Nicholas Dowbiggen's "The Other" is a free, extremely rules-light take on the horror RPG that is more or less entirely unknown, but deserves wider appreciation. Inspired by the kind of haunting, psychological dread characteristic of the Silent Hill series of games, "The Other" is almost entirely focused on the steady mental degradation of its characters. Certainly, this in and of itself is nothing particularly new. Call of Cthulhu and its venerable sanity system have been compelling would-be paranormal investigators to suicide and madness for more than 20 years. The thing that is so compelling about "The Other" is the total primacy to this idea. While sanity is important to CoC, it is simply a part of larger equation, and more often than not has a way of becoming little more than a secondary hit point system. In "The Other," the psychological state of the characters is the only thing that matters. All other elements are seen through the lens of your mental decay. The question isn't so much whether you have the skills to pick a lock or aim a gun, but whether you have it together enough to do so, and how the increasing pressure reveals new aspects of your character.
Each character has three Progression Stages, emblematic of their decreasingly rational methods of response to the formless evil that pulls the strings behind their world. Each Progression Stage has a number of Threshold Notches (3 for the first, 2 for the second, 1 for the last). Whenever the player loses a roll against the Other, they go down a notch, crossing into new stages as appropriate. Each stage describes the overarching attitude of the character, which changes as the stress increases. The stroke of genius comes from the fact that character creation consists entirely of a 3 page psych evaluation that the player hands in to the GM, who then creates appropriate progression stages for the character, which he keeps hidden until they come into play. So, much like in reality, the players don't really know how they're going to respond once they snap, and the ramifications are much more personal and character driven than CoC's "run screaming" or "go catatonic" sanity effects. It also contributes to mechanically aided character development, as each progression stage reveals something about your character's unconscious mind.
On a similar note, each character has a Stress-Perception Symptom and a Repression Symptom which are unknown to the player but shape the way that the game plays out. The Stress-Perception Symptom is a buried truth integral to their personal story that they must cut through the Other's machinations to uncover. More interestingly, the Repression Symptom is a lie, something important that they believe to be true, but that is in fact a self-deception they must overcome.
The combination of the Progression Stages and Repression Symptoms makes every character delightfully unstable, creating one of the few roleplaying experiences I can think of in which the players themselves are unreliable narrators. I cannot stress highly enough how cool this is, and how much more conducive it is to genuine horror than pretty much any other system I can think of. When a game forces you to question not only the world, but your character's perceptions of both himself and the world around him, you know you've found something special.
Sadly, the blog on which this game was originally posted has been reabsorbed into the seething froth of primordial darkness, but I've put it up for download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?tc5q4m97v144sty.
If anyone plays it and wants to share experiences, I'd love to hear how it went for you.
The link is down. Could you please upload it again?
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