Best Horror RPG system?

[UserClone]

So far, my favorite one has been Dread, which is insanely simple. It's Jenga, the RPGing.

Honorable mention goes to Geiger Counter.

The reason I like both of these games so much is because they both require a part of that social contract at the beginning of play that the PCs' lives are not sacrosanct, and at least one PC will go insane, die, or otherwise be horrifically and permanently scarred and damaged by the menacing horror, whatever it happens to be.


What system(s) do you feel compliment the horror genre the best?

[Lycan 01]

Call of Cthulhu will always hold a special place in my heart, especially after the game where I left one player too scared to walk home alone in the dark that night and another player had nightmares.

[Kurald Galain]

Wraith: the Oblivion.

[Tengu_temp]

FATAL. Playing it is a really horrific experience.

[Satyr]

Detailed rules and fear do not mesh well. Horror is often supported by unpredictability and the Unknown and a static description of this through rules just sucks the marrow out of it. Horror is usually better achieved through gamemastering than through rules. This doesn't mean that there are no rule systems which work well with it, but the rules are usually not nearly as important as the atmosphere. The only game which are detrimental to horror are those where the PCs are very powerful or invincible by default, because that does not translate well to feat (or tension in general).

There are different kinds of horror - The Cthulhu games Call/Trail/Cthulhupunk are a subgenre of their own, so is zombie stuff, or the like.
I would recommend Trail of Cthulhu and Fear Itself (both use the same rules) for a horror game however, these are pretty excellent games (and yes, Trail of Cthulhu is an appropriate successor to Call... which starts to show its age) with a good focus on horror. Gurps Horror is a good example for a dedicated guide to horror gaming and are very useful tool in this regard, but that's actually one of the points were I usually wouldn't pick Gurps as an optimal choice.
Little Fears used to be a pretty stressful game - you play basically a child whose nightmares come true and the adults won't believe you (of course). The original game (which is long OOP) had some quite disturbing additional information about non-supernatural horrors for children, from "mere" neglect to pedophilia, but as far as I know the reprint has significantly cleansed this up. I am not sure if this a change for the better. On the one hand, it's unlikely that an RPG can appropriately deal with these matters, but on the other hand, I don't think that ignoring it will make it go away either (or that self-imposed censorship is something I want to support).
From a "global horror" game as in apocalypse-in-progress, there is little more impressive than good old Degenesis. A pity it never got translated.

[Psyx]

Depends on the GM...

But I really rate:

CoC
Dark Heresy
SLA Industries

[Zeta Kai]

Horror is really in the hands of GM with the talent & patience to cultivate it. Horror is like a plant: it needs certain environmental factors to be just so in order to grow & flourish, otherwise it will languish, or worse, wither & die. I've seen a CoC game mutate into unintentional hilarity because of a GM inept attempts to be "spooky". And I've seen a high-level D&D 3e game give the players chills, due to a masterful DM's vivid descriptions & creepy plot. The system is not nearly as important as people running it.

That being said, there are some games that aim for the right atmosphere:

• Trail of Cthulhu (Cosmic Horror)
• All Flesh Must Be Eaten (Zombie Horror)
• Wraith: the Oblivion (Gothic Horror)

One homebrew that I feel should be plugged here is an impressive one by Kuma Kode: Shadow Theory. It seeks to emulate a survival horror experience akin to Silent Hill, & I think that it does an admirable job. Seriously, it's free & it's awesome, even as a WIP. Check it out.

[Aroka]

Trail of Cthulhu
All Flesh Must Be Eaten

These two. Can't beat 'em.

Call of Cthulhu is a pretty crap system, really. It's stripped-down RuneQuest with a bad sanity mechanic and phobias. Trail of Cthulhu is actually purpose-fitted for mystery and horror, and it shows.

[ghost_warlock]

Always loved the idea behind Wraith: The Oblivion.

[UserClone]

Trail of Cthulhu and Fear itself are two of the systems I've been looking at for a bit now. Anything you have to say about the mechanics of either (the GUMSHOE system pretty much works the same from game to game, right?) that supports the horror feel?

[Aroka]

Trail of Cthulhu and Fear itself are two of the systems I've been looking at for a bit now. Anything you have to say about the mechanics of either (the GUMSHOE system pretty much works the same from game to game, right?) that supports the horror feel?

Trail of Cthulhu/GUMSHOE:

The clue mechanic supports the mystery feel (which is separate from horror, but the two go hand in hand in Cthulhu games) very well; the clues are meant to be found, so why make them dependent on rolls? But investing in investigative skills should be rewarded, and the spends allow that. It's a great system.

The separate stability and sanity mechanics are a huge improvement over CoC's pathetic sanity system (which has basically not evolved since the original edition, except for the half-assed addition of disorders other than phobias), and support the horror feel very well. Pillars of sanity and drives, too - they make it easy to tailor horrors that target the PCs, and give the PCs a reason to go on putting their lives at risk to learn the truth.

The rest of the mechanics don't get in the way, which is the most imporant thing in a horror game; most of the time, you won't be using the mechanics anyway, so they need to be unobtrusive.

[Tyndmyr]

My biggest pet peeve with horror stuff is when they feel the need to tell me something is horrible. Or spooky.

Yeah, if it's actually horrible, then describing it will freak me out. Merely telling me it is doesn't really do much. A *lot* of "horror" stuff falls into this trap.

[Aroka]

My biggest pet peeve with horror stuff is when they feel the need to tell me something is horrible. Or spooky.

Yeah, if it's actually horrible, then describing it will freak me out. Merely telling me it is doesn't really do much. A *lot* of "horror" stuff falls into this trap.

That's got nothing to do with systems, though - that's all about the storyteller.

I've never had to describe monsters in detail, though, because nothing ever looks scary, especially when you describe it; things feel scary. "Boo" scares and disgust are worthless for horror anyway - tension is what works.

[hamlet]

Call of Cthulhu will always hold a special place in my heart, especially after the game where I left one player too scared to walk home alone in the dark that night and another player had nightmares.

Your horror-fu is strong, grasshopper, but you have some to learn still!

I have seen a good GM (playing Rolemaster I think) running a horror adventure and, during the course of three hours, actually reduced three of his players to curling into a fetal position wimpering about the horrors they had witnessed.

And no, they weren't talking about the rules. They were all Rolemaster afficianados.

I wasn't even playing (just an observer), and I was getting creeped out.

[Zeta Kai]

That's got nothing to do with systems, though - that's all about the storyteller.

I've never had to describe monsters in detail, though, because nothing ever looks scary, especially when you describe it; things feel scary. "Boo" scares and disgust are worthless for horror anyway - tension is what works.

Exactly. That's why Silent Hill is always so much more effective as Horror than Resident Evil. One is about atmosphere & tension, while the other one is about low ammo & puzzle doors.

[ghost_warlock]

Anyone ever play the Jurassic Park game for the Super NES? Outdoors, it was mostly action/adventure (although could get a bit startling when T-Rex appeared out of nowhere and ate you...but that could only happen in one specific area of the map).

Indoors, however, were freaking creepy...

[The Big Dice]

Legend of the Five Rings (first edition) and Warhammer FRPG (first edition) are the games that spring to my mind when it comes to horror.

L5R has two supplements, Bearers of Jade and Way of Shadow which both take the game into realms of horror that make the D&D BoVD look like a saturday morning cartoon.

BoJ is all about exploring the inhabitants and location of the Shadowlands, which is literally hell on earth. Driven by the will of a fallen god and powered by the realm of evil, thisplace doesn't just want you dead. It wants you to join it, to embrace it and to become one with it. And if that fails, there's plenty of savage and subtle things waiting to rip your head off. Plus the final chapter is a very good one on how to implement hrror scenarios into your own games.

Way of Shadow is more about existential horror. If develops the idea that you can spend your life chasing shadows, until one day they let you catch up with them. Current editions of L5R have pulled the teeth of the Shadow, naming it the Lying Darkess. But Way of Shadow describes a shapeless, namless peice of left over stuff from before time. It wants to unmake the universe, absorbing everything into itself and returning the cosmos to it's original formless state.

It has no name of it's own and it has no face of it's own. But it can steal both from you. Making you a part of it, or possibly unmaking you and making copies of you from itself.

It's very Lovecraftian in many ways, and it's one of the few RPG sourcebooks that can be read as a work of fiction in it's own right.

As for Warhammer, that's a great gothic horror game. It has a wonderfully cheesy mechanic for gaining Insanity Points, then having those points turn into various psychoses. And with the powers of Chaos being presented in a more subtle and corrupting manner than later editions, the rot under the paint of society is much more plausible.

And it just begs for Hammer-style situations. With the creepy castle on top of the hill being assaulted by pitchfork weilding peasants all carrying burning torches.

[kc0bbq]

Shattered Dreams is pretty good. It's getting pretty tough to find but there's usually a copy in eBay.

Basic premise is that there are people who not only have lucid dreams, but can leave their own and enter other people's dreams. There are horrible things that live in this world and can travel through it, too. Some can leave, some use dreams to cause the dreamer to change through causing really awful nightmares.

There are two parallel adventures going on, interconnected, one in the real world and one in the dream world. It can be pretty awful with a good storyteller.

[Petrankov]

Kult had a very creepy feel to it.

I agree with Aroka, its all about the GM, give a bad GM the best horror game it will not have the same feel as one run by a good GM.

[Aroka]

Legend of the Five Rings (first edition) and Warhammer FRPG (first edition) are the games that spring to my mind when it comes to horror.

This is true. Both scream horror setting. The Oni and Maho of L5R makes for great horror scenarios, and the rest of the game supports mysteries pretty well. WFRP is more survival horror, but dungeon-crawling in the Old World should definitely have more in common with Call of Cthulhu than D&D. And both systems are just deadly an unfair enough to make players fear the unknown.

[Balain]

I've only played Call of Cthulhu so that's what I tend to play when we play horror. It really doesn't matter what the system is it's what the GM does to make it scarey. I've played D&D that was scarey as well as Runequest, Rolemaster and Toon. Just depends on the Gm and pklayers.

[UserClone]

The advice you give about it mattering less the system than the gm is sound I'm sure, but this discussion is for systems lending themselves to be better for horror than other systems are.

[senrath]

I like All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Dark Heresy for horror, myself. Of course, those are the only two systems that I've played in that are actually designed for horror games, so that might have something to do with it...

Anyway, both games have you asking not "will I die?" but "when will I die, and what will kill me?" (unless you have a really lenient ZM/GM/ST/Whateveryoucall it, in which case the horror element kinda goes out the window). That's not to say that you can't survive (if one of my characters survives tomorrow night, then the next session, he'll have survived the entire campaign he's in), it's just that it's unlikely.

[Ellye]

NEMESIS deserves a mention. It works kinda of nicely.

Although, from my personal experience, Horror games need to be as minimalist as possible. Whenever you stop to roll a die, you remind the players that you're playing a game, and the Horror atmosphere is reduced a bit (though it does build up a bit of tension if it's a decisive die roll).

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Risus.

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

Seriously, though, it would be interesting to use Risus in a horror game, not for comedic intention but with the intention of intensity.

[Lycan 01]

I actually ran a DnD 4e game where Slender Man made a cameo. The Bard had the misfortune of messing with a mirror, and when he turned to walk away then looked back at it one last time, Slender Man was looming over his shoulder in the reflection. Things went downhill from there...

The Bard's player did not sleep for 36 hours, caught glimpses of Slender Man through his dorm room window, and had to watch Sister Act and other uplifiting movies all night long to keep himself from being consumed by paranoia. Not exactly the desired result...


Oops.


I'll have to look into a few of these games. Trail of Cthulhu sounds like its worth checking out...

[Draz74]

Risus.

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

Seriously, though, it would be interesting to use Risus in a horror game, not for comedic intention but with the intention of intensity.

You know, I actually wonder if this could work pretty well.

From what I've seen, the one time I've actually played Risus, one of the distinctive elements of its combat system is "after you get damaged at all, your offensive capabilities and general effectiveness are sharply reduced." Which could lead to a lot of dread-and-doom feelings as combat goes on.

Also, the rule for victory in Risus is that the victor gets to decide what happens to the loser. Just because he will normally choose capture and/or humiliation in a comedy-themed game doesn't change the fact that, in a horror-type game, he can choose a gruesome and grisly form of death (or worse).

[Sheep Overlord]

Dang, now I want to play a horror game >.<

In Resident Evil's defense, scarcity of resources does lend itself heavily to a horror theme - having only three bullets leaves you hesitating before you shoot, where in some other games it's heywhat'sthatDIEDIEDIEDIEDIE! on fully automatic the whole way through. That said, yes, Resident Evil < Silent Hill for horror factor.

And if anyone feels like running something creepy on the boards . . . >.>

I'm here.

[Aroka]

Dang, now I want to play a horror game >.<

In Resident Evil's defense, scarcity of resources does lend itself heavily to a horror theme - having only three bullets leaves you hesitating before you shoot, where in some other games it's heywhat'sthatDIEDIEDIEDIEDIE! on fully automatic the whole way through. That said, yes, Resident Evil < Silent Hill for horror factor.

For scarcity of resources (and pretty much everything else), Dark Corners of the Earth takes the prize. You don't get a gun for the first hour or so, and things are trying to kill you. The game gets way less scary when you do get a gun (although once you realize the second level of the foundry/factory can't be "cleaned out", the tension's back).

[UserClone]

Ah, you seem to have figured me out. I am actually looking to run a game on these boards. I may continue with the same group playing different scenarios if we all seem to enjoy it. The system we use will be crucial, though, since it's PbP, which is its own unique brand of gaming in the first place.