Best Horror Role Playing Game

[jdrakeh]

Yes. Its an independent organization (there also were some serious changes what occurred with the organization between the second and third edition).

In second edition Chill, SAVE is basically Poltergeist: The Legacy (an old but extremely fun television show).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which edition is the hardcover? Looks like 2nd Mayfair... I've the hardcover. Also is the edition I played. Which said, there are PDFs on DTRPG for it now.

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

multiple editions in PDF, even.

Both second and third had hardcovers as I recall.

 

[Piperken]

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...

...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...

I'm not versed in horror games, and even I know about Call of Cthulhu!

Recommendations:

I will throw my lot in with Vaesen, which I've just started running. Some ppl feel YZE as it's iterated in this version isn't as elegant for the genre, but overall with players coming from 5E D&D and importantly, having less experience with interacting with fiction elements at the table, it's been a great introduction towards emphasizing those aspects in their play.

While I have not played or run myself, I have heard praise given to Mothership in this space.

Both are more in the narrative driven, less crunchy side.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

The key to ToC is resource management. Keep spending enough to get away and eventually you run out of resources to get away with.

In retrospect, I think I was also too generous with letting players know the difficulty of tests. I ran Dracula Dossier (Night's Black Agents) after TOC ETERNAL LIES and was much more careful, only letting players know the difficulty of challenges in vague terms. It was definitely more suspenseful for the players not to know the targets, but against that, some players get annoyed when they overspend and so "waste" resources, so this only works with players that have learned to accept that that is a part of the game.

Uncertainty in the amount of resources that will be needed .. so you might run out .. is a nice way of doing this, and would work well for more players. Good thought.

 

[aramis erak]

I'm not versed in horror games, and even I know about Call of Cthulhu!

Recommendations:

I will throw my lot in with Vaesen, which I've just started running. Some ppl feel YZE as it's iterated in this version isn't as elegant for the genre, but overall with players coming from 5E D&D and importantly, having less experience with interacting with fiction elements at the table, it's been a great introduction towards emphasizing those aspects in their play.

The issue my players had was that they sometimes lept to far in their conclusions... solving 2 of 3 mysteries, but one of those solves also resulted in hundreds of deaths... and they were kill-happy.

Spoiler: Mystery breaking details for one of the aventures in the first supplelement

In the adventure where they are investigating the missing folk in the island town, they correctly ID'd the bad guy, but immediately decided to end him, triggering the failure state of a tidal wave... cause by his ocean goddess mother.

it's intended to be very much investigate and mitigate, not search and destroy, and the published adventures have strong failure states...
Buffy/Supernatural/Witcher fans will need to be guided away from the kill-based mindset.

Mechanically, it's as solid as all the other YZE. It's dicepool flavor, success on 6, no 1's effect, damage is complications (instead of HP), pushes also cause complications.

 

[kronovan]

...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.

Along the lines of Deadlands...I've used Savage Worlds+Horror Companion for the Action-Horror subgenre and achieved good results. If you're referring to the SW edition of Deadlands, you'll get a similar vibe and experience those 2. You might have to turn a few nobs and push a few sliders like enabling gritty damage and possibly the sanity rules from the HC. For horror settings like Blade or Resident Evil, IME it delivers well.

There's also 1st party Horror settings available for SW, like Holler, East Texas University, Rippers and to some extent the Weird Wars series. And a number of 3rd party settings such as War of the Dead and Shadowed Earth.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You could also probably use SW for a reasonable survival-horror game with the right--I've forgotten the name, but rules toggles that they have baked in.

 

[dbolack]

I am also partial to Whispering Vault, though I'm not entirely sure it should be classified as a Horror game.

 

[Gradine]

The thing about Dread is that everyone talks about the Jenga tower and how genius it is (and it is!) but I think the most underrated aspect of Dread is the rules, such as they are, for character creation.

Your "character sheet" is essentially a list of leading, pointed questions like "How did it feel the first time you took a life?" or "Who knows that you're a complete fraud?" or "They say everyone has a price; when did you discover yours?"

Really helps to set the tone.

 

[jdrakeh]

I am also partial to Whispering Vault, though I'm not entirely sure it should be classified as a Horror game.

I think it's almost The Clive Barker RPG.