The Curseborne Player’s Guide, an expansion for the Curseborne tabletop roleplaying game from Onyx Path Publishing, is funding now on Kickstarter.

In Curseborne, which Onyx Path Publishing funded last year, you play as Accursed, descendants of monstrous lineages lurking in a modern world that closely resembles our own. This is the Onyx Path team’s return to Horror game design after years of shepherding the World of Darkness 20th Anniversary lines, as well as Chronicles of Darkness and other games including They Came From Beneath the Sea! and Dystopia Rising: Evolution.

We had a chance to talk to the team a bit about this new Player’s Guide project and some of the material within.

What does the Player’s Guide offer that isn’t in the Curseborne Core Rulebook?

The world of Curseborne is much richer and deeper than we could (or would even want to) cover in the core rulebook, so the Player’s Guide gives us more room to poke in the corners and see what skeletons we can disturb, as well as presenting different playstyle options that switch up the core Curseborne experience. At a high level, the Player’s Guide contains:
• Nine new families of Accursed, as well as Orphans (those without a family)
• A look at how the different Families gather and interact, as well as roleplay advice for each Lineage and family
• New Role Paths, Lineage Torments, and spells for each of the Lineage’s practices
• More information on Venators, including creating Venator player characters
• Templates allowing players to quickly build or randomly roll new Curseborne characters

What can you tell us about the new Families in the Player’s Guide?

There are nine new Families in the Player’s Guide. Here’s a brief rundown of each.
• The Eurydicae are a Family of Dead who become obsessed with broken people and try to replicate their lives.
• The Tormentors are Dead who track down those who have abused others and deal out vigilante justice.
• The Menders are a Family of Hungry who try to improve the life of someone and then feed off their newfound success.
• The Plague Doctors are Hungry who feast on diseased blood and flesh.
• The Prenderghasts are Outcasts who believe they’re the servants of the Fae and use servitude to others to infiltrate and uncover the secrets of their origin.
• The Napoleons are Primal werepigs who seek out and hoard Heirlooms.
• The Nest are a Family of Primal wererats who use their affinity for cold to tear down a corrupt world.
• The Gate Openers are Sorcerers who want to destroy cursed objects through destroying Heirlooms, thinking that unleashing their contained curses will improve the world.
• The Memori are a Family of Sorcerers who seek ways into and out of lost eras of time.

This book includes information on creating Orphan and Venator player characters. Can you tell us more about that?

When we released Curseborne, there were a few people who mentioned wanting to play “just” a Hungry or “just” a Dead, without necessarily associating with a Family. Plus, we foresaw characters who were ousted by their Family, or never knew their original Family in the first place. So for those players, we offer Orphans. Instead of having a Lineage-bound Family, Orphans have Community Paths, based around the circumstances and experiences that left them outside the Families in the first place.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a game about monsters if we didn’t talk about those that hunt monsters, and those are the Venators in Curseborne. And the moment we presented monster hunters, there were people who wanted to play them, which is the perfect thing to add to a player’s guide. Of course, in Curseborne, nothing’s ever easy, and Venators are tangled up in the web of curses that afflict Accursed and everyone else in the world. In this book we dig into how Venators differ from Accursed in terms of character creation and mechanics (including how Venators use magic, and new spells just for Venators), and present five Paths to reflect the different Venator organizations (called Operations).

What can you tell us about the creative team on this book?

The creation of the original Curseborne book was a massive team effort over the course of several years, with Danielle Lauzon doing a lot of the hard work taking a sprawling design and turning it into the fantastic book we ended up with. She was very eager to work on the Player’s Guide, and Eddy Webb (one of the people who has been involved with Curseborne since the beginning) stepped up to help her out as a co-developer. The writers are also a diverse team, pulling from people who worked on the original game, those who were heavily involved in previous horror games like the World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness, and some brand-new to our world. All in all, it was a fantastic team who poured their hearts and souls out to make the best possible player’s guide we could.

For those that missed the original Curseborne Kickstarter, what options are available to get caught up today?

The Player’s Guide Kickstarter has some great add-on options so folks can get the core rulebook in PDF, print-on-demand, traditional print run, or deluxe hardcover. You can also get the Curseborne dice set and the Storyguide’s screen, and even a compilation of the twelve antagonists we’ve released monthly throughout 2025 in our Tasty Bit Compilation. Everything you could want or need for the game is available through this Kickstarter campaign!

Now that the Player’s Guide Kickstarter has funded, what stretch goals are you hoping to achieve?

We’re very close to releasing an anthology of short stories, and Lauren Roy had so much fun working on it that we’d love to do even more Curseborne fiction. Another anthology would be a great addition to our growing world. The original campaign gave us both a setting book and an adventure book, and we’d love to get a few more adventures into the world. There are so many different kinds of stories you can tell in Curseborne, and we’re eager to show you all the ways you can play, and to help people get a Curseborne chronicle up and running as quickly as possible, or to just enjoy a couple of sessions. If the campaign really takes off, though, the sky’s the limit!

Thank you to the Onyx Path team!

Head over to Kickstarter.com to check out the campaign for the Curseborne Player’s Guide. If you missed the Core Rulebook campaign, you can get both books and more now.

Tags | modern-horror, onyx path