Ring Side Report-RPG Review of Shiver RPG

Product– Shiver RPG

System- Shiver RPG

Producer– Parable Games

Price– $21.00 here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/399308593/shiver-a-film-and-tv-inspired-ttrpg 

TL; DR– DON’T LET THIS GET AWAY!  99%

Basics-Who’s the man in the mask?!  Shiver is a horror RPG with some serious table top influences.  Let’s look at the pieces and give a review.

Basics– This is a mostly d6 based system.  Each time you do anything, you roll a number of d6 equal to your stat for the skill.  The game uses speciality d6s with specific symbols on them.  Every symbol that matches the task (like strength for a strength based task) is a success.  Get enough successes and you do the thing.  Don’t, and you fail!  You can also roll luck symbols which allow you to add additional dice to later rolls by banking those points.  There are also strange symbols.  These have OTHER effects depending on the scenario or character you are playing.

Talent dice– you can also get d10s in each skill for a specific action in a skill.  These have much higher chances of success and have a few strange symbols for good measure.

Combat and monsters- wouldn’t be horror if there were not monsters that would show up and kill you!  Combat works pretty much like everything else.  You mostly use grit as the skill and the brawling ability.  Each monster has a challenge rating and that is the number of successes you need to hurt the monster.  If you get two more than needed, then you get a critical hit.  Critical hits are random and you get a random effect, ranging from extra damage to knocking down the target.  

Monsters also have random effects when hit depending on their type.  Basic monsters only do something every once in a while, but big monsters respond to each hit!

Combat rounds are quick with people acting in the beginning for fast characters, middle for characters who don’t need to go fast, and last for hurt characters or slow people.

DOOM!-Horror needs suspense and you get that with doom!  Each failure and some strange dice rolls result in the clock ticking closer to midnight. As we get closer and close to midnight, the game gets harder and things happen!  Success means good things, and failure has consequences.  Sometimes the heroes don’t win!

Ok, now my thoughts.

Mechanics or Crunch-Got to love a committed horror game!  Shiver is an easy to learn game.  Heck, what you saw above is the basic rules!  Roll d6s, see if you win.  The doom mechanic means randomly doing things has consequences.  This means the basic mechanics of rolling ties right into the theme.  Also, that mechanic of dice, doom, and failure reminds me of many board games I’ve played, and I love those games!  That is some good mechanics execution!  5/5

Theme or Fluff-Already said I love the mechanics and they flow right into the horror of the theme.  This game is amazing for its flow of dice rolling going right into the basic mechanics.  I love the horror and the difficulty of the game.  People will focus on their roles as each die only gets you a ⅙ chance to succeed at an action, so less random rolling happens and people play their roles in the horror story.  I love what’s here!  5/5

Execution–  PDF?  YEP!  Hyperlinked? Maybe?  I got a prerelease, but I like what’s here.  The art looks like Hellboy, which is good.  The only thing I don’t like is fancy dice.  I know, I know, it’s a small thing to whine about, but fancy dice are hard to get after a kickstarter.  You do get rules to deal with regular dice, but that’s my one minor issue.  Outside of that, this is an amazing RPG that you need to get onto.    4.9/5Summary-DON’T SLEEP ON THIS!  There are less than 50 hours left.  Go get this. Solid rules, solid theme, and good execution of the book mean this is a game you can get playing in under 30 minutes when you get the PDF.  For 21 bucks or 15 magic foriegn money ( I kid I kid!), I am already in, and YOU SHOULD BE TOO!  99%