Midwinter Ghost Stories is a love letter to Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories, in roleplaying game form. It’s a book of five system-neutral scenarios, each one an eerie, chilling hauntings for your characters to investigate and resolve.

The scenarios are system neutral. They come without rules, but with guidance on how difficult a challenge each scene should be, what type of traits or attributes to use, and other relevant advice to bring the scene to life. With a little bit of prep, you’ll be able to drop in game mechanics for whatever system you want to play the scenario in (within reason; we’re assuming a game with a traditional GM/facilitator role, for example).

That leaves a pretty massive pool of games, including Call of Cthulhu, They Came from Beyond the Grave, and Vaesen (just our top three). And yes, if you’re more familiar with traditional fantasy roleplaying games, including 5e, the scenarios will work there too (we suggest using the  Masque of the Red Death Players Guide, from DMs Guild).

Midwinter Ghost Stories will be available in PDF, print-on-demand from Drivethru RPG, and in a limited run special edition — cloth-bound, bedecked with gold, and as close as we can get to a book you’d pick up in a dusty, haunted library — only through Kickstarter.

The Ghost Stories

The five scenarios are loosely linked together by the presence of the same cursed garment: a wedding dress, loved and treasured but never worn.

• In our first tale, the dress is appropriated as a costume for a glamorous masquerade that quickly turns sinister.
• Later, it becomes a theatrical costume in a tragic, bedevilled production.
• Cut to shreds and used as pillowcase, the dress’s fabric brings restless dreams to a family in peril.
• The silk shreds’ presence make a gathering of spiritualists a deadly occasion.
• And finally, the last rags of the dress attempt to reunite, dragging their maimed and murdered owners along for the ride.

The Team

Midwinter Ghost Stories is an Ex Stasis Games production. You know us. You’re on our itch.io page. We make an array of spooky games, with varying degrees of scares and dry humour. Cat’s writing one of the scenarios, and Lore’s editing and working on art.

Our writers are:

• Alicia Furness
• Jessica Marcrum
• Lena Meier
• Oliver Darkshire

And our artists, all chosen for their exquisite monochrome artwork, are

• Caleb Cleveland
• Izzy Peters
• Rori Montford (Montford Tales)

The Kickstarter launches on 14th November 2022. There’ll be some sweet early bird deals and limited quantity rewards, so it’s well worth following to be notified as soon as we go live.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exstasisgames/midwinter-ghost-stories-spine-chilling-ttrpg-scenarios

Got questions? Ask them here!