Dread: A Tumbling Tower of Terror
My favorite Halloween game. Is it yours?
You have been playing for three hours. The tower looms tall, more void than edifice now, threatening to topple at any moment. Four sets of eyes filled with a mixture sympathy and fear train on you.
“It’s your turn,” whispers a voice on your left. You reach out a trembling hand, stopping just short of the wooden structure, as though waiting for a sign. None appear. You spy a promising-looking block and allow yourself to hope. You give it a gentle nudge. The tower quivers, but the block shifts. You proceed with confidence now, dragging the block millimeter by millimeter. The block is almost free now. You grasp it between forefinger and thumb and give it a gentle pull.
A shudder ripples through the tower as the block catches. Too late, you try to let go, but the tower is already falling. Wood crashes against wood, the sound masking the thudding of your heartbeat.
Your ears ring in the silent aftermath. You look up. Your friends stare at the tower’s broken remains. Only the game master looks at you with a steady look.
“You try to resist, but you are powerless against the vampire’s hypnotic gaze,“ they say. “It takes its time approaching you and savors the feeling of its fangs piercing your neck. There is no pain, only the feeling of warmth leaving your body. Your vision grows dark, and within minutes you are dead.”
Your friends rebuild the tower in silence. You see relief in their faces. Sure, you think, they’ve bought themselves a little reprieve, but it’s only a matter of time before one of them becomes the next victim.
Fear in a Handful of Blocks
Dread is a storytelling horror role-playing game (RPG) released in 2005 by The Impossible Dream. Unlike most RPGs, which use dice rolls to resolve action, Dread settles its conflicts by making players pull blocks from a Jenga tower (or a “tumbling tower,” if you want to avoid trademark infringement).
In Dread, players each create a character and together tell a horror story featuring those characters. Any time a character does something risky, their player draws a block from the tower. If the tower stays up the character succeeds, but if the tower falls that character dies. When a character dies, the tower is rebuilt, three blocks are pulled for each dead character, and play resumes. The game continues until everyone has died or the survivors escape.
Dread is a flexible system able to tell any sort of horror story. The rulebook includes three scenarios covering the slasher, space horror, and monster genres. Each scenario has a set up, a list of questions for character creation, and a rough three-act outline to set the pace of the story. Everything else is determined by the characters’ choices and the game master’s imagination.
It is this flexibility that makes Dread such an excellent storytelling game, and it is down to two core mechanics: the questionnaire and the the tower itself.
The Questionnaire
While the tower is the most memorable aspect of Dread, the mechanic that really sets it apart is its character creation. Rather than assigning skill points or stats, each player is presented with ten leading questions such as “What is the worst injury you’ve ever caused to another person?” or “How did your sister die?” The questions are framed in a way to create strong archetypes that match the tone of your story, while giving players enough creative freedom to determine the specifics of their character.
The questionnaire also allows players to establish details about the world itself, like the name of the company that hired you or the circumstances that brought your characters together in the first place. It is a wonderfully agile system for creating compelling stories with lots of room for player creativity.
The Tower
What I love about the tower is how it dictates the pacing of the story you choose to tell. The rules of Jenga mirror the tension-and-release cycle of horror through its increasingly tense block-pulls and the catharsis of succeeding at a risky venture, all while knowing that the outcome is inevitable. Someone is going to lose, it is only a question of when.
It is so effective at building tension, in fact, that other RPGs have copied the mechanic outright. For example, The Wretched by Chris Bissette is a solo RPG in which you play an astronaut struggling to survive on a derelict ship; and Rest in Pieces by Imagining Games takes a different approach, using the tower not for horror but to simulate the increasing mayhem of a cartoon show. Both games use a tumbling tower to build the tension as the game hurtles towards its inevitably tragic ending.
The tower, though simple, has a lot of utility built into it. More difficult tasks may require more than a single pull, pushing the players even closer to disaster. Players can refuse to make a pull, avoiding death but suffering a heavy narrative consequence like a crippled limb or broken equipment instead. At any time, a player may willingly knock over the tower and make a heroic sacrifice, creating dramatic moments of overcoming danger.
The tower is a creative way of using game mechanics to set the pace of a story, and it is not the only one. Games like Fate and Good Society use a token economy to set the pace of the stories players tell, and next week I will be covering a game that uses candles as a means of pacing, to even more grisly and horrifying ends.
An Ideal Halloween Game
I love to pull out Dread this time of year. I have been involved in two Dread games — once as game master and once as player — and I am preparing another game next week! I would happily play Dread once a year for the rest of my life if I could, it is such a delightful and simple game.
The game is designed to be played in one sitting, meaning that there is little time commitment, and there is not much prep besides the initial setup and outline. You don’t need much prep material at all after the characters are established. So if you have a couple of hours and some friends who would like to hear a scary story, just pull out your old Jenga tower and give it a whirl!
You can get the game yourself in either print or PDF format.
Next Time…
We wrap up spooky season with one final RPG horror recommendation, this time trading tumbling towers for tea candles.