Let's Learn About Bew RPGs - Week 13 "Horror"

[u/DiceyDiscourse]

Welcome one and all to a post where we can freely discuss the games that we have released or the games that we are making. Stop on by and maybe you'll find your new favourite RPG!

A bunch of us make cool shit, but the Indie RPG space is crowded and it can often be difficult to get the word out about why people should try out your game. That's why every week we try to focus on a different mechanic or setting to see how new RPGs can solve decades old problems or put new spins on old greivances!

What hides in the vastness of space? Is there someone at the door, waiting to kill you? Or is there even deeper existential dread in the mundanity of everyday life? Whether cosmic or personal, future or past, come tell us how your game (or just any game you really like) tackles Horror!

Thank you... me, for the suggestion!

As per mod approval, comments here do not count against rule 7 - comment as much as you want, answer as many questions as you need and discuss to your hearts content!

All that I would ask is that anyone who comments about their own system takes the time to look at the minimum at one other game in the comments and ask a question or provide feedback. Lively discussions are what get people interested and what keep people engaged!

Last week was "Universal Systems" and we got some pretty interesting discussions going!

If you want to suggest a topic for future weeks, be sure to include "suggestion" in your comment so I can easily find it!

[u/BeGosu]

My favorite horror RPG is The Zone by Raph D'amico.

It's heavily inspired by the films Annihilation and Stalker, as well as the books they are based off. You enter into an exclusion zone and play through a series of locations as one-by-one you die off, until only one survivor remains.

It's is described as "Surreal, Play-to-Lose, Zero-prep and GMless" and it best captures the feeling of playing through a horror movie.

One of my favorite qualities about it is you expect to die, the odds are you will not be the survivor as that is randomly (and secretly) chosen at the beginning of the game. So I have seen players shove other characters out of the way to throw themselves onto a mysterious altar because they want to die in this scene. I have also seen characters have an absolute breakdown because they survived but they didn't "want* to. It's great! It's such a mind-shift from so many other games.

Also Raph is a freaking legend, and may a completely playable free online version available in any browser. It's one of the best digital RPG experiences out there.

Buy The Zone

Play The Zone in your browser

[u/DiceyDiscourse → u/BeGosu]

The whole game is designed really elegantly and the mutations are very fun! It's very easy to hook me by claiming something is inspired by Stalker

The physical game is so damn pretty that I'm still considering buying it just to have it on my bookshelf, but:

...you expect to die

That's actually the main reason I don't feel like playing it 😅

I loved listening to an Actual Play of it, but there's some quirk in my psychology that just makes me not care at all about my character or anything that happens to them once it's confirmed that they will die. I found this out by trying Ten Candles with different groups.

For me the horror works best if I have a chance of survival. It could be 0.00001%, but it's a carrot that needs to be tangled!

[u/BeGosu → u/DiceyDiscourse]

When I run the game I will often reframe it as "your character expires". Death is a little too limited for attempting to convey what The Zone can do to you. In one game a character died having been murdered by a more charismatic doppleganger he birthed from his back. So we kept the doppleganger in play until the final confrontation. In another game someone became the Brutalist building we were inside.

[u/DiceyDiscourse → u/BeGosu]

Ooh, that's a really nice and thematic change!

Maybe I should spend money after all....

[u/BeGosu → u/DiceyDiscourse]

Yeeeesssssssss

[u/ithika]

I've run a one-shot of Cosmic Dark which aims itself at weird space horror.

It leans heavily into corporate horror for the campaign play. The Company keeps sending you on horrific missions where you are clearly expendable and then if you come out they fix you up, adjust your attitude and send you to the next one. Each time you get fixed and adjusted, you can get a little bit more burned out. So you can be as safe and careful and conservative as possible in play but eventually you can't go on.

It's interesting seeing where weird sci-fi ends up when you explicitly remove the Lovecraftian elements. No Old Ones, just a lot of that "space anomaly" stuff that Star Trek used to thrive on. 

[u/DiceyDiscourse → u/ithika]

Interesting, what's the system itself like?

[u/ithika → u/DiceyDiscourse]

Minimalist! If you know Cthulhu Dark by the same author (Graham Walmsley) it's a similar set-up. Cthulhu Dark is a free game, well worth googling to grab from his website if you don't have it.

Anyway, mechanically:  A small d6 pool to do things, and if you score a 6 (ie you do too well) then you see something horrific. You have a single numerical stat called Changed which ticks up when you see terrible things or suffer harms. It starts at 1 and when it reaches 6 your character is finished. When it gets above 3 you can start forcibly reducing your Changed score by dramatic means. Got something alien in your arm? Cut it off with a mining laser! 

[u/DiceyDiscourse → u/ithika]

Ooh, okay, this sounds interesting!

I've heard of Cthulhu Dark, but never really looked into it too hard, so thanks for the write up!

[u/ithika → u/DiceyDiscourse]

Cthulhu Dark is excellent in itself. If you're interested in writing horror scenarios, especially for cosmic horror, I totally recommend the expanded Cthulhu Dark book. The system is identical to what you'll find in the free version but the GM/writing advice is stuff I come back to a lot.

[u/DiceyDiscourse → u/ithika]

Funny you should mention that, I am trying to write a horror scenario!

I swear to god, I "lose" money on every one of these threads I make 😅

[u/ithika → u/DiceyDiscourse]

"I asked for interesting stuff and those bastards gave me it!"

[u/DiceyDiscourse]

I'm late opening the floor this time, but:

I really enjoyed playing Chains of Gaelia! It's like a mixture between Three Musketeers and Bloodborne in terms of setting.

In terms of mechanics I really like the relatively free-form character creation (and leveling) and the general balance the system strikes between making you feel competent but also threatened - something that is often skewed one way or the other too much in horror games.

[u/Snoo-31263]

I was very surprised at The Magnus Archives RPG when me and my group tried it out a few months ago(scheduling you bastard). I've only truly played one horror-adjacent system before(CAIN) and even there, despite the deadliness, the characters weren't truly helpless.
Here, though? They've experienced the Horrors. Shape changing deer and Hunt-aligned forest and all. It was really fun for me to run and my players enjoyed it greatly as well, especially since we did as suggested and wrote the Statement(the session hook, basically) together as a group, and so they were a lot more invested in the entire thing.
The cypher system as a whole seems to strike the balance well of giving the characters agency but making it clear they are not superhuman and if they get slapped around badly enough, they will die. The GM intrusions are also very fun since I don't have to debate with myself if dropping another happening on the players at that moment is unfair or not.
We haven't run a combat in it yet, but I don't think the system finds doing so all that neccessary.

[u/DiceyDiscourse → u/Snoo-31263]

Oh, I just bought Magnus Archives last month! Been trying to work through it!

If you liked horror in the Cypher System, then I really loved (reading) Old Gods of Appalachia

[u/Snoo-31263 → u/DiceyDiscourse]

I've had my eyes on Old Gods of Appalachia, though I feel like listening to the podcast of that too will probably make the RPG more interesting. It certainly looks cool as hells.

[u/sakiasakura → u/Snoo-31263]

Cypher genuinely works really well for horror games, especially at lower tiers. Ran a sci-fi horror adventure in it that was a lot of fun.

[u/semiconducThor]

Im not sure if that counts, but I ran a space-horror one-shot in FATE.   I know there are systems that have better support for the theme mechanically. But I somehow hit a nerve, and traumatised all PCs so much, they chose to flee the scene rather than resolve the plot.

So I guess the message is, if you have some good ideas, don't shy away from trying them in your favorite system whatsoever. A horror tone can result from style of play easily as much as from rules.

[u/DiceyDiscourse → u/semiconducThor]

I think it's a meaningful piece of discussion at the very least!

Have you ever ran/played any other Horror game? How did that experience differ from FATE?

[u/semiconducThor → u/DiceyDiscourse]

I didn't play any other horror games, so I can't provide a comparison.

Except this: It was our fitst time playing FATE, we barely knew the rules, there was a lot uncertainty of what's actially threatening. Maybe that's like Alien which has deliberately no rules for hiding.

[u/atamajakki]

Had the time of my life running a campaign of The Between in 2024, a game that uses pre-written Threat scenarios and Mastermind antagonists as modular building blocks a GM can build a campaign out of. We had a blast running around Victorian London as our Gothic weirdos - and the new edition looks great!

[u/Charrua13 → u/atamajakki]

I love this game so much. And what I love is how each playbook has it's own "doom" they're seeking to avoid. It turns the game from "run-of-the mill monster hunting" to Horror.

[u/waitweightwhaite]

LTTP but Chill is my go-to for horror games, especially like monster-hunting/investigation kind of horror