The Horror Roleplaying Game

CHILL is a generic horror roleplay game. That means it can be run using most horror genres and is not limited to one particular genre, such as Lovecraftian horror. It allows for a nice mixture of many ideas.

The Original CHILL Game

The first edition of the CHILL game was a rather quirky game written by Gali Sanchez and published in 1984 by a company called Pacesetter. It had some good ideas, including having the characters agents of SAVE, an organisation that fought against a powerful supernatural force called “The Unknown”. SAVE agents had Disciplines of the Art as special psychic abilities and monsters used powerful Disciplines of the Evil Way.

However, the original system lacked a lot of depth, having a very basic game system with limited skills.

Mayfair Games revamped the system in 1990, giving it more depth and introducing Edges and Drawbacks that enhanced the original game. However, the new system did not really seem to know where it was going and it created lots of rather bizarre, random monsters.

Neither game had any rules about magic or related aspects of occultism and missed off a large area of supernatural story telling. They were not particularly successful games, lacking any decent adventure modules.

My CHILL Game

This version of the game is based loosely on the original system, but with a lot of amendments and expansions. A number of ideas have been taken or modified from other roleplaying games. Various players over the years have made contributions to the system too.

I steal heavily from books, comics, films, tv series and other roleplaying games, such as Call of Cthulhu. If you have read of lot of horror material, you may start to recognise certain story lines, especially authors like Graham Masterton, Shaun Hutson and Stephen Laws.

Themes in the Game

Chill includes Demons, Occult Magic, Religion, Murder, Mental Health, Monsters and many others. It would probably offend certain types of people, but it's just a game.

Films like The Exorcist, The Omen, Evil Dead, The Beyond, Prince of Darkness, The Thing, The Devil Rides Out and The Wicker Man featured heavily in my youth. Few of those actually make good roleplaying adventures, but their tone certainly influences how I run the game.