Spooky music and eerie lighting are not your only options for a DnD horror campaign

Freak out your players

DnD 5e has a bunch of legitimately freaky monsters. Put them to use.

Beholder 5e is a paranoid floating cyclops head with eye-tentacles that can paralyze you, turn you to stone, or just straight up disintegrate you. Beholders are also completely insane, enslave others on a whim, and think that the whole universe is coming to destroy them. Did we mention that they have razor sharp teeth too?

Night Hag 5e are the wicked witches of the DnD universe. Not only are they terrifyingly ugly, but Night hags can shapeshift and trap you in dreams, so you don’t know what reality is. Night hags also have an annoying tendency to stitch a bag made of your flesh, trap your soul in it, and drag you down to hell.

Mind Flayer 5e are slimy, squid-like mental vampires that smell like garlic and onions and want to eat your brain and take your knowledge. Mind Flayers can read your thoughts and like to stun you while they use their tentacles to extract your brain. Mind Flayers reproduce by attaching a tadpole to your brain stem that eats your mind and transforms you into a Mind Flayer…so that’s a thing.

Stress out your players

It makes sense that player characters would be stressed out in a horror campaign. Luckily there is a variant 5e rule for stressful events.

The following stressful events increase your Stress by 1d4, to a maximum of 20.

• Conflict. Perform an action against your ideals.
• Threat. Something threatens your Bond.
• Fear. Encounter a phobia.
• Loss. NPC is killed or captured.
• Injury. HP reduced to 0.
• Hunger. Go without food equal to CON modifier.
• Failure. Complete dungeon with less than 3 resolved encounters.
• Curse. Get cursed.
• Madness. Roll for madness.
• Poverty. Change to a cheaper lifestyle.

When you first reach 5 or more Stress points, roll 1d8 to see what the stress does to you. Roll for a more severe effect when you hit 10 or more stress. At 20 Stress, you have a nervous breakdown and retire, or just go insane.

 Dice Roll/Event       With 5 or more Stress)    With 10 or more Stress

Limit your players’ power

Horror often comes from a feeling of powerlessness—but DnD player characters tend to be pretty powerful. You have to be creative to instil true fear.

Split the party up by unforeseen events such as a wall collapsing or a mischievous NPC trapping a few of your crew somewhere.

Maybe there is a mysterious tower that muffles magical energy within its radius, or “watchful eyes” that drain your party of constitution if they don’t pass a check.

You can also do an apocalyptic setting where resources are scarce, and players have to survive on their wits and strategy to get through.

Go Straight to the Source

Wizards of the Coast has a readymade horror-themed adventure for levels 1-10 called the Curse of Straud that has you trying to escape the demented plan Barovia. This module gives you the whole package as far as adventure hooks and a cohesive narrative for players to follow.

Then there’s Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, which gives you additional lore and background info on the dark powers at play in Boravia and other Domains of Dread, as well as a few specific characters and groups you can incorporate into your game.

These books are fantastic for inspiration and structure and offer lots of ideas and inspiration for horrifying monsters, characters, and environments to weird out your party.