Some of my favorite games have something in common with Chill- and that's awesome Jim Holloway artwork. The cover of Chill is one of these pieces, like the covers of Paranoia and MechWarrior. Holloway had a way of establishing a feel in a game through his illustrations that helped give players and referees - Chill Masters in this case - an idea of how the authors intend the game to be played.
Chill was a game I saw in Dragon magazine. I had already been gifted a copy of Call of Cthulhu, so horror gaming wasn't new to me. I'd later get into Beyond The Supernatural, NightLife, and Vampire: The Masquerade. But Chill was something very different from CoC. CoC had a very serious tone in the manner of Lovecraft's stories- truly horrifying horror. Madness-inducing horror. Existential horror. Chill seemed to go with the feel of the Hammer films, horror, to be sure, but horror with a dash of B-Movie or, dare I say, camp. This is nowhere more apparent than the licensed Elvira, Mistress of the Dark supplement, Evenings of Terror. If my words are inadequate to express the tone of horror Chill was going for, witness the fact that they licensed Elvira.
In Chill you are assumed to be a member of SAVE, the Societas Albae Viae Eternitata. The Eternal Society of the White Way, which was renamed "the Silver Way" in recent editions, substituting "argentae" for "albae" to avoid a potential racial meaning. SAVE was formed in 1844 to deal with "The Unknown." Membership in SAVE usually means that you or your ancestors have had direct run-ins with The Unknown, and know personally that all the stuff people think are legends or myths actually exist.
The game uses ten-sided dice, both in the tradition roll-and-add mode and the percentage dice mode. Most rolls are a simple percentile dice roll versus Abilities or Skills. In combat, there is a table for results. It's fairly straightforward, and there are rules for The Art, if your character has the ability to use magic or psychic abilities.
Let's take a step into The Unknown and make a character.
Character Creation
Step one is making a copy of the character sheet. OK, done. Step two- fill in your own name. Gotcha. Step three- roll 3d10x2+20. Do this eight times and write down the results. OK, here we go - 46, 52, 66, 48, 52, 58, 60, and 62. Now we move to step four, where we assign these numbers to the eight Basic Abilities.
The Basic Abilities are: Strength, Dexterity, Agility, Personality, Perception, Willpower, Luck, and Stamina. In my head, I'm seeing a character who is a professor at the local community college (near and dear to my heart) who is somehow exposed to The Unknown and thrown into the world of Chill. So let's create the character with that in mind.
- Strength: 46
- Dexterity: 52
- Agility: 52
- Personality: 66
- Perception: 62
- Willpower: 60
- Luck: 58
- Stamina: 48
This makes our "Unskilled Melee Score" 49, as it is the average of Strength and Agility- that's step five. Step six is determining skill points, rolling a d10 we get a 7, resulting in 4 skill points, one less than the best available, which would have been 5.
In step seven, we find out that conveniently to the character concept, the levels of skill are "student" and "teacher." There is a "master" level, but beginning character cannot be at that level as the game begins. Getting a skill at Student costs 1 skill point, Teacher is 2 skill points. We grab History and Anthro/Archaeology at Teacher. With our remaining three points we get Investigation, Outdoor Survival (from digs and investigations) and Rapier from fencing classes long ago.
Step eight lets us know that if Perception is 60 or more (it is) and Willpower is 50 or more (also a yes) the character can choose a discipline of The Art. Interesting. We choose "Sphere of Protection" as something the professor found in a book and learned how to use.
Now we decide, in step nine, the background notes on the character. The professor is in his 50s, 5'7 and 150lbs, has a Doctorate in Archaeology, is American, and works at the local university teaching both Archaeology and History. There is a SAVE Standard Equipment Pack on page 11, we'll go with that.
The Character
Archaeology was nothing like an Indiana Jones movie. Well, perhaps it was a bit like that part where Dr. Jones tells students that most of Archaeology is done in a library, with reading and research. Dr. "Jim" Harrington sometimes lamented that it wasn't all bullwhips and a new love interest, it was more like term papers and the occasional interesting dig. The high point of his career was assisting in the excavation of new areas of Pompeii, which, while interesting to other academics, was about as exciting as uncovering a Roman 7-11 to the average college student. Still, it was a living.
Late one night, Dr. Harrington came across an odd book in a crate of donations to the University. The book was bound in leather and had pages of a material he couldn't identify. It was written in an odd dialect of semi-modern English, but the rantings about spells and mystical forces were beyond his understanding. Surely it was some sort of crackpot's crowning achievement, or maybe an elaborate hoax. Little did Harrington know that his human hands touching the book for an extended period had made it known to creatures that the book had been found- and something came looking for him.
Jim never found out if the werewolf was acting of its own volition or just an errand-wolf for something even more powerful, but it nearly had him when one of his students burst in the door- with a crossbow. As student and wolf fought, the Professor shook himself out of his disbelieving stupor and found the book where it fell during the altercation. It was open to a page the purported to be a protective spell - with nothing to lose, and a goddamn werewolf trying to kill him and one of his students, he read the spell aloud- and it worked!
The spell caused the werewolf to try to flee- and the student pursued, a silvered knife in his hands. The wolf leapt out a window- only to be intercepted and slain by two more students. The Professor stood, shakily, taking in the view of his bloodsoaked students and clutching the book to his chest. Stepping forward, the student who previously had a crossbow held out his hand. "Professor Harrington... welcome to SAVE."
My Thoughts
Just read the rulebook. The examples themselves give a great feel for the intended play style of Chill. It's horror, with a sense of humor. Not comedy horror, like Ghostbusters, but horror with a sense of humor.
We didn't play Chill as much as I would have liked, and that's a thing I can say about many games. There are so many RPGs worthy of table time, and it seems that the big ones take the lion's share since they are approachable to more people. Fantasy and IP games like Star Wars are an easy sell for a group. Niche genre games like Chill and Space: 1889 are harder to find groups with which to play.
Now that I am re-reading
Chill, I really want to revisit it. Over the years I've collected not only the first edition from Pacesetter, but the second edition from Mayfair Games which had a completely different (and kind of disturbing) art style. There are two current editions of
Chill- the official
third edition from Martin Caron which is
definitely worth picking up, and
Cryptworld which is less an evolution of
Chill, and more a spiritual retroclone of first edition.
Cryptworld even has a Jim Holloway cover.
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