The Castlevania franchise - both the long-running series of platforming action games and the animated series on Netflix - distill a thousand motley gothic horror tropes into a setting of spooky castles, vampire lords commanding legions of hell, and the ragtag monster-hunting heroes who challenge them. These tabletop roleplaying games in turn distill the essence of the Castlevania franchise into a series of compact rules for creating pre-modern monster hunting player characters and setting them against brooding, vengeful lords of darkness; vampire-killing bullwhips are optional, but always welcome.
"Castlevania" is the name of the haunted, labyrinthine castle, and Dracula is the dark, undead lord who commands its residents. These are the common plot elements of nearly every Castlevania video game and animated adaptation, which frequently star different protagonists from the monster-hunting Belmont Clan and take place in different eras of European history. The motivations of Dracula, a character taken from the eponymous horror novel by Bram Stoker, also change from adaptation to adaptation. Sometimes he's a cruel tyrant seeking immortality and dominion over all, and other times he's a tragic figure seeking vengeance on the human race who burned his true love at the stake.
None of the following tabletop roleplaying games are official adaptations of the Castlevania series (itself a loose adaptation of Dracula, Carmilla, and other vampire vs. vampire hunter horror novels). Still, the creators of these tabletop RPGs are unabashedly open about their love of the Castlevania games, and their desire to create roleplaying systems that pour on the gothic horror action and castle exploration while also interrogating the motivations, histories, and turmoils of both hunter and monster, characters who are trapped in an endless cycle of conflict, defeat, and resurrection.
Castlevania-Like RPG: What's So Horrible About Having A Curse
The title of the gothic horror RPG What's So Horrible About Having A Curse is a shoutout to the meme "What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse," a recurring quote from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, one of the earlier entries in the Castlevania series. Just like the main protagonist in that game, What's So Horrible About Having A Curse, designed by Lucas Valensa, is about a group of vampire hunters in a gloomy land who must defeat a monster lord to lift the curse placed upon them. The mechanics of this game are directly lifted from the minimalist RPG What's So Cool About Outer Space, where a player rolls 2d6 and tallies up their various advantages and disadvantages to see how well they do at certain tasks and whether the dark power of their Curse will overwhelm them or not.
Castlevania-Like RPG: Rhapsody Of Blood
Published by UFO Press, Rhapsody Of Blood is a Gothic Horror tabletop RPG built around the modified version of the "Powered By The Apocalypse" system, redesigned to tell stories of player characters from the family line over different generation. In this particular case, each PC in Rhapsody Of Blood belongs to a bloodline of monster-hunting heroes, sworn to destroy the Castle that appears once per generation and dethrone the corrupted Regent who commands the creatures lurking its halls. The "Playbook" characters sheets of Rhapsody Of Blood, describing different archetypes of gothic horror heroes, come in two varieties: playbooks for the founders of a heroic bloodline, and playbooks for future generations of characters who inherit their bloodline's will.
Castlevania-Like RPG: Demon Castle Dracula
Like Rhapsody of Blood, the RPG Demon Castle Dracula borrows a lot from the "Powered By The Apocalypse" system, using narrative game rules and archetype-focused character sheets to tell a story of darkness-touched heroes raiding a dark castle to foil Dracula's evil schemes.
Thematically, Demon Castle Dracula, one of "The Nerdy Paper Games" made by Rob Hebert, is much more compressed in theme, focusing on a single dark night of supernatural peril where vampire hunting PCs explore the shifting castle of Dracula and think back to memories of the moments that led them to their current fate. Icons for character sheet features such as health, coins, or bonds are also designed to bear a strong resemblance to the interface icons of classic Castlevania titles.
Castlevania-Like RPG: Beneath A Cursed Moon
Beneath A Cursed Moon draws inspiration from several works of Gothic horror fiction and supernatural fiction – video games like Bloodborne or Castlevania, comic books like Hellboy, and TV shows like Angel, among others. Each player character playbook in this "PBTA" system is a monster hunter of some stripe – champions of the light, masters of weapons, wielders of dark magic, or even monsters who defy their cursed natures to fight against kindred who've embraced their monstrosity.
Unlike the other RPGs listed above, Beneath A Cursed Moon, available on itch.io, de-emphasizes the idea of "Castle Crawls" in favor of investigation-based gameplay, where players try to unravel the secrets schemes of monsters and villains who've embedded themselves in the fabric of the societies they wish to overthrow and corrupt.