Abnormal Things
A downloadable horror storygame
Abnormal Things is a game I wrote that lets you and some friends tell a story similar to the one told in the show Stranger Things. You get to create a small town, populate it with characters, and roleplay them trying to protect the people they care about, from the monster that's abducting their friends and loved ones one by one. It has a rotating gamemaster role, which means players take turns controlling the horror and trying to creep out and scare their friends. It uses cards and dice to inject some random chance, and to emulate the slowly rising threat of the horror.
It allows for 3-5 players, and can be played as a one shot over about 4 hours, as a short campaign over a few sessions, or as a longer campaign as the monster returns to the same town over multiple seasons.
It's a hack of the game Abnormal by Avery Alder, which is also available for free!
Want to know more? Read this amazing actual play and review by Antonio Lo Iacono.
Download
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Development log
- Rules Update!Nov 30, 2021
- Well I feel sillyJul 31, 2021
Comments
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I was playing this game with a group and we ran into a major problem. It took so many rounds to unlock new stages because we had to roll a specific number. We ended up playing scene after scene where nothing new happened and the threat didn’t escalate, but still couldn’t finish in a one shot.
Then I looked at the original rules for Abnormal and noticed there is a rule for rolling above the number of the next stage. That rule isn’t in your game and without it the game dragged on far too long. We thought we were supposed to roleplay a scene even if we rolled too high.
Thanks for the feedback! You're right, the way the game should work is if you roll above the next stage it will still unlock.
This text is still in the current rules in the horror turn section: "If the die face doesn’t match or unlock a stage, then unlock the next stage card but place no fragments this turn. No scene occurs, and the Horror turn is over."
Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I'm looking at the current rules and it is there. I'm sorry if you missed that part of the rules and your experience suffered from it.
You are right. I copied and pasted parts of the rules into a Google Doc because my players didn’t want to have the book in front of them during the game. I did not read the paragraph in its entirety every turn.