I said to a friend of mine that there aren't a lot of horror RPGs out there. And that might seem like a weird thing to say since it seems like there's games about vampires and werewolves coming out every other day. But let's really break those down. Most of them fall into one of three categories.
Dark Fantasy. This is just regular old adventure stuff with gothic or death metal aesthetics.
Urban Fantasy. This is just romance and action movies with werewolves and vampires.
Monster Hunter/Occult Investigators. Scooby-Doo mysteries with varying dials of grittiness.
When was the last time you picked up a plain old regular horror novel? Something by Barker, King or Koontz? They don't really resemble any of those things. Like what RPG would you play The Shinning With? Especially if you consider that Jack Torrance might be a player character?
My thoughts around this started when I re-read Dracula and couldn't help but notice that Dracula is hardly in the novel. After Harker's experience in the castle which is practically it's own novel, about 3/4s of the book is taken up by his assault on Lucy and everyone attempting to deal with it. And they deal with it mostly by trying to keep her alive while also coping with like their own problems (Arthur's dad dies, Seward trying to deal with Renfield (which for most of the book is treated like a medical case), Mina fretting about Jonathan's obvious PTSD). They aren't really doing anything about Dracula at all. But they're INVESTIGATING! Aren't they? Actually no, not really. The only one investigating anything is Van Helsing and he does it entirely elsewhere. In fact, Van Helsing kind of drops the ball because he refuses to tell anyone what he's up to because he's NOT the "seasoned monster hunter" some interpretations would make him out to be. He's just a guy with some solid folk lore background an he can't quite bring himself to believe what he suspects and he certainly isn't going to tell anyone else because that would be CRAZY. He doesn't tell anyone what he thinks until it's too late and Lucy is dead. He just uses everyone for proxy experiments. "Hang garlic everywhere and see what happens." And everyone else just does it assuming it's just strange folksy medical advice.
It's only the last quarter of the novel where everyone kind of gears up and goes on this "monster hunting" thing that so many RPGs basically model their gameplay on. (If fact, I think a lot of problems with RPGs is that they tend to model their rules on capturing the climatic feel of the last act of pop media instead of the dynamics of the middle act where all the interesting uncertainties are, but I digress). My point is every "Monster Hunter RPG" is just the last 50 pages of Dracula over and over again.
By shear coincidence I happen to read some Ray Garton novels right after Dracula and I noticed the same thing in play. Very normal people encountering something very weird and really only turns into "investigation and fighting" after someone close to them gets horribly victimized by whatever threat the book was about. If you like B-Horror movies I recommend Ray Garton because he never saw a horror film he didn't think he couldn't crank up to 11.
Around that time I started I started noodling around with an RPG idea I half jokingly refer to as "Middle-Class Professionals vs. Evil". Because that was something most of these books also had in common, including Dracula. They're about doctors, teachers, lawyers, graphic designers, real-estate agents, prison guards and so on. These are not Fearless Monster Hunters and Intrepid Investigators. These are guys having the worst lunch hour of their careers.
Then I had the chance to play @anim-ttrpgs's Eureka! Although Eureka still frames itself as an urban fantasy investigation game, it's really not in the way say Candle Obscura or Vaesen are. It's much closer to a Ray Garton novel or at least it can be. I got to play James Wakefield a high school teacher in their FORIVA scenario. And no point did I ever feel like I stopped playing "just a high school teacher". And no point to James become a Monster Hunter or Occult Investigator. He was just a high school teacher who wanted to know why bad things were happening to some kids at his school and that turned into the worst long weekend of his career.
I realized that Eureka was probably already about 90% of what I wanted "Middle-Class Professionals vs. Evil" to be, so I kind of stopped thinking about it for a while. Then for unrelated reasons I was reading up on Romance Scams and how difficult they are to stop once the victim is pulled in because the perpetrator is so remote and the victim quickly comes complicit in their own victimization. I was struck by how much it reminded me of the Lucy portions of Dracula (again 70% of the book). I thought, "This is what it should feel like to fight a vampire in real life. It should be this unknowable, mysterious presence you can't ever confront directly and all you can do is tirelessly attempt to shield the victim but you can't ever pull the victim out either."
And then last night I had a horrible bought of insomnia. Like, didn't got to bed until 5am insomnia. And in that sleepless fit a whole game just arrived in my head all at once (this is common for me). It's a GMless game about ordinary people desperately trying to defend a mutual connection from an assault by a supernatural creature they don't understand and can't ever confront.
It's literally the scariest game I have designed. Just imaging the procedures in action was seriously giving me a low-key anxiety attack which wasn't helping the insomnia. I managed to get it all down in the notes app on my phone and am working on transferring it to my computer properly. It requires a custom deck of cards which I threw together this afternoon and ordered a prototype off a POD card printing service so I can play this thing as soon as possible.
I call it, "God's Madmen" from a line Van Helsing says in Dracula. I have often said that good horror RPGs don't need "Sanity" mechanics because rational people acting under irrational circumstances will look like madness to any outside observer. The main characters of Dracula do wild things trying to save Lucy. They engage in experimental blood transfusions. They lie to Lucy's mom. They hold all night vigils. They decorate bedrooms in garlic. They hide things from each other and violate sacred trusts with one another. And that's what this game is designed to do. Turn ordinary people into "God's Madmen".
