What ho, fellow gamers! Today's tabletop spotlight is a departure from the dank dungeons and crowded high-fantasy streets you're most familiar with. Today, I bring you a game so esoteric that it goes for quite a mint in online auctions. A game that garnered some controversy and was refused to be carried in some shops. A game that was praised by psychologists and lambasted by concerned parents. This game of horror and imagination is
Little Fears - The Roleplaying Game of Childhood Terror
Grab some Lovecraft, remove the dry and repetitive plot devices, toss it in a pot and mix it up with some Lewis Carrol whimsy and you get Little Fears, a game that pits you as a six to twelve year old child in a world of nightmares. As a mentally disturbed child, you are consistently haunted by nefarious Demagogue and the Seven Kings of Closetland all of which are based on the seven deadly sins. Armed with "Belief" the ability to shape the "matter" of imagination, you must defeat the kings and the monsters in the closet without going crazy.
(the following pictures are copyright Joshua Hoffine. They're not from the book I just felt like showcasing them because they're really creepy)
Character creation is a simple process utilizing a GOAT (generic occupational aptitude test) that's set up like an elementary school questionnaire. All actions are settled as a result of a d6 with the target number being your attribute or lower. Additional qualities a character can achieve can add extra die to the pool allowing you to choose the lower of the results in a given action. Unfortunately, the system allows an abuse of min-maxing allowing characters to be real exceptional at multiple attributes. There is no level up mechanic, which is good to an extent, but this leads to the game's biggest flaw:
There's hardly any direction. As a child, your only goal is to survive. It's up to the GM to decide the ultimate goal of the quest, but outside of roleplaying (and playing as a child, a REAL child not the Hollywood superstar children, is a fun experience) there's little to the narrative as all "events" are either "you live, you die, or you go insane." One could say that the ultimate "goal" of the game is
to be your character and with a good GM and group of players the RP involved could be completely engrossing but the game pigeonholes you by providing little in the way of actual accomplishments.
The GM is also in charge of playing as adults, a force that acts as a foil to the "imagination" creatures of the world. It's a jarring experience to act as a god playing as gods as adults themselves have "powers" over the world that no child can reach or comprehend. Essentially, it's a world with an obscure hierarchy and events that characters can do little about other than A) running or B) fighting. It lends itself easily to terror, which is the focal point of the game, but less attentive players can easily find themselves bored.
Little Fears isn't a bad game by any means. Its mechanics are strange but the material is original and disturbing. Expect a true storytelling experience, not a hack and slash dungeon romp.
Fun Note: A new edition (dubbed Nightmare Edition) was supposed to be released last Halloween. Jason Blair, the creator, updated his website back in January of this year saying the games mechanics were kicking his ass. Finding this game is nearly impossible as there was a limited run and copies were actually destroyed because the publisher refused to give carriers their refund when they found out about the "content."
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Tabletop Sundays: All Children Must Die [tabletop]