Horror RPG bundle channels devil babies, The Wicker Man, MF Doom and internet creepypasta for Halloween game night
Scarily cheap.
A bundle of indie horror RPGs has landed on Itch.io, offering an instant collection of unique scary stories and spooky adventures for this Halloween.
The TTRPG Halloween Spooktacular bundle brings together a mix of standalone games and scenarios for games such as D&D 5E, including both existing titles and brand new releases making their debut.
The RPGs include a pair of ghost-bustin’ games in Alicia Furness’s Paranormal Inc. - a GM-less RPG in which surviving capitalism is as much a terror as the undead - and rules-light RPG Unhaunt This House by Yanahn, which tasks players with exploring a haunted building in an effort to exorcise its spectral residents.
Folk horror also makes a strong showing. In Eyes by the Roadside, players create a small Midwestern town and its history of spooky folklore (and its perhaps even more scary real-life terrors), before a mysterious ‘Incident’ triggers the arrival of a group of characters - also controlled by the players.
Meanwhile, Cassi Mothwin draws from familiar folk horror in What Crooked Roots, a collection of scenarios for D&D 5E inspired by classics such as The Wicker Man.
Moving from the traditional to the present day (or, at least, this century), Stoneshore’s technohorror party RPG forum.crypt explores the horrors of the internet as investigated through a series of creepypasta forums in the early noughties.
For those who like to don a pair of sunglasses even when the sun is down, Viditya Voleti’s Bloodbeam Badlands offers a post-apocalypse RPG inhabited by ‘cool vampire gunslingers’, while The Wretched creator Chris Bissette explores “sun-drenched horror” in experimental fiction offering Conkers.
Alongside the full games are several individual adventures and scenarios for games, including Level 1 OSR dungeon Witchtomb, bundle curator Cat Elm’s classic haunted house story The Haunting of Abimond Manor and Nettle Leaves, an adventure for Mausritter that forms part of Doomcrawl series inspired by the songs on rapper MF Doom’s early album Special Herbs.
If those don’t quite fright your fancy, how about Micah Anderson’s devil-baby adventure Child of Darkness: a system-agonistic scenario about hunting down the literal spawn of Satan that’s compatible with D&D 5E (or whatever RPG you wish to use).
The 11 games and books can be had for the suitable demonic price of $16.66, knocking more than 80% off their usual value of $91.
The 2022 TTRPG Halloween Spooktacular bundle will be available from October 1st - that’s this Saturday - until November 1st, spanning the whole of the spookiest month.