Readers may remember our terrific run with Handiwork Games’ a|state earlier this year. Just a great, smart game all around. Designer Morgan Davie took an old Forge-era indie fave and reframed it with Forged in the Dark tech, then went on to add several sharp quality of life improvements to the FitD framework as well. Handiwork isn’t particularly on anyone’s FitD radar, and a|state continues to be underloved on Discord, but I’m here to tell you for my money it’s the best FitD game out there.
Morgan Davie is back with a Kickstarter campaign for FiveEvil. It’s an adaptation of a much beloved game system: this time, D&D 5E. As is probably apparent from the millions of words on this site and, you know, the site name, I’m not a 5E guy at all. Don’t care about Wizards, Hasbro, corporate domination of a fan-run, fan-created activity, none of it. I put my time in back in 1980 with B/X. I’m done with D&D.* And yet here’s a proven, talented designer and game-improver putting together a fuckin’ Fifth Edition game. God damn it my dude.
But Morgan Davie is really good at what he does. So now I’m looking down the barrel of FiveEvil, a 5E-based horror game and wondering, you know…
Can I run this and maybe not tell anyone?
* I’m actually not done with D&D, of course. My daughter’s middle school has a D&D club, I’ve run it for kids, my heart’s not stone.
FiveEvil
Probably goes without saying that my greatest skepticism about FiveEvil is that 5E isn’t well suited to horror gaming. Characters in Fifth Edition games typically have far too many layers of safety and competence, there’s no particular attention given to character interiority, it’s just not that kind of game. Doesn’t mean folks won’t shoehorn anything and everything into 5E: that’s where the money is.
One might cynically say FiveEvil is itself a cash grab by Handiwork (who, to be clear, has also published the Beowulf RPG, also based on D&D 5E, and is a masterclass in one player-one GM game design). In the intro to the first free demo of FiveEvil, Morgan points out that 5E is also the lingua franca of most of gamerdom. And if you can slip in some scary surprises to folks who aren’t used to being surprised by their emotional support game, well, all the better. Pretty good pitch.
The Splinters
Handiwork has put out five Splinters, little scenarios that spool out a sample of the various changes and additions he’s introduced to the Fifth Edition SRD. Each Splinter also includes a mini-scenario that you can run together as a multi-session “adventure.”
Even if you’re not going to actually run these adventures, this is a great way to eyeball how they’re supposed to work and envision what the new systems might do. Not sure I’ve seen this done well by anyone else yet. Usually it’s one quickstart file with as little of the system as possible presented.
The storyline follows the travails of folks who work at a “leisure centre” (it’s very British!) and come to the attention of a predatory being that follows very strange rules and logic. Lots of creepy bits, and the predator’s attention becomes more intense and dangerous. No spoilers! But it’s not the vampire story it sounds like.
New Mechanisms
I’m a more mechanisms-oriented player so I was more drawn to studying what all Morgan’s doing with his toy box. Unfortunately I’m not especially versed in the great big world of the 5E aftermarket. All I can talk about is what’s in FiveEvil on its own merits.
The big addition to me is a loop between earning Desperation tokens (by taking inspiration-like bonuses like rolling at advantage, or adding a +2, or both) which increases your “oh you fucked up bad” floor when you roll, an Intensity die that ticks up throughout the scenario and sets the DC for every roll (10+ the die face), and a catch-all Doom roll you make when no other skill fits, which is squeezed by the increasing DC on one end as the Intensity die goes up and on the other end as you accumulate desperation tokens. The game squeezes and squeezes until you pop. I could see adding this to straight 5E, although it feels more like survival horror than heroic badassery.
Another addition, which you couldn’t really tack onto 5E, is the entire combat system is swapped out for a “terror encounter” system. Instead of a bloodless game of risk and resource management, you get to decide on one thing you’re going to focus on during your combat round…and then face the horror, which means making that Doom roll I mentioned above that’s based on current Intensity at the top and accumulating Desperation at the bottom. On a miss, the GM inflicts one or more evils on you. All the good stuff, like arbitrary damage, disadvantage on your next roll, and so on.
Finally there’s an investigation system, among others, built on helping the GM improvise around what the players want to try. The Splinters scenarios are based on stages of how the monster terrorizes the PCs, rather than rooms or clues, which requires the GM roll with the punches. Unlike games like Gumshoe that always give the PCs a necessary clue to move forward, though, you can outright miss clues
The other stuff is more about addressing usual D&Disms: everyone’s stuck at 10 hit points, period. You can get wounded or other conditions separate from losing hit points, and they’re all tuned to horror rather than adventure (afraid, bound, down, overpowered and so on). There’s a modified list of skills that land under different stats than usual. No surprises, all good and easy choices.
Horror Advice
Besides all the mechanical tweaks and twists of the game, what jumped out at me is Morgan’s extensive advice on what he thinks makes horror tick. He’s got opinions!
One of my favorite ideas is that he considers horror scenarios in FiveEvil as being, essentially, traps. The characters are trapped by circumstance and the will of the baddie, and they can’t just walk away from it. This feels a bit like a commentary on certain strains of D&D play where PCs simply refuse to engage with difficult elements. Or in OSR language, players who actively avoid rolling dice and instead come up with good ideas. FiveEvil’s horror scenarios force you back to the dice because sometimes there’s just no walking away from it. Compare this to the monster-hunting ethos that so much Call of Cthulhu gaming reflects.
Throughout the Splinters samplers, his writing is eminently readable. I can’t stress enough how straight, conversational game text readability is becoming a lost, or at least underappreciated, art.
Last Thoughts
Like I said up front, I’m not just not a 5E guy, I’ve actively avoided most of it except when coerced by family or school obligations. I’ve got all of Handiworks’ Beowulf series on my shelf, and have read through it all, but haven’t found a willing victim to go one-on-one with me. But FiveEvil would be the first 5E-adjacent game I’m actively interested in putting on the table. It does different things than either Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu, it’s not laser-focused on one trick like (the excellent) Cthulhu Dark, it’s not tightly married to a setting like Kult, it’s not monster-hunting like Delta Green, and it’s more immediately accessible than Sorcerer or other indie-game-y takes.
