As I’m finalizing GUNS MAGES CORPSES, I work on my next projects. I already wrote about DARK LENINGRAD and will do again soon (sharing my gripping internal debates, “should I use a 2d6 or d100-based system to portray a country stuck in stagnation?”).

As I was enjoying playing UFO50 (especially Night Manor), watching too much of Dungeon Chill excellent videos, I was reminded of my love of the Survival Horror genre.

Of course, I thought to myself, why not take this idea a little bit farther. First of all, this specific subgenre of horror is tailor-made for RPGs as it was born in video games. The idea of characters that get better (or get better equipment) with time are already embedded into it, making it a much better fit for gaming than pure horror.

As I stated in in Nightmare in Lake 13 (a mini-game I wrote for Knock #3): “We all know that 1st level adventures can be scary: characters are squishy and bad decisions (or mere bad luck) can lead to a swift death. So it's not much of a stretch to say that OSR rules can be very effective at running modern horror adventures.”.

This was at the back of my head as I was re-reading Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy… How could I adapt this to a survival horror game? It turns out things flowed rather easily once I put myself in front of a blank page. Those of you who played the old Silent Hill game remember how the main protagonist, Harry Mason, controlled like shit but it made sense as Harry wasn’t a fighter (even Chris Redfield needed a few bullets to put down a zombie with a Beretta in Resident Evil).

I kind of feel the same way when playing a character in most OSR systems, my little avatar doesn’t do exactly what I want: its attributes, class, saves, etc. take a bit of control out of me. I may want my warrior to act like the warrior of my dreams would do but the mechanics make sure to thwart my expectations…

In my brain this makes OSR-type rules perfect for survival horror games. It also means that it’s a big project (we’re talking 200 pages) and of course, at least two adventures to give players and Referees a good idea of what they’re getting into.

This one is going to be a wild ride and I’m happy to take you with me!

I always enjoy listening Thi Nguyen talk about games. “Our society is dominated by measurable outcomes, so to save ourselves […] We need places in life where a sense of meaningfulness and value runs wild. […] We need structured tools to ease our passage out of the world of standardized outcomes […]But we should also expect those [tools] to look stupid, inane, and useless from the perspective of the outcomes mindset precisely because they drag us away from a lifestyle laser focused on efficient outcomes. […][We need] goddamn games”