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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

In a word: Futurama! Well, the Santa Claus theme has already been mentioned. Let's try something different. First of all, I wouldn't try to pick a regular adventure and christmasfy it. You want a Christmas adventure, not a strange hybrid. What you have in Christmas aside from Santa? Baby Jesus, that is, the birth of a god. So, my first suggestion is make ...

He knows your darkest sins, he knows when you are sleeping, and neither lock nor door will keep him from your home. Seriously, Santa Claus as bringer of wrathful justice is trivially easy. Have your players attempt plant a curse on him to make him into the jolly gift giver we know and love today. Bonus points for having their descendants pick up the pieces ...

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 ...

Choose games that support this style of play If I were you, I would consider a move to short-form games - these are games that are designed to be played in their entirety in a single session. They are one of the fastest-growing segments of the RPG world today, based entirely on my own observations. There are a number of examples in answers to my question on ...

I've been writing homebrew settings and adventures for many years. What I find works best is a mix of history and little details. That said, I always start with a map of the relevant territory. How big the area is depends on the idea that sparked the setting. Some have been continents, others only a village in a valley, or just a chain of islands. ...

Silent Hill gives a nice twist to this: It's daylight, creepy, and all that... Suddenly, the siren sounds, the paint peels, and now it's night time. What this entails is that your "creepy" bits are done in whatever time the characters turn up. It's just creepy. Suddenly, the whole world shifts to your survival horror setting. Of course, you need a ...

Piss them off. The best game I can ever remember being in was a home game my Dad wrote for a charity event a few years ago. Long story short, a butler we'd been interacting with killed someone for money, then ran down into a trapped underground passage, then escaped. The fact we'd interacted with him before, the fact he was always one step ahead of us, ...

Whenever it needs to be nighttime and the PCs end up there during the day, I cause there to be a very bad thunderstorm. Now it's much darker outside, much less pleasant to not be inside, and things like wind, rain, and lightning can do some pretty dramatic things to the mood. Even in the middle of the day. I've often had the players elect to wait the ...

I'm not sure it needs to be night time. Horror and creepy settings are at night to obscure full view of the horror. But as far as ghosts go, a ghost in the darkness may as well be a human in the darkness. Try having spectral horrors during a time most people consider safe. If they can't see the true problem it might have the same effect. Not all horror ...

Is there anything inherently Christmassy that can be twisted? Things coming down the chimney to leave things behind? Sounds like an excellent element for horror. Opening closed boxes, to see a surprise? I don't know why people do it, sounds like an excellent way of having your mind blasted out of your skull by things that should remain unknown to mankind.

When designing adventures for short sessions, one great way to start is to have some degree of player buy-in to being "ordered" into something. The characters are part of a group who work for a larger group. Another good trick to minimize time needed to do sessions is to do a bit of the legwork that players would normally do and just give it to them. For ...

Chrismas, a time of caring and joy... is an excellent way to raise the stakes locally about people the PCs care about. Once those ties of care and affection have been established in the world: tighten your grip and let the threat create its own horror. To answer: "Can I adjust any normal horror adventure to make it Christmas-themed?" Yes. Yes you can. And ...

I suggest you (re)watch Gremlins. It is horror, with a bit of humour, and it is set right before Christmas. You can turn up or down the dials on humour and horror, at your will. Even if the players know the movie, you don't need them to replay the part of the main characters (i.e. causing the "infection") - they just have to deal with the results, even if ...

You can easily twist Christmas by making it slightly wrong. Santa who murders people by climbing down their chimney is less scary than Santa who is nice and jolly and doesn't know that an evil mastermind has poisoned every single gift he is giving out. Try either setting up a clichéd plot (e.g. where Santa leaves a path of destruction, but it's genuinely ...

I have no experience with The Dresden Files, so this might not be applicable to your specific situation. I have found that it can work for a variety of games, though. The "Impossible Mission Team" approach can be a lot of fun if you tailor it to the game world. Short, well-defined missions that are given to the player characters by an organization, ...

Perhaps a real nighttime isn't needed, but a magical one would do. some sinister spell cast by the horrors that wait for the party within damned to eternal nightfall by some super power, punishment for the atrocities committed therein A curse The side effect of a protective spell used to lock in the evil