TOP FIVE SURVIVAL HORROR RPGS Mike Brennan breaks down the Top Five Survival Horror RPGs Survival horror is a tricky genre to pin down. The horror part is easy enough, you just need an unsettling atmosphere, and the threat of catastrophe. It can be anything from “The villagers are a little too nice”, or “These angles shouldn’t exist in normal spacetime”, to There’s a giant blob eating everybody....RUN!!!”
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Survival horror is a tricky genre to pin down.”
It’s the survival part that’s the hard one to capture. A good test for survival horror is to remove the horror part. If after all the weird stuff packs up and leaves, you still have players in a potentially life threatening situation it’s a fair bet your running a survival horror game. 5. The Farm - Jared Sorenson (Inspectres) http://memento-mori.com/project/the-farm/ You are a ‘resident’ on the Farm, a small city located on a remote island run by the Headmasters. If you manage to survive for 6 ses-
sions, you will be rewarded by being killed and eaten. The object is to escape. The Farm has a group character creation system, there’s a pool of dice to be allocated to stats that the whole group draws from, and no real insistence on a fair distribution. The game revolves around the idea that what benefits the group may hurt an individual and vice versa. The system supports this idea well, without interfering in the flow of the game. Tasks are made easier if you elect a Leader, who rolls dice for the whole group, but the Leader has no responsibility to actually help you succeed. During group rolls one player can claim the roll of the “Pig” securing their chance of success, but potentially causing others in the group to fail catastrophically. You can aid other players but doing so puts you into Skill debt, making it impossible to succeed at that skill
Mike Brennan Mike has been gaming since before he was old enough to know better. Now he is old enough to know better and still hasn’t stopped. He lives in London with his boyfriend and a cat. You can follow him on Twitter @ohcrapzombies if you’re prone to that sort of thing.