This month’s free adventure is St. Cecilia’s Blasphemous Bordello. It’s a creepy, investigative horror adventure set in the old west. But I’m going to use this adventure to talk about the problem with all modern-era big bads. The problem is this. With magic and melee deemphasized, the toughest RPG boss can barely last a turn […]
Tag: horror
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 […]
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 […]
This month, I go waaaaay back in time to the ice age. And to make it more brutal, I add some Lovecraftian monstrosities into the mix. The ice age is probably the most ignored RPG setting. There are very few RPGs that focus on it. But… it’s also one of the best historical settings for […]
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 […]
