Horse Around The House: A Horror Roleplaying Game

I've been fascinated by horses for a while. I loathe them. They're just too big - and famously skittish - and that combination unnerves me. There's something primeval in it: this is a beast. Quite how people manage to ride the fucking things around is beyond me.

A few years ago, I wrote a game called Will You PLEASE Stop Summoning Horses. Here it is in its entirety:

It's not long enough to publish and charge money for, but I don't want to add anything to it. The nightmare majesty of these enormous bastards is evocative enough on its own. Similarly, I had the spell "SUMMON HORSE" in A Familiar Problem, the one-page game I wrote for Critical Role.

On the back page of THE DUNGEON OF NUMBERED DAYS, one of the fun things you can find in the (freezing cold) dungeon is a red tap with "H" written on it: it dispenses horses at a tumultuous rate.

HORSE FAUCET. A tap at knee height with a red “H” on top of it. Look, I’ll level with you: don’t touch this tap. We tried to warn you by writing an “H” on the top of it, and even colouring that H in red to show that it’s dangerous to use, but people keep messing with it. All it does is spray full-size, furious, profoundly injured horses a minute out the open end at a frankly baffling rate. The horses hate it because there’s just not enough space in there for them, and those that survive the process are barely fit to kick you to death (but that doesn’t stop them trying!).

So: horses are clearly a thing for me. I wanted to write an entire game about that combination of ridiculous power, genetic fragility and lunatic demeanour. Horse Around the House was a comedy game, back when it first took form in my brain around three weeks ago. I struggled to come up with a core mechanic or anything more interesting than the absurd core premise: a perfectly normal American sitcom where a live, untrained horse was present in every shot.

I got to do some interesting research, as you can see:

But! I was reminded of Roar. (I learned about it from Trash For Trash, a podcast that was sadly shut down alongside the rest of the Rooster Teeth empire last year. It's a good episode! You should have a listen.)  Roar was a "comedy" film which starred several untrained big cats and co-starred a team of increasingly-injured humans. Thanks to the understandable difficulties of shooting a film where half of the actors could (and did!) maul the other half with a casual sweep of their claws, the production took 11 years to complete and 70 people were injured during the process.

The thing about Roar is that it's an unintentional documentary on genuine human fear that takes place during an attempt at an adventure/comedy movie. Characters who lived peacefully alongside lions were played by terrified humans, and every scene with the cats present is underscored with genuine, poorly-concealed terror. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

So: the horror crept in around the edges. I figured it would be interesting to come up with the leverage that the studio had over each player character, and from there the rest of the game took shape.

It's horrible: one of the least pleasant games I've written. It has a physical dexterity challenge as the core mechanic. It's about being kicked to death by a horse while you're trapped in a job you can't leave.

It's one of the few games I've put out that doesn't have a success/failure mechanic. I remember speaking with Alex Roberts when she visited the UK in 2022. We were sitting on a train trying to come up with a occultist game where chanting was the core mechanic, and I was struggling to work out how to work out how actions succeeded or didn't, and she casually mentioned that such mechanics were beneath her, and I've spent the last two years recovering. Alex is a fuckin genius (so smart, in fact, that she no longer makes roleplaying games for a living) and knew how to make fascinating, layered, curious experiences without resorting to such brutish concepts as whether or not something happened; meanwhile, I'm fumbling around out here with what amounts to releasing a different Dungeons & Dragons hack every month. Rolling dice. Can you imagine it? Like a child playing Snakes and Ladders.

Later that day, we played a variant of her game For the Queen in which we were minimum-wage employees tasked with driving a very heavy cube across the country to deliver it to someone who had done so well at destroying the planet this was the only way their success could be celebrated. I guess Horse Around the House is about capitalism too, probably. It's that thing I write games about. (That and death. And it's about that too!)

I've rambled on enough. Have fun with the game.

Or maybe it's not supposed to be fun? I don't know. Whatever would impress Alex more.

• Grant x