This year I celebrated the rare intersection of Halloween and a full moon by releasing my first ever self-published, standalone, tabletop RPG. Crying Wolf is a short, sharp, violent survival horror game, about Cassandra truths and monsters hidden in plain sight, inspired by the Aesop fable. It’s my contribution to the “kids vs the horror” genre Stranger Things and It have popularised in recent years, with a specially designed simple system, perfect for one-shot online play as the nights grow darker sooner.

I’ve been working on this game for three years now, originally submitting it to the Spooky Game Design Jam organised on Google Plus back in 2017. Though invaluable playtester feedback has resulted in tweaks along the way, it’s still fundamentally the same game I envisioned back then – a game that alternates between phases of being Hunted by the wolf and Punished by your parents for “making up stories”, played out over three nights. I remember #MeToo being an inspiration back then, as the appalling testimony of women disbelieved for decades finally started to be listened to. Unfortunately, “Gaslighting: The Roleplaying Game” has never stopped being topical since.

At the moment, the game is on sale at Itch.io, but I’ll update this post when I get approval from DriveThruRPG to start selling there too (EDIT: you can now get it at DriveThruRPG HERE!). Please do buy it, read it, play it, promote it and let me know what you think. Whilst you’re at it, go back Melissa Trender’s Patreon – she’s the artist who did so much amazing work on the game’s illustration and layout, and she definitely deserves your support.