Horror RPG mechanics

[psiconauta_retro]

Since Curse of Stradh was announced I have felt again drawn to horror-themes after getting away from them for several years. Now I daydream about home-brewing a simple system for a sporadic horror campaign. Unfortunately I know few horror games so until now I am just considering as inspiration Raveloft, oWoD and Carcossa.

Which horror RPGs would you recommend and why?

Are there any specific game mechanics that work specially well for horror? I have heard good things about Insanity in Call of Cthulhu but I have never played that game.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Call of Cthulhu is definitely the grand poobah of horror RPGs. I also have fond memories of playing Chill, which just had a new edition come out. And I’ve yet to play it, but Don’t Rest Your Head looks neat.

 

[5Shilling]

I played the original Chaosium Call of Chthulu and it was a lot of fun. One of the tenets of that game is that you will eventually, die, go mad or worse. The game is really about seeing how long you can survive. I think that danger is an important part of any horror game.

Another thing the strokes me about it was that PC stats were pretty awful, to begin with anyway. To get by you relied on player skill a lot more than character skill.

Silent Legions by Kevin Crawford is a nice modern take on CoC. The game mechanics look a little simple but I've not played them yet - even so the book was worth getting because most of it is a system for generating your own Lovecraftian mythos and suitable adventure structures - great if you are DMing for people who already know their Mi-Go from their Elder Things, and the results can be used with pretty much any game system you like.

This is important because horror games rely a lot more on good setting and adventure design. In order to maintain suspense, fighting should be a last resort and so more game time is spent on investigation and mystery solving. That mystery has to be interesting and satisfying to make for a fun game, so well written adventures are a must.

I've also heard good things about Don't Rest Your Head and Chill. Chronicles of Darkness (AKA New World of Darkness) seems to have made a good attempt at bringing horror back to front and centre of the game, especially if you play just the 'Core' (ie human protagonist) rules.

 

[Celebrim]

There are two classics, already mentioned: Call of Cthulhu and Chill.

For Chill, I prefer the second edition. For Call of Cthulhu, the mechanics have on the whole been pretty stable. Any version based on the BRP system should be fine, so long as you don't have power gamers and watch out for some of the unbalanced supplemental material often intended for NPC's but which when coopted by PC's gets stupid.

Call of Cthulhu is about cosmological horror. It's about finding out the world itself is antithetical to human life, that human reason is futile, that human resources are inevitably insufficient, that human religions and philosophy are false, that truth is unknowable, that logic is useless, that human science and progress merely will lead to humanities inevitable undoing. The horror is very much philosophical, and the forces you are facing are vast and marked by great indifference to mankind and suffering. The horror here is discovering that you are little more than some insect to be devoured or parasitized by something vastly beyond your understanding and completely unconcerned with you.

Chill is a smaller more personal sort of horror. Here the universe you know is being invaded by things that are actively and perversely evil. They not only are aware of your suffering, they enjoy it and feed on it. Instead of fighting vast indifferent cosmic entities, you are fighting back things that go bump in the night and the darkly familiar monsters of human myth - werewolves, vampires, hags, and worse things.

Both can be truly frightening if done well.

The hot new kid on the block is one I haven't played and which I'm not sure how you'd run until I've seen it demonstrated well, and that's Dread. Dread as I understand it is designed mainly for one offs, typically emulating something that might be an episode of the Outer Limits or a horror movie, with a cast moving toward some inexorable doom. It seems to have a lot of fans, but it is a very different experience from a traditional PnP RPG.

 

[Greg K]

What type of horror?

Early Universal Studios and Hammer Films? Chill 1e (Pacesetter). This is out of print, but Cryptworld (Goblinoid Games) as I understand it is essentially Chill 1e with a different title and without the organization S.A.V.E.

80's/90's Horror? Chill 2e (Mayfair Games) out of print. Pdf available at rpgnow under a different publisher, Martin Caron

Lovecraft Horror? Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium) as mentioned

Slasher flicks? There is Slasher Flick (Spectrum Games) which is designed to emulate slasher flick movies in play.

Splatterpunk? Dread: the First book of Pandemonium( not to be confused with the other Dread horror rpg that uses Jenga for resolution) and Spite: The Second Book of Pandemonium. Both are by Rafael Chandler and were published under his Neoplastic Press imprint. The two have been combined and released as Pandemonio. One reviewer described it as In Nomine rpg if written by Clive Barker

General cinematic horror game?
Horror Show by Bedrock Games. I have not played it, but it was a good read on different horror genres. It has received good reviews at RPGNow and elsewhere. Here is a review from Tommy Brownell atThe Most Unread Blog Ever


Modern Action Horror about hunting monsters? Looking for something for Supernatural, Buffy, Grimm or Special Unit-2?

• Angel (Eden Studios)and Buffy (Eden Studios): Both games use Cinematic Unisystem. out of print. pdf is available at rpgnow.
• Supernatural (Margaret Weis Productions): uses the Classic Cortex system out of print. pdf is available at rpgnow.
• Monster of the Week (Evil Hat): a powered by Apocalypse Engine game

Zombie Apocalypse?

• All Flesh Must Be Eaten(Eden Studios) uses Classic Unisystem.
• War of the Dead (Daring Entertainment). genre sourcebook/Setting/Adventure for Savage Worlds
• Two free zombie apocalypse games are Zombi and The Dead (Kreg Mosier), The latter may require some google fu to find.

 

[psiconauta_retro]

WOW, thank you very much!!! I am impressed of how fast you have so complete answers, as if you had all this right on the tip of your tongues (or of your fingers)!

I have a lot of homework to do!

Thxs again!

 

[Greg K]

WOW, thank you very much!!! I am impressed of how fast you have so complete answers, as if you had all this right on the tip of your tongues (or of your fingers)!

I have a lot of homework to do!

Thxs again!

You are welcome. I went back and added a few notes
1. Chill 2e is out of print, but PDFs are available at RPGNow. The current publisher is Martin Caron
2. Angel and Buffy are both out of print, but the pdfs are available at RPGNow from the publisher Eden Studios.

 

[AnimeSniper]

Huzzah Horror

I can't recommend any titles or supplements at this time but I can state that depending on which books you have access you can begin a Horror based campaign with some ease and a few headaches.

For example using the D&D 3.5e Core Book, D20 Modern Core Book, Weapons Locker, and etcetera with a few tweaks to the given stats of the monsters the group I game with have run the following campaigns loosely based on the following media

Resident Evil Games, Books, and Movies- began at the start of the outbreak than our group meeting up and trying to reach a safe zone that wasn't
Left 4 Dead Games- Fast running Mob style zombies and special infected... a revived zombie in full riot armor is not a good thing and fighting off the zombie children nearly killed us because two PC's failed their will saves and wouldn't open fire on them
Dead Rising- took place in a Mall of America setting
Dead Island- started on a cruise ship that ran aground on a resort island
MIB/Department 7- extraterrestrial and extra-dimensional campaign where our characters were pulled from their home dimension unconscious only to awake in holding cells with no way to return home yet we joined said organization to help fight off aliens and other threats

Now if you are looking for game mechanics to use say for when the players become scared when first seeing the gargantuan horror I'll have to see what I have in my notes or book links... off the top of my head I know we used in the aforementioned campaign Will Saves and if failed the player took a penalty to attack rolls or the urge to run took control like when three NPC's charged forward only to die and two ran which alerted us to the approaching horde of zombies behind us

 

[Celebrim]

I can't recommend any titles or supplements at this time but I can state that depending on which books you have access you can begin a Horror based campaign with some ease and a few headaches.

For example using the D&D 3.5e Core Book, D20 Modern Core Book, Weapons Locker, and etcetera

You can run a decent horror game with pretty much any system, simply by looking at what challenges the system is designed and intended to provide, then pointedly not providing challenges like that. Paint it in dark colors, provide a suitable brooding atmosphere of impending doom, and you've got a horror game of a sort. However, sustaining that play over a long period can increasingly become a headache for the DM. In any D&D derived system, barring significant rule changes, eventually you are going to end up with PCs as superheroes, at which point you have the problem of trying to run a game of psychological terror involving characters that could be members of the Justice League. E6 or D20 CoC would be recommended before you got to that point.

If you are running a 3e/D20 inspired game, you can probably get mileage out of the Fear, Horror, and Madness rules from 3e Ravenloft.

 

[Greg K]

I can't recommend any titles or supplements at this time but I can state that depending on which books you have access you can begin a Horror based campaign with some ease and a few headaches.

For example using the D&D 3.5e Core Book, D20 Modern Core Book, Weapons Locker, and etcetera with a few tweaks to the given stats of the monsters the group I game with have run the following campaigns loosely based on the following media

If I were using d20Modern for a horror campaign, I, personally, would look at third party sourcebooks including
Blood and Blades (RPGObjects): a sourcebook of slasher movie killers with the serial numbers filed off including Chucky, Freddy, Jason, Sil (from Species)
Blood and Brains (RPGObjects): a zombie campaign sourcebook
Blood and Spooks (RPGObjects): a more serious ghostbusting sourcebook.
Modern High (RPGObjects): if the game takes place in high school