Terror From The Tabletop: TTRPG Horror Adventures That Are “Not Ravenloft”

Welcome to the table,

It’s that time of year when ghosts and goblins lurk and skitter across mist-laced moors and witch-haunted woodland paths. To be honest, I’m a fan of horror year-round, but this time of year gives me an excuse to talk about some of my favorite horror-themed things without feeling like I’m showcasing spooky stuff in the middle of a lovely spring celebration or some such.

With that in mind, today we are going to take a quick look at some of my favorite horror-themed tabletop roleplaying game adventures. This is not going to be my full list by any stretch. It will 100% include some fun and iconic standouts that came to mind when our man Tony and I were chatting about things to do around Halloween.

Tomb of Horrors

First up is the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module S1, known as Tomb of Horrors. While Tomb of Horrors has made an appearance in multiple editions of D&D, the original stands out for me. It’s laced with so many memories of trying to navigate the various puzzles and traps as a player and trying to learn why the adventure itself was so powerful and compelling as a storyteller so I could better build my own adventurers to challenge my players at the table with.

The original was written by Gary Gygax, the father of D&D, and was originally used at the 1975 Origins gaming convention as a module to really challenge players at the table. What I love about this one is that the plot focuses on a demilich named Acererak, who I feel is an unsung icon in the D&D space. Vecna and Strahd are great. I dig the hell out of both of them for sure, and popular culture has really embraced them both with Vecna getting a recent glow up and sharing a name with the undead thing that harrows all those kids in Stranger Things.

Acererak, though, has always delighted me because he is this weird, undead guy who spent who knows how many years building this dungeon of death traps for seemingly no real purpose other than to be a menace in some Scooby-Do sort of plot to gain more power and amuse himself. It’s this almost SAW-style plot, long before the SAW series ever started, with the slowly dying puzzle master being replaced by this undead wizard in a wacky hat.

I loved his goofy hat, by the way. The reason the adventurer fits so nicely into the horror space is that with each death trap, the players feel the pressure growing, and each failure depletes their resources, hit points, and will to want to press forward, swapping out swarms of monsters and menacing hierlings for the cold, unflinching sting of swinging blades and gravity-reversing spike traps.

The original ended with the destruction of Acererak. There wasn’t much pomp or ceremony to follow up the death of your creative foe, but it does present many opportunities for the Storyteller to continue on their own. In my case, that was by introducing a cult that wanted to resurrect the undead wizard so they could enlist him in building a Hellraiser kind of temple of destructive delights.

 

Masks of Nyarlathotep

Next up on the stack is Chaosium’s Call of Cthulu: Mask of the Nyarlathotep. I grew up reading the works of H.P.Lovecraft. While I will be one of the first to admit the racist and xenophobic passages in his works are problematic and harm people, making the man himself very uncool, there are creators out in the world who have stripped away the very regressive and broken ideas present in the work, and made some really cool stuff out of it.

One of my favorite stories from the works of Lovecraft is the 1920s prose poem Nyarlathotep. It tells the story of an ancient entity in the form of a pharaoh with a mastery of modern science and sorcery, traveling from town to town, showcasing his wonders and leaving each location plagued with nightmares. The poem shifts towards the end to dive into the existential dread of a reality where the universe is falling apart, society has crumbled, and the soul of all things is this cosmic intellect who seems to be the orchestrator of the destruction, without once taking any action other than showing mankind more than their mind can handle. 

The TTRPG adventure is massive. It spans multiple continents and was a favorite of mine and my friend Jim, who is no longer on the mortal coil with us. That dude was an amazing player and a great friend, and the world is less cool without him in it.

What makes Masks of Nyarlathotep really stand out for me is that it’s told across a handful of really moody adventures that take place in the 1920s and center around a group of adventurers. They’re trying to figure out not only what the Nyarlathotep is, but what it’s trying to accomplish. This is accomplished by means of investigating and interpreting a bunch of handouts in the form of fake newspaper articles, matchboxes, letters, and business cards that serve as clues to the greater cosmic machinations of the “Crawling Chaos” and various associated and yet unknowable Outer Gods.

The adventurer does something really cool. It sets up this looming dread that spans the globe, as cults across various locations in the world are trying to bring about the downfall of mankind, and players are traveling across New York, Cairo, Shanghai, London, and more to figure out what exactly is happening.

Not only does this adventure create some really cool moments of existential dread and looming cosmic horror. It also changed the proverbial game in a lot of ways. Most adventures keep you in a set location or structure, exploring a kingdom, castle, or region to fight something threatening the immediate area. Mask of the Nyarlathotep transports players across the world to varied locations and really gives this sense of travel and exploration on a global scale.

All of this is probably why, to date, this adventure is seen as one of the greatest of all time in the TTRPG space.

 

Strange Aeons

Paizo’s Pathfinder has a ton of really strong adventure paths that stretch across multiple volumes to form a cohesive campaign for your players. The adventure path Strange Aeons is one of those super strong offerings from Paizo that is memorable for its ability to take some deeply dark horror themes and lace them into high fantasy in a way that really works.

Strange Aeons has a lot of very recognizably Lovecraftian entities driven by their own desires and the will of the Elder Gods. The adventure kicks off in Briarstone Asylum, where the players are missing bits of their memory and have to work together to figure out what happened to them.

If the party survives the first volume, the second sees them traveling to the town of Thrushmoore, where they are still working to figure out where their missing time has gone. There are lots of cool combat encounters, a cult devoted to the King in Yellow, a witch, and an ancient and strange edifice that seems to be the source of the growing cosmic forces that are trying to consume the people of the town and the surrounding area, and possibly the world.

 

 

Volume three of Strange Aeons is where I think it really starts to take a fun shape as we get some of my favorite monsters, The Gugs. It goes from a rad riverboat moment and shifts into the exploration of the Dreamlands, where you get this almost Blood Born, Demon Souls, Elden Ring kind of existential dread-filled nightmare landscape. Depending on how your storyteller runs it, that can turn into some really cool moments to showcase each of your players as they face their own demons and larger cosmic threats.

If the party can survive the Dreamlands, volume four takes them to Cassomir to hunt after Count Lowls, who they eventually discover has taken a cursed book from the capital city of Qadira.

Of all the bits of this adventure path, this one I liked the least, mostly because slave trading cities, even when very clearly displayed as places of ill repute and ethically wrong, just feel unnecessary. It could be a city that produces weapons of war or consorts with demons. I just personally find a lot of discomfort in slavery, and it’s not really a good look when you can control the fantasy world you are writing in.

All that said, though, the adventure is solid. Though a little more mysterious and exploratory than the other volumes in this path, it serves as a change of pace before the titular “end game” of it all.

Volume five has the players finding the path to the ancient city of Neruzavin, where they explore a really cool lost city still on the hunt for Count Lowls. The player party clashes with Count Lowls’ group. If they survive, they must figure out how to use the book he stole to activate Neruzavin’s strange monument. much like the one they saw the cult trying to use back in Thrushmoore, the location in volume two, and head to the nightmare city of Carcosa.

The dread really looms in this adventure because there is a Great Old One sleeping in the lake, and there are all sorts of horrible monsters waiting to ambush the party at every turn. It turns up the tension a ton because the players never really get a chance to rest as they have to push from encounter to encounter, trying to figure things out as they go and avoid all sorts of party-destroying horrors.

As a side note, I adore the cover of this volume and have said multiple times that it’s one of my favorites across all the covers on the Pathfinder Adventure Paths.

The last volume in this path takes the players to the nightmare city of Carcosa. The party is tasked with figuring out how to break the bindings that connect the faraway planet that uses the various hidden pathways to link Carcosa to Golarion, the world where the majority of the Pathfinder adventures take place.

As the party explores this alien city, they realize that Carcosa is this collection of places ripped from other worlds. Once they get laced into the network of haunted streets and corrupted courtyards of Carcosa, the city becomes this twisted reflection of what it once was, turning an almost funhouse mirror on reality and really messing with the perceptions and norms the players have come to know and expect in their world.

The whole adventure has this looming dread of the actual King in Yellow arriving among the other challenging entities who call the strange streets of Carcosa home. If the party survives, all of these volumes they will have accomplished something truly memorable in the TTRPG space.

So there you have it. Three really fun, horror-themed adventures that you can check out to add some fun horror to your tabletop experience.

Until next time, I could have added a multitude more. Anyone who is familiar with the TTRPG space is probably asking, “Why no mention of Ravenloft?”

When I originally started to write this up, I managed to get nearly a thousand words on just Ravenloft before I realized this was just becoming a love letter to a well-known horror adventure that is frankly one of my favorites across all editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

I think Ravenloft is delightful and stuffed full of memorable moments, but it is so well known, and while the others mentioned above have a lot of attention in the horror landscape as well, I thought it would be fun to give old Acererak, the “Crawling Chaos,” and “The King in Yellow,” some love this Spooky Season.