HORROR TOOLKIT
RICHARD
BELLINGHAM
BRUCE
BAUGH
ELSA S.
HENRY
JENNIFER
LEWIS
MARISSA
KELLY
NICK
PILON
PHIL
LEWIS
SARAH
RICHARDSON
SOMETHING LURKS IN THE SHADOWS...
Maybe it’s a masked killer, or a creature
from the unknown depths, or a psychotic
porcelain doll. Or maybe it’s just a cat,
and the threat stands right behind you!
The Fate Horror Toolkit offers a variety
of tools, mechanics, and hacks to help you
develop thematic horror in your game.
Explore what horror is and how to employ
it effectively at your table. Learn how to
develop horrific elements in Fate—a game
system designed around competent,
proactive characters not usually seen in
horror. Pick from a variety of mechanics
to easily design your own game about
the things that go bump in the night.
The Fate Horror Toolkit is a Fate Core
supplement. This Toolkit includes:
• Extensive tools to make scary
and effective horror adversaries
and running Fate games
where doom is inevitable
• Modified and thematic compels
designed to help up the
suspense and visceral horror
elements in your games
• A variety of new aspect types such
as legacy and intensity aspects
to help develop thematic horror
elements and define boundaries
to drive their stories.
engine.
n of the
latest evolutio
Fate Core is the
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Fate roleplaying
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TELL YOUR TALE.
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EM
Fate Toolkits.
All the tools to
build your stage.
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• A campaign framework for
RE OF FATE
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running horror stories based on
teamwork—particularly good
for younger audiences.
FOR USE WITH
BRIAN
ENGARD
JEREMY
KELLER
RYAN
MACKLIN
MIKE
OLSON
HORROR
TOOLKIT
WRITING & SYSTEM DESIGN
RICHARD BELLINGHAM
BRUCE BAUGH, ELSA S. HENRY,
MARISSA KELLY, JENNIFER LEWIS, PHIL LEWIS,
NICK PILON, & SARAH RICHARDSON
with contributors
EDITING
CREATIVE DIRECTION
AMANDA
VALENTINE
RICHARD
BELLINGHAM
PROOFREADING
SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT
ANNA K. MEADE
ART DIRECTION
BRIAN PATTERSON
COVER ARTWORK
KURT KOMODA
INTERIOR ARTWORK
JUAN OCHOA &
KURT KOMODA
LAYOUT
FRED HICKS
LINE DEVELOPMENT
LEONARD
BALSERA
ED TURNER
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
SEAN NITTNER &
SOPHIE LAGACÉ
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
FRED HICKS &
CHRIS HANRAHAN
MARKETING
CARRIE HARRIS
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
CHRIS HANRAHAN
PRODUCT REVIEW
BRUCE BAUGH
CONSULTANTS
BRIE SHELDON & JOHN STAVROPOULOS
PLAYTESTING
APRIL WALSH, BEN MOON, BLAKE SMITH, DANIEL D’ANGELO,
DANIEL LEE BING JIE, DON BISDORF, EDMUND METHENY, FELIPE REAL,
GERARDO SANHUEZA, GORDON RYCROFT, GUY SIMMONDS,
HEATHER CAROLAN, HEATHER NELSON, HONGYI HU, IAN PAINTING,
JAIME CABEZAS, JOSEPH ARNAUD, MAX VANDERHEYDEN, PAUL CAROLAN,
RODRIGO KITA, RUTH PAINTING, SEIJI KATO, & SOPHIE LAGACÉ
An Evil Hat Productions Publication
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Fate Horror Toolkit
Copyright © 2018 Evil Hat Productions, LLC.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2018 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC.
10125 Colesville Rd #318, Silver Spring, MD 20901.
Evil Hat Productions and the Evil Hat and Fate logos are trademarks
owned by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior express permission of the publisher.
That said, if you’re doing it for personal use, knock yourself
out. That’s not only allowed, we encourage you to do it.
For those working at a copy shop and not at all sure if this means
the person standing at your counter can make copies of this thing, they can.
This is “express permission.” Carry on.
This is a game where people make up stories about wonderful, terrible,
impossible, glorious things. All the characters and events portrayed in
this work are fictional. Any resemblance to real people, meddling kids,
blood-sucking creatures of the night, man-made abominations, ghostly
tormentors, zombie hordes, oppressive regimes, or eldritch horrors is
purely coincidental, but... don't look behind you at night, just in case.
CONTENTS
The Fate Toolkit Series...................................................................................4
Chapter 1: Gazing Into The Abyss................................................................. 5
The Anatomy of a Horror Game.............................................................................5
Player Consent and Safety....................................................................................... 7
Our Bloody Instruments: How to Use This Book.............................................9
Resources for Horror in Fate Core.......................................................................10
Chapter 2: The Raveled Sleeve of Care...................................................... 11
Media Inspiration.........................................................................................................12
Game Creation............................................................................................................ 13
Character Creation..................................................................................................... 14
During Play................................................................................................................... 16
Chapter 3: Some Scars Are Invisible.......................................................... 35
Media Inspiration....................................................................................................... 35
Tools of the Trade...................................................................................................... 36
Wounds Lead to Scars.............................................................................................37
Trauma Aspects.......................................................................................................... 39
Coping Conditions..................................................................................................... 41
On Othering Mental Illness....................................................................................44
The Horror of Viscera and Gore........................................................................... 45
Chapter 4: Who’s Who of the Damned......................................................49
Making Monsters........................................................................................................ 49
The Flesh Is Weak—Your Own Body as an Adversary................................. 65
The Other—Ideas, Regimes, and Wholly Alien Adversaries.......................73
Chapter 5: We Are All Going to Die...........................................................85
Media Inspiration....................................................................................................... 85
Why Play if We Know How the Story Ends?................................................... 86
Game Creation: Building the Doom....................................................................87
Doom During the Game.......................................................................................... 89
Chapter 6: The High Cost of Living............................................................93
Media Inspiration....................................................................................................... 94
General Notes and Major Rules Changes......................................................... 95
Game Creation........................................................................................................... 95
Character Creation.................................................................................................... 95
During Play.................................................................................................................. 96
Example Survival Campaigns..............................................................................105
Chapter 7: Horror Is the New Pink............................................................ 106
Media Inspiration......................................................................................................107
Mechanizing Discomfort....................................................................................... 108
Feminine Features.................................................................................................. 109
Feminine Horror in Action.....................................................................................114
Chapter 8: Spooky Fun............................................................................... 123
What Is This?.............................................................................................................. 123
Meddling Kids: Character Creation...................................................................126
Never Say Die: Confronting Evil......................................................................... 132
The Menace.................................................................................................................134
Twistcraft.....................................................................................................................136
Structure...................................................................................................................... 137
The Hotspot................................................................................................................138
Appendix 1: The X-Card............................................................................... 141
Appendix 2: Script Change........................................................................ 143
Appendix 3: Complementary Tools...........................................................147
THE FATE TOOLKIT SERIES
Welcome to the Fate Horror Toolkit, the newest book in the Fate Toolkit series.
The Toolkits are exactly what they sound like—a collection of add-on tools to
make things happen in your Fate games. As always, we encourage you to hack
the rules to your liking, but sometimes it’s nice to have a little help (or a little
inspiration), and these Toolkits are designed to provide just that.
So how does this new series differ from the Fate System Toolkit? The Fate System
Toolkit was like a buffet, but instead of serving a variety of foods, it was full of
ideas for all different kinds of games. In this Toolkit series, though, each volume
focuses on a specific theme. Some give help with a particular game element, such
as creating effective adversaries and using them to drive the plot of your campaign,
as in the Fate Adversary Toolkit. Others are dedicated to a particular genre of game,
like the Fate Horror Toolkit here. Rather than taking a cookie-cutter approach, each
volume is tailored to provide the most useful system hacks, samples, and story
starters for the topic, so you’ll find something new and different in every book.
We hope you’ll check out our list of current and upcoming Toolkits on our
website (www.evilhat.com/home/fate-toolkits).
Now, dare to open the creaking cellar door and face your Fate!
4
FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + The Fate Toolkit Series
CHAPTER 1: GAZING INTO THE ABYSS
Introduction and How to Use This Book
Many roleplaying games are lightly spiced with disturbing or scary elements
intended to thrill and entertain their players.
Others draw on the rich tradition of horror fiction to pose awful moral dilemmas, offer existential threats at every turn, and tell stories saturated with tension
and dread.
Such games gaze into the abyss and challenge it to gaze back—if it dares.
HORROR DOESN’T EXCUSE BEING HORRIBLE
The horror genre has been used to great effect in exploring and
validating the consequences of systemic bigotry and, unfortunately, sometimes endorsing it. In horror fiction, women and members
of minority groups are often depicted as perpetual victims or as
“getting what’s coming to them.” The purpose of this book is not
to legitimize or enable this kind of exploitative horror—“We’re
playing horror” is not a license to behave horribly. The tools we
provide here are for exploring scary stories where characters of
every kind must deal with horrific events, terrifying threats, violation, betrayal, and emotional and physical vulnerability.
The Anatomy of a Horror Game
The goal of the Fate Horror Toolkit is to give you the tools to run effective horror
games in Fate Core. However, before we don our leather aprons and open our
stained roll of sharp and terrifying instruments, let’s review the vital parts of a
successful horror game.
Horror Requires Player Investment
All horror requires investment from the audience. Movies and TV can get a head
start on this by using music, lighting, jump-scares, and other cues as shortcuts to
the viewer’s fight-or-flight response, while books have the luxury of a one-on-one
relationship with the reader and plenty of time to get into their head.
Roleplaying games don’t have it so easy. They’re an inherently social activity,
making it much more difficult to achieve an atmosphere fully conducive to horror.
You can use music and props to help you build the mood, but without the enthusiastic cooperation and investment of the players, your efforts are doomed to failure.
A successful horror game provides tools and advice that facilitate player investment in the horror themes of the game, and minimizes distractions that make
this harder to achieve.
Chapter 1 + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
5
Horror Is Transgressive
The beating heart of horror is violation. Nothing and no one is safe, and the
more important something is to the characters, the more likely it is to be corrupted, mutilated, or destroyed. Morals are tarnished and buckle under the
weight of unspeakable dilemmas. People and things the characters love betray
them, or are twisted, broken, and torn apart. Horror is a crucible from which
nothing emerges unscathed.
Horror Is Isolating
Horror fiction systematically isolates its protagonists from anyone or anything
that can help them, leaving them nobody to rely on but themselves. Sometimes
it goes even further, eliminating the protagonists one at a time until the last survivor faces a desperate struggle to survive against insurmountable odds.
In a horror game, the player characters find it difficult to persuade anyone to
help them, or their helpers meet grisly fates. The existence of their adversaries
is difficult to prove. At best the authorities view the characters as confused or
dishonest, at worst they’re seen as menaces to be handled accordingly.
Presuming, of course, that the authorities aren’t already owned by the adversary.
A game can be isolating without employing a high player character mortality
rate, but if characters are expected to die regularly—such as when evoking a
Halloween-style slasher movie—the game needs to provide options for keeping
the players of dead characters involved and engaged in the game.
6
FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + Chapter 1
Horror Is Disempowering
Horror is closely associated with feelings of hopelessness and despair. Without
conflict there would be no drama, but the conflicts of horror fiction are unfair
and overwhelming. If the characters are adequately prepared and equipped to
cope, it takes us away from horror and into thriller territory.
Characters don’t have to be incompetent, but they do have to be outmatched
by horrendous adversaries, disempowered due to their circumstances or a lack of
appropriate knowledge, or have their coping tools stripped from them over the
course of the game.
Failure is always a possibility, and sometimes doom is inevitable. In other cases
the characters are able to rally before the end of the story, gaining the tools and
support they need to fight back and, perhaps, win the day.
Horror Thrives on Uncertainty and Suspense
Ignorance may be bliss, but its cousin uncertainty is surely not. While ignorance
reflects absence of knowledge, uncertainty derives from partial knowledge and
is the root of suspense—a state of anxious uncertainty about past, present, or
future events.
We’re all familiar with the corrosive effects of everyday suspense. Will I be a
victim of the current round of job layoffs? Is my partner having an affair? Is the
shadow on my chest X-ray a tumor or a benign cyst?
Horror turns suspense up to eleven, often in a way that exaggeratedly reflects
real-life fears. Why have my work colleagues been disappearing after they go to
their “performance reviews”? Is my partner really my partner, or is he an identical
replacement that’s subtly wrong? Is the shadow on my chest X-ray a tumor or a
horrifying thing that’s slowly gnawing its way out of my body?
Effective horror games give enough information to the players for them to be
anxious without giving everything away at once, because suspense relies heavily
on ambiguity and partial information.
Player Consent and Safety
We’ve stated that horror games require player investment and are transgressive,
isolating, and disempowering. They ask players to make themselves vulnerable
and then actively work to make them feel anxious and uncomfortable while
exploring dark and troubling themes.
All of this makes horror gaming a potentially harmful experience. The intensity
of a scene might be too much for some players; one of you might experience a
panic attack due to game events stirring up the past, or you might accidentally
invoke a player’s phobia with one of your descriptions. In a worst-case scenario,
someone might use your horror game to legitimize or conceal deliberate abuse
of another player.
It’s your responsibility as the GM to work with the group to create an enjoyable
horror experience with the players’ enthusiastic consent, and to ensure they have
the tools to manage their own safety.
Chapter 1 + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
7
Before You Begin the Game
• Be certain that your group is comfortable with horror themes in general
and specifically the ones you plan to use in your game. Some players will
want to establish hard rules about scenes they won’t accept—such as portrayals of violence against children or animals—while others will accept
the possibility of troubling content in the game but will ask you to draw
a veil or fade to black rather than employing full and gruesome detail.
• To ensure there are no objections, discuss the specific rules you intend to
adopt to evoke horror.
• Discuss and explore a framework that can be used during the game by players to control their experience and protect themselves. Some players won’t
know in advance what they can and cannot tolerate, or might change their
minds during play. It’s also easy to get carried away during the game and
overstep boundaries set by some of your players, so you need a mechanism
to allow the group to get back on track.
• If you’re playing a convention game with strangers, the X-Card system
by John Stavropoulos (page 141) is a good option as it allows players
to call a halt to a situation or description without explanation. If you’re
gaming with a group of people who know and trust each other a bit better,
the Script Change system by Brie Sheldon (page 143) allows for more
nuanced control over scenes and for a degree of conversation about what
is problematic and why.
During Play
• Don’t deliberately exploit the players’ genuine fears to get an easy scare
unless you’ve discussed it with them first and received their explicit and
enthusiastic consent.
• Consent given once does not imply blanket consent for the same thing
forever. Even if a player has previously been okay with an element in the
game, listen to them if they ask you to stop using it from now on. If you
use a tool like intensity aspects on page 27 from the beginning of the
game but a player becomes uncomfortable with them, stop using that tool.
• Ensure you listen when players use the X-Card or call for a Script Change
or otherwise express their desire to bypass or address something they are
finding too uncomfortable.
• While the X-Card or Script Change tools allow players to take control over
their own safety and to call for content changes, it is still your responsibility as the GM to ensure that everyone is having a good time. If a player is
visibly getting very uncomfortable but hasn’t said anything, don’t assume
they are okay just because they haven’t used a tool; call a brief break and
check in with them privately to be sure.
8
FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + Chapter 1
Our Bloody Instruments: How to Use This Book
Each of the following chapters of this book provides horror tools grouped around
a specific theme:
• Chapter 2: The Raveled Sleeve of Care—Tools for encouraging players to
invest in the game and care about what happens to their characters and
the NPCs.
• Chapter 3: Some Scars Are Invisible—Tools for sensitively portraying the
long-term psychological effects of horrific situations in your games.
• Chapter 4: Who’s Who of the Damned—Tools for making scary, effective,
horror adversaries from monsters to more abstract threats.
• Chapter 5: We Are All Going to Die—Tools for running games where doom
is inevitable.
• Chapter 6: The High Cost of Living—A campaign framework for stories
where the group’s survival—and the price they pay for it—is the focus
of the horror.
• Chapter 7: Horror Is the New Pink—A campaign framework for exploring
the subversion of supposedly safe spaces and other forms of horror that
primarily pertain to the feminine experience.
• Chapter 8: Spooky Fun—A campaign framework for running horror stories
for younger audiences that encourages the players to work as a team. Show
kids that monsters can be defeated!
There are tools in each chapter that are relevant to any horror game, not just the
specific frameworks we present here. You can also build on the common themes
of the tools we’ve developed to create your own tools:
• Themed or modified fate points: Communal fate point pool
(page 24), monster pool (page 59)
• Modified or thematic compels: Enhanced self-compels (page 25),
visceral compels (page 46), climactic dilemmas (page 30)
• Declaring story details: Reconstruction (page 22)
• Themed aspects: Legacy aspects (page 19), intensity aspects (page 27),
feminine horror aspects (page 110), haven aspects (page 102), theme and
purpose aspects (page 50 and page 52)
• Modified concessions: Heroic sacrifice (page 18)
• Modified skills and approaches: Who’s Who of the Damned (page 49),
Spooky Fun (page 123)
Chapter 1 + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
9
• Conditions: Who’s Who of the Damned (page 49), coping conditions
(page 41), Spooky Fun (page 123), hardened hearts (page 48), and
confronting the other (page 78).
CONDITIONS IN THE FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
In several places in this book, we use conditions as defined
on page 116 of Dresden Files Accelerated. If you don’t have
access to Dresden Files Accelerated, you can refer to the
rules for conditions on page 18 of the Fate System Toolkit or
at https://fate-srd.com/fate-system-toolkit/conditions. The
main difference is that a Dresden Files Accelerated condition
is not an aspect unless the text specifically says it is.
• Modified stress and consequences: The High Cost of Living (page 93),
the doom clock (page 89), mutilation (page 66), the book of scars
(page 92)
•
Using the bronze rule: The Other (page 73), attacks on havens
(page 103), rogue body parts (page 70), physical transformations
(page 67)
• New and altered outcomes: Failure with style (page 91)
• Manipulating obstacles and zones: Re-zoning (page 57)
• Themed stunts: body horror (page 65)
• Modified milestones: The Other (page 73)
We’ve put together a list of the tools from different chapters
that we think work particularly well together. You can find it
in Appendix 3 on page 147.
Resources for Horror in Fate Core
The following books and articles are useful companions to the tools we present here:
• The Fate Accessibility Toolkit—Discusses X-Cards and veils in greater detail.
• “The Horror Paradox” in the Fate System Toolkit—Explores changes you
can make to the base Fate system to make it a better fit for horror-themed
games.
• “Sustaining Dread” and “Feminine Horror” in the Fate Codex (Volume
2, issue 6).
10
• Dresden Files Accelerated because of its treatment of monsters, scale, mantles,
and conditions.
CHAPTER 2: THE RAVELED SLEEVE OF CARE
Encouraging Player Investment and Creating Sympathetic Characters and NPCs
For your players to get the most out of your horror game, it’s critical that they
fully invest themselves in their characters and assist you in building and sustaining the necessary mood. The tools provided in this chapter are designed to help
you achieve this.
A failing of many horror stories is that their characters are so poorly drawn or
so unlikable that the audience doesn’t care what happens to them. Much of the
advice we provide here is dedicated to ensuring that the characters and NPCs
in your game are sympathetic and fully realized, helping you create an effective
horror experience.
Chapter 2 + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
11
Media Inspiration
The following books, movies, and TV shows were useful sources of inspiration
when we were compiling the advice in this chapter:
• The main characters in the film Insidious are smart and likable and the
tension of their situation is built expertly to make you really care for them.
• Revival, Doctor Sleep, and many other Stephen King books rely on building
your sympathy for the protagonists to make the tension more effective.
Many of King’s protagonists are flawed but likable characters as a result.
• If you didn’t care what happened to the survivors in The Walking Dead,
there would be no drama. Also a great inspiration for The High Cost of
Living.
• The Red Tree by Caitlin Kiernan—Lovecraft via a feminist lens—and
Monstress by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda are great inspiration for the
Sensual Horror material on page 26.
• Saw, Drag Me to Hell, and The Purge are all modern movies that pose
interesting moral dilemmas amid the carnage.
• Button, Button by Richard Matheson was made into a movie called The
Box and provides an interesting moral dilemma to chew over.
• Sophie’s Choice by William Styron features one of the most terrible and
heart-wrenching moral dilemmas in all of fiction. It was adapted into a
movie starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline.
• Ringu (The Ring in the English language remake) features a sympathetic
protagonist trying to survive against a terrifying supernatural threat which
is, itself, a victim.
• Let the Right One In is unusual in that it builds and maintains sympathy
for a monster even when the extent of their monstrousness is revealed.
• The Cabin in the Woods gleefully lampshades and inverts common horror
tropes but still manages to build sympathy for the characters as they try
to survive the events of the movie.
12
FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + Chapter 2
Game Creation
The first step of game creation is to talk to your players about the issues we
discuss in “Player Consent and Safety” on page 7. Knowing that there are
boundaries to what can and cannot be expressed in the game gives players a base
level of comfort and allows them to really throw themselves into the game.
Next, discuss the style, genre, and major themes of horror you intend to evoke
and ensure that all the players are enthusiastically on board. If one of your players is bored with zombie stories, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to fully engage
them in a Walking Dead style survival horror game and you’ll be better off finding
something else that interests the entire group.
Creating the game’s setting and issue aspects together is a good way to get
everyone on the same page about the broad strokes of the horror that’s to come.
This a good opportunity for players to discuss where their current limits for
disturbing content lie.
Take the time to discuss the altered rules you’ll be using for your game. This
is another good opportunity to obtain enthusiastic consent and buy-in from the
players for the various tools that reinforce horror conventions, giving you the
comfort to employ them without worrying that players may react badly to them
in play. If a player objects to any of the tools you intend to use, discuss whether
it can be amended to relieve their discomfort with it… but ultimately no horror
tool is worth more than the comfort of your players. If you can’t reach agreement,
drop the tool or switch to a different type of horror game that doesn’t rely on
the contentious tool.
Chapter 2 + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
13
Character Creation
Players usually become attached to their own character during the process of
character creation, so your goal is to ensure that they also invest in and become
attached to the other PCs. That means making them interesting and sympathetic.
You can learn a lot about what makes a character sympathetic—and the opposite—from books, movies, and TV. Certain character traits can make a likable
character into a beloved favorite or make even an unpleasant character enjoyable—that’s how we get magnificent bastards, antiheroes, and lovable rogues. You
can blend game mechanics and storytelling techniques to showcase and reinforce
these traits.
Fate Core is designed to create characters who are competent and proactive and
somewhat larger than life, whereas horror fiction usually features characters who
are more grounded. You don’t have to make any significant changes to the character creation process to reflect this, but consider the characters through a horror
lens and ensure the aspects, skills, and stunts each player takes are appropriate to
the type of game you’re running and the nature of the characters they’re playing.
Choosing Aspects
Ask players to come up with grounded high concepts and other aspects. If a
player suggests the high concept aspect Elite Soldier for their character,
you might propose Grizzled Veteran or Experienced Infantryman as
alternatives.
VULNERABILITIES AND FLAWS
We often identify strongly with characters who have made mistakes, who have
overwhelming or destructive needs, or who are flawed or vulnerable in some way,
but who are doing their best to get on with life regardless.
These things aren’t just for trouble aspects. The best aspects are double-edged,
and introducing a flaw or a darker twist into an otherwise beneficial aspect is a
good way to encourage compels while also making it easier to sympathize with
the affected character.
Nick’s character Rufio isn’t just skeptical, he’s Skeptical to a Fault.
People can also be vulnerable because of their physical limitations. The elderly
and children are typical examples of this in horror fiction, as are people with a
reduced ability to see, hear, or move about under their own power. If you use this
approach, it is important to treat the subject with respect. For more about playing
characters with physical limitations, see the Fate Accessibility Toolkit.
LINKED ASPECTS
Aspects that link to other player characters or NPCs (such as the ones chosen
during the traditional Phase Trio, Fate Core System, page 38) are extremely useful
for building a bond between the characters that you can later leverage to evoke
horror themes.
14
FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + Chapter 2
Choosing Skills
When reviewing each character, ensure that their Good (+3) and Great (+4) skills
are adequately justified by their aspects. It makes sense for a Grizzled Veteran
to have Shoot at Great (+4), but a Jaded English Teacher shouldn’t unless he
has another aspect, like Weekend Hunter and Outdoorsman.
It’s more difficult to isolate characters with high Resources or Contacts skills
from sources of support (whether that’s allies or expensive equipment) so consider
deleting these skills from the list for your game or applying higher opposition
than usual when the players use them—but make sure you tell your players in
advance if you’re doing this.
Choosing Stunts
Don’t allow stunts that undermine the horror themes of your game. For example,
the stunt Always Making Useful Things (Fate Core System, page 103) makes it
much more difficult to isolate a character from their tools and other useful items.
Instead, encourage players to take stunts for their characters that have a darker or
more cynical tint to them in keeping with horror themes. A good example is Lies
Upon Lies (Fate Core System, page 104), which makes it easier to lie to someone
who has already believed one of your lies in the current session.
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During Play
These tools will help you to sustain and increase the players’ investment in the
game and in the characters and NPCs that inhabit it during play.
Creating Uncertainty and Suspense
To build suspense, avoid giving everything away to the players from the beginning of a scenario. Choose aspects that hint at the truth rather than reveal it, and
adapt them during play as the characters uncover more information about the
situation.
You begin your game with a series of grisly killings, and the players’
investigations lead them to believe that an Outsized Dog is responsible.
Of course, the perpetrator is actually a Cursed Lycanthrope.
You can turn the availability of information in Fate Core to your advantage in
scaring your players. As Alfred Hitchcock pointed out, there is a big difference
between surprise and suspense, and the latter is a more effective way to scare
your players. If two players are at a scene in a restaurant when a bomb suddenly
explodes, they are surprised and probably horrified, but there has been no suspense.
If instead you describe the bomb under the table as they sit down and occasionally mention as an aside that the number on its timer is ticking ever closer to
zero, you build tension and suspense that keeps them on the edge of their seat.
Ed’s GMing his horror game Morts and he says, “There’s something
about this building that gives you a bad feeling, but you can’t really
say why. Oh, by the way, I’m just going to put this situation aspect
here, Hiding in the Shadows with two free invokes. It’s nothing to do
with any of you. It’s probably nothing, don’t worry about it. Anyway,
what do you do next?”
Incomplete information is a great way to generate tension. In Aliens, the Marines
know exactly how far away the xenomorphs are and how fast they’re moving, but
can’t track them in three-dimensional space, allowing for an amazingly tense scene
where they realize that the aliens are in the ductwork immediately above them.
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Managing the Game’s Tension Level—The Heartbeat of Horror
Horror fiction is often constructed with a recognizable pattern that would look
a bit like a heartbeat if you plotted it on a graph. Each moment of intense threat
is followed by a lull in which the tension stays at a baseline or builds slowly, letting the audience catch their breath and anticipate the next moment of tension.
This is also vital to your horror game. If you keep the tension level high all the
time, you’ll burn players out and they’ll start to disconnect from the game. Keep
the heartbeat in mind while you’re planning or running the game and ensure
that each scene of high tension is followed by a more relaxed scene in which the
players and their characters can take a breather or perhaps even have a laugh or
two. They will continue to anticipate the horror during the lull and it will make
the impact of the next high tension scene much more effective.
As your scenario builds towards its climax, make the lulls shorter and increase
the intensity of the threat in each tense scene so the heartbeat of your game gets
faster and faster. Then, at the climax, go wild with a long scene with an extended
and highly exaggerated threat and your players will be sitting on the edges of
their seats.
The first Paranormal Activity movie is a masterful example of the heartbeat of
horror in action. The daytime scenes start out being quite calm and unthreatening
because we know the “ghost” only manifests at night, but the things the characters
witness on the video build a low level of unsettling tension and anticipation. The
night scenes start out with relatively low-intensity spikes of horror at the start of
the movie, growing longer and more intense as the situation escalates, until the
long and extremely tense scene at the end of the movie.
Overwhelming the Player Characters
The players will invest more in the horror themes of your game if they feel as
though their characters are genuinely threatened by whatever dangers they face.
Your object is generally not to kill the PCs, but to ensure that their adversaries
feel overwhelmingly vast and dangerous—at least, until they find or develop the
tools to have a chance at standing against them.
Sometimes the PCs are unable to even challenge a horrific menace on its
own terms. If they’re hounded by a demonic apparition, the first few times they
encounter it they won’t have any tools they can use against it; the very best they
can hope to expect is to get away with their lives, health, and sanity.
Be sure to challenge the PCs with robust opposition. In any high tension scene,
use opposition from +0 to +3 over the current apex skill to increase the costs of
victory and make a concession or defeat more likely.
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Making Player Character Death Count
As we say in Gazing Into the Abyss, a horror game doesn’t have to be more lethal
to player characters than any other. However, player character death is more
likely than in many other genres, and some types of horror are predicated upon
the morbid reality that everyone dies eventually. You can use the following two
systems to make character deaths a significant moment in your game and to give
fallen characters a legacy that continues to affect the game.
HEROIC SACRIFICE
The heroic sacrifice is a special form of concession. Like any other concession,
a player can only choose to do this while they haven’t been taken out and before
the dice hit the table on a current action. When they heroically sacrifice their
character, they will die and there is no way for this to be prevented. The player
gets to describe the circumstances of their PC’s death in as much detail as they
like, adding reasonable story details as necessary, and can achieve one of the following results in addition to their glorious demise:
• Take out a mob of nameless NPCs
• Take out a supporting NPC
• Force a named NPC to take a severe consequence. If the NPC has already
taken a severe consequence, make them take an extreme one instead. If
they have already taken an extreme consequence, take them out.
• If the group agrees, immediately end an ongoing conflict. This is a form
of group concession and means the PCs don’t fulfill their objectives for
the conflict. The sacrifice allows them to escape without any further ill
effects, letting them lick their wounds and try again later. The PCs receive
fate points for the concession as normal.
• If the group agrees it makes sense, the dying PC immediately overcomes
a single obstacle without a roll, regardless of the opposition against them.
When a player chooses to heroically sacrifice their character, they can’t create
a new one until the end of the scenario. However, their character can live on
through a legacy aspect (see the next section) and/or as a ghost as suggested
on page 19.
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LEGACY ASPECTS
You can use this system whether a PC makes a heroic sacrifice or dies through
any other circumstance in the game. Once the remaining player characters have
had a chance to take a breather and commiserate over the character’s death, they
can take a legacy aspect to represent the lasting impact of the fallen on their
lives.
This is a group aspect that embodies the lasting example set by the fallen. If
the player of the fallen character has not been able to create a new character, give
them two free invokes on their fallen aspect each session that they can use to aid
their living companions.
Only allow one legacy aspect for each player. If a player loses two characters,
the group can have a legacy aspect relating to either character, but not both.
Rufio heroically sacrifices himself to permanently blind the werewolf
who was stalking the group. Later that night, the remaining characters
share a drink in his honor and reflect on what he taught them. The
group creates a legacy aspect for Rufio of Fortune Favors the Bold.
As Rufio heroically sacrificed himself, Nick can’t make a new character
until the end of the scenario…but he does get two free invokes on
Rufio’s legacy aspect to aid his fellow players and he can play Rufio
as a ghost if he wants to.
HAUNTING
A player can bring back their departed character as a ghost. Ghosts can appear
even in games that don’t have any active supernatural elements. There’s a rich
tradition in drama where the ghosts are the living characters’ subconscious trying
to communicate to their conscious selves, allegorical representations, or manifestations of guilt and internal struggle. Ghosts of this sort can’t manifest tangibly
in ways that affect NPCs or the world at large—nor can they be attacked—but
they can interact with living PCs.
Before the game begins, discuss what ghosts are and what they’re capable of.
Can they walk through walls? Read emotions? Manipulate electronics? Do they
even exist except as guilt-ridden hallucinations?
Ghosts are always less flexible and adaptable than the living, more focused on
matters related to their death and unfinished business. Convert them to a Fate
Core supporting NPC, choosing from the character’s prior skills. Change their
high concept to represent their ghostly state, and give them a new trouble that
relates to their unfinished business.
A character who dies and returns to haunt their friends through text
messages and other electronic ephemera is a Ghost in the Machine.
Another character returns as a more physical specter that’s Back from
Hell for Revenge.
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Ghosts have the default number of stress boxes and can’t gain more with
Physique or Will, and they have a single mild consequence slot. If a ghost is
taken out, it must leave the lands of the living in impending bliss or misery, based
on the circumstances.
Ghosts are usually invisible, intangible, inaudible, and otherwise separated from
physical reality. Their senses work just fine, and they can communicate freely with
their still-living associates, albeit in limited ways consistent with their new high
concept. They can whisper, write messages in the dust or on a computer terminal,
manifest a scent survivors will associate with them, and so on.
Make them roll against Fair (+2) opposition when delivering complicated
messages or trying to communicate in stressful situations; ghostly messages are
often at risk of misinterpretation or confusion!
More tangible effort—louder, more physically forceful, more lasting in impact—
requires crossing the gap between worlds. To do this, the ghost rolls to create an
advantage with Will or another skill consistent with their high concept to create
an aspect like Manifested.
The Ghost in the Machine rolls Crafts to get the aspect Repossessed
Car, giving them physical control over the vehicle for as long as the
aspect lasts.
While Manifested, the ghost can take actions to directly affect the material
world at +2 to whatever opposition applies.
Given their frailty, ghosts make better observers and informers than active
participants much of the time. Nothing is innately impossible for them, though,
and they are free to attempt whatever seems dramatic and interesting. Creating
haunting effects like ectoplasmic manifestations and eerie apparitions is a matter
of creating an advantage.
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Making Sympathetic NPCs
The advice in “Character Creation” (page 14) also applies when you’re building
NPCs. The following tools will also help you make sympathetic NPCs.
WE’RE A LOT ALIKE
In fiction, it often turns out that a character isn’t so different from the protagonist, and that they share habits, goals, or personality traits. Such similarities can
cause the protagonists to identify with an antagonist and hesitate to work against
them, making this a favorite technique of monologuing supervillains.
You can employ this technique by designing NPCs who have aspects or stunts
that echo ones possessed by the PCs, albeit with sufficient tweaks that they don’t
feel like carbon copies or inversions. Any character with an aspect representing
their business, hometown, school, or passionate interests has a ready-made option
for this.
Marissa’s character Kelly has a stunt that makes her an expert at recognizing and translating foreign languages. Elsa builds an NPC with
a passion for creation myths and a stunt that gives him an almost
inexhaustible library of books in many languages that contain such
stories from around the world.
THE BEN FRANKLIN EFFECT
This counterintuitive psychological principle was observed by Ben Franklin, who
said, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you
another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
In other words, getting someone to do you a favor tends to make them like you
more and improves the odds that they will help you again in future.
You can use this technique in your games by having a significant NPC request
a favor from one or more of the group. It doesn’t need to be anything huge; the
example cited by Franklin in his autobiography was the temporary loan of a
rare book. For your purposes, something that takes a scene or less to resolve and
doesn’t involve too much risk is ideal.
The group is about to go out into the city to scavenge food when
they’re approached by a survivor they don’t know very well. He tells
them they’re heading into the area of the city where he used to live
and he’d be ever so grateful if they could keep an eye out for his pet
cat and bring her back to him if possible. When the group is searching a mini-mart for supplies, they find the traumatized cat and spend
a scene outwitting and capturing her for return to her exceedingly
grateful owner. Sessions later, when the cat owner is in dire trouble (or
worse, killed), the group will feel it more keenly because of the earlier
favor. If you use this specific example, the result might be that the
players care more for the cat than the survivor, but that could work
just as well for your purposes...
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RECIPROCAL CARING
We come to care about people who show evidence of caring about us, and you
can make this happen in your games as well. If an NPC has regular friendly chats
with the PCs and asks them how they’re doing, or gifts them a candy bar from
their stash or a nip of vodka from their hip flask, it makes the NPC more real to
the players and gives them a reason to care.
This dynamic can become creepy if taken to excess, however, or if the NPC’s
solicitousness comes across as being fake or part of a hidden agenda. Watch how
your players react to the NPC’s interest in them. If they start to suspect the NPC’s
motives or are creeped out by the attention, you have two choices.
• You can dial back the NPC’s attention to a level where the players are
comfortable. Don’t spotlight that NPC for a few scenes, and if they appear
in the game anyway make sure they treat the PCs neutrally.
• Alternatively, you can dial up the creepiness factor and use the NPC as a
horror element in your game. It may not have been your original intention,
but if it works then use it! What started out as a friendly guy just trying to
pass the time socially with the group can easily turn into a devious villain
with a hidden agenda.
HUMANIZING VICTIMS
Every horror story needs victims, and it’s vital that the audience cares about them.
The following are some techniques you can use to encourage your players to care
about the victims of your vile plots.
I Know Him from Somewhere
Your players will care more about the victim if they aren’t a stranger. You don’t
have to subject a major NPC to a grisly fate every week, but you can have one or
more players unknowingly interact with a prospective victim some time before
they meet their doom. If you’re sneaky, you’ll use this retroactively on an NPC
that the players met in passing and ended up liking.
Doing this too often will strain the players’ suspension of disbelief due to
the feeling of coincidences piling up, so only use this technique once or twice
a scenario.
Flashbacks & Reconstruction
You can use flashback scenes to give the players a visceral sense of what happened
to a victim by having them portray the victim(s) in the moments immediately before they met their fate. This is a method typically used by shows like
Supernatural to build sympathy for the victims in the cold-open at the start of
the episode.
When you want to employ a flashback, pause the action and say something like,
“A few hours earlier…” then frame the scene as the last minutes of the victims’
lives. Give each player very brief details of a victim or character around them (an
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aspect and apex skill for each will do) and then play out the scene. Don’t reveal
too many details during this scene; use short snatches of description to build
suspense and give some clues to the threat without giving it away entirely.
Another option is to provide clues and allow the players to reconstruct what
happened for themselves.
When the group encounters a scene where something awful happened, come
up with at least one detail about the scene per member of the group. These details
can relate to what the victim was doing immediately before the incident, what
happened, or the event’s repercussions for others.
Give each player one detail and ask them to elaborate on it to help build a
picture of the incident and its aftermath. Encourage them to add as much detail
as they like about the victim’s thought processes and the circumstances revealed
by your facts. If you’re using a communal fate pool (page 24) add a point to
the pool for each detail they add that will complicate things for them.
Elsa has five people in her group. They’re going hiking in the wilderness
and she plans to have them stumble across the remains of a hunter
eaten by werewolves. She chooses the following details:
•
Large wolf footprints paced around the perimeter of the camp
• The remains of a meal, barely touched, lie congealing on a plate next
to the burned-down fire
• A rifle that is splattered with blood and smells of gunsmoke
• The hunter’s satellite phone is still in his tent, and it has 18 missed
messages from “Lisa”
• The hunter is now little but scattered bones, gnawed almost clean
Richard narrates how the footprints are evidence of intelligence.
Whatever did this clearly paced around the perimeter of the camp
as the hunter grew more and more terrified, until finally the animals
attacked. Elsa gives her predators a Highly Intelligent aspect and
puts a fate point in the communal fate pool. Nick describes the horrible scene when the hunter was finally taken down and eaten, putting
lots of gruesome detail into the savaging and gnawing and tearing
apart. This adds to the group’s visceral appreciation of the scene, but
it doesn’t introduce any new complications so Elsa doesn’t add a fate
point to the communal pool.
The players may declare details that fit the facts but are incompatible with
your plans—for example, Elsa’s players might decide that the attack was carried
out by intelligent wolves rather than a werewolf. If this happens you can change
your story to fit the players’ interpretation of the facts or keep to your original
plan—but if you do this, award each player a fate point when you dramatically
reveal the truth.
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Using a Communal Fate Point Pool
Communal fate points are a pool of additional fate points that can be used by
any player, but only on behalf of another PC or an allied NPC. When a player
uses a communal fate point to invoke or compel an aspect, they must explain
how their character is directly involved in the action.
Rufio is a Brash Swashbuckler. When he and Marissa’s character
Kelly are fighting a pustulous abomination in the sewer, Kelly’s warding amulet is ripped off and starts to sink into the corrosive bile that’s
flooding the sewer channel. Nick narrates how Rufio uses the tip of
his weapon—a fencing foil—to pick up the amulet and return it to Kelly
with a flick of his blade. This is an action to help another character and
his character is directly involved, so he can use a communal fate point
to invoke his aspect.
The communal pool resets to zero at every significant milestone and can hold
as many fate points as there are players in the group—but don’t take points away
from the pool if it’s full and some of the players can’t make it to a session.
When a compel complicates matters for the group and not just a single character, give the fate point to the communal pool. Some of the other systems in this
chapter also add fate points to the pool.
The use of communal fate points is designed to encourage the group to work
together, to think about each other’s characters, and to reduce the number of fate
points gained by the group when a complication affects more than one player.
Don’t use this system if distrust and group in-fighting are core elements of the
horror in your story.
USING A GROUP ASPECT
If you’re using communal fate points, it’s a good idea to give the whole
group an aspect that represents its nature and provides opportunities for
communal invokes and compels. This is essentially a high concept aspect
that describes the whole group rather than an individual character.
• Example: Rufio’s group are Occult Urban Explorers.
Making communal fate points the only ones available to the players makes
teamwork an absolute necessity. Decide with your group during game creation
if you’ll use communal fate points, and whether they’ll supplement or replace
each character’s usual pool of fate points.
The following two systems use the communal pool to encourage players to
self-compel and to declare story details that complicate matters for the group.
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ENHANCED SELF-COMPELS
A character with visible flaws tends to be more sympathetic than one who is
perfect. Giving players a small incentive to self-compel makes it more likely that
they will remember to do so and therefore encourages them to take control over
their own character’s failings.
When a player self-compels in a way that highlights one of their character’s
flaws, they get a fate point as normal and add a fate point to the communal
pool. If the communal pool is full, they instead gain a free invoke on a setting
or situation aspect of their choice. If the compel causes a complication for the
group rather than for the character as an individual, add two fate points to the
communal pool instead.
Rufio is Skeptical to a Fault. A sinister old man gives him some
alleged “magic words” that will protect him from danger when he
enters a haunted tomb. Rufio dismisses this out of hand because it’s
clearly a bunch of hokum. Later, when they’re in the tomb and their
weapons prove to be useless against the eldritch threat bearing down
on them, Rufio decides to use the spell just in case it works after all.
Nick suggests that Rufio didn’t try to remember it properly and ends
up garbling the words. Instead of protecting the group from the wight,
the spell makes it angry! This is a complication for the whole group, so
the compel adds two fate points to the communal pool.
ENCOURAGING PLAYERS TO DECLARE STORY DETAILS
You can help players engage with their own characters and the NPCs they
encounter by encouraging them to declare story details that humanize the character for everyone. Once per scene, when a player declares an appropriate story
detail, they add a fate point to the communal pool instead of paying a fate point.
To get this benefit, the story detail that they add must be inconvenient or at
least neutral rather than helpful in the current circumstances, and must directly
pertain to a character or their activities.
The group is investigating the death of a Lonely Insurance Executive
who was found next to his parked car with severe acid burns all over
him. Bruce says, “He was sitting in his car after work looking at a dating
app on his phone. He’d decided earlier that day that he wasn’t going
to find anyone unless he started looking more actively.” Because this
story detail isn’t immediately useful but helps to humanize the victim,
Bruce adds a fate point to the communal pool.
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Exploring Strange and Dangerous Desires
Helping the players empathize with their characters’ conflicted desires can build
their investment in the game. Desire is wonderful and terrible. It pushes and
pulls us in directions we never expected to go, in ways we may find unimaginable
until we’re actually doing them. Desire isn’t just about sex—it’s about all the
things we do for and because of our objects of desire, the things we give up for
their sake, and the ways we change our whole lives for them. Sometimes these
changes are marvelous, often they’ve got a funny side, and sometimes they’re
downright horrific. This tool will help you represent that last kind of desire
in your game, focusing on strange desires, on the clash of desire-driven wants
with other values, and on the question of what’s really monstrous when all’s said
and done.
Even if you focus on desire, your game need not make a turn for the erotic.
Our goal is to emphasize the sensations of desire—wanting what someone feels
they shouldn’t want, the hardships (and rewards) of pursuing the subject of
ambiguous desire, the feelings of satisfaction and regret at a desire fulfilled, and
so on. This book doesn’t have any advice on playing out actual sexual acts; you’re
on your own for that.
The key to horror from desire is the conflict between desire and repulsion for
the same object. If you only wanted people of a sort you typically found attractive
and had reason to believe wouldn’t be harmful for you, there’d be little room for
horror. If you only felt fear, anger, and repulsion toward a person, then your horror
would have little room for desire. When both combine, any conviction in sensible
rules of desire fall apart and things seem terribly, horribly, wonderfully possible.
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BEFORE THE GAME
During game creation, discuss whether the group wants the sensual horror of
desire to be a notable factor in the game. Making it so has a significant impact
on the feel of the game—characters will spend more time agonizing over their
conflicted desires and their mental and emotional state than some groups are
comfortable with. It’s the difference between Day of the Dead and Life After Beth
or Warm Bodies.
DURING THE GAME: INTENSITY ASPECTS
A character who forms a bond of intense emotional engagement with someone
or something else in the game can change one of their character aspects at a
minor milestone to an intensity aspect like Captivated by Her Mysterious
Charms, Always Thinking of What It Hints At, or Repelled by Him,
But Unable to Leave Him that represents their desire.
Characters can also gain intensity aspects due to accepting an extreme consequence or when they’re taken out in an appropriate conflict.
Unlike normal aspects, intensity aspects have a numerical rating to reflect the
magnitude and direction of the engagement. A persistent but controllable attraction starts at +1, up to +3 for all-consuming desire that’s leading the character to
neglect the rest of their life for the sake of the attraction. Persistent but controllable repulsion starts at -1, down to -3 for all-consuming hatred and fear. One of
the keys to the horror of desire is that engagement can change its nature as well
as its intensity in an instant.
The key to good intensity aspects is ambiguity. Is it a thing the character is proud
of, ashamed of, or both at once? Does it suggest both promise and peril? Does
it sound like the setup for all kinds of trouble? Then it’s a good intensity aspect.
The bonus or penalty comes into play as the character acts. When the intensity
rating is positive, the character gets a bonus when they’re trying to help the object
of fascination and increased opposition when acting against the object’s interests.
When the rating is negative, the character gets a bonus to hinder the object and
faces increased opposition if they try to help them.
• If a character takes an action that works with their intensity aspect, they can
use the aspect’s absolute intensity rating instead of a skill or use a skill at +1.
• If a character takes an action that works against their intensity aspect, they
face minimum opposition of the aspect’s absolute intensity rating. If the
opposition was already higher than this, it gets +1.
Someone with Average (+1) Shoot trying to gun down a target for
whom they have a -3 intensity aspect would roll at Good (+3) because
they are attacking the object of their loathing. Someone with Average
(+1) Athletics trying to dodge a punch from someone with a +3 intensity
aspect towards them would roll at Good (+3) because their opponent
is working against their own desire.
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Changing Intensity Aspects
Characters can voluntarily move the rating of an intensity aspect up or down a
level instead of swapping a skill at a milestone. If they reduce an intensity aspect
to 0 they can immediately swap it out for another aspect at the same time. This
is the only way to get rid of an intensity aspect.
Once per scenario, the character’s object of desire may also try to change the
intensity aspect’s rating by initiating a contest. The object of desire plays on the
character’s various hopes and fears, whether revealed naturally without extra
mechanical effort or by creating advantages to expose more of the character’s vulnerabilities. The character may make appeals of their own, or engage in defensive
efforts to reinforce their sense of themselves and the relationship. If the object of
desire wins, it can choose one of two options:
• Raise or lower the rating by a level.
• Invert the rating, turning attraction into repulsion or vice versa.
Addison, once a perfectly normal database manager for a regional
phone company, has been obsessed with the thing calling itself Doctor
Finale for a year now. A minor trouble ticket revealed strange things,
and inquiry escalated into curiosity, then repelled fascination. Addison
has the aspect Everything Is About Doctor Finale, Sooner or Later
at -2. Doctor Finale likes the attention but not the trouble-making, and
in the wake of Addison reaching a significant milestone, makes its move.
This is the second time the two have met face-to-face. Doctor Finale
lures Addison to a cafeteria in the persona of a colleague with stories
about similar monsters elsewhere. As they share lunch, Doctor Finale
slides smoothly from flattery to the temptation of full knowledge of
entities like itself. Addison gradually realizes what’s sitting across the
table, but all efforts to disengage somehow fail. Doctor Finale wins
the contest, and flips the rating’s direction. Now Addison has the
aspect at +2.
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Posing Moral Dilemmas
A moral dilemma means making a difficult choice between two or more alternatives, each of which is similarly undesirable. We use dilemma here in its popular
sense, rather than its strict meaning of a moral conundrum with explicitly two
alternatives.
Moral dilemmas are a staple of horror fiction and you can use them to great
effect in your games. However, they require careful handling to ensure that your
players experience them as dramatic and enjoyable scenes rather than artificially
constrained situations that take away their agency.
EVERYDAY MORAL DILEMMAS
Not all dilemmas are matters of life or death. Everyday dilemmas are a great way
of creating drama through internal conflict as the characters wrestle with what to
do. Several of the tools in this book rely on this technique, for example the rules
for rationing and starvation in The High Cost of Living on page 96.
You can also use aspects that are in tension with each other to spotlight these
sorts of dilemmas. If the character’s choice ultimately makes things more difficult
for them, this is a compel.
Here are some examples:
Principle vs. Need: If a character believes that a certain behavior is wrong but
they need something they can obtain by engaging in that behavior, will they stick
to their principles or will they do it, just this once?
A character who’s Always Faithful but has a Big Debt to Pay is offered
a waiver of their debt in exchange for a “harmless secret” about another
member of the group.
Deferred Gratification vs. Instant Gratification: When a character has an
opportunity to get what they want right now but with a cost of some kind, or
must otherwise wait until much later, what will they choose?
A character sees a Hated Enemy through her rifle scope and has a brief
window to shoot before they disappear to safety…but if she fires it will
make a loud noise and draw the Ravenous Horde.
Divided Loyalties: If a character is loyal to two different characters, but those
characters are in a conflict with each other, what do they do?
A character’s Reliable Friend wants to go out into the wilderness to
look for more survivors so they can rescue as many people as possible while their Pragmatic Strategist lover wants to consolidate their
resources and secure their position. When put in the middle of these
two perspectives, how do they resolve the argument and prevent either
character from being upset with them?
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CLIMACTIC DILEMMAS
When a story is in its final act, the characters sometimes face a terrible dilemma
with high stakes and no ideal or even satisfactory options in sight. In this case,
the best they can usually do is choose the least of the available evils.
The following system walks you through how to frame a scene as a climactic
dilemma so that your players will agonize over their choices rather than begrudge
their lack of options.
First, some ground rules:
• It’s called a climactic dilemma for a reason: A dilemma like this is
a moment of great narrative significance, when the outcome of an entire
scenario hangs in the balance. Only use this technique once a scenario or
you’ll burn your players out.
• Options, not outcomes: When you frame a climactic dilemma, give the
group a limited range of options and give them some idea of the ramifications of each. The outcomes are not yet determined, though, and will
change depending on how the resolution scene plays out.
• There’s always another way: Your PCs can ignore the options in front
of them and try to chart their own course through the dilemma. This
path is extremely difficult and can exact a terrible price on the PCs, but
the option is there.
• Dilemmas are rewarding: Because framing a scene as a dilemma constrains the players’ options unless they fight terrible odds to go their own
way, this is a form of compel. Give each player involved in the scene a fate
point when you initiate the resolution of a climactic dilemma.
Planning and Presentation
Dilemmas work best if the players have a chance to anticipate—or dread—them,
especially if they can discuss and agonize over their limited options well before
they act.
You will eventually explicitly state the dilemma to your players and then pressure them to act on a decision before something horrible happens because of
their inaction. By the time you trigger this climactic scene, they should already
be aware of the looming dilemma and the options available to them.
Sometimes an effective dilemma develops naturally from the PCs’ aspects,
interactions, and behavior during the game. If a situation arises where the players
are already agonizing over what course to take out of several conflicting options,
that’s an ideal opportunity for you to trigger a climactic scene with the choices
they’ve already identified.
Alternatively, you might think up a really dramatic dilemma and use it to
inspire an entire scenario. In this case, you can gradually introduce the options
available to the PCs as the scenario unfolds so that the dilemma feels natural to
the players when you trigger the resolution scene.
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Elsa comes up with a dilemma that she plans her next scenario around.
A malevolent spirit is possessing a young firefighter and using them as
a vessel to commit unspeakable acts of evil. Elsa decides there are two
equally unpalatable ways the group can deal with the spirit. They can
exorcise the spirit at risk to the firefighter, temporarily resolving the
problem of the possessed victim’s evil acts, but the spirit will be able to
cross back over and possess another host next Hallowe’en. Alternatively,
they can use a magical ritual to permanently bind the spirit into the
firefighter’s body. This will also make the firefighter immortal, so the
PCs can lock them in chains and bury them deep underground to
keep the spirit out of the mortal world forever. Unfortunately, trapped
in their mind with only the evil spirit for company, the firefighter will
suffer an eternity of torment...but the spirit won’t trouble the mortal
world ever again.
Choosing Not to Act
The players always have the option of doing nothing, but when you’re planning your dilemma make sure that the consequences of inaction are as bad—or
worse—than the other available choices.
Elsa decides that if the group takes no action against the spirit possessing the firefighter, it will lock the doors during a matinee performance
at a major local theatre and then burn the place to the ground, incinerating everyone inside.
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Making Things More Complicated
You can begin with a simple dilemma and then introduce complications to make
it a more difficult decision for the PCs. As a simple example, if they must choose
between saving one person or three, they’ll find the decision much harder to
make if the choice is between one young child and three adults. But there’s no
need to stop there; what if the child is possessed by a vicious ghost and the adults
are police officers trying to arrest her?
The best complications are ones that align with aspects belonging to the PCs
or to your game, because you already know that these are important to the group.
The Holy Grail of dilemmas is one with complications relevant to two or more
conflicting aspects, as this will encourage a great deal of soul searching and debate
among the PCs.
Elsa looks at the PCs’ aspects and sees that Marissa’s character Kelly
has the aspect No Woman Left Behind. Elsa decides that the firefighter
will be a woman so Kelly is more likely to argue for saving her instead
of trapping the spirit. Meanwhile, Sarah’s character has the aspect A
Stitch in Time Saves Nine, meaning that she’s more likely to argue
for causing a known amount of suffering to one person in order to
prevent an unknowable amount of suffering to others in the future on
the spirit’s return.
If a PC ends up strongly conflicting with others in the group due to the way
one of their aspects pertains to a moral dilemma, give them a fate point as if this
were a self-compel.
Resolution
Time pressure is essential to making a dilemma play out with the drama it
deserves, so the first part of triggering a resolution scene is to show the players
why they need to act in the imminent future.
During a scene, Elsa’s players investigate the possessed firefighter and
observe her reconnoitering the theatre and sabotaging one of the fire
exit doors, allowing them to deduce the spirit’s plan. The players know
they must make a decision on what to do and put their plan in motion
soon if they are to prevent a tragedy.
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Declaration: Next, formally frame the situation as a dilemma so the players
know what they’re up against. Hand everyone a fate point and say something like:
“You have a dilemma on your hands. If you don’t act now, [bad result of inaction]
will happen. But will you [option 1], in which case [a rough idea of the consequences] or will you [option 2], in which case [a rough idea of the consequences]?”
Elsa says, “You have a dilemma on your hands. If you don’t act now,
hundreds of people could be burned alive. But will you hunt down
the firefighter and perform a dangerous exorcism, at best freeing the
spirit to return next Hallowe’en, or will you use the spell you discovered in the Codex Infernus to trap the spirit forever in the body of the
firefighter, condemning her to a personal hell but preventing the spirit
from harming anyone else?”
Next the group discusses the situation and decides how to proceed, choosing
between the options presented in the dilemma or one of their own devising. If
the characters can’t come to a unanimous decision that’s fine—anyone who voted
against the choice made can refuse to get involved or actively oppose the other
characters during the following scene.
Climax: Whatever option the players choose sets the stakes of the climactic scene,
which you then resolve as a conflict, challenge, or contest—whichever fits the
situation best.
Elsa’s group discusses the dilemma extensively and ultimately comes
down to a split decision to imprison the spirit in the firefighter’s body.
Three of them will proceed on this basis while the other two plan to get
in their way and exorcise the spirit instead. When Marissa and Phil act
later to defy the group, they each get a fate point. Because there’s a lot
going on, Elsa decides to run the climactic scene as a conflict between
the players and the possessed firefighter. If the three who want to trap
the spirit win, they get to proceed with their plan. If the firefighter wins,
then the spirit gets to proceed with its attack (or escape). If the two
who want to try to exorcise the spirit win—against all the odds—they
can save the firefighter and free the spirit.
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Going Their Own Way: If the group chooses an option not presented in the
dilemma, they must contend with opposition that’s three or four points higher. In
addition, the results of being taken out will be much more severe—at minimum
players should expect to receive an extreme consequence if they are taken out.
If Elsa’s group had decided to take their own option of using untested
magic to remove the spirit from the firefighter’s body and immediately
trap it in a doll, they would have gone into the climactic scene facing
Legendary (+8) rather than Superb (+5) opposition and knowing that if
they were taken out they would suffer at least an extreme consequence.
It’s a happier ending, but a lot more difficult to achieve.
Changes of Heart: If the group, or anyone in it, changes their mind and decides
to work towards a different option in the climactic scene, that’s fine—in fact, it’s
a great source of drama. If they switch to work on an option not declared in the
dilemma, they face increased opposition and greater risk as previously described
in “Going Their Own Way”.
Conclusion: Be Adaptable and, if It Works, Keep Doing It
The tools and advice we’ve provided in this chapter will help you present compelling NPCs and situations to the players that will help them buy into the game
and invest in its horror themes. The rest of this book provides specific advice
related to various types and themes of horror, but we have one last piece of
general advice.
Rather than relying on preconceived notions of what will make your players
invest in your horror game, be prepared to adapt according to their reactions.
Look for patterns in how they respond and, once you’ve found something that
works, do more of that thing. Be careful not to wear it out, though; familiarity
really does breed contempt. For example, if the group starts to become blasé about
NPCs with too many finger joints and shadows that move all by themselves, find
something else to scare them with.
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CHAPTER 3: SOME SCARS ARE INVISIBLE
Representing the Mental Toll of Horror
Fate Core provides a system for mental conflicts and the potentially lasting consequences that can result from them. The tools we provide here are designed to
supplement the standard mental conflict rules in handling the long-term mental
toll of horror on the characters.
Media Inspiration
The following books, movies, and TV shows are useful sources of inspiration
when considering the mental toll of horror:
• The Orphanage is an excellent movie that speaks to the extremes to which
grief can drive people.
• The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, along with several of his other
works, focuses on the repercussions of guilt and shame.
• Jessabelle is a Southern Gothic movie about recovering from extreme injury
while in your childhood home.
• 10 Cloverfield Lane depicts the consequences of isolation and uncertainty
on the human psyche.
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel exploring the twin roles of hope
and fear in driving the characters to survive in a bleak, post-apocalyptic
world.
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a classic about a man surviving alone
and surrounded by vampires who comes to realize that he has become a
monster to the monsters.
• The Shining by Stephen King excruciatingly depicts the descent of one
man into madness.
• Stakeland is a tale of humans surviving a vampire apocalypse, being herded
for food and facing unimaginable terrors in the night.
• Alien gets under your skin… Literally.
• Quarantine is a zombie film in a filthy, claustrophobic setting that practically assaults all five senses.
• Knights of Sidonia is action sci-fi with a heaping helping of visceral horror
and some good ideas about how to integrate it into other stories.
• Child of Fire features creatures that provoke a visceral reaction largely
outside of normal horror tropes.
• Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are
the classics of ‘80s slasher flicks, and capture the essence of splatter horror.
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Tools of the Trade
Representing mental health issues at the table is something you must handle
sensitively and respectfully. The possibility of causing distress to a player by
mistreating the subject is very real, and so is the risk of reinforcing prejudice
against—and misunderstanding of—people with mental health issues.
The issues of player consent and safety we discussed earlier (page 7) are of
paramount importance when you’re going to explore the subject of mental health.
So, before discussing specific rules, let’s briefly review the general tools that you
have at your disposal as a GM to make psychological trauma a viable—and nonharmful—character arc at the game table.
Metagaming is the practice of considering the game as a whole—including
rule books, character sheets, and other materials—rather than relying entirely on
in-character experiences. While often derided for “ruining” a game, metagaming
is an excellent tool for discussing choices prior to their occurrence.
Steering is the use of the metagame materials and out-of-character discussion
to make in-character choices. Your group needs to be on the same page when it
comes to the use of psychological trauma in plot and story, and the best way to
do this is with all eyes open following a discussion of the subject.
In addition to using discussion to make plot points about mental illness acceptable, use of X-Cards (page 141), Script Change (page 143), and Open Door
Policies (players can leave the table at any time for no reason, to protect their
boundaries) can help keep the room feeling safe. Just because you’ve discussed
something prior to it happening, doesn’t mean that everyone will be okay in the
moment that it happens. A player who was just fine with the idea of roleplaying
a mental breakdown might not be when it comes time to do so, or someone else
at the game table may find to their surprise that it’s too much for them to watch.
All these tools make it possible to tell stories involving mental illness and psychological trauma safely and respectfully.
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Wounds Lead to Scars
Horror fiction is powered by the things we fear. Commonly, we fear the things
that can happen—or be done—to us, or to our friends and families. We can
experience a trauma, and thus acquire mental health issues that we didn’t have
before. As explored in “Body Horror” (page 65), we can lose a limb, sight, or
hearing in a horrifying way, and mental consequences can result. There may also
be mental consequences for seeing something awful, as described in “Visceral
Horror” (page 45).
DEALING WITH GRIEF
Bereavement is a particularly potent source of mental harm. Loss is
something we must all deal with in our real lives, and in a horror game
PCs and NPCs are likely to die on a regular basis. How characters
respond to the loss of a close friend, mentor, or collaborator is a worthwhile place to explore psychological trauma. If you’ve ever experienced
the death of a family member or friend, you probably remember what
it felt like, but there are many ways to grieve.
Characters who live with addictions might indulge in those habits
more than they regularly do as a reaction to a death. Others may go
totally numb, protecting themselves from their actual feelings by pretending that nothing is wrong—right up until it goes very wrong. Still
others react with anger.
Grief is an emotional and physical response to death. Some people
feel physically ill upon hearing that they’ve lost someone—and it’s not
a psychosomatic response. Others can’t stop crying, no matter how
hard they try.
Grief can be about more than death, as well. Loss of a friendship, a lost
pet, or any other kind of traumatic or sudden loss, whether it’s a death
or the end of a career, can trigger grief responses from characters.
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Whatever happens to a character, there can be psychological repercussions if
what happened was traumatic.
Such repercussions are real. Unlike a system with a well of sanity points which
can run out and make a character unplayable, we encourage you and your players to recognize and engage with psychological trauma, and to see through the
consequences of a character’s actions or experiences. Having mental consequences
doesn’t mean you’re out of the game.
The trick is, when we play out the kinds of horror which require us to pursue
very real fears, we must treat the people in real life who experience these things
with civility and kindness. This section addresses some ways you can do that
without harming players—or even observers—of your game.
Before we get started, we want to state up front two hard rules for portraying
characters with psychological problems in any Fate horror game:
• Mental illness does not make people act like cartoonish caricatures. Players
must keep their characters consistent with their aspects and pre-existing
beliefs rather than using their psychological issues as an excuse to act
without a moral compass or to do “crazy” things.
• People with psychological problems are not punchlines. Characters may
well find humor in their situation, but it’s important that your group
only ever laughs with characters rather than at them in respect to their
mental health.
WHAT ABOUT EXISTING
MENTAL ILLNESSES?
The Fate Accessibility Toolkit is a handbook for
playing disabled characters and running games
with disabled characters in them. It covers a variety of disabilities, including actual psychological
disorders and mental illnesses, and how they
might be portrayed within a game.
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Trauma Aspects
For the purposes of this section, a trauma is a single, definable event or series of
closely related events that creates overwhelming distress and exceeds a character’s
ability to cope normally.
A trauma aspect is any aspect that’s intended to represent a significant, longlasting effect of trauma on a character’s mental wellbeing. This will usually be a
moderate, severe, or extreme consequence or an aspect gained while a coping
condition (page 41) is checked. A player can choose to treat a situation aspect
as a trauma aspect if they understand this will make it last indefinitely; characters
never really heal from traumas so much as they find ways to cope with them.
Whenever a character takes a trauma aspect, identify potential triggers and
responses associated with the aspect. Together, these form a guide as to how the
character expresses their reaction to the trauma in everyday life.
If a character was in a horrific car accident, they may have an anxiety
attack every time they try to drive a car on the highway, or in the rain.
If they were trapped inside a house with a serial killer trying to break
in, they may be afraid of being alone, or they might still get a pang
of fear in their gut when they walk past a window with the curtains
closed. Or maybe they’re afraid of the sound of knocking on the door.
Players, take the time to research genuine mental illnesses when coming up with
trauma aspects, as this will help you to pick triggers and responses that really go
together instead of building a genre cliché. It’s possible that you’ll discover what
you were looking for wasn’t what you expected.
Rather than using a clinical name like Acute Stress Disorder, use an
evocative name that guides how the aspect affects the character—mental illness
doesn’t look the same for any one person all the time.
Richard’s character, Tanvir, was in a car crash that killed his husband. His
husband’s ghost has been haunting Tanvir in mirrors and windows ever
since. Richard researches post-traumatic stress disorder and decides
it would be the appropriate basis of a trauma aspect, so he chooses
Legacy of Shattered Glass.
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Using Trauma Aspects in Play
You can invoke or compel trauma aspects when appropriate—usually when one
of the triggering conditions you identified when creating the aspect occurs—to
complicate a character’s life in a way consistent with their psychological state.
One technique is to compel a trauma aspect to incite a flashback, in which
the player re-enacts the traumatizing scene from their character’s past. Used sparingly—once a session at most—this is an excellent way to instill a scene with
drama and character development.
When the ghost punches a mirror to get Tanvir’s attention, the GM
asks Richard to play out a fraction of that car crash in a flashback
spotlight scene.
A character can be compelled in other ways as they fail to cope with their trauma,
meaning they experience nightmares, experience a panic attack, or freeze in place.
They might instead use a maladaptive coping mechanism like ritualized behavior,
avoidance, or hypervigilance. See “Coping Conditions” (page 41) for a system
that builds on the idea of maladaptive coping.
When a character marks a box of mental or physical stress, that’s a good time to
offer a compel on one of their trauma aspects as the strain of the situation causes
the symptom to take effect. Most importantly, the player and GM should agree
on what triggers the symptom or condition.
Tanvir has a Gun-Shy condition that he marked off during a desperate
gunfight. Later, when he’s in a standoff with a gun-toting cultist and
has to mark his second physical stress box, Elsa uses that as justification for a compel on Gun-Shy to make him freeze for a moment and
let the cultist move unopposed to a tactically advantageous position.
Trauma aspects last until the character takes the time to treat them through
professional therapy or heart-to-heart conversation with another character. Each
game will function differently in how difficult it is to treat trauma aspects, but
the idea is to highlight the process of healing and treating mental illnesses. Players
heal their characters’ physical wounds by seeing a medic; why wouldn’t characters
also see therapists or psychiatrists?
Once a trauma aspect has completely healed, this means that the character
has learned to use healthy coping mechanisms to deal with their psychological
discomfort, which never entirely goes away. Healthy coping mechanisms aren’t an
aspect to be invoked or compelled, but part of how the character acts and behaves.
Tanvir eventually lays the ghost of his husband to rest; the literal
haunting ends, though he continues to be haunted by the accident.
Eventually, after regular visits to a therapist, he learns to cope with his
remaining symptoms of PTSD using mindfulness, exercising regularly,
and investing more deeply in his other relationships.
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Coping Conditions
This system uses conditions from Dresden Files Accelerated, page 116, to represent
coping conditions—maladaptive coping mechanisms that enable characters to
keep functioning in the face of a horrible, hostile world, but which ultimately
make life more difficult for the character.
• When a character takes physical or mental stress, their player can check
a coping condition to absorb stress in addition to a single stress box and
any number of consequences.
• A fleeting coping condition can absorb two shifts of stress, a sticky one can
absorb four shifts of stress, and a lasting one can absorb six shifts of stress.
• You can also cause PCs to check a coping condition due to the consequences of a compel or an in-game experience that doesn’t inflict stress,
such as encountering an eldritch tome.
• A coping condition is defined the first time it’s checked, not written on
the character sheet in advance.
• While a coping condition is checked, the character has a trauma aspect of
the same name. If an opponent caused the condition to be checked, they
get a free invoke on the related trauma aspect as normal.
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• Checking a coping condition means that the character begins engaging in
the maladaptive coping behavior described by the condition, and will do
so until they take whatever steps are necessary to clear out the condition.
As the character has an aspect of the same name, they can be the subject
of appropriate invokes and compels.
• Each character can have only one of each kind of coping condition—fleeting, sticky, and lasting—on their character sheet.
• Coping conditions aren’t fixed to a limited list; any character can take one
of the example conditions given here or a new one created by your group.
• If a character has an unchecked coping condition at a minor milestone,
their player can delete the condition from their character sheet instead of
changing one of their aspects.
• If a character already has a coping condition defined and needs to check
a more severe one, they can “upgrade” their current coping condition,
moving it to the higher condition slot and freeing its existing slot for
immediate use. They can only do this if they don’t currently have a condition defined in the higher slot.
Elsa is playing a Mythos Scholar and marks a sticky Flashbacks coping
condition on encountering an evil book. She experiences flashbacks to
the horrors within the text, hideous images flashing across her mind
every time she tries to recall the book’s content. Later, when exposure
makes Elsa’s flashbacks worsen, she upgrades it to a lasting condition
as she suffers repeated nightmares featuring the content she’s read.
This frees up her sticky coping condition slot for later use.
• Fleeting coping conditions remain checked for a scene but are cleared out
immediately when the scene ends or the character escapes from it.
• Sticky coping conditions remain checked until the character recuperates
naturally. The maladaptive coping behavior recurs when triggered by stressful situations or affects the character continually until they have a chance
to find some peace with a good night’s sleep, a stiff drink, a convivial meal,
meditation, or some other calming and centering activity.
• Lasting coping conditions remain checked until the character seeks help.
The maladaptive coping behavior recurs regularly and the character must
receive counseling and/or medication to clear the condition, needing
someone to overcome at least Great (+4) opposition.
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Example Coping Conditions
• Hypervigilance: Characters with this condition might be highly sensitive to touch, or have an overactive startle reflex, increased scanning for
threats, and heightened awareness of surroundings. A fleeting version of
this condition fades when the immediate danger is past, while a sticky
hypervigilance condition can be resolved with rest and the establishment
of trust. A lasting hypervigilance condition may never be resolved without
significant story developments.
• Obsessive Ritual (sticky or lasting only): The character copes with
their psychological distress and lack of control through specific rituals.
Some rituals are checking mechanisms (checking locks, turning faucets
on and off) while others relate to distress about contamination (fear of
germs, excessive washing of hands), hoarding, rumination, or intrusive
thoughts. Sticky conditions are treated by the resolution of the concern
(for example, some kind of workaround for the stemming issue like carrying hand sanitizer or having a security system) while lasting ones can be
permanent without significant psychological assistance.
•
Avoidance: The character cannot engage with the object of their trauma.
For example, Elsa’s character steps on a rattlesnake. The snake doesn’t bite
her, but the experience of finding her foot right next to a rattling snake,
ready to strike and able to poison her, sticks. Whenever she sees a picture
of a snake, her heart speeds up and she looks away. When she finds out
there are plastic snakes at the toy store, she reroutes herself to avoid it.
Avoidance can look like sticking fingers in ears to not hear a topic of discussion, closing eyes, taking alternate routes, or shouting over someone
so you cannot hear them.
• Inappropriate Emotion: The character’s emotional responses to sources
of stress are mixed up. For example, instead of becoming scared in a nervewracking situation your character becomes angry and prone to lashing out
at her allies because anger is more controllable than fear. A fleeting version
of this condition fades when the stimulus is past, while a sticky version
needs to be resolved after resting and having a chance to process complex
emotional responses. A lasting version requires conversation, soul-searching,
and therapeutic assistance to overcome.
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On Othering Mental Illness
The Collins English Dictionary defines othering as “feeling or making others feel
disowned and alienated.”
When creating stories involving mental illness, it’s important to make sure not
to other those mental illnesses. Othering in fiction is the act of creating characters
whom readers and consumers of media cannot identify with because they are different, and using that difference to make the audience fear them. An example of
this is Renfield from Dracula. Renfield does the bidding of a vicious creature, he
wears the trappings of insanity (a straitjacket), and he eats flies and other insects.
All these things are the imagery used to paint Renfield as “crazy”—and thus
supposedly incomprehensible to us. Mental illness is being used in this context
to make Renfield scary or creepy, rather than him being perfectly sane and still
working for Dracula (which to me, reader, is even scarier).
The practice of othering creates a space between a person who is different and
“normal” people, and capitalizes on that space to make the other look more terrifying. When you create characters with mental illnesses, please don’t cast them
only as a villain or tragic figure. Plenty of people with mental illnesses come
out of normal and stable settings, and while we don’t want to make it look like
mental illness isn’t a problem, we need to acknowledge that a mental illness, by
itself, is not a reason to simply decide someone is evil or in some other way unfit
for social interaction.
Especially in America, where the distinction between a perpetrator of gun
violence and a “crazy person” must be re-examined every time there is a tragedy,
we must not conflate mental illness with violent acts. We must remember that
people with logic and purpose might still have a mental illness, and that people
who commit violent acts may not have one at all. Oversimplifying these matters
hurts everyone, not just those with the illnesses in question.
Horror fiction has a particularly bad track record for othering people for their
nature, mental or physical issues, or behavior as a lazy way of indicating that
they’re the villain or to make it acceptable that they become victims.
It’s possible to use themes of The Other in your horror games without punching
down at people who are different from the mainstream, where The Other represents the forces of totalitarianism, alien threats, or a liberating or a transformative
force which is ultimately embraced by the characters. We present tools for doing
this starting on page 73.
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The Horror of Viscera and Gore
A common source of emotional and mental distress for characters in horror
fiction is exposure to bodily harm or its gory aftermath. You can use these as a
seasoning in your game to induce instinctual reactions of repulsion and revulsion in both a player and their character. This shared reaction can help the player
identify with their character’s situation and heighten other aspects of horror—for
example, a sense of helplessness.
In this section, we provide tools and advice for using visceral and splatter horror
in your games as a source of psychological trauma for the characters. Like any
seasoning, use visceral horror sparingly—repeated use quickly numbs its impact.
LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR
While this section is aimed squarely at emulating
gore and splatter horror, its systems also work
well for representing the disturbing and unsettling
nature of encounters with the eldritch and uncanny
which are the hallmarks of Lovecraftian horror.
Rather than gore, encounters are with mind-boggling architecture and Things That Should Not Be.
The Narrative Uses of Viscera
When describing viscera, open and close your description with senses other than
sight to heighten the sense of wrongness and discomfort. Open with the taste of
rot in the air, or the smell of a pustulous blight. End with the squishing sound
of something moving or settling, or the feel of something unexpectedly wet—or
dry—under a character’s foot or hand.
Viscera serves a practical purpose as well, by providing evidence of something
off-screen. This allows you to retain mystery by keeping a threat out of view
while influencing the current action with its aftermath. Gory remnants of an
attack provide clues about how a monster works, such as how it kills its victims
or whether it behaves in certain ways during or after an attack. Such remnants
can also build tension by intimating a future threat, demonstrating the power
of something that must be confronted—or escaped—soon, or revealing some of
its capabilities.
Splatter horror overturns the normal limitations of viscera by turning the gore
up to eleven. Depictions of violence are frequent, extreme, and fast-paced, resulting in exaggerated injury and suffering. When you’re running a splatter horror
game, use the same advice and mechanics, but delay any viscera-related compels
until after the dust settles and events have had a chance to sink in.
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Visceral Aspect Compels
Viscera is normally the basis for compels as soon as the characters encounter
it. As their instincts override their higher reasoning and they make bad decisions as a result, their players temporarily lose their narrative control as well.
Usually you’ll compel a situation or monster aspect representing the gore itself,
but in some subgenres tying the compel back to a character aspect may be more
impactful.
In Richard’s survival horror game, the PCs stumble into the aftermath
of a zombie attack. Richard passes out a fate point to each player,
with the compel “The Brutal and Bloody Corpse Carnage turns
your stomachs. You spend several minutes throwing up and regaining
your composure, which was very much a bad idea. By the time you’ve
recovered yourselves, you realize that several of the corpses have risen
to their feet and are almost on top of you...”
In Elsa’s nihilistic horror game, the investigators have discovered the
imprisoned results of the cult’s experiments. She compels one of the
investigators: “Because you’re a Secluded Scholar, you’re overcome
with shock and disgust and scream in fright when one of the prisoners
rolls over and stares at you. This goes wrong when you hear heavy feet
treading on the stairs down to your level…”
Decision-based compels driven by viscera are a great way to set up classic horror
situations, like a character…
• …fleeing the scene and ending up alone with something dangerous nearby
• …fleeing the scene and leaving behind something (or someone) important
• …screaming and attracting unwanted attention
• …ruining their tough facade in front of someone they want to impress
• …abandoning a carefully-prepared ambush and frantically attacking
Viscera can also be used for event-based compels. These draw on the exact
circumstances more than decision-based compels, but some examples include
characters…
• …being so distracted that they miss an ambush
• …being mistaken as the cause of the gore by another party
• …slipping in the gore and getting thoroughly covered in it
• …incorrectly identifying the victim because they can’t bring themselves
to look carefully
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The Mental Toll of Gore
Characters often want to come away from a viscera-splattered scene with something they can use as an advantage later. In horror genres with powerful monsters,
these scenes offer a great opportunity to build up advantages and free invokes
that can be used in a later confrontation...but not without a cost to their mental
wellbeing. Rather than using compels to reflect the traumatizing experience of
scenes like this, make the gore a character in the scene and have it act directly on
the characters as they investigate in a contest or conflict.
Give the visceral mess a Gore rating, and roll attacks with it every exchange,
defended by Will or Careful. A Gore rating at or slightly below the group’s average Will rating means that characters must be cautious, since the GM has a stock
of fate points per scene they can use to boost their attacks. Depending on the
circumstances, the gore can roll against a single character, divide its shifts among
everyone, or, for an especially challenging scene, attack everyone with its full roll.
Make the scene brisk, with characters creating some advantages against the
threat, taking some stress and maybe a consequence, and then getting out. To
change things up a bit, you could transition to a fight or a chase after an exchange
or two.
Bruce’s players have found some bodies half-dissolved in some malignant but dormant fungus. He’s about to compel them to flee the scene
when Marissa suggests that this is a great opportunity to learn more
about the source of the fungus. After rolling to create several advantages to analyze samples of the fungus, Bruce rolls the scene’s Gore of
Good (+3) defended by Marissa’s character’s Fair (+2) Will and Nick’s
character’s Average (+1) Will. Marissa’s is fine, but Nick’s character takes
a 3-shift hit. He marks a stress box and takes a mild consequence of
Unmoored from Reality.
Next exchange, Nick looks at his treacherous dice and declares that
he’s conceding before Bruce rolls. Marissa’s PC shrugs off the hit again,
and Bruce and Nick decide that the fungus has begun to wake up and
he’s passed out from inhaling the spores.
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Splatter Attacks
Monster stunts are another effective way to bring viscera into play, especially in
a splatter horror game. When triggered, these stunts let the monster create an
advantage representing disgust or revulsion, or make a Provoke attack against
all witnesses.
Triggers might include:
• When the monster’s target takes a consequence
• When the monster succeeds with style
• When a disgusting monster first comes into clear view
• When you first smell the monster’s stench
• When a monster is discovered in an unexpected place, like hanging from
a ceiling or moving through a pipe that should be too small for it
These stunts are powerful, and should be limited—usable once per scene, requiring a fate point, or requiring an invoke of a suitable situation aspect.
Chainsaw Flourish: When the Appalachian Stalker succeeds with style
on an attack with his chainsaw, the GM can spend a fate point to roll
a Provoke attack against everyone else in the original target’s zone.
Hardened Hearts
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense for a character to be bothered by viscera. In
some subgenres of horror, especially survival or splatter horror, this works without further complication. Give your character an aspect like Expert Surgeon
or Combat Veteran justifying why they can shrug off a bloody mess or a room
strewn with internal organs. Since aspects are always true, you can use such an
aspect to argue that a viscera-based compel is inappropriate, and you’ll always
have something to invoke when defending against viscera-based attacks.
In other genres, especially those focusing on psychological horror, this kind of
hardening comes at a cost. One way to handle this is with a stunt that exchanges
your internal cost for an external cost; instead of you getting grossed out, everyone
nearby is disturbed by your indifference.
Inured: You’ve got a strategy for coping with viscera and gore, but
it’s not comfortable for others. You have a sticky condition (Dresden
Files Accelerated, page 116)—Disturbingly Callous []—that you can
check at any time. While it’s checked you’re immune to gore-based
mental attacks and can’t have visceral aspects compelled against
you—but you also can’t use or defend against the Empathy skill. To
clear Disturbingly Callous, you must demonstrate that you are vulnerable and human after all, for example by making an emotional appeal
in a safe place, or putting yourself in danger for your allies. Anyone
without Disturbingly Callous checked adds one to the shift value of
every gore attack they receive if they’re in the same zone as someone
with the condition checked.
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CHAPTER 4: WHO’S WHO OF THE DAMNED
Making and Playing Monsters and Other Adversaries
Monsters are often the real stars of horror fiction. We’re happy to root for the
protagonists, but when the story’s over it’s the monsters we remember.
But monsters are the top of a horrific iceberg, and effective adversaries come
in many guises. From the manifestation of a personal fear—like dread of one’s
own capacity for evil—to body-ravaging disease, involuntary transformation, or
existential threat, adversaries reflect and magnify the fears common to the human
condition to scare and thrill audiences.
In this chapter we give you tools and techniques for making scary, memorable
adversaries in your games.
Making Monsters
From Frankenstein’s Creature to Jason Vorhees, there’s a pantheon of iconic monsters that are regularly resurrected in new forms because of their enduring appeal.
Media Inspiration
We liberally borrowed from some classic horror movies when we were writing the
advice in this section. Works that inspired us include:
• Lights Out is the inspiration for the Shadow Specter on page 50.
The history of this antagonist and its relationship with the protagonists is
fascinating and well done.
• It Follows is the inspiration for the Ineluctable Hunter on page 50.
It’s a mysterious figure about which we know almost nothing, and it doesn’t
jump out and scare you. In addition to being a great example of how the
inexplicable can be scary, it’s an object lesson in the power of suspense,
and also poses an interesting moral dilemma.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street: Almost everyone is familiar with Freddy
Krueger, the legendary monster from this series of movies. He inspired
the Nightmare Stalker on page 50. He has an interesting past, an
excellent motivation for his horrendous crimes, and a beguilingly sinister
personality that turned him into something of an antihero by the end of
the series.
• The Omen: Damien, the child antagonist of this sinister movie, is the
inspiration for The Devil’s Spawn on page 50.
But now it’s time to make your own monsters.
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Choose High Concept and Theme
The best monsters have a deeper meaning or theme alongside their obvious
horrific traits. Vampires are blood-sucking fiends who act as a metaphor for
penetration and the corruption of sexuality. Zombies represent the inevitability
of death and fear of the Apocalypse in a battle of humanity against mortality.
Sometimes monsters symbolize more than one theme—a vampire might also
represent a failure to join the present or let go of the past, or the sacrifice of
morality on the altar of longevity and survival.
When you begin making a monster, consider not just what it is but also what it
means. What does your monster symbolize, and how does it relate to the human
experience?
Write down your monster’s high concept aspect and a sentence or two describing its theme. As the theme is an extension of the monster’s high concept, you
can use invokes and compels to demonstrate and reinforce it during play, even if
the monster isn’t involved in the current scene.
The Shadow Specter is a ghost that only manifests in darkness and
disappears in the light, representing the primal fear of the dark. You
can offer a compel on its high concept to have the characters’ flashlights fail, plunging them into total darkness. Or you can invoke it
when they’re picking their way through a dimly-lit building even if the
specter isn’t there.
Here are some other examples of monstrous high concepts and their associated themes:
• An Ineluctable Hunter latches onto a single victim and pursues them
at a walking pace until it catches and kills them, taking the concept of an
obsessive stalker to a supernaturally intense conclusion.
• The Nightmare Stalker is a monster that haunts people in their bad
dreams, symbolizing the debilitating effect of fear itself and the terrible
things people will do when they’re afraid.
• A Cursed Lycanthrope who transforms into a ravening beast on the
nights of the full moon represents the fear of loss of control, of unrestrained
rage and murderous intent.
• The Devil’s Spawn is a murderous child with psychokinesis who embodies the fact that children are alien to adults, combined with the fear of a
parent that their child might be somehow wrong.
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Determine Threat
Next, consider who—or what—your monster threatens, and how. The threat it
poses is most effective if the players are invested in and care about your monster’s
targets, as we discuss in The Raveled Sleeve of Care, starting on page 21.
In the early stages of a story, it’s better for your monster to threaten what the
players care about rather than the PCs directly. Posing a direct threat to the PCs
hastens a confrontation with them, reducing the time available to build mood
and set appropriately high stakes for the climax.
If your monster does mess directly with the characters, begin with constant
small aggressions, ongoing drains on energy and emotional wellbeing. You’ll keep
them on edge, but they won’t really be able to react in a meaningful way due to
the fleeting and unpredictable nature of the interactions. Like a cat toying with
its prey, the monster will make them bleed from a thousand tiny wounds before
it closes for the kill.
But your monster doesn’t have to pose a lethal threat to be scary and effective.
In fact, a monster that tortures, mutilates, or psychologically breaks its victims
can be scarier than one that flat-out murders them. Perhaps the scariest of them
all is a monster that transforms its victims into something just like it. We discuss
these sorts of fates in depth in Some Scars Are Invisible (page 35), in Exploring
Strange and Dangerous Desires (page 26), and later in this chapter.
Your monsters can also effectively threaten things other than people. Concepts
like hope, faith, love, and charity can come under attack and so can places, objects,
objectives, or organizations. If a ghost starts haunting the alma mater of two of
the PCs and threatens it with closure, will they idly sit by and let their college
fall due to the specter’s activities or will they do all they can to protect it? What
if the players are working to redevelop a run-down district, but keep getting their
workers scared out of the area by a levitating woman with a blood-red face in a
tattered, flowing dress?
You can also threaten pets and other beloved animals with your monsters,
but use this trope with particular caution. It’s an interesting wrinkle of human
psychology that you can kill as many people as you like in your fiction and most
people will be fine with it, but kill one dog and you’ll drive away a significant
portion of your audience (for evidence of this we submit www.doesthedogdie.com).
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Choose a Purpose
You know from the previous step what or who your monster threatens; now it’s
time to decide why that is.
Every monster wants something. Some just want to watch the world burn;
others have a specific mission of revenge or a desire to complete their final killing
spree from beyond the grave. Some monsters have obvious purposes, while others
act in ways that make little sense until a hidden pattern emerges.
Once you’ve decided on your monster’s purpose, write this down as its second
aspect.
Use the monster’s purpose to build on its high concept and theme to make it
feel like a well-rounded entity rather than a two-dimensional monster of the week.
Here are some example purposes for the monsters we described earlier:
• The Shadow Specter’s purpose is Jealous Possession. It sees the
woman it’s haunting as its property and will drive away or kill anyone
to whom she gets too close. It wants to be the only thing near her in the
comforting darkness.
• The Ineluctable Hunter seeks to Exhaust and Kill its victims. It
pursues them at a walking pace, forever, until they tire and it can finally
destroy them.
• The Nightmare Stalker seeks Vengeance Visited Upon the
Children. An angry specter who was murdered by vigilante parents, it
now takes its revenge on the children of those who killed him.
• The Cursed Lycanthrope just wants to hunt and kill in her bestial form,
but more importantly she wants to Be Cured of this Curse and will
do anything it takes, no matter how heinous.
• The Devil’s Spawn wants to kill people mercilessly as an example of
how evil is allowed to exist in the world. His purpose is to Obliterate
Faith and Hope with his diabolical acts.
Giving your monster a purpose that’s in direct opposition to one or more characters or game aspects is a good way to make sure it naturally comes into conflict
with the group. If one of the PCs is a Troubled Priest, it’s relatively easy to
draw him into a story involving The Devil’s Spawn. The Loyal Daughter of
the Shadow Specter’s target will naturally come into conflict with the specter
as she works to stay in her mother’s life.
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Choose Other Aspects
Once your monster has a high concept and purpose, you can use other aspects
to flesh it out and make it a more vivid threat. Your monster can have as many
aspects as it needs, but as a significant part of your story it should have at least
as many as any other main NPC. Here are some ideas for what those aspects
can be about:
Vulnerability: What can harm or kill your monster? Making this an aspect gives
the players a simple way to use it to their advantage with invokes or compels.
You might also say that any attacks invoking your monster’s vulnerability can’t be
absorbed with stress boxes or that they disable any stunts that make your monster
tougher. Alternatively, you can say that any attack not invoking its vulnerability
simply doesn’t work.
Immunity: What can’t hurt your monster? If it’s vulnerable to most things but
immune to one common source of harm, it might be better to give it an immunity
rather than a vulnerability.
Important Features: If your monster has Prehensile Tentacles or a
Terrifying Shriek, these are good options for aspects. If you also tie these
into monstrous stunts (page 55), you can make your monster significantly
more dangerous.
Interests and Obsessions: If your monster has an interest or obsession above
and beyond its primary purpose, it can make an interesting aspect. The vampires
of Asian myth are Obsessed with Counting for example. Such obsessions
can serve as secondary vulnerabilities for your monsters or just make them more
interesting and fleshed out than single-minded engines of destruction.
Limitations, Hatreds, and Fears: Does your monster have an aversion to garlic?
Can it cross running water? Does it hate one type of person so much that it will
prioritize attacking them over anyone else?
Positive Traits: If your monster demonstrates one or more positive traits, it can
help make them feel more “human” and heighten the horrible things they do
by contrast. You can also use your monster’s positive traits to hint at its original
identity or its weaknesses. Perhaps your monster Never Harms Children
because it was once a schoolteacher, or it Won’t Kill Unarmed Prey because
that would be against its alien code of ethics.
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Choose Monstrous Skills or Approaches
Using custom skills or approaches for your monsters is a good way of enhancing
their theme and making them feel different from regular characters. The simplest
way to do this is to simply reskin an existing skill with an appropriate name—for
example, instead of Fight your serial killer might have Mutilate, or instead of
Forceful your specter might have Poltergeist.
The other option is to create entirely new skills or approaches for your monsters. You can write down anything as a skill or approach and then judge during
play when it’s appropriate for the monster to use it during a particular situation.
If you want to be consistent in how you handle a monstrous skill or approach,
you can write it up in full using the rules for creating extras on page 271 of Fate
Core System. This is an excellent choice if there’s any possibility a PC might learn
or obtain the ability to use the monstrous skill or approach.
Elsa gives her Nightmare Stalker a skill called Nightmare which it uses
to enter nightmares and attack people in their sleep. She decides to
make it a full extra, because if a PC manages to get hold of the weapon
the stalker used during its living rampages they’ll gain the same ability.
She writes it up like this:
Nightmare
This skill determines the character’s ability to reach into a sleeping
mind and twist a dream into a nightmare, opening a weakness through
which the dreamer can be physically attacked.
Overcome: Nightmare can be used to overcome defensive advantages that have been created inside a dreamscape by a lucid dreamer.
Create Advantage: Nightmare can be used to create advantages that
gradually twist a pleasant dream into a nightmare. Actively opposed
by Will.
Attack: You can use Nightmare to attack the dreamer if you invoke
an aspect you previously created with this skill. Defended by Will.
Nightmare attacks can only be absorbed with mental stress boxes or
physical consequence slots. Waking witnesses will see wounds opening
up on the sleeper’s body as they fill consequence slots.
Defend: Nightmare isn’t used to defend.
Choose Unique Conditions
Giving your monster unique conditions (Dresden Files Accelerated, page 116) is
a good way to represent their physical characteristics, vulnerabilities, and transformations. Conditions used to flesh out a monster’s state of being can’t also be
used to absorb conflict stress, but you can give your monsters stress-absorbing
conditions as well as or instead of normal consequences.
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Fleeting conditions can be used to represent the temporary drain of a resource
that refreshes each scene.
You make a sapient plant monster that can release soporific pollen to
make feeding easier. You give it a fleeting Depollenated [] condition
that it checks whenever it has used this ability, meaning that it can’t
use it again until the next scene.
Sticky conditions work well to represent states that toggle on and off when
particular conditions are met. You can create stunts that only function if a sticky
condition is checked (or unchecked) or use a sticky condition to give your monster
a new vulnerability in a particular circumstance.
See Curse of the Daystar in the entry for vampires on page 61.
Lasting conditions are suitable for a significant drain on the monster’s abilities or a vulnerability that has a sustained impact on the monster’s health when
it’s triggered.
The specter of an electrocuted mass murderer must mark off a
Drained [] lasting condition when she uses her Lightning Soul stunt
(page 57). She can’t use the stunt again until she clears this condition, which requires her to take power from a source of electricity
by making a Physique roll against Great (+4) opposition, and then
waiting a full session.
Choose Stunts
If you’ve chosen your creation’s monstrous skills carefully, you probably don’t
need to give your monster stunts that give it a +2 bonus on certain actions or
use a skill in an unusual way. Instead, concentrate on giving your monster stunts
that reinforce its theme by letting it break the usual rules of Fate in some creepy
and unsettling ways.
GAINING NEW STUNTS
Your monster doesn’t have to have all the stunts you create for it straight away.
In horror fiction the threat faced by the protagonists often grows throughout
the story as it “levels up” to meet their growing knowledge and confidence. Just
when the players think they know how to deal with your monster, having it use
a stunt that they haven’t seen before is a good way to throw them into disarray
and increase the drama.
Be fair in how you do this, though—your monsters should only gain stunts at
a milestone just like the PCs.
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EXAMPLE STUNTS
Dominate: Demons and vampires often have this stunt, as does any other
monster that thrives on making its victims do its bidding. The monster gains
a sticky condition Domination [][][]. To use this stunt, the monster must
meet a prerequisite like making eye contact, constructing a voodoo doll of the
victim, dosing the victim with some of its saliva, or making them hear its song.
It then rolls an appropriate skill to create an advantage opposed by Will to
create an aspect like Enthralled on its target. The monster can check boxes of
Domination instead of spending fate points to compel or invoke Enthralled
to make a nearby victim do its bidding. The monster must rest, feed, perform a
magic spell, or take another suitable action to clear out its Domination boxes.
Drain: Suitable for vampires of all kinds and any other monster that drains blood,
psychic energy, etc. from a victim. On successfully attacking in a manner to feed
(e.g. with fangs or by invoking an emotion to feed off) the monster can either
begin the recovery of a consequence of equal or lower severity to the one taken
by their opponent or gain a free invoke on their high concept to represent the
surge of energy they get from feeding.
Figment (Nightmare): Roll Nightmare (page 54) opposed by Will when the
monster is inside a victim’s dream to have a threatening entity from their dream
materialize in the real world. The figment is a supporting NPC or a mob of nameless NPCs. The figment acts in accordance with the behavior it demonstrated in
the dream and the monster does not have direct control over it.
Indestructible: Suitable for werewolves, vampires, and indestructible serial kill-
ers. When this monster is taken out, it can’t be killed unless it has already filled
its extreme consequence slot or the final attack invokes a vulnerability aspect.
Instead of dying, the monster flees or appears to be dead for at least a scene,
and then returns when the PCs least expect it. Each player in the conflict that
took the monster out gains a fate point at the end of the scene for going along
with this trope. On its return, the monster clears its stress and recovers any mild,
moderate, or severe consequences it has taken—except those taken from attacks
that invoked one of its vulnerabilities.
Infect: Suitable for zombies, werewolves, and other monsters that transmit their
curse to others, this stunt lets your monster infect an innocent victim to begin
their transformation. Success with style on an attack using their teeth, fangs, claws,
ovipositor, or other body weapon allows your monster to inflict the curse. Use the
system on page 67 (“Progressive Alterations—Transformation and Degradation”)
to resolve the effects of the transformation.
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Lightning Soul: Works for Frankensteinian creatures, electric chair specters, and
other monsters who’ve ridden the lightning. The monster can create surges of
electricity that make lights explode, short out appliances, and shock nearby people.
Roll Physique to overcome or create advantages related to electricity in a zone,
or to attack a single target with a surge of power from a nearby outlet. Electrical
attacks have weapon rating depending on the source—a toaster has Weapon:0,
while shorting out an electrical substation gives Weapon:4.
Possess: Suitable for spirits, ghosts, and demons, the monster can spiritually
enter a victim and control them. After taking a victim out in a mental or physical
conflict, the spirit can possess them indefinitely. They use the victim’s physical
skills but their own mental skills as appropriate. Getting rid of the spirit requires
the victim’s allies to research the correct exorcism technique and then win a conflict
against the possessing spirit. If you use this on a PC, let the player continue to
portray their character, but you can compel them to act in accordance with the
spirit’s purposes without giving them a fate point. The player of the possessed
character can spend a fate point for their character to regain a limited amount of
control for a scene, letting them oppose the possessing entity’s actions.
Remote Control: This is a classic for vampires and sirens, but it can work for
other monsters that exert an uncanny hold over their victims. Requires Dominate
(page 56). The monster can check a box of Domination to compel their
enthralled prey no matter how far apart they are. The most common use of this
stunt is to summon a victim into the monster’s presence.
Re-Zone: Once defined, zones usually stay as they are. In horror, that’s not the
case. Horror is full of experiences where zones don’t stay static: hallways lengthen
no matter how far characters run down them, buildings recede no matter how
fast characters approach them, chasms suddenly open up between characters that
somehow don’t change the relationship of things around them. This stunt allows
the monster to combine up to three zones into one, break a single zone into two
or three, switch the places of two adjacent zones, or bridge two zones so they’re
adjacent to each other even though one or more zones lie between them. The first
use of this stunt in a scene is free; after that it costs a fate point each time it’s used.
Swarm Composition: If the swarm is composed of small, fast moving animals,
it’s difficult to inflict significant damage without fire or another area effect weapon.
Any attack that doesn’t invoke the swarm’s vulnerability deals a maximum of one
shift of stress.
Transform: Lots of monsters have the ability to take on alternative forms. When
your monster has this stunt, come up with one or more sticky conditions that
represent its alternative forms. These conditions can alter the monster’s skills
or approaches, change its physical abilities and vulnerabilities, lock and unlock
stunts, and so on. In its most powerful form, this stunt is free to use; if you want
to limit the monster’s ability to transform, make it cost a fate point or limit its use
to once per scene. For examples, see the example monsters starting on page 60.
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Introducing Your Monster
Many horror movies go downhill when they reveal too much about their monsters. That which is seen in glimpses and shadows is much scarier than something
that is seen fully in the light, no matter how hideous it actually is. This is an
advantage that written fiction and roleplaying games have over films, because
it’s much easier to use description to reveal just what you want to the audience.
When you introduce your monster, tease the players with partial revelations
using vivid multisensory descriptions. Over time they’ll build up a picture in their
minds of what the monster is like that will be scarier than if you describe it in
detail the first time they encounter it. This is also a good way to avoid overloading
your descriptions with details that can ultimately numb the experience.
In a shuttered warehouse, Elsa’s group encounters the creature behind
the current zombie outbreak for the first time. The only light entering
the building is in the form of narrow and randomly placed shafts of
light from bullet holes in the walls and ceiling. Elsa describes that the
first thing they notice is the stench, a mixture of rot and chlorophyll
green-ness. There is a heavy, wet sound pulsing from somewhere in
the back of the warehouse like a gigantic heartbeat. They catch a brief
glimpse of something low and multi-legged skittering through a shaft
of light, a glistening brown trail left behind. What will they do now?
To help maintain mystery and suspense, you can either keep your monster’s
aspects hidden until they’re discovered by the PCs or you can deliberately word
them in a suspenseful way. For example, rather than being an Ancient Vampire
your monster could be a Sanguine Fiend.
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THE COST OF KNOWLEDGE
You can make learning about your monster a doubleedged sword, but make sure you let your players know
in advance that you’re using this rule.
The PCs can learn about your monster, but it comes
at a price. Whenever a player successfully declares a
story detail about your monster or creates an advantage to reveal one of its aspects, add a fate point to a
separate pool of points. Unlike your pool of points for
the scene, points in this monster pool remain until you
use them. However, you can only use them to invoke
and compel aspects directly relating to the monster.
You can use custom fate points that represent
the monster to build a bit of drama with this technique. Blood-red beads or plastic fangs for a vampire,
miniature knives or tiny hockey masks for a serial
killer—whatever you can find that’s easily distinguishable from your usual fate points and appropriate to
the monster will work well.
If multiple monsters are involved in the same scenario, only use this rule for the most significant monster
in the story. At your discretion, if a monster has minions
that directly relate to its theme, they can also benefit
from the monster pool.
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Example Monsters
Rather than giving you fully fleshed out examples, the following entries are
designed to give you a solid core that you can improvise around to produce
variations on a theme.
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VAMPIRE
From blood-drinking undead fiends to psychics who feed on mental energy,
vampires are perennially popular in horror fiction.
Sample High Concepts: Sanguine Fiend, Ancient Leech, Emotional
Vampire, The Blood Is the Life
Theme: Vampires are the embodiment of violation and the corruption of sexual-
ity. To their victim’s detriment, they take what they want without asking for
it. Vampires also possess a dangerous allure, the draw of the predator. They
penetrate with their fangs and they corrupt other people into being like them.
Sample Purposes: Find My Eternal Love, Build a New Empire of
Blood and Fear, Survive and Prosper, Avenge Myself Upon the
Descendants of My Enemies
Sample Vulnerabilities: Dracula’s Banes, Tainted Blood, A Virgin’s
Touch, Obsidian Blades
Skills: Because they represent violation and corruption, vampires tend to be
strong, tough, and manipulative. If you use the regular skills, focus on their
Physique, Provoke, and Rapport. They will also likely have reasonable Fight,
Stealth, and Athletics scores. If you use custom skills, consider giving them a
Dominate skill for their ability to control and manipulate others. In the stories, vampires also often have mastery over wild animals, so consider a Beast
Master skill.
Suggested Stunts: Dominate (page 56)—Requires eye contact, or for an
emotional vampire to have fed on the target, or for the victim to have tasted
the vampire’s blood (pick one); Drain (page 56)—Must use this stunt to
heal consequences inflicted by an attack that invoked a vulnerability; Remote
Control (page 57); Transform (page 57)—Bat, Wolf, or Mist form at no
cost; Indestructible (page 56).
Unique Conditions
[]Curse of the Daystar (sticky): Mark this condition at dawn and clear it at
sunset every day. While this condition is checked, the vampire is incapable of
healing or using stunts and faces a base opposition of Superb (+5) against any
action it tries to take.
[]Wolf Form (sticky): While in the form of a wolf, the vampire replaces its skills
with three approaches called Hunt, Kill, and Run. One is rated the same as the
vampire’s apex skill, one is one lower, and the other is two lower.
[]Bat Form (sticky): While in the form of a bat, the vampire replaces its skills
with three approaches called Fly, Hide, and Feed. One is rated the same as the
vampire’s apex skill, one is one lower, and the other is two lower.
[]Mist Form (sticky): When in mist form, the vampire can only drift at a
walking pace and has no skills or approaches. It can enter anywhere that isn’t
airtight and can’t be harmed except by an attack that invokes a vulnerability
that would logically affect an immaterial form—such as fire or sunlight. The
vampire cannot defend against such attacks.
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SLASHER
Slashers are apparently indestructible engines of violence. They relentlessly
pursue their victims until they’re all dead or the slasher is miraculously taken
out by the final survivor.
Sample High Concepts: Masked Murderer, Spree Killer, Vengeful
Assassin, Merciless Mutilator
Themes: Slashers often embody the concept of punishment or revenge. They
want revenge for something you (or your family members) did or they want
to punish you for having somehow transgressed—it has become a cliché that
masked murderers in slasher movies go for the teens who’ve lost their virginity
first (except in Cherry Falls, which completely inverts the trope). Slashers also
represent the fear of strangers: when we’re walking past someone late at night
and they look at us a certain way, it’s easy to imagine that they could lash out
and attack us. Slashers dial that fear up to 10—if you’re in the wrong place
at the wrong time, you could be the next victim and there’s nothing you can
do about it.
Sample Purposes: Revenge for What You Did, Chasing the World
Record Number of Kills, Purify the Sinful
Sample Vulnerabilities: Many slashers don’t have a specific vulnerability, they
just take an extreme amount of damage to put them down for good. Those
who do have vulnerabilities tend to have primal ones like Fire, Drowning,
or Falling.
Skills: Slashers rarely interact with their victims in any way but the physical
and intimidating. If you use the regular set of skills, prioritize Fight, Physique,
Will, and Provoke. Consider using a stripped-down set of custom skills that
really focus on what the slasher does, like Murder, Mutilate, Terrify, Destroy,
and Resist.
Suggested Stunts: Indestructible (page 56).
Unique Conditions
Instead of using regular consequences and the Indestructible stunt, you can give
your slasher multiple conditions that represent progress towards taking it out.
Giving it three or four fleeting conditions, two or three sticky conditions and
one or two lasting conditions will make it very tough! Also, instead of hindering
the slasher, each condition it checks makes it more brutal and difficult to kill.
For example: Pissed, Brutal, Adrenaline Rush (Fleeting); Vengeful, Inured
to Pain (Sticky); Berserk Frenzy (Lasting)
Marking one of these conditions gives the slasher an aspect of the same name
and a free invoke on that aspect.
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THE KILLER SWARM
While a lot of horror fiction focuses on the danger of an individual monster,
there is a grand tradition in which the threat is a dangerous swarm of creatures.
From The Birds to Arachnophobia, killer swarms have been terrifying audiences
for years.
Sample High Concepts: Venomous Spider Swarm, Avian Army, Horde
of Scorpions,
Legion of Lampreys
Themes: Swarms represent the enormity of nature and humanity’s tenuous place
within it. Humans are outnumbered enormously by other species; if they were
malevolent and rallied in large numbers, they would pose a significant threat
to us. The threat posed by a killer swarm is often created or magnified by
humans—genetically engineered piranha, Africanized bees, spiders whose territory is invaded or destroyed by humans. In these cases, the killer swarm poses
a moral lesson about tampering with nature and the cost of hubris.
Sample Purposes: Protect the Queen, Survive and Spread, Destroy
the Human Plague
Sample Vulnerabilities: Fire and other area-effect attacks are a vulnerability
for individual swarms, but the threat as a whole can’t be permanently dealt
with unless the nest and/or queen or alpha animal is destroyed.
Skills: Swarms rely on weight of numbers to overwhelm their prey and to survive against attacks. If you’re using regular skills, prioritize Fight and Physique
according to the size of the swarm. While the rank and file members of the
swarm are unintelligent animals, there is often an alpha or queen animal with
near-human intelligence who controls the swarm and which you can generate
as a full NPC with a complete set of skills.
Suggested Stunts: Infect (page 56)—Rather than infecting the victim with
a curse, the swarm poisons its victim or implants its young inside them. The
victim can still be bodily transformed—perhaps into a new queen or giant
version of the swarm creatures—but they’re more likely to be poisoned or
impregnated, eventually leading to a gruesome death as the poison takes its
course or they burst open to give birth to thousands of new swarm members;
Swarm Composition (page 57).
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THE CREATED
Horror fiction is replete with examples of monsters created by mad scientists,
sorcerers, and others. Frankenstein’s Creature is the classic example, but there’s
also the Golem of Prague, The Mummy, and Hector the murderous robot in
Saturn 3 among many more.
Sample High Concepts: Murderous Robot, Clay Avenger, Reanimated
Corpse Creature
Themes: There’s an interesting observation that “Knowledge is knowing
that Frankenstein is the creator, not the monster. Wisdom is knowing that
Frankenstein is the monster.” Horror featuring created monsters is all about
the hubris of the creator rather than the villainous evil of the monster. In fact,
the monster is often treated sympathetically, its bad behavior shown as an
inevitable consequence of its unnatural birth. Perhaps the creation must be
killed for the good of everyone, but it’s the creator who is truly the monster.
It’s common for the creator to get their comeuppance by the end of the story,
but the “monster” often survives for a sequel...
Sample Purposes: Kill All Humans, Murder My Creator, Find a
Purpose for My Unnatural Life
Sample Vulnerabilities: As a consequence of their constructed “perfect” nature,
the created often lack any specific vulnerabilities and must simply be destroyed
through overwhelming force.
Skills: Created monsters can have any skills, but in their role as physically
unstoppable powerhouses, they will likely have good ratings in Physique and
Fight. Custom skills do a good job of highlighting the monster’s created and
potentially quite focused nature, such as Dissect for a murderous surgical
robot.
Suggested Stunts: Indestructible (page 56); Lightning Soul (page 57);
Transform (page 57)—Murderous robots can change form into a dangerous
combat mode for the cost of a fate point (see Battle Station Mode below).
Unique Conditions
Conditions are a great way of representing the created monster’s unusual physiology. Here are some possibilities:
[]Lightning Struck (fleeting): After being struck by lightning or using its
Lightning Soul stunt to shock itself, the monster becomes powerfully energized until the end of the scene. Immediately recover the monster’s lowest
consequence and gain two free invokes on its high concept.
[]Battle Station Mode (sticky): A robotic monster changes configuration into a
powerful attack form. In this mode it can’t move zones or dodge attacks, but
it gains Armor:4 and sprouts cannon, electrical generators, or another ranged
weapon with Weapon:2.
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The Flesh Is Weak—
Your Own Body as an Adversary
What if your adversary isn’t an external threat, but rather your own betraying flesh? This is the premise of body horror, defined by The Collins English
Dictionary as: “a horror film genre in which the main feature is the graphically
depicted destruction or degeneration of a human body or bodies.” For the
purposes of this section, we are broadening the definition slightly to include
non-consensual bodily alteration, transformation, or loss of control.
We are also concentrating on the expression of body horror as pertaining to
one’s own body. We provide tools for dealing with the reaction to body horror
that happens to someone else in The Horror of Viscera and Gore, page 45.
Media Inspiration
The following books and movies are useful sources of inspiration to help you
explore body horror themes:
• Many Clive Barker books, including Cabal, The Books of Blood, and The
Hellbound Heart all fit the bill. “Everybody is a book of blood. Wherever
we’re opened, we’re red.”
• David Cronenberg’s The Fly, in which the protagonist is the victim of a
matter transportation experiment that goes horribly wrong when he starts
transforming into a humanoid fly.
• Scott Sigler’s Infected, which focuses on a man’s battle with an intelligent
disease that’s infecting his body and that has its own agenda.
• Idle Hands and Evil Dead 2 both feature rogue body parts.
• The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey explores both the fear of being
transformed and the fear of already being a monster, in a few different ways.
• Ritual by Graham Masterton. Ritual autophagy and murder as a holy
sacrament feature heavily in this grisly novel.
• The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1983 original is the best, though the 2011
remake is also decent.
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is a seminal example of a non-lethal
transformation.
Permanently changing a character’s body is of great narrative and emotional
significance and you must obtain enthusiastic consent from your players before
you use the techniques presented here. Don’t assume that your players are comfortable with their characters being mutilated or tortured just because they signed
up for a horror game.
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Mutilating Injuries
Physical injury or mutilation is a quick and dirty option for scaring a movie
audience, because most of us automatically feel revulsion and discomfort when
we see someone sustain a serious, permanent injury. This is even more potent
when it happens to a player character in a roleplaying game, due to the depth of
identification a player has with their character.
When using this trope, consider that depictions of mutilation are ultimately
exploitative, in that they leverage the kinds of injuries sustained by real people
every day—whether by deliberate acts or in accidents—for their shock value.
It’s fine to focus on the horrible experience a character has on sustaining a permanent injury and in dealing with the aftermath—especially in a tense survival
situation—but treat the subject with respect and never imply that sustaining an
injury makes someone less of a person.
On a similar note, don’t use bodily mutilations or disabilities as signifiers of
villainy in your NPCs. This is a lazy cliché that does nobody any good.
Extreme consequences already represent the very long-term repercussions
of serious injuries, but if the group agrees it’s appropriate for your game, other
physical consequences can also reflect mutilation. In this case, having an Eye
Gouged Out could be a moderate consequence while a Severed Leg would be
a severe consequence. If the character has an opportunity to recover from such a
consequence, it fades into being part of the character rather than an aspect to be
regularly invoked or compelled. However, if a player wants to continue to focus
on the effects of a mutilating injury, they can incorporate it into one of their
aspects at a minor milestone in addition to the usual benefits of the milestone.
Rufio has his Eye Gouged Out by a cultist who needs the body part
for a ritual. Rufio has the injury treated and the consequence recovers
at the end of the next session, but Nick decides to keep a memento of
the injury. He has Rufio don a rakish eye patch and changes his high
concept to Brash One-Eyed Swashbuckler at the next minor milestone.
If your game is really going all-out on the mutilation and bodily violence, you
can also propose that a character suffers mutilation when they succeed at a major
cost along with taking an appropriate consequence.
“Well, the good news is you’re not infected with the zombie virus anymore. The bad news is, the doctor couldn’t purge it any other way, so
he had to tie a rubber tube around your arm and saw it off just above
the elbow.”
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Another option is to let players buy the following stunt or, if you’re going to
the farthest extreme of splatter horror, give it to everyone in the group for free:
The Flesh Is Weak: You can have your character suffer a mutilating injury—
requiring you to fill a moderate, severe, or extreme consequence slot—to
automatically and without a roll:
• Take out a single supporting NPC
• Take out a mob of nameless NPCs, or
• Score two victories in an ongoing contest.
Finally, see “The Book of Scars” on page 92 for a system that makes all consequences leave scars, even after the injuries that caused them have healed.
Progressive Alterations—Transformation and Degeneration
The total or partial transformation of a protagonist into something unpleasant
or disgusting is a staple of the body horror genre. In David Cronenberg’s The Fly,
a man gradually metamorphoses into a human-fly hybrid. In H.P. Lovecraft’s
The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the protagonist realizes that he too is a descendent
of Dagon and will become a Deep One in time. And in a plethora of zombie
movies, we witness victims struggling with infected bites until they ultimately
succumb and become undead monsters.
We present here two slightly different systems you can use to tell stories like
these about the progressive permanent alteration of characters. The first is ideal
for alterations that completely destroy the character, either by making them
unplayable as a PC—such as turning them into a shambling zombie incapable of
anything but groaning and hunting for fresh meat—or by killing them outright.
The second is better suited for alterations which are permanent and unpleasant,
but which don’t prevent the character from being played at least somewhat normally—for example, being turned into a vampire or a Deep One.
Fatal Alterations
Use physical consequences to progress the transformation. Once a consequence
slot is filled with a transformation consequence, it can’t be healed without
extraordinary circumstances. To help the player enjoy their gruesome transformation, give them the free invoke on their new “feature.” See “Progressing
Transformations” on page 68 for guidance on when this happens.
This system evokes the genre by making it a relatively fast process from beginning the transformation into a monster or puddle of molten flesh to being taken
out. Marking the first transformation consequence is the beginning of the end
for the character.
If you take out a character with transformation consequences in a conflict and
their player agrees, you can have them complete the transformation.
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Survivable Alterations
For slower-paced transformations, especially where the character will remain playable at the end, use a set of custom conditions (Dresden Files Accelerated, page 116)
in addition to the character’s standard stress, consequences, or conditions.
Transformation conditions are all Lasting and can’t be cured without extraordinary
circumstances. For example, in Dracula Mina Harker’s Thrice-Bitten condition that
dooms her to become a vampire if she dies is only cured at Dracula’s final death.
When the character marks a transformation condition, they gain an aspect of the
same name and a free invoke on that aspect.
If the character is called upon to mark a transformation condition and can’t, they
complete their transformation and change their high concept aspect to reflect their
new nature. All of their transformation conditions are removed and incorporated
into their new high concept.
In Cronenberg’s The Fly, when Brundle is turning into Brundlefly he has
the following transformation conditions:
Hairs Where They Don’t Belong, Teeth and Fingernails Falling Out,
Liquid Diet, Compound Eyes, and Emerging Fly Limbs.
When Brundle needs to mark another transformation condition and
can’t, he changes his high concept from Shy Physicist to Brundlefly. He
loses all of his transformation conditions because they are encompassed
by his new high concept.
Progressing Transformations
Whether you use consequences or conditions, there are a couple of options for determining when the character must take another step towards their transformation.
• You can build the transformation as an extra (Fate Core System, page 271)
and have it attack the character periodically (e.g. once a scene or session) or
when a trigger is met (e.g. when the character becomes significantly stressed).
Elsa decides the Z-Virus has a single skill of Zombify at Superb (+5) and
it attacks an infected character once every scene, defended by Physique.
• This technique is useful in other ways: if the transformation is curable, you
can give it a Resistance skill that lets it fight back against attempts to cure it.
You can also give it skills or stunts that the infected player can access once
they reach a certain stage of infection.
Elsa gives her Z-Virus a stunt called Corpse Flesh that an infectee gains
once they’ve taken a moderate or worse consequence from the virus.
The stunt reflects that their body is becoming numb and it makes them
immune to invokes on their physical consequences.
• You can have them mark off a consequence or condition without any kind
of defense either periodically or when a trigger is met.
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The Mental Consequences of Body Horror
Physical consequences work well for representing many types of body horror.
When your body is changed involuntarily, a large part of the trauma is psychological, however, and you can use mental consequences—or situation aspects
relating to your state of mind—to highlight this.
Worried About Losing More Teeth: You lost a tooth last week. It was a bit
wobbly, then when you brushed your teeth and spat, it just flew out with a click
into the sink. Your other teeth are starting to feel loose, and you’re paranoid about
losing more of them.
Everyone Keeps Staring at Me: Since you started to grow scales and your skin
turned a blotchy gray-green, you’re convinced everyone is looking at you all the
time. It’s really beginning to play on your nerves.
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Rogue Body Parts
Alien Hand Syndrome is a real-life condition where a person’s hand sometimes
moves without their conscious control, and in its best documented cases resulted
from separation of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. In horror stories
such as Clive Barker’s “The Body Politic” or the movies Idle Hands and Evil Dead
2, the syndrome is exaggerated to a horrific conclusion, in which the hand is not
just out of the person’s control but rather malevolent and destructive.
To evoke this trope, you can create a character representing the victim’s disobedient hand and use it to torment the character. But why should hands get all
the fun? There are plenty of other body parts that can go rogue and cause grief
for their owners.
In the following examples of rogue body parts, we’ve used conditions (Dresden
Files Accelerated, page 116) to represent each part’s ability to resist attempts to
control them. While a PC has a checked condition on a rogue body part, they
have an aspect of the same name (but it doesn’t get free invokes). If the character
manages to take out their rogue body part during a conflict, they regain control
over it until a later compel sets it off again.
If the rogue body part manages to take out the character, it means the character
has been forced to cut it off (or out), or it has freed itself, and it can now pursue
its unholy agenda separate from its original body.
Permanently curing a rogue body part means finding the cause of the issue and
dealing with it, such as vanquishing the demon possessing it.
Hand/Arm
NOTES
This is the classic example. Your rogue hand and arm can oppose anything
you try to do and can take independent actions to annoy, hurt, or inconvenience you. Your rogue hand has all the same skills you do.
STRESS
Physical [1][2]
CONDITIONS
Pins & Needles (fleeting), Dead Arm (sticky, lasts until you have a chance
to shake some blood into it and have a brief rest), Broken Arm (lasting,
until splinted and cast)
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Tongue
NOTES
Your rogue tongue can talk for whatever malevolent force is possessing you,
embarrass you by sticking itself out at people in social situations, or mess
you up by twisting your words as they come out so you say something you
didn’t mean to say. It can only attack you when you’re eating, and it does
so by sticking itself out of your mouth quickly in hopes of being bitten off!
Severed tongues move about like slugs and can’t really achieve much…but a
swarm of them might be able to overcome someone and choke them to death.
SKILLS
Good (+3): Deceive (can oppose the character’s Rapport, Provoke, or Deceive
rolls), Provoke
Average (+1): Bite me!
STRESS
Physical [1]
CONDITIONS
Swollen Tongue (fleeting), Half Chewed-Off Tongue (lasting, requires medical attention and rest to recover)
Heart
NOTES
If your heart takes you out, it can choose to kill you by punching itself out of
your chest. If it does this, it extricates itself from your body with a significant
portion of your circulatory system, allowing it to move around and grapple
using your veins and arteries in a squid-like fashion. While it remains inside
you, it has limited options for messing with you, but it can attack you by refusing to beat, make you feel woozy by beating slowly or irregularly (arrhythmia),
or make you anxious with unpleasant palpitations. You can defend against its
efforts with your Physique as you strike your ribcage or solar plexus (or use a
defibrillator) to bring it back under control.
SKILLS
Great (+4): Heart Attack
Good (+3): Arrhythmia, Palpitations
STRESS
Physical: [1]
CONDITIONS
Chest Pains (sticky, cured by a few hours of sleep), Fractured Ribs (lasting,
cured by avoiding strenuous activity for a few days)
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Eye
NOTES
Your rogue eye can see for whatever malevolent force is controlling it, or
give you hideous visions that are hard to distinguish from reality. It can also
inconvenience you by swiveling out of sync with the other eye, forcing you to
either close it or get disorienting double vision. It can also dilate or contract
its pupil to half blind you. If it gets ripped out, your eye can ambulate on its
ocular muscles, moving around a bit like a crab with its optic nerve trailing
behind like a tail. It can’t attack you outright.
SKILLS
Good (+3): Blind, Disorient
STRESS
Physical: [1]
CONDITIONS
Sore Eye (fleeting), Badly Bloodshot Eye (sticky, cured by an eye bath),
Weeping Blood (lasting, requires rest and bandaging until healed)
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The Other—Ideas, Regimes, and
Wholly Alien Adversaries
The Other is any opponent with the ability and will to change the characters’
natures. Horror scenarios with the Other as antagonist throw the characters into
a struggle to define their very selves. This type of horror is innately personal and
internal, and therefore calls for an extra round of care before, during, and after
the game for the wellbeing of the real people playing.
Media Inspiration
Our focus here is on the Other as a force of repression to be overcome or, conversely, initially unwanted but ultimately liberating change. These are a few of
the works that inspired us:
• Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson is a collection of short stories based on the
theme of facades and the real people inside our skins.
• Suffered From the Night: Queering Stoker’s Dracula, edited by Steve Berman,
is an anthology of short stories that shows just how many directions open
up when authors revisit old, familiar material without narrow assumptions. This volume contains an exuberant variety of reinterpreted histories,
relationships, and outcomes.
• The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan, is a harrowing tale narrated
by a schizophrenic woman trying to make sense of experiences that may
be hauntings or may just be symptoms. The trans woman she’s in love
with plays a crucial part in separating true life and imagination, while the
mysterious woman who sometimes stalks her gains power in part from
the social norms that push the narrator and her girlfriend to the margins.
It’s an intense novel, sometimes grueling to read (as it was to write), but
the rewards are great.
• Occultation and Other Stories, by Laird Barron, includes the novella
“Mysterium Tremendous”. Barron tells the story of two gay couples whose
camping vacation turns into utter ruin, and shows the difference between
writing about characters being gay and writing about characters who are gay.
• Gothika has a protagonist who’s opposed by people who should be helping
her because they believe she’s mentally ill.
• Cabal by Clive Barker, filmed as Nightbreed, features someone in a confrontation with a supernatural Other who comes to realize that the Other
is not the enemy.
• Get Out is a modern classic exploring themes of racism and racial fetishism
in a terrifying and claustrophobic way.
• 1984 by George Orwell is the seminal example of a dystopian, all-controlling, all-seeing government. It’s also a great example of something that
wasn’t written or marketed as horror, but which works great for horror
anyway.
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What Is the Other?
The concept of an enemy that wants to shape its
victims in its own image is one we see again and
again. We humans fear threats to our sense of
self and to what we consider acceptable society.
We find it easy to personify a whole group or
set of groups that threaten these things as one
entity: the Other.
The Other in your game may be a purely
mundane force of political tyranny that wants
its subjects not just to submit, but to embrace
their submission.
George Orwell’s Big Brother from
1984 is the archetypal modern
example of a political Other, and
Winston Smith’s final submission is
a classic example of what losing to
the Other means. He comes to find
his own actual life less interesting
and trustworthy than the day’s lies
about industrial production and warfare. Everything that made Winston
an individual ultimately yields to the
Party’s idea of what he ought to be.
Alternatively, the Other may be a supernatural,
alien, or otherwise exotic threat to life as the
characters wish to lead it. Possibilities include
literal aliens, viral/sentient ideas, elder gods or
other Cthulhu Mythos-ish ancient evils, and
artificial intelligences.
In They Live, the Other is an alien
race that hides in plain sight and rules
humanity with subliminal messages so
they’re unaware of their subjugation.
Our identities are fragile in many ways, and
can be threatened from almost any direction,
with some emotional and experiential similarities regardless of the threat’s origin. Whatever
people find strange, hard to comprehend, and
threatening can become the Other, and the
Other is a monster to be defeated.
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ON OTHERING PEOPLE
Horror fiction often has a conservative, even reactionary, streak. People who
dare to have sex out of wedlock are punished. Gay characters are presented as
creepy and unnatural because of their sexuality. The Black character often dies
first. As part of this trend, the Other has historically been used to embody the
forces of change and diversity perceived to threaten an idealized, old-fashioned,
small-town community.
Othering the “weirdos” who believed in racial equality, the worth of women,
and the naturalness of non-straight relationships was rarely part of a calculated
agenda, but the things that everyone involved with a project took for granted
show where an era’s fears lay.
Instead of looking to the conservative roots of horror, we have chosen here to
focus on the example set by horror writers who belong to various marginalized,
oppressed groups. They have taken the notion of the Other and subverted it in
two different directions:
Redefining the Other: It turns out that the threat is not the outsiders, but the
mainstream that won’t engage with them as equals. Whether the outsiders win or
lose a battle against the Other, they’re the ones championing values of personal
freedom, civilization, and community.
In Gothika, the institutional forces that the protagonist would normally
turn to for help immediately flip against her once she’s got the stigmatizing label of being mentally ill following her experiences with ghosts.
After that, everything she sees and learns becomes only evidence of
her mental illness, and confirmation that she needs to be locked up.
Embracing the Other: It turns out that the outsiders have qualities that make
them fundamentally unlike the mainstream force fighting them...and that’s just
fine. The outsiders’ Otherness isn’t harmful, although it threatens the comfort
and security of those who shun Otherness.
Clive Barker’s works including Cabal and The Hellbound Heart are
prominent examples of this. He evokes the gay experience of accepting one’s difference from others—and one’s similarity to others who’ve
been excluded and shunned—in his characters who discover that what
the world sees as monstrous has its own wonder and even beauty.
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CREATING THE OTHER
In a Fate game, the Other is a fractal NPC consisting of one or more of:
• An Other-as-entity NPC representing the totality of the Other
• Sub-groups of entities within the Other, each with a specific purpose and
created as NPCs
• The individual entities that together comprise the Other
Creating the Other-as-entity is a very similar process to making a monster as
described on page 49. Give the Other:
• A high concept aspect and theme
• A purpose aspect
• One or two other aspects that define it. Use these to flesh out its nature and
the threat it poses. If it has vulnerability aspects, they reflect institutional
blind spots and other large-scale flaws rather than physical weaknesses.
• A few custom skills that reflect its strengths and method of operation. Its
apex skills should be at least one or two steps higher on the Fate ladder
than the group’s current skill cap; it is an overwhelming threat.
• At least one custom skill at Poor (-1) or Terrible (-2) to exemplify something it is not very good at
• Two or three stunts that reinforce the Other’s areas of competence or ability
to achieve feats that others can’t
Repeat these steps as necessary to create smaller sub-groups of the Other, such
as departments of a government or corporation or special-purpose teams. Subgroups can share skills and stunts with the Other-as-entity or have completely
different traits.
Finally, create individual entities that make up the Other, either as monsters or
regular nameless, supporting, or main NPCs depending on their role in the story.
GIVING THE OTHER SCALE
The PCs face overwhelmingly difficult opposition if they try to confront the Other-as-entity without having resources of a similar scale
at their disposal. Using the scale rules from Dresden Files Accelerated
(page 182) is a good way to handle a disparity of power between
the Other and the group without having to give the Other-as-entity
very high skills ratings. There are five levels of scale from Mundane
to Godlike. Each level of scale over an adversary gives the acting
character +1 to their roll, +2 shifts if their roll is successful, or an extra
free invoke on a create advantage roll opposed by their adversary.
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How far you need to drill down when you’re creating the Other and/or its
constituent parts depends on the Other’s role in your story and the scale of the
conflicts you’re planning. If the PCs are part of a coherent organization that can
rally significant resources, then you can resolve conflicts at the Other-as-entity
level. If, however, the characters are a group of rough sleepers fighting a shadowy
organization that’s kidnapping and brainwashing them, they can’t—initially at
least—meaningfully affect the Other-as-entity and must instead interact with its
individual members or small sub-groups.
Bruce’s game is based on 1984, so he writes up Party mastermind
O’Brien and a few low-ranking officials the characters frequently
encounter, then creates the rest of the Party as a single entity whose
aspects, skills, approaches, and stunts cover its vast human and physical resources, its psychological penetration of culture and language,
and so on.
MEANS OF RESISTANCE
There’s a fundamental choice to discuss when setting up a game
featuring the Other: what kinds of resistance are effective?
The straightforward answer is “any means necessary.” Society at
large may come to think of the characters as terrorists, but their
violence can be very effective and justified by the nature of the
threat posed by the Other. In a game with an action-movie level
of depth, it may not even be an issue—of course the characters are
justified, they’re the heroes. In games with more depth, there will
either be enough people in authority to recognize the necessity of
the character’s actions for a heroic outcome, or there won’t, and the
characters will face condemnation and maybe worse.
Where the Other is providing a social critique by its very nature,
often haphazard violence won’t work, on the principle that using
the enemy’s tools brings the characters halfway toward being the
enemy themselves. The characters must find other ways to strike
back: peaceful sabotage against brutal violence, careful planning
and/or surreal chaos-making against physically overwhelming force,
magic against materialistic tyranny that denies the spiritual.
If violence against the Other is truly not the best strategy, change
the rules of the game to reinforce this fact. Either flat-out say that
attacks against the Other don’t work, or impose a cost every time
someone attacks the Other, regardless of whether their roll is
successful.
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Confronting the Other
Confrontations with the Other move through three stages: initial conflict, a
threshold moment of critical vulnerability, and transformation—whether that
means becoming the Other, changing the Other so it’s no longer a threat to the
self, or changing oneself into something capable of resisting the Other.
You don’t need to complete all three steps or cover each of them in detail,
especially not in games intended to be short or where you just want to focus on
part of the process.
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INITIAL CONFLICT
During this phase of the game, the characters and the Other discover each other
as threats and begin to clash with increasing intensity. The Other isn’t deliberately hunting for the characters, and initially brushes up against them as typical
interference in its business from the not-yet-subjugated world. The characters
likely aren’t hunting the Other either, and experience its presence as apparently
random difficulties in going about their business, violence or chaos in their environment, or increasingly suspicious patterns of recurring hardship for people
like them.
Recognition
After a few such encounters, play out a pivotal scene in which the characters and
the Other finally come to recognize the threat they each pose to one another.
This is a contest, challenge, or minor conflict in which the PCs are directly
opposed by agents of the Other and finally come to realize its existence as a
coherent foe rather than a series of coincidental problems.
Discovering the Other’s existence and responding to it challenges the characters’
worldview, even when it’s essentially a natural force at work. The Other confirms
every paranoid fear—the kind we usually try to talk each other out of—and adds
that, yes, it’s all very much planned, not just improvised by fumbling would-be
authorities who share our frailties. The individual or group at the top has a purity
of vision, a capacity for disregarding normal human impulses; they are unlike
most people, including the characters.
Feeling Out the Opposition
Once they notice each other’s existence, over subsequent scenes each side acts to
discover more about the opposition. The PCs can investigate the Other by taking
create an advantage or overcome actions, completing challenges, or engaging in
contests with the Other to obtain intelligence or material evidence. Meanwhile,
the Other probes them in return. The way actions are carried out on both sides
brings the nature of the Other into tangible experience.
An institutional, bureaucratic Other can flood the characters with weird but
not entirely unjustifiable demands for disclosure of paperwork, registration forms,
and duplicate documents. A viral idea or parasitical Other can “borrow” a separate
person’s body for each encounter, wrapping the characters in an endless procession
of strangers who seem to all share a certain set of quirks reflecting their unseen
masters at work. An eldritch Other can prey on the characters in non-physical
ways, haunting them with ghosts or visions using the rules on page 19. Others
can be very inventive, stealthy, and unsettling in their methods, and part of your
job as GM is to convey the sense of a power playing by its own rules.
Isolation is a crucial element of the strategy used by every Other. It tries to
cut off characters from their allies, friends, and families, from their sources of
income, from places that have been secure and safe. The characters’ response to
these threats exposes more of the Other’s scope of influence and shows them the
fate of others who resisted and lost.
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THRESHOLD
Soon the Other understands the characters well enough—or thinks it does—and
begins to attack their essential selves. There’s a moment where this phase of
the struggle begins. In movies, it’s often an instant of unexpected violence or
other tragedy framed by silence as the characters face their changed situation in
stunned surprise. In books and comics, it’s the cliffhanger ending of a story arc
and the beginning of a new one.
Discuss the threshold criteria for your game with the players during game
creation. Examples of good thresholds include:
• A character suffers a severe consequence from the Other’s actions (or the
second time a character suffers a severe consequence, if you want the
conflict to last a bit longer)
• A character concedes (or is taken out) in a struggle against the Other
• One or more characters lose something vitally important, like a spouse
or home
Regardless of the length of your game, the moment of threshold is a major
milestone.
TRANSFORMATION
This is where the characters themselves become the front line of the struggle.
The Other has a target list of personality traits it wants to suppress, and others it
wants to mandate. Since every human thought is a very complex product of very
complex inputs, the Other can’t just decree that all its subjects will hold a specific
list of ideas. What it can do is set attitudes and priorities.
Transforming a PC in this way requires the Other to inflict mental or physical
harm on them in a conflict.
First, the Other must establish narrative permission to transform the PC by
engineering a situation that allows them to do so. The exact preparations required
depend on the Other’s nature, aspects, and skills.
The cockroaches of the post-human age—here in the present to
steer our apocalypse—need to prepare a special brainwashing larva
in advance, grapple a target during a conflict, and then successfully
attack them to insert the larva into their ear.
Big Brother’s Party uses incarceration, beatings, and brainwashing in
secure facilities to transform their opponents, requiring a PC to be
taken out and transported before the process—a mental conflict—can
begin.
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Once the Other has established the conditions required for transformation,
it can attach a sticky checked condition (Dresden Files Accelerated, page 116) to
a single moderate, severe, or extreme consequence taken by the PC during the
conflict. While checked, the condition has a rules effect—about equivalent to a
stunt—that furthers the Other’s agenda.
Big Brother inflicts a moderate consequence on a meddling reporter
and gives her the condition Nothing to See Here []. While this is
checked, the reporter gets +2 opposition on rolls to investigate the
Party.
The cockroaches inflict a severe consequence and a brain larva on a
World Health Organization doctor and give them the condition They
Had It Coming []. While this is checked, when the doctor treats a
consequence on an enemy of the roaches, the consequence goes into
recovery as normal but heals as if it were one step worse.
The transformation condition is unchecked when the consequence it’s attached
to is cleared. If the Other successfully transforms the PC again later, it can re-check
the same condition or replace it with a new one as it prefers.
In the very long term, the Other’s goal is to inflict extreme consequences on the
PCs to establish character aspects like Enemies Aren’t News, by Definition
and The Only Good Human Is a Devoured Human.
How the PC feels about an imposed condition or aspect is up to the player,
within the boundaries of the Other’s agenda. It may seem completely normal to
the character, or it may feel weird and inappropriate.
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ENDGAME
It is quite likely that the characters will lose their struggle. They often do in
horror stories with this kind of conflict. But sometimes getting lost in the Other’s
grasp isn’t the end of the story. There’s a tradition of characters being partly or
entirely consumed and yet returning to themselves (even if scarred and traumatized) and being able to help others escape the Other’s clutches.
Once a character has an extreme consequence due to the Other’s efforts at
transformation, the Other can turn them into a fully willing pawn the next time
it takes them out. This turns them into a main NPC, immediately recovers all
their consequence slots, and permanently checks their current set of transformation conditions.
For the PCs to liberate a pawn of the Other—regardless of whether they were
ever a PC—the circumstances must be created to justify a deprogramming attempt.
The liberation then proceeds as a mirror image of the original transformation
process: once in each conflict, the liberators can inflict a consequence on the pawn
and uncheck one of their transformation conditions. Once all of the pawn’s transformation conditions are unchecked, they are removed from the Other’s control.
Characters emerge from such rescue operations with only dim, fuzzy memories
of what it was like to be subjugated by the Other. If they spend time in self-analysis
and seeking others’ help to understand their experiences, players can choose to
use the next milestone to recover those memories instead of spending it on the
usual options. Characters with recovered memories now know what happened
to them while the Other was in control, and come out with useful insights; they
gain a stunt specifically to be used against the Other.
The Other as a whole becomes aware of liberation attempts only when the
characters fail, or when they succeed and the newly liberated target disappears
from the Other’s awareness altogether. This makes it possible to assemble a force
capable of resistance using of some of the Other’s own assets. Finally, there can
be an epic showdown, with the smoke of conflict clearing to reveal whether the
Other is still standing or not.
OTHER OTHERS
Here are two variations on the theme.
The Other as Liberator
This option draws on the tradition of Others who are symbols of desirable alternatives to mundane existence: living without fear or compromise as a person
of an ethnicity, or sexual orientation, or gender identity, or disability, or some
other quality that the mainstream hates and fears. Some people find it unsuitably
campy or trivializing. Others find it an important part of the Other’s symbolic
power: it turns out that normality is far short of human potential, and that liberated humanity is much more than anyone still in subjugation knows.
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The first stage of confrontation unfolds as usual, because the Other is at this
point still a largely unknown menace, an unsettling possibility almost entirely
obscured.
Things change when characters hit the threshold. Now they see the Other for
what it is—a possible future for themselves set free of the constraints that have
made their lives miserable (or worse). At each significant milestone, they can make
improvements reflecting their better understanding. This is a kind of mystical
enlightenment, and can unlock powers beyond normal human boundaries.
Options include:
• Raising a skill or approach beyond normal human limits, and without the
usual skill pyramid limits
• Allowing the purchase of stunts or extras reflecting physical transformation
or outright psychic, supernatural, or other powers. Powers like those in
Venture City and Psychedemia can appear in horror play as eerie, worldtransforming abilities that are threatening to those still in the old way of
understanding.
Tristan is already one of the best verbal aggro generators in the world,
with Provoke at Superb (+5). After a series of clashes with the memetic
parasite that is the Other, Tristan also has fresh insights into how human
minds deal with conceptual assault. Tristan takes advantage of the next
significant milestone to raise Provoke to Fantastic (+6), and doesn’t
have to advance two other skills to Superb (and the cascading requirements down the pyramid) before being able to do so. Now, when
Tristan needles and unsettles, targets really don’t know what hit them.
Rosario has always tried to flee violence. After a confrontation with
the homophobic and racist pre-human entity that is the Other, mental
barriers peel back, and the next significant milestone goes to acquiring another stunt. It buys Super Speed from Venture City (page 63),
with the Speed Demon collateral damage effect and a horror-oriented
drawback. Any time Rosario uses Super Speed two or more turns in a
row, first her clothing and then her skin burns away, trailing away as ash
and cinders; when Rosario slows down to normal speed again, observers see a person burned from head to foot. This doesn’t harm Rosario,
but it requires cleanup and fresh clothes to shed the raw-meat look.
Future minor and significant milestones can give Rosario additional
stunts for developing this power. There’s also potential for consequences and dangerous aspects—Rosario might come to feel My Body
Is My Own, the Hell With Anyone With a Problem About It or If
Norms Mattered that Much, I’d Just Stand Still.
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This sort of transformation always comes at some cost, even when it’s a cost the
character pays gladly. Stepping outside the normal range of human possibility
opens up new prospects, including the prospect of regarding humanity as inferior
to one’s new self. In horror, every great gift has the potential to become a great
weapon, which might end up aimed at its own wielder or at others. Empowered
characters inevitably face temptations to use their new powers in ways that turn
other people into mere objects, and what they do in response will drive much
of the ensuing story.
The characters’ transformation may or may not be visible to the outside world.
There’s a tradition of it being very visible indeed, the characters gaining wings,
scales, hair, eyes, and skin in unique colors, and more fantastic, grotesque options
like skin and bones folded and bent to make harps, knives, or lenses. Exterior
exuberance expresses inward delight.
Once the characters have embraced the Other and their transformation by it,
a second Other, the embodiment of the Old Order, now comes into play as the
real enemy of the characters and their kind. Create this new Other using the rules
on page 49 with a focus on regaining the old status quo.
When the Old Order manages to transform characters who’ve become part
of the original Other, it focuses on restoring the traits the characters replaced
during transformation. Its threat begins by forcing the characters back into their
old selves and lives; whether they retain any clear memories of what they were
becoming is up to the Old Order.
The Other as Chaos
The Other can serve as a mechanical representation of world-breaking chaos,
rather than a force with a clear agenda. At the beginning of play, each player
writes one of their character’s aspects on a card or slip of paper. The GM shuffles
them together. When the Other inflicts an extreme consequence and thus has
the opportunity to impose its agenda, draw an aspect at random. It replaces one
of the character’s existing aspects, chosen either at random or by the player.
For even deeper chaos, also do one or both of these:
• Include at least one of each character’s skills, approaches, or stunts as well.
Targeted characters may end up with traits that aren’t even the same kind
of trait that they lost.
• Include traits from example NPCs written for other settings. They don’t
have to be possible within the parameters of the game’s world as established
so far, since this represents reality falling over. Characters could end up
partially embodying characters they regard as fictional, as well as possibilities they’d never considered.
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CHAPTER 5:
WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE
Tools for running games where doom is inevitable.
Not every story has a happy ending. Horror fiction is
often tragic; even if it looks like things have ended well
for the characters, there’s often a final twist or sting in
the tail that casts the finale in a different light.
In a horror game, the PCs won’t always win. Hell,
they may not even survive. Risk and uncertainty are vital
parts of the horror experience, and the odds of emerging
at the end of a story unscathed are vanishingly small.
But some horror stories take things further than
that: the protagonists are doomed from the start, and
nobody is under any illusions that there might be a
happy ending.
This chapter provides tools for evoking doomed
horror in your games in a way that your players will
enjoy rather than resent.
Media Inspiration
These are a few of the sources that inspired us when we
were writing this chapter:
• Swift to Chase by Laird Barron has several interweaving stories about a supernatural serial killer
in Alaska, and the ways those who escape are
twisted by the experience.
• Spider by Patrick McGrath: Distrust the ending
as Spider should.
• Devil’s Pass is one of the few really good foundfootage films, about American film students
investigating a historical mountaineering disaster
and falling into the remains of Soviet military
research and holes in time.
• The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti has the
most doomed artists and scholars since Lovecraft.
• The Bridge by John Skipp & Craig Spector. Like
every horror/disaster novel, but we all lose.
• The Mist by Stephen King, though it’s the film
adaptation that has an ending like a punch in
the gut.
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Why Play if We Know How the Story Ends?
Genres exist because people like certain combinations of story ingredients and
want to enjoy fresh stories that contain them. Genre authors become famous for
their ability take familiar ingredients and make them into something exciting.
The same is true of your game. When players come seeking a zombie story, it’s a
safe bet that they want to interact with a collapsed or collapsing society, struggles
within and between groups of survivors, lots of zombies, and real danger for the
characters—including some or all of them dying along the way. That’s the recipe,
and as GM, you aren’t insulting the players’ intelligence by using a good recipe
for zombie drama and adventure when that’s exactly what they want.
Even knowing the ending in advance—or at least the general kind of ending—
doesn’t spoil the fun. After all, Titanic was the world’s highest grossing film for
ten years after its release despite audiences knowing the ending.
Stories about characters doomed to die appear in many genres, from entirely
naturalistic tales of criminals fighting the law and each other to supernatural
stories of the whole world crumbling into a metaphysical abyss.
Whatever doom may be waiting, the story’s not done until all of the characters are.
The Journey, Not the Destination
Knowing the broad strokes of your game’s ending lets the players focus on their
journey through the game. What surprises happen and what can they achieve
along the way? What unexpected complications arise that may even threaten the
overall recipe—and how can the characters get back on track? There’s plenty of
room for you to bring creativity to bear in a game about characters with known
fates.
But why bother? What can doomed characters achieve that’s worth playing out?
• Survive as long as they can: People in general prefer to live, and PCs
are no exception. This is their last chance to use all of the resources at their
disposal and show the world (and themselves) just how good they are. See
Chapter 6: The High Cost of Living (page 93) for a campaign framework
focused on the trials and costs of survival.
• Understand their doom: Intimations of doom often arrive with a lot of
mystery. Why is the driver they can’t even see trying to run them down?
Who is the masked person that’s trying to chop them up, and why are they
doing it? Who unleashed the zombie plague, and can anyone survive it?
• Achieve goals that will outlast their doom: Can they save their children so something of them will live on? Can they secure this archeological
discovery before the plague gets them? Can they make one recordingworthy performance of a symphony before the meteor hits? Can they
secure this valley with a holy aura so their animals will be safe from the
demon armies?
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Game Creation: Building the Doom
In addition to the current and impending issues in your game about doomed
characters, formalize the doom itself as the doom issue aspect. You can do this
during game creation or, if you plan for your game to last for multiple sessions,
after a prelude session featuring the PCs’ regular lives. That way you can tailor
the doom issue to the strengths and weaknesses the players revealed in play.
Here are some things to consider when creating the doom issue for your game.
Scale and Context
Decide the overall scale of the doom. Are the PCs Trapped by a Wildfire,
trying to rescue as many others as they can before being cut off? Are they part of
an international network of scientists, politicians, and others working to preserve
something of humanity from an Incoming Asteroid? Small and large scale
dooms can both be emotionally engaging.
Context is also important when considering the doom’s impact. The wildfire
peril is a less overwhelming threat if the characters can communicate rapidly and
reliably with regional and national authorities, and the asteroid’s threat lessens
if there’s any kind of space travel that might be scaled up for mass evacuation.
Timeline and Complications
At some point, the PCs know their doom is coming—unless everyone in the
group is enough into irony to play a few sessions of mundane life followed by the
GM announcing, “And now you’re all dead.” But some dooms come with more
warning than others. How much normal life do the characters get to experience,
and how quickly does the doom develop once it appears?
Doom usually comes gradually. Natural and supernatural disasters leave people
free to choose to cooperate or compete, to share information or hoard it, to plan
or panic.
Create group aspects, issues, or setting aspects with the doom issue to focus
the game on things the PCs want to use, prevent, or achieve as things go from
bad to worse during the game. The tsunami created by a supervolcano’s eruption
doesn’t stop the evil cultists from Trying to Unleash Elder Gods until it
drowns them; field scientists who know they’re doomed continue to gather data
To Prepare Future Scientists.
Is the doom already upon the PCs at the start of the game? Coming in one
session, or a few? The quicker doom comes, the less room there is for issues that
aren’t part of it. The longer the game, the more opportunity there is for play to
wander into a tangle of complications.
You’ll use the doom clock (page 89) to keep track of the PCs’ progress toward
their doom, so decide together how many hours there are to midnight when the
game begins, and what circumstances will make it tick forwards and backwards.
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Internal vs. External Doom
How much does the PCs’ doom depend on who they are and what they do?
Could they avoid their fate if they changed themselves, or is it an external power
beyond their control?
Some dooms are entirely internal: a gang of criminals who fall out with each
other and drive themselves into a confrontation that destroys them all; obsessed
magicians who reject all warnings to give up their current pursuit until the thing
they’ve summoned eats them all; rival chieftains of small tribes who refuse to
cooperate in a defensive alliance and are slaughtered by invading Romans. Even
when there’s an external threat, the real doom comes from the PCs’ choices—if
they chose differently, they would escape their fate.
Other dooms are entirely external: the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts; a
plague with no cure sweeps the land; the Earth’s poles shift just like the crank
psychics said they would. None of these depends on who the characters are, and
their responses may not ultimately matter to anyone else.
Many dooms combine internal and external elements: the zombie apocalypse
isn’t the characters’ fault, but their greed and paranoia are; the wildfires engulfing the mountains around the characters’ campground aren’t their fault, but the
hostility that disrupts efforts to fight the fires is; World War II isn’t the characters’
fault, but their xenophobia that makes their espionage attempts easy to discover is.
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Doom During the Game
The doom issue goes a long way toward setting up the PCs’ inevitable fate in
your game, but these rules help you to reinforce the themes of doomed horror
during play.
The Doom Clock
The doom clock is like a stress track, but arranged like a clock to really drive
home the metaphor of a countdown to the end. As the characters make things
worse, or fail to stop antagonists from making it worse, the clock ticks closer to
midnight; on the occasions when they manage to make things significantly better,
the players push the hands back as doomsday temporarily recedes.
Each tick of the doom clock moves it one hour closer to midnight. The game’s
overall pace depends on how close to midnight it already is when play begins.
Starting at 10 o’clock, so two ticks will initiate the endgame, is a good pace for
a single-session game. Starting at 6 o’clock, it will take a few sessions to tick to
midnight, particularly if the characters earn a few opportunities to move it back
an hour along the way.
When the doom clock runs out, the game begins to wind down. This is the
point where it’s clear that nothing the characters can do will make any material
difference: their doom is upon them. The characters get a final scene—or more,
up to a whole final session in longer-running games—to take their final actions
and explore their final feelings. Do they go out with hope, despair, resignation,
useless resolve to go down fighting? This is when you all find out, and then the
curtain rings down on the show.
For more open-ended play, don’t initiate the endgame the first time the doom
clock strikes midnight. Instead, significantly worsen the characters’ situation—
manifest a major new threat or issue, have something dreadful happen to a place
or person important to the characters, remove or corrupt an important NPC or
aspect—and then start counting down again.
The doom clock can only be set back every so often. The default is once per
scene, no matter how many times in that scene various characters do things
that justify moving it back. Allow moving it back more often for a more heroic
flavor, or less often—down to only once per session or not at all—for play that
emphasizes doom whose pace is as certain as its outcome.
SCHEDULED EVENTS
You can use the doom clock to build tension by scheduling dramatic complications to occur when the doom clock strikes specific hours; this works most
effectively if the players have a rough idea of what’s going to happen.
Bruce’s group is trying to defend their village from silent zombies. Each
time the doom clock ticks, Bruce tells the group that the foul, obscuring
fog blowing in from the sea is getting closer…and it will arrive when
the doom clock strikes eleven.
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MAKING THE DOOM CLOCK TICK
The circumstances that make the doom clock tick forwards and backwards are
vital to the feel of the game. Choosing them calls attention to which changes
matter most in the group’s struggle to survive.
Decide as a group what makes the doom clock tick:
• A PC is taken out
• A PC chooses to concede
• All of the PCs are out of fate points
• A significant NPC ally is taken out
Then decide what (if anything) makes the doom clock tick backwards:
• A character succeeds with style (once per scene only)
• The PCs resolve a setting issue
• The PCs make a lasting change for the better
• The PCs reach a major milestone
Or come up with your own circumstances for each. For a shorter or more heavily planned game, it works very well if you tie ticks of the doom clock to specific
in-game events—for example, “Tick the doom clock backwards if the PCs rescue
Mark from the mine shaft. If they leave him to die, tick forwards.”
The only hard rule is that it must be much harder to make the clock tick
backwards than forwards, unless you want the potential for the doom to be
indefinitely delayed!
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The Fifth Outcome: Failure With Style
Failure is an important ingredient of doomed horror, and adding this outcome
emphasizes the role of heroic self-sacrifice and the rewards of difficult choices.
When you really want to ramp up the tone of desperate struggle, you can even
remove success with style as an option and add this in its place, so the four outcomes are weighted toward failure with or without some mitigation.
If a character rolls at least 2 shifts less than their opposition, they fail
with style. They may also choose to fail with style on any failure. Whenever
a character fails with style, their opponent succeeds with style.
If a character fails with style, they have no option for success at a cost—failure
is guaranteed.
Narrate the character’s failure at the intended task, and also the stroke of luck,
the unexpected reward on the margins for heroic effort, or whatever else it is that
gives the benefit. Depending on the tone of your game, this can be anything from
sensible but dramatic to ludicrously over-the-top implausible. Enrich your game
in ways that suit what you’re all trying to do.
At the beginning of the next scene, the player who failed with style gains a
special token that lets them do one of the following:
• Gain a free invoke on an aspect of their choice
• Remove a single free invoke of their choice
• Step the doom clock back one hour—this can only happen once per session, no matter how often players fail with style
The benefit gained from the token must follow logically from the narration
of their failure.
Marissa’s character Kelly is trying to stay hidden from the threat that’s
stalking the group. She fails her Stealth roll with style and narrates how
the monster drags her out from her hiding place by the ankle, gloating about how powerful and perceptive it is. Later, Marissa uses her
failure with style token to gain a free invoke on the threat’s Egotistical
Warlock aspect.
A player can only hold one failure with style token. If they already have a failure
with style token at the start of a new scene and are supposed to earn another, they
can instead pass it to another character as long as they can narrate how this occurs.
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The Book of Scars
In a game of doomed horror, injuries—mental and physical—leave permanent
scars. Every PC gains an additional aspect, The Book of Scars. Whenever
the PC recovers from a moderate, severe, or extreme consequence (or a sticky or
lasting condition), their player writes down a suitable scar on their sheet that is
counted as a sub-part of The Book of Scars.
Rufio had his eye gouged out by evil cultists and wrote down Gaping
Socket next to his The Book of Scars aspect.
Each PC can have five scars in The Book of Scars. Once the book is full,
the character can’t ever clear out their moderate, severe, or extreme consequence
slots (or recover from sticky or lasting conditions).
Medical treatment renames the consequence as normal (e.g., Broken Leg
becomes Splinted Leg) but the consequence will never fully recover.
Now That You’ve Lost
Death is always on the table if a PC is taken out in a game of doomed horror.
However, unless you’re playing with a GM and a single player, it’s not likely that
all the PCs will be taken out in the same scene—at least until the doom clock ticks
its last. Some are likely to survive quite a bit longer than others. Should players
pay a penalty for their characters’ inability to survive? Of course not. They can
continue to play their character as a ghost with the rules on page 19, or they
can turn against their fellow players and work to hasten their downfall…
If a player’s ghost is taken out, or they’d rather turn to the dark side straight
away, they can say goodbye to their character and help you bring doom to the
survivors by playing part of the opposition. If there’s a supporting NPC handy,
you can ask them to take over playing it, with suitable private briefings about
what they should know to do their doom-ward part. Alternatively, you can work
together, applying the principles of the Fate fractal, to make an NPC out of some
part of the doom: bad weather, a mob of strangers all subject to the same hateful
frenzy, a band of zombies roaming together. If the threat is defeated, that part
of the doom is lessened, and the survivors earn a step back on the doom clock.
Then the player can pick up and play another portion of the doom: survivors are
limited but there’s plenty of doom for everyone...
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CHAPTER 6: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
Campaign framework for survival games
The framework provided in this chapter is to help you run games where the PCs
face danger from an overwhelming threat and their continued survival is a result
of caution, preparation, resource management, and cleverness rather than the
repeated application of physical violence. This framework combines well with
the doom mechanics from Chapter 5: We Are All Going to Die, but works equally
well if you leave the PCs’ fate entirely in their own hands.
At the beginning of the game, the PCs are accompanied by NPC survivors.
Some are close friends and family members created by the players, and the rest
are less significant NPCs.
The PCs have to manage the resources needed by the survivors and handle
conflicts arising as a result of prejudice, incompatible moral codes, and differences
of opinion on what’s best for the group.
Can they maintain their humanity as the group of survivors is whittled down
one by one, until only they remain? And when they’re all that’s left, is there anything they won’t do to survive?
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Media Inspiration
The following books, movies, and TV give an idea of the style of game this framework is designed to evoke:
• Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead are the
grandfathers of the zombie survival genre.
• The Stand by Stephen King is a story about survivors in the aftermath
of an apocalyptic flu epidemic, though there’s also a more supernatural
antagonist involved…
• 28 Days Later is a great reference for “fast zombies”—the infected are alive,
but reduced to animalistic, predatory behavior.
• Alien and Aliens are both stories about surviving against an overwhelmingly
superior foe, using whatever resources are available.
• The Mist: Based on a short story by Stephen King, the movie is a chilling example of how your fellow survivors are the real crux of drama in a
survival horror story.
• World War Z by Max Brooks is much better than the film adaptation. It’s
presented as a series of interviews, found footage, and other documentary
evidence of the global war against zombies.
• The Fireman by Joe Hill would also fit well in the section about the Other,
as it features an us vs. them narrative between the infected and baseline
humanity. In the aftermath of an infection that causes people to spontaneously combust, survivors who are infected but don’t burn try to survive in
a world that fears them.
• The Girl with all the Gifts, a novel by M. R. Carey that was recently adapted
as a film. It’s unusual in that its protagonist is one of the infected, and it’s
not just the baseline humans who want or deserve to survive the events
of the story.
• Arachnophobia, a movie about a small town trying to survive an onslaught
of deadly spiders.
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General Notes and Major Rules Changes
The PCs and the group of NPCs they have fallen in with are collectively referred
to as survivors in this framework.
PCs have no stress and must absorb any hits with consequences...but can kill
or maim an NPC instead (page 100).
Survivors can’t recover from consequences (or sticky and lasting conditions)
without invoking Medical Supplies or a similar consumable (page 96) or
situation aspect.
Game Creation
Choose the consumables your group will be tracking and decide how many free
invokes on each consumable the group has as the game begins (page 96).
As a group, decide how many supporting and nameless NPC survivors are with
you. A larger group requires more consumables, but provides more characters to
sacrifice on the altar of your own survival. A good starting point is to use three
times the number of players as your pool of supporting and nameless survivors.
A third of these are supporting NPCs (Fate Core System page 218). As a group,
give each of them a high concept and a trouble.
The remaining survivors are nameless NPCs. They act as background color and
cannon fodder, so for now just write down how many there are.
If your game has five players, there are fifteen supporting and nameless NPC survivors, of which five are supporting NPCs and ten are
nameless NPCs.
The systems for doomed horror work particularly well with this framework. As
a group, decide whether you’re using the doom issue, doom clock, failure with
style, and/or the book of scars.
Character Creation
In addition to their PC, each player makes a main NPC survivor (Fate Core
System page 220) with a positive relationship to their character. The player
initially chooses the NPC’s high concept and trouble and their peak skill or
approach; the rest of their traits can be filled out during play. One of each PC’s
aspects must include their relationship with the main NPC they created.
At least two of each PC’s aspects must create tension between them and other
PCs or main NPCs.
Nick’s character has Natural Born Leader while Sarah’s has Nobody
Bosses Me Around.
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During Play
We present here three systems that neatly fit together to evoke the tropes of
survival horror. The characters must manage survival resources, watch NPC
survivors die one by one around them, and build and maintain safe havens to
protect themselves from the threat that assails them.
Not Enough Resources to Go Around: Consumables
are aspects that define the resources your group needs to survive.
During game creation, pick three to five to keep track of according to the scenario. A zombie story might use Food Supplies, Ammunition, and Medical
Supplies while a Mad Max style story might focus on Water, Ammunition,
and Fuel. Consumables can be invoked normally during the game, for example
by bartering Ammunition for favors from other survivors.
One or more of the consumables is a necessity for survival, for example Food
Supplies in a zombie story.
Each survivor—including NPCs—must periodically burn a free invoke on
each necessity just to stay healthy. Survivors can’t invoke necessities with fate
points to survive.
The rate at which necessities are consumed depends on the game’s pace. If your
zombie scenario plays out over a few days, survivors must invoke Food Supplies
at the main mealtime every day. If the scenario spans months, survivors might
have to invoke every Sunday instead.
You can also have two necessities with different consumption rates—for example,
Food Supplies must be invoked monthly but Water Supplies weekly.
Consumables
CONSUMABLES RULES SUMMARY
Consumables are aspects used to track resources needed by the
survivors. Each game has three to five, one or more of which is
a necessity like food or water. Free invokes on consumables can
be used to help the survivors, and can be gained by scavenging,
trade, etc.
Every survivor must spend a free invoke on each necessity periodically. Water might be once a day, food once a week, and so on.
If a survivor is called on to invoke a necessity and can’t, they
must decrease an appropriate skill (usually Physique) by one or
take a consequence.
If two survivors are on half-rations, they use one invoke on the
rationed necessity between them, but gain a situation aspect
representing their privation.
A survivor who has reduced skills or taken consequences from
going without a necessity can use an extra free invoke on the
consumable to recover a point of the skill or, if the skill is back to
normal, to begin recovering a consequence taken from privation.
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Decide how many free invokes each consumable has when the game begins.
The players can add more invokes during the game. Fewer invokes, especially on
a necessity, increases the pressure on the survivors:
• If you want the game to have a desperate feel from the start, give them free
invokes on necessities equal to the number of survivors or fewer.
• If you want the game to start a bit more relaxed and get tenser over time,
give them invokes on necessities equal to twice the number of survivors.
Using physical objects to represent necessities (for example, pretend plastic
food to serve as food or band-aids to represent medical supplies) is a great way
of giving players a constant reminder of how few resources they have.
CONSUMABLES IN SHORTER GAMES
If your game is designed to take place over a single night of
in-game time or less, such as when you’re telling a story about
a serial killer stalking college kids one fateful evening, tracking
three consumables is unnecessary. Just pick one like Medical
Supplies that is sure to become relevant in a short amount of
in-game time.
GOING WITHOUT
When a survivor goes without using a free invoke on a necessity they can either:
• Reduce their Physique (or Forceful, if using approaches) by one to a
minimum of Terrible (-2). To save the player from having to rearrange
their skill pyramid, the skill stays where it is on their character sheet, but
is treated as its lower value for all purposes.
• Take a consequence.
If they can’t do either, they are taken out.
REDUCING DIFFERENT SKILLS OR APPROACHES
You might decide that it makes more sense to reduce a different
skill or approach when the survivors run short of a necessity. For
example, if they run short of Scent-Blocking Cream in a zombie
game, it reduces their Stealth (or Sneaky) as their enticing smell
becomes easier for zombies to notice.
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Half-Rations
Some or all of the survivors can go on half-rations to eke out a necessity. Every
two survivors on half-rations use one free invoke between them. However,
anyone on half-rations gains a negative situation aspect.
The group’s Food Supplies necessity has 11 free invokes. They need 14
to feed all the survivors, so they’re short by three. The group puts the
six nameless NPCs on half-rations, meaning they only use three free
invokes and there’s now enough food to go around. The nameless NPCs
get a Desperately Hungry aspect that Elsa writes down, planning to
compel it later to inspire a revolt of the starving against the well fed.
RECOVERING FROM LACK OF NECESSITIES
When a survivor is called upon to invoke a necessity, they can use a second free
invoke to recover their Physique or Forceful by one.
If their Physique is at its normal rating, they can instead use a second free
invoke to immediately begin the recovery of a consequence taken due to a lack
of the necessity.
Survivors can’t use more than one additional free invoke on a necessity in
this way.
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USING CONSUMABLES
Consumables are normal situation aspects and can be invoked on any appropriate roll. If you have a surplus of food, you can stock up to help you with a feat
of physical endurance, or you can trade supplies of ammunition or water with a
rival faction to aid you in a negotiation. You can also spend a fate point to invoke
a consumable if you narrate how you use it to your advantage without consuming it; for example, using food to lure some rivals into a trap.
GAINING FREE INVOKES ON CONSUMABLES
PCs can create an advantage to add free invokes to a consumable as long as they
can justify how. Be strict on this; it will kill the tension if the survivors can easily
add to their resources. You can award any number of free invokes on one or
more consumables because of the PCs discovering supplies through exploration
or making deals with other factions during the course of the game.
If you don’t want to spend a lot of time on finding supplies, you can instead
use a special type of contest to quickly resolve a scavenging expedition.
First, determine the threat faced by the players on their mission. The usual rules
for playing the opposition on page 222 of Fate Core System apply.
In each exchange of the contest, the threat attacks one or more of the PCs
rather than competing for victories, and the players roll against passive opposition guided by how far they’re going and how many consumables are available
in the target area. Opposition increases on successive scavenging expeditions as
the PCs deplete nearby resources and must go farther afield.
PCs can stop at any time, or keep going to accrue more victories. Without three
victories the scavenging expedition fails, and they can’t take any consumables back.
Otherwise, they can distribute two free invokes among appropriate consumables
for each victory achieved.
SENDING NPCS TO SCAVENGE
The PCs can order a group of NPCs to go and scavenge
resources on their behalf, but at a cost. Roll a single attack
against the NPCs while one of the players rolls to defend.
Each shift the GM gets kills a nameless NPC or deals a
consequence to a supporting or main NPC. If there are any
NPCs left alive, they return home with one free invoke for
each NPC sent on the mission to be put on a consumable
of the players’ choice.
DESPERATE MEASURES
Players can take desperate measures to get free invokes on some consumables.
For example, you can sacrifice an NPC to gain a number of free invokes on your
Food Supplies equal to their Physique.
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Whittling Down the Survivors
In a typical survival horror story, at best only a few people survive. The following
system is designed to evoke this experience by:
• Ensuring that the PCs are the last survivors.
• Generating tension and drama through the death and maiming of the
PCs’ allies.
Because your character has no stress boxes, the only way to avoid being
taken out is to take consequences or to sacrifice an NPC survivor to take
the hit for you.
The NPC doesn’t have to be in the same scene. For example, if you’re out scavenging for supplies and would be bitten by a zombie, your boyfriend back at the
mall can still take the hit for you—when you get back, you discover he’s been
bitten by an undead infant that managed to crawl into the base.
An NPC’s ability to absorb harm on your behalf depends on their significance
and your relationship to them.
NPC SURVIVOR CONSEQUENCE SUMMARY
Instead of their PC taking a mild consequence, a player can:
• Severely maim a nameless NPC (effectively an extreme
consequence from which they’ll never heal).
• Have a supporting NPC take an extreme consequence.
• Have a main NPC with whom the PC shares a positive relationship
aspect take a moderate consequence.
Instead of their PC taking a moderate consequence a player can:
• Have a nameless NPC die horribly.
• Have a supporting NPC with whom the PC shares a positive
relationship take an extreme consequence.
• Have a main NPC with whom the PC shares a positive relationship
aspect take a severe consequence.
Instead of their PC taking a severe consequence a player can:
• Have a supporting NPC with whom the PC shares a positive
relationship aspect die horribly.
• Have a main NPC with whom the PC shares a positive relationship
aspect take an extreme consequence.
Instead of their PC taking an extreme consequence a player can:
• Have a main NPC with whom the PC shares a positive relationship
die horribly or permanently become an enemy to the group.
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NAMELESS NPCS
These folks are doomed to a short lifespan once the horror begins. Their purpose
is to demonstrate the danger of the situation and to be a drain on consumables,
while adding a bit of drama to the game.
You can have a nameless NPC suffer a nigh mortal wound, severe maiming,
zombie infection, or catastrophe of similar magnitude—effectively an extreme
consequence from which they can never recover—to avoid a mild consequence.
Having a nameless NPC die gruesomely lets you avoid taking a moderate
consequence.
SUPPORTING NPCS
These characters are given enough characterization that it will cause a minor
downbeat in the story if one of them is killed or maimed.
You can have a supporting NPC take an extreme consequence (Fate Core System
page 162) to avoid a mild consequence.
If you or the NPC have an aspect describing a positive relationship, you can
have them take an extreme consequence to avoid a moderate consequence, or
have them die or otherwise be permanently removed from the game to avoid a
severe consequence.
When a supporting NPC dies, at the next minor milestone promote a nameless
NPC to a supporting NPC.
MAIN NPCS
Each main NPC is created exactly like a player character. They are important
secondary protagonists, and it will cause a major downbeat in the story if one of
them is killed or maimed.
A main NPC can only take consequences for you if you have a significant,
important relationship with the NPC as described by one or more character
aspects.
A main NPC can take a consequence for you to avoid a consequence one less
severe. That is, you can have a main NPC take an extreme consequence so that
you avoid a severe consequence, and so on.
You also can have a main NPC die horribly or become a permanent enemy
(through descending into violent insanity, becoming a zombie, etc.) to avoid an
extreme consequence.
If another PC has a character aspect relating them to the main NPC that you
are sacrificing, they may reject your sacrifice by giving you a fate point. If they
do this you must find another way to absorb the damage.
When a main NPC dies or permanently becomes an enemy, at the next minor
milestone promote a supporting NPC to a main NPC, and a nameless NPC to
a supporting NPC.
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Managing “Safe” Havens
We described in Chapter 2: The Raveled Sleeve of Care how the tension in a horror
story follows a pattern like a heartbeat (page 17), with peaks and lulls. In a
survival horror game, when danger is all around, there needs to be somewhere
reasonably safe in which these lulls can occur…but it mustn’t ever be too safe.
DESIGNING A SAFE HAVEN
The PCs might start out with a haven when the game begins, or you might have
to find one in play. Designing one is the same either way:
Choose a double-edged aspect that defines the haven.
The mall is well-stocked, and thus a target for desperate, potentially
violent survivors. It’s also a juicy target for the zombie horde, so the
group chooses The Smart Brains Shop at the Mall.
Choose an aspect that describes the haven’s biggest drawback or vulnerability.
Once a safe drive along the highway from the city, it’s now difficult to
get from the mall to the city and vice versa. In the Middle of Nowhere
works well to reflect its isolated nature.
Give the haven a Defend skill, which reflects how well protected it is against
external threats. A military barracks with razorwire fences and trenches around the
perimeter has Superb (+5) Defend while a trailer park has Average (+1) Defend.
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The mall has toughened glass doors and frontages with security grilles.
It’s out of the way and has good sight lines on the surroundings, so
the group decides its Defend is Good (+3).
The haven has no stress but has mild, moderate, and severe consequence slots.
If it’s taken out, the haven is destroyed or becomes overrun and the group must
flee to find another haven.
Draw up a quick map of the haven and divide it into zones. This will come in
handy when the haven is threatened.
ATTACKS ON A HAVEN
The survivors’ haven can be attacked at any time. Often this will be during a
calm moment, but it can also ratchet up the tension if an attack comes right in
the middle of another crisis.
Use a full conflict scene to resolve the attack if:
• The survivors notice the attack coming and mobilize to intercept the
attackers outside the haven.
• Someone (or something) lets the attackers into the haven.
• The haven has an unrepaired consequence, giving the attackers a point
of ingress.
• The haven is breached in the initial attack (optional, see below).
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Otherwise, attacks are resolved with the following abstract system:
• Come up with a single aspect to describe the attacking force and give it an
Attack skill. An Attack equal to or lower than the haven’s Defend should be
easily rebuffed, while an Attack that’s two or more higher may result in a
consequence or two.
A school bus on its way to safety at the mall hits a zombie that busts
through the windshield. Soon all the passengers are turned. The resulting
Undead Football Team starts shambling towards the mall in search of
food. The GM, Elsa, decides they have Fair (+2) Attack.
• Roll the Attack skill of the threat. You can invoke any relevant aspects with
free invokes or your fate points for the scene.
• The players pick someone to roll Defend for the haven. As a group they can
use free invokes from consumables such as Ammunition to help fend off the
attack. Each PC can also use a fate point or free invoke to invoke ONE other
aspect to aid the defense of the haven.
• If they succeed with style, the haven is unharmed and they gain a free invoke
on an aspect of their choice. This can be a consumable, if they can justify it.
• If they succeed, the haven is unharmed.
• If they tie, the haven is unharmed but you add an additional fate point to
the GM’s pool for the next scene.
• If they fail, the haven takes a hit equal to the attack’s shifts. The survivors
must absorb this with the haven’s consequences or by sacrificing NPCs
using the rules on page 100. The haven’s defensive perimeter has been
breached and it’s time to zoom into the action as the survivors deal with
the situation—run the rest of the scene as a conflict or contest. If zombies
breached the perimeter, they need to find and kill them; or maybe some
of their consumables are destroyed, leading to a need for a scavenging trip.
When the Undead Football Team attacks the mall, Elsa rolls +++- for
a total Attack of Great (+4). The players nominate Nick to roll for them
and he gets --00 for a total Defend of Average (+1). Jennifer recently
established Regular Security Patrols, so she uses her free invoke on that
to get the group up to Good (+3). Phil’s character is A Cop One Day Away
from Retirement which he explains means he’s spent hours at the target
range, making it easy to pick zombies off with his service revolver. He
invokes his aspect with a fate point, taking the group’s result up to Superb
(+5). That beats Elsa’s result by a shift, so the zombie jocks are defeated
without the haven being harmed.
Haven consequences can’t be fully repaired. PCs can make an overcome roll to
change one into something slightly less bad for defense (e.g., a Gaping Hole becomes
a Boarded Up Hole), but there’s no fighting off the inevitable slide into entropy.
Eventually the group will run out of survivors or their haven will fall.
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Example Survival Campaigns
Here are three example survival campaigns that you can adapt for your own
purposes or use for inspiration when you’re going through game creation with
your group.
Zombie Apocalypse
Current Issue: The Dead Walk the Earth
Pending Issue: The Living Are More Dangerous Than the Dead
Consumables: Food (necessity, daily invokes required), Medical Supplies,
Ammunition
Wilderness Slasher
Current Issue: The Appalachian Stalker Is Picking Us Off One by One
Pending Issue: The Middle of Nowhere
Consumables: Warmth (necessity, hourly invokes required; represents firewood, hand warmers, gasoline, and other material that can be used to generate
heat and fend off frostbite and other effects of the cold), Phone Charge (can
be used for light, play music for morale, call for help if they reach a cell phone
mast high on a peak), First Aid Kit
Radioactive Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland
Current Issue: Drier Than Dry Land
Pending issue: Mutants Are Getting Ornery
Consumables: Juice (Water! Necessity, daily invokes required), Medz, Bang
Bang Stuff, Gazz
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CHAPTER 7: HORROR IS THE NEW PINK
Campaign framework for intimate and feminine horror
Women are often told that what they fear and what they face isn’t real, but in
horror fiction, it is real, it is affirmed, and it is explored. Having their fears validated draws some women towards horror in fiction, games, and movies.
However, many women have a complicated relationship with the genre. On
the one hand, horror fiction treats women as victims or object lessons to teach
women that they are at least partly to blame for what is done to them—in slasher
movies, a woman is often the first victim, usually in the guise of the promiscuous
hot babe who always trips while running away.
On the other hand, women are also the Final Girl—the last survivor with a
gender-neutral name who gives the baddie some sorely needed comeuppance.
Horror from a feminine perspective usually involves powerlessness; it takes place
on and inside of bodies, and in spaces that are supposed to be free from danger.
Women aren’t the only ones who connect to this kind of sinister storyline. The
power of horror appeals to folk from all walks of life, making the exploration of
femininity through the lens of horror all the more powerful. If these themes are
something you have never experienced, what better way to explore them than
within the dark embrace of a horror game?
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Media Inspiration
The following movies are useful sources of inspiration when considering horror
through a feminine lens:
• In Alien and its sequels, aliens use humans as unwilling hosts for their
offspring. Ripley and the Alien Queen battle each other to protect the
children who depend on them.
• The Babadook depicts the relationship between a mother and her troubled
son, and the supernatural threat that disturbs them, with themes relating
to loss and grief.
• Carrie is an iconic horror story in which the onset of puberty is accompanied by shame, bullying, fear, and blood. Carrie develops telekinesis,
and uses it to lash out at those she thinks have hurt her.
• Drag Me to Hell depicts a woman’s struggles against a curse brought down
on her when she tries to impress her boss.
• American Horror Story is an anthology series that includes feminine horror
tropes like witches, miscarriage, teen girls, nuns, lesbians, and freak shows.
• Psycho is the story of one man’s unhealthy relationship with his deceased
mother, and what it drives him to do.
• The Craft is about a quartet of high school girls who discover their proclivity for magic, with its attendant costs and complications.
• The Conjuring is based on real-life demonologists Lorraine and Ed Warren
as they investigate a haunting affecting a family with five daughters.
• Hard Candy is about a teenaged girl who captures and tortures a man she
suspects of being a pedophile and murderer.
• The Silence of the Lambs is about the complicated relationship between
FBI agent Clarice Starling and serial killer Hannibal Lecter as she asks for
his help to catch a serial killer who skins his female victims.
• The Descent depicts six women trying to survive in an unmapped cave
system as they’re repeatedly attacked by strange creatures from the darkness.
• The Company of Wolves is a werewolf tale based on the story of “Little
Red Riding Hood.”
• Crimson Peak is a gothic, tragic romance with complicated family
relationships.
• Ginger Snaps is about a teenaged girl who becomes a werewolf, and how
she and her sister cope with her monthly transformations.
• In Rosemary’s Baby, a young mother’s concerns about her pregnancy are
dismissed by those who claim to know what's best for her.
• Get Out deals with those in power laying claim to the bodies of others.
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Mechanizing Discomfort
Successful horror is predicated on reactions of fear, shock, and disgust. To create
those feelings at your table you must give yourselves permission to explore these
themes in a fun and safe way. One way to give that permission is to explicitly
mechanize the horror at your table. Fate gives us the tools needed to explore
feminine tropes and environments without needing to experience these feelings
outside of the framework of a game.
A lot of the horror women experience in real life takes place in their homes and
workplaces, perpetrated by people they know. Nothing is safe; homes, partners,
co-workers, even children can be dangerous. Reproducing that horrific intimacy at
the table is an effective technique to evoke feminine horror. Start by subverting a
common roleplaying trope: many games assume the players are exceptional people,
and the unexceptional people in the background tend to be ignored. However,
domestic spaces are ripe for terror. Ask your players to play characters who are
usually assumed to be “safe” and “boring”; servant, teacher, nanny, cook, parent,
babysitter, daughter, secretary, wife. Feminine horror deals with things that should
be familiar and comforting, but instead are full of terror.
In this chapter, we discuss some ways to mechanize these uniquely feminine
horror themes and use them to supercharge your horror game. Check out the
following example setups, character aspects, stunts, NPCs, and current and
impending horror issues and locations.
Playing horror games can be really intense, so make sure both you and your
players are comfortable. A good horror game manages to terrify and make players uncomfortable without crossing their boundaries, just pushing them right
up to that edge. Please see the descriptions of X-Cards (page 141) and Script
Change (page 143), systems that you can use for this. Above all else, make sure
your players know that horror is on the table; it’s not fun to get surprised with
horror when you were expecting a light-hearted comedy. You need the buy in of
the players to really make a creepy game sing.
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Feminine Features
Here are some themes to hang your feminine horror game on. They include the
nasty side of romance, the surprising places horror is birthed, and ways to mess
with your players’ minds. Use these ideas to set up a game where your players can
explore their dark side—or plumb the depths of your own imagination.
Scent of a Woman
Encouraging selfish behavior
Romance is often at the core of horror stories. The cute cheerleader only sees the
redeeming qualities of the weird loner after he exposes the bad behavior of the
perfect high school hunk whose house is frequently free of all adult influences,
and who is so obviously a bad guy at heart. Or the serial killer stalks women who
look like his ex-wife, taking out his feelings of betrayal and anger on women who
remind him of her.
These toxic romantic elements can be used at the table as compels and consequences to encourage trying to survive at the expense of everyone else.
Sarah and Ariana’s characters are running from a serial killer who’s
targeting all the brunette women on campus. Their characters are
in a romantic relationship. Marissa, the GM, tells Sarah that she sees
Ariana run one way, with the serial killer after her. She reminds Sarah
that her character is a brunette, so if she shouts a warning to Ariana,
the killer will most likely go after her instead. Marissa compels Sarah’s
Desperate Measures, and Sarah decides to sneak away in search of
help instead, leaving Ariana’s character to her fate. This goes badly
when Sarah gets to the campus security office, though—the killer got
there first, and she has to watch as he kills Ariana’s character.
You can make it fun for someone to play a bad guy by encouraging everyone
to play someone who is flawed, or by discussing how to make sure everyone is
okay with one player being an antagonist. Is that player portraying the weird
loner who lusts after the cheerleader?
Marissa is playing a bit of a loner with a crush on Tanika, a cute yet
uninterested girl who draws dark powers to her with her careless use
of her magical abilities. When Marissa offers to do something selfless
for Tanika, Sarah, the GM, undermines the act by accepting it, but
reminding Marissa of every time Tanika has spurned her advances.
Or is someone playing the cute cheerleader? Repeatedly have the hunk do
terrible things, but have all the NPCs excuse or deny his behavior. This is called
gaslighting (page 113).
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Stalking
I will always love you.
Although many romantic movies present stalking behavior as just a way to get
the girl, the reality is far more disturbing. Bring this into your game by having a
character discover a secret diary, blog, or social media account documenting all
of their recent activities—or containing photos of them sleeping—that belongs
to another character. You can also include an NPC who is obsessed with one of
the players, where this obsession could be the focus of the game or just another
plot for the PCs to explore.
Sarah is playing a private detective tasked with finding a runaway
nephew. While investigating his apartment, she comes across a locked
file cabinet. Marissa, the GM, describes its contents as being some personal documents like birth certificates and the like, but at the bottom of
the drawer is another manila envelope, with Sarah’s character’s address
on it. Inside is a notebook filled with minute-by-minute logs of every
time Sarah had passed by the windows of her apartment.
Feminine Horror Aspects and Horror Points
Like any Fate game, your characters will have a range of aspects, but a game of
feminine horror may demand that you reserve an aspect that emphasizes the
unique feminine tones you want to explore. A feminine horror aspect describes
the complicated relationship the characters have to this kind of fiction. When
you inflict a feminine horror aspect on your players, think about movie tropes,
feminine stereotypes, and troubles that change the character’s behavior, but not
who they are.
Examples: Someone’s Always Watching, Mark of the Beast, Smells
Like Prey, Sinful Appetite
Leave this aspect blank until the time feels right. Do not give your players
control of creating this aspect—the lack of agency helps hammer home the theme
of powerlessness that underlies feminine horror.
Assigning a character’s feminine horror aspect is a very powerful moment in
the game, where a fundamental piece of agency is stripped away from them and
there is nothing they can do about it. Pick a moment where it will cut them the
most deeply, whether it’s a revelation that curdles a moment of apparent triumph
or kicks them in the stomach when they’re already at a low ebb.
Marissa is playing a space marine trapped on a derelict space station with several aliens hunting her. She finds a hiding spot in the old
medical bay, and hunkers down to wait for the aliens to pass by. Sarah,
the GM, gives her the feminine horror aspect of Someone’s Always
Watching when she catches a glimpse of movement in a shiny refrigerator door, and realizes that it’s not the right size for an alien.
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HORROR POINTS
Encourage your players to self-compel their feminine horror aspect by rewarding
them with a special horror point. Horror points are double fate points (+4, or
reroll and +2, etc.) and every time a PC self-compels their feminine horror aspect
they get a horror point instead of a fate point.
Dangerous Spaces
Bringing horror to your table
The best way to unsettle your players is to use the things that you personally find
horrifying and listen to their reactions and feedback. What scares you will scare
your players, if you focus on how the scene makes you feel, rather than only
describing how it looks. When running a horror game, pay strict attention to
your players. If you notice a nervous tic, like someone rubbing their earlobe, you
know that means they’re feeling what you’re portraying.
Describe things using all the senses; for example, people really freak out when
they touch something seemingly innocuous, like the banister of a staircase, only
to find that it’s warm and pulsing with the rhythm of a beating heart. If you’re
describing a bodily sensation, like the shifting weight from a monstrous pregnancy
or the first signs of realizing you can conjure magic by cutting yourself, try standing up and showing them with your posture and gestures how that feels. Lean in
to the table and speak quietly to your players. Be aware of how your presentation
creates that intimate atmosphere that makes up feminine horror.
Domestic
A place where you cannot find comfort
Home is where everyone wants to feel they are safe. The PCs expect something
terrible to happen if they spend the night in a mineshaft rumored to be haunted
by the men who died in an awful accident, but not when they’re relaxing at
home with a nice cup of tea. Yet the best time to spring horror on characters is
when their players assume they’re safe. Perverting the purpose of rooms to place
the characters in jeopardy can bring new life to a horror game.
Marissa is playing one of a number of paranormal investigators and is
discussing the probably haunted basement. When she goes to check,
the basement door is open and Sarah, the GM, describes how the
sunny kitchen darkens and Marissa feels a presence behind her. It
chases her into a bedroom, where Marissa hides under the bed and
watches hooves walk around and check the closet before leaving. Is it
really gone? Sarah tells Marissa she’ll have to leave safety to find out.
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Expanse
A place where you cannot escape loneliness
Space and underneath the ocean, even wilderness that stretches to the horizon,
can be unsettling. Feeling utterly alone except for things that creep in the darkness can be an excellent theme for a horror game—even better if it doesn’t start
out that way. You can better experience absence when there was something there
to begin with. Women can be particularly vulnerable to this fear, as women are
often shown as prey, such as in the wilderness for groups of men, or when isolated and having to rely on their own physicality for survival.
A crew tasked with exploring the remote depths of the ocean find
themselves isolated inside of the compartments of their deep sea
vessel, all too aware of the distance between themselves and any outside help. Pick off crew members one at a time, making their demise
seem innocent for as long as you can. Then enlist those players to
assist with GMing duties, and watch the final survivor gasp for breath.
Internal
A place where you become the monster
An early theme of horror was the line between humanity and the monstrous (all
love to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), and it continues to fascinate people even
now. Not only do women deal with the changing of their body during puberty,
childbirth, and menopause, but their very identities can be challenged during
these times. Far worse than filling up your mental stress track is to lose control
over your very being, and to become what you fear. This can be literal, with
characters slowly transforming into monsters (see “Body Horror”, page 65, for
more on this), or subtler, with the players slowly realizing that their end goal isn’t
as benevolent as they thought. Give your players all the rope they need before
they find that they’ve rationalized themselves into a worse situation than they
would have guessed.
Sarah is playing a private investigator hired to find a lost family heirloom. Marissa, the GM, tells her that if she hands it over she could
receive untold riches and power—at the reasonable price of a human
sacrifice or two. Sarah thinks it over and agrees, provided those being
sacrificed are not innocents. Marissa grins and agrees to these new
terms.
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Insidious Gaslighting
There’s nothing to worry about.
Gaslighting, named after the 1944 movie Gaslight, is a manipulative technique
where the victims are told that reality is not as they perceive it to be, with the
goal of making them doubt their own senses or sanity. Although this can be used
on both men and women, it is associated with women and tropes around their
unreliability in relating their own experiences.
This trope creates a sense of dread at the table by exposing a creepy, terrifying,
or horrific act to the PCs, and then introducing a character who seems to not
notice anything amiss. A subtler example is to set up a scene where it appears an
NPC is doing something horrible, but then to expose it as something innocuous.
Use setting or character aspects to bring gaslighting into your game. Doubt
Your Own Senses and Lost and Found can be used to mechanize this
idea explicitly. Using character aspects (especially feminine aspects) makes this
extremely personal, while using setting aspects makes it an overarching theme of
your game to which all players (and NPCs) are vulnerable.
Doubt Your Own Senses allows both player and GM to rewrite an event
previously assumed in play, (such as a declaration that a re-appearance of a serial
killer was merely a tree branch scratching a window) and can be invoked by
the player to pretend everything is fine, or compelled to lure the character into
dangerous situations.
Marissa is playing a young tenant in a haunted apartment building. She
has the Doubt Your Own Senses aspect, and Sarah, the GM, compels
it to lure her character further into a dimly-lit laundry room filled with
odd-shaped shadows and strange noises, while offering the knowledge
that Marissa’s cute neighbor, Jose, usually does his laundry at this time.
Lost and Found can be invoked or compelled in a similar manner, allowing
players to attempt to find advantageous items, while the GM takes them away
at key points.
Sarah is playing an urban explorer who has broken into an abandoned
factory. She has Lost and Found, and Marissa, the GM, compels it so
that when Sarah puts down her bolt cutters to retie her boot, it is
gone when she stands up. Later the bolt cutters show up again in the
wrong person’s hands.
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Feminine Horror in Action
Much of the following section revolves around bodies—the things that can
happen inside them, the things that can go wrong with them, and the things we
do with them. We’ve outlined a few ideas and included some examples to get
you started.
LINGERING ISSUES VS IMPENDING ISSUES
Feminine horror is often about the things that follow the characters rather
than the new situations they encounter along the way. To represent the
haunting horrors that trail protagonists, you can use lingering issues
instead of impending issues.
Lingering issues cling to the PCs, haunting their steps and threatening to make the world worse as they continue to cause problems.
Protagonists tackling these issues are trying to keep the world from slipping into chaos or destruction. Examples: the death of a child, crippling
alcoholism, the last exorcism you performed.
Poisonous Sexuality
Horrific desires
Sensuality and horror have a common theme of building tension and a mounting
need for release. There is a trope of female sexuality being contagious, infecting
unwary men and innocent women alike, with society trying to control it through
reminders of possible dire consequences such as STIs and pregnancy, and labels
such as slut and prude. However, many women also find power in their sexuality
and how they express it. Frequently society deals with this empowerment by portraying them as predatory and obsessive—sometimes even beyond death itself.
Adding overt or subverted elements of feminine sexuality to a horror game
is the perfect way to spice things up. Some literal embodiment of frightening
female sexuality—gorgons, maenads, furies, and so forth—may be just the thing,
or you can take a fear and turn it into a supernatural force. If there’s a sexually
transmitted marker that attracts death, do the players try to stop it—or do they
seduce anyone bent on punishing their licentious ways, thus turning the tables?
You can enact a social stigma for promiscuous PCs that follows those they spread
their infection to, apply it to those who aren’t sexually active—or both! Focus on
the juxtaposition between sexuality and contagion.
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EXAMPLE SETUP
The PCs are drawn to a house that’s reported to be haunted by a particularly
licentious ghost. They all have their own motivations for going: exorcising
troubled spirits, speaking to loved ones who have passed, proving that their skepticism of an afterlife is well-founded. Once inside, however, those who encounter
the ghost temporarily have their feminine horror aspect overridden by the aspect
Act Out Physical Desires. When they share a moment of intimacy with
another PC, they can spend a fate point to pass it on, unless they would rather
keep it. While they have this aspect, you can compel them to act recklessly in
order to fulfill the physical desires the ghost in the house can no longer feel.
SUGGESTED FEMININE HORROR ASPECTS
That’s My Kink: PCs might not usually engage in sexual behavior that exposes
them to the Act Out Physical Desires aspect, but there’s that one thing that
works for them.
I Got Mine: A PC with this aspect has no moral qualms about infecting others
with the Act Out Physical Desires aspect, as long as they get their sexual
pleasure.
STUNTS
Double-jointed: You bend all the ways. Gain +2 to Athletics when you’re contorting yourself to do something out of a normal person’s range of motion while
someone else is watching.
Dirty Mind: Once per conflict, you can spend a fate point to create the aspect
Distracted with a free invoke on anyone you’re flirting with. Distracted
disappears if someone successfully inflicts stress on your character.
NPCS
Name: Channer Dankworth
High Concept: Medium Hawking His Talents
Trouble: Crushing Debt
Channer is walking a fine line between true believer and huckster. He believes
the path to fame and fortune lies in getting his own reality show about ghost
hunting, even though he knows it will be at the expense of truly helping the ghosts.
Those student loans need to get paid, and he likes all the attention.
Name: Harper Ajax
High Concept: Widow Seeking Answers
Trouble: Denying the Truth
Harper misses her deceased husband, Barnaby, to a distracting degree. She
believes Channer can help her contact her lost love, and she will go to any lengths
to do so. After all, surely there is a perfectly rational explanation for all the jewelry
belonging to other women Harper found after Barnaby died...
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CURRENT ISSUE
Dark Spirits: It’s nearing All Hallow’s Eve and something more sinister than
children in masks is lurking. A family just moved into the big old house at the
end of the block, but what started as strange whisperings and creaking floorboards
has turned into a desperate struggle to survive. The move took all the money
they had, but somehow they found the number of a paranormal investigations
crew, their last hope before their family is consumed by these dark spirits acting
out their last desires.
LINGERING ISSUES
In addition to the Dark Spirits and the threat it poses, there are a number of
other lingering issues that will cause the investigators problems in the future.
The Allure of Alcohol: It’s always been there and there is no way out.
Sometimes it makes the day tolerable, other times its grip is unbearable, and it
usually compromises your judgment.
Face: Jasmine
Everyone has lost someone, but she was such a sweet girl with little knowledge
of the world. Crossed over, some say, but in your travels you haven’t seen her.
You can’t hold her in your arms one last time.
Face: Mr. White
A loyal cameraman, investigations didn’t used to be his full time gig—some
of the cases he even did pro-bono—but things got messy at his day job when
his porn stash was found, and Mr. White was fired.
Veteran Investigators: You’ve seen things, heard things, and you know the
darkness looked back. What happened at the last paranormal scene you investigated? Can you ever forget that feeling?
Face: The Voice
A dark guttural noise that rises from within. Being a medium is a useful skill
in the business, but how long before the other side uses you as a doorway to
cross back and take over your body? It’s only happened once. Maybe it won’t
be heard from again?
Face: Bethany
For years she suffered. Left in that damp basement to rot as a forgotten
plaything. Long after her body gave out, her ghost remained, dragging herself
across the floor by a fleshy stump, reaching out, jaw distended. But it was too
much to handle, and Bethany was once again left there…by the only ones
who could have helped.
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Anticipated Blood
A coming of age horror story
Blood is a scary thing that means injury in most cases, but it also symbolizes life
and transformation, especially in the transition from childhood to adulthood.
It is often associated with occult rituals and sacrifice. The changing body of a
teenager is a perfect canvas for horror.
For many young women, their own maturing bodies can be confusing or
even something to be feared. Even if you’ve been told about the process, actually experiencing the blood, cramps, and mood swings can be terrifying. It can
feel like your own body has turned against you, and it’s even worse for young
women who aren’t prepared. These feelings are often connected to nature, with
the cyclical nature of the moon mirroring a woman’s cycle. This identification
with nature also showcases the sheer brutality of the natural world: rabbits eat
their young, wolves target the weak and sick, and thrushes store their living prey
on thorn bushes for a delayed meal.
Making the developing body of a teen into a parallel for developing witchy
powers isn’t a stretch. In Fate, your players can pick what type of talent their
character has, but it should manifest in unexpected or disturbing ways. Magic
powers sound cool, but can be quite horrific if you are unprepared, can’t control
them, or if others view them with a wary eye. When using these themes in your
game, focus on how the changes in the PCs’ bodies make them feel different from
their peers and change their concept of themselves, and highlight the harm they
unwillingly cause to those around them through their impulsive actions.
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EXAMPLE SETUP
The PCs have just begun training as witch hunters, a sacred calling in their
country. Teenagers from across the land competed for the honor, but only the
very best are selected to join the Order of Hunters. During the young hunters’
initiation ritual, one of the PCs overperforms and gains Bleed for Power in
her feminine horror aspect slot. Now she can unleash this greater power every
time she bleeds. The aspect can be compelled for paranoid, foolhardy, or violent
behavior.
SUGGESTED FEMININE HORROR ASPECTS
Actually a Witch: A character with this aspect is prone to brutal acts of violence,
but only when they’re alone with a target.
Torn Loyalties: A character with this aspect feels attached to the witches they
hunt, in spite of witnessing atrocities committed by them.
STUNTS
Apex Predator: When you use Empathy to create an advantage on a neutral
NPC, gain an additional free invoke on the aspect you create, even on a tie.
Animal Magnetism: Whenever you are in the company of animal allies, gain
+2 to overcome fear or terror using Will.
NPCS
Name: Elizavetta Roth
High Concept: Headmistress of the Order
Trouble: Fell for the Wrong Girl
Elizavetta Roth is the headmistress of the witch hunter academy. She takes her
job very seriously, although she’s not above showing favoritism towards the students she’s had a hand in shaping. Roth has a brisk manner and enforces the rules
with an iron fist…unless it’s her beloved, Adelheid Engel, who is breaking them.
Name: Adelheid Engel
High Concept: Power Hungry Sleuth
Trouble: Bit off More than She Can Chew
Adelheid Engel teaches the students the history of witches, the secret wars,
and past heroes of the Order, but she has delved far deeper in the dark secrets
of witches than anyone knows. She’s in too deep, and it’s starting to affect her
teaching, her hygiene, and her relationships with other people. Adelheid doesn’t
really love Elizavetta, and she’s lost track of the line between human and witch.
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CURRENT ISSUE
Witch Hunt: Witches, still living among the innocent, plague society with
violence, curses, death, and ruin. If left unchecked, the streets would surely run
red with blood and witches would rise up as supreme. From coast to coast, the
Order has been preparing for a yearly purge by training the next generation of
witch hunters.
LINGERING ISSUES
In addition to the Witch Hunt and the threat it poses, there are a number of
other lingering issues that will cause the students problems in the future.
Buried History: An ancient conspiracy between the Order and the witches has
begun to surface. Dark alliances, recorded in blood, have passed down a magical
pact that can no longer be ignored.
Face: Damien the Warbird
A celebrated hero among the witch hunters, Damien was accused of being
a part of the conspiracy and outed as a cowardly villain.
Face: Selena, Queen of the Witches
Recently awakened in a young woman’s body, Selena is back to collect on
past debts.
The Power of Ash: “Burn her! Burn her!” they all scream. Who knew you could
get so high off this stuff? The addictive properties of the ashes of burned witches
has made many men rich.
Face: Jamie the Funeral Director
Jamie just burns whatever bodies he’s given and doesn’t ask too many questions. But his new business partner has been collecting the ashes of a lot of
dead youth who could be witches.
Face: Monica the Police Inspector
Monica has been investigating a series of mysterious disappearances and the
appearance of a strange new substance on the market.
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Alien Pregnancy
Parasitic Dependency
From Aliens to Rosemary’s Baby, horror often features a strong fear of being
invaded, of harboring something wrong inside your own body. Take Aliens, for
example—the protagonists face an outside fear, something beyond comprehension that has found its way inside. It’s also a bodily invasion of a sort male
characters do not normally fear.
There are many fun ways to impregnate PCs with alien parasites and demonic
babies. Just listen to what kind of themes your table is interested in and go for it.
Some may be comfortable with exploring depraved demonic beings, others may
enjoy a more disease-like infection—i.e., “big things have small beginnings”—but
it’s also perfectly fine to hand wave or choose a different route to show how their
character was “impregnated,” as the game’s focus is on the aftermath, not the
inciting event. Movies frequently use memory loss or dream sequences that are
fragmented and non-linear; you can do the same.
Making the unnatural nature of the pregnancy explicit to the infected can
be a powerful way to build dread in your game. Rather than going straight for
demonspawn, start out by setting the scene for subtle body horror as the characters
experience things about themselves that just don’t seem right—a feeling of shifting
weight and painful growth within their body, distorted reflections, clothes that
no longer fit, and unusual cravings.
The PCs don’t have to be pregnant, or even biologically capable of such a
thing, to be carrying some sort of alien parasite around, but pregnancy can serve
as a model for the ways in which the PCs’ bodies seem to change. Focus on the
unnaturalness of the space that surrounds the characters and crawls inside them.
EXAMPLE SETUP
The PCs are on a long-term space mission and are currently out of hi-tech hibernation to perform some routine maintenance. They discover an alien artifact and
bring it back on board. Then a bunch of readings start being off, and the scanner keeps reporting people in different locations than they actually are. Doors
inexplicably close and lock themselves, and one PC is trapped in a room that
temporarily loses life support. When they’re taken back to the medical division,
it’s discovered that they now have a rapidly growing parasite inside them, gaining
the Host mild consequence and the Maternal Instinct stunt. They can spend a
fate point to pass the Host consequence and Maternal Instinct stunt to another
player, or give them the Fatalist mild consequence. While any PC has this
consequence, it can be compelled to make the PC take risks to figure out what’s
going on or put themselves in danger to save others.
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SUGGESTED FEMININE HORROR ASPECTS
More Human Than Human: PCs with this aspect may not be aware they are
artificial beings, but it makes sense once they know. They may welcome infestation
by the alien parasite, as they are not able to reproduce, or may not understand
other players’ reluctance to become a host.
Perfectly Formed: Infected PCs can use this to extend their senses beyond
what is normally possible.
STUNTS
Maternal Instinct: Gain +2 to Fight when you’re trying to protect the parasite
from harm.
Nuke It from Orbit: Treat any success using improvised explosives as a success
with style.
NPCS
Name: Alexi Chownyk
High Concept: Head Medical Officer
Trouble: The Bottle Rules Me
Alexi would be a great doctor if they didn’t drink so much. They’ve been
assigned to this mission to keep them out of the way of anything important.
Alexi does love a medical challenge and would jump at the chance to investigate
any physical anomalies.
Name: Gotzon Castell
High Concept: Naive Engineer
Trouble: Far Too Trusting
Gotzon didn’t know signing up for deep space missions would be this boring—
or this lonely. He’s young and a bit dumb, but has a knack for fixing things.
Gotzon would jump to protect anyone, probably because he doesn’t really believe
in his own mortality.
CURRENT ISSUE
Hull Breach: They are inside the ship, in the dark, scuttling around the air
ducts, waiting for their chance to strike. Sometime during hypersleep there was
a hull breach and an alien lifeform made its way onboard. Now that it’s here, not
everyone may have the crew’s best interests at heart. This undocumented species
could be a valuable asset to the inner ring.
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LINGERING ISSUES
In addition to the Hull Breach and the threat it poses, there are a number of
other lingering issues that will cause the crew problems in the future.
Compulsory Sterilization: Missions into deep space are highly regulated and
to get the job, you must agree to be sterilized. Crewmembers give up their reproductive rights to keep the mission running to spec and within budget.
Face: Tyrone the A.I.
He’s the responsible, calculating, and handsome caretaker of the crew. He
likes to be called “Ty” by his fellow crewmembers, but his priorities seem just
left of being human. He’s a natural fit to gaslight the characters.
Face: Commander Gabledone
The oldest of the crew, she had a life before this as a highly decorated officer,
wife, and mother. Over-friendly and talkative, the commander likes to boast
about her children back home.
Xeno Artifact: The discovery of an alien artifact is a historic and profitable suc-
cess for the mission, but strange things start to happen once it is brought aboard.
Face: Lieutenant Lee
This happy-go-lucky officer was restricted to the medical bay after a sudden
and brutal suicide attempt where he ripped his own eyes out.
Face: Grand Counselor Maylynn
She has a vested interest in recovering the Xeno Artifact in order to install
it as a symbol of her religious faction’s power.
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CHAPTER 8: SPOOKY FUN
Campaign framework for horror games aimed at young people
What Is This?
If you thought vampire hunting was scary, try 7th grade gym class.
Welcome to Spooky Fun! In this chapter we give you a toolkit for running
horror games in the style of fiction and shows like Goosebumps, Scooby Doo, and
Nancy Drew. This material is aimed at younger players—in the 8-14 age range—
but older players may have fun with these tools as well. The characters in a game
focused on Spooky Fun are children of roughly middle school age, but we’ve
written the rules on the assumption that the GM is a little older.
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Influences and Inspirations
The aim of this framework is to give you the tools to run games in the vein of
such classics of children’s horror as:
• Goosebumps by R.L. Stine is the series that has terrified generations of
young readers.
• Are You Afraid of the Dark? is an anthology TV series where a group of
kids regularly gather to tell each other spooky stories around a campfire.
• Scooby Doo features the group of meddling kids and their dog who disrupt
the plans of all the nefarious grownups.
• Gotham Academy is set in the same universe as Batman and features a teenaged girl and her friends dealing with the mysteries and threats of their
school, which is just across the road from Arkham Asylum.
• Nancy Drew by Carolyn Keene is the classic girl sleuth.
• Super 8 definitely owes a debt to Steven Spielberg’s works like E.T. A group
of kids encounters a terrifying otherworldly force with nobody to rely on
but themselves.
• The Lewis Barnavelt Series by John Bellairs features a shy, overweight,
bookish boy and his friends overcoming evil forces usually bent on ending
the world.
• The Goonies is a classic movie about a group of kids facing their fears—not
just of monsters and darkness and crooks, but of moving house and being
split up—and going on a wild and crazy adventure.
• Stranger Things is a TV series inspired by Stephen King books like IT and
The Body. Kids roam around on bikes and face down existential threats
with their pluck and each other.
• Monster Squad is about a young group of monster fanatics who attempt to
save their town from Count Dracula and his fellow monsters.
• Hocus Pocus is about a resurrected trio of evil witches, and the brother and
sister duo who, with their new friend and talking cat (it’s a long story), try
to put them back in the grave.
MONSTER TWISTS
Although monsters in children’s horror are based on standard tropes,
they may still have twists to make them unique. For instance, in Bunnicula
the menace is a vampire, who also happens to be a bunny. Spooky Fun
lets all the players contribute twists; see “Twistcraft” on page 136.
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Children’s Horror
The element at the core of children’s horror is the same thing that makes adult
horror scary: taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. Fear of the unknown
is a universal theme in horror, and you can use it to great effect regardless of the
age range of the participants.
Despite this universal theme, there are conventions in children’s horror that
clearly distinguish it from horror aimed at older audiences. A primary one is
the handling of violence—there are rarely depictions of violence or injuries in
children’s horror, much less death. And certainly not where it happens to the protagonists or any of their close allies. Nor does children’s horror explore the sorts of
existential crises that often feature in adult horror. Children’s horror does feature
distrust and incredulity from authorities because of the protagonists’ youth, but
typically this is resolved at or before the climax of the story, when adults finally
realize how bright and capable the young protagonists are.
The fear in children’s stories tends to be more immediate and localized. A
menace of some sort shows up early on and threatens the protagonists or their
loved ones. The menace is frequently a traditional type of monster (such as a
mummy, vampire, ghost, or werewolf ) and leaves telltale clues that point to its
nature. The protagonists reach out for help, but being kids, naturally no one
believes them. Horror thrives on powerlessness; this is easier to do in children’s
horror, because they don’t have access to the tools that will let them fight off the
menace. Instead, they must rely on their wits and camaraderie to triumph.
Empowerment
Horror presents a great opportunity for empowering children to confront their
own fears. This is particularly true in a group game setting, where children can
work together and talk out what’s scaring them—and then vanquish it. This is
an important part of Spooky Fun: the children must be able to handle whatever
menace is presented to them, and shouldn’t ultimately be saved by adults or
other forces.
In fact, adults in children’s horror are frequently depicted as incompetent or
unaware of what’s really going on. They aren’t able to relate to the children, nor
do they believe them. Kids play the role of the defenders, breaking the rules that
are supposed to keep them “safe” in service of fighting a grave threat.
As with horror for adults, the menaces may be metaphors. For example, they
could be twists on the perils of social media, dealing with hostile cliques at school,
or having trouble with a particular teacher. Any of these can be given a spooky
sheen and used to explore topics that are personal and meaningful to children.
Fun
Your Spooky Fun game must be fun! The best way to achieve this is to discuss up
front what sorts of scary stories everyone likes. Is there a particular kind they like
more? The monster stories of Goosebumps or maybe the mystery of Scooby Doo!?
“Aspects” on page 126 discusses the use of a nightmare for each character. This
is a very important tool in both setting boundaries and figuring out what each
player wants to see. Setting expectations is a big part of any game, but particularly
one that’s designed to scare the players.
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Meddling Kids: Character Creation
The characters in Spooky Fun are kids dedicated to thwarting menaces and monsters. As mentioned in “What is This?”, the game is geared toward players aged
8-14, and their characters are in a similar age range. The protagonists must navigate the awkward landscape of middle school while also dealing with menacing
terrors.
The characters in Spooky Fun stories are created a bit like the ones in Fate
Accelerated. However, there are some pretty big differences, which we tell you
about in this section.
Aspects
Characters in Spooky Fun have three aspects—high concept, nightmare, and
clique—which are fleshed out during character creation. The youngest players
may find it difficult to come up with good aspects, so ask leading questions to
get the creative juices flowing. You can also give them suggestions to guide the
process.
High Concept: Functions the same way it does in Fate Accelerated. What’s their
deal? Are they an Introverted Bookworm or a Sassy Track Star? The high
concept should suggest a niche for their character.
Nightmare: This aspect lets each player highlight what their character is afraid
of. This gives the players some control over what they want to see in the game.
Are they afraid of concrete things like Snakes or Spiders or something more
abstract like Looking Stupid or Not Sticking Up for My Friends?
Discuss with the players how this nightmare would look during the game. Make
sure they choose something they’re comfortable seeing—this is something the
character, not the player, should be afraid of. Their nightmares will come up in
the game, so make sure that all of the players are comfortable with each character’s
nightmare. If one player can’t deal with clowns (and let’s be honest, who really
can), that’s a bad nightmare for anyone to choose.
Clique: You remember how junior high was, right? Yeah, it’s painfully socially
stratified and fractured. This aspect highlights what group the character runs in,
like the JMS Drill Team or Kevin Baker’s D&D Group. It’s also fine being
a Lone Wolf, but highlighting how groups treat each other lets the players play
through experiences and situations that are familiar to them. Having to approach
different groups for favors and help makes for a fun roleplaying opportunity.
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Report Card: Skills
Characters in Spooky Fun get a report card. The report card is a list of skills as
in Fate Core, although there are fewer skills here, each representing a very broad
area of expertise. These skills also reflect the ability to gain related resources and
contacts. Every skill can be used for all four actions; during play, the players
describe how the skill in question lets them accomplish a task. Give players wide
latitude in how their characters’ skills apply to the task at hand—one of the biggest sources of fun is watching kids come up with creative ideas for how to stop
the dark forces they face.
Each character gets one skill at Good (+3), one skill at Fair (+2), one skill at
Average (+1), one skill at Mediocre (+0), and one skill at Poor (-1).
Computers and Tech: Technological savvy. Hacking into the school computer.
Using lockpicks on a door. Disabling an alarm. Setting up motion sensitive video
cameras.
Drama and Art: Creative expression. Pretending to be someone else. Creating
a dummy to lie in bed while sneaking out of the house. Gaining assistance from
the stage manager at The Vortex playhouse.
English and History: Command of language and culture. Researching a strange
artifact. Learning about someone’s family history. Forging a note to get out of
7th period.
Math and Science: Understanding of the natural world. Figuring out what sorts
of large animals would live in Oak Hollow. Making a dry ice bomb. Procuring
a microscope.
Physical Education: Physical aptitude. Running away from a ghostly force.
Climbing over a tall fence. Fighting off Pascal and his bully minions.
SKILLS AS APPROACHES
Skills in Spooky Fun are very broad. They straddle the line between skills
in Fate Core and approaches in Fate Accelerated. Problems should be
amenable to a wide variety of solutions. In this sense, these skills become
prescriptive in driving a certain type of fiction while in play. Getting away
from a bully might not require Physical Education. Instead, a player might
have an idea to steal a letterman jacket from the band room, and use
Drama and Art to slink away with a gaggle of band kids.
Aspects and stunts can be used to help increase diversity. For example,
a Track Star might be quick, but doesn’t necessarily have a high score
in Physical Education, perhaps because they aren’t a good teammate.
Similarly, the Debate Team Captain might not do as well in English and
History, getting by more on charisma than scholarship.
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Conditions
Characters in Spooky Fun don’t have stress tracks or consequences. Instead they
have conditions. These are a little like consequences that are already filled out.
They’re described in more detail in the Dresden Files Accelerated, page 116.
Whenever a character is successfully attacked, one of these conditions is checked
off. If the attack gets a success with style, two conditions must be checked off.
Conditions may also be checked off to succeed at a cost. If a character must take
a condition, but has no relevant conditions available, the character is taken out.
The choice of which condition to check off is based on the source of the attack
or cost. As with using skills, allow players fairly wide latitude on how these are
applied.
While a Spooky Fun character has a condition marked on their character sheet,
they also have an aspect of the same name, and that aspect comes with a free
invoke that can be used by their enemies.
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REMOVING CONDITIONS
All of the conditions in Spooky Fun are considered sticky, which means they
stay checked off until a specific event happens. It’s up to you to decide when
these conditions are unchecked. Having other characters step in to help promotes teamwork and makes for a fun narrative—for example, “How do you help
Anna get out of being grounded?” In some cases, it will take overcoming passive
opposition of at least Fair (+2) to remove a condition.
CONDITIONS
• Angry: When a plan doesn’t work out for the characters. When a character
is humiliated in a social situation.
• Weary: When the characters must travel far and didn’t do well enough in
Physical Education to not be winded. When the characters have a run-in
with a menace. This condition goes away after a short rest.
• Spooked: A Spooked character is always looking over their shoulder for
signs of trouble. When you’re Spooked, it’s difficult to do well on homework. Spooked is a good condition to take when a character sees signs of
the menace, but hasn’t been directly confronted.
• Terrified: Terrified is a more severe condition than Spooked, probably
brought on by failing to overcome fear when confronting the menace. A
Terrified character mostly wants to get away and hide. If forced into a
confrontation, they prefer to stay in the back and throw objects maniacally.
If a character becomes Terrified, the other players should work to get them
un-Terrified. Perhaps those Drama skills can be used to put on a brave face.
• Grounded: Parents just don’t understand. The players are always in danger
of getting in trouble, and this is what happens when they get caught! Time
to start sneaking out of the house.
• Detention: Teachers just don’t understand. Late to class due to “ghost
hunting” is not an excused absence. On the plus side, detention is a great
place to meet that rebel kid whose uncle has all those old books about
vampires.
• Suspended: If Detention is already checked and more suspicious stuff
happens at school, you may get Suspended. Although this opens up time
for monster hunting, it can make it very hard to work with other kids.
Typically, getting Suspended also means getting Grounded, unless the
character succeeds at some fast talking.
• Untrustworthy: Too much of that monster talk gets you labeled as a liar.
There aren’t many in the adult world who are okay to talk to.
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Stunts
Use the rules in Fate Accelerated Edition (page 31) to create stunts. As mentioned
there, characters start with one stunt and may choose more at appropriate milestones. If the players are new to Fate, it’s a good idea to start with no stunts and
add one later.
Besides gaining a +2 to any of the skills mentioned in the report card, stunts
may also get +2 to Courage in certain circumstances. See “Overcoming Fear”
(page 133) for details on how this works. Be particularly careful not to make
stunts using Courage too broad, since it’s so important to the game.
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•
Because I have Lockpicks, I get +2 when using Computers and Tech
to open a locked door.
•
Because I know Tae Kwon Do, I get +2 to Courage when dealing
with bullies at school.
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Adapting for Different Countries
Nightmares and monsters are a universal human concept. Junior high and
middle school, however, are not. While this piece is written from the perspective
of the United States school system, you may want to set it somewhere else.
If the game is set in a country you aren’t familiar with, read up on how junior
high works there. It varies quite a bit. Setting your game somewhere different
is a great way to learn about another country, but horror works best with some
level of familiarity. Help the players gain an understanding of notable differences
for their characters.
Nightmare: While fear is universal, the particulars of fear can also vary by culture. There are a few very common fears: spiders, heights, snakes, and enclosed
spaces. But this could be an opportunity to find something more unique and
evocative. In China, students work fairly long hours in preparation for a Senior
High School Entrance examination. This test is very stressful, and it would be
natural to have fears about not doing well. The conditions in the game take on
added significance when so much pressure is placed on one test. Other countries
have similar high pressure exams that are nightmare fodder.
Clique: The clique aspect could be replaced with something more thematic. For
instance, if the characters go to a boarding school in a Commonwealth country,
it might be better to have a house or floor aspect. Cliques are to some degree universal, but a house can function similarly while evoking the school system better.
Conditions: In some places, children may be more separated from their parents,
such as if they go to something more like a boarding school. In this case, a few
of the conditions may not make sense. In particular, being Suspended might
completely take them out of the action. It might be good to replace Suspended
with something like Punishment Detail. That way they remain with their peers at
school where the mystery is, but have additional obligations to fulfill. Grounded
might become Early Curfew.
Skills: Finally, the names of the skills may need to be changed to match the area.
It’s important, though, that a suitably broad range of skills are available. The skills
in this game were chosen to cover most of the challenges present in young adult
horror. If the students go to a technical school, they may not be exposed to the
arts as much. But it’s useful for some skill to serve the role of creative expression,
such as Computer Animation or Cinematography. Skills are the trickiest part of
the game to get right, so use caution when making changes.
NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS
Occasionally you may find it necessary to create other NPCs besides the
menace for the players to interact with. In these instances, use the rules
for creating mooks found in Fate Accelerated Edition (page 38). This
consists of listing a few things the NPC is good at, for which they get a
+2, a few things they are bad at, for which they get a -2, and everything
else gets a +0. If the character is an adversary of some sort, it also may
be useful to give the character a Fear skill, which should be lower than
the menace’s Fear skill. That gives an opportunity for Courage to have an
impact, which is the core mechanical engine for Spooky Fun!
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Never Say Die: Confronting Evil
In Spooky Fun, the players work to defeat a menace. The menace may or may
not be supernatural. The menace may or may not be a monster. But it always
impacts the characters’ lives negatively, and above all, it’s spooky. The key skill for
a menace is its Fear, which is opposed by the heroes’ Courage. Courage and Fear
function as pacing and teamwork mechanisms for the investigation.
Courage
Courage is a special skill shared among all the players; it accumulates as the players learn more about the menace and work together to stop it.
Courage only applies to one menace at a time. When the players face a new
menace, their Courage resets to zero. When a player earns Courage, it’s added to
the group’s Courage total. If the menace isn’t defeated in one session, keep track of
how much Courage the players have accumulated! It doesn’t reset between sessions.
Like Fear, Courage represents more than just the character’s innate bravery—it
also reflects knowledge that the players have about the menace. One common
theme in kids’ horror is that understanding your fear is the first step to conquering
it. This ties in with Lovecraft’s maxim that the strongest and most powerful fear
is the fear of the unknown. Thus, as the players learn more, they gain Courage.
Of course, Lovecraft would also say that as you put together all the pieces you
go hopelessly insane. But, well, this is Spooky Fun, not My First Existential Terror.
So how do players earn more Courage?
LEARNING ABOUT THE MENACE
The primary way is by learning about the menace. Whenever the players uncover
a clue about the motivation of the menace or gain knowledge of a weakness
it has, they gain one point of Courage. The players need to understand how
the clue ties into the motivation or weakness to gain the Courage point. That
is, finding the strange powder at the entrance to the mine isn’t enough to earn
Courage, but putting together that the strange powder is residue from the chemistry lab of Dr. Pemberton is.
HELPING EACH OTHER
Players also get Courage points by engaging in acts of self-sacrifice for other
members in the group. Actions like standing up for another character—particularly if it means gaining a condition or spending fate points or free invokes to
directly help another character—earn a Courage point.
CREATING A TWIST
The final way players may earn a Courage point is by suggesting a twist for the
menace. A twist is a spooky turn in the story. Suggestions are given in “Twistcraft”
(page 136). There shouldn’t be more than one or two twists in a session.
MAX COURAGE
The players may never have more points in Courage than the Fear rating
(page 134) of the menace they’re investigating.
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Overcoming Fear
Courage is used to overcome scary situations. Menaces and their minions rely
heavily on fear and intimidation to enact their devious plots. Whenever the PCs
encounter the menace or a minion of the menace, each player must roll separately to overcome with Courage. However, the players may only use their points
in Courage if they are all together (and nobody has been taken out). If they are
off on their own investigating the menace, they can certainly cover more ground,
but without their friends for support their Courage skill is Mediocre (+0).
If all of the players fail or tie their Courage checks, the characters run away.
Back to safety! Under the bed, toward the nearest teacher (that isn’t a witch), or
into the clubhouse. All players must take a related condition. If they can’t, they
are taken out (page 134).
If at least one player succeeds, everyone can stay, though characters who fail or
tie must still pay some sort of cost (taking a condition satisfies this). The characters
must either run away or stay and face the menace as a group. Having one player
run off and do nothing is boring.
Taking out a menace is usually resolved with a conflict. Provided the characters don’t run away, each side takes actions trying to force the other side to take
conditions until they get to the point where they must take a condition and have
none left to take. For characters, conditions like Angry, Weary, and Terrified
are common results of successful attacks by the menace. The menace has special
conditions based on their weaknesses. In the case of success with style, two
conditions are taken.
Remember that when one character is taken out, others may stay and confront
the menace, but their Courage is treated as Mediocre (+0), making it much easier
for the menace to use Fear to scare the characters. This encourages the players to
get everyone back into the action quickly.
OVERCOMING FEAR EXAMPLE
Coach Wimbly, the Malevolent Soccer Coach and Walking Hotspot,
has the drop on Caroline and Samantha. He has the ability to control
their phones, which promptly come to life and show video of when they
were sleeping in their rooms. Something was watching them. This calls
for overcoming Fear.
Coach Wimbly’s Fear is Fantastic (+6). The girls have made some
progress toward understanding what’s going on, and currently have a
Courage skill of Great (+4).
The result for Caroline is Superb (+5). She already has the Spooked
condition checked off, so the Terrified condition is checked.
The result for Samantha is Epic (+7). Since Samantha has passed, both
characters may remain in the presence of Coach Wimbly. However, since
their Courage is still lower than the menace’s Fear, it may be prudent to
run for it and return another day.
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Being Taken Out
If a character must check off a condition but has no relevant conditions available,
they are taken out. As usual, the player doing the taking out gets to decide what
that looks like. However, remember the genre of story here. The protagonists in
these stories don’t get injured, much less die. This isn’t that kind of horror.
So what does getting taken out look like? The character might be paralyzed
by fear. Or banished to their room. Or ostracized by the other students. Bad
stuff—but not directly physically damaging. Another good option is to compromise something the characters care about as the cost of getting taken out—their
friend is captured by the menace or their phones are taken away as punishment.
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER
Another thing to keep in mind is that not being able to act is super boring.
Getting taken out shouldn’t relegate a character to the sidelines for very long.
Instead, it should be a prompt for the other players to work hard to get the character back in action. There is one big motivation for the other players to make
that happen (“Overcoming Fear”, page 133).
The Menace
Before you sit down to play Spooky Fun, you need to create a menace. For inspiration, look at “Influences and Inspirations” (page 124). Or substitute teach at a
middle school. Or both.
With all that in hand, think of clues that might lead to the menace. Try to keep
these clues open-ended so that they don’t have to be found in a certain order.
Having too much structure in the placement of clues can work against the clever
ideas of the players.
To make a menace for Spooky Fun, follow the steps in “Making Monsters”
(page 49), but the first step is to figure out how scary and powerful it is.
Fear
Fear is represented in the form of a Fear skill which is rated on the Fate ladder
as normal. On the lowest end, the players can confront the menace without any
work at all. That’s a sad menace indeed. A bully of the lowest sort. Or a flumph.
No, not very scary at all. On the highest end, the menace is both terrifying and
has broad reach and ability to affect the world. The players will need to spend
a few sessions gathering resources and information before they can thwart it. A
menace with a Fear rating two higher than the peak skill of the characters is a
great adversary for a one-shot adventure.
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Fear measures more than just pure terror (although it definitely represents that).
It also determines the sorts of resources and power the menace can muster to stop
the characters. A high Fear menace has far-reaching capabilities.
Get Spooky!
The next step is to determine the nature of the menace. Is it natural or supernatural? Is it a living thing? Is it an object? If the characters are already created, use
their nightmare aspects to help in the creation of the menace, so it can capitalize
on those fears. Also figure out a goal for the menace. Scare as many children as
possible? Stay youthful? Accumulate gold? Keep tourists away from the illegal
mining operation? The goal helps you frame what the menace is up to. Don’t
worry as much about its ultimate motivation; just think about what it’s going to
do that will affect the characters.
How will the menace negatively affect the characters? Come up with a list of
ways to scare the characters and make their lives difficult. As you run the players
through the game, refer to this list frequently to keep the action going.
Use the menace’s nature, goals, means, and evil plots to help you choose its
high concept, trouble, purpose, and other aspects (page 50).
Skills
The main skill that menaces use is Fear. This is a broad and effective skill, used
both to scare off the characters and for when the menace is exercising its true
nature. However, it’s fine to give menaces a few monstrous skills as well, as
described in “Making Monsters” (page 54). If Fear or monstrous skills don’t
apply but a roll is needed, the menace rolls at Mediocre (+0).
Weaknesses
Menaces also don’t have stress or consequences. Instead, they have some number
of conditions that fit their nature. As a starting point, give the menace a number
of conditions equal to half the menace’s Fear. The menace’s conditions work the
same way they do for characters, although typically once a menace has a condition checked, they may never uncheck it.
Taken Out
If a menace has no relevant conditions when it needs to check one off, it is taken
out. Unlike the characters, when a menace is taken out, it is taken out for good.
This can take many forms depending on the nature of the menace. For example,
monsters may be destroyed, criminals discovered, and ghosts sent to rest.
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Twistcraft
Creating twists is fun and scary! In Spooky Fun, the responsibility for creating
twists is shared by everyone. The players get a Courage point for suggesting a
fun twist, so prompt the players during the game for good twists. Good twists
are spooky, surprising, and make things difficult for the young investigators.
Sometimes kids need some guidance to create a twist that meets those criteria.
A good opening for a twist is when they’re already researching or learning about
the menace.
“You think they actually live in the nearby swamp? I wonder why?”
Frequently during play, the players plot and speculate on what sort of horror
they’re up against. Often their ideas are better than whatever you have planned.
This just takes that idea and makes it explicit. All of the players can bounce ideas
off of each other and come up with something great. Now, if you have a good
idea and want to keep it in your back pocket for a particularly scary time, so
much the better.
Oh No!
Here’s a list of different twist ideas for inspiration. Feel free to set this out on the
table so all the players can see it, and have them add their own creepy suggestions.
Generally, these are all in the form of a revelation, such as “Oh no...” Remember
the lessons from the uncanny valley: something almost, but not quite, like its
real life counterpart is spooky. Thus, little twists on something familiar to the
players is likely to be spookier than something completely and totally unfamiliar.
However, be careful not to introduce real people as the antagonists of the game.
It’s already easy enough for kids to badmouth students and teachers they don’t
like—no need to also turn them into forces of darkness.
TWISTS
Oh no…
• …my parents are in on it!
• …our teacher is in on it!
• …the police are in on it!
• …that house has been abandoned for 10 years!
• …it’s controlling my cat!
• …it’s already in the house!
• …the conspiracy goes way deeper!
• …it can walk through walls!
• …it can read my mind!
• …it can eat our dreams!
• …it already got to our parents!
• …they’ve been dead for over 10 years!
• …it feeds on electricity!
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Structure
So, you have a menace, now what? Think of a hook to get the ball rolling. This
should be a clear problem the players need to tackle. It should suggest an explicit
path for them to take, such as a friend in trouble or something bizarre that happens to them that they need to address. This is frequently an initial brush with
the menace or agents of the menace. Remember, fast pacing! Spooky Fun is
designed to be played over a few short two-hour sessions. Pace accordingly. Get
to the bad stuff quickly. No slow burns. Younger players (and most adults) have
short attention spans.
After the hook, the game will wander broadly. Particularly in Spooky Fun, where
you’re soliciting feedback from the players to create twists, you shouldn’t expect a
certain sequence of actions on the players’ part. Instead, create a list of evil plots
the menace will use to cause problems for the players. Pull these out when there’s
a lull in the action or when the players need more motivation.
Finally, come up with a list of events and clues that can be used by the players
to thwart the menace. These should point at the weaknesses of the menace, as
well as putting the menace into context. Where does it come from? What does it
want? Remember, spooky! Try to come up with some scary revelations that will
make the players gasp.
Clues also work as a pacing mechanism for the story. The rate of discovery
should be based on how long you want to play. Remember, shorter is better
when playing with kids! If there’s a lull in the action or the players seem confused,
clues may be delivered by an ally to help prod them along again. Twists are player
facing tools which also help lulls, but sometimes clues work better for pushing
the action along.
Back to Reality
After the session, it’s time to come back to earth. Particularly if the game featured places and things familiar to the players, it’s useful to briefly discuss the
distinction between what happened in the game and how those places and things
function in real life. One effective technique for doing this is to put the players
in the shoes of a horror writer. Pull back the curtain on how fear was created
in the game. Knowing the tricks can help children realize how their fears are
manipulated by imaginary things.
Chapter 8 + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
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The Hotspot
Me: “What’s your greatest fear?”
My Kid: “No wifi.”
Following is a sample menace, ready for you to throw against your younger players. This is, perhaps, the most horrifying thing a middle schooler can imagine: a
teacher able to control their precious phones.
The physical education teacher at Jackson Middle School, Coach Harold
Wimbly, is not exactly what he appears. Sure, he’s a hypercompetitive soccer
coach angling for a job at prestigious St. Francis High School. Everyone knows
that. Everyone also knows Coach Wimbly is willing to do whatever it takes to
get there. What they don’t know is just how much he’s capable of doing. That’s
up to the characters to discover.
Coach Wimbly has strange powers over nearby wireless devices. In particular,
he’s a walking hotspot, able to connect to the internet without any external aid.
He can also control his student’s thoughts through a nefarious app called the
JMS Fitness Wizard, mandatory for all students enrolled in his physical education class at JMS. Coach Wimbly uses the app to crush his opponents and make
himself look better.
Weaknesses
Coach Wimbly needs to feed on electricity to survive. If he doesn’t consume
batteries every day, he begins to fade out of existence. If the characters can keep
him from getting his battery supply, they will weaken him, possibly to the point
of defeating him. They may also be able to use science to construct a device that
draws power from him. Or hack into him and infect him with a computer virus
that shuts him down.
The Hook
Maxine Green, friend of the characters, is in trouble. She got caught breaking
into Dalton Haywood’s house. The characters know her very well, and she’s not
the kind of person to do something like that. But no one believes her, and now
she’s in trouble. She doesn’t remember anything about what happened. The last
thing she remembers was filling out her exercise information on the JMS Fitness
Wizard. Maxine was proud of herself for finishing the three mile jog. And then—
bang!—she’s suddenly sitting outside of Dalton’s house waiting for the police.
Weirdly, she had Dalton’s phone with her, apparently the only thing she took.
Through investigation, the characters may discover that Dalton Haywood
doesn’t go to Jackson Middle School. Instead, he goes to their rival, Mesa Prep.
He also happens to be Mesa’s top goal scorer on the soccer team, as well as an
excellent student.
Maxine successfully installed the JMS Fitness Wizard onto Dalton’s phone,
and when he opens it, Coach Wimbly will infect Dalton’s brain. Dalton will
suddenly feel ill and not be able to play for the upcoming game. The players may
learn about his absence by going to the game or through the school rumor mill.
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Evil Plots
This is a list of ways Coach Wimbly may make life difficult for the characters.
Most of these are for use if Coach Wimbly starts suspecting the characters are
onto his plan:
• Coach Wimbly successfully infects one of the characters with the JMS
Fitness Wizard app. The characters are, of course, all in his P.E. class. He
might use them to steal batteries from local stores, or sabotage another
soccer team by putting laxatives in their drinks or destroying their equipment. This naturally gets the characters in trouble. Grounded for sure!
As an alternative, he may infect one of their close friends again. Maybe
poor Maxine.
• One of the characters’ phones starts working erratically. It doesn’t connect
to the internet. Unbeknownst to the characters, Coach Wimbly is nearby
causing problems. How will they communicate with their friends and get
the team together?
• Coach Wimbly sends Larkin, Tom, and Susie, school bullies all, to engage
in a campaign of harassment against the characters. These school bullies
have Fair (+2) Fear.
• More than anything, though, Coach Wimbly wants to defeat all of the
soccer teams on his schedule by the greatest score possible.
Clues
The following are lots of spooky clues and events to use during the characters’
investigation:
• In the JMS gym store room, the players discover buckets and buckets of
used batteries.
• The characters see Coach Wimbly ingesting a battery by placing it in his
mouth. His entire head lights up with energy. When he’s done, he spits it
out onto a pile of used batteries.
• The players find a weird hotspot—WINNRWIMBLY—at school near the
gym. If the players go to school at night to investigate the gym, it’s not
there. In fact, it seems to only be around when Coach Wimbly is around.
How could that be? Once the players learn this, it can be a good way to
show when the Coach is nearby and stalking them.
• Coach Wimbly moved here this past summer from Oakwood Academy,
a school in a nearby district. There were lots of angry reports filed against
him, suggesting he sabotaged other soccer teams he competed against.
Strangely, these reports never saw broader circulation and didn’t reach the
administration at JMS.
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Coach H. Wimbly
ASPECTS
High Concept:
Malevolent Soccer Coach
Other Aspects: MOAR VOLUME!;
Walking Hotspot
SKILLS
Fantastic (+6): Fear
STUNTS
Mind Control: Provided they have used his
mind control app, Coach Wimbly may
implant a suggestion in the target’s mind
unless the target successfully defends
with Courage against Good (+3) passive
opposition. The target can use Courage to
resist the suggestion even if they are alone.
WEAKNESSES
[]Hungry for Energy
[]Auxiliary Power
[]Frustrated by Losing
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APPENDIX 1: THE X-CARD
For reasons of space, we present only the key details of the X-Card text here for
your reference. GMs, we encourage you to read the full document at the link
included here.
The X-Card is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) by John Stavropoulos http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg
The X-Card is an optional tool (created by John Stavropoulos) that allows
anyone in your game (including you) to edit out any content anyone is uncomfortable with as you play. Since most RPGs are improvisational and we won’t know
what will happen till it happens, it’s possible the game will go in a direction people
don’t want. An X-Card is a simple tool to fix problems as they arise.
To use, at the start of your game, simply say:
“I’d like your help. Your help to make this game fun for everyone. If anything
makes anyone uncomfortable in any way… [draw X on an index card] …
just lift this card up, or simply tap it [place card at the center of the table].
You don’t have to explain why. It doesn’t matter why. When we lift or tap
this card, we simply edit out anything X-Carded. And if there is ever an
issue, anyone can call for a break and we can talk privately. I know it sounds
funny but it will help us play amazing games together and usually I’m the
one who uses the X-Card to protect myself from all of you! Please help make
this game fun for everyone. Thank you!”
Notes:
• The X-Card speech above can be more useful than the X-Card itself. It
makes it clear that we are all in this together, will help each other, and that
the group of people playing are more important than the game.
• Use the X-Card early, even on yourself, to lead by example, and model
the behavior.
• The X-Card does not have to be a tool of last resort. The less special it feels,
the more you use it, the more likely someone will use it when it really is
badly needed.
• The X-Card is not a replacement for conversation. If you prefer to talk
about an issue that comes up instead of using the X-Card, please do. Just
because the X-Card is available does not mean it has to be used. But
when it is used, respect the person who uses it and don’t ask why or start
a conversation about the issue. The X-Card is optional.
• The X-Card is a safety net, but not everyone will feel comfortable using
it in all situations. If a player had a problem with the game and wants
to talk to you about it afterward, please listen. It is not okay to say “but
you didn’t use the X-Card” as a defense. Don’t use the X-Card offensively.
Listen and talk it out.
Appendix 1 + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
141
• If you aren’t sure what was X-Carded, call for a break and talk with the
person in private.
• Don’t use the X-Card as an excuse to push boundaries. It’s not a Safe Word.
• Some GMs (usually those who haven’t used the X-Card) fear that the
X-Card will limit their creativity. Many GMs who use the X-Card find the
opposite is true. Since the GM doesn’t have to be a magical mind reader,
it frees up their energy to focus on other elements of GMing.
• The X-Card is not an excuse to try to get back to the game as soon as
possible. People matter more than the game. If you need to take a break,
take a break.
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APPENDIX 2: SCRIPT CHANGE
Script Change is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
4.0 International License by Brie Sheldon http://tinyurl.com/nphed7m
Tabletop games are exciting, and fun, and can explore adventures we otherwise
might not have. However, they can approach topics that some people aren’t comfortable with. Some people might want to play a grittier game that digs deep into
the grindhouse style of action, or one that has sex and romance that’s detailed and
intimate, while others might want to have the gore and guts or sexual content
happen off-screen.
Often it’s good to discuss with your group a “rating” for your game content.
You can refer to the standard film ratings for these, or create your own! Generally,
however, you should know what audience you’re playing for - is it going to be
G-rated good fun for all ages, or is this more of an adults-only show? Will there
be sex? Gore? Everything is acceptable as long as everyone at the table agrees to it.
One caveat: Sometimes people don’t know their boundaries yet. Maybe they
do, and they just aren’t expecting to kick down the door and find something that
really makes them scared, or uncomfortable. This is where Script Change comes
in. The Script Change tools are called Rewind, Fast Forward, and Pause, and
are detailed in the following text.
At any point during the game, if a player or game master (GM) finds that they
are uncomfortable with the subject matter or actions happening in the game,
they can call for a Script Change. To make things easier, the GM should write
“Rewind,” “Fast Forward,” and “Pause” on individual index cards or print out
the sample Script Change cards in the back. There are also some additional tools
related to Script Change, the Highlight Reel, Instant Replay, and Wrap Meeting,
discussed later in this document.
What’s the point of Script Change?
If you’re playing games with people, you should always discuss consent first.
What everyone is okay with, what is not, and ask before you do anything that
may make people uncomfortable - any visceral violence, sexual contact not previously agreed upon, etc. Even so, when you’re in a game, sometimes elements
change. Script Change helps address those moments.
How do I call for a Script Change?
Say “rewind,” “fast forward,” or “pause,” or raise a Script Change card.
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What happens when I call for a Script Change?
You can ask the current actor to either rewind or fast forward. If you just want
to skip over unpleasant content - maybe you want the sex scene to fade to black,
or you want to skip the gory details of someone being disemboweled, you ask for
a fast forward. However, if something has already been said or done that you take
issue with, ask for them to rewind to a specific point, and they can start again.
You may also call for a pause. Pauses are used when things are too intense, but
you still want to continue playing the scene. With a pause, there is no discussion,
just a break in the action while we all catch our breath, and then play resumes
with no changes or omissions.
Do I have to explain anything?
No. If it’s unclear, state what you want to avoid, but you don’t need to offer any
explanations.
How do I know people will take it seriously?
Every player at the table and the GM should read about Script Changes and
agree to the terms before playing. If someone won’t follow the rules, just explain
that they’re violating the contract, and feel free to step away from the table or
ask the GM to handle it.
If the GM is the problem, speak to the other players for support. A show just
isn’t a show without a full cast, and the GM is just as responsible for the content
of the game as the players.
Never feel pressured to do something that you feel violates the contract, and
know that the rules here support your right to feel safe and comfortable when
playing your game.
144
FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + Appendix 2
Is Script Change just for content?
No way! You can use script change to help manage tone and roleplay, too. If
the tone has gone too comedic or too dramatic for you, call for a rewind. You
can also use rewind if someone is pulling punches and not making the game as
action-filled, or as drama-filled, as you want it to be! If you feel like someone is
going on-and-on and is making the game boring, you can call for a fast forward.
Best of all, you can always use pause when you need a break.
What other things can you do to enhance the game with Script
Change?
You can do a lot of fun things, but two particular options are a Highlight Reel
and an Instant Replay.
With an Instant Replay, right after a scene happens, you can call a pause just
to go over what happened out of character. It is a metagaming tool, but can be
useful to make sure everyone is on the same page. This is particularly great when
you’re doing intense social scenes or complicated action, or if you have a longer
scene that might leave people lost.
A Highlight Reel is at the end of the session. This is a strictly positive thing,
and the intention of the tool is to allow players to point out things they liked
about the session. Each player should have the opportunity to mention a specific
scene or interaction they liked in the session, and the GM gets the chance to do
the same. Since it’s inevitable that players might have negative or constructive
feedback for the game, it’s suggested that all sessions have a Wrap Meeting as
an optional tool - for emotionally intense games they’re heavily recommended.
Wrap Meetings are an opportunity for the group to go over anything that happened in the game that people might need to discuss, from constructive to negative.
It’s good to develop a habit of talking these things through. Some things people
might want to talk about: if a certain action in game went over their boundaries
and they didn’t feel comfortable calling pause or rewind, or if something had an
impact on them emotionally that they need to talk out. This should be a supportive environment, and no one should tell someone their feelings are “wrong.”
Constructive criticism is always great, including in regards to plot choices, feelings
of imbalance in character focus, or even mechanics disagreements. In general,
use wrap meetings to talk about the game and what could be improved and how
it’s impacted the players, or the GM. Everyone is an equal in this conversation.
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145
REWIND
REWIND
FAST FORWARD
FAST FORWARD
PAUSE
PAUSE
146
FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + Appendix 2
APPENDIX 3: COMPLEMENTARY TOOLS
Not sure which of the many tools in this book to use in your game to get the best
effects? To get you started, here’s our guide to a few sources of inspiration and the
tools that work particularly well with each other to emulate them:
Game Style
Tools
28 Days Later, Night of the
Living Dead, The Walking
Dead, The Evil Dead
The High Cost of Living (page 93),
The Book of Scars (page 92),
Rogue Body Parts (page 70).
Supernatural, The X-Files,
Lovecraft Mythos
Flashback & Reconstruction (page 22),
Using a Communal
Fate Point Pool (page 24),
Climactic Dilemmas (page 30),
Trauma Aspects (page 39),
Coping Conditions (page 41)
Saw, The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, Hostel
Viscera and Gore (page 45),
Hardened Hearts (page 48),
The Flesh is Weak (page 67)
The Dead Zone, The Mist
The Doom Clock (page 89),
Failure with Style (page 91),
Haunting (page 19),
Heroic Sacrifice (page 18)
Crimson Peak, Rosemary’s
Baby, Hellraiser, Nightbreed
Horror is the New Pink (page 106),
Exploring Strange and
Dangerous Desires (page 26),
Confronting the Other (page 78)
Appendix 3 + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
147
INDEX
Adaptability, 34
Addictions, 37
Adversaries, 49
Alien
Hand Syndrome, 70
pregnancy, 120-22
Angry, 129, 133
Approaches
modified, 9
monster, 54
Arm, rogue, 70
Aspects
in children’s horror, 126
choosing, 14
themed, 9
Attack, 54
of safe haven, 103-4
Avoidance, 43
Bereavement, 37
Bodily harm, 45
Body horror, 10, 65, 112
fatal alterations and, 67
media inspiration
for, 65
mental consequences
of, 69
mutilation and, 66-67
rogue body parts
and, 70-72
Body horror, survivable
alterations, 68
Book of Scars, 92
Care, 9, 11-12, 22
Character(s)
creation of, 14-15, 95,
126-131
vulnerabilities, flaws
in, 14
Children’s horror, 9, 123
adaptations for, 131
aspects in, 126
back to reality in, 137
character creation
for, 126
conditions in, 128-29
courage in, 132
empowerment and, 125
fear in, 125, 132-33,
134-35
148
Children’s horror
(continued)
fun in, 9, 10, 125
media inspirations
for, 124
menace in, 132,
133, 135
monsters in, 124
non-player characters
in, 131
self-sacrifice in, 132
skills in, 127, 131
structure of, 137
stunts in, 130
taken out in, 133-34
twist in, 132
twistcraft and, 136
Climactic dilemmas, 9,
30, 30-34
Clique, 126, 131
Clues, 137, 139
Coming of age, 117-19
Communal fate point(s)
pool, 9, 23, 24-25
Compels
modified or thematic, 9
visceral aspect of, 46
Concessions, modified, 9
Conditions, 10
in children’s horror,
128-29, 131
menace and, 135
monster and, 54-55
Conflicted desires, 26
Consequence
extreme, 34
modified, 10
Consumables, 95, 96
desperate measures
for, 99
free invokes and, 99
scavenging and, 99
in shorter games, 97
using, 99
Context, doomed
horror, 87
Coping condition(s), 10,
39, 40, 41-42
examples of, 43
types of, 42
FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + Index
Courage, children’s
horror, 132
Created, The, 60, 64
Cursed Lycanthrope, 50
Custom fate points, 59
Dangerous desires, 26
Dead characters, 6
Decision-based
compels, 46
Degeneration,
transformation
and, 67-68
Desires, 26
Detention, 129
Devil’s Spawn, The, 49,
50, 52
Dilemma(s), 29-30
climax and, 33
complications of, 32
declaration of, 33
resolution of, 32
planning,
presenting, 30-31
Disempowerment, 7
Domination, 56, 57
Doom, 9
Doom clock, 10, 87,
89-90, 92
Doomed horror, 85
achievements
outstanding doom
in, 86
Book of Scars and, 92
after death and, 92
failure with style in, 91
game creation for, 87
game rules for, 89-92
internal vs. external, 88
journey in, 86
media inspiration
for, 85
scale, context in, 87
scheduled events in, 89
surviving as long as
possible in, 86
timeline,
complications in, 87
understanding, 86
why play, 86
Doubt Your Own
Senses, 113
Drain, 56
Dresden Files
Accelerated, 10
conditions and, 41
custom conditions
and, 68
monsters and, 54
scale in, 76
sticky condition and,
48, 81
Early Curfew, 131
End game, Other and, 82
Enhanced self compels, 25
Event-based compels, 46
Evil plots, 137, 139
Eye, rogue, 72
Failure with style, 10, 91
Fate Accelerated
Edition, 130
children’s horror
approaches with, 127
Fate Accessibility Toolkit,
The, 10
disabled characters
and, 38
Fate Codex, 10
Fate Core System, 14
character creation
with, 14, 95
children’s horror skills
under, 127
non-player characters
and, 95
NPC extreme
consequence
under, 101
playing opposition
and, 99
progressing
transformation
and, 68
resources and, 10
scaring players and, 16
stunts selection
with, 15
Fate points, themed,
modified, 9
Fate System Toolkit, 10
Favors, 21
Fear
in children’s horror,
132-33, 134-35
overcoming example
for, 133
monster and, 53
Features, monster, 53
Feminine horror, 106
action in, 114
alien pregnancy
example of, 120-22
aspects of, 9, 110, 115
domestic, 111
gaslighting and,
109, 113
haunted house
example of, 115-16
internal, 112
isolated spaces and, 12
lingering vs.
impending issues, 114
mechanizing, 108
media inspiration
for, 107
points in, 111
presentation of, 111
stalking in, 110
toxic romance and,
109, 114-15
Witch Hunt example
of, 117-18
Figment, 56
Flashbacks, 22-23
Flaws, 14
Fleeting condition(s)
coping, 42
monster, 55
Franklin, Ben, 21
Free invokes, 96-98
Game creation, 13
Gamemaster
before game begins, 8
challenging player
characters, 17
creating uncertainty,
suspense, 16
during play, 8
tools for, 9-10
Gaslighting, 109, 113
Ghost, 18, 19-20
Going without, 97
Gore, 45
mental toll of, 47
Gratification, deferred vs.
instant, 29
Grief, 37
Grounded, 129, 131
Group aspect, 24
Hand, rogue, 70
Hardened hearts, 10, 48
Hatreds, monster, 53
Haunted house, 115-16
Haven. See also Safe haven
aspects of, 102
attacks on, 103
Heart, rogue, 71
Heroic sacrifice, 9, 18
Highlight Reel, 145
Horror game
anatomy of, 5
tools for, 9
Horror genre, 5
disempowerment in, 7
isolation in, 6
uncertainty,
suspense in, 7
violation in, 6
Hypervigilance, 43
Immunity, monster, 53
Inappropriate emotion, 43
Indestructible, 56
Indifference, 48
Ineluctable Hunter, 49,
50, 52
Infect, 56
Instant Replay, 145
Intensity aspects, 8,
9, 27-28
Interests, monster, 53
Isolation, 6, 79
Killer swarm, 63
Knowledge, cost of, 59
Lasting conditions
coping, 42, 43
monster and, 55
Legacy aspect(s), 9, 18, 19
Lightning soul, 57
Limitations, monster, 53
Linked aspects, 14
Lovecraftian horror, 45
Loyalties, divided, 29
Index + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
149
Maladaptive coping
behavior, 42
Manifested aspect, 20
Menace
in children’s horror,
132, 133, 134, 135
sample of, 138-40
Mental aspect, naming, 39
Mental conflicts, 35
body horror
consequences of, 69
media inspirations
for, 35
repercussions of, 38
tools in, 36
wounds in, 37
Mental illness,
othering, 44
Metagaming, 36
Milestones, modified, 10
Monster(s)
aspects selection for, 53
in children’s horror, 124
conditions for, 54-55
examples of, 60-64
high concept, theme
for, 50
introducing, 58
making, 49
media inspiration
for, 49
pool, 59
purpose of, 52
skills, approaches
for, 54
stunts for, 55-57
threats of, 51
Moral dilemmas, 29
Mutilation, 10, 66-67
Necessity, 96
free invoke and, 98
half rations and, 98
recovering from lack
of, 98
Nightmare, 56, 126, 131
Nightmare Stalker, 49,
50, 52, 54
Non-player characters
(NPCs)
in children’s horror, 131
main, 101
nameless, 101
scavenging, 99
150
Non-player characters
(continued)
supporting, 101
survivor consequences
and, 100
sympathetic, 21-22
Obsessions, monster, 53
Obsessive ritual, 43
Obstacle
manipulation, 10
Open Door Policies, 36
Options, 30-31
Other, The
chaos and, 84
concept of, 74
confronting, 10, 78
creation of, 76-77
embracing, 75
end game and, 82
initial conflict and, 79
isolation and, 79
as liberator, 82-84
media inspiration
for, 73
opposition and, 79
redefining, 75
resistance and, 77
scale and, 76
threat recognition
and, 79
threshold criteria
and, 80
transformation
and, 80-81
Other-as-entity, 76
Othering mental
illness, 44
Outcomes, new,
altered, 10
Overcome, 54
Physical
transformations, 10
Player character(s), death
of, 6, 18
Player consent, safety, 7, 8
Player investment,
5, 11-12
game creation
and, 13-16
Poisonous sexuality,
114-15
Positive traits, monster, 53
FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + Index
Possess, 57
Principle vs. need, 29
Prior knowledge, 22
Punishment Detail, 131
Purpose aspects, 9
Radioactive PostApocalyptic
Wasteland, 105
Reconstruction, 9, 22, 23
Remote control, 57
Re-zoning, 10, 57
Rogue body parts, 10, 70
Roleplaying, 5-6
Safe haven
attacks on, 103-4
designing, 102-3
Scale, doomed horror, 87
Scars, 10, 35, 37
Scavenging, 99
Script Change system, 8,
36, 108, 143-45
Self-compels,
enhanced, 25
Self-sacrifice, children’s
horror, 132
Sensitivity, 9
Shadow Specter, 49,
50, 52
Skills
in children’s horror,
127, 131
choosing, 15
menace and, 135
modified, 9
of monster, 54
Slasher, 60, 62
Splatter horror, 45
attacks in, 48
Spooked, 129
Stalking, 110
Steering, 36
Sticky condition(s), 48
coping and, 42, 43
monster and, 55
Story details, 9, 25
Strange desires, 26
Stress, modified, 10
Stunts
in children’s horror,
127, 130
choosing, 15
for monster, 55-57
themed, 10
Survival horror games, 93
character creation
for, 95
consumables in, 96, 99
creation of, 95
examples of, 105
free invokes in, 96-98
going without in, 97
media inspiration
for, 94
necessity and, 96-98
safe havens and, 102-3
skill, approach
reductions in, 97
whittling characters
down in, 100-101
Suspended, 129, 131
Suspense, 7, 16
Swarm, 63
composition of, 57
Taken out
in children’s horror,
133-34
of menace, 135
Tension, managing, 16-17
Terrified, 129, 133
Theme
aspects and, 9
monster and, 50
Threshold criteria, 80
Tongue, rogue, 71
Tools,
complementary, 147
Toxic romance, 109
Transformation, 57
alterations and, 67-68
fatal alterations and, 67
Other and, 80-81, 84
progressing, 68
survivable alterations
and, 68
Trauma aspect, 39
in play, 40
Twist, 132
Twistcraft, 124, 136
Uncertainty, 7, 16
Unique conditions
of created, 64
of slasher, 62
of swarm, 63
of vampire, 61
Untrustworthy, 129
Vampire(s), 50, 60, 61
Victims, humanizing, 22
Violation, 6
Viscera
aspect compels
and, 9, 46
narrative uses of, 45
Vulnerabilities, 14
monster, 53
Weary, 129, 133
Wilderness Slasher, 105
Wimbly, Coach H., 140
Witch Hunt, 117-19
Wrap Meeting, 145
X-Card system, 8, 36,
108, 141-42
Zombie Apocalypse, 105
Zombies, 50
Zones manipulation, 10
Index + FATE HORROR TOOLKIT
151