Not long after my recent discussion with Matt and Eric about horror TTRPGs, I picked up a copy of the newly-released Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. Having been primed by our discussion, I read through the entire campaign sourcebook in a single sitting. Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft greatly expands on the basic information about the Domains of Dread presented in Curse of Strahd and introduces 5E players to a classic D&D setting. Reading Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft brought to mind just how much fun I’ve had playing horror TTRPGs over the years. I have always been a fan of horror stories and the vicarious thrill that comes from watching characters in books and movies navigate frightening situations in the hope of survival. Horror TTRPGs take this dynamic to the next level by allowing players to control characters who find themselves in the midst of sinister and scary circumstances. So, I thought I might share some of the best horror TTRPGs I’ve played over the years. If you are a fan of horror stories, I highly recommend taking a look at the following games.

Ravenloft

 My first foray into TTRPGs occurred many years ago when I was invited to play AD&D 2E with some high school friends. It was during the first session that I was introduced to the classic D&D setting, Ravenloft: Realm of Terror. The gothic horror themes of Ravenloft are fused with the Tolkienesque elements presupposed by the fantasy TTRPG like some kind of dark alchemy. I was hooked. In the Ravenloft, players are kidnapped by mysterious and sinister mists that serve the ends of Dark Powers, whose agenda seems to consist of toying with and corrupting lesser beings. The mists transport the players to a Material Plane-like domain ruled by a Dark Lord. The Dark Lord is cursed by the Dark Powers in a manner uniquely suited to the Dark Lord’s moral failings and determines the character of the domain. Escaping from the Domains of Dread requires the consent of the Dark Powers, and accordingly, is extremely difficult…if not impossible.

The 5E adventure Curse of Strahd provides players with an introduction to the Domains of Dread, while the newly-released Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft provides DMs with everything they need to create a campaign within the setting. Existing domains and cursed Dark Lords are described therein, along with guidelines to create unique Domains from the ground up. One thing to note is that Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft does not offer stat blocks for Dark Lords. While this has been a minor point of contention among some members of the D&D community, I think this provides DMs with the opportunity to tailor Dark Lord NPCs to suit the demands of their campaign. Overall, the Domains of Dread as written in Curse of Strahd and Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft constitute one of the best settings in the D&D multiverse and are well worth the time of D&D players who are also fans of horror stories.

Call of Cthulhu

Call of Cthulhu is based on the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, a pulp horror author of the early 20^th century. For those unfamiliar with his work, Lovecraft wrote a series of short stories that later came to be known as the “Cthulhu Mythos”. The Cthulhu Mythos exemplifies the cosmic horror genre and features as its central themes: forbidden knowledge, the dangers of scientific progress, and the futility of the human endeavor. The central premise of the Cthulhu Mythos stories is that despite humanity’s faith in reason and the power of human ingenuity, the cosmos is actually governed by the blind forces of chaos. Madness-inducing, monstrous beings dwell among the stars or slumber in the dark places of the earth, hidden from the eyes of men. These beings are indifferent, if not openly hostile, to human life. The only defense humanity has is that it is largely beneath the notice of such beings. Occasionally, a human will stumble upon knowledge that hints at the true nature of the cosmos and is typically compelled to learn more. Such knowledge is as seductive as it is dangerous. Sanity is a fragile thing, and the blasphemous truths at the heart of reality can lay waste to even the most resilient human mind.

In Call of Cthulhu, players take on the role of “investigators” who stumble upon some bit of forbidden lore that draws them into the sinister world of the Cthulhu Mythos. The PCs are ordinary people who are forced to contend with horrors that no human mind can adequately cope with. Each PC has a sanity rating that decreases as they uncover the secrets of the cosmos. Even magic, one of the greatest assets a PC can gain access to, erodes sanity with use. During the inexorable decline of sanity, PCs gain psychological disorders which further hinder their effectiveness. While sanity can be recovered with prolonged therapy, this only postpones the inevitable, as knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos damages sanity beyond hope of recovery. Eventually, if a character survives long enough, she will eventually succumb to madness through sanity loss as forbidden knowledge eats away at her ability to reason. While this may seem incredibly bleak, it is also incredibly entertaining. Playing a character that is ultimately doomed is oddly liberating and affords a number of interesting roleplaying opportunities. Call of Cthulhu 7E,published by Chaosium Inc., is the current iteration of the game and has a ruleset thatis largely based on percentile dice for resolving most actions. Those looking for a d20 based version of the game can check out Call of Cthulhu published by Wizards of the Coast in 2002, which was designed to be compatible with D&D 3E. 

WoD & CoD

The World of Darkness game line published by White Wolf Game Studios in the 1990s and early 2000s consists entirely of horror TTRPGs. The WoD game line supposes a world nearly identical to our own with one difference: the supernatural is a very real and omnipresent (though hidden) force in the world. While Hanlon’s razor (i.e., the principle that “one should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”) holds in our world, the inverse is often true in the World of Darkness. Supernatural beings of various stripes have infiltrated human society in an attempt to further their own agendas at the expense of ignorant humans who remain unaware of their existence. In the World of Darkness, conspiracy is the coin of the realm. Unlike Call of Cthulhu, the PCs play as one of these supernatural beings rather than as a hapless mortal, subject to the depredations of the monsters in their midst.

There are seven major game titles in the WoD line: Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, Changeling: The Dreaming, Hunter: The Reckoning, and Demon: The Fallen. While each title is designed as a standalone game, all of the games share a core ruleset (which is exclusively based on a d10 system) which allows for crossover campaigns. While Vampire: The Masquerade remains popular to this day, Wraith: The Oblivion is easily my favorite among the titles. I have always been a sucker for a good ghost story, and in Wraith the PCs play as the recently deceased, trapped in a shadowy underworld, attempting to resolve unfinished business with the living while surviving against the forces of Oblivion, the cosmic force of entropy that seeks to tear down all of existence.

One of the central premises of the WoD game line is that the end of the world is nigh. Over the course of the publication history of the WoD, the end of the world steadily advances through a metanarrative connecting the various titles that eventually culminates in the end of the World of Darkness game line in 2002. In 2004 the World of Darkness was reimagined as the Chronicles of Darkness with a new series of games that (originally) mirrored the classic WoD, with such titles as Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken, and Mage: The Awakening. The titles are thematically similar to their predecessors, but the emphasis on an overarching metaplot connecting the games was abandoned. These games featured a somewhat generic narrative and are a bit lackluster as a result. In 2012, Onyx Path Publishing procured the licenses for both iterations of the World of Darkness game lines and began creating second editions of the CoD titles as well as a number of new titles. The new editions streamlined and improved the ruleset for the games and fleshed out the respective settings for each of the games, and tied them together with a subtle, implicit metanarrative. In my estimation, these are some of the finest horror TTRPGs on the market today.

Kult

Combining elements of Call of Cthulhu and several WoD games, Kult is a mature game with dark, urban horror themes and considerable philosophical depth. Originally published by Swedish publisher Target Games, Kult was the controversial subject of a moral panic over roleplaying games in Sweden in the 1990s. The central premise of Kult is that despite outward appearances, humanity has been unknowingly imprisoned and cut off from its true nature. Once, humans were divine beings of god-like power who governed their own destinies until the Demiurge, a being of incredible power, diminished humanity by locking it in a prison of false perception called the Illusion. The Illusion is, of course, the mundane world we think of as reality. Why the Demiurge imprisoned humanity is unknown. Whether out of envy or for sins long forgotten, humanity remains trapped in the Illusion, ignorant of the truth of its own existence. After stripping humanity of its divine birthright, the Demiurge created a seat of power in the form of a giant citadel in humanity’s ancestral home, the city of Metropolis. From his citadel, the Demiurge ruled the cosmos for eons until his disappearance in the 16^th century. Since then, the Illusion has begun to unravel and aspects of reality that were previously inaccessible have begun to bleed through into the Illusion. Once the servants of the Demiurge held the Illusion together by controlling social institutions to keep humanity ignorant and compliant. Since the disappearance of the Demiurge, however, our jailers have begun to lose control of the entire project. Creatures of darkness just as lost as the humans they prey upon now hunt in the shadows, seeking to satiate their dark hunger on the humans that populate the Illusion. This is the world of Kult.

Players in Kult take on the role of ordinary people who have been touched by darkness. Every character has a dark secret that offers a glimpse of the reality beyond the Illusion and leads them deeper into mental instability as they search for the truth. In many ways, the setting is similar to Call of Cthulhu and is just as hopeless for the characters. While it is possible for a human in Kult to awaken to their divine nature and break free of the Illusion, this is virtually impossible for the PCs to accomplish. To be successful would take several lifetimes and entails purposefully succumbing to madness in order to divest oneself of the shackles of false perception permanently. Such a feat has only been accomplished a handful of times since humanity’s imprisonment. While Kult is thematically similar to Call of Cthulhu and WoD games, its treatment of these themes is heavier and more mature overall, and requires a responsible, mature gaming group to do it justice. Kult: Divinity Lost is the current version of the game, published by Helmgast in 2018. The current version updates the setting to reflect our contemporary world with the social and technological developments that have occurred since the game was first published in the 1990s, with a simple ruleset that utilizes a 2d6 roll for resolving actions in game.

While there are number of great horror TTRPGs out there, those listed above are some of my favorites. I would encourage anyone interested in horror games to give any of them a try. Enjoy!