5 Spooky Games You Can Play at Go Play NW Online this Month
It’s that spooky time of year when ghosts and ghouls creep forth desperate for a taste of that sweet sweet pumpkin spice. Whether you’re a The Nightmare Before Christmas adherant or prefer more skin-crawling fare, Go Play NW Online’s Fall 2022 event is here register now! to satisfy your monster madness with suggestions for five great horror themed tabletop roleplaying games.
1. Sleepaway
The Lindworm haunts these woods, a horrifying shapeshifting monster that has terrorized and traumatized campers from years past. It terrorized you when you were a camper here, and now that you are counselors here, you refuse to let the Lindworm wreak its horrors on another generation of campers–You’ll keep this camp safe, no matter what.
Sleepaway is a GM-less story game where each player takes on the role of a camp counselor and of elements that make up the surrounding setting for where your story takes place. As your story unfolds across three distinct acts, each of your story’s various pieces: the characters, locations, and items slowly intertwine around the mystery of the Lindworm.
Tips for playing online: Sleepaway is the most complicated game on this list for playing online. It requires a deck of cards, tokens, index cards, and a whiteboard. The whiteboard and index cards can be substituted through a virtual whiteboard tool, like Miro, Witeboard, or Roll20.
The most challenging part of online play is deciding who will act as the Lindworm, since this decision is supposed to be a secret. The easiest way to do this is to have a player take a number of index cards equal to the players in the game and write “Lindworm” on one of them, shuffle the cards, have that player blindly draw and show a card to each player, while all the other players keep their eyes closed.
All other card draws can be done through the Go Play NW Community Discord’s dice roller, Dicecord , and whoever is acting on the Lindworm’s behalf can note the chosen card onto the whiteboard while the other players close their eyes. For the purposes of anonymity, you may want to have someone draw the cards first and then have the players close their eyes since Diecord informs the channel who initiated the card draw.
Tags: GM-less, Belonging Outside Belonging, diceless, summer camp, LGBTQIA, mosquitos
Content Warnings: Body horror, mental health
Are you ready to finally put the Lindworm down?
2. Rhapsody of Blood
The blood moon has risen again and the dark silhouette of the great villain’s castle once again blots the sky. Your family has trained you for this since birth–trained you to take on the villain’s legions, to steal your mind as reality warps around you, and to send that dark horror back to hell to keep the world safe for another generation. It is time for you to fulfill your calling.
Intended for multiple playthroughs as the subsequent generation hailing from one of five families, each decision you make as you explore the nightmare castle and wrestle with the great villain’s blood-soaked hordes determines what horrors the next generation will face when the blood moon rises again.
Tips for playing online: Rhapsody of Blood only requires two six-sided dice and character sheets to play. Players can either roll their own dice at home or use the Go Play NW community Discord’s dice roller, Dicecord. Just make sure you have a way to share the character sheets with your players so they have them as a reference! Tags: PbtA, dungeon crawl, action/adventure, generational storytelling, chain whips
Content Warnings: gothic horror, blood, monsters
Are you ready to fulfill your family’s legacy?
3. The Final Girl
It’s a classic for a reason! In this slasher-inspired horror, something is out there hunting down and picking them off one-by-one. As each one of you falls, the remaining survivors grow in strength until only one final survivor remains to confront and finish off the killer.
The Final Girl is a diceless story game where players take turns portraying The Killer and their victims, using a deck of playing cards to decide each hapless victim’s fate. Tips for playing online: The Final Girl requires a card deck and a way of collaboratively tracking the various characters. The simplest way to track characters is as a list in a shared Google Doc, allowing all players to freely collaborate on changes in a format most of them will already be familiar with. If you’re playing on the Go Play NW Discord server, cards can be drawn using the server’s dice roller, Dicecord.
Tags: diceless, slasher, rotating characters
Content Warnings: horror, murder
Will you be the last one standing?
4. Golden Sky Stories: Twilight Tales
There’s a little town on the outskirts of the city through which a single rail line passes, where the fireflies light up the rice paddies, and the sky seems to stretch endlessly beyond the horizon. It is a place of everyday magic, where spirits inhabit the rocks, rivers, and tees, and where a few special folk—mononoke—can transform into people and help their neighbors solve everyday problems.
In this expansion to Golden Sky Stories, Twilight Tales asks you to take on the role of the more mischievous folk–the ghosts, oni, kappa, michinoke, and strange visitors–who haunt our enchanted little town. What happens when these mysterious beings decide to do their best and help the people around them?
Tips for online play: Golden Sky Stories uses token pools, making it easy to run and play online. The one mechanic that doesn’t translate to online play well is the Dream mechanic, which is where players award each other for things they do in the story. In person giving a Dream involves handing a token to another player, but in online play that is harder to do without interrupting what other players are doing, which means players will get fewer dreams in online play than in-person. The best way to address this is to reduce the number of Dreams needed to spend for improving Connection by 2.
Tags: diceless, heartwarming, honobono, non-violent, pastoral, mischievous tricks
Are you ready to meet your neighbors?
5. Blood Heist
Welp, Dracula won, and now the world is pressed under the thumb of a collection of the immortal vampire clans that make up his Undying Empire. The Great Houses are forever locked in eternal squabbling for power against one another. Unfortunately for you, you’re just a gang of criminal outcasts positioned far outside the greater social strata. “Fortunately,” that makes you the perfect candidates for stealing a valuable object from your powerful vampire employer’s rival; make sure it can’t be traced back to them. Good luck.
Bloodheist uses a combination of dice pools and cards to create a thrilling heist adventure filled with strange and horrible blood magic and secret agendas that put your thieves against one another.
Tips for online play: Bloodheist requires dice and cards to play. If you are playing on the Go Play NW Community Discord, you can use our server’s dice roller, Dicecord for both.
Tags: Forged in the Dark, heist, comedy
Content Warning: crime, blood, body horror, vampires
