Daniel (@dungeondive) lays out a Halloween table of horror RPGs that work alone, noting where each can still be bought. Most descend from Liminal Horror, the Cairn-lineage game of strange investigations, which has no solo rules of its own but borrows them easily. Around it orbit the Fear bundle of pamphlets, point crawls and a kaiju supplement, now half price and still in print, and two M. Allen Hall projects. The first is the Liminal Grimoire, whose Alone in the Dark toolkit tackles the hard part of solo mystery: keeping secrets from yourself. The second is UHF Contact, a three-scenario analog-horror campaign about a cursed Magnavox.
The centrepiece is Midnight of the Century, a mid-90s pre-apocalyptic serial-killer investigation set in a rain-soaked Pacific Northwest that Daniel knows street by street. Its appendix runs from Seven to Millennium, and its generators build victims, killers, clues and timelines for solo play. Cthork Borg brings Mörk Borg rules to the Mythos with its Dreary and Isolated solo rules. Alone Against Fear’s new The Broken People expansion is another pre-programmed hex crawl, a direction Daniel likes less than the base game’s sandbox. He closes with the bespoke cassette-tape edition of Ghost Transmission that Gustavo Coelho made for him.
Which solo horror game would you set up on Halloween night, and how do you keep a mystery a mystery when you are the only one at the table?