Fear and Panic, a companion game to The Lurking Fear, has been released! Also, revised rules and layout for Lurking Fear! And more news!

Lots of big news today!

If you liked The Lurking Fear, take a look at Fear and Panic.
I designed The Lurking Fear to make it as easy as possible to play old Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green adventures using a short, simple, free ruleset. That means it sticks very close to the conventions that have been a part of CoC since it first came out in 1981. I want to make sure something like that always exists on the Internet to lower the barrier for people to play the literally thousands of published CoC adventures. I also want to build something of my own, something that takes inspiration from the many RPG innovations of the last few decades. That's what Fear and Panic is all about - getting creative and trying to build a game that does more to help people have the kinds of incredible horror experiences I've had when gaming with a good group and a good adventure.

There are two key innovations I have in Fear in Panic. Seeing scary things doesn't make characters faint, run away screaming, or do anything else that takes the player out of the game. It's a horror game and we're here to experience horror - so getting scared is mechanically rewarded. Fear gives characters the desperate drive to do more, risk more, and fight harder. The characters are still miserable, but the players don't lose agency.  Additionally, there's no more hitpoint-based combat. I've always been frustrated at how moving into combat turns and checking off hp slows down a game and kills the tension, even in relatively lethal horror systems. Instead, combat is resolved by fast and decisive opposed rolls that follow the rhythm of violence in a horror story.

One thing I've kept is the d100 skill system. I really like how a list of skills shows the things that a character does, not the things they are - sort of a mechanical "show don't tell". I also like how easy it is for players and GMs to tell the odds of a d100 roll.

The Lurking Fear and Fear and Panic are companion games. The Lurking Fear  is a portal that unlocks the treasures of the past. It won't change much, because it doesn't need to. Fear and Panic is a living, breathing creature of the present. I want to keep working on it and try to make it the best horror system that I can. I'm going to follow the path laid out by Mothership, another great d100 horror game - put a fully playable game up in early access, learn from how people play it, and improve it based on experience. Speaking of which, I'll be taking it on the road to Metatopia 2024 to get some playtesting feedback in person, so look out for me there!

You can download Fear and Panic here: https://lymetime.itch.io/fear-and-panic

Limited Physical Releases
On September 27th, I will be selling physical copies of most of my games at a game fair Takoma Park, Maryland. While I'm hoping to do a larger print run of Fear and Terror at some point, this may be the only time I sell physical copies of my other games. I'll have professionally printed staple-bound zines for The Lurking Fear and Fear and Terror, DIY zine versions of To Be A Wanderer and Nightmare Unleashed, and a surprise. You can check out the event at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/games/.

A Terrible Secret
I have a shocking and horrifying confession to make. When The Lurking Fear was originally released in August of 2022, it contained AI-generated background textures on the interior pages and an AI-generated symbol on the character sheet. The interior textures were intended to give the pages the look of pages printed on old paper. I released The Lurking Fear for free and Creative Commons, so I have never profited from the use of AI. I have now removed the AI-generated textures and symbol from The Lurking Fear, but I wanted to come clean about this for the sake of transparency.

In 2022, generative image AI was not a buzzword - it was a novelty whose only application seemed to be creating spooky and surreal dreamscapes. Artists I knew laughed at the idea that it could ever replace human work. If I had known then what generative AI would become, I would not have used the content. At any rate, the textures and symbol are now gone. The cover of Lurking Fear continues to be the beautiful work of Biohazard Shorty, a fully human artist who might be some sort of cryptid but definitely isn't a machine. I have never used AI to generate text in any of my works, and I never will. I write for the fun of it, and it would make no more sense than hiring an AI to eat ice-cream for me. There will never again be AI-generated content in my work.

The Lurking Fear now has a nice art-deco style interior layout. I think it looks better than the old edition, and it's definitely a smaller file! The pages are slimmed down to digest size to allow for convenient zine printing, and there's even a print-friendly version with offset pages if you'd like to try printing a copy for yourself at home. Since I had to redo layout, I took the chance to also rewrite some of the rules. I've made it a little more friendly for new players who have never heard of CoC. I also swapped around the opposed roll mechanic, so the higher roll wins on both mutual success and on mutual failure - the original version did lowest roll on mutual failures, which made a certain sort of poetic sense but actually rewarded characters with a lower rank in a skill. While the ePub version didn't need any layout changes, it includes the revised text as well.

I hope people can enjoy the cleaner rules and cleaner look. I swear, that GM's Guide is coming out sooner or later - it's just been a little stickier to write than I expected, but you can find some previews on my blog.

More to Come

I'm working on another large RPG project that I'm very excited about. It's a little different than the work I've already done - I've already made three different d100 horror systems, so it's about time for a change. Here are some options for getting updates when it comes out:

Join my mailing list at https://buttondown.com/Lyme
Join my discord at https://discord.gg/2vXZzJTkQU
Follow my new blog at https://brackish-draught.bearblog.dev/blog
Receive occasional Mastodon posts at https://dice.camp/@Lyme