Horror Indie TTRPG Series: Ten Candles

  From now until Halloween, come to Pandemonium for the next several Fridays to learn (and play) a selection of horror tabletop roleplaying games! Horror, as a genre, is broadly defined, and our selection reflects that (progressing from dark fantasy to tragic horror). Even still, owing to the content that may be covered in these adventures, these sessions will be for adults 18+ in age.

Note that, for this year (our 3rd doing this!), we’re focusing especially on group-improvised games that interrogate the structure of these types of tabletop stories. Therefore, if you find yourself scratching your head at the list (or nodding, soberly), feel free to read on!

How this will work:

The schedule of ttRPGs is below:

• Friday, 10/02: Daggerheart (Hope & Fear content)

• Friday, 10/16: Cosmic Dark

• Friday, 10/30: Bluebeard’s Bride

• Saturday (evening, 5:00-9:00 p.m.), 10/31: Ten Candles

Each session (unless otherwise noted)  will run from 6:30 - 9:30  p.m. on Friday (in the back event room – past the ttRPG books). Note that games won’t necessarily take 3 hours, but for these, we want to save some extra time at the end to decompress.

What You Can Expect

To paraphrase a horror-centric episode of Quinns Quest, horror ttRPGs ask players to do two contradictory things: 1) play your character as if you want them to survive, and 2) create a thrilling story where your character may not live. 

Each of these games will be run as one-shots where the above will be true. In addition, these games tend to be rules-lite and require more active participation from the players to help the GM craft the story. Therefore, if you don’t mind free-form, slightly more horrific horror games, you may enjoy this selection (if “enjoy” is the correct word).

Finally, because these are horror games, we will make use of ttRPG safety tools at the table (especially Lines & Veils and the X-Card). To read an excellent write-up of what these tools are (and why they’re used), follow this link to Mike “The Lazy DM” Shea’s article here. 

Resources about the upcoming game (a Google Doc) can be found at the link here. It will be updated with information roughly one week before the game is scheduled. 

And for a final note on scheduling: the facilitator may arrive exactly at 6:30 p.m. for these events, so if you arrive early, check in with a staff member to see where you will be seated. We won’t have a lot of time to play this year (just 3 hours!), but we will do what we can.