Announcing Macabre Tales, Spectrum’s Lovecraftian Horror RPG!

Spectrum Games is pleased to announce the release of Macabre Tales, a dominoes-based role-playing game that seeks to faithfully emulate the type of “weird stories” penned by H.P. Lovecraft during the 1920s and ’30s. The game is intended for use by one narrator and one player, but there are detailed optional rules for multiple players as well.

According to designer, Cynthia Celeste Miller, “While designing this game, my goal was simple: to accurately recreate the feel of Lovecraft’s fiction right at your gaming table. This required me to examine how an RPG functions, disassemble it all, modify it and then put it back together again. It was a time consuming and arduous task, but I think the final result was well worth it.”

Macabre Tales forgoes the use of dice in an effort to better model the meticulous, exacting nature of Lovecraft’s stories, opting instead to employ the use of dominoes.

Says Miller, “The domino game mechanic is set up so that the player has more control over the outcome of the character’s actions. It’s much less random, but luck still plays a part in the equation. There’s just enough luck involved to keep you on the edge of your seat.”

Another important aspect of Macabre Tales is that it completely ignores the “contributions” of other authors to the pseudo-setting that Lovecraft established and concentrates solely on that which he created himself. If Lovecraft had nothing to do with a creature, tome, location or tale, it’s not included in this book.

Macabre Tales is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Tags | lovecraft