Winner, Winner Killer Thriller!

When was the last time you really enjoyed an RPG with a high PC mortality rate? How about a game in which it pays to fail your roll? Killer Thriller achieves both these distinctions, and in the process provides a superb one-shot gaming experience. This rules light game of exploitation horror movies includes a lot of nice touches. It provides clear, concise advice on running a free wheeling splatterfest in an irreverent conversational style. The rules are simple and simulate the hackneyed tropes of the genre perfectly (using a firearm makes you progressively less competent, for instance). Character creation is lightning fast, which is just as well given the nature of this sick little gem.

For a start PCs have victim written all over them. You don’t have ability scores in this game, you have Inabilities that measure how much you suck at making good decisions, being lucky or keeping your cool. You get to assign scores of seven, eight and nine to these and if you roll under your Inability on 2d6 then Bad Things happen. If you roll your Inability score exactly an Epic Fail occurs involving your character taking damage equal to that score.

Wait, did we say character? We meant characters (three per player is the default). Don’t get too attached to them, you’ll want to walk, or run them screaming, into Savini-esque death scenes. Why? Another nice touch – hit points are called Unharm (generated by a roll of 1d6+6) when they are reduced to zero that character dies, but their starting Unharm score lives on to be donated to one of that player’s other PCs. This guarantees that your last surviving character will be a hard kill. In effect, the rules make a player’s last surviving PC a monster for the monsters (Monsters automatically succeed except against a Last Survivor, when they have to roll just like any other character, with the same penalties if they succeed).

The result is an easy to run, fast playing, fun, free-for-all. Just put the characters into a stereotypical horror movie situation and let them run around until they die or become a much tougher proposition as Last Survivors. This should be the first choice for one-shot games with a horror theme. Buy it for your group this Halloween and dive merrily into the mayhem!

Wow! 28 pages of meaty, bloody goodness. Killer Thriller is any easy to learn and quick to start Beer & Pretzels game where your stats work against you and TPK is the primary goal.

In addition to being a great game for fans of bad horror movies, Killer Thriller makes a great filler game for nights when your group's normal game falls through.

The Good: Dirt cheap, but written with charm and with that never overwhelms the book.

The Bad: It definitely doesn't do "serious" well...and it also has room for expansion, especially in the "Unreal" and "Unthinkable" selections.

For my full review, please visit: http://mostunreadblogever.blogspot.com/2010/10/tommys-take-on-killer-thriller.html

This game is awesome.

I'm uniquely qualified to make this statement. I'm the National Sci-Fi Movie Examiner. I've written my own supplement on horror movie slashers. And Killer Thriller puts all my efforts to shame.

Killer Thriller is distilled horror in a can, only it's in an RPG. The game takes all the elements of the horror movies you know and love and turns them into easy to play rules by a simple, brilliant inversion. Instead of rolling to succeed, you roll to FAIL.

The primary conceit of role-playing games with horror elements has always struggled with this one simple fact: the rules are empowering. Any attempt to add horror rules to existing systems, like I did for D20 Modern, grapples with the fact that heroes are supposed to be good at what they do and the rules reflect that. Not so in Killer Thriller.

Killer Thriller is out to kill characters. Lots and lots of characters. To that end, players start with three or more characters and are rewarded for their deaths. Every statistic in the game operates against these victims, and to that end their "inabilities" are cleverly named unwise (wisdom), unluck (luck), undone (sanity), unharm (hit points), unreal (advantages), and unthinkable (disadvantages). Killer Thriller strips away role-playing game rules and replaces them with horror movie rules, the kind that don't make any sense at all.

It's that beautiful synergy that makes Killer Thriller so much fun. As the victims slowly get whittled down to just one, the Last Survivor (or, in horror movie parlance, the "Final Girl") gets the cumulative Unharm of the other victims controlled by the same player. And when the monster finally faces down the Last Survivor, the system flexes again. Now, instead of players rolling for their characters, the player rolls for the monster. And of course, the monster becomes a bumbling idiot, as all slashers must when faced with the Last Survivor.

Killer Thriller's horror pedigree is evident throughout its 28 pages. Author Tony Lee has seen more horror movies than I have, and that's saying something. He throws out so many horror movie quotes, so many horror movie in-jokes, and so many horror movie references* that it's like being hit by a bag full of horror bricks in the face. I actually had difficulty keeping up.

Killer Thriller isn't complicated. It's not fancy. But it's beautifully elegant in its simplicity. It has a single-minded focus on slaughtering victims and then having the last man/woman standing beat the bad guy. All that for less than the price of a bag of popcorn.

• That's a lot of horror movies!