Claustrophobic Chills

Imagine being in a cave. Deep underground. In the dark and the damp and the cold. It is easy to imagine. What though, if you were trapped there? What if there had been an accident and now you simply could not retrace the steps that led you into the depths of the earth and so make your way to feel free again under the light and warmth of the Sun and the vast openness of the sky? What will you do? How will you react? You are not alone. You have friends and colleagues with you, but what will they do and how will they react? You know you will survive and find your way out, right? Not everything is lost, and of course, people know you came down here, so the alarm is sure to be raised soon, right? So put a plan together, check on your resources, and set out to find a new route to safety. Then the sounds starts. The skittering of movement. The moans of something that has your scent. A shadow that seems to move out of your headgear lamp. The sense you are being followed… Does the fear rise? Are you terrified at being trapped here with it? Is that the sound of your friend’s screams or your own? This is the set-up for Squeeze: A Tabletop Game of Subterranean Claustrophobic Horror.

Squeeze: A Tabletop Game of Subterranean Claustrophobic Horror is a micro-game published by Parable Games, the British publisher best known for the horror roleplaying game, Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown. It was funded as part of the publisher’s Parable Games ZineQuest RPG Buffet on Kickstarter. It pitches ordinary men and women who have delved deep underground and due to an unfortunate accident become trapped—and trapped with something else what will hunt them as they try to find a way back to the surface. It provides a set of tables for determining why and where the Player Characters, or Explorers, have ventured underground, as well as the nature of the accident, plus a table of environmental threats that they might have to overcome and a set of ten different monsters that will react to their presence. Combine this with a simple set of rules and means of character generation, and what Squeeze: A Tabletop Game of Subterranean Claustrophobic Horror provides is short, handy roleplaying game that can be pulled off the shelf and readied to play with very little preparation. It does require several four-sided per player, but other than that, this is a very imagination driven roleplaying game for the Game Master and her players who are happy to improvise.

An Explorer in Squeeze has four traits: Head, Heart, Lungs, and Hands. They represent in turn, intelligence and experience, compassion and charisma, health and stamina, and strength and dexterity. They are rated between one and four. An Explorer also has a Health stat and a Calm stat. To determine the value of the four traits, a player either divides nine points between them or they can be rolled for. Lastly, a player rolls for two items of equipment.

Tony Wroe
Head 2 Heart 3 Lungs 3 Hands 2
Health 11
Calm 6
Equipment: Rope, Rucksack

Mechanically, to have his Explorer undertake an action, a player rolls a number of four-sided dice equal to the appropriate trait. The aim is to roll as many successes as possible, in order to beat a difficulty ranging between one and five, with five being considered impossible. A result of two is a failure, but three is a success. A roll of one is a critical failure and reduces the total number of successes rolled by one, whereas a roll of four is critical success and lets the player roll again and again as long as four is rolled each time. In combat, each success rolled inflicts a single point of damage. There will also be bonuses for damage from claws, mandibles, and so on (or even sharp rocks if the damage is environmental in nature.)

Squeeze gives guidance on how to use the mechanics to model the environment, such as using the Hands Trait to handle climbing, the Head Trait to identify safe routes up the climb, and even the Heart Trait if the climb itself is that high… It also shows how it might be used as a timing and distance mechanism, such as swimming and attempting to avoid the danger of drowning. However, what Squeeze does not do is really fully show how Panic works in the game. When an Explorer loses all of his Calm, he suffers Panic and loses a point from one of his Traits. If the Explorer can make a Lungs check, he can draw a deep breath and restore points of Calm, but another Explorer can also calm another panicked Explorer down and also restore points of his Calm. This is the mechanical aspect of losing Calm and it is really only what Squeeze covers. So, there is no advice on roleplaying this and worse, there is no guidance on how Calm is actually lost. It is a major oversight. What it means is that the Game Master is going to have to work out how this works herself. For an experienced Game Master this should be no problem, especially given how simple it is to run and play Squeeze.

In terms of creating a story, Squeeze includes a table of four story hooks and a table of four accidents, along with a table of eight settings. All the Game Master do is roll on these and she has the basics of the starting point for a game of Squeeze. Thus, the Explorers have descended into an abandoned mineshaft in order to search for a missing child, but are cut off from their route down by a cave-in, or be archaeologists looking for a sunken civilisation in some catacombs when someone sabotages the team’s way back. Environmental threats include falling stalactites or an underground lake, whilst the list of horrors includes Stone Spiders, Wall Crawlers, a White Wyrm, and the Shadowman. Overall, there are enough options here for a handful of games of Squeeze.

Physically, Squeeze is decently laid out and quick and easy to read. It is easy to learn and set up, and though it relies on a great of improvisation by the Game Master, it is not difficult to run. Or rather, it should not be difficult to run. The lack of rules on how Calm is lost so that Panic can be triggered is a major omission upon the part of author and publisher. It is not an insurmountable omission, especially for an experienced Game Master, but annoying, nonetheless. All it would have taken was another page to explain the rules and that would also have allowed space for a bibliography of horror films about being trapped underground far below the surface. Alas, Squeeze: A Tabletop Game of Subterranean Claustrophobic Horror is simply not complete and not what the publisher intended.