Silent Legions: Enter The Survival Horror

One game which has haunted my childhood memories is the original Resident Evil and it's direct sequels. While extremely dated by modern standards, these games were at the time a horrific experience actively trying to make you panic and waste your resources inter spaced with ridiculously convoluted and often silly inventory management puzzles. But, oh man, was it tense.

What a nice, homely place. Heh.

Having started replaying the PC port of the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil (or REmake) what can safely be said is that it remain just as much of a horrific experience. The original Resident Evil is very much designed to be a playable horror movie more than a monster-shooting game. It also inspired me to take back many of these old yet still-relevant game elements and apply them to a Silent Legion game concept mixed with a dose of Hexcrawl.

The Core Survival Horror Tenets (Or how it all 'mesh' together)

Survival Horror isn't a very popular genre in spite of how many games claim to belong to said genre. The reality of it is that the best and greatest of the Survival Horror franchises have either been lost and abandoned or have morphed into more of a horror-themed action game series.

• The environment is closed off: You can't leave wherever you are, be it some kind of mansion, a lab complex or an island. Given that players would want a bit more freedom than in a video game where everything is pre-scripted I would say an island or some similarly isolated location is well suited to such game.
• Resources are limited: This one is obvious and merge very well with the more dungeon-crawly OSR games. However whereas a more typical fantasy dungeon crawl has you carry torches and arrows, now it's lamp batteries and ammo. Similar concept but re skinned. Likewise, it would be best to limit the maximum number of ammo and guns on the locale.
• Fear of death: The players should not be aware of their total HP, only have a general idea of how wounded they are. This should help make the game genuinely scary as now the players need to ask the GM (or be described) how their character's current overall shape is.
• Okay maybe you do need some inventory management: Obviously your character won't be limited to some arbitrary inventory space mechanic as badly as early Resident Evil but it is worth keeping in mind that becoming a pack rat in a game where you need to keep on your toes and avoid fighting as much as possible may be a bad idea. Keep an eye on your character's carrying capacity.

In many ways this is hardly different from what you'd already see in many tabletop RPG.

My Core Game Concepts

The core ideas of the hypothetical survival horror game I'd run:

• Limited Monsters: The amount and/or type of monsters would be limited to a certain amount and to a certain density. These are unholy abominations which are greatly feared and can rip apart even the toughest of people, not basic orcs or zombies meant to be mowed down in mass. In the event I do use zombies (or a zombie-like monster) they still are more likely to be an ambush creature or a hazard than something which will swarm in mass to be gunned down.
• Monster Lair: These individual monsters (or maybe specific breeds, depending how it goes) would be limited to a certain environment/part of the map. At least, in theory, as that is barring some truly unlucky random encounter as I'd add the monster from a nearby area in a random encounter table as it represent the creature wandering outside it's territory.
• Know Your Foe: In turn, players have time to observe the environment of these creatures and learn how certain locales or condition indicate the lair of a specific type of monster. While this does make the monsters more predictable in the long run it does reward players for being smart and learning to plan around a specific creature.
• Only So Many Survivors: There would be only so many spare survivors when a player gets a character killed. When the last character fall it's game over with no save-scumming. Think of it as the tabletop equivalent of Aliens: Infestation. Each of your lives/spare character sheet has a name.

But What About The Monsters?

Oh right, what would the monsters even be? Zombie, mutants, eldritch abomination....mutated zombies animated by eldritch abominations perhaps? A good question and one there currently is no answer and, given that some of my players do in fact read this very blog it mean whatever idea which may or may not exist will have to remain in my mind for now. One thing is certain: the less players expect/understand a monster (at least initially, see above) the better. Zombies are obviously the most stock of all modern horror monsters and difficult to take seriously as a threat unless one make them much more powerful than the stock form, not to mention everyone know their iconic weakness. So, odds are, it probably won't be zombies.