Fear Itself Designer’s Notes

FI2_350Many years ago – the fabled year of 2003, or so – I wrote a largely forgotten book called OGL Horror for Mongoose Publishing. It was designed to be a toolkit for running modern-day horror games, using (somewhat awkwardly) the d20 system. As it was based on the Open Gaming Licence, Pelgrane was able to release a supplement that drew on rules I wrote – the original Book of Unremitting Horror, conceived and illustrated by horror maestro Dave Allsop and developed by fellow ex-Mongoose writer and all-round good chap Adrian Bott.

It was one of those unusual cases where the supplement utterly eclipsed the original book. That d20 Unremitting Horror was reworked as a monster book for the first GUMSHOE game, The Esoterrorists. Shortly afterwards, there followed a second GUMSHOE game that was even more suited to the sort of sordid, ghastly, oppressive – one might  say unremitting horror of the BOUH – Fear Itself. In many ways, it covered the same ground as OGL Horror, only in fewer pages and with greater effect.

I redeveloped Fear Itself for GUMSHOE’s tenth anniversary. A lot of the new material is just applying the accumulated knowledge of those ten years to the text – FE2 discusses how to build mysteries, how to use different types of clues, how to handle investigative spends, and has lots of nuts-and-bolts advice on running GUMSHOE. (It also takes pointers from other horror games – there’s some Dread spliced in, for example). It takes a toolkit approach to horror, encouraging the GM to build the rules and setting around the player characters. (Ken’s Vendetta Run gives an idea of how the game can be stretched to settings other than the modern day, while still retaining its core theme of ‘ordinary people pitted against unremitting horrors.)

As part of that toolkit approach, the book splits into four distinct sections – one covering One-Shots, one for limited-duration Miniseries, and one for open-ended Campaigns (the fourth section covers rules and concepts common to all three styles of play). Most Fear Itself games are one-shots or short series, so I doubled down on this and made changes that support shorter games.

Each section also contains a sample adventure, demonstrating how to adapt the rules to that style of play. So, the one-shot adventure The Circle is designed to be played in a single game session and comes with a set of pregenerated player characters. The Glass Beach Summer miniseries has a built-in finale. The Dispatchers campaign frame attempts to answer the question “why would ordinary people go chasing monsters?”

And oh, there are monsters. A few came visiting from the Book of Unremitting Horror, like the Ovasshi and the Mystery Man, but there are also delightful new monsters like the Cuckoo Mother, the Fat Golem, or the Bystander. Just to balance things, player characters get new abilities like, er, Hiding (it works the same way as Fleeing; it’s a lot cheaper to build a Fear Itself character who’s good at hiding and running away than it is to make one who’s good at sneaking around and any other sort of athletic display.)

Fear Itself 2nd Edition is one more trip around the spiral, circling every closer to that platonic ideal of modern horror. If OGL Horror helped inspire something as beautifully hideous as the original Book of Unremitting Horror, I simultaneously shudder and thrill when I contemplate what Fear Itself 2nd Edition might inspire others to create.

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