The Culture: Why You Don't Need Specific Horror Products

Spoopy Day, so here's something I concluded about Muh Horror a long time ago: it's the flip-side of Supers.

Supers and Horror are the same fantasy from opposing points of view. For the Super, you are the overpowered party engaging opposition that--save for some equal or greater to you, which remains a rarity--you can easily handle most of the time so the point ceases to be stopping the opponents so much as it is defeating the plan behind their actions. Horror puts you in the position of the ordinary opposition taking on opposition that is greater than you in power- sometimes so much so that direct confrontation doesn't even rise to suicidal, like Ordinary Man vs. Superman (and no, Lex Luthor is not ordinary; neither is Bruce Wayne) so you are forced to outthink and outwit the superhuman opposition to win, for certain definitions of "win".

You get a sense of this, believe it or not, with 40K media.

If you're the ordinary men, that's a horror scenario. For the Marines, this is a Super scenario- until the end, when the power differential flips and now they face a Horror scenario.

That's it. That's the basis of Horror; are you underpowered vs. the opposition you face.

This is why Horror scenarios are always, in Tabletop parlance, "one-shots"; as nothing less than Resident Evil/Biohazard shows, the instant you become capable of facing the threat on a more or less even level it ceases to be horror and becomes a Weird Adventure with a sinister tone to it.

You don't need Call of Cthulhu, or any other Horror product. You just need a scenario where your mans are underpowered against the opposition. Yes, that means playing Soviet conscripts in the Winter War could easily be a Horror scenario. No supernatural or superhuman elements required, and that actually happened.

You can just master the game you've got and get the same result. Just play D&D.