u/Expensive-Tell-3505

This is a question I kept coming back to across 31 interviews with the designers and writers behind interactive fiction — from Fighting Fantasy veterans to OSR game designers to LARP theorists.

The answer I arrived at is simple but not trivial: the gamebook survives because the book survives.

There is something in the physical act of turning pages, in holding an object that can be given as a gift, annotated, lent, worn down — that the digital doesn't replicate. And the choice in a gamebook is a deliberate, voluntary, slow choice. It isn't a reflexive click on a screen. It's a decision you make keeping your finger on the page and thinking for a moment before you turn.

One of the designers I spoke with — Andrea Tupac Mollica, the most award-winning Italian gamebook author of his generation — put it this way: he built 25 endings for his adaptation of Orwell's 1984 specifically so that none of them would feel like a victory. The protagonist isn't Winston Smith. He's a member of the Thought Police. The reader doesn't fight the system — they serve it. And in some endings, through that network of choices, they begin to understand what that means.

Another — Manuele Giuliano — spent months interviewing survivors of the Italian retreat from Russia before writing his gamebook on the subject. He built in a meta-narrative moment where the reader is reminded: you can start over. 85,000 people couldn't. That's not a narrative trick. It's an ethical choice about what you do with the reader's ability to choose.

The book is called Narrative at the Crossroads — 31 long-form interviews including Dave Morris, Jonathan Green, Ken St. Andre, Kenneth Hite, Sandy Petersen, Yochai Gal, and Shane Hensley, alongside Italian designers who have been building this scene for decades.

Happy to discuss any of the themes in the comments.

When I asked Kenneth Hite about the sanity system in the new edition of Trail of Cthulhu, he made a distinction I hadn't considered before.

"The real madness of a Lovecraft character is having knowledge you cannot share. That sense — I know something that would destroy everyone around me, and I cannot tell them — is the crucial type of madness in Lovecraft's fiction. What we wanted to avoid was the gamification of schizophrenia."

The new system, designed with Gareth Hanrahan, separates stability from sanity — and it's a deliberate attempt to return to the spirit of Sandy Petersen's original Call of Cthulhu, where sanity never came back. In Trail, sanity generally doesn't return either. But stability lets you remain functional as a character — which, as Hite puts it, honours Sandy's original design while making the game more survivable.

He also had a clear and simple explanation for why Gumshoe works:

"There are two types of rolls. Rolls where if you fail things get worse, and rolls where if you fail things get interesting. Never make the first kind."

The clue-finding system follows from this directly. If your character has the relevant skill, you find the clue. Always. "The clues tell you where the Shoggoth is in the basement of the old mill. They don't tell you how to deal with it. The challenge of a mystery is never how you get out of the library you've been searching forever. The challenge is: what do all these clues mean?"

I spoke with Kenneth for Narrative at the Crossroads.

Happy to answer questions about the interviews in the comments.

Yochai Gal has a clear position on OSR: it is not bringing back an age that actually existed.

"I was not playing D&D in the 1970s and 80s," he told me. "At the time there was no Ben Milton on YouTube explaining how to play. Everyone had a copy of the D&D manual and that was their only connection to the rules. They had to make up their own rules as they went and developed their own play style. People today look back nostalgically because they can insert whatever experience they want, since there was no consistent experience across the board. I see the OSR as a new phenomenon, not a faithful reconstruction."

He also had something interesting to say about what actually drew him into the movement — not nostalgia, but a specific frustration with options:

"I remember running a game of Dungeon World and one of my players said: there are just too many options here and I do not want to look at this. Playing old school games later I thought: I do not need to push a button to do a special move. The special move is my brain."

Cairn itself started as a personal solution — he wanted to play Dolmenwood with Into the Odd mechanics, no compatible version existed, so he mixed Knave and Into the Odd, added two original mechanics, and put the result on GitHub under Creative Commons. There are now hundreds of forks worldwide.

I spoke with Yochai for Narrative at the Crossroads.

Happy to answer questions about the interviews in the comments.

Jonathan Green is one of the few people alive who has held Ian Livingstone's handwritten first draft of City of Thieves in his hands. He's also seen both original rule sets for Warlock of Firetop Mountain — material that had never been published before.

When I asked him how You Are the Hero came to exist, he told me it started as a 3,000-word commission for SFX magazine. He delivered 7,000 words, apologised for being unprofessional, and asked them to read it before cutting anything. They published the whole thing.

Then he launched a Kickstarter, and the book grew in the telling. Every interview led to someone new he had to speak to. The first edition ended up at 100,000 words and around 400 pieces of artwork. For the 40th anniversary, he combined everything into a single definitive volume — written as an actual Fighting Fantasy gamebook, with 400 sections, using years as section numbers so you could navigate from 1982 to 2012 the way you'd navigate an adventure.

I spoke with Green for Narrative at the Crossroads, a book of 31 long-form interviews with the designers, writers, and theorists behind interactive fiction — including Dave Morris, Ken St. Andre, Sandy Petersen, Kenneth Hite, Yochai Gal, and Shane Hensley.

If anyone here is interested, the book is available on Amazon — happy to answer questions about the interviews in the comments.

I'm building a cosmic horror tabletop campaign set on the American frontier. The setting forced me into a problem I hadn't articulated before: almost all of the genre's visual and spatial grammar is claustrophobic. Tight corridors, basements, sunken cities, the house with the sealed room. Enclosure does real work: it limits sightlines, justifies ignorance, and makes the reveal a matter of opening the wrong door.

The frontier gives me the opposite. Horizon in every direction, brutal sunlight, sightlines of thirty miles. On paper that should kill dread. In practice, playtesting taught me the desert is scarier, but through a different mechanism. Enclosed horror says: you cannot see it, and it is close. Open horror says: you can see everything, and what you see is that nothing is coming to help you. The scale itself does the work the corridor used to do. A single wrong thing in an empty vastness (a figure standing where no figure should be, tracks that start from nowhere) lands harder than the same thing in a hallway, because the emptiness around it offers no rational place for it to have come from.

The tradition backs this up more than I expected. "The Colour Out of Space" is open farmland. The Willows is a river island under open sky. A good chunk of folk horror (Picnic at Hanging Rock) runs on daylight and distance. And the ocean-surface stories work the same way: infinite visibility, zero safety.

What are the best works, in any medium, of what you'd call agoraphobic cosmic horror? And do you think the two modes scare in fundamentally different ways, or is enclosure just a special case of the same mechanism (the environment refusing to behave as a neutral backdrop)?

Researching for a cosmic horror tabletop campaign set on the American frontier (disclosure: my own project, and that's the last you'll hear of it, this post is about the fiction), I went looking for how much of the West exists in the Mythos canon. The answer is: one story, and Lovecraft was embarrassed by it.

"The Transition of Juan Romero" (written 1919, unpublished in his lifetime) has everything the subgenre would later be built on: a Western mine, a blasting operation that opens a gulf the engineers cannot sound, drums from below, and a workforce that understands before the educated narrator does. HPL considered it minor work and never submitted it anywhere. It only saw print after his death.

What strikes me rereading it is that the story's engine is economic. Nobody in it is a cultist. The abyss is opened by a mining company doing exactly what mining companies do: dynamiting deeper because the vein pays. That feels like the most honestly American mechanism for cosmic horror ever put on the frontier, greed as an unwitting summoning ritual, and Lovecraft got there decades before the weird west became a genre label. "The Colour Out of Space" works the same soil from the other side: the rural family that stays on poisoned land because leaving costs too much.

So, two questions for the room. First: is Juan Romero underrated, or was Lovecraft right that it's apprentice work? The prose is rough, but the bones seem ahead of their time. Second: what's the best Mythos or Mythos-adjacent fiction actually set in the American West? I know the anthology scene has touched it (and CAS set work in California), but I suspect this community knows corners of it I haven't found.

I'm designing a tabletop horror RPG (disclosure: my own project, no links, and the question is medium-agnostic on purpose). One core system is a deliberate trap: supernatural power is available on demand, it always works, and it always costs you. Immediate resource damage plus a hidden counter that eventually comes due at the worst dramatic moment. The design intent is temptation: the fun is supposed to live in choosing to take the deal while knowing it's a mistake.

Playtesting revealed the predictable failure mode: a meaningful share of players simply never opt in. They treat the mechanic as a trap, correctly, and route around it. For them a whole subsystem, and the theme it carries, never activates. It's the elixir hoarding problem with extra steps: if a resource's cost is salient and its necessity is avoidable, rational players preserve it forever.

Things I've considered, with doubts:

Making encounters unbeatable without the power punishes the cautious playstyle instead of tempting it, and turns a choice into a toll.

Front-loading a freebie (first use discounted or forced by the narrative) teaches the mechanic but undermines the fiction that this power is never safe.

Having the game actively offer the deal at moments of desperation (the system's equivalent of a demon whispering when you're at low health) works best so far, because it moves the decision from planning time, where players are rational, to crisis time, where they aren't. But it depends on hand-crafted timing, which is easy at a tabletop with a human GM and hard to systematize.

My question for designers across mediums: when you've shipped opt-in mechanics whose entire point is a bad bargain (corruption tracks, cursed items, high-interest loans, deals with devils), what actually moved the needle on engagement? Is the answer always "make the offer arrive during crisis, not during planning," or have you seen cold, planned-in-advance temptation work?

I'm designing a Weird West horror campaign on the Daggerheart engine (disclosure: my own project, here for design input, no links). Daggerheart uses Duality Dice: every action rolls two d12s, and which die is higher determines whether the result carries Hope or Fear, feeding the meta-economy. The system's whole philosophy is that one roll resolves everything: outcome, tone, resource flow.

Firearms are central to the Western fantasy, so reloading needs to exist as a pressure point. My first implementation was traditional: after attacking, roll a separate d6, and on a 1 the gun runs dry. It worked mechanically and failed philosophically. The extra die broke the one-roll rhythm, added a beat of dead time after every attack, and the tension it created was random rather than dramatic: the revolver quit on a meaningless mook as often as at the story's peak.

The revision I'm testing: no extra die. The gun runs dry when your attack roll comes up with Fear (which in Daggerheart already means "the GM's side of the fiction advances"). Reloading is then a quick action that interacts with the action economy. The reload pressure now arrives exactly when the fiction is already turning against you, it costs zero additional table time, and gun-heavy characters feel the drumbeat of managing cylinders during bad streaks without bookkeeping during good ones.

The trade-off I can see: with a separate die, reload risk was independent of narrative luck, so a player having a great session still sweated ammunition. Riding the Fear result correlates all the bad news together: when it rains it pours. For horror that clustering might actually be a feature, but I'd like outside eyes on it.

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Question for the room: in systems with a unified resolution roll, have you seen equipment states (ammo, durability, fuel) hang off the existing roll's texture rather than their own dice, and did the correlation of failures feel dramatic or just punishing at your table?

I'm the designer of a Weird West cosmic horror campaign built on the Daggerheart engine (nine volumes, currently in pre-release, so consider this disclosed self-promotion of the honest kind: I'm here to talk design, not to sell).

The premise: the party plays ordinary people. A gunslinger, a country doctor, a preacher, a shaman. Against outlaws, the revolver works. Against what the railroad money dug up, the body holds while the mind gives way, so a sanity track called Mental Fortitude runs parallel to HP.

The design decision I want to talk about is magic. Early playtests had a familiar problem: any repeatable, reliable player magic flattened the horror. If the shaman can always banish, the unknowable becomes a resource management puzzle. So I cut player spellcasting entirely and replaced it with a single channel called the Devil's Hand: each character secretly draws two Pacts at the start of a volume. Playing one costs Stress immediately, and every Pact feeds a hidden Grip counter. Fill it, and the debt comes due at the worst narrative moment. The GM can also spend their own resources to tempt you with a Pact when you're desperate, which is where the fun lives: the table knows accepting is a mistake, and accepts anyway.

Tomes, rituals and alien artifacts all route through the same principle: the cosmic will give you what you ask, and it always keeps the receipt.

What I'm still wrestling with: players who simply refuse to ever touch the Pacts. It's a legitimate choice (fear working as intended), but it means a subsystem some tables never see. Have you played or designed games with "poisoned power" mechanics (Trail of Cthulhu stability spends, Heart's beats, demon dice)? Did opt-in corruption work at your table, or did cautious players just route around it?

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The free Quickstart with the full system is out; happy to share links in the comments if anyone wants them.

I'm designing a Weird West cosmic horror supplement on the Daggerheart chassis (disclosure: it's my own project, still pre-release, not linking anything). The core premise is that the party plays ordinary people, not heroes: a gunslinger, a country doctor, a preacher, a shaman. Against human threats the system works as written. Against the cosmic, I run a parallel sanity track alongside HP, because the genre demands that minds fail before bodies do.

Working on this has surfaced a tension I suspect anyone converting a heroic engine to horror has hit: heroic systems are built on player empowerment loops (metacurrencies, reliable abilities, forward momentum), while cosmic horror is built on erosion. Some specific friction points I've had to resolve:

Magic is the big one. The genre says arcane power must always cost you, but the chassis hands casters clean, repeatable spells. My solution was to remove player spellcasting entirely and route all supernatural power through devil's bargains with hidden costs. It works at the table, but it means three classes needed complete reinterpretation.

Sanity death spirals are the second. Repeated sanity checks in long scenarios snowball fast. I've ended up capping checks per scene and tying recovery to downtime rather than in-scene mitigation, otherwise one bad night of dice ends a character by attrition rather than drama.

For those who've run or designed horror on heroic frameworks (5e Ravenloft, savage-genre hacks, whatever): what broke first for you, the mechanics or the mood? And did you find player-side hope economies help horror (something to lose) or undercut it (safety net)?

I'm building a Weird West cosmic horror setting for Daggerheart where the party plays ordinary people: a revolver handles outlaws just fine, but against the cosmic the body holds and the mind gives way. To support that, the setting runs a homebrew sanity track called Mental Fortitude alongside HP: certain horrors force Presence Reaction Rolls, and failures mark segments on the track instead of HP. Here's one of the mid-tier creatures. Curious how it reads to you balance-wise.

SERPENT'S SERVANT
Tier 2 Standard

A human shape that almost holds together. The proportions are wrong in ways the eye registers before the brain does.

Motives & Tactics: Herald the Serpent, whisper, unmake, regenerate

Difficulty: 14 | Thresholds: 10/20 | HP: 6 | Stress: 3
ATK: +2 | Tentacle: Melee | 2d6+3 phy

FEATURES

Wrong Body - Passive: A PC who looks directly at the Servant must make a Presence Reaction Roll (11). On a failure, they mark 1 segment of Mental Fortitude.

Forbidden Whisper - Action: Target a PC within Close range. They make a Presence Reaction Roll (14). On a failure, they mark 2 segments of Mental Fortitude.

Regeneration - Passive: The Servant clears 1 marked HP at the start of each of their spotlights. This doesn't activate if they took fire or silver damage since their last spotlight.

Design questions I'd love input on: (1) Is Regeneration too punishing for a Standard at this Tier, or does the fire/silver counter give the party enough agency? (2) Does a double sanity pressure (passive gaze + active whisper) on one Standard feel oppressive, or right for horror pacing when they show up in pairs?

Homebrew adversary for an independent setting compatible with Daggerheart, created under the Darrington Press Community Gaming License. Not affiliated with Darrington Press or Critical Role. No AI was used in this content.

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I've been building a Weird West cosmic horror campaign built on Daggerheart, where the party plays ordinary people (a gunslinger, a doctor, a preacher, a shaman) rather than heroes. Against outlaws a revolver is enough but not against what sleeps under the desert :)

I wanted the art to match that tone, so I commissioned traditional illustrations from Alessandro Paderi, an Italian illustrator who works in ink and pencil. Sharing a few pieces here, because I think his take on "frontier dread" turned out beautifully.

A question for other GMs running horror in Daggerheart: how do you handle the visual side at the table? Do you show creature art the moment the party meets something, or do you hold it back and let descriptions do the work until the horror is fully revealed? I keep going back and forth on this.

All artwork by Alessandro Paderi, commissioned by me and shared with his permission. No AI was used in the creation of this artwork. The campaign is an independent production compatible with Daggerheart, created under the Darrington Press Community Gaming License. Not affiliated with Darrington Press or Critical Role.

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