While most tabletop role-playing games are focused on heroic adventure, many incorporate elements of horror to try to keep players on edge. Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder offer plenty of creepy monsters, horror-focused settings like Ravenloft and Ustalav, and rules for characters with unsettling powers. Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green make sanity a resource worn down by exposure to the unknown, until characters begin to crack under the stress.
Ten Candles evokes fear by literally dimming the lights, while 13 Omens makes dice rolls increasingly perilous as the game goes on. But no game combines mood and mechanics quite like Dread. Published by The Impossible Dream in 2006, the ENNIE Award-winning TTRPG from Epidiah Ravachol and Nathaniel Barmore is gloriously simple.
Rather than using dice, all challenges are resolved by playing Jenga. Whenever a character wants to perform a difficult task, such as escaping from a burning building or translating an ancient text, they have to pull a block from the tower and gently put it on the top. Like in any game of Jenga, this starts out pretty easy.
But as the game progresses, every draw threatens to bring the whole tower tumbling down. Dread is meant to be played as a one-shot, and many of the characters won’t survive. If a player tries to pull out a block and the tower falls, they fail at whatever they were trying to do, and their character is removed from the game.
If they were fighting back against an ax murderer or trying to escape from a death trap, toppling the tower can lead to their immediate demise. If their challenge was less obviously threatening, they might just flee in terror or even wind up switching sides and becoming an NPC. The tower is then reassembled, giving the other players a bit of a reprieve as pulls become easier for a while.
A particularly heroic player might even do the rest of their friends a favor by knocking over the tower, sacrificing their own character in a dramatic fashion to give everyone else a better chance of survival. The extreme simplicity of the mechanics means almost anyone can quickly learn to play Dread. The rulebook offers several horror story setups, like a college camping trip hunted by a werewolf or a spaceship crew encountering a hostile alien.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
