Inspiration works in mysterious ways but a lot of the mystery disappears when you look back at the things that sparked your inspiration in the first place. You can have a kinda Dr Manhattan moment:

It’s 1983, I’m playing my first RPG. It’s D&D Red Box, it’s confusing and I don’t understand much. All I know is I want more of it.

It’s 1996, I’m a stretcher-bearer in former-Yugoslavia. There are a few roleplayers in the ranks. Playing RPGs is what keeps us sane. Fantasy horror is comforting in the face of real-world horror.

It’s 1997, I’m playing Resident Evil 1 on my brand new PS1 and having the time of my life. I’m playing it until I get the infinite ammo rocket launcher and then I play some more.

It’s 2001, I’m a video game journalist, I get to play a lot of survival horror games onwards: Hellnight, Eternal Darkness, Silent Hill, Cold Fear, Dino Crisis, Galerians, Parasite Eve… Survival horror is no longer a gimmicky marketing slogan, it’s a genre. Other survival horror games existed before Resident Evil 1 (Alone in the Dark, Sweet Home on NES) but it became the trope codifier.

It’s 2021, I write Nightmare on Lake 13 for Knock 3 because it dawns on me that low level OSR-style rules are perfect for running horror games.

It’s 2024, I read Kelsey Dionne’s Shadowdark. Almost everything that gets in the way of the game’s main theme, dungeon crawling, is tossed away. The apparent blandness of the implied setting makes it perfect for anyone to make the game their own.

It’s 2025. I’m watching the last episode of Stranger Things, the end credits are a mock-up Player’s Handbook with the show characters as the protagonists.

2026: all those influences and ideas collide and fall into place. It’s like the game was always here just waiting to be discovered. Even if it’s a bit cliché, it’s a good analogy, most of the work you do when designing a game is refining things, meaning you don’t add new stuff, you toss out superfluous shit. I wanted plucky survivors to fight off evil monsters in Haunts: malevolent places creeping on our world because of our own evil actions. The game basically wrote itself (except for those damn random tables, I’m happy most of you love them because they’re a pain in the ass to write).

So when I started to work on Darkness Protocol, I never asked myself how I could turn this…

…into an RPG. Survival horror was a genre born out of games:

And, of course, we all know what kind of RPG share the same core principles: OSR games.

All they needed was a shotgun.