Every so often I am reminded that Past Me cannot be trusted with a Kickstarter account. At some point he apparently thought, “You know what you need, as a person who has deliberately drifted away from 5E? A 5E horror game.” And then, months later, a perfectly handsome PDF arrived and Present Me had to work out how to justify it to Future Me. This is that attempt.
FiveEvil’s pitch is right there on the tin: “a game of unnerving terror, subverting the expectations of the world’s greatest RPG.” It is very transparently a 5E fork, but it is also very transparently written by someone who actually runs horror and wants 5E tables to stop playing heroic fantasy with rubber masks on. The opening chapter is basically “turn up, be adults, play hard, play safe,” which is about as un-D&D an opening as you can put in a 5E book.
The big structural move is Intensity. Every scene has an Intensity number; it’s the difficulty tax horror pays. Doom checks, terror encounters, and even GM fiat run off that number, which gives the GM a way to say “this is a bad scene” without inventing a subsystem every time. Then there’s Desperation, which is the game’s permission to push: you can juice a roll, but you’re also telling the GM “yes, make it worse.” It is a nice way of keeping the “I roll again!” instinct from 5E but giving it horror teeth.
The signature bit, though, is terror encounters. On the surface they look like 5E combat rounds; in practice they’re wobbly, unfair, and deliberately unclear. Position is fuzzy, order is standardised, Intensity is high, and every turn something nasty can chain: monster hits you, you make a Mistake, then the GM rolls a Doom and now the house is on fire. This is very much not 5E’s “we all know where the grid is, we all know when it’s our turn.” It’s the game telling you, “Horror is allowed to be messy and you don’t get to pin it down.” That’s a genuine design difference from bog-standard 5E.
Why would I run this when I already run Call of Cthulhu all the time? CoC gives you investigation-first, SAN as spotlight, and a hundred years of scenario gravity. FiveEvil gives you none of that, but it does give you an audience. You know those people in your gaming circles who only understand d20 + mod vs DC and get nosebleeds when you say “spends” or “SAN 1/1d6”. This is my on-ramp for them. I can say, “It’s 5E, but horror, trust me,” and there’s an opening You cannot do that with, say Fear Itself (“you have a Risk Factor, lean into it”) because that game asks for different player instincts. FiveEvil is horror for the people who still think the PHB is the ur-text. That’s the niche.
FiveEvil has good, practical advice on investigations and “moments” and even a mystery toolkit, but you’re still adjudicating success/failure the 5E way. The clever bit is the Doom check: when you don’t want to be the cruel GM personally smashing their PC, you roll vs Intensity and the game does it for you. That’s the horror equivalent of Trail’s “just give them the clue,” except here it’s “just let the dice be mean.” For long horror campaigns, that’s actually helpful.
The elephant in the room is 5E characters being fantasy superheroes. FiveEvil’s answer is: don’t make them superheroes. The character chapter assumes ordinary people, kids, teens, no spell pyramids, and then the whole ruleset leans on Conditions, harm, and “you get hurt fast.” You can still see the SRD bones, but the game expects you not to port in Bob the 9th-level Gloomstalker. If you do that, yes, the horror will bounce. If you make fresh FiveEvil characters, the terror engine can actually bite.
Prep-wise, it’s friendlier than I expected from a 5E-derived thing. There’s a full scenario right there (Wakefield House), which is classic “turn up, creepy bloke, escalating manifestations, chase through the house.” Then the Theseus Protocol in the bonus PDF is a good proof that the chassis works for “aliens on a ship, now make terrible choices.” You can run either almost cold: read, highlight the monster, note Intensity, go. That is less prep than a CoC multi-partter, more than a Cthulhu Hack one-shot, about the same as Fear Itself’s sample mysteries.
What doesn’t quite land (for me) is that it can’t fully escape its DNA. You will still be saying “make a Dex save” in a horror game. You will still be tracking HP-ish harm and Conditions. You will still have players rolling in exactly the rhythm they roll in Forgotten Realms. If your whole personal project the last few years has been “get people out of that rhythm,” FiveEvil will feel like a step back. But: it’s a step back with horror stagecraft, safety baked in, and GM principles that explicitly say “play hard, take the hits.” That’s more than most 5E horror hacks manage.
Can I salvage the Kickstarter decision? Maybe, in a few ways:
Run it as “Horror Night for the D&D Crowd.” One-shots, two hours, terror encounter in the middle, Doom check in public so they see the swing. For those players, this is better than telling them to learn GUMSHOE from scratch.
Steal the terror encounter procedure and drop it into CoC/Trail when I want “messy, panicky scene” instead of “I shoot, I dodge.” It’s system-agnostic enough to lift.
Use the scenario design chapter whenever I’m tired and don’t want to think of five different horror fragments. It’s good, no-frills advice on “note some set-piece scares, don’t overplot, make the monster defeatable only through story actions.” That’s useful even in Vaesen.
Who would I pitch this? Not to my CoC lifers; they’ll ask where the SAN track is and wander off. Not the Trail people; they already have clue security. I’d pitch it to: (a) the 5E folks who keep saying “I’d try horror but I don’t want to learn a new system,” and (b) the person who loves The Cthulhu Hack but wants something with more GM-facing tools than “roll usage dice.” Also (c) anyone who’s been edging toward Vaesen’s “mystery structure + folklore” but wants to stay in d20-world.
I don’t expect to be running this anytime soon but if I wanted to broaden the group of people on my server to include some curious 5E-for-lifers then this is the tool to do it with. Meanwhile, I will be stealing some ideas to make combat in CoC a little more interesting.
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