The help and structure in The Cursed Library does not end with either the ‘Shiver Board of Classification’ or the end of the scenario itself. Each scenario begins by explaining what the Director knows, the set-up for the Player Characters, the types of character that fit the scenario and their archetypes in Shiver, and then after the scenario there are suggestions as to how to expand the story, helps and hints to better run the scenario, and of course, each scenario comes with a list of Doom Clock Events and new weapons, equipment, monsters, and NPCs. Every scenario in Shiver is played against the clock as it ticks down to midnight, primarily due to the actions of the Player Characters, and at ‘Quarter Past’, ‘Half Past’, ‘Quarter To’, and ‘Midnight’ certain events will happen. Each of the six scenarios provides four such events suited to both subgenre and the story. The new weapons, equipment, monsters, and NPCs are all potentially useful for the Director if she wants to use them in scenarios of her devising.
The Cursed Library: A book of scary one-shot short stories opens with ‘The Lost Ship’, inspired by The Thing, The Void, and Event Horizon. There is a dash of The X-Files in there too as the Player Characters are members of a Special Ops team assigned to locate the USS Morningstar, a United States Navy research vessel operating in the Artic which has lost communication with the outside world. When the scenario starts out in Barrow, the first response is to think of a vampire attack as in 30 Days of Night, but ‘The Lost Ship’ is actually a tale of cosmic horror than bloodsuckers. The scenario has a pleasing sense of frigid isolation as the Player Characters locate and descend into the bowels of the ship and things seem to come out of the walls and floor at them. The monsters too are fantastically otherworldly too and that is ultimately where the Player Characters will have to deal with the threat currently contained within the hull of the USS Morningstar. This is an action-packed opener which gets the anthology of to a good start.
The second scenario combines Stranger Things, People Under the Stairs, and The Haunting and sets it all on Halloween. ‘All Hallow’s Eve’ is a set in any small town with creepy old house where no one lives, in which many a teenager is challenged to see how long they will last inside its walls. The ultimate bragging rights go to the kid who can stay the whole night. This year it is the turn of the Player Characters—as teenagers from the local high school—to test their resolve, but this time when they cross the threshold, the front door not only closes, but locks too! The scenario combines two puzzles in one—how to get out of the house and what happened to the original owners. Thus the Player Characters are on the hunt for clues to both, forcing them to explore the house and in the process encounter all manner of classic haunted house elements. Animated suits of armour, Ouija boards, demonic toys, things in the bathtub, and more. The horror in the scenario tends towards being creepy rather bloody, but the Director can dial either up or down as necessary, and there are some fun suggestions as to what do with the outcome of the scenario. These include having the front door open to somewhere else rather than their hometown when the Player Characters finally get all the keys necessary to unlock it or secrets being revealed that lead the Player Characters to investigate the original owner’s background. This is a fun scenario in which both players and the Keeper play up the clichés and enjoy its gothic Americana.
‘Dark Prospect’ is set on the frontier of the Wild west in the town of Hope’s hallow. Inspired by The Blob, Bone Tomahawk, and The Descent, the fortunes of the town rest on the mines in nearby Deadwater Peak, so when all news dries up of the miners, the local sheriff—backed up by the mine owner’s $2 reward (each)—raises a local posse and rides into the mountains, up to the mine, and from there descend into the depths. Compared to the other scenarios in the anthology, this is a smaller, much tighter, and more linear affair, and more physical too.
Inspired by Alien, Event Horizon, and Starship Troopers, the fourth scenario, ‘Protocol’ is a Science Fiction thriller set in outer space. The crew and passengers of the CCV Pilgrim respond to a distress call from a nearby planet and discover a downed vessel with the majority of its crew missing despite there being signs of their being alive when the ship went down. The clues point elsewhere and if the Player Characters follow them they discover another crashed starship, this with its own definitely missing crew and still the mystery of what happened to the crew of the ship that sent the distress call. ‘Protocol’ very much takes its cues from the xenomorphs of Alien and works hard with them. It all ends with a desperate race to get back to their shuttle and back off planet as the true nature of the threat is revealed…
The final scenario in the anthology is ‘Mr Husk’. Inspired by just Children of the Corn and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, this is a rural slasher Folk Horror scenario. It is the seventies, and the Player Characters are driving through the flat Midwest with nothing to see but cornfields, when their vehicle breaks down. Stranded in the middle of nowhere, the Player Characters are going to need help, but what they find at the nearest farm is horror in the barn. With limited locations, but wide-open spaces of the cornfields, there is room here for stalking the Player Characters as they try and hide and get away from the farm and what is going on there (Clue: It is not cannibalism!) This is the shortest of the scenarios in The Cursed Library and the most flexible, instead having set Player Characters, it suggests a range of character types including Vietnam veterans, travelling salesmen, a band going from gig to gig, and even some low budget film makers looking to shoot some film… ‘Mr Husk’ brings the collection to a close with a swing of the scythe.
Physically, The Cursed Library is much like the core rulebook for Shiver. The artwork is excellent for the most part, done in a style similar to that of Mike Mignola and his Hellboy comic, and very much showcases the type of horror stories that Shiver was designed to handle. The writing is clear, but does need a stronger edit in places and the cartography is too plain for each scenario’s needs.
From its choice of subgenres to its choice of plots, The Cursed Library is one big book of horror clichés and familiar plots. However, that is far from being a bad thing. After all, Shiver is designed to deliver fast-playing, dramatic, and generic horror in which the players roleplay horror archetypes in various subgenres, and that is what The Cursed Library delivers. Its stories are not so much horror clichés as horror archetypes, just like the Player Characters, and they complement each other. The five scenarios in the anthology will be familiar to many, after all, they are film-inspired, but knowing and playing into that familiarity is part of the fun with a generic horror roleplaying game. Both player and Director alike need to load up on popcorn and fizzy drinks, lean into the clichés of the subgenres in five horror scenarios in The Cursed Library: A book of scary one-shot short stories, and together, they will have a blast.
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