Dread

[Ahriman238]

So... this is a thing.

Dread is a relatively new horror pencil-and-paper RPG. It's incredibly innovative in just how simple it is. No stats, no dice, no long campaigns, you can wrap in one sitting, an hour or maybe four. Character generation is just a short one-page questionnaire about relevant backstory, relationships and personality traits. Instead of rolling, you have a jenga tower and anytime you do something difficult, dangerous or under pressure, you pull a block and put it up top. Knock over the tower, you die. Chicken out, you fail the check. Simple, but it involves some small skill in the real world, ratchets up the tension as the game goes on and the tower gets increasingly rickety and a different sort of strategy. Is whatever you want to accomplish worth the risk?

Developer's site.

You can buy the PDF form of the rulebook for just four bucks. Or they have four scenarios on the site for free use if you want to playtest it. I highly recommend if you have some friends over.

[bilateralrope]

Relatively new compared to which titles ?

Their page on Drive Thru RPG boasts of winning a 2006 award. Wikipedia gives a 2005 publication date.

I've played Dread and it works very well for what it's designed to do: One shot horror sessions. The character questionnaire gets players invested in their characters, to the point that I had one of the other players asking if I was afraid of rats in real life. So I view the questionnaire as being as important as the Jenga tower, even if the tower is what most people talk about.

The Jenga tower provides two important roles for a horror experience. Building tension with each successful pull and then releasing it when the tower falls. After the tower is rebuilt everyone knows that things are safer (but not safe), which I've seen people compare to horror movies where the death of one character isn't usually followed by the immediate death of another.