Paizo's Pathfinder is one of the best tabletop RPGs ever made, an extremely popular first stop for folks changing tracks from D&D, and has successfully spawned a hugely successful sci-fi twin in Starfinder. So it was a surprise, to be sure, last month, when the firm announced its next game was 13 Omens: a rules-lite horror game that doesn't use the Pathfinder engine at all. Now, as the first gameplay details begin to emerge, we're finding out how welcome that spooky surprise is.
According to a new 13 Omens event summary page on the UK Games Expo website, Jason Bulmahn and Joe Pasini's latest game is a purpose built, one-night affair, not a campaign RPG. That figures - Dread and Ten Candles, two of the best horror TTRPGs ever, also play in one sitting, for maximum intensity and immersion, minimum downtime.
But a Paizo email sent out on Wednesday (and shared by Redditor DnDPhD on the r/Pathfinder2e board) reveals some juicy new details that we didn't expect. For a start, 13 Omens uses "a unique, six-sided-die (D6) based engine with all players sharing the same pool of dice", and generates more and more chance of bad stuff happening as the game goes on, a bit like the classic board game Betrayal at House on the Hill.
All the D6s go into a bag - some of them "safe" dice (roll them, achieve things, hooray) and some differently colored "Omen dice" (roll badly on these, and it'll "cost you", says Paizo). With every check, you'll pull a random mix of these dice from the bag, and hope your bad rolls are all on safe ones.
"As the night lengthens and the story progresses," explains Paizo, "more and more Omen Dice are added to the bag as well, increasing your chances of danger". So, we can check 'escalating tension' and 'characters in constantly increasing jeopardy' off our horror movie structural elements hit list.
Two more intriguing titbits Paizo has reportedly revealed: 13 Omens doesn't require pre-game character creation, and the GM (referred to as the 'Host') makes no dice rolls. The game's prepared scenarios apparently each have their own character archetypes to choose from; you just grab one and go. Exactly how the Host role functions isn't known yet.
But, from all this, 13 Omens looks to be shaping up in the mold of a Dread or 10 Candles: a dedicated one shot game, very light on rules, heavy on vibes, perfect for Halloweens or a low-prep breather week in a long campaign.
What are those vibes, you ask? On that front, we still just have the initial sales pitch from the website: "A modern, supernatural, rules-lite horror TTRPG set in a dark reflection of our world; beset by horrifying specters, bloodthirsty killers, cursed places, and secrets best left unknown." Sign me the hell up.
We'll be keeping our beady eye on 13 Omens as more info comes out of Paizo, so to stay updated, come join the free Wargamer Discord community and sign up to our weekly email newsletter. Both are certified specter-free. There are some rats, but they don't bite.