Words by David C. Obenour
A board creeks. A light flickers out. A cold draft sinks in deep. You’ve experienced all of these sensations before, but something about how they feel in this particular home is different. Years of neglect have added to the eeriness, along with stories that none of the neighbors can seem to agree on any details. A troubled family, dense and unnatural vegetation, dark late night rituals, porcelain dolls that act on their own; the only part they will agree on is that you should stay away. Still, you feel compelled to explore. So summon your courage, draw a card, answer a question, and begin to shape the stories and rooms of your own haunted house through the map building role playing game, Home.
Off Shelf: Can you share some of your personal favorite Haunted House stories? Or as a genre what appeals to you about the frights it specifically can deliver?
Yeonsoo Julian Kim: The Woman in Black by Susan Hill is one of my all time favorites. The premise is deceptively simple, but the unsettling atmosphere and deep dread in that book are immaculate. I love stories where someone is trapped within a haunted space that is supposed to be a sanctuary and they have no choice but to face what’s there. People’s houses are supposed to be a safe haven, but they inevitably also become the vessels for so many tragedies because that is where much of life plays out. Humans generally become very emotionally invested in their homes. I like to think of hauntings as our homes becoming just as emotionally invested in us, in a way.
Doug Levandowski: See, I always learn about such great stuff from you. I need to read that!
For me, I love both Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Mike Flanagan’s total reworking of the text that was on Netflix. They keep a lot of the same themes but Flanagan does such wildly different things with the plot that I could love them both.
And I love what you said about the home getting invested in us, and that puts it better than anything I could say! One other thing for me is that I grew up in a house I thought was haunted, the visceral fear of that appeals to me. The unfamiliar spaces that exist in a familiar place appeal to me. What’s really in the attic? You’ve never actually been in the crawlspace in the basement, have you? Anything could be there…
OS: Reading horror and watching horror are two very different experiences, playing it is even more different still. How do you think the frights change or can be heightened in a role playing game setting?
YJK: In games, we have agency, and agency makes everything more terrifying. You can’t just sit back and watch the terrible things happen to someone else. You are the one making the decisions that will save your character or put them in harm’s way. Your character cannot confront their demons without you forcing them to. Staying locked in a freeze response isn’t an option. Games and interactive horror experiences give you the power to act, but that power also makes you more vulnerable because it tells your brain that this is also happening to you.
DL: I agree totally with all of that, and I think that you have to play to the strengths of the genre. Horror games make people make choices they wish they didn’t have to make. In Home, we often give you two bad options and make you pick what you think will be the least worst. You can’t answer a question into a jump scare, but Yeonsoo is good at making questions with a last word that feels like one…
OS: Safety and content are important considerations for all RPGs, especially in the horror setting. You’ve set up some guidelines and mechanisms for Home – could you explain your intent and hope with how players introduce and engage with them?
YJK: I firmly believe that the most interesting horror can only be experienced when you know you have a safety net in place. This might be a silly example, but I went to a haunted attractions with some friends recently and one of them was so foggy with such rickety infrastructure that we couldn’t really get into it as much as the others. We were too focused on not tripping or knocking into anyone to get invested in the narrative elements, atmosphere, or jump scares. You need to be able to let yourself go a little in order to get the full experience in anything horror-themed, and if you’re too busy worrying about basic safety – whether that’s physical or emotional – you won’t be able to get there. Plus, if you just end up dissociating because you’re too stressed out, you’re not able to experience much of anything at all. It was really important to us to give people some tools so they can push themselves without pushing themselves too far.
DL: Totally. If you’re always having to hit the brakes on a scene because it’s going in a direction you don’t want—or that you’re worried it will and you don’t know if you’ll be able to stop it—you’re out of the moment. And the best horror happens, I think, when you’re as fully immersed as possible.
OS: Can you further talk about the balance of making players uncomfortable as opposed to unsafe?
YJK: Discomfort can be a great catalyst for growth and self-exploration. You can learn more about yourself while outside of your comfort zone than you can in any other state of being. When you start to feel truly unsafe, however, you enter survival mode and it’s no longer about exploration or curiosity or daring yourself, but about just trying to get through to the other side. Everyone has different limits when it comes to where that line is between being willingly uncomfortable and feeling unsafe. Consent and calibration mechanics are really important to accounting for those differences, which is why we incorporated them as much as we did.
DL: I think it gets to the idea of Type 1 and Type 2 fun. Type 1 is something that’s fun at the time and you look back and say, “That was fun!” Like watching a comedy with friends. Type 2 is something where you go beyond what’s comfortable and it isn’t necessarily fun at the time, but you look back and say, “That was fun!” because you were scared or surprised in a way you enjoy. Roller coasters are often the go-to example for Type 2. You’re scared and screaming, but you get right back in line. But if you’re scared because you think it’s genuinely dangerous, you look back and say, “I’m lucky I got out of that.” Horror should, I think, push us to confront things we’re glad we confronted, not things that genuinely make us feel unsafe.
Or, if we want to get science-y in a way that I’ll probably butcher [laughs] I went to this talk for my work as a teacher where the doctor presented about tiers of stress responses. We start out in the ventral vagal stage, where we feel safe and feel like we can act. As we get pushed, we move into the sympathetic stage, where we’re in fight or flight and panic. And past that, there’s the dorsal vagal, where we just freeze up because we’re so overwhelmed that we can’t act. Horror games want to toy with the edges of a sympathetic response, I think… just enough to spur action, but not so much that you leave the game or, of course, shut down. Hopefully, I didn’t massacre the science on that…
OS: You also establish that, as in other examples of the genre, Home can be played for humor or horror. While obviously a preference for the players, what do you see as the differences and strengths of each style of play?
DL: Both rely on timing of revealing the unexpected, but I see the goal of that timing as different. With comedy, we want the punchline to be something that strikes us as absurd. With horror, we want the punchline to be something we wish wasn’t, something that scares in its unexpectedness. I think the strengths of playing for comedy are a lot of the safety that we’ve been talking about. Cracking jokes with friends is Type 1 fun, and especially in a horror game that you skew funny, you’re making fun of the stuff that might normally scare you. I scare incredibly easily, so I love comedic horror! What We Do in the Shadows is a great movie, and I’ve loved the TV series so far. Vampires creep me out of course, but seeing them being idiots is a treat for me.
YJK: Comedic horror is a genre I’ve always had such a mixed relationship with. When horror doesn’t land, it can come across as comedic, so I think that’s where I have most of my hang ups. However, being able to laugh in the face of something scary can be a really liberating experience. Of course, there are some nights when everyone is just in a goofy mood but you still want to engage in a scary experience. While Home is generally more serious-leaning, we wanted to present the option to have a sillier time too. After all, Courage the Cowardly Dog was a childhood favorite for me. And it still terrified me at times.
OS: Can you talk about mood setting? It’s importance for a game like Home and some easy to extravagant ways that players might heighten their experience through things not directly linked to gameplay?
YJK: Oh, I am all about creating atmosphere in really over the top ways! I’ve been known to redecorate an entire room for the sake of one game, with color changing lights and everything. Ambient sound is one of my favorite ways to play with immersion but you really need to check with players ahead of time because some people just find it distracting. I also am really into fragrances and have candles and oils to evoke just about any setting or mood. But again, check with players about that beforehand because some people just get migraines from scents.
DL: I tend to be a lot more theater-of-the-mind-y about it, mostly because I’m generally a lazy GM and host. So I love to get players to contribute to the mood themselves with the things they set up at the start of the story. And if it’s a GMed game, I like to bring those things back later to haunt them.
OS: Through the use of cards, tokens, and a dry erase map, Home offers players some rails in which to drive the narrative. What do you appreciate about this style of role play as opposed to a more explicitly open world?
YJK: I personally really enjoy games that are designed to provide a very specific experience. It’s always important to give plenty of room for creativity, but if you provide a solid structure and do that heavy lifting for the players, that takes some of the cognitive load away so they can focus on what’s meant to be the core experience. Everyone is always tired all the time. The less learning and running a game feels like homework, the better in my opinion.
DL: And I think with our effort to make this GM-less, we needed to provide a lot of rails for the players so that they could make their own creepiness rather than having someone say what they think will best creep them out.
OS: In creating the archetypes provided in the game, were there any related to characters from books, movies, television that people might know and appreciate? What range were you hoping to cover with the options?
DL: The Perpetual Victim is a favorite of mine, and a lot of that I think goes back to my love of Shirley Jackson. I see the sisters in We Have Always Lived in the Castle as kinds of perpetual victims in such delicious ways! I also love The Expectant Heir, which I can’t pin down to one specific piece of media, but I feel like a ton of cheesy, bad horror movies I’ve watched have that one character who’s walking around this old mansion that’s actively trying to kill them all saying, “Oh yeah! This is all mine!” And I love seeing those characters die.
YJK: The Ardent Believer and the Rattled Skeptic are archetypes you see everywhere in horror, and they are two of the first character ideas we came up with. The Redemption Seeker is probably my favorite archetype, however. One of my favorite depictions of this type of character is Riley Flynn from Midnight Mass. They are often the most haunted characters because the primary thing haunting them is something that they brought upon themselves. We wanted to make sure all the archetypes were deeply flawed characters, because perfect people don’t really have a lot to bring to the horror genre.
OS: Are there any other fun easter eggs or references you were particularly proud of how they worked into your games? Maybe think of just a “trailer”‘s worth, to excite fans.
YJK: I think the main thing is that Doug and I put a lot of our own fears into this game. A lot of the prompts I wrote are drawn directly from things that have frightened me in real life. But I also know I worked in some bits and pieces from the lived experiences of friends who have found horrible things in their walls or have woken up in the night to witness something they wished they hadn’t.
DL: One little egg is that, originally, the game asked players to play themselves and it was all about finding rooms from your childhood homes – like, the players’ literal, actual childhood homes – in the house as the night goes on. That creeped a lot of players out too much, so we – I think wisely – shifted away from that. But it lives on, sort of, in the Echoes of Childhood Haunting Tale. It’s an echo of that original idea.
OS: You worked with a number of contributors for the offered Haunting Tales, what prompted this collaboration and how did you select who you worked with?
YJK: Different things scare different people, and one of the best parts of the horror genre is seeing the full spectrum of fears. A lot of the contributors are people we’d worked with before. For instance, I made Women Are Werewolves with C.A.S. Taylor and the Chucky board game with Eric Slauson. I met Dominique Dickey at Big Bad Con years ago and have been following their work ever since. And Jabari Weathers is so talented in so many ways, and I will forever be wishing for them to write horror fiction.
DL: Yeah, getting everyone’s different perspectives on this was just so exciting. Like, getting to sit and read what they wrote and recoiling from the spreadsheet going, “Oh I hate that! It’s perfect!!” was a dream come true. Kristin and Tim Devine are two of my favorite people in the design world, and I’ll be forever asking them to work with me on things. Mabel Harper is brilliant at creeping people out, and Benito Cereno and Bridgett Jeffries were both people who Wet Ink introduced us to – I think – and their work was just phenomenal. And of course James Mendez Hodes’s send-up of club culture as a nightmare was great. I’ve worked with him on a few other projects, and getting to see what he did with this was so cool. Basically, I think we wound up mentioning everyone who contributed to this because their work was just so, so wonderful.