How to Run a Horror RPG Campaign Without Any Visuals

On paper, horror looks like the worst genre to attempt without pictures. There's no flickering bulb, and no creature design to recoil from. Nobody can cut suddenly to a face pressed against the window either. I think that's backwards. Some of the most frightening stories ever told reached people through their ears alone. Radio drama managed it in the 1940s and podcasts managed it again in the 2010s (horror audiobooks, meanwhile, never stopped). Now AI-narrated audio RPGs are joining the club, and I'd put good audio horror up against most of what ends up on a screen.

The usual example is Orson Welles and "The War of the Worlds" in 1938. The legend of a nationwide stampede is mostly that, a legend: as A. Brad Schwartz explains in Smithsonian magazine, newspapers blew the "mass panic" far out of proportion. Still, some listeners really did mistake the fake news bulletins for the real thing, and their anxious calls to police and newspaper offices were real too. Those Martians cost the Mercury Theatre nothing to build. The listeners built them, in their own heads, and that's the whole trick of this post.

What follows is a craft guide for building and running horror campaigns in EchoQuest. Some of it works for any audio storytelling. The rest is specific to interactive horror, where the player's own choices decide how deep the dread goes. And if horror isn't your genre, stick around anyway. The principles underneath are mostly about pacing and about what you hold back, so they'll sharpen any tense scene in any campaign.

I care about this one personally, by the way. The library has a gothic world and a cosmic-horror investigation. The GM's own instructions also say horror means "slow dread and uncertainty, never cheap jump scares," and the World Builder Wizard has a "Horror: dread and restraint" setting to match. So I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about what makes a scene land when nobody can see it.

Why Audio Horror Works

Fear lives in the imagination. H. P. Lovecraft opened his long essay on the genre with a line horror writers still quote: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" (Supernatural Horror in Literature). Psychology has come round to something similar. In a 2016 review in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, the psychologist R. Nicholas Carleton argued that fear of the unknown "may be a, or possibly the, fundamental fear" underneath anxiety.

So the monster you can't see is almost always scarier than the one on screen. When a horror film finally shows you the creature, your brain files it away: "CGI wolf, cost $3 million, actors were on a set." Then the fear sags. The thing has been settled, given edges, turned into something known. Once it's known, it's manageable. And once it's manageable, it stops being terrifying.

Even Steven Spielberg ended up grateful for that. The mechanical shark in Jaws kept breaking down, so he had to work around it, and on Desert Island Discs in 2022 he called that his good luck, because "it's a scarier movie without seeing so much of the shark." Audio horror gets that broken shark for free, every single scene.

Now take a line of narration like "you hear something large moving in the dark beyond the reach of your lantern." Your brain produces the monster on the spot. Better still, it produces the exact version you personally find most frightening, built from your own fears and your own mental stock footage. No film budget can compete with that. A million-dollar prosthetic monster looks identical to every viewer. The unseen one looks different to every listener, because your subconscious has tailored it to scare you in particular.

I'd bet that blind horror fans have understood this for a long time. They've spent years listening to fear that their own imagination assembles for them, and they tend to be sharp critics of how audio horror is paced. Sighted listeners who come to it later often find out they'd been missing something all along. What they were missing was their own imagination's share of the fright.

The Craft of Audio Horror

Sound design is your biggest tool. A cave drip. The sound of something wet, then a long silence. Details like these build dread before anything in the story turns threatening, so set the sound environment early and let it work before the plot catches up. In EchoQuest, the ambient layer picks its bed from how a location is described: a crypt or a catacomb gets the dungeon track, a drowned chapel gets the underwater one, and a thunderstorm gets the storm track I added back in May. Put simply, what you write in your Game Bible decides what plays under the narration. You can't script "two seconds of silence, then a single drip" (I'd love that too, honestly), but you can write the drip into the room's description so the GM has it to hand. The GM also chooses sound cues from a fixed set, including ones like "danger near" and "death nearby." I spent a chunk of May making those cues behave. The ambient bed now ducks underneath them so a warning sting isn't buried under rain, and two identical cues firing within 80 milliseconds of each other get trimmed to one, because a doubled sting sounds like a glitch rather than a threat.

Withhold information deliberately. Horror is the gap between what your player knows and what they suspect, so don't reveal too much. Let them hear something without explaining it. Let them find evidence of something terrible without ever showing the event. The blood on the wall is scarier than the killing it implies, and an empty room with three plates set for dinner is scarier than the family who used to eat there. Left alone, an AI narrator tends to over-explain. You can correct that by stating it plainly in the world's tone notes: horror in this world reveals itself through implication, not exposition. When I rewrote the GM's instructions, I built in the same instinct. It's told to hold things back and to plant small details now so it can pay them off turns later, because a reveal hits harder when the player half saw it coming.

Make the mundane wrong. The most effective horror isn't really about monsters. It's about familiar things behaving incorrectly. Freud wrote a whole essay on this in 1919, and the Tate's short guide sums up his idea of the uncanny as what happens "when something can be familiar and yet alien at the same time." So give your players these:

• An NPC who knows the player's name without being told
• A room that's slightly larger on the inside than the outside
• A child's laughter from a place where no child could be
• A clock that ticks at the wrong rhythm
• A road that bends differently each time you walk it

The wrongness should be small enough that the player can't be sure they aren't imagining it. Doubt is the texture of horror.

Use silence. Narrate a scene that ends on something alarming, then stop talking. Let the player decide what happens next. The silence after "you hear it stop moving" is more frightening than any follow-up description could be. EchoQuest's GM is already told to stop on the hook instead of summing things up, and after that nothing happens until you act; only the ambient bed keeps breathing underneath. I also learned the hard way that chosen silence and broken silence are very different animals. On May 16, I found the ambient soundtrack was quietly ratcheting itself down to nothing after about five turns, and later that month it was silent on mobile altogether. Accidental silence doesn't read as dread. It reads as a bug. Around the same time, I noticed choices were being announced to screen readers while the narrator was still mid-sentence, which trampled every ominous final line. Now the choices wait until the narrator has finished, so the last line gets its moment.

Escalate slowly. The player should feel a slow creep of wrongness for several scenes before anything openly threatens them. By the time the danger is explicit, the dread has already sunk in deep. The classic structure goes like this:

1. Scene 1 establishes the world as normal
2. Scene 2 introduces a single small wrong thing
3. Scenes 3 to 5 layer on more wrongness while the character tries to rationalise it
4. Scene 6 is when something undeniable happens

By scene 4, the person at the keyboard should be ahead of their character. They know something is terribly wrong, even though the character is still busy convincing themselves there's a normal explanation.

Use the player's name. Once your character has a name, the GM saying it where it shouldn't be said is one of the strongest horror moves around. Maybe an NPC who shouldn't know it says it, or it echoes from a place where nobody should be, or it arrives in a tone that feels slightly off. The GM reads your character sheet every turn, so the name is always within reach. It's the player's hook, too. Twist that hook and you twist the player.

Don't be afraid of dark endings. Horror that always ties up neatly isn't really horror. The best horror campaigns are willing to end somewhere other than triumph: a pyrrhic victory, perhaps, or a cost the character carries forever, or a survival that feels worse than the alternative. One honest note about EchoQuest here. Characters don't die permanently. However, dropping to 0 HP brings a real setback: you might be captured, dragged clear by someone with an agenda of their own, robbed, or you wake hours later with a price to pay. That suits horror rather well, actually. So tell the GM up front that this campaign has darker endings on the table, and the world will lean into them when your choices warrant it.

Building a Horror World in EchoQuest

When you write your Game Bible for a horror campaign (or answer the World Builder Wizard's questions), keep these in mind:

• Define the central horror clearly for yourself, then reveal it to players gradually. Write down what the threat actually is and what it wants. Its rules belong on the page too. The GM needs that to stay consistent. The player doesn't need it, and shouldn't get it, until the moment has been earned
• Write specific sensory details for each location, because horror lives in specifics. "The hospital corridor" is generic. "The hospital corridor where the linoleum has buckled in places that make you walk slightly off-rhythm, the fluorescents flicker every 14 seconds, and there's a faint smell of formaldehyde that gets stronger near the locked door at the end" is a place. Remember that blind and low-vision players hear every word of it, so smell, touch and sound pull more weight than colour ever will
• Give your main antagonist or threat a distinctive sound before the player ever "sees" it. The player should learn to dread that sound over several scenes. The first time they hear it, they shouldn't recognise it. By the third time, they should know they're in trouble before anything else has happened. EchoQuest's sound-cue library is a fixed set, so your monster's signature sound has to live in the narration. Describe it in your Bible, and the GM will put it into words
• Establish what's normal in this world, so deviations register as wrong. Horror needs a baseline. If everything is creepy from scene one, the player calibrates to it and nothing ever escalates
• Set the content rating to Teen or Mature to allow genuine darkness. The Wizard describes Teen as "some peril and conflict" and Mature as allowing graphic content. Family-rated horror exists too, but it has a lower ceiling

Example opening:

"You've been assigned to document the decommissioned hospital on the edge of town. The front door is already open, which the records say it shouldn't be. Inside, the smell of antiseptic has been replaced by something older and wetter. Your torch throws shadows that seem to resolve into shapes a half-second after you look away. Your radio is playing static, and you don't remember turning it on."

That's a complete horror opening with no monsters and no jump scares. It's just wrongness, piling up. Notice how specific the sensory details are: the door, the smell, the timing of the shadows, the radio. Each one is a small wrong thing on its own. And by the time the player decides what to do, they're already well inside the dread.

So, what's the scariest thing you've ever only heard? Build your campaign around that sound, and you're halfway there.

Start your horror campaign →

Related reading: Browse all EchoQuest blog posts.