Crow’s Corner

Horror One-Shots: Read, Played, Reviewed

Spooky season is (almost) upon us, so it’s time to delve into the spooky games! I love running horror tabletop roleplaying games of all kinds, so my posts in October will be all about the vampires, animated pumpkins and other monsters lurking in the dark that get our blood pumping.

This week’s post is about horror one-shots! There will be another post about Halloween-specific games, so this will focus on horror games in all kinds of genres. I will talk about:

Without further ado, let’s get into it!

The Zone

the zone

Game Designer: Raph D'Amico

Publication Year: 2023

Mechanics: Cards, GM-less

Genre: surreal, paranormal, modern, play-to-lose

Content Warnings: body horror, violence, mutation, loss of agency, madness, paranoia, isolation, all kinds of phobias

The Zone is a GM-less RPG where PCs venture into – you guessed it – The Zone, a top secret area where things mutate and nobody has yet returned from. I’m sure you’ll be the first. Since it’s GM-less, it’s also no-prep, which makes it perfect for spontaneous game nights. That’s not to say this has to be a backup game - it really does stand on its own as the main act.

The boxed set is extremely beautiful and you not only get a Manual and the cards, but also some inspirations for Mutations and Twists, which are ideas and custom setups for different flavours of the game.

Upon character creation you get an archetype, a phobia and an obsession. Some of the phobias definitely got under my skin, so safety tools are in my eyes mandatory in this game. The game does provide an X-Card in the box, which I highly appreciate. See also here, for my article on Safety Tools.

You take turns being the director and at a certain point, PCs start dying in every scene. It’s collaborative storytelling at its finest and there are enough prompts to keep the table going at all times (I might be biased though, since our table was exclusively forever-GMs). But the potential for wildly different stories being told is there and with how open-ended the prompts are, every playthrough will be wholly unique.

As I’ve mentioned, at some point PCs start dying. Being the earliest death doesn’t feel too bad, since it’s first and foremost a storytelling game and you can still shape the story together, even if your character is dead already. Backstories do get cut a bit short by early deaths, though.

What needs the most drive from the players is interpersonal connections and drama. We worked together a lot to make that happen, but I can see this being less central if not driven by the players themselves; as it often isn’t by the prompts.

Mechanically it works really well and the way the end is resolved is well thought out and makes for chilling stories. And if the price tag of the (admittedly very beautiful) print edition is a deterrent, you can also play it online for free!

Night’s Black Agents: The Carmilla Sanction

The Carmilla Sanction

Game Designer: Kenneth Hite

Publication Year: 2016

Mechanics: GUMSHOE

Genre: spy-thriller, investigative, vampires

Content Warnings: post-war occupation, real-world (historic) politics, sex, slavery

Night’s Black Agents is a game about (ex-)spies who hunt the vampire conspiracy that threatens our world behind the curtain. The rules are based on GUMSHOE with a good helping of spy thriller tropes and vampires sprinkled on top. The adventure The Carmilla Sanction is part of The Edom Files, a collection of 8 missions made as a supplement to their The Dracula Dossier campaign, but can also be run as a standalone.

The story is based on the book Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. The book was written in 1872, which is pre-Dracula, and is one of my favourite books about vampires. It is a Gothic novella about Laura, a young woman living in a secluded castle in Styria, who is seduced and preyed upon by the vampire Carmilla. It explores themes of innocence and corruption; and Victorian views about women as property are thrown out of the window, as women are shown as capable and the main focus of the story.

The adventure picks up where the book left off: here the original book is real - Sheridan Le Fanu has found a doctor’s report on the actual Carmilla and published his story based on it. Carmilla has now resurfaced in Austria in 1948 and the Agents are tasked to find her, which sends them on a chase through the country, which culminates in Vienna.

I am from Vienna myself, so I took some extra joy in running this. Some of the names are bullshit and some places don’t add up, but that’s only a minor nitpick for people who actually know the places. The adventure also mentions the movie The Third Man, which is kind of a classic over here and - in my opinion - a must watch if you plan to run this adventure. It captures post-war Vienna well and the adventure has a few references to it.

The game runs roughly 2-3 sessions, or potentially longer for especially thorough or roleplay-heavy groups. It’s fairly prep-heavy and as GM you need to keep track of a fair amount of NPCs. Having a bit of historical knowledge about occupied post-war Vienna also helps.

If hunting a vampire in her mountain castle and the intricacies of navigating Vienna under Allied rule sounds like a good way to spend 8-12 hours, I can warmly recommend it.

Vaesen: The Silver of the Sea

The Silver of the Sea

Game Designer: Tomas Härenstam

Publication Year: 2020

Mechanics: Year Zero Engine

Genre: mystery, horror, Scandinavian

Content Warnings: real world religion, drowning

The first of four adventures in A Wicked Secret and Other Mysteries, this one immediately caught my eye. It has a healthy dose of Cthulhu-esque Horror (somewhat adjacent to The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft) and is set in a little fishing archipelago. The featured Vaesen are definitely exciting (no spoilers!) and the NPCs were a highlight for me, with each and every one of them fun to bring to the table.

In the end the players need to make a tough and meaningful choice - and there’s no real “good” outcome there. Which I’m a big fan of.

Generally it runs like any other Vaesen adventure. You need to keep track of where clues can be found and the progression of the countdown, otherwise it’s pretty straightforward. Mysteries with fixed outcomes can be tough to run, but it manages well, like most Vaesen adventures, considering the constraints of the system. The open end with multiple meaningful choices is a bit more unique to this adventure, compared to others.

I might be biased, because I read The Dunwich Horror shortly before running this, but it definitely was a highly enjoyable one-shot. We finished in a single session, but it can definitely also be played in two.

The Walking Dead Universe RPG: The Golden Ambulance

The Golden Ambulance

Game Designer: Nils Hintze

Publication Year: 2023

Mechanics: Year Zero Engine

Genre: drama, zombies, modern

Content Warnings: blood, gore, dying loved ones, potential violence to (PC) teenager

The Golden Ambulance is included in the core book of the game and perfect for getting into the game. It showcases a bit of the drama and faction play (that’s a bigger deal in a campaign) and the mechanics of the game, while not being too overwhelming to run. Knowledge of the TV series is not needed - this game can stand on its own as a zombie game.

What I enjoyed a lot was how easily it could be adjusted to a different city. I set it in the city I live in and adjusted some names and places to make some fun little references. At the beginning I told them what was currently happening when the zombie virus broke out in 2014 (politics, current music, etc.); and fleshing out the details of the PCs’ haven is also something special when it’s your own home where you can place an imaginary haven from the zombies.

Players choose their PCs from a set of premades that are written into the story. They are “ordered”, meaning that if you have for example four players, you choose from the first four premades. This fixed choice might feel restricting, when a certain character doesn’t catch any of the players, but that’s due to the nature of the rules, where each PC has ties to other PCs. The fixed set is so that as few players as possible end up without connections and the most important PCs to the story are present. There are no actual character sheets provided, just the stats, so that sadly needs work by the GM to provide or takes session time to make players fill it out during the session. There probably is content available online by now though.

I can recommend the one-shot to anyone trying out the game and interested in a zombie game, no matter if you’re a fan of the TV series or not. But in the end, this is a system intended to be played as a campaign.

Alien the Roleplaying Game: Hope’s Last Day

Hope’s Last Day

Game Designer: Dave Semark, Matthew Tyler-Jones, Andrew E.C. Gaska

Publication Year: 2019

Mechanics: Year Zero Engine

Genre: science-fiction, aliens

Content Warnings: being hunted, body horror, gore, loss of agency, parasitic reproduction

In Hope’s Last Day, the players step into the shoes of people from Hadley's Hope, the colony that is found deserted at the beginning of Aliens (the second movie from 1986).

Hope’s Last Day was previously included in the core book, but got moved into its own boxed set in the Second/Evolved Edition. Make of that information what you will.

This is not a one-shot that’s intended to be “won”. The colony is lost. We live its last moments. Players need to be on board with the deadliness of the game, and are ideally at least somewhat familiar with the Alien movies or the genre. It is a really good imitation of any alien movie, it’s more or less exactly what you expect it to be. Get in, get infected by Facehuggers, get mauled by Aliens. Maybe even get away. But did you really clear out all those pesky things?

I’ve heard some conflicting feedback from players about the game being too deadly, but also not being deadly enough, so I’d say it sits in a good spot and it all comes down to setting player expectations.

Overall, Hope’s Last Day is fun to run, but not super easy to prep for. It’s a bit of a crawl, with many rooms, items and aliens to keep track of. What makes it shine are the premade characters. Each comes with a baked-in secret, with some of them being quite juicy. Betrayal is almost inevitable. And for me, the secrets worked better here, than they did in The Golden Ambulance, above.

So if you want to have a typical Alien experience, this is the game for you.

Further Links

This is only a glimpse into the many horror games that are out there, so below you can find some more! These are games about which I heard only good things, but haven't yet had the chance to read or play. Many more will be reviewed in the coming weeks!

Shameless Self-Promotion

I also made a horror one-shot!

Sent to a cave full of flowers, in order to retrieve a pair of missing lovers, the characters soon find themselves embroiled in an ancient feud. These Blooming Delights is a one-page dungeon crawl compatible with Mörk Borg. It is inspired by Romeo and Juliet, mixed with eldritch horror and can be run in a single session.

You can find it here!

These Blooming Delights is an independent production by CrowberryCake and is not affiliated with Ockult Örtmästare Games or Stockholm Kartell. It is published under the MÖRK BORG Third Party License.

MÖRK BORG is copyright Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell.