I envy the evil overlords who are about to start construction on their newest dungeon. There are hundreds of fantastic blogs, Reddit threads, and books on how to best construct a world-class dungeon for roleplaying games. Sinister ghosts however get the short end of the stick. There’s sparse advice for GMs on how to create […]
Tag: horror
If you ask Call of Cthulhu fans to list their favorite horror adventures, Dead Light is guaranteed to be in the top 10. It’s been described as a “quintessential” horror adventure. I won’t spoil the adventure for those of you haven’t played it yet. But the back cover advertises it as an adventure about surviving […]
Last month I asked Call of Cthulhu fans for suggestions of rare monsters. I wanted to know which Lovecraftian monsters had rarely, if ever, appeared in a scenario. My challenge to myself was to write an adventure based around an obscure monster I had never heard of. I received lots of suggestions. The Hounds of […]
This month I review two other one-shot adventures that I enjoyed running: Quest Givers’ MacDeath and Alien: Chariot of the Gods. And to save you a little work, you can download some of the VTT assets I used at the end of the blog. Both adventures are solid, grim one-shots that you can finish in […]
One of my favorite old-school videogame RPGs was 1992’s Darklands. Set in medieval Germany, the game was brutally difficult, seeped in superstition and folklore, and — way ahead of its time — a massive sandbox you could explore. It was also incredibly buggy, had UX issues, and required some some serious autoexec voodoo to get […]
The slasher film is a popular take on horror. In RPGs, slasher adventures are utterly underrepresented. For Halloween this year, I went on a search for a great ’70s or ’80s style slasher killer adventure. I almost came up empty. I found RPG-adjacent storytelling games like The Final Girl and Slasher, and I also found […]
The ice age is probably the most ignored RPG setting. It’s also one of the best historical settings for Lovecraftian horror. Let me make my case: For the ice age to really work as a desperate and alien setting, you need to fully embrace the setting’s quirks. If the ice age just feels like a […]
Horror RPGs appear to be going through a resurgence, at least according to my own convention statistics. It’s easy to fill up a game of Call of Cthulhu with excited players these days, even at a small convention, and my GURPS Horror historical crossovers do well too. As most horror writers will tell you, the […]
One of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories is “The Temple”. It’s a straightforward but moody account of a German submarine crew dealing with one horrible problem after another – a cursed item, an engine malfunction, mutiny, madness, suicide, and then finally its lone survivor staring straight into The Impossible. It has all the hallmarks of […]
