Rule of the Dice

Happy Halloween, Dicers! Hopefully all of you have your horror-themed games planned for tonight or this weekend, or maybe you're watching Night of the Living Dead for the hundredth time, or maybe (like me) you'll be hiding in the dark on your porch to scare the shit out of little kids when they come to your door begging for candy. (To be fair, now that I have my own little guy, I'm starting to feel bad about that one.) But if you're a sad lonely person who doesn't have plans tonight, here is some reading material for you to catch up on. Please feast your eyes on some of the best horror-related content Rule of the Dice has posted over the years. Enjoy! Rule of the Dice - Top 8 Best Horror-Related Posts 1.  D6 Zombies - My all-time most popular post on Rule of the Dice (in terms of hit count), showcasing some weird zombie antagonists, statted for the D6 system. 2.  How I Put Crazy in My Game (Sanity Levels for D6 Horror) - One of my personal favourite

Since it's Halloweek , we decided that our last game of the night should be thematically appropriate. I had just bought last night on earth, so we opened it up and got cracking.  Here are my thoughts on the game: 1) Packaging.  The box has tons of room, but the interior plastic trays are poorly thought out.  When the game is new and all the tokens are still in their cardboard frame, it fits beautifully.  Once you punch out all the markers, there's no good place to put them where they won't slide around in the box. If the "card" areas had been made deeper, all the other bits would have fit perfectly.  Not the end of the world (though that's the theme of the game), but something that could be improved. 2) Gimmicks.  The game comes with a CD for background mood music.  The music is fine, but the CD is too short to last a full game.  Especially a first full game where you are stopping to look up rules and figure out strategies. 3) Speaking of rules:  The

Can you smell Halloween on the air? Smells like non-toxic face paint and burnt pumpkins. In case you weren't aware, I've been playing around with a zombie/horror game based on the Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel system - basically you send in a gang of 0-level schlubs, hoping that at least one survies to become a level 1 character in an on-going post-apocalyptic survival game. It uses basic d20 rules that everyone is pretty familiar with. To keep the game as chaotic as possible, in our first playthrough I just rolled the scenario out randomly as we went along - determining encounters, locales, etc purely by a toss of the dice - and I plan to continue doing the same thing. Partly this is to keep my prep work down, partly it's to keep the tension and suspense high as the party never knows what to expect. Sometimes the group meets 1d4 stray dogs, sometimes they meet 1d4+1x100 roaming zombies. I've been using the many tables in Palladium's DEAD REIGN ™®© books (a

We tried the Walking Dead -style Funnel last Friday and I think it went really well. It was a welcome change after my recent GM-related negativity  - I personally had a ton of fun running it, and I hope the players did to. The best part of it, that I didn't even think about when I came up with the idea, is the freedom it gave the players to try weird things and to play out horror-movie style tropes to full effect. See, I had assumed that the game would just be the characters lining up to be ground into paste, played for laughs as we described the gruesome ways they were torn to pieces as their dice betrayed them. While that certainly did happen, the coolest side effect of playing 4 "disposable" characters was that players developed scenes and situations that they don't normally get into during regular games. I don't know about you, but most people I play with tend to be cautious, careful and calculating in their games. They have a strong connection to thei

Ah, October. Month of horror and spookiness. We have Halloween, autumn in full swing choking the life out of the world, the season premiere of The Walking Dead , Canadian Thanksgiving . It's a good time for wearing white sheets out in public. But what's the Month of Spooks without some scary gaming to go along with it? I love horror-themed RPGs, and despite there being plenty of great ones out there, I keep trying to create my own. I was convinced that the d6 system was perfect for it for awhile, and have toyed with the idea of building a full on "D6 Horror" game , but recently my fancy has turned to the glorious world of Fate . I started to brainstorm for a Zombie Survival version of Fate, which would work perfectly fine except that the characters in Fate are purposefully built more competent and capable than average everyday joes. Obviously you can tweak Fate to make it work (you can make Fate work for anything ) but what if there's a better way? A game whe