Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!
Fear and Panic is a 43 page horror game by Lyme, who previously brought us the excellent Dawn of the Orcs, with art by Roxanne B, Roque Romero, Strega Wolf, and Chaoclypse.
Fear and Panic is a game that resolves the player characters actions primarily. The basic rules here are to roll a d100, lower than a skill to succeed. You also roll to gain fear when your character is scared, which you then you can spend to panic and gain bonuses. There are 7 ways to panic, each providing a different bonus. What’s the downside? Whenever you roll fear you may gain a scar, which changes your character in a tangible way, with mechanical as well as non-mechanical impacts. From there, the game delves into situations, advice on how to run horror, and finally some concrete examples of NPCs and categories of NPCs. This is all pretty solid.
Fear and Horror is one of those games that attempts to streamline what makes a certain category of game fun, when the classics of that genre are a little heavier than I appreciate. The skills selection here really feel like the target here is Call of Cthulhu, and a huge chunk of the back of the book is advice on how to convert adventure paths or modules to Fear and Panic from these systems with large module ecosystems. I really like this style of game – I have written a bunch of games that at least incorporate the same impulse. The issue, though, is that this desire to exist in relationship to these other systems and ecosystems means that it has no real character of its own. I can’t love Fear and Horror, because it is a lens I view other peoples’ work through, a tool to get things to my table I wouldn’t otherwise because I don’t like the system they’re looking for.
Fear and Panic is clever, and it does the job it’s designed to do. I’d honestly choose Fear and Panic over Liminal Horror as a horror game, particularly if I was going to run something that wasn’t written for Liminal Horror. But unlike Liminal Horror, it doesn’t have much of a personality of itself, and so I find it hard to get excited about it. It feels a bit like the weaker first editions of Cairn and Knave, which felt like experiments, but then came the stronger, more flavourful and specific second editions. That said, the elegant part of Fear and Panic is on the cover: Fear is the key to survival, and the loop of fear and panic here is likely to make basically every horror module better, in my opinion. If you’re looking for a streamlined, universal-ish system to run horror classics in that you’ve heard so much about, I think Fear and Panic is the game for you. If you’re looking for your horror game, though, something with a personality and ecosystem of its’ own, you might have to pray for a second edition. I’d love to see it.
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