As Halloween draws closer, tabletop RPG players looking for interesting new works of horror media may well enjoy the following Actual Plays - tabletop RPG campaigns recorded on YouTube or streamed live on Twitch with heavy themes of terror and suspense. Ranging from one-shot sessions of Critical Role to surreal horror campaigns in the style of Twin Peaks, these Actual Plays are full of scary scenes that are both visceral and personal, with interesting storytelling techniques players and Game Masters can draw on for their own games.
Actual Plays, popularized by gaming groups such as Acquisitions Incorporated and Critical Role, have in some ways become the heart of the online tabletop RPG community. Newcomers interested in how tabletop RPGs work can watch the players and Game Masters of an Actual Play roll their dice and shift in-and-out of character. Experienced tabletop gamers who want to improve their play can observe the narrative techniques GMs use and the in-game choices and conundrums players find most fascinating. Then there are the publishers and developers of tabletop roleplaying games, who sometimes sponsor Actual Play sessions as a way to promote their new RPG game-lines.
The Actual Plays in this article use a variety of game systems and cover several different Halloween-adjacent genres: science fiction, like Alien; paranormal suspense stories similar to Strangers Things; personal horror stories about being monsters, such as vampires, and so on. Besides being resources tabletop gamers can use to learn about new Horror RPGs and the principles of running spooky tabletop campaigns, they're also quite entertaining in their own right, with interesting characters and story scenarios that are both fantastical and frightening.
LA By Night
LA By Night, an Actual Play of Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition hosted on Geek & Sundry, is a horror/urban fantasy game run by the soft-spoken Storyteller Jason Carl, filled with a cast of players and actors who portray troubled, ambitious vampires who navigate the city of Los Angeles at night. As a campaign where players are the monsters, much of the horror, tension, and humor in LA By Night stems from the player characters themselves and the harsh choices they make to appease their thirst for blood, advance their status in the cutthroat politics of vampire society, and the danger they face from the vampire-hunting forces of the Second Inquisition (should they flaunt their vampire status overmuch).
Dimension 20 - The Unsleeping City
The Unsleeping City is a tabletop RPG liveplay that's one of the primary settings of the Dimension 20 Actual Play series, is a Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in a modern-day New York City with underground societies of magicians and supernatural creatures, as well as numerous pathways to the realms of Dream.
Run by Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan, the paranormal narratives of Unsleeping City Seasons 1 and 2 are full of fun PCs and NPCs that blend D&D tropes with New York's culture, history, and foibles. It features Broadway stars who are secretly glamour-devouring fairy Bards, firefighter Paladins who draw divine power from their sense of civic responsibilities, pixie mobsters, and even more.
The Phobos Saga
The Phobos Saga, hosted by the Hyper RPG group, is an original paranormal horror setting explored through three different campaigns with three different tabletop RPG rule-sets. The first campaign, an anthology of horror/mysteries stories, uses the Ten Candles RPG, a system where tales of tragic horror are played by the light of ten candles, and each extinguished candle brings PCs closer to their final end. The second campaign was a play-test of the Kids On Bikes RPG, while the third campaign, Kollok 1991, is centered around kids from the early 1990s investigating the mysterious disappearance of their friend from both their small town and the memories of its inhabitants.
Critical Role - The Nautilus Ark: A Johnson Corp Odyssey
In-between episodes and seasons of their main D&D campaign, the Critical Role team frequently organizes one-shot RPG sessions where people other than Matt Mercer take on the role of running a game. One of these one-shot RPGs, The Nautilus Ark: A Johnson Corp Odyssey, was recently designed and run by Critical Role veteran and actress Ashley Johnson. The plot of this one-shot, much like the movie Alien, is centered around the crew of a massive starship who wake up from cryogenic stasis and struggle to deal with the hostile alien life-form that snuck aboard their ship through a hull breach.
Sources: Hyper RPG, Critical Role