My favorite Horror game of all time has to be the 1991 edition of Kult. The cover of the crucified angel stood out on the shelf and the flavor text on the rear cover cemented the sale. I had previous experience with other horror games but Kult made them insubstantial and childish by comparison. It is very much reminiscent of the work of Clive Barker or Thomas Ligotti but with a darker and more refined edge.

This RPG took a refreshingly adult and personal approach to horror that I hadn’t experienced before. Nearly every character was flawed or tragic and the very horror of the setting was intrinsic tied to them. There were few happy endings and the game sessions were intense, rewarding, and often horrifying as they ran late into the night.

The strongest part for me was that the world itself mirrored the development of the PCs, especially as the barriers dividing the false reality and the “real” world fractured. The PCs the potential to reclaim their place as gods but to do so, they’d have to conquer or embrace their inner demons and face some very frightening forces. The opposition was the stuff of nightmares and some of the most creative adversaries I’ve ever used.

I still have my original copy of the corebook, all of the supplements, and added a mint copy of the newer edition in the past year. Kult that will always have a place on my shelf.

Contest Entry:

Whenever I’m in the mood for a good horror game, I take my first edition “Vampire: The Masquerade” book off the shelf. This was the first World of Darkness book published by White Wolf Game Studio. I still remember how excited I was when I bought my softbound copy in dealer’s room at an RPG convention. Only two minutes into reading the prologue, I was hooked.

The premise of the game is intriguing. Characters enter the game world as newly created vampires, often abandoned by their sires to discover their predatory instincts entirely on their own. Some don’t survive their first few nights, losing their sanity to the grim reality of undeath or falling beneath the stakes of vampire hunters. The rest must find their place in an ancient society fraught with political intrigue, supernatural mystery, and inhuman depravity.

Each character takes an individual journey, discovering just how much of their morality can be preserved despite their eternal bloodlust. Their monstrous instincts constantly fight to be set free. The longer these instincts are denied, the stronger they become, until finally a vampire falls into a mindless frenzy of violence and feeding. The results are always horrific. Thus, every vampire must balance his humanity against his inner beast. The vampires themselves summarize this clearly, “monsters we are lest monsters we become.”

Don’t Rest Your Head is a clever, small, nasty game: the mechanics drive the game naturally towards the spiral of madness and exhaustion that will underline the theme of the game. How much are you willing to risk to have it your way?

The setting is highly evocative, and each group can dial the horror, weirdness and symbolism meters to suit their tastes.

The protagonists are all inherently flawed, each with some deep personal
problem, but they also become very powerful when they become Awake in the Mad
City. They can make a difference, until their push finally breaks them.

Mad City is all the more scary because it can be very familiar on its
surface: it’s your hometown, it’s everybody’s city. But then weird things
happen. Doors lead to the wrong places, Nightmares roam the streets… and
it’s always nighttime.

The players, creating their character, define the first scene of their game,
and from that kick off the game makes it very easy for the Game Master to
improvise: he only has to define how much Pain is each obstacle. The dice
mechanics do the rest. Each time the dice are thrown the story goes forward,
coloured in tone by Madness, Exhaustion or Pain.

To many role-players around my age their first introduction to Horror roleplaying was the venerable Call of Cthulhu, but not me. Mine was Chill. I had the Pacesetter version (1st Edition), which I remember quite fondly. The Mayfair version (2nd Edition) is of course superior, but it lacks some of the feel I associated with the game. Maybe it was the lack of the Jim Holloway art or the darker tone. Picking up a copy of the Mayfair version now I get the impression (true or not) that the makers of Kult saw it and thought, yes this is good, but what if the world was much, much worse?
I liked Chill also because it had Midwest sensibilities. Pacesetter was from Wisconsin, Mayfair is in a suburb of Chicago than is not to far from where I live. It was while playing Chill that learned that the best horror was horror close to home. I don’t care really what Hollywood thinks is horror. How can a place that gets 350 days of sunshine a year know horror? On the other hand East Coast horror (Lovecraft) has a completely different flavor. It’s almost alien. Chill may have had a global scope, but the horror is home grown. Chill remembers that there is simple horror in the haunted house, or the strange creature from the Unknown. It is not about the bigger-badder-more horror of some games, where every game has to up the ante on the last game.

For me, nothing beats the original Chill from Pacesetter. While Call of Cthulhu had already broken the horror ground for RPGs, it focused on eldritch, unknowable horrors. Chill, on the other hand, was a riff on the Saturday night horror shows I used to watch on TV, with monsters you could not only know but beat.

The best part of the game, though, was the Creature Feature supplement, which provided rules for playing the monster, long before Vampire brought that to the fore. The cover showed a couple soaking in a hot tub while a werewolf in an apron and chef’s hat crept up behind him and winked at you, a shaker of salt in his hand.

That tongue-in-cheek attitude toward horror—the blackest of humor—drove the whole game home for me. The game lacked angst of any kind. Horror, laughs, tension, but never hopelessness. It made an adventure out of horror, and it came up with good rationales for making a campaign out of it too.

[Disclaimer: I wrote a small bit for the second edition of the game, and I'm friends with some of the former owners of Pacesetter.]

Contest Entry:
AState, published by Contested Ground Studios, is my favorite horror role-playing game. AState’s production values are invariably high, with every book well written and organized. Every AState book I have read teems with evocative detail. Through this meticulous attention to detail, the authors grant the reader deep insight into the post-apocalyptic world they have created, called The City. The City is a sprawling metropolis of brutally sharp contrasts, choking on the accumulated refuse and detritus of countless generations. Denizens of The City are forced to share The City with The Shifted, four races of unknown origin and terrifyingly inhuman motivation. No one knows where they come from or what they want. Anyone who tries to leave The City disappears in a flash of bright light. No one living remembers why this is, but theories and rumors abound. These types of mysteries are central to AState.

While it was the rich tapestry of details that originally drew me to AState, it is the game’s theme that keeps me coming back again and again. AState is fundamentally, and seemingly paradoxically, about hope. Although the player’s characters cannot reasonably expect to rebuild The City or undo a millenia of crushing social inequalities, they can make a real difference by helping their families, friends, and communities. In a genre that all too often seems to revel in the characters’ inevitable defeat or descent into madness/inhumanity, AState stands out as a thought-provoking game where you get to play a hero.

I’ve played many games that have been great horror games. Game’s that pulled me right into the action, making me forget for a while that I was playing a character. But the one type of game that always twisted around in my mind the most was the one’s that played with my childhood. The Alice in Wonderland series has always been a favorite childhood fairytale for me. So to have that story twisted around, pulled in the direction of evil and reincarnated in the mind of a lunatic child who is laying comatose in an insane aslyum got inside my own brain as only American McGee can. All the key characters make an apperance in this story, only this time they are stark raving mad and dangerous to boot. You play the dark, stern Alice, who tromps around Wonderland in her blood stained apron, weilding a very large, very much used, kitchen knife, searching for the Queen of Hearts. Each chapter deals with more and more characters who you thought were your friends in the original story. In your new reality they’ve all been warped by the Queens new rule and you must now destroy them, or face eternal lunacy in a catatonic body.
Personally, warping a story like that is more frightening then all the blood and guts stuff that is being produced lately. Scare tactics,soundtrack enchancements and special effects mean nothing when your childhood dreams are turned into a nightmare.

The best part about the game is the gleeful way a person can dive into this world of monsters and madness for a few hours and totally get lost. The combats are brutal, the chance of survival a constant concern and considering the game encourages setting up an atmospheric game with props, costumes, and sets, a player can get lost completely. I will never forget getting the chance to play a Victorian era maid who was a serial killer, poisoning her employers, or an African tribeswoman meant to be wedded to a cannibal warrior. Then there was the sinister nurse in a sanitorium, serving up her patients to an elder god to produce its foul young. All in all, Cthulhu Live is the best out there for live-action horror.

Many people would as me why this game. It isn’t even all that scary. But it was my first, the first game I had purchased for myself that actually had me on edge afraid to see what could happen next. I played this before know what Silent Hill or Resident Evil was, and had it not been for this game, I probably never would have. The fact that the game was unique in terms of it’s gameplay and battle system intrigued me a lot. I was hooked and found myself staying up late with the lights out looking forward to scaring the wits out of myself.

The game felt poetic too, an opera singer burns down an entire opera house at Christmas by her voice and exciting the mitochondria in the room. I will never be able to get the scene out of my head of the singer belting out her voice as the entire place burns. The game left it’s mark on me and will forever go down as a favorite.

Zombies. They’re slow, dumb, and not really that big of a threat. That’s not what Eden Studios would have you believe in the surface text of All Flesh Must Be Eaten, but that’s how it is. Modern science and its pal, the United States government, have done all that they can to protect its honest, hard-working citizens from the slavering dead. The real fear is lurking in front of the horde, grotesque in its commonality. It’s the people who encourage the lifeless scourge because it promotes their own agenda or targets people who they don’t care about. Fear is having to trust men just as desperate to escape the zombie-infested prison as you are, and knowing that they’ve done far worse things than the monsters you’re fleeing.

The system is what makes All Flesh Must Be Eaten stand out as a horror game for me. The characters are competent enough that they can succeed if they’re able to do everything just right. They’re in hard situations, but the underpinnings of the universe aren’t stacked against them; they aren’t marked from birth for madness or automatically condemned to a joyless adult life. Those scenarios are scary, but on a detached level. The personal resonance is in knowing that the death of thousands could have been averted if our everyday hero was just a tiny bit tougher, smarter, or better. The game provides escapism because there are corpses exploding everywhere, but the ultimate message points toward something far more fragile. (248 words)

Just imagine a skinny girl running away from a Demon possessing her father. She’s crying, she’s afraid, she can’t believe her father just killed her mom with a knife. Her world is falling apart.

Imagine you are a war veteran whose nights are filled with nightmares and whose days are filled with guilt and anger. You know how the little girl feels. You know it because you were attacked by a demon too. But you were saved by a man who taught you to fight back.

Now it is your turn to save someone. You kick the door open. One of your companions unleash the fires of hell on the demon and force it out of the father’s body. Before the foul beast can even move you blast it with your shotgun.

That’s what a play session of Dread look like. Hunt Demons, save innnocents and kick ass before you kick the bucket.

The rules are simple and easy to teach. The book has more than enough guidelines and examples to help you built your scenarios. And most of all, the writing is brilliant, you can almost feel the breath of the demons on your neck while you read their description. Same goes for the lenghty spells section. The demons grow in the shadows of our weaknesses and sins. In Dread you fight them with steel, fire and style.

Dread has become my rpg of choice when I want to run a splatterpunk, horror action game. Highly recommended !

Eternal Darkness offers pure Lovecraftian horror. Alexandra Roivas is called to Rhode Island when her grandfather is brutally murdered. There she learns that her family is the current keeper of the Tome of Eternal Darkness, a blasphemous book which has been the center piece of a cosmic war stretching back 2000 years. As Alex follows the Tome’s history she sees eleven lives touched by eldritch horror. Some are corrupted, some are destroyed, and all of them are changed.

With 12 playable characters, Eternal Darkness offers an experience unlike most platform horror games. Some of the characters are athletic, able to confront evil with a blade in hand. Others are scholarly and more adept at using Eternal Darkness’ deep magic system. What makes Eternal Darkness truly stand out is its unique sanity system. As the characters see skeletons rise from the dead or watch squamous creatures lumber towards them, their sanity takes a hit resulting a game which plays the player just as much as the player plays it. Eternal Darkness will trick you into thinking you’ve deleted your saved games or that you’ve hit the mute button on your remote control. The longer you play Eternal Darkness, the harder it is to tell what is really happening on screen and what your character is hallucinating and then the fourth wall shatters and you can no longer trust your senses either.