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I hate railroading and GMs breaking immersion to enforce their hackneyed vision of "the plot" so I figured I needed to contribute another perspective in the answers. Try not being completely in love with the specific idea of "there at night" you have. So they can go there during the day, and it's still scary. You can employ fog, rain/snow, and/or thick ...

There are several choices. Just make it night. No matter how long it looks like it should take them to get there, they get there just after sunset. Might feel like railroading, but in a horror setting your players shouldn't mind too much. You can even use it to play up the creepiness factor: in the movie Army of Darkness, at one point the sun sets ...

For a one-off, treat it as a short story, rather than a chapter of a trilogy or an episode of a TV series. Here are a few things to keep in mind: Self-contained story. Its plot must resolve to everyone's satisfaction. It's ok if a thread or two are left dangling, but the main story must end. Pick a central theme of your adventure, which can be summed up ...

A good and effective robbery that isn't a typical adventurer's smash and grab has a number of components: Recon Infilitration Securing the Objective Exfiltration These are all interesting and present exciting role-playing opportunities. Player may choose to preemptively plan or to assert that they have planned off-camera and make it up as they go along. ...

An appeal to role would fit very nicely here. Lawbringer: The bad guys will only operate at night. It is your job to catch them in the act. Msytical Ingredient: The mystical ritual can only be completed under the jet black sky of a new moon. Appeal to masculinity: "I double dog dare you to spend the night at [X]!" Appeal to Curiosity: "You can hear ...

Conventions are tricky beasts. Ask anyone who has demonstrated a system (new or old) or run a tournament they will tell you to live by the saying "your best laid plans will never survive engagement with the enemy". The best rule-of-thumb I use for conventions is KISS (Keep It Simple Sammy). Remember in any presentation what your are trying to do. You have ...

I'm going to lay out an easy, step-by-step method that is in parts inspired by and borrowed from a book of plots I own. What you'll get as a result is a situation to drop your players into and see what happens. Eureka by Engine Publishing is an excellent book of adventure plots that are designed to be adaptable to any game and any genre. The format of the ...

Oblivious Sage already made a perfect reply, but I just wanted to add that scary places can be just as awfully scary in daylight. Perhaps the players get to the haunted forest and experience all kinds of unsettling stuff as they travel through it by day - something moving beyond a cluster of trees, objects and people appearing and disappearing where they ...

Your one shot game has to complete itself. It needs a distinct beginning, middle, and end that will all take place in the same ~4-8 hour session. While obvious, this is actually a pretty big deal since a lot of what happens in the game can be considered filler from a storyline perspective. What I mean is that when you're running a campaign, you might ...

For this, I usually look for inspiration at series episodes. You'll notice how many good series intersperse "breather" episodes between their "arc story" episodes. Still, those breather episodes always carry small hooks to the main plot, or maybe they introduce new characters, new situations... add into the session things that, looked up front don't seem ...

In an nut shell: Twist Christmas or a threat to Christmas. Twist a theme of Christmas (whichever you pick) to make the opposite of what it should mean. This will corrupt Christmas into something dark and horrible. Remember that most of horror/fear comes from familiar setting suddenly being unsafe (isolation), from not knowing what is out there ...

When I've done this before, I look at the example of a television series. During the first season, they have a 'pilot' or a short season. With that in mind, I usually hit these points: Plan for an arc that will be resolved during the scenario, so that even if the game doesn't continue, you have closure. To this point, make the final conflict the final ...

Make it so the PCs have to go there at night. E.g: The door to the temple of Bflaghnrwtw only opens when the unholy plaque of Xloptox is hit by moonlight. The ghosts in the haunted house on the hill are only active at night, so daytime investigations will yield next to nothing except clues that shit is going down nighttime, yo. The PCs' friend gets ...

I'd start out waaaaay before the actual content of your adventure. To whit: Be prepared, whatever that means (for me it means a full water bottle and a good night's sleep). Show up a little early. Make sure everybody knows everybody. Shake hands. Be clean and friendly. Project excitement. Assume people will need a pencil, paper and dice Tell people what you ...

This is a wonderful question! Sure, you could adapt an existing horror adventure but it could easily feel like you did just that. If you want it to be special, it really needs to be custom from the ground up (imo). Other than lighting and music I don't use props, but for a holiday horror I would suggest working in music from "A Very Scary Solstice" Play ...

As I remember The Trial, the protagonist (K) bounces almost randomly between surreal situations. There's a big theme of dystopian authority, which closes in gradually until K's execution. Here are some systems which would do that well. These systems will, I think, highlight the elements of The Trial that might serve well in games. The most obvious system ...

To your question about what to avoid, here are a few of my pet peeves as a player. They can be minor annoyances in a campaign but can sink a convention session. "I have brought you all here today..." It can be tempting to dump a bunch of exposition on the players at the very beginning. Avoid this temptation. The introduction is your opportunity to grab ...

If you're tied to it being night per se to make it scary, many of the other suggestions here will serve you in good stead. But if you want to make it scary and creepy, there's a general formula: Make things almost, but not quite, normal. Sure, darkness is scary because you can't see. But what if you suddenly stopped casting a shadow? Or if you stopped ...

There was a very good session prep workbook from GenCon 2008, which you can view here. This does have broader areas however, I would mainly look into utilising "The 5 Room/Scene Adventure" from here, though it is given a wider outlook (beyond a dungeon crawl) in the workbook. The basic premise is to have a formula, which can be mixed, which should hopefully ...

I ran a thieves guild campaign several years ago. The players spent a lot of time planning their heists. Like, more time planning the heists than running the heists. Eventually, I stopped prepping in advance. I let them speculate about the obstacles they'd face and I wrote down the good ones. I also wrote down the ones they thought they solved but whose ...

This is difficult to answer in a system-agnostic way, but you should remember that horror gaming also relies on how you use your 'safe' time too. If you're getting near the big finish of your story, then waning daylight becomes a giant, nagging clock that ticks down to 'What a horrible night to have a curse' time. Give them X number of things to do before ...

Innocent bystanders I would include innocent bystanders in the escape. People have a habit of freezing to the spot, getting in the way or doing silly things under pressure. Have the artefact go on tour If you wanted to make the robbery a little different, you could have the artefact leave the security of its home. For example, a magical religious item ...

I did this recently to introduce some new players to Call of Cthulhu and wrote the process up on my blog (link to one-shot details). The core premise was similar: a one session scenario to explore key elements of the game, which if enjoyed by the group, could lead on to other things. My process for this type of thing is this: System Plan to touch on ...

Playing devil's advocate for just a second here... You Can't Take a Plot - But You Can Take a Situation You cannot take the plot of another literary work and turn it into a game. Period. Before anyone goes ballistic, let me make a clear distinction here between situation and plot. Plot is the sequence of events that happen in a story. Situation is the ...

You can get away without using a prepared scenario in Maid RPG, at least at first. Have the Master give some arbitrary orders, roll on the random events chart, and watch the players scramble for Favor points in the resulting chaos. To make a scenario, you essentially want three things: A problem or situation that can't be resolved in a single encounter A ...

Netzer has uncovered evidence about a previous incarnation of the OV. It appears that Herod was part of this organisation and he ordered the Massacre of the Innocents to cover up what was seen as a breach in the veil. That there are no sources on this other than the Bible is proof of the power of his veil out. Netzer never talked widely about his work and ...

Have a few semi-relevant (part red herring), backup plot events prepared that you can insert into the daylight part of your adventure to delay the PCs. Use these to make the story deeper and even more credible, and to build up / lay the groundwork for the tension - and to give them further reasons to enter the forest at night. (Delay is good for other ...

Ask the players if they are interested in how going in at night adds to the horror sort of theme. If they are interested, ask them why their characters would go in at night - let the players make up the reason! After all, they are interested in the horror. And if they are not interested in horror and simply want to do as they will, don't get too invested in ...

A friend of mine ran Maid using the anime/manga Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji) as inspiration. The basic summary of the game was that a multitude of demonic guests were showing up at the manor with various outlandish and conflicting requests, and the PCs had to deal with it all.

Savage Worlds has an excellent licensing setup that you can check out at: http://www.peginc.com/licensing/ I have written to the email address provided there to ask about licensing, and they gave me a list of several things they were looking for. They hold all their officially licensed products to the same standards as their own products. They check that ...