As a horror fan, I am on an eternal quest to find tabletop RPGs that scare me half to death. It's a tall order for any roleplaying game. Despite how immersive these games can be, it can be tough to truly convince the mind that your dining room is a lair of unquenchable evil. It's too tempting for nervous friends to break character and revel in silly shenanigans rather than suffering and terror.
My holy grail of horror TTRPGs is one that's played alone, with no companions to shield you from your feelings. Its grim illustrations compel you to dream the worst dreams imaginable. You can close the book, but you still see its contents behind your eyelids.
This dungeon of horrors does exist. It also happens to be a comedy game for children.
Enter the dungeon
GrailQuest, an Arthurian fantasy series published between 1984 and 1987, combined the choose-your-own adventure page-turner with a dice-based combat system. Many gamers will recognize this format from the Fighting Fantasy books, whose first title was published by Games Workshop's co-founders in 1982.
Fighting Fantasy's influence stretched further, and GrailQuest's last two books never even made it to the States. However, back on British soil, I stumbled across a second-hand copy of the first GrailQuest book in the early 2000s. It scared me senseless.
GrailQuest resolved all manner of violent encounters with a 2D6 dice system. If you rolled more than a six (or a lower number if you had the right weapons), you'd wipe out some of your enemy's life points. The same could happen to your character, the hapless peasant boy Pip. Lose too many life points, and you're headed straight for the death description in section 14.
Luckily for Pip, he had the advantage of being able to sleep some of that damage off. Unluckily for seven-year-old me, the illustration of my nightmares was hiding in the Dreamtime chapter.
The remains of a soldier stare into your eyes. He's been nailed to a post, scarecrow style and only his skull and shoulders remain. The remains of his tattered garb blows in the wind. His hands, torn from his body rather than rotted away, have been nailed to the post that keeps him standing. There's no telling what the unseen assailant did with the rest of him.
Alright, when you stare into the skeletal face as an adult, it's not that upsetting. But in my earliest years, that one image fuelled weeks of nightmares. I memorized the exact page it was printed on so that I could skip past it any time Pip needed to dream. When I caught a glimpse of that dreaded figure, my heart would race.
The GrailQuest books are packed to the brim with pictures like this. Rotting bodies hung from gallows. Skulls, mummies, and demons. There are even some illustrations of ordinary humans that are a little too visceral. Each is the work of one man: prolific comic book artist John Higgins.
Painting by nightmares
Higgins has colored and illustrated some of Britain's most influential comics, including Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, and numerous issues of 2000 AD's Judge Dredd. Before that, though, he spent the late 1970s training as a medical artist in London's Royal Marsden Hospital.
"One of my heroes, to a certain extent, is Leonardo da Vinci, whose knowledge of anatomy is still second-to-none", Higgins tells me. "The fact that da Vinci did dissections to analyze the human form was the sort of thing that inspired me."
Despite what Higgins calls his "love for pure anatomy", he didn't see himself performing medical artistry as a full-time job. "The thing that I was always really interested in was the fantastical, things like science fiction, fantasy, and horror that took me away from the inner city home I was living in when I was 14 or 15."
Higgins spent his lunch breaks at the Royal Marsden showcasing his portfolio, and he eventually landed a gig with Armada Books, publisher of GrailQuest. He found he could use his extensive understanding of the human body in a whole new way. Namely, to spook small children who saved their pocket money to buy paperbacks.
GrailQuest's illustrations are stark black-and-white images, constructed from fine dip pen and brush lines. Higgins cites iconic pen-and-ink artists like Edward Gorey and woodcut masters like Gustave Doré as inspirations, and it's easy to see their Gothic influence. This style, however, was largely used out of necessity. "Because the paper was so cheap, [the publisher] said you couldn't do any solid blacks", Higgins tells me. "Influences for me were the great Victorian artists, the ones who used to work on the same type of paper in newspapers."
You'll see this same style in many RPG books from the 70s and 80s. Fighting Fantasy was similarly filled with pen-and-ink illustrations. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which released in the late 70s, also offered a sea of monochrome (though TSR did occasionally fork out for full-page color pictures). Color may be cheaper to print these days, but many RPGs still opt for the pen-and-ink style to harken back to what many consider a golden era of tabletop gaming. 'Old School Renaissance' games, from Sword and Wizardry to Shadowdark, wouldn't be where they are without the cheap fantasy paperbacks of these earlier decades.
Please, don't scare the children!
While this style was prevalent in fantasy games of the time, the GrailQuest illustrations still have something uniquely gruesome about them. Higgins tells me that this was always the point. "The young people who worked for the publishers were only about 10 years older than their audience", he says, "so they were very much in touch with the sort of thing that young people would want to read".
"They allowed me to do whatever I wanted", he tells me. "I was just told I couldn't make it too horrific." In fact, Higgins still has a copy of a letter from his publisher debating how much gore they could show in a book for ten-year-olds. "I couldn't do disemboweling, but apparently maggots falling out of the eyes was acceptable to a younger audience."
That letter was published in Higgins' own artbook in the late 2010s. It reads: "Please pick the most horrific aspect of each scene and go to town on the horror. Marion has asked me to explain that when she said 'not disgustingly gory' in her letter, she meant blood and gore rather than not too scary; maggots in eye sockets are fine."
My youthful nightmares begin to make more sense. Armada and Higgins were right, however. My terror was thrilling, and I dove back into GrailQuest over and over to get another taste.
The desire of many children - for ghosts, ghouls, and gory deaths - is rarely understood by adults who want a quiet bedtime. There were also many that saw darker subjects in children's media as a source of moral panic.
The Satanic Panic surrounding D&D in the United States certainly reached parts of the United Kingdom in the 80s, but the British Isles had plenty of its own obscenity scandals around that time, too. One prominent example in the world of fiction is the comic book Action, published by 2000 AD (who Higgins has illustrated many comics for). It garnered so much negative press attention for its depictions of violence that issues were pulled from circulation in 1976.
Describing his work in illustration during this era, Higgins says "there was a very fine line" with what could be portrayed. "Tabloids in the old days used to jump on any old bandwagon - they had to protect the innocence of childhood and all that."
Remembering GrailQuest
Despite the dark nature of its illustrations, GrailQuest has historically been remembered as a lighthearted, funny series of children's books. Most modern game designers would balk at a book with such a drastic difference in tone between its art and writing. In tabletop RPGs, art is there to illustrate the tone and logic of the world created by the text. Following that line of thinking, GrailQuest's artistic direction might not make much sense.
Higgins, however, can see the fine line between comedy and horror, and he says that GrailQuest taps into this. "Herbie [J. H. Brennan, GrailQuest's author] had that wonderful impish humor that I think really came across", he tells me. "That's always been a great part of horror, that crossover where a scream is very close to a laugh. That's the thing I've always enjoyed about whatever he did."
Brennan was apparently infamous for subtle, mature jokes in his children's series, the kind that "an eight-year-old might not necessarily catch the first time, but when they read it again at 17 or 18, they do." "That was the thing about Herbie; he never wrote down to the audience", Higgins says. "We were the same as the readers", Higgins tells me. "We wanted horror and puerile humor, absurdity, and thrills."
J. H. Brennan passed away in 2024, aged 83. That same year was the 40th anniversary of the first GrailQuest book, The Castle of Darkness. A reprint of the first four books was issued in 2024 by Canarian publishing house Celaeno Books. Higgins tells me that an English-language reprint of the series is due to release at the end of October. This comes from publisher Two Yards, and Higgins assures me that my dreaded skeleton scarecrow is still printed inside.
I'm sincerely looking forward to a new edition of GrailQuest. The Castle of Darkness was my first tabletop RPG, and it fueled a passion for horror and gaming that would shape the rest of my life. Hopefully, there's a new generation of small children about to be scared into a lifetime of fantasy gaming.
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