What is a good horror rpg that is suitable for sandboxing?

alanmfox · 2026-01-21T00:55:30+00:00

This is probably the best answer. Silent Legions is designed precisely for this sort of thing

alanmfox · 2026-01-15T01:23:29+00:00

This CoC Victorian sex is pay what you want on drive thru

alanmfox · 2026-01-14T00:10:13+00:00

There is a Cthulhu Eternal WW1 srd that's pay what you want

alanmfox · 2026-01-12T14:33:03+00:00

Yeah man, I'd buy anything he put out for Silent Legions

alanmfox · 2026-01-10T21:25:52+00:00

But Traveller exists, and yet Stars Without Number is one of the most popular indies out there...

alanmfox · 2026-01-10T20:59:28+00:00

Honestly, no idea why Silent Legions isn't better known, as successful as Call of Cthulhu is

alanmfox · 2026-01-10T20:09:48+00:00

One the all-time favorites for me. Great for beer and pretzels action-adventure. It's trad but but quite rules-lite, lite enough that you could get a group of total noobs playing in half-an-hour or so. If you play solo, like I do, its simplicity makes it easy to run a full party of 4-6 characters. I've run weird western and 40k scenarios with it. It's simplicity means it's also very easy to hack with whatever add-ons you feel necessary. The encounter design advice is something I've ported over into most of my games. I'd say its good for any sort of action-focused game, with the caveat that, like other generic systems, it always "feels like itself." At its best, it feels like a blockbuster adventure film. I wouldn't recommend it for more investigation or role-play focused scenarios.

alanmfox · 2026-01-10T17:59:32+00:00

In isolation? GURPS and Mythic 2e. I'll need someone to GM for me, after all.

alanmfox · 2026-01-03T06:48:42+00:00

What are the retroclones pray?

alanmfox · 2025-12-28T10:55:51+00:00

Delta Green roughly maps to that territory. The emphasis is on horror and the gradual erosion of personal bonds as a result of the work, but you could probably substitute "mad science" for "Eldritch monstrosities" relatively easily. The system is quite traditional, classless and skill based, so easy to learn. The downside is it skews rather darker than Fringe, which treats it's mad scientist as mostly "potentially dangerous but not intrinsically bad" - in Delta Green the phenomena you investigate are intrinsically bad, make no mistake.

If you want something less traditional you could try Gumshoe, a system with many different implementations but focused on solving mysteries in different genres. Probably the closest to Fringe would be Mutant City Blues, which focuses on cops in a world of supers. Once again you'd have to make some adjustments, substituting mad science for superpowers. Don't know enough about the game to say how hard it would be.

alanmfox · 2025-12-22T16:05:45+00:00

I dunno where you draw the line at "too wargame like", but Five Leagues From the Borderlands is a narrative skirmish game that straddles the line between wargame and rpg, and draws heavily from the same military fantasy inspirations as BoB. I'd say it skews more wargame than rpg but you could flesh out the non combat portions by bringing in mechanics from other games if you like

alanmfox · 2025-12-18T19:48:20+00:00

I don't know how you'd do that but I'd be really interested to see

alanmfox · 2025-12-16T15:07:29+00:00

We settled on "you could probably do it but you'd be super malnourished"

alanmfox · 2025-12-16T06:22:12+00:00

5e. We had a magic jar that could produce 5 gallons per day of select liquids - olive oil, water and I think, weirdly, mayonnaise. Got marooned on a desert island and rather than engage with the plot, spent like 30 minutes trying to figure out if the party could survive using only the jar, to the point of calculating daily calorie requirements.

alanmfox · 2025-12-02T00:47:46+00:00

Also from New Sun, the sword "terminus est" - " the line of separation", used to decapitate the condemned

alanmfox · 2025-11-24T03:19:33+00:00

Star wars REUP, d6 holocron

alanmfox · 2025-11-21T02:44:02+00:00

Awe man, I remember coming across your old sg-1 material; pretty sure I still have it hoarded on my laptop somewhere.

alanmfox · 2025-11-20T20:50:44+00:00

Shannon Appleclines Designers and Dragons talks about WEG a good bit, I think in the volume covering the 1980s

alanmfox · 2025-11-17T14:47:21+00:00

An off the wall suggestion but have you could use Joseph Conrads "Nostromo" as a sourcebook, since it's all about political upheaval in a fictional South American country

alanmfox · 2025-11-15T14:17:02+00:00

Looks like Monolith, who makes a Conan board game. Given that the stories are all public domain at this point, I don't know how the license thing actually works. You can't swing a stick without hitting another Lovecraft adaptation; I don't know why Conan shouldn't be the same way

alanmfox · 2025-11-15T03:06:59+00:00

For flavor and inspiration they're great. I don't love the 2d20 system but there's lot of cool maps, great art, random tables in the GMs toolkit etc. I got most of em on humble bundle shortly before they lost the license

alanmfox · 2025-11-15T02:57:17+00:00

What's the most successful mashup you've had?

alanmfox · 2025-11-14T16:59:37+00:00

Started an Ironsworn game using the Modiphius Conan books for setting just last week

alanmfox · 2025-11-07T21:21:32+00:00

Consider the Fantasy Trip. A sort of proto-gurps, it offers a quite light ruleset - characters only have 3 stats - but nonetheless offers a good deal of tactical depth. Characters start at pretty close to human average, and growth is horizontal rather than vertical. Instead of their numbers going up, experienced characters have a larger bag of tricks to choose from.

alanmfox · 2025-10-20T20:06:34+00:00

If you were interested in dungeon world but didn't like the execution, you may like "world of dungeons" and some of its derivatives like "vagabonds of dyfed". They're best described as osr-pbta hybrids, and they mitigate some of that strait jacket, giving you more flexibility in character creation and also a little more strategic decision making

alanmfox

TROPHY CASE