We've currently got a thread going ranking the
best horror movies of all time. Let's talk about the best horror RPGs of all time. Criteria? Look, I don't really like to get bogged down in discussions of what is or isn't horror. If you want to tell me Burrows & Bunnies is a horror game, okay, I won't argue with you, but I'll sit here in silent judgment instead.
It's kind of surprising to me how few horror games there were in the early days of RPGs. I'm just counting stand alone games here, not supplements or sourcebooks like GURPS: Horror or the classic I-6 AD&D module "Castle Ravenloft."
1981 - Call of Cthulhu (Played)
1983 - Stalking the Night Fantastic (I've never heard or seen of this game before doing some research)
1983 - Witch Hunt
1984 - Chill
1987 - Beyond the Supernatural (Played)
1989 - In Nomine
1989 - It Came from the Late, Late Show
Horror games started really picking up in popularity during the 1990s but I'm not going to go into all of them here. And today I can go into my local game store and see Alien, Vaesen, Candelra Obscura, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire, Werewolf, and Hunter. That doesn even count others that won't be at my game store like Eat the Reich or Bluebeard's Bride. It warms the cockles of my black, black heart to see so many horror games being produced these days.
But we all want to know what's the best horror game? I mean other than Call of Cthulhu. What's the tops on your list? My list is in no particular order.
#1. Delta Green (FOOLED YOU!) While this started out as a sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu back in 1997 (not counting it's first appearance in Unspeakable Oath a few years prior), Arc Dreams Games released a standalone edition of the game back in 2016. In DG, you play a government agent (typically) who is part of a conspiracy to combat unnatural forces. It's kind of like a mashup of the X-Files and the Cthulhu mythos (both franchises draw from the same UFO mythology like Roswell, etc., etc.). The 2016 version of the game is updated as threats have changed, the war on terror has made it a little easier to pull off illegal conspiracies at the federal level, and the Delta Green organization itself is much different.
What I really like about this game is that the horror you engage are mostly humans. Sure, they have that cosmic element thrown in, but most of the "bad guys" are people. And the game isn't really about being a big, damn hero. Your job is to contain the threat, keep it secret, and don't get caught. If you want to frame someone for a murder they didn't commit to keep people from finding out what really happened, go for it. What is your character willing to do to achieve their mission?
#2: Deadlands. This might seem an odd choice, but it's a horror game. One of the taglines for Deadlands in the late 1990s was "A spaghetti western with meat." Deadlands takes place in an alternative past in the American west circa the 1880s. You might get into a gunfight with a vampire one week, face down a yeti the next, and run into an animated player piano the third week. Your posse (party) might consist of a cowboy, a samurai, a rabbi, a flamethrower toting mad scientist, and a Russian aristocrat who came to hunt the buffalo. It truly is the weird west.
It's not a particularly scare game. It's more in the vein of movies like Dead Alive or Army of Darkness in tone, but it's a very, very fun game.
#3. Call of Cthulhu. I feel somewhat obligated to put this one on the list. As the first horror game (that I could find), it's been continuously published for more than 40 years now. The default setting is the 1920s which is both alien and familiar to modern players which I think adds to the atmosphere. There are a ton of great scenarios/campaigns published for CoC and they're pretty much all compatible with the current edition.
#4. Vampire the Masquerade (1991). This game was very different to what I was used to playing. If you weren't around back then, it's hard to describe just how big an impact this had on gaming. Other than D&D, it's the only game from the 80s and 90s that I can think of that made any sort of cultural impact. Anyone remember the terrible Kindred: The Embraced show on Fox? Vampire was huge back in the 1990s and induced a kind of moral panic. I remember it being featured on an episode of
Real Stories of the Highway Patrol. It sounds cheesy now, but at the time I kind of felt like this was an adult RPG. Of course my friends and I played it all wrong and leaned into the super heroes with fangs aesthetic. Why, yes, my character does have a Desert Eagle and a katana, why do you ask?
#5: Alien (2019). I passed on the Kickstarter for this because I couldn't see how you'd maintain a full campaign with this. But the more I read about it the more I fell in love and I ended up buying it. It's not like I run long campaigns of anything these days. This game does a great job of emulating both
Alien and
Aliens 2. And presumably other Alien movies if they had made any. The rules are extremely simple and it's fun to play.
There are two modes, campaign and cinematic. Campaign mode is more like what we're used to with other games. You make your character and they adventure. In cinematic mode, you have a pre-generated character who has some goals they need to meet in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd acts of the scenario. These goals are secret and serve to make the game a bit more interesting as sometimes player goals are conflicting.
