Secrets of Spireholm is a huge Gothic campaign that can be played over a large number of sessions taking characters right from their early levels as nighttime novices all the way to hardened veterans of horror. Inside you’ll find everything you need to play the story including monster profiles, items, NPCs, and plot galore. SHIVER is setting neutral allowing you to play any story, anytime, and as anyone. Want to play a game of teens in survival mode against a zombie horde? Kids on Bikes who dread exploring a haunted house on Halloween night? Or perhaps a medieval monster hunter looking for a werewolf, vampire or mage? SHIVER can deliver stories and characters for anything from cult pulp classic to Cthulhu fuelled eldritch mystery. The Shiver series of games have already gained a strong reputation for being able to emulate the feeling of just about any type of horror movie except slashers… until now! Part of their currently funding Double Feature release, Shiver: Slasher ups the ante by now allowing you to play generational characters, letting you escape murderers across sequel after sequel. The basic rules and framework - rolling d6s and d8s with easily discerned symbols - lend themselves to a jaunty, breezy chase between the killer and their potential victims, and the best part is that being part of the Shiver universe makes the game structure ripe for crossover potential.

Fight your way through ghoul infested abandoned buildings, sleuth out a murder mystery, pull off a grand heist and fight werewolves, vampires, and monsters galore in this most Gothic of setting and story. SHIVER is a tabletop roleplaying game bringing tales of the mysterious, the peculiar and the strange to life. An easy to learn and innovative game system inspired by a love of horror films and pulp TV shows that brings storytelling to the fore. Shiver makes it simple for you to tell the stories you want to tell, however weird and wonderful they may be. This month the Petrifying Patron Tierintroduces a brand new group to the SHIVER story universe C.R.E.E.P.S. A society of amateur investigators leaving no stone unturned in their search for the strange and extraordinary. As characters gain in tiers, they gain in powers, and characters in Shiver can become significant powers in their own right. How powerful? You could run a Hellboy-level style game with Shiver. In fact, I wonder if I detect Mike Mignola influence on artist Ben Alexander. Even the Enemies have their own creation process and Shiver offers a practical and functional sequence to guarantee the right villain for each adventure. Lazy Directors also have a list of archetypes for their enemies. The Atmosphere of ShiverThis fun social deduction mini game will pit players against tavern patrons and each other to discover who has been replaced by a adventurer eating mimic. There’s no setting in Shiver. That’s entirely up to you. The game suits sci-fi as well as urban horror or even alternative history. Want to use our ambience files for your livestreams, podcasts or other commercial projects? Subscribing tot his tier will give you access to a creative attribution license for all the SHIVER Ambiences and Soundscapes we release through Patreon to use in your own projects for profit. Each archetype, with the exception of the Survivor, has a preponderant linked Skill where you can assign the highest value, which is 5. As we have already seen in this review, Shiver offers the opportunity to play in any setting or historical period, without limitations of any kind. With this nearly limitless number of possible game worlds, the Director has an unlimited arsenal of possible equipment to assign to characters.

The layout of the manual is simple and easy-to-follow. The artwork reminds me of the Mike Mignola Hellboy comic book covers, and it is pretty consistent throughout the rulebook. Gothic may be the first genre of horror we are exploring for SHIVER but we’ve also started working with an ever-growing pool of talented artists and writers who are going to help us delve deep into other horror genres going forward. As for other projects, we have some other things we are working on that are separate from SHIVER but we’ll be keeping those hidden for now…”HEART is pure charisma or the character’s talent in charming, persuading, or deceiving other characters (or enemies). This tier will also give you access to the Cursed Archive, the repository of Patreon content where you can get the previous 3 months releases and any bonus permanent content that fills its shelves. We will update this every month, so as soon as something leaves the archive, a new spooky piece of content will take its place.

The opening article in Shiver states that we go to horror movies because it’s fun to be scared. Maybe that’s right. We wanted to show off what the system could do and focus on all the different stories you could tell over the course of a single session like a movie.” Menzies continues.An additional one-shot story, 'It Lives', graveyards in Spireholm are being raided, bodies alive and dead are going missing. You and the other concerned citizens of Spireholm are out to investigate and find the culprit. The question, “Should I risk that?” is a pretty significant one in Shiver. This is not an RPG in which fortune favours the bold.

A crew answers a distress signal in the uncharted depths of deep space, only to find more than just survivors. Collecting another undoubted success, a sign that the horror genre is far from being dead and buried. I’m reminded of the classic and appropriately highly regarded board game “Betrayal at House on the Hill”, with its omens counting slowly up to the dramatic event. The ever-present threat casts its chill across the entire game and not in a bad way.

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Just like in a horror movie, in fact, the characters will have to group together to be able to survive adverse events whether it is dark forces at work, terrifying monsters or disturbing mysteries to be solved. SHIVER is inspired by many great bits of pop culture which we really wanted to play on the table including: Shiver proves to be an interesting and extremely versatile game. The atmosphere is undoubtedly one of the main elements in this type of game and the core book itself provides a number of tools to help the Director.