Give the Darkness Teeth

Greetings all,

It's October, so for the rest of the month we're talking horror. This week is the dark itself, and the one rule that's been quietly stealing it from your table. Next week, we take over the room.

Which one is more unnerving?

Your darkvision shows you the whole chamber in shades of gray. Old stones. The floor is a mess of debris and broken bottles of wine... no, that isn't wine. Blood. Then the smell hits you. The stench of blood and gore fills the room.

In the far corner, a small child is hunched over the remains of a man. Crunching. Slurping. Wet tearing.

Then the child... no. The creature looks up at you with a blood-stained mouth and grins. A mouth full of sharp teeth, still chewing.

Or this one:

Your torchlight reaches a few old stones around you. Its meager glow barely gets into the chamber. The floor is a mess of debris and broken bottles of wine... no, that isn't wine. Blood. Then the smell hits you. The stench of blood and gore fills the room.

Somewhere in the dark past your torchlight: crunching. Slurping. Wet tearing.

Then the sound stops.

At my table, I make those sounds myself.

Those are the same room. The first is what a character with darkvision gets. The second is what the human with the torch gets.

Now put both at the same table. When one player has darkvision, you have to tell them what they see, and everyone else hears it too. You can't un-hear "a blood-stained mouth full of sharp teeth." The human's player knows exactly what's chewing in the dark, even if her character doesn't.

One player with darkvision turns the lights on for everybody.

I hate darkvision.

On a monster, it's fine. A ghoul that sees you coming down a black tunnel is exactly as scary as it should be. What I hate is the coupon every player gets at character creation. Most of my players have darkvision. That's usually how it goes. In Pathfinder, an elf starts with low-light vision, and an ancestry feat upgrades it to darkvision. At my table, the elves always take it. So the elf who grew up in a sunny forest ends up seeing in the dark underground. The human who spent her whole life in the mines doesn't.

That rule serves one thing: nobody has to carry a torch.

And the torch was the point.

What the dark used to do

Darkness is the oldest horror tool we have. You can't fight what you can't see, and you can't run from what you can't find.

When light matters, players make choices. Do we light the torch and announce ourselves to everything on this floor? Who carries it, and what aren't they holding instead? How deep do we go before we turn back? What happens when it goes out?

When everybody sees in the dark, none of those questions get asked. The ambush in the black corridor fails because the whole party watched the goblins set it up. And the dungeon ends up lit like the tavern.

I wrote about this in my old Shadowdark review, back when I called darkvision "a racial coupon for free parking." Shadowdark doesn't give it to anyone. Torches burn in real time at the table, and an hour of light is an hour of light.

I love it. At my Shadowdark table, the torch is a timer you can see. I bought a set of hex-shaped pomodoro timers, the kind with a different amount of time on each side. Light a torch, flip the timer to the hour, and it starts counting down in the middle of the table. Nobody has to track anything. The players can watch their light run out.

It gets intense fast. Especially when they're on their last torch and still trying to find their way out of the dark.

But I run Pathfinder most weeks, and I wasn't going to strip a core ancestry feature out of my players' hands without trying something smaller first.

The rule I tested

The rule: darkvision sees darkness as dim light, out to 30 feet. Past that, you're blind.

Here's that chamber from the top of this post, for a character with darkvision at my table now. Same torch, same floor, same smell. Then:

Past your torchlight, your eyes find shapes. Lighter shadows on darker ones. In the far corner, something small is hunched over something larger. Crunching. Slurping. Wet tearing.

Then the sound stops, and the small shape turns toward you.

She gets a little more than the human next to her. She knows where it is and how big. But nobody at the table gets the teeth, so I can describe the same dark to everyone, and nobody's sitting on a spoiler. It puts the whole table back on a level playing field.

If you play Pathfinder 2e, think of it as low-light vision with a little extra. Low-light vision turns dim light into bright light. My darkvision does that too, and it can also see into true darkness, but only out to 30 feet, and only as dim light. Anything out there is concealed, so attacks need the DC 5 flat check. Past 30 feet, nothing.

That changes what a torch is worth. A human with a torch sees more clearly than an orc in the dark without one. The orc can get around without it, but everything she sees is shadow. Put a torch near her, though, and she sees clearly to the edge of its glow, dim part and all.

So the torch matters again, even to the orc.

The monsters that live down there keep their full darkvision. It's their home.

The Emerald Spire

I tested it on the first floor of The Emerald Spire, which I'm running in Pathfinder 2e. That floor eats light. Every torch, lantern and light spell reaches 5 feet, and not an inch more. As written, darkvision walks right past that. I'd rebuilt the whole floor into an undead nightmare, and I didn't want it to be a stroll.

With the house rule, darkvision got my players out to 30 feet. Shapes that might be furniture. Shapes that might not be.

The only real light in the party all night was Hanzo's: a light cantrip cast on his spellbook, floating in front of him. One small circle of light, moving through a floor full of the dead.

The rule earned its keep in the fights. Zombies came climbing over the rubble, and Talia landed a critical hit. The dim-light flat check ate it.

Later, with half the party already heading for the exit, they heard nails on stone from the north. Ghouls.

Talia lit a torch.

Then she walked back in.

I didn't ask her to. The ghouls could see her either way. They live down there. But she'd already lost one crit to the flat check that night, and she wasn't going to fight ghouls through it. She wanted them in the light.

She'd learned the dark was dangerous. It came with risks, and the torch was how she took one of them back.

That's a choice darkvision as written never asks anyone to make.

Making light matter at your table

You don't have to go as far as Shadowdark. If your table won't give up darkvision, give the dark teeth another way: magical darkness it can't pierce, or a predator that hunts by sound. If they will, try the rule above. And if you want to go all the way and take darkvision off the player ancestries, that's a conversation for session zero, not a surprise in session six.

Describe the edge of the light

Whichever way you go, the dark only works if you describe it. Most of you already describe what the room looks like (if not, start with Stop Describing Rooms). Start describing what's past it: what your players hear and smell out there, and what moves. A scrape on stone. Water dripping somewhere that could be ten feet away or a hundred. A shape at the edge of the glow that wasn't there a second ago. If you can stand to, make the sounds yourself.

Stop putting tokens on the map past it, too. I made that mistake that same night: I kept placing monsters out beyond Hanzo's 5 feet of light, which told my players exactly where things were that their characters couldn't see. Now, past the light, there's no token. I describe it instead. Players with darkvision get a better sense of where something is, but to attack it, they pick a square. If the flat check passes, that's where it was.

And let the light be a decision. A torch in combat is a hand that isn't holding a shield. And everything out in the dark sees it coming long before your players see what's out there.

Light a torch

Talia lit that torch because the dark had already cost her once.

Give your players a dark like that. Then, somewhere past the torchlight, start chewing.

And stop.

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See you at the table.

A new GM tip goes up here every Friday.

Header photo by Pranjall Kumar on Pexels.