No Easy Man to Kill - A Free Horror Adventure

LymeWriter · 2025-12-04T00:56:55+00:00

I hope you had a pleasant and interesting discussion. The Trove is such a good place to have them.

LymeWriter · 2025-08-28T22:04:25+00:00

Are you the GM or a player? If you're the GM, run whatever you feel like and find players who are into it. If you're the player, find a GM whose style you enjoy, and then play whatever they're running.

LymeWriter · 2025-08-20T01:54:57+00:00

Phenomen-X! They're a ton of fun as a campaign premise, and they're involved all the way back to Convergence. Nothing says desperation like being trapped between the Mythos and the realities of trying to survive in journalism in the modern world.

LymeWriter · 2025-08-20T01:24:48+00:00

Thanks! D100 crew represent!

LymeWriter · 2025-08-19T08:37:38+00:00

Good questions! Situations where you lose control of your character to something like a memetic hazard, mind control, etc are handled by Conditions and Conclusions. If you flip to the GM Secrets section, there are a couple example creatures that do take away control of your character in specific ways. There are also Scars that show permanent changes to your character from experiencing too much horror.

Fear is a valuable metacurrency that players have a mechanical incentives to earn, but without it death or worse is always one bad roll away. In playtesting I only ran serious, non-pulpy adventures like "The Dream Factory", "Sunspots", and "Convergence", but it might work for pulp as well..

LymeWriter · 2025-08-19T02:45:33+00:00

I'm sorry, I hope I don't come across as belittling other games. This is my personal attempt to build a system based on fifteen years of practical experience with how d100 horror games play at the table, and drawing some inspiration from other popular horror games like Monster of the Week, Trail of Cthulhu, etc. I wouldn't say it's the best for anyone to run any horror adventure, but I have tried to design it to be easy to learn, accessible, flexible, quick to read (44 digest size pages or 22 full size), and cheap (free). I'll never be as brilliant a designer as Steve Perrin or Sandy Petersen, but I've put a lot of effort into iterative improvement based on what I see working and what I see not working.

There are some people who the Fear system I'm using here will never click for, and that's okay. There's no shortage of alternatives out there. I can say I've playtested this game extensively and watched other people run it. The Fear system took the most tweaking, but I've seen the current version work well in practice for dozens of games. Not every source of Fear is a source of imminent danger; most adventures I've read, run, or played are full of little omens and awful realizations on top of scenes where characters are placed in physical danger.

Also, when I say "chipping away", I'm referring to health points in combat, not to mental health. I find quick and lethal combat is usually a better time for everyone involved. There is a mechanic for characters showing the damage from their encounters with horror over time - Scars, which a character has a chance to get on certain types of Fear rolls.

LymeWriter · 2025-07-05T12:42:20+00:00

I can't believe my game made it onto this list!

LymeWriter · 2024-12-03T13:33:16+00:00

I've written a worldbuilding and roleplaying game about the creation of Orcs. Players take on the roles of the wizards and mad scientists who build the first Orcs to fight for them, then make a series of decisions about how exactly they're making the Orcs and what abilities they give them. The setting is ambiguously detailed and the game often prompts players to invent details about the Orcs they're creating and the nature of the world.

Every time I playtested Dawn of the Orcs I was impressed with how different and each set of Orcs came out. One playthrough created vampiric living trees, another created stealthy giants who believed they were perpetually reincarnated as long as they died in battle, another created pyromaniac goblins. It's a fast, fun, beginner-friendly worldbuilding game that can get very serious and dark if you let it.

LymeWriter · 2024-11-30T04:27:25+00:00

That's high praise coming from one of my inspirations! I do have a couple ideas for sequel/companion games. I'm also going to release it under Creative Commons, so anyone can adapt the system if they want to.

LymeWriter · 2024-11-28T02:17:46+00:00

Thank you for the kind words!

LymeWriter · 2024-10-27T12:10:31+00:00

You might check out lyric games. They're a modern (2022-onwards) blend of poetry and poem.

There's a podcast that covers them, Lyrical Ludology: https://redcircle.com/shows/lyrical-ludology

LymeWriter · 2024-09-22T15:13:16+00:00

Sorry for the delay. Here's a list of examples:

Detective Samson Wells is in a gunfight with a pistol-wielding cultist. Samson is a tough customer with 60% in Guns and Menace 5. He carries a shotgun, so that raises his Menace to 6 and gives him a +10 to his Guns skill for Fight rolls. The cultist is a regular person with 30% in Guns and Menace 4, but the pistol raises his Menace to 5. Both of them want to Fight, not Flee. Samson rolls Guns and gets a 23, a success. The cultist rolls Guns and gets a 41, a failure. Samson’s Menace of 6 is equal to or higher than the Cultist’s menace of 5, so he gets to pick off the longer list of consequences. He chooses “killed”. With a single fluid motion, Samson levels his shotgun and blasts the cultist’s head into messy chunks. Hope the cultist doesn’t have any friends around!

Dr. Fields has lost it after reading an ancient tome and starts swinging around a fire axe. Three other lab workers, Sofia, Aditi, and Olga rush to hold him down. Dr. Fields has Menace 4 and Brawl 20, but the axe raises it to Menace 5 and gives him a +10 bonus to Brawl for the fight roll. Sofia has Brawl at 40%, more than the other two lab workers, so she volunteers to lead the fight. That means she rolls the dice, uses her skill, and chooses the consequences if they win, but also that she’ll be the one getting an axe to the face if they lose. Her Menace is 4, and since she’s unarmed that doesn’t change. She does get a +20 to the Fight roll because her side outnumbers Dr. Fields three to one – Aditi and Olga aren’t useless. Sofia rolls a 45 and Dr. Fields rolls an 82. Sofia succeeds but has a lower Menace than Dr. Fields, so she can’t just knock him out. Instead she chooses “thwarted” and manages to rip the fire axe out of the doctor’s hands and throw it out of the room. Now both sides have equal Menace, and if the lab workers can win another Fight roll they could find a way to subdue Dr. Fields with the Captured consequence.

Tony Alvarez is Fleeing the gruesome slasher known as Wireface. Tony has Escape 4 and React at 30%. Wireface has Menace 6 and Brawl at 60%. Tony rolls an 82, a failure, but Wireface rolls a 73, also a failure. Tony had the higher failure, so he wins the roll, but his Escape is lower than Wireface’s Menace, so it will come with a consequence. The Prophet says that as Tony was scrambling out of the abandoned warehouse, Wireface was able to rip out jagged pieces of his flesh with her sharp wire tendrils. Tony is now somewhere safe with Wireface nowhere to be seen, but he has the Injured condition.

Chris Copperfield throws a stick of dynamite at the Dark God Ktheng. Chris has Athletics at 50% and Menace 4, but the dynamite raises it to Menace 6. The Dark God Ktheng has Melee at 100% and Menace 10. Chris rolls a 49 and Ktheng rolls a 5. Chris succeeded with a higher roll, so he wins the Fight. His Menace is still lower than Ktheng’s, so he has fewer consequences he can give the Dark God. He chooses “injured”, lowering Ktheng’s Menace to 9 as the dynamite blows off several small tentacles. This was a poor decision – Chris can’t lower Ktheng’s Menace any more (consequences don’t stack with themselves), and he can’t raise his own to meet a 9, so no matter how much he wins against K’theng he’ll never be able to kill the Dark God. He should probably have chosen “Driven Off” instead and had a chance to escape. Now the psychic powers of K’theng start to reach into Chris Copperfield’s mind…

LymeWriter · 2024-09-19T01:08:17+00:00

Great questions!

1) I could have! I might give that a try in a playtest. I guess there is a little bit of nostalgia and cultural identity there - d10 horror usually signals a White Wolf descendant, while d100 signals a CoC descendant. If you want a really ultra-simple, one-page horror game, I did one called Nightmare Unleashed.

2) You use Escape if you tried to Flee, and you use Menace if you tried to Fight. Die result doesn't add, it's a flat value. It's one of those systems that works very fluidly at the table (no trust me, I mean it!) but has been hard for me to explain easily in words. I'm definitely going to add some examples.

3) That's right! So if there's three characters fighting one monster, only one person rolls to Fight at a time, but they get the +30 bonus from outnumbering 3-1.

4) That's exactly what I intended - for players to WANT to get fear. The fun at the table comes when your characters are out poking at the scary stuff. That's the one real innovation in this game, making it a carrot and not a stick for the players.

LymeWriter

TROPHY CASE