I was thinking back to the Chilling Tales adventure packet, and the Terror Tips that were contained there. Some of them were fairly spooky - others were a mixed bag.
That got me thinking. Can you, as players or DMs, give brief rundowns of ideas or situations of Gothic terror or horror from your campaigns? Heroes of Horror has a good number of these. These can be anything - from DM techniques at the tabletop, to actual in-game situations and descriptions.
I'll share a few to get the ball rolling (all three from Clive Barker's Undying):
1. Bloody footprints - PCs enter a vault with coffins and sarcophagi. There is one large door that they cannot open. Something restless resides in one of the biggest sarcophagi. If the PCs lift the lid off, they hear a creaking rustling sound, and huge bloody footprints (each the size of a small horse) appear on the ground along with the sound of heavy footsteps. These lead to the door, which rotates all its locks one by one and then swings open. The bloody footsteps end and the blood begins to dry normally.
2. Water bulge - PCs are in a dungeon or temple, trying to get from one level to another. The only method of doing so appears to be a hole in the ceiling, ringed by a balcony that burns with a magical fire. A pool of water is in the middle of the room. Using control water or some other incantation (perhaps even summoning a water elemental), the PCs can cause the water to "bulge" upwards past the flames and then enter it to swim up to the next level normally.
3. Tortured statue - PCs are in a dungeon or temple, with a high shaft above them and no way of climbing it. In the center of the room is a statute of a crudely shaped human in pain. Its hands are folded across its chest. If the PCs use any detect magic or dispel illusion spells (or perhaps see ethereal), the statue shows up as a maimed angel in terrible agony, who opens his chest like a jacket to expose his heart and pleads with the PCs to kill him. If they destroy his heart, he dies and a rent opens in space where his heart used to be. Blood begins pouring out of this at an alarming rate. Within a few rounds, it's waist-deep, and rising. Within a few minutes, it begins filling up. PCs have until then to shed all their heavy equipment (perhaps dragging it along with a rope) and swim upwards as the shaft fills with blood, or risk drowning themselves. This is likely to cause a horror check.
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