Crowdfunding Spotlight: CHAINSAW RPG
Rob Wieland dives into spooky season with a recommendation for a horror game from a underrepresented genre.
Who Will Survive And What Will Be Left Of Them?
Could a chainsaw even hurt this nightmare clown? - Image by Driftwood Archives
It’s spooky season here at Storytellers Forge so let’s talk about horror. Okay, it’s ALWAYS spooky season here, but I wanted to talk about a crowdfunding role playing game that covers a horror genre that rarely hits the tabletop. The horror genre I’m talking about is the slasher genre, home to mask wearing killers like Jason, Michael Myers, Ghostface and Leatherface. These killers and more are the inspiration for the aptly titled CHAINSAW which is currently raising funds on Kickstarter. But before we talk about that, we need to talk about MÖRK BORG.
No, MÖRK BORG is not the gritty cyberpunk reboot of Robin Williams’s first sitcom. It’s a role playing game created by Swedish game designers Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr. Free League Publishing released it in 2020 and it’s had an influence on the gaming world I haven’t seen since Vampire game out in the 1990s. MÖRK BORG is brief, brutal and beautiful. The rules are very light which makes teaching the game easy. They are also unforgiving; characters are built to die to the point that the game and its many variants offer 50-count character sheet pads and online character generators to get players back in the game when their current character inevitably falls. The original has a stunning look that’s both bright and dark which has brought a breath of fresh, doomed air to the look of gamebooks all over the place. Even when I encounter a MÖRK BORG product that I don’t enjoy, they are always full of great art and inspiration.
“From the first time I encountered MÖRK BORG, I fell in love,” said Matthew Myslinski, creator of CHAINSAW. “It was exactly the right blend of dark fantasy, art-focused layouts, and metal. I knew I needed to do something with it, and CHAINSAW was inevitable. I'm a huge horror fan, and I've always wanted to do a horror game based on slasher movies. When looking for my next project, this idea kept haunting me, so here we are!”
They Were Warned…They Were Doomed…
CHAINSAW uses the same tools as MÖRK BORG to deliver a game where players are the main characters in a horror movie pursued by relentless monsters. The basic rules make this an easy pitch for horror loving friends that have never played a role playing game before.The high mortality rate is completely within the genre and I think it would be fun to ask for help in describing whatever gnarly kill happens. Players rarely get to enjoy their death scenes so why not let them describe what happens? The art previews make the book seem like you’re flipping through a lost collection of bloody poster art.
“Where MÖRK BORG is pitch-black apocalyptic fantasy,” said Myslinski, “CHAINSAW is designed for much more modern settings. It still has the same heavy metal influences, but applied to the horror movie genre. With it, you could run games set anywhere from the old 70s and 80s movies up to modern horror!”
The slasher genre was foundational for me growing up as a kid. I watched a lot of these movies on HBO growing up along with things like Creepshow and Tales From The Crypt. These movies helped me conquer my fears and helped me build a solid wall between knowing what was pretend scary and what was real scary. Freddy and Jason weren’t real and got more ridiculous every movie they returned, but watching shows about the aftermath of a nuclear war kept me up at night.
As a quick bonus recommendation, fans of this genre should check out Van Ryder Games’ Final Girl. It’s a solo puzzle game where the player is the hero of a slasher movie trying to survive to the end. Each expansion offers new final girls, new killers and new locations. While the expansions are themed, players can switch things up for new challenges, like fighting a demonic clown in an arctic weather station or chest bursting alien at the circus. Playing the game makes you feel like a movie character but setting it up makes you feel like a producer trying to come up with sequel ideas to keep your horror franchise fresh. If you can’t wait around for CHAINSAW to drop, Final Girl is a good way to get some neat ideas in the meantime.
How Would I Run CHAINSAW?
I could go a few ways running CHAINSAW as a one shot. It would be fun to do a retro game set in the 80s full of big hair, horny teenagers and needle drops. This version would be more of a satire of the genre with players gleefully describing how they die when they drop to zero hit points. But I could also see a more serious one shot thinking about what I would do if I got a small budget to write and direct my own film that reflected the anxieties of the time. Maybe a new take on The Most Dangerous Game or The Running Man where the players are transported to a private island and hunted by billionaires for sport in exchange for their families getting enough money to be financially secure.
I also think CHAINSAW could be an interesting campaign for generational horror. This would be something like IT, the most recent Halloween films or Ty West’s X trilogy. Have the first game take place in the 1970s with each following game taking place in the next decade adjusting the monster and location to fit that era. A junkyard in the 70s, a mall in the 80s, a video store in the 90s, and so on. If we get to the point where we go into the future and do CHAINSAW…In…Spaaaace, I feel like I will have gotten my money’s worth from the book.
CHAINSAW is on Kickstarter from now until October 4th, 2024. It is currently slated for an October 2025 release.
Rob Wieland is an author, game designer and professional nerd. You can find him on X and Bluesky @robowieland and on YouTube as the host of Theatre Of The Mind Players, the Actual Play show that plays everything besides Dungeons & Dragons!
