Threats

---

This page is for Directors.

Blood on the Lens presents each of its episodes as conflicts with a single entity that the players must survive, investigate, and hunt, lest they be hunted themselves.

Overview

All of the Threats detailed on this page leverage the following ideas and structures.

Hunt or Be Hunted

When a Threat is on the loose, one of two things will happen: either it’ll pick off the players one-by-one, or the players will investigate it, uncover its weaknesses, corner it, and bring it down. None of these are small feats; each is fraught with peril, thrusting them into encounters with the Threat or its minions. In the course of investigation, the characters might need to procure special weapons or resources, pull on threads of inquiry to meet people familiar with the Threat, or simply spend a lot of time at the library. Every action brings them closer to an inevitable final confrontation, whether they’re ready for it or not.

Critical Weakness

Many things can be learned as the players delve into investigation, from the Threat’s origin, to how it kills, to the location of its lair, but the most important is undoubtedly the Threat’s Weakness. As invincible as any monster might seem, every entity has an Achilles’ heel, some critical vulnerability that slows them down, undermines their powers, banishes them from time and space, or allows them to be slain. With the proper research, and a little bit of luck, the players might be able to find some detail which gives them a fighting chance.

Insidious Lair

Whenever the Threat has finished consuming or abducting a victim—and whenever it is forced to flee—it retreats to its Lair, a shadowy bastion where it heals and grows more powerful. Within its lair, the Threat wields all the tricks of familiar territory. However, it is also the most vulnerable to being cornered, trapped, and slain.

Hook, Mystery, Revelation

Each Threat on this page is presented with the outline of a three-part episode—beginning, middle, and end—arranged as a set of story hooks, an overarching mystery, and a number of revelations to uncover as the investigation unfolds. The Running the Game page provides additional guidance on how to run episodes using this format.

Furthermore, each Threat can mix-and-match with any setting you wish. This means that certain details—like “the town” or “the authorities”—are painted with a broad enough brush to grant the necessary flexibility. Feel free to change smaller details to suit your selection of setting, NPCs, and factions. Also, experiment with unconventional pairings of Threats and settings. Perhaps a string of daemonic creatures visits the sci-fi Blackpost colony, or an extraterrestrial invasion sets its sight on Nowhere, USA.

Hooks. For the Threat’s slow, insidious reveal, each comes armed with at least three story hooks, which inform different aspects of the mystery that follows. Don’t simply pick one—use all three! When all of the plot’s elements center on the Threat in different ways, the players will organically point their investigation in the correct direction as well.

Mystery. The overarching mystery centers on how the Threat hunts, the clues it leaves behind, and the investigation’s unexpected detours. Sometimes, the mystery has all the hallmarks of a detective story or a monster movie; other times, it involves deciphering esoteric patterns appearing in the world or reckoning with intangible forces from beyond space and time.

Because the mystery is almost entirely player-directed, this section of the Threat should be taken as a loose guideline, molded to the whims of your players and the demands of your story.

Revelations. It wouldn’t be a mystery without secrets to uncover. As the characters investigate, they’ll pinpoint the Threat’s lair, realize previously unseen aspects of its nature, unravel its motivation, and ultimately determine how it can be killed. Each revelation is a modest achievement, a step toward understanding and ultimately achieving victory over the Threat at hand.

Doom Clock

Detailed on the Insomnia Storytelling Engine page, the Doom Clock is a tool the Director can use to build tension as the episode progresses. Each monster includes a Doom Clock table with six recommended events. You can also substitute these events with those in the Insomnia Storytelling Engine page or your own.

Battling a Threat

Each Threat is detailed with a few statistics that define how they act, how difficult they are to kill, and how to characterize their supernatural strengths and weaknesses.

Trauma. Each Threat has a given amount of Trauma it can sustain before being defeated. This amount of Trauma increases with the number of players, from three to six. You can usually extrapolate the Trauma for larger and smaller groups of players by adding or subtracting three.

Traits. Each monster’s statistics include one or two special traits, usually including a description of its Weakness. Most often, a monster’s weakness counteracts another trait that renders it invulnerable (or nearly so).

Actions. The Threat acts between each player’s turn, performing any Action you desire. When you don’t have a grand, cinematic moment in mind for the Threat’s Actions, you can choose a predefined Action or randomly determine one with a die roll. (You can also ask each player to roll a die to determine the monster’s Actions before their turn.)

Evolution. No battle with a Threat remains static throughout. At least one moment in each battle should fundamentally reshape the encounter. Each Threat, therefore, also features an Evolution—a twist that takes place during its encounter. These range from the relatively benign, such as revealing the monster’s face, to dramatic changes in form and function.

Minions

Some Threats are accompanied by a host of lesser horrors known as Minions. Whereas the Threat is a singular force upon which the entire Episodes centers, Minions are individually surmountable. Therefore, Minions always try to use overwhelming numbers to their advantage.

Running Minions. Like the Threat, Minions always act between the players’ turns. Distribute the Minions around the table and keep track of where each Minion acts. You should always be able to fit them evenly between the players. When a Minion is defeated, it no longer takes its turn and players will start taking turns back-to-back until no Minions remain.

Trauma and Numbers. Each Minion can only take a certain amount of Trauma, usually one or two, before being defeated. With more players, however, more minions attack, as detailed in the Minion statistics.

Actions. You can choose how Minions act from a predefined list in its statistics or roll to determine them randomly.

Sidebar: Adjusting the Threat

You can double the Threat’s overall Trauma or cut it in half to match the players’ level of power. 

Furthermore, when a Threat calls for a Reaction to avoid Trauma, you can have it deal two Trauma instead. A Success (one 5 or 6) avoids one Trauma, whereas a Big Success (two 5s or 6s) avoids both Trauma.

Alternately, if the Threat is dealing too much Trauma to the players, you can choose for it to spend its turn moving evasively, imposing Disadvantage on the players, or shifting the environment in its favor.

The Slasher

Content Warning: Death, Gore, Kidnapping

A remorseless killer on a protracted rampage, the slasher’s rough-hewn hood conceals the terrible face of undeath beneath.

Hooks

The slasher’s hideous visage can be introduced in a number of ways. Use these hooks to introduce players to this monster.

Urban Legend. Teenagers are fond of telling the story of the slasher by firelight, wooing and making scary noises as accompaniment. The details of the urban legend always differ, shifting to match the times as it has passed through the decades, but the curious nursery rhyme which accompanies it hasn’t. All one has to do is go into a pitch-black room with a candle and recite the following lines before extinguishing the flame and waiting in silence for five minutes:

Dark of night, dark of night, what do you see?

Not a thing, not a thing, nothing’s here with me!

Candle light, candle light, fire in the mirror!

Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, nothing left to fear!

Douse the flame, douse the flame, think about your friends!

In the dark, in the dark, coming to their ends!

Can you hear, can you hear, heartbeats in your head?

Listen close, listen close, here comes Mister Red!

Historical Record. Amateur local historians are soon celebrating an unorthodox anniversary: every twenty-three years, like clockwork, there’s a killing spree. Sometimes, the killings are condensed into a single tragic night, other times they take place over a span of days or weeks, but they always claim dozens of victims (usually children and young adults). Someone is almost always sentenced under the barest of evidence, and memorials are usually erected in memory of the victims. It might be a coincidence or a case of cherry-picked news reports, but the sheer consistency makes it a tantalizing subject for speculation.

Murder! Someone close to you has been butchered in their home. Within hours, the authorities are grilling you about when you last saw them and showing you grisly depictions of the crime scene: you didn’t even know a person could be carved up into so many unrecognizable parts.
Another 24 hours later, someone else is killed in the same manner. Despite the authorities’ best efforts to keep people calm, folks around town grow frantic as they conclude that someone or something is hunting them for sport. For you, however, it’s personal—and you have revenge on the mind.

Mystery

Once the slasher awakens, it butchers one person each night, or a pair if it happens upon a lone couple. Before striking, the slasher lingers in the shadowy periphery, stalking its prey until nightfall. This provides a rare chance to glimpse the slasher at a distance: its profile is disturbingly human, wearing a long trench coat, workman’s gloves, and a rough-hewn burlap mask with one eyehole. The oversized knife slung over its back is the tool of choice, brandished only when the killing begins.

Each crime scene it leaves behind is a bloodbath, recounting a desperate chase, a chaotic struggle, a decisive strike, and a deliberate hacking to bits, starting with the head. Nobody escapes. The slasher always pilfers a trophy from the corpse, usually its head or some other defining feature, which it mounts on its belt for all future murders. The trail of blood leading away from the killing points somewhere distant, a location which can be derived with a map and a few data points.

The slasher methodically executes its killings to be as unique as they are gruesome, using whatever tools that prove to be most lethal. It isn’t possessed of high thoughts or grand ambitions: it kills become it is compelled to, and because it enjoys its victims’ suffering.

While lacking heads makes it harder to identify the bodies, a pattern of victims gradually emerges. They are a circle of friends, classmates, or coworkers familiar with the slasher’s urban legend, and they invariably realize they are being hunted before the authorities do. They stoke their own fears and suspicions, playing a game of whodunit with the web of acquaintances they have left, trying to place someone they know beneath the slasher’s mask. Soon, fight or flight sets in: the remaining survivors rush to fortified or remote places, clutching any weapons they can find. This rarely impedes the slasher for long.

Doom Clock

Use these events to build tension as the episode progresses.

Clock	Event
1	String of Murders. Two people were killed within 48 hours.
2	A Survivor. Someone witnesses the slasher’s killing spree and describes what they saw.
3	Gruesome Warning. The slasher leaves a grisly totem, such as a decapitated head hung from a tree, specifically for the players to find.
4	Sinister Traps. Where the players expect a survivor or a trove of clues, they instead find a sadistic mechanical trap
5	Kidnapped. The slasher abducts a player and brings them back to its lair.
6	Killing Spree. Insane with rage, the slasher works its way through the community, killing dozens indiscriminately.

Revelations

As the characters uncover clues and unravel the mystery, they might uncover any of the following revelations about the slasher:

Undead Killer. Encountering the slasher quickly reveals that, despite its lumbering, it possesses inhuman strength and durability. Nothing truly injures the slasher, though a few things might slow it down. Its pallid flesh and revolting stench provide additional clues that the slasher is not a masked killer exacting revenge, but is actually an undead creature.

Summoned. Not everyone involved in the string of killings is strictly innocent. Someone known to the victims chanted the slasher’s rhyme with serious intent (whether or not they believed it would work), and beckoned the undead monster into existence. It was this individual’s thoughts which guided the slasher to its targets. Should all these targets be butchered, the slasher will depart and resume its slumber for another twenty-three years.

Murderous Ritual. Research suggests that the slasher has performed its killings for hundreds of years, stemming from an ancient curse invoked as revenge for some wrongdoing forgotten to history. No magic can break this curse, for there are no remaining practitioners of this variety of necromancy.

However, there is one other way to end the killer’s spree early: if the slasher can be tricked into killing its summoner, its connection to the mortal realm will be broken forever. Knowing this, the slasher will never willingly attack its summoner, nor even interact with them after appearing out of the blackness to begin its murder spree.

Weakness: Holy Water, Iron Spike. With enough research, or by interrogating the oldest people who remember the rhyme, the characters can discover that the slasher’s rhyme has two additional lines:

Now he’s done, now he’s done, All your friends are dead!

Holy water, iron spike, goes right through the head!

These reveal the slasher’s weakness, by which it can be “slain,” ending its killing spree early (though the slasher will still awaken when called in another twenty-three years.) Holy water is only mitigation for the slasher’s invulnerability, and an iron spike through the heart or head is the only way to kill the slasher for good.

Lair: Killer’s Basement

The slasher always sets up shop in someplace below ground, usually an abandoned basement filled with rusted tools and broken antiques. There, it shackles kidnapped victims whom it is not yet ready to kill, displays its trophies, and sharpens its knives. The slasher resides in its basement in daytime, pensively waiting until nightfall. Once the sun goes down, it is possible to infiltrate the basement, but doing so is perilous, as the slasher could return at any moment.

Slasher Trauma 7 (3 Players), 10 (4 Players), 13 (5 Players), 16 (6 Players)

Deathless. When the slasher reaches its maximum Trauma, it only dies temporarily. At the start of its next turn, the Slasher returns to life with 6 fewer Trauma. Weakness. If the slasher is splashed with holy water, its Deathless trait doesn’t function for the rest of the session. Weakness. If the slasher is tricked into killing its summoner, it dies and its Deathless trait doesn’t function.

Menacing Approach (Roll of 1-2). The slasher moves to a Far player. If an obstacle, such as a wall, stands in its way, it demolishes the obstacle on approach. The player has Disadvantage on their Action rolls during their next turn. Butcher (Roll of 3-4). One Close player must succeed on a React roll or suffer one Trauma. Vicious Throw (Roll of 5-6). The slasher grabs one Close player and throws them through an obstacle, such as a door or window, destroying it. The player must succeed on a Withstand roll or suffer one Trauma.

Evolution: Undead Visage. When the slasher has taken half or more of its Trauma, its mask is removed or ripped away, revealing a hideous face of undeath. The player who most recently dealt Trauma to the slasher must succeed on a Withstand roll or suffer one Trauma. Each other player that can see the slasher has Disadvantage on their next Action roll. (1/Session)

The Vampire

Content Warning: Bats, Darkness, Illness

A blood-drinking undead abomination hailing from antiquity, the vampire’s curse hangs over the populace as it stalks the night and drinks its fill.

Hooks

The vampire’s haunting presence can reveal itself in a number of subtle ways. Use these hooks to introduce players to this monster.

Low Moon. The full moon looms low and large in the sky, seeming to grow wider each night. At first, it might be an optical illusion, the bright lunar phase causing the moon to appear more prominently than it might otherwise, but soon it is unmistakable: the moon is colossal, hanging so close that you can see each and every crater on its pockmarked face. It’s even visible throughout the day, casting a shadow that delays the morning and lengthens the night.

Hemophilia. A minor health crisis has tightened its grip on the area: dozens of people have reported bleeding for hours from minor wounds, a textbook symptom of hemophilia. This minor medical annoyance becomes life-threatening whenever someone sustains a serious bodily injury and starts bleeding uncontrollably. What makes this crisis utterly bizarre is that hemophilia is genetic, not contagious, and that the issue seems to be affecting more and more people each day.

Living Shadows. You spot movement in the corner of your vision, but turn around and there’s nothing there. Movement again; nothing again. When you think you’re at last losing your mind, you see it: shadows moving of their own accord—shifting around when they think nobody’s watching. You try to close your mind to it, but the very idea makes your skin crawl. The shadows are alive, and it seems they want something from you.

Mystery

The vampire’s arrival is signified by ominous signs and omens: a low, orange moon, the sense that the shadows are suddenly alive, and a sudden abundance of nocturnal creatures—bats, most of all. Shortly after, the killings begin: usually one person a night, desiccated into a blackened husk, like a mummy. Should anyone chance upon the vampire as it feeds, they are cut down with prejudice, usually hacked to pieces.

Apart from the bodies left behind after its meals, the vampire leaves few clues in its wake. Bloody footprints vanish after a few steps, and nothing can capture the monster’s image. The scant few witnesses and survivors, however, report an uncanny spectacle: a silent figure in medieval armor bearing a greatsword, floating near the horizon at dusk.

Doom Clock

Use these events to build tension as the episode progresses.

Clock	Event
1	Blood Moon. The community has been gripped by a wave of hemophilia, rendering even small injuries life-threatening. Simultaneously, the moon hangs red and low in the sky.
2	Blackened Husk. A victim is discovered, withered into a blackened husk.
3	Reign of Shadows. Living shadows stalk the streets.
4	Enthralled Messenger. The vampire infects the mind of one of its victims, who seeks out the players to deliver a message: a time and place for an audience with the vampire. Clearly a trap.
5	No Dawn. The sun refuses to rise past the horizon, blanketing the community in an endless night.
6	Extermination. An army of living shadows rounds up innocent people to be devoured by the blood-starved vampire.

Revelations

As the characters uncover clues and unravel the mystery, they might uncover any of the following revelations about the vampire:

Noble of Antiquity. Research indicates that this vampire is the last of its order, perhaps the last of its kind. It traces a once-proud heritage to historical kingdoms, when it once reigned as a lord with legions of peasants under its command. Despite how far it has fallen in the centuries hence, it still considers itself a personage of noble blood. All others, save royalty, are merely cattle upon which to feast. Therefore, it spares anyone of royal blood.

The vampire sleeps and eats sporadically, slumbering for decades, then feasting voraciously for weeks.

Sanguine Magic. When the vampire awakens, it commands an eerie blood magic to cover its tracks and loosen the blood of its victims. This magic predates other arcane disciplines, perhaps tracing its origin to prehistory.

Moreover, the vampire’s immortality doesn’t equate to eternal youth. The passing centuries have withered it into a terrible husk, such that it can no longer create more of its kind.

Vampiric Beast. Though the vampire appears humanoid in most respects, the facade crumbles if it is starved of blood for too long, revealing its true form: that of a monstrous bat creature. Once transformed, it will engage in a killing spree ended only by its death or the consumption of an ocean of blood.

Weakness: Silver. Through research, experimentation, and observation, the characters can learn that the vampire isn’t susceptible to classic vampiric weaknesses. It outright ignores garlic, crucifixes, and running water, and, while it is nocturnal, sunlight doesn’t harm it. A stake (or any other object) through the heart is painful and inconvenient, but not outright lethal.

Silver, however, proves fruitful, as it is possible to poison the vampire with silver-laden blood. Such poisoning is similar to heavy metal poisoning in humans, but curiously only works with dissolved silver, causing the vampire’s organs to falter, interrupting its regeneration.

Perhaps this is why the vampire’s image doesn’t appear in mirrors, as ancient mirrors were often composed of polished silver.

Lair: The Dark Spire

Guided by predatory instinct, the vampire makes its lair as high as possible: the peak of an abandoned tower or spire will usually suffice. From such a vantage point, it can select its nightly meal (or meals, should its appetite compel it), and it can look down upon the mortals it sees as loathsome peasants.

Minion: Living Shadow When the vampire perceives a threat to its midnight hunts, it directs living shadows to strike at its foes. These foul shades are the remnants of those consumed—body and soul—by the vampire in ages past. As commanded, they seek out and strangle those who might discover the vampire’s weakness, and defend the vampire’s lair while it hunts.

Trauma 2 Number of Minions 7 (3 Players), 10 (4 Players), 13 (5 Players), 16 (6 Players)

Fade (Roll of 1-3). The shadow disappears into the darkness and reappears at the start of its next turn. Necrotic Touch (Roll of 4-6). One Close player must succeed on a Withstand roll or suffer one Trauma.

Vampire Trauma 4 (3 Players), 7 (4 Players), 10 (5 Players), 13 (6 Players)

Grab (Roll of 1-2). The vampire grabs one Close player. A successful Force roll made by any player helps them escape its grasp. Bite (Roll of 3-4). The vampire deals one Trauma to a player it has in its grasp and reduces the Trauma it has taken by one. Ancestral Blade (Roll of 5-6). One Close player must succeed on a React roll or suffer one Trauma.

Evolution: Metamorphosis. When the vampire has taken all of its Trauma, it undergoes a horrific transformation—bones break, skin rips, and it reforms into a monstrous bat-like creature. It uses the statistics of the Bat. (1/Session)

Bat Trauma 5 (3 Players), 8 (4 Players), 11 (5 Players), 14 (6 Players)

Resistant. The bat ignores the first 5 or 6 rolled on any Weapon roll targeting it. Weakness: Silver. If the bat ingests silver or suffers Trauma from a silver weapon or projectile, its Resistant trait doesn’t function for the rest of the session

Screech (Roll of 1-3). The next player has Disadvantage on their Action roll. Thrash (Roll of 4-5). One Close player must succeed on a React roll or suffer one Trauma. Bite (Roll of 6). The bat deals two Trauma to a Close player.