Dread And Other Horror Tabletop Games That Generate Spooky Stories

Some roleplaying games, tabletop or otherwise, are power fantasies where players take on the personas of characters with amazing superpowers and heroic hearts; the following horror tabletop games, however, are all about roleplaying vulnerable, frightened human characters in the middle of their very own scary stories. Through clever mechanics that simulate the physical and mental breakdowns of people pushed to the brink and storytelling advice on how to create tension and suspense, tabletop RPGs like Dread and Call Of Cthulhu will, in true horror movie tradition, entertain players even as they scream in terror.

At first glance, the horror genre and the tabletop roleplaying medium seem to be incompatible. The classic RPG environment of a kitchen table with snacks, dice, and character sheets isn’t exactly a scary one, and a game master, outside gimmicks like sound effect clips and blood bags, can only convey so much terror through their narration.

But, then again, people have been telling spooky stories to their friends for thousands of years – around the campfire, in the dining room, in a darkened bedroom with a flashlight shining under their face. The imagination of a person listening to a horror story can weave nightmares darker than the goriest special effects in a slasher movie. Furthermore, the quintessential RPG practice of rolling dice to see if your character triumphs is an act filled to the brim with tension and suspense, a terror tactic the four RPGs below shamelessly exploit to create moments of horror.

Great Tabeltop Horror RPGs – Dread: A Game Of Horror and Hope

The narrative RPG Dread: A Game Of Horror and Hope has a brutally simple set of rules for creating scary stories. To make their character, players fill out a questionnaire with loaded questions, such as “What did you bury in your backyard last year?” and  “How did you discover you were a werewolf?” Instead of dice, players pull a block from a Jenga tower whenever their character does something risky. If the tower falls, their character suffers a gruesome fate. The tagline of this RPG, “A Game of Horror and Hope,” reflects the core ethos of Dread‘s storytelling principles: A horror story needs the hope of escape or victory, lest it become just an exercise in despair.

Great Tabeltop Horror RPGs – Call Of Cthulhu: The Roleplaying Game

One of the oldest horror RPGs out there, Call Of Cthulhu: The Roleplaying Game puts players in the cosmic horror universe of author H.P. Lovecraft, where antiquarians, archaeologists, and investigators uncover the sinister secrets of sorcerers, cultists, and the alien, insanity-inducing gods they worship. Mechanically, the Call of Cthulhu game system enforces the vulnerability and smallness of its player-controlled Investigators through two conceits: their low amount of health, which makes face-to-face confrontations with monsters an unwise proposition, and their Sanity score, which tends to decrease whenever a PC beholds something eldritch or other (bringing a host of mental debilitations along with it).

Great Tabeltop Horror RPGs – Heart: The City Beneath

The indie tabletop RPG Heart: The City Beneath can best be described as “D&D, but with science-fantasy weirdness and body horror.” Set in a great labyrinth far beneath the city of Spire, bands of dungeon-crawling adventurers called Delvers descend into the depths of the Heart, slaying monsters, seeking out priceless treasure, and risking death or madness every step of the way (very similarly to video games’ Darkest Dungeon). The deeper these Delvers go into the dungeon, the more twisted reality becomes, with mutated monsters and flesh walls pulsing with the sound of a distant heartbeat. The character classes themselves are tinged with grotesque horror, from the Apiarist, who cultivates occult crystal bees within their body, to the Witch, infected with a disease that lets them cast blood magic.

Great Tabeltop Horror RPGs – Chronicles of Darkness & Hunter: The Vigil

Onyx Path Studios has come out with a number of tabletop RPGs that tell horror stories from the perspective of vampires, werewolves, mages, mummies, ghosts, demons, and other, more obscure supernatural monsters. Two of the studio’s publications, however, are deliberately centered around the trial and tribulations of ordinary, mortal humans, trying to survive one day at a time in a “World of Darkness.” This world is a lot like our own reality but with darker shadows and more things that go bump in the night. The first core rulebook, Chronicles of Darkness, acts as a generic supernatural horror storytelling system, where ordinary civilians stumble across supernatural apparitions and the clicking gears of a God Machine embedded in Earth’s reality. As PCs in this game try to make sense of the restless ghosts and clockwork angels that hound them, players must roll dice to maintain their character’s mental integrity in the face of breaking points that threaten their worldviews.

If Chronicles of Darkness is about everyday people forced to acknowledge what lurks in the darkness, then Hunter: The Vigilis about those same people lighting a candle to challenge the dark. In this game, groups of monster hunters form themselves into Cells based around their local communities, investigating the supernatural world they’ve discovered and hunting monsters who threaten humanity (a mission as lethal to hunters as it is to humans). As plain, mortal humans, these hunters must rely on teamwork, tactics, a few odd mystical rituals, and good old-fashioned firearms to level the playing field against the supernatural, along with a personal Code that establishes their reason for hunting and keeps them different from the monsters they fight.

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