I do love scary stories. Never been a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft, though. Even before I really understood the racism in old Howard’s stories, existential cosmic horror was just okay for me. And the gamer fandom around Mythos stuff gives me the ick. Cthulhu plushies at cons, Mi-Go references with the little IYKYK knowing giggles, all that. The treatment of sanity in Call of Cthulhu and how it reflects H.P.’s stories and values has always been kind of weird for me too! What sort of fact or observation makes you lose your marbles? The idea makes no sense to me! Honestly my complaint list about this whole thing isn’t worth going into. Unreasonably long and mostly personal biases.

So the name of Lovecraftesque (Second Edition), a new game from Black Armada, very nearly was a show stopper for me. But I’m glad I didn’t give it a pass, because it turns out this card-driven storygame is good stuff! Even if it doesn’t come with a plushie.

How It Works

Lovecraftesque is definitionally a story game: the point of play is to collaboratively create a story. At each step of the game, there is one main character (called the Witness) and one gamemaster (called the Narrator). Everyone else is a “whisperer” there to help the Narrator. After each clue is revealed, all the roles move clockwise so the former Witness becomes the next Narrator, and so on.

You start with a deck of cards that includes a setting, some locations, some NPCs, and some clues. Everyone’s got a handful of clue cards, some of which might instead be “special,” i.e. they break the game rules in interesting ways. And then you’re off to the races.

Gameplay is structured into three Acts. First there’s five rounds of Signs and Portents, where you put clues into play for players to take into consideration. Then there are up to three more rounds of Impending Doom, where the clues and scenes become more overtly supernatural and unexplainable. Then you enter the final Act, the Journey Into Darkness, in which everyone takes turns creating little vignettes of the Witness descending into the full horror of the situation. The game wraps up with someone being the last Narrator and explaining what happens to the Witness. Then there’s an epilogue and folks share their versions of “what really happened” and so on. The whole thing took five players about 2 hours to get through when we played it.

You always follow the same structure, and it seems like the game could get stale because of it but it really doesn’t. The core box comes with six fleshed-out scenarios and cards/tools to build your own beyond that, and there are three other sets, each with four scenarios. Even if you never DIY you can play the game 18 times! I might get it to the table four or five more times in the course of owning it, probably at cons and such.

There are tons of spooky clues in the core “mystery deck,” but each time you build the deck for a game, you only use some of them. Then you combine those with the must-include clues in the scenario. Seems like you’d have a lot of variety despite the tight 3-act structure, even within the same scenario.

Who ends up deciding “the answer” to the mystery of what the heck is up with all this horror depends on the push and pull between the Narrator and Witness roles. Either one can trigger the end, but when you’ve reached the end of the Journey into Darkness track the players have to end it. You can sort of engineer the timing so you’re the Narrator if you want to be.

Mystery Solving: A Different Approach

The killer app of Lovecraftesque is how the players work together to close in on what’s really happening at the heart of this horror story.

This process starts right after the first clue card is played in the first Act. Everyone secretly writes down their theory: a scary monster, a conspiracy, or a horrifying truth in a process called Leap to Conclusions. Going forward, every time another scene takes place and a(nother) clue is revealed by the next Narrator, you then refine your theory. You also use your personal theory to help decide which of your clues you’ll introduce. After this has happened a handful of times, folks will naturally start to nudge toward a “real answer.” Even if they’re not all the same, at least everyone’s theory will at that point be acceptable! Nobody is going to come up with a left-field theory.

It’s a clever system for building out a theory from scratch. It’s in a somewhat similar vein as Brindlewood Bay or Apocalypse Keys (both based on the mystery creation system created in the first edition of Lovecraftesque) in that you don’t start with a secret real answer; it’s not Clue, and it’s not on a facilitator to come up with the truth ahead of time. The difference between Lovecraftesque 2E and the Brindlewood games is the theory that ends up being revealed as “true” is never wrong. Players don’t have to face the cognitive load or emotional disappointment of coming up with a whole new idea if the first one is proven false.

It seems like this approach takes up so much rules volume that it’d be hard to use in a more straightforward RPG, but Black Armada’s upcoming Ex Tenebris, a space horror RPG, is built on the same mystery framework. Exciting!

BYOCthulhu

There’s only as much Mythos in Lovecraftesque as you bring to the game. There are no lists of known Call of Cthulhu entities or anything. Our game would be considered more folk horror than existential horror, I think. So what, then, makes the game “Lovecraftesque” at all?

I think you get there if players come up with as big an answer as possible: not just a local weirdo but a vast conspiracy. Not just a local haunting but a dimensional incursion. And so on. I think it’s the overwhelming scale that makes a story feel stylistically Lovecraftesque, even if the man himself frequently wrote smaller-scale stories.

Table Feel

We played through the very first scenario that comes in the basic box: “A Place in the Country.” Spoilers going forward, but as I mentioned before the mix of players and clues you end up with will make even a replay come out much different.

The premise of A Place in the Country is that Emma Manvers, our Witness, has arrived at a weird manor in the countryside that’s about to be sold. She represents an investment group looking to turn the creepy manor into a resort. The manor is also populated by a few oddballs, like the old groundskeeper and the heir who unexpectedly came to own the property.

Rotating Manvers players felt okay once we understood there wouldn’t be any character monogamy. Taking on the other characters, though, usually meant each of us mostly owned them. Not always. But mostly.

Taking on the Narrator role right after playing the main character felt very easy to slip into, and since that cycle continues throughout the game everyone quickly fell into step. Setting scenes in a GMless game like this can be hard, but with the spread of locations and NPCs available we got up and running pretty fast every turn.

There was a little confusion after the very first Leap to Conclusions, with one player coming up with a reasonable Scooby Doo type explanation. Like, the manor is swamped with toxic gases that make people see things, or whatever. Once we got that straightened out we were off to the races.

The first Act is always five scenes long and that seemed long enough to get some clues into circulation. We also had our first Special played, which made everyone pass their Leap to Conclusions to the left! That’s what revealed the Scooby Doo thing. It was an interesting card to play, since it required us all to shift our pet theories to someone else’s pet theory. I think not everyone really took to that, preferring their original ideas more.

The second Act, where things get more overtly supernatural, went the full three scenes. It doesn’t have to! But we were having fun creating additional characterization and fleshing out our setting a bit more.

One thing that came up a few times was players not being completely sure if or when a clue had been formally introduced into the scene. You have a Mystery card that says “Clue” on it and you can play it overtly, but it’s easy to try and be clever and try to nudge folks toward the reveal via narration. That can work but it’s iffy and not everyone is equally skilled at it, or at recognizing it’s happening.

There’s a clever but very straightforward rule about being the Witness, which is “always follow the clues.” This gets interesting when you’ve been in a scene for a while and old roleplaying habits crop up! I had to remind my Witness, when I was a Narrator, that (very wisely) avoiding a creepy-as-shit shed wasn’t following the clues. On the other hand, it’s literally against the rules to harm the Witness, at least in the first Act.

When we played through the Journey Into Darkness, and the rules shifted such that we were just creating little vignettes, the game got much more surreal. I think this is on target for many kinds of horror! And probably even models the Lovecraft finale when our protagonist ends up deep into whatever awful bullshit they couldn’t keep themselves from exploring. But in our case, it was hard to grab onto what the last person said and build off it, especially since we all still had our own emerging, evolving theories of what’s at the core of the horror.

Playing as a Whisperer taking on one of the NPCs, it was fun to riff with the current Witness. But also it was only riffing, filling in dialogue or building up a little characterization. Because you’re not the Narrator and you can’t introduce a clue on your own. So a couple Whisperers might get into a fun little side convo where we’re just leaning toward being weird and mysterious but never quite delivering something terrible. It was okay, even pretty fun, but you do have to defer to the Narrator.

Our finale very much felt like it was within the broad range of where we had all been leaning: that the manor was for-real haunted, and the nearby grotto was full of corpses, and the spirits of those who had died in various fires throughout the centuries remained to draw new victims into new fires. There were variations on this theme around the table, which we shared after the game, but if any one of us had ended up delivering our “real answer” everyone else would have been fine with it.

A Few Quibbles

The game has little helpful cards called Story Cards you’re supposed to flip over to remind you of procedures, but it wasn’t obvious when to flip them over. Sometimes I would just check ahead a bit to see if we should be on a certain card or not. There isn’t anything spoilery in the Story Card set so it’s not a big deal. They just weren’t as helpful as they might have been.

The Rules cards that contain most of the game’s rules are clever in that you turn some of them up or down depending on where in the game you are. That’s a good use case! But there were specifically two cards that didn’t feel like they were different enough to warrant flipping them. Specifically, the first five scenes of Signs and Portents (Creeping Horror rule) and the variable scenes of Impending Doom (Survival and Sanity rule). The cards are written differently but at the table it was hard to feel out just where the line was between them. The bright line between them is that the supernatural can’t be directly observed, just heard about, during Signs and Portents, and supernatural stuff can be directly observed, but only if it’s unclear or ambiguous, during Impending Doom. I’m not sure why we tripped on that but we did.

The box comes with a black light flashlight. It is very cute but they could have saved so much money. There is invisible-ink art throughout the rulebook and all over the box, and it really is fun to explore that. Kind of wish the cards had secret messages or even rules on them too. Maybe they do? I haven’t checked them all.

Bottom Line

Lovecraftesque is a clever RPG-adjacent story game perfect as a two hour collaboration warmup or RPG filler for up to five players. You’ll get a horror story out of it, you’ll do a little light roleplaying, and it might even be Lovecraftesque if you aim big and/or drop some well known names.