Tags
Free RPG, Georgian, Gothic Adventure, Gothic fiction, Gothic Horror, Gothic Literature, Gothic Novel, Gothic Romance, Gothick, Napoleonic, OGL, open game license, Regency, role-playing game, Romantic Horror, Romanticism, rpg
Hello! Its been a long while since I’ve posted here, but I’ve been working on the Gothic RPG that I’ve long been promising. Now I’m ready to share it with you.
Ghastly Affair is an OGL Role Playing Game where players portray typical characters from Gothic fiction, set in the delirious years between 1765 and 1820. It utilizes a simple “roll-under-ability” system, with a loose play style that emphasizes high drama and immersion. Its intended to be a game where defending yourself against vicious slanders in High Society is as important as combating the demons possessing the bodies of your spouse and children. While not necessarily combat-centered, there are certainly opportunities for destroying the forces of evil. Or for becoming them…
If you want to…
- explore the dark castles of mysterious noblemen
- rescue hapless prisoners from the clutches of an ancient vampyre
- steal the money (and hearts) of decadent aristocrats
- confront a howling ghost in a long-abandoned chamber
- wander the lonely moors, seeking your lost love
- plot revolution in a dark coffeehouse, wary of royal spies
- defend your village from the depredations of a werewolf
- pursue scientific truth beyond the bounds of morality
- bargain with a witch for wealth and fortune
- attend lavish masquerades where reputations are destroyed with flicks of a lady’s fan
then Ghastly Affair is for you!
I wrote Ghastly Affair because it’s the game I wanted to run with my diverse group of Players. It has its roots, of course, in the Gothic material that I published on this blog. I decided, however, to create my own game designed to better emulate the Gothic genre. I’m sharing it for the benefit of those who might want to play a Gothic Romance RPG, with minimal pick-up time. Also, the game is almost entirely Open Game Content.
Ghastly Affair is available in the Download section. Enjoy!
Note: Ghastly Affair includes some potentially disturbing material drawn from pre-Victorian Gothic literature and late eighteenth-century history. Although the game can support a variety of play-styles from darkly comedic to action-packed, the text is intended for mature readers.
The Engine of Oracles 
I am beyond delighted with this product. I’m a high school English teacher with an M.A. in folklore and a longstanding love of the literary Gothic. Your understanding of the period and the genre are spot-on, and I want to commend you for a labor of love executed with thoughtfulness, thoroughness, and polish. (I just ordered the paperback from amazon!)
Bravo, sir!
Thank you so much for your kind words! It was my intention to create something that would be as faithful as possible to the sources (and history), while still being accessible to a modern audience. It’s my hope that more people will re-discover how great the classic works really are, by showing how much fun they can be! I have also always been fascinated by the time period, and how shockingly different it was from the later 19th century.
I wish you many hours of enjoyment!
Now that you mention it, it’s fascinating to me how little attention this era, in which Romanticism first takes shape, has gotten from gamers. We collectively seem to love Age of Steam Victorian steampunk fantasy and post-Stoker vampire lords (by way of Anne Rice), and we’ve got a decent handful of seventeenth-century pastiche games, mostly involving pirates viewed through the lens of Sabatini and Flynn. All good fun, certainly, but there’s a French Revolution/Regency Period lacuna in between.
All the more praise to you for filling it in, then. Ghastly Affair reminds me, favorably, of Vajra Enterprises’ Hoodoo Blues. (Do you know it?) I never loved the system undergirding that game, but I really enjoyed its attempt to capture the Southern Gothic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ghastly Affair shares its love of genre emulation and supernaturally inflected history; there’s nothing I like more than game design that does its homework in terms of tone and setting.
Again, I salute you, and I look forward to seeing what you do with the game next. Bring on the Ghastly Companion!
I’ve heard of Hoodoo Blues, but I’m not familiar with it. I’d love to do a Southern Gothic game, but it could be a problematic genre to role-play. Most obviously, having characters speak and act in a historically-accurate manner regarding race would be horribly offensive. It’s one thing to watch a movie for 2 hours, or read a book that you can put down. Its another to sit in a room for 4 hours with people actually saying these vile things. Of course, I had to deal with a similar situation while writing “Ghastly Affair” – “Gypsies” are an essential part of the Gothic genre, but real-life Romany and Traveler people are still subject to real persecution in Europe to this day. I needed to deal with the topic in away that would be true to the genre, but also address the problematic treatment of “Gypsies” in the literature. Even the word “Gypsy” is controversial for some people – its not a derogatory term in American English at all, but I am aware that some Europeans do consider it pejorative.
As for the paucity of Georgian/Revolution-era/Napoleonic/Regency RPGs, its especially strange considering that Gygax and Arneson (the co-creators of D&D) were both Napoleonic wargamers. Maybe its because the late-Georgian/Napoleonic era looms so large in wargaming that many RPG writers have avoided it? The time period is crammed with fascinating, larger-than-life figures – people like Cagliostro, Mesmer, Mary Wollstonecraft, de Sade, Madame de Stael, Lord Byron, and so many more. Also, there was so much happening in terms of wars, scandals, and catastrophic natural disasters that dramatic scenarios practically suggest themselves.
A thoughtlessly presented Southern Gothic game would indeed be horrible, especially for gamers of color. That said, I think there’s a lot of room in that genre for resistance narratives. Hoodoo Blues is actually structured in such a way as to encourage protagonists who are black or Indian (there is admittedly potential for trouble there too, given how many of the gamers are white, and how few of us are capable of sensitively rendering a character of a different race and/or culture, especially one that has in real life been oppressed by one’s own culture, but I digress). The magical elements of the game grow out of thoughtful research into hoodoo and vodun and the intensely creolized folklore of the region, and subtly nudge players—at least in my opinion—toward narratives of defiance and the price of freedom/gratification. Maybe that’s just my reading, but I do know the literary Southern Gothic can serve as a sharp critique of racism, false piety, and injustice; the marvelous Flannery O’Connor’s work springs to mind. Anyway, you might enjoy giving the game a look.
Your theory about the wargaming roots of the Napoleonic era is a fascinating one, and I’ll have to give it more thought. Roleplaying games based heavily in real history don’t tend to do super-well in the marketplace, and often succeed only when nerdtroped, to use Robin Laws’s word for the addition of zombies, steamtech, magical conspiracies, and the like. But the beautiful thing about the Napoleonic/Regency period is that the Gothic romances of that time have already nerdtroped it for the player: it is both the period detail and the presence of the supernatural that give this epoch its distinctive flavor. But I hardly need to tell you that, given the obvious and passionate research you’ve poured into your wonderful game.
Lastly, let me say that this exchange is one of the most thoughtful ones I’ve had about roleplaying in quite a while, so thanks for writing back.
Hi Daniel, I’m Abraham from the Talking About Games reviews channel:
https://www.youtube.com/talkingaboutgames/videos
In case you are handing out review copies of the Ghastly Affair Player’s and Presenter’s Manual Illustrated PDFs, I would be interested in doing a video review for each of them. Cheers!