There is a rhythm and structure that is common to most horror stories, and even when a particular story or piece of horror media attempts to subvert that framework, it is made manifest in its comparison, by the ways in which it breaks from the expected patterns, often in delightful and terrifying ways.
The Horror Story Structure
Although there are countless small variations, the general structure is this. The protagonists are introduced to the setting in a way that makes us familiar with them and the world around them. A baseline is established, the world and the character’s place in that framework becomes familiar, but throughout this time, there are small bits of foreshadowing. Something is not quite right, there is something lurking just out of sight, waiting to strike. Something often goes wrong in the early part of the story, but most fail to believe it as anything truly dangerous. As this first act of the story draws to a close, something undeniably horrible happens and the characters quickly realize that they are in big trouble.
This second act of the story sees a rapid escalation of the danger. Whatever terrible thing is that is haunting the characters, it is now active and growing in power. The characters might try to fight back, but are thwarted time and again, and with their losses growing, it seems like nothing can stop the evil forces arrayed against them. It is in this act that the characters reach the depths of despair. But just as things look at their darkest, there is a glimmer of hope. As this act draws to a close, the protagonists learn of some way that they might win the day, whatever form that might take. Merely surviving at this point could be seen as victory.
In the final act of the story, the characters race to try and accomplish whatever victory they can achieve. This is often when they are at the most risk, because the only way to win is to face the evil directly. This culminates in a final confrontation, where the protagonists must risk it all. Those that survive go on to deal with the consequences of their actions and the fallout from the events of the past few days. They return to that world from the beginning, changed in many ways and not always for the better. Finally, horror stories frequently close with some small hint that the evil from the story is not really gone or that it lingers on, waiting for its next victims.
Creating a Horror Game
When the first ideas for the 13 Omens roleplaying game started to come together, the game’s experience needed to emulate the horror story framework. At its core, the very mechanical underpinnings of the game itself had to play into that story structure, reinforcing its pacing and growing sense of tension and dread.
The first step was identifying a system by which the players at the table could feel a palpable sense of apprehension and fear. Dice are the most common tools used in RPGs, but they are hardly scary. To make them something to fear, they needed to be fickle, mysterious, and, most importantly, dangerous. That is where the idea for a dice bag and shared dice pool first entered the picture. It was, in fact, the very first idea associated with 13 Omens.
If everyone drew their dice from a shared pool hidden inside a bag, and some of those dice were “bad”, that could certainly make each check feel more dangerous, and if that got worse over time, if the dice became more deadly, then the engine would become a part of the horror story. The game itself was engineered to kill the characters.
That was the foundation. What came next was a lot of math to make the way the game played match overall pacing of a horror story, which was far trickier. It started by creating a basic map of how the tension flows in most horror stories. It starts of low, almost nonexistent, growing piece by piece, but with moments of relief and small accomplishments. Moving into act two, it has to grow significantly, while still giving small moments of reprieve. Finally, in act three, the tension reaches a crescendo, before crashing down at the very end, as the protagonists make good on their plan and flee back to the rational world.
Mapping that to a game system took a fair bit of playtesting and revision to get just right. The bad dice, which by this point were known as Omen Dice, had to have a very measured addition to the game, while at the same time, the danger from each individual die had to ramp with the acts of the story, to increase the pressure and bring the story to a climax. This is how the Omen Dice pacing ended up tied to the Acts and the number of the Act was then tied to the chance that an Omen Die would result in a wound.
It was the most elegant way of measuring out the pacing of the game, while maintaining a constant ramp of tension, forcing the game into a crisis point where nearly every check can hurt or kill your character. This was critical to the game’s early playtests. If that did not work, then it was back to the drawing board.
Fortunately, that part of the early game engine really clicked.
The math behind character checks and aspects, however, needed some work. Early drafts of the game had 14 aspects for each character, with a varying number of ratings you could assign, based on Archetype. The problem was how it was related to the dice probabilities and how the Host might affect the way the dice were rolled at the table. In the end, it was just too complicated. A good horror game needs a simple system, one that gets out of the way whenever it can to allow you to focus on the gritty terrible details of the story.
That first month of playtesting saw a lot of revision to the ways that characters were made, how the dice were rolled, and what tools the Host had to influence play and guide the story forward. The breakthrough here came when doing some of the dice math and it became apparent that giving and Edge or a Flaw on the roll (drawing an extra d6, rolling them all together and taking the two highest or two lowest, respectively), matched up pretty well to the shifting of the target numbers based on your rating. In essence, having an Edge made a check against a “bad” aspect behave more like a check against an “average” aspect. It might not seem like much, but that level of intuitive “behind the scenes” math makes a lot of difference in the elegance of the game. Getting and Edge or having a Flaw becomes something that is easy to quantify which in turn makes it easy to fold into the narrative without having to resort to careful math or other rules considerations. Random chance might ruin the day, but a player’s time was not being spent thinking about rules or having to puzzle out their odds of success. The easier that is to pick up and use, the faster the players can get back to the story, and more importantly, the terror.
And so it went with every system in the game. Archetype structure, Perks, Gear, everything was examined and playtested to make sure it was a smooth and elegant in play as possible, while still giving the players everything they needed to make a compelling and believable character for the story they were about to explore. The end result is the game engine you will find in the 13 Omens Rulebook.
Looking Ahead
While the engine for 13 Omens is solid, that does not mean we are done tinkering with the system and exploring other ways it can be used. A lot of people have asked about how they might use 13 Omens to tell a tale over multiple sessions, with surviving characters coming back to experience new terrors week after week. That was one of the first thoughts we had internally as well, and you can rest assured that we have something cooking to allow you to play this game over a longer stretch of time… assuming any of the characters survive the first session. But that is not all, there are a lot of stories coming together right now that are building more than just a single night of fun, they are building an entire world of horror.
We’re thrilled that you’ve decided to join us around the campfire in this dark and spooky woods. We have so much more to show you.
Jason Bulmahn
13 Omens Game Designer
Director of Games
Paizo Inc.