What’s it about? wrote: Locus is a bespoke, mystery/horror roleplay game with unique mechanics crafted entirely around horror.

It is a game about flawed character, about exploring consequence and morality against a backdrop of very real, supernatural and monstrous danger.

The game master assumes the position of a Director, who conducts their Cast (the players) in their tragic play of characters haunted by their own pasts and a scenario which aims to turn those haunts against them.

The goal is two-fold - to unravel the mystery of the world, and then survive it.

Our project will fund the printing of our roleplay system, Locus, in to a pair of high quality hardback A5 books. As part of this Kickstarter we have also included costs for a full, professional edit and the funds to pay our artist for her work on the previously available 'version 0' of the product.

Locus is already written and designed. With a version 0 having been previously available on DriveThruRPG.

However, we want to sand off the rough edges, give it some polish, and get some physical copies printed. There will be a some other small changes from the version 0, including but not limited to a more robust safety statement, a significant revamp of the prewritten campaign and more sample items and monsters. Should this Kickstarter succeed the updated digital version will be made available for purchase.

There are two books we would be looking to get printed: the Director’s Guide (approx 150 pages*), which details how to plan and run a game and reveals a number of mechanics and lore which are to be ‘secret’ for the players; and a Player Guide (approx 60 pages*), which is a much smaller document focused on how players should engage with the game and how to create their characters. Between them, the books include rules guides, examples of how to play, photocopiable / printable cards for use for characters, items, and monsters and a sample campaign.

Locus will be printed as two full colour A5 Hardback books.

The seeds of Locus’ creation were planted over 7 years ago, in a horror-themed roleplay game we ran as undergraduates, set in an asylum with time-travel elements. Upon reflecting on that game, we realised that for that style of story, none of the available systems we looked at really fit, including the systems we used to run the game. During development, the initial idea morphed and matured into much more.

Inspired by our love of the Horror genre and pulling inspiration from properties such as: Silent Hill, Event Horizon, Ju-on: The Grudge, Forbidden Siren, Limbo, Penumbra, Jacob's Ladder, Pan's Labyrinth and Triangle.

The tabletop rpg sphere has many games influenced by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and while we feel this has resulted in some incredible works we felt that there was a lot of untapped inspirations in the horror genre which we chose to draw on instead. Locus deliberately does not draw from the works of Lovecraft and outright avoids using sanity as a resource or main theme.

One of the core goals of this system was to personalise the monsters for the player characters, making it more meaningful to them and less existential or abstract. It plays with themes of guilt and regret, with all player characters requiring one or more Haunts - an event in their past which plagues them and drives the journey through a harsh landscape. The title, taken from the Latin genius loci, is itself a clue to the mystery element of the game - why exactly is the world so hostile?