pain to remember light sources and who can see how far, who keeps thinking that darkness isn’t that scary because they are a dwarf and they never use light because of darkvision. Those players are idiots, any creature would want a light source, seeing just a few feet more could be the difference between life and death.
Using Darkness
How do you bring darkness into your games? Think about times where you have been in the dark. Normal noises of the day time sound strange and dangerous at night, was that the shutter flapping in the wind? Or did someone knock on the window?
When thinking about running your games, think about what an environment would look like when a character can only see part of it. How does the darkness begin twisting shadows into monsters? What about the monsters who can blend into their environment? Did the rock move or was it there the whole time?
When you describe a scene that is in darkness, avoid talking about what a character sees but focus on every other sense. What is the temperature? Cold, is there a chill in the air? What about smell? Caves are incredibly strong-smelling thanks to the high humidity, the smell lingers for weeks down there and if something dies, you are going to smell it long before you ever find it. What sounds can you hear? If you are walking through a dark forest, describe the crunch of leaves underfoot and how walking over a tree branch sounds like bones snapping. Using descriptive language that reminds players of horror can pull them into the experience.
The last thing to then describe to the players is what they can see, but keep it short and cryptic. Describe the twisted limbs of trees seem to move in the dim light of the lantern, that the moon is hidden by a cloud and the darkness seems to grow stronger around you. That off in the distance, you swear you saw a bush move, but you can’t be sure. Maybe it was the wind, maybe it was rat scurrying away. Don’t tell the players what they see, describe what they see in a roundabout manner. Here’s an example:
Do NOT describe it like…
You are walking through a dark forest and it’s hard to see. The sounds of wolves can be heard off in the distance and there is a cold breeze. The darkness is around you as you continue your journey, walking past bushes and trees.
DO describe it like…
A cold wind cuts through the air and with it are the sounds of howling that echoes from tree to tree. Crushed leaves and trodden sticks sound like bones snapping, and the shadows begin their dance through the forest. Tree branches reach out towards you before the dull glow of the lantern freezes them in place.
When describing the situation, don’t provide the reasons for what they are experiencing. By labeling it wolves howling, they are no longer scared. They’ve fought wolves. By calling it howling, it could be anything. From wolves to hell hounds and more. When describing what they see, obfuscate the language. Saying it is hard to see isn’t helpful, describing the tricks that shadows and light can play on their eyes is helpful. You can imagine branches dancing in the darkness before freezing in place once light is shown on them, you can’t imagine what “it’s hard to see” is like.
Inspiration
Here is some inspiration you can use for your own games and to think about as you are preparing for your session. Many of these are focused on exploring a cave, and you should keep that in mind. Players and tables can get exhaustion when under certain stresses that can stop a game from being fun - if you are going to go all-in on the dark, do it in very specific places where you want to evoke the sensation.
When describing something, go through all other senses and end with sight. Sight is unreliable in the dark and is only used to calm your fears.
Darkness causes hallucinations. Traveling through pitch-black forests and the unimaginable darkness of a cavern, people begin seeing things in the darkness. From monsters hiding in the shadows, to food, to anything. Our minds are not meant for such darkness and begin playing tricks on us. If your players are walking through a cave, learn everyone’s Perception skills and then choose not the characters with the highest modifiers, but middling ones. Describe to them the shapes that creep along at just the edges of their vision.
Madness haunts are minds, if you have a party traveling for a few days in the darkness, some might start getting jittery and paranoid. You could call for checks to work against the darkness, like a Wisdom saving throw, and choose the ones who rolled the lowest. They are the first ones to break under the strain and you can roll a minor insanity that persists until they leave the cave or they get a full night’s sleep, in which case, they gain a new minor insanity. (You might call for a new check when they wake up, and just have the insanity pass from one individual to the next, if you have too many insanities at the table, it could create a problem. Less is more in this situation.)
Unless adventurers have a way of keeping time while in the darkness, like seeing a moon or have a magical timepiece, be vague about time frames. While in the darkness, you never know what time it is and it’s hard to know when it’s morning. You might ask for a type of check and provide different time based on those results. Providing different time to different players can create confusion among the party, and create a sense of uncertainty. This is another instance of less is more, you can describe a character getting tired but they aren’t sleepy, while still telling them it feels like midnight. You can read this article which talks about how two scientists subjected themselves to months of being alone in a cave, how they would sleep for 30 hours, and think it was only a nap and their struggles of needing interactions with other creatures.
Caves are rarely ever dry, they are typically wet and damp with slick spots and noises that echo through the cavern. Sound travels even further underground and it’s difficult to pinpoint its exact location, sound bounces around chaotically and you might hear something miles and miles away from you and think it is just around the bend.
Musky and stale, the world below doesn’t get fresh air and smells linger for weeks under here. Due to the humid air, those smells cling to water which causes them to be even more intense. You can recreate this effect by bringing something smelly into a bathroom after a hot shower, the smell will be more intense as the water in the air more readily takes those smells and carries them into your nose.
Oxygen is limited beneath the ground and rarely circulates. There might be a build-up of horrible gases in certain parts that haven’t spread to other parts of a cave network, which you can describe to your party as dead bats or rats that litter the ground, seemingly untouched by any other creature. A creature left unconsumed for weeks at a time is a clear indication of some sort of danger that the players can’t pick up on and you can describe sluggishness and tiredness as the lack of oxygen causes them to lose focus around them. Of course, don’t kill characters due to the lack of oxygen in a cave, but you can describe the effects of arriving out of one of these strange bubbles of bad air like a rush of oxygen hits their lungs and they realize the danger they were once in and how their senses feel sharper than before.
Natural and man-made caverns can be massive. Hundreds of feet wide, hundreds of feet tall, it’s impossible to accurately determine the size of a room. But just as the underground world can be massive, it can also be minuscule, tiny passages lead to small streams of underground rivers, narrows paths could be haphazardly carved halfway up a massive cavern with no bottom in sight, the underground is chaotic and is horrifyingly difficult to map.
Europe has hundreds of underground, man-made structures. These can be found in villages, under cities, and more. Some of them were meant to be shelters from invading armies, places to hide in the natural caves, while others are places for messengers and soldiers to use during a siege. These tunnels are rarely ever fully mapped and are prone to cave-ins and more.
The Darkness Breaks
Luckily for all of us, the darkness eventually breaks and we can find our ways out of the dark caverns. I hope this provides some inspiration to be used in your games, and I’m going to provide a few sources that helped inspire this post. I hope it can be of use to you as well.
LindyBeige - Torches: Outdoor Use [Youtube]
Science Explorer - Isolation in the Dark Drives Humans to Brink of Insanity [Article]
And so much more. If you ever get a chance to go on a tour of a cave or underground area, do it! Great way to immerse yourself in what your players are dealing with.
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