horror games that you love (that aren't 'world of darkness' or cthulhu related.)

[overgeeked]

Yeah. Someone being personally scared by something or not has no bearing on whether the piece is horror. Likewise comedy. You laughing or not doesn’t change the genre its in.

Old-school D&D and OSR games absolutely can be horror. Weak PCs facing overwhelming odds and monsters that could kill them in one good hit. It all depends on the presentation and the focus.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

I am quite fond of the Trophy system from The Gauntlet - Trophy Dark is a great fantasy-treasure-hunters-going-to-their-doom game with lots of cunning one-shots available, while Trophy Gold is a horror-tinged OSR dungeon crawl campaign game.

It is built on Graham Walmsley's Cthulhu Dark system, so your character risks being lost to the horror the more they push their luck, and it's dead easy to learn with a d6 system. It also adds bits of Forged in the Dark design, and a dangerous spell system to boot. The GM advice is all about building thematic details into your game - with a killer 5-ring structure for the Trophy Dark scenarios.

Trophy RPG

Trophy is a storytelling game of dark fantasy and psychological horror. It's about a group of treasure-hunters on a doomed expedition into a forest that doesn't want them there. You can get Trophy in...

www.gauntlet-rpg.com

 

[MGibster]

Well, you can play thign thing as pretty much an adventure game. But play up the atmospherics and the Guts checks, and you'll see fear in the player's eyes right quick.

You're absolutely right. I've had some things in my Deadlands game that were every bit as bad as what you might find in a Stephen King novel, but the tone of the Deadlands games I run are so offbeat that it's closer to Evil Dead 3 than it is Evil Dead. And, again, I just want to make it clear that I'm not arguing it isn't horror. Since the great Science Fiction genre wars of 2002, I find it better to take an umbrella approach.

 

[MGibster]

A lot of horror isn't scary, per se. Much of it is satirical... Werewolves of London, Lifeforce, and the remake of The Blob are all in the "campy horror" along with the Evil Dead Trilogy. And much of it is creepy rather than proper fear inducing - The Blob, Blair Witch Project, Pitch Black.

Lifeforce was one of the breast best science fiction horror movies from the 80s. Mathilda May is a hell of an actress.

Oh, and monster smackdown was the guiding motif of Hammer Films, as well as a couple other film studios doing the campy horror of the 50's and 60's. And exactly the kind of films Scooby Doo was a sendup of. Most of Hammer's films ended with the bad guys losting... largely due to the Hayes Code.

Who didn't love Ingrid Pitt in those movies? And, uh, the Hayes Code was a thing here in the United States. I'm pretty sure the British public had some other set of codes to follow for their cinema.

Now for something completely frightening. No British person I know has ever been able to explain Kate Bush to me.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Now for something completely frightening. No British person I know has ever been able to explain Kate Bush to me.

Heathcliff, it's me, it's Cathy, I've come home!

 

[aramis erak]

Lifeforce was one of the breast best science fiction horror movies from the 80s. Mathilda May is a hell of an actress.

It's brilliant. For me, it was, however, not nearly as scary as Alien. And then, the GW guys had to go and coopt it straight into the 40KRT rulebook....

Who didn't love Ingrid Pitt in those movies? And, uh, the Hayes Code was a thing here in the United States. I'm pretty sure the British public had some other set of codes to follow for their cinema.

The Hayes Code was imposed by the US film industry, not the government. And the major studios in the US required everything going through the distributors they used to meet the same requirements... and the distributors generally upheld it. In no small part because they were mostly owned by movie studios. As were, until the 60's, most of the movie theaters in the US.

Meet the Hayes Code, get shown in the US. And the US was a larger and faster growing market...

 

[jdrakeh]

The Whispering Vault, perhaps the most original, over-the-top, horror game ever published. You can get it in print at Lulu or in PDF at Paizo.

 

[MGibster]

It's brilliant. For me, it was, however, not nearly as scary as Alien. And then, the GW guys had to go and coopt it straight into the 40KRT rulebook....

The Hayes Code was imposed by the US film industry, not the government. And the major studios in the US required everything going through the distributors they used to meet the same requirements... and the distributors generally upheld it. In no small part because they were mostly owned by movie studios. As were, until the 60's, most of the movie theaters in the US.

Meet the Hayes Code, get shown in the US. And the US was a larger and faster growing market...

I didn't think I suggested in was imposed by the government. Technically it wasn't, but the Hays Code was created by Hollywood to get the government off their back. A lot of politicians were trying to pass legislation to censor movies, and Hollywood thought it was best if they censored themselves rather than let someone else do it. You see similar reasons for the creation of the Comics Code Authority in the 1950s, the RIAA and their Parental Advisory strickers in the late 80s, and the ESRB system created for video games in the 1990s.

 

[Fenris-77]

I am quite fond of the Trophy system from The Gauntlet - Trophy Dark is a great fantasy-treasure-hunters-going-to-their-doom game with lots of cunning one-shots available, while Trophy Gold is a horror-tinged OSR dungeon crawl campaign game.

It is built on Graham Walmsley's Cthulhu Dark system, so your character risks being lost to the horror the more they push their luck, and it's dead easy to learn with a d6 system. It also adds bits of Forged in the Dark design, and a dangerous spell system to boot. The GM advice is all about building thematic details into your game - with a killer 5-ring structure for the Trophy Dark scenarios.

Trophy RPG

Trophy is a storytelling game of dark fantasy and psychological horror. It's about a group of treasure-hunters on a doomed expedition into a forest that doesn't want them there. You can get Trophy in...

www.gauntlet-rpg.com

Trophy is brilliant. It does a bunch of horror-adjacent stuff quite well. I liked it so much I wrote my own Sci-Fi Horror hack of it. See my sig...

 

[Voadam]

I liked the cosmological setup of original Kult a lot and have used it in my D&D games. I only ever owned the monster book from an old edition but the concepts are fantastic. There is a current edition of Kult but I am not as familiar with it.

Humans are actually immortal powered beings whose powers and memories are repressed by the tortures of Hell upon death so they can be reborn without knowing their true nature and potential. God, angels, and devils are all in on it to suppress people and maintain their power with angels maintaining the illusion of reality, sanity, morality, and false enlightenment paths to keep people distracted while devils are in charge of torturing souls in hell to obliterate/suppress memory. Some people (including PCs) delve into either true enlightenment, insanity, or immorality to escape the illusion and access their actual supernatural powers. God recently went missing and the illusion starts to crack so there is a bit more opportunity for humans to take power, particularly as angels and devils start some infighting.

Some cosmological overlap with Shadow of the Demon Lord.