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Killer Thriller $3.00
Publisher: Timeout Diversions
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by Michael T. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 11/24/2010 19:57:54

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!


Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Killer Thriller
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