
According to Spectrum Games President, Cynthia Celeste Miller, “I fell in love with anthology-style horror when I was a young girl, starting with Creepshow. That love continued with the old EC and DC horror comics, as well as with HBO’s Tales from the Crypt series, among others. It occurred to me that this style of storytelling might make for a very different gaming experience, both in terms of the rapid pacing and the types of characters that these tales typically focused on.”
• SftG is built around making it possible to play out several short stories in a single setting, with each one feeling exactly like the kinds of tales spun in the comics, shows and films of the genre.
• The game is powered by a heavily modified version of the Intention System (the ruleset used for Retrostar). It’s simple, narrative and encourages players to have plenty of control over how the story progresses.
• The system is fast and easy to learn. In fact, the actual rules take up just over 12 pages.
• Character creation is a very simple matter that takes 15 minutes or less.
• Players are rewarded more for making the story more entertaining than for "staying alive". As anyone who is familiar with the source material can tell you, many of these stories focused on truly reprehensible people who ultimately get their just comeuppance.
• Players can acquire help from a communal pool of Grave Tokens that can be snatched up and used to lend a hand... but not without a price. After all, one of the main themes of anthology-style horror is that you can never get something for nothing.
• The Grave Keeper has plenty of tools at their disposal as well, including Story Frames that can be used as the foundation for virtually any tale imaginable. Every effort has been made to keep it easy to set up and run games of Stories from the Grave.
• You’ll find details for many of the most common Story Frames, including “Careful What You Wish For”, “Consequences”, “Hapless” and more.
• The rulebook contains a full-blown sample installment (aka adventure) to get you started with.
• An exhaustive 8-page “example of play” covering the entirety of an installment will help players and Grave Keepers to better grasp the finer points of the rules.
• Evocative illustrations from C. Michael Hall, Bradley K. McDevitt, Nolan Segrest and art taken directly from “public domain” horror comics of the 1940s and ‘50s.
You can purchase Stories from the Grave here.