The Lurking Fear, Past and Future

It's around one week since I put The Lurking Fear online. Since then, I've been floored by the number of downloads, especially considering the basically nonexistant marketing and social media presence. It's inspired me to talk a bit about the origins of this game and my plans for its future.

I've been interested in both rules-light indie games and the OSR for a long time. The OSR is a design philosophy inspired by the early editions of D&D that existed in the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes I see other games from that era, like Traveller, thrown in. One set of games I never see mentioned are the early horror games. Call of Cthulhu came out in 1981, Chill in '84, West End's Ghostbusters in '86, Beyond the Supernatural in '87. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was designed as a fantasy game in the vein of D&D, but many of its early adventures were directly inspired by CoC and took the form of horror adventures, most notably Shadows over Bögenhafen.

There's probably two reasons for the OSR ignoring the horror games. First of all, the early horror games were very different than early D&D. CoC is the biggest player in the space, with a d100 system and player characters as ordinary people in a nearly-mundane world, usually 1920s America. There were some dungeon crawls, but most published adventures tended towards investigate horror - solving a crime or investigating a weird occurrence. Over time, GMs realized that CoC was a great system for doing straight-up historical adventures and mundane mysteries as well.

Second, the horror game has never really needed a renaissance. CoC and Ghosbusters have been brilliant, quick-playing, relatively rules-light designs from the day they were published. Like sharks and cockroaches, CoC hasn't changed much and hasn't needed to over the years. The system was basically the same from 1e-6e. 7e, released in 2014, made some big changes, but you can still pretty much run a 1e adventure with the 7e rules and vice-versa. CoC adventures did character-driven narratives, intense psychodramas, and avant-garde stories long before the big indie narrative game boom, and they did remorseless lethality and rulings-before-rules before the OSR. There have been innovative new games in investigative horror, like Unknown Armies, Fear Itself/Trail of Cthulhu, Cthulhu Dark, Eclipse Phase, and 2015's standalone Delta Green ruleset, but none of these have gone in an OSR-style direction. The Cthulhu Hack deserves a special shoutout for letting people run investigative horror games in 1st edition D&D.

I was inspired to write The Lurking Fear when I sat down and thought - what if there had been an OSR for the early horror games? What if I sat down and tried to write a game that captured the spirit of sitting down at Sandy Petersen's gaming table instead of Gary Gygax's? There were definitely improvements that could be made on the old books after more than 40 years. To start with, most of my players aren't going to read a 445-page gamebook. Nor do they need to. Players in the 1980s needed large tomes as references for the 1920s, the Lovecraft mythos, and how to do investigative horror, but today Cthulhu is a household name, historical research is much more convenient, and a lot of players are coming to the table with a sense of how they expect an investigative horror game to go.

As I set about boiling the mechanics of classic investigative horror games down to their essence, I realized I was outlining the way I personally enjoy running horror games. I like to keep mechanical resolutions quick and focused on the story - and while I've had fun doing this in narrative games, I really like to do it with a d100 in hand. Pick a skill, roll it, and see if you got what you wanted - that's how I run a game, and looking up specific rules for edge cases like poisons, chases, or falling always seemed to break up the pace and dispel the tension. The only more complicated mechanic we really need is a sanity death spiral, since that's the heart of campaign play. Throw in some eldritch tome rules for good measure, because consulting an eldritch tome is one time when pausing to check the rules won't hurt the flow, and having a specific rule for tomes reminds GMs that they're fun to have around. If something weird is going to happen in a particular adventure, like a PC gaining an alien mutation, then the rules for it are part of that adventure; the next horror may be utterly distinct. Failing forwards is nearly mandatory in investigative horror, but there are no mechanics for it - that burden rests squarely on the GM and the plot. So that's the game I made. It's investigative horror, the way I've found myself running it for over a decade, whether the name on the front of the book says Warhammer or Delta Green or Unhallowed Metropolis. And yes, you caught me when I switched from saying horror to investigative horror - it's a distinction worth making after the end of the 1980s, when games like Vampire let people play a very different side of the horror genre.

Along the way, I've noticed that there really is a lot in common with trying to reach the Platonic ideal of a vintage-style d100 system and doing the same for fantasy d20 games in the traditional OSR style. The Lurking Fear is fast, lethal, and minimalist. It emphasizes creative problem-solving and exploration over combat, which is quite risky. It has no concept of game balance except through the unpredictability of an adventure having the potential to make anything useful or useless - in fact, I intentionally included some stats and skills that would usually, but not always, be less useful than others.

But what about tables and randomness? That's one big difference between investigative horror and OSR D&D - a good investigative horror game really does need a well-made plot for the players to poke at. Still, I've read, run, and played enough investigative horror that I think I can sum up the most important plot elements in a few good tables. I'm planning to put tables, plus GMing advice and examples of spells and monsters, in a follow-up book, The Lurking Fear: GM's Guide. You can expect to see that out on my itch.io page within a few months. I'm also working on a more modern d100 horror system that will be less compatible with old published adventures, but also have fewer of the quirks of classic systems.