Carefully consider what your character feels is important and what he or she would do to protect that. For instance:The true measure of courage is not to face danger fearlessly but to face fear and overcome it. Heroes without fear lack an important emotional tool to add weight to their stories. This exercise will help you discover that fear makes you stronger and more interesting.
One of the most obvious fears to confront an adventurer with is that of physical harm. After all, a huge portion of the job is risking danger. Pain and death are obvious and appropriate fears that most adventurers will face often. It may add flavor to some characters to make this a fear of specific injury: for instance, a bard may be terrified of an injured hand, which will affect her music. Some characters may need an even subtler approach. A strong fighter may fear their body aging, thus losing their defining trait. A character obsessed with strength can even fear an inadequacy that does not exist, frightened of a weakness she does not possess.
Carefully consider what your character feels is important and what he or she would do to protect that. For instance:
Pain
Weakness
Inadequacy
Injury
Sickness
Death
The most powerful tool any adventurer has in her arsenal is her mind, since it controls how she puts her skills to use. It can also work against her, constructing invisible enemies and threats out of harmless things. Shadows can be signs of lurking horror; coincidence can be a sign of a superior enemy; an oddly phrased sentence can be a sign of conspiracy. Adventurers make calculations about danger out of necessity. Fear lies in how they draw those conclusions and react to them. The mind is also the space where characters catalog their plans and resources. Any anxiety about failure, readiness, or progress is felt through the mind. Certain heroes are dependent on their minds in ways others are not. For a wizard, his mind and ability to study are paths to power. It is easy to tie this story to fears of inadequacy and anxiety over sense of self. Fears of the mind are less visceral than others, but they carry no less weight.
To create a mind-based fear for your character, consider what you know and focus on the dangers you find most important. For instance:
Anxiety
Lack of preparation
Feeling lost
Post-traumatic stress
Lack of valuable information
Existential dread
The world of fantasy offers boundless possibilities for exploring spiritual themes. A lot of what is abstract in real life takes concrete form in fantasy. It is very possible to play a character who simply fears evil as a force. A story about good and evil on a conceptual level becomes more grounded when you have a character embody those concepts. Evil is very easy to understand when it can swing a sword at you. You can even create internal conflict by exploring the thought process of a good person for whom violence is an unavoidable aspect of life. Fearing personal corruption is a great way to add weight to actions and decisions your character must make.
To construct a spiritual fear, ask difficult questions about your character’s beliefs and behavior. Create an emotional attachment to his or her sense of justice and find the areas where there are no easy answers. For instance:
The nature of evil
The fragility of virtue
A specific evil person
Personal corruption
Crisis of faith
Cosmic horror à la H.P. Lovecraft
Emotional storytelling is the core of character-driven fiction. The way you interact with other characters drives a great deal of the story. Rejection is an easy theme around which to build fear. Our world is already fraught with social strife surrounding appearance and acceptance. Adding features like tusks, tails, and otherworldly fire to other characters or NPCs (non-player characters) makes differences more overt and easier to play with. Facing rejection is especially terrifying when one’s way of life depends on trusting other people. On the other side of the coin, intimacy is another common heroic fear. Allowing yourself to care about others makes the pain of loss more pronounced and opens you up to new vulnerabilities. Fear of intimacy raises the stakes on otherwise mundane interactions.
To construct a fear of the heart, focus on a social interaction and what would happen if something went wrong. For instance:
Rejection
Intimacy
Loneliness
Personal awkwardness
Loss
Social pressures to succeed
Despite being abstract, the beast is probably the most commonly represented fear in storytelling. It is based around the unknown and unknowable causing harm. The most obvious manifestation of the beast is monsters: the awful things that lurk in dungeons with sharp teeth and steely claws. It is easy to play a character who fears a specific type of monster. Almost every creature found in a monster manual, or bestiary, is individually terrifying, and it is easy to empathize with a character who sees monsters that way. The beast is also a central aspect of cosmic horror, where forbidden truths unravel stable aspects of reality to make our world unstable and unsafe. There is also an element of the beast in the fears that drive hatred and bigotry. Those who are ignorant and fear what they do not understand are in thrall to the beast.
To construct a fear of the beast, think of what your character does not know and find a way to make that dangerous. Focus on the alien and outwardly horrific to find the shape of the beast. For instance:
Monstrous appearance
Dangerous abilities
Forbidden knowledge
Alien cultures and practices
Unfamiliar devices
Uncontained power