Winner, Winner Killer Thriller!
When was the last time you really enjoyed an RPG with a high PC mortality rate? How about a game in which it pays to fail your roll? Killer Thriller achieves both these distinctions, and in the process provides a superb one-shot gaming experience. This rules light game of exploitation horror movies includes a lot of nice touches. It provides clear, concise advice on running a free wheeling splatterfest in an irreverent conversational style. The rules are simple and simulate the hackneyed tropes of the genre perfectly (using a firearm makes you progressively less competent, for instance). Character creation is lightning fast, which is just as well given the nature of this sick little gem.
For a start PCs have victim written all over them. You don’t have ability scores in this game, you have Inabilities that measure how much you suck at making good decisions, being lucky or keeping your cool. You get to assign scores of seven, eight and nine to these and if you roll under your Inability on 2d6 then Bad Things happen. If you roll your Inability score exactly an Epic Fail occurs involving your character taking damage equal to that score.
Wait, did we say character? We meant characters (three per player is the default). Don’t get too attached to them, you’ll want to walk, or run them screaming, into Savini-esque death scenes. Why? Another nice touch – hit points are called Unharm (generated by a roll of 1d6+6) when they are reduced to zero that character dies, but their starting Unharm score lives on to be donated to one of that player’s other PCs. This guarantees that your last surviving character will be a hard kill. In effect, the rules make a player’s last surviving PC a monster for the monsters (Monsters automatically succeed except against a Last Survivor, when they have to roll just like any other character, with the same penalties if they succeed).
The result is an easy to run, fast playing, fun, free-for-all. Just put the characters into a stereotypical horror movie situation and let them run around until they die or become a much tougher proposition as Last Survivors. This should be the first choice for one-shot games with a horror theme. Buy it for your group this Halloween and dive merrily into the mayhem!
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |