Horror Roleplay: How to Build Real Tension

Horror is the hardest genre to pull off in roleplay. Jump scares don't work in text. Gore is easy to write but hard to make feel anything other than gratuitous. The challenge of horror RP isn't being scary — it's creating dread, that creeping unease that makes someone glance over their shoulder in a well-lit room.

Here's how to build genuine tension in your horror roleplay.

Less is More

The most terrifying thing in any horror story is the thing you don't fully see. Suggestion, implication, and the unknown are your most powerful tools. A shadow that moves wrong. A sound that doesn't have a source. A door that was definitely closed a minute ago.

The Thing in the Basement on Velvet demonstrates this perfectly. It's an entity that exists in the foundation of your house. It speaks through the walls in a layered, inhuman voice. It says it just wants to talk. It's never broken a promise — but it's also never made one before. You never see it. You don't know what it looks like. And somehow, that's infinitely more unsettling than any monster description.

Make the Normal Feel Wrong

The uncanny valley of horror isn't about monsters — it's about familiar things behaving in unfamiliar ways. A smile that lasts too long. A house that has one too many rooms. A conversation where the other person answers questions you haven't asked yet.

The Curator runs a haunted house that knows your fears before you speak them. They're unfailingly polite. The politeness is the scariest thing about them. When normal social behavior becomes the vehicle for horror, the effect is deeply unsettling because your brain can't categorize the threat.

Build Before You Scare

Tension requires a ramp. If you start at ten, you have nowhere to go. The best horror sessions spend significant time establishing normalcy before introducing anything wrong — and then the wrongness enters slowly, almost imperceptibly.

Think of it as a temperature change. At first, the room is slightly cool. Then cool enough to notice. Then you can see your breath. Each step is small enough that the character (and the reader) keeps questioning whether something is actually happening — and that uncertainty is where dread lives.

Use the Character's Psychology

Generic scares are forgettable. Personal scares are devastating. The most effective horror targets what a specific character fears, cares about, or can't let go of.

Oliver Sinclair is a paranormal debunker investigating a house that might actually be haunted. The horror isn't the ghost — it's the threat to his entire worldview. If this is real, then everything he's built his career on is wrong. The monster here isn't supernatural. It's the collapse of certainty.

Pacing is Everything

Horror pacing is about alternating between tension and release — but never fully releasing. Give your character a moment of calm, a breath, a logical explanation for the strange thing that happened. Then take it away. The cycle of hope and dread is what makes horror sustainable across a long session.

In roleplay specifically, resist the urge to escalate constantly. Constant horror is numbing. A single quiet moment after sustained tension — a cup of tea, a joke, a breath of cool air — makes the next scare land ten times harder.

Make the Characters Care

Horror without emotional stakes is just atmosphere. For the audience to feel dread, they need to care about what's at risk. Establish relationships, give characters something to protect, make the reader invested in someone's survival before you threaten it.

Agent Hale's horror comes not just from the serial killer he's tracking, but from the fact that the killer knows his name, and Hale has a daughter he calls every night. The professional threat becomes personal, and personal threats are what make horror stick.

Trust Your Reader's Imagination

In text-based roleplay, you have an advantage that film doesn't: the reader's imagination will always create something scarier than what you describe. Provide the framework — the sound, the feeling, the implication — and let their mind fill in the blanks.

"Something was wrong with the painting" is scarier than three paragraphs describing what was wrong with the painting. The reader's brain will generate the version of "wrong" that unsettles them specifically.

The Best Horror Lingers

The mark of great horror roleplay isn't a moment of shock — it's the feeling that follows you after the session ends. The best horror makes you think about it later, when you're lying in bed in the dark, when you hear a sound in your house that you can't immediately identify.

Build your horror on ideas rather than images, on implications rather than revelations, on questions rather than answers. Leave something unresolved. Leave something unexplained. Let the dread live beyond the page.

Ready to face the dark? Velvet's horror characters are waiting. But don't worry — The Thing in the Basement just wants to talk. Probably.