In case you hadn’t noticed from my reviews, horror is my favorite RPG genre. This favor filters through many of my other media preferences including TV shows, movies and podcasts. Last year, Monte Cook Games took on one of my favorite horror podcasts with Old Gods of Appalachia: The Role Playing Game. They did a good job with it, so I was excited to hear they were tackling another podcast that I enjoy. The Magnus Archives offers players a chance to investigate the things that lurk in the shows of our world and hopefully return to the light not too changed by the experience. Monte Cook Games provided a review copy to me. Does this game make a statement in the crowded horror field? Let’s play to find out.
The Magnus Archives podcast offers a straightforward setup for spooky tales. The original podcast centered around an archivist reading the statements of people who had encounters with the unexplained into the record of the Magnus Institute. The reading gives listeners a chill or two and then the archivist follows up with some notes about investigations into the details of the story he just read.As the show goes on, the team realizes things are more connected than they seem and the format switches up a bit but that gets into spoiler territory. What matters is that the game delves into the investigations that exist between the initial statement and the follow up at the end. That allows for a few variations on the theme for individual campaigns ranging from playing a new team of investigators, following up on favorite episodes or even spinning off into a new branch outside of the Magnus Institute instead of the London one featured in the show. The setup is one of my favorites when dealing with licensed games. Small enough to riff on the episodes everyone at the table likes but large enough to never run across the official storyline to muck it up.
The horror of The Magnus Archives feels cosmic in nature. The stories are about unknowable forces barely perceived by regular humans. The monsters are just as strange; there’s little time for things like vampires or ghosts here. People who get too close to the horrors find themselves changed but not necessarily driven to insanity. The game feels like a fresh take on Call of Cthulhu style horror without the baggage of being linked to Lovecraft’s work. If you can’t run that game because of the underlying opinions of the author or because your players see a Deep One and yawn, the strange creatures in this book offer a spooky path forward.
Horror seems like a good fit for the Cypher System given its focus on managing depleting resources and quick combat. This game offers a stress mechanic that not only layers on top of the main point pools but gives the game a slightly different feel. Stress reflects injury which makes players feel a little more frail than the heroes of Numenera. But it’s also how characters develop knowledge and, potentially, develop strange abilities of their own they can use to solve the mysteries of the setting. This potentially adds a fourth descriptor to their characters which gives them weird powers but also sets them apart from the rest of humanity that’s still unaware of how the universe works. It feels less like the slow crumbling of sanity and more like asking how far will your character go to learn the truth.
One of the first features I sought out was the method to have the whole group set up a potential investigation. I was hoping for something a bit more mechanical but there is some solid advice for groups on using a writer’s room approach to a story where they come up with strange details first and then leave it to the play session to figure out what’s going on in the case. I would recommend groups interested in this style of play check out The Weird as it has charts packed full of details that could be stitched together to create an intriguing entry point for a mystery.
Bottom Line: The Magnus Archives is an excellent adaptation of the horror podcast for tabletop while also a great resource for cosmic horror fans looking for new inspiration.
