Let's focus this time on two similar games, both from Wizards of the Coast's D20 line: Star Wars and Wheel of Time. Sure, I said similar. One's science fiction (science fantasy, anyway) and the other's epic fantasy, but they're both heroic adventure games based on licensed properties, and as readers of both games have noted, the character types are often parallel. Both games posit worlds in which life is simple for most people, albeit lived against a backdrop of a world-wide conflict between good and evil, and in which rare individuals exist who can master that world's equivalent of magic: a force mysterious and often feared by the general populace.
So how do we work horror in?
The original Star Wars source material -- the movies -- doesn't give you too many hooks. There are so many varied types of aliens that it's difficult to imagine "monsters" being frightening. Darth Vader is certainly foreboding, but how would you use him in a horror game? You wouldn't, but he's one of the two keys to what sort of horror games you'd run. The other is the famous "asteroid belt" scene, in which the Millennium Falcon barely escapes a monster large enough to swallow it whole.
The Dark Side is the most obvious aspect of the setting to involve in a horror adventure. We see very little of what Dark Jedi are capable of in the movies. What about, for lack of a less cheesy term, Force-powered zombies -- corpses animated by a Dark Side force-user like the Emperor? Or "ghosts," like those of Kenobi, Yoda, and others in the movies, only from the Dark Side -- haunting the hero instead of guiding him? Could one of them try to regain power in the physical world, by feeding off the living, like a wraith or vampire? In a different style of campaign, what about a "personal horror" approach like that of Vampire, dealing with the heroes' corruption by the Dark Side? A good hero forced by circumstance to rely on Dark Side powers -- or force-using heroes somewhere in the thin slice of gray, slowly being corrupted and changed as they slide towards the Dark.
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