your friend nate

That sounds super fun! I'm also getting my in person campaign migrated online. We're using roll20 and discord as well, but I really want to move some of the action over to Fantasy Grounds. Fun to hear your players are getting into it.

My overall goal is to incorporate content the players create, with backstory, conversations, quirks or traits they give themselves, into the horror in surprising and creepy ways. I also try to create increasing doom in the session. I'll use common horror tropes as cheats to tell a lot of story without having to create a lot of story. And setting the physical mood is key - it's hard to for me to generate any creepiness in a brightly lit room with birds singing through the open windows. Ambient music, dimmed lights, table setup all are critical.

As a keeper it's delightful when players spend their luck points willy nilly, I'm constantly calling for luck rolls and group luck rolls for all kinds of random things, and everything gets fun when that gets low. Also for Pulp your players (and you) should be closely tracking that 30 point minimum to spend all your luck for avoiding certain death - and certain death should be coming up. It should even out.

0. Why? It's very little fun to play battledoors. No one wants to go three rounds with a door because of bad rolls. Make one skill check, make it funny of they roll bad, and get them through the door and into the game. If there's a reason a door is extra strong, make that part of the narrative in a fun way.

The Things We Leave Behind is also an excellent collection of modern setting scenarios - some super creepy stuff in there (suggest Forget Me Not right out the gate).

Give pulp another look for one particular reason, it's so much easier for characters to survive, and thus the same character last for an entire campaign. I'm running 2HS for that reason with a newer group. Also for me the keeper there's some great content out there, such as Seth Skorkowsky's youtube videos on it and even better, the How We Roll podcast liveplay through the campaign that really helps paint a picture to how to run these things.