While I have been working away on Drashar, the 2dX Engine, and another to-be-announced project, I have been neglecting this blog! My apologies, but just in time for Halloween, I wanted to post my experience with Paizo’s new horror game 13 Omens while at Gamehole Con!
13 Omens – Horror in a Black Bag
Paizo Publishing is known for its tactical, tightly designed, and crunchy games like Pathfinder 2e and Starfinder. So, imagine my surprise when I was browsing through the events for Gamehole Con 2026 and came across a rules-light horror game called 13 Omens. And that’s right, it was by Paizo! On top of that, the gamemaster was none other than the industry veteran and Paizo Chief Creative Officer Erik Mona.
First of all, Mona is a fantastic GM; in our three-hour session, he nailed the pacing, atmosphere, and NPCs. As you would expect from an industry icon.
Game Overview
In this narrative-driven game, a GM leads players who control characters through a three-act horror scenario. As each act advances, so does the horror and lethality of the scenario.
Characters are pre-selected for the scenario, but players determine the strengths and weaknesses of characters’ aspects (attributes) and skills during creation. For example, my character’s archetype was “The Fun Drunk,” and I made him a washed-up post-high-school athlete who had just partied and let himself go after an ankle injury that cost him his college scholarship.
One interesting and effective aspect was that all archetypes for all scenarios have the same set of aspects and a core set of skills, but each scenario has a set of skills that are relevant for that scenario. This does a great job of keeping things consistent enough across scenarios but allows for you to have relevant skills for the scenario and timeline. You don’t really need a Computer skill when in a 1980s slasher scenario.
Simple Yet Layered and Brutal Mechanics
The core mechanic is super easy. Pull 2d6 at random from a bag. Roll the dice and compare it to your character’s skill or attribute. If you hit or exceed the number, you succeed. Under, and you fail. When you fail, your skill or attribute becomes strained, and when you make a roll using that skill or attribute in the future, you draw three dice and take the lowest two to determine your total.
But things get interesting when you consider the Omen dice. In the dice bag there are eight safe dice and one Omen die. As the story progresses, the GM adds Omen dice to the bag or directly to a player’s roll. When those Omen dice show a result that is equal to or less than the current act’s number, the player gets and injury. Four injuries and you’re dead. If you succeed on your roll, the dice go back in the bag. If you are wounded, you keep one of the Omen dice to signify the wound. And when you die, all your omen dice go back in the bag. This creates a really interesting flow of threat in the scenario. With odds of drawing an omen die (and thus the potential for wounds) increasing as the GM adds them throughout the acts, and spiking again when a PC dies. While PC injuries actually reduce the odds of drawing Omen dice for future rolls.
The three-act structure is also tied directly to the Omen dice. Of the 13 total Omen dice, once the fifth die is added, act two begins, and as the ninth die triggers act three. So, by the time you are in act three, anywhere between 9 and 13 dice are in play, and anytime you roll a 3 or lower on one of those dice, you suffer a wound. It creates a spiraling, deadly sequence of events that supports the scenario's pacing very well.
Every time I reached into the bag, I was looking for those black dice with that red skull. And a sense of relief was felt when all the dice were safe. I was lucky enough to draw only safe dice several times, even in the later acts, which was probably the main reason my character survived the scenario. Whenever someone at the table was rolling Omen dice, we were all paying attention, looking to see how those dice landed and then expectantly listening to Mona’s grisly description of how things went wrong.
Interesting One-Shot Scenarios
The scenario Mona ran was one he had written as part of a stretch goal for the currently running Kickstarter. Without spoiling anything, it involved exploring some of Seattle's interesting (and underground) historical elements, missing persons, intriguing choices, and plenty of horror.
Only one player character made it out alive (me) with a severely injured NPC in tow, and on top of that, it ended on a cliffhanger rather than a happy ending. While the other four PCs died, 13 Omens has a cool flashback mechanic where at any time, the player of a dead PC can enter the narrative and describe something their character did in the past that would modify the current narrative. It was this feature that even allowed my character to survive to the end.
Closing thoughts
It’s fantastic to see Paizo doing something like 13 Omens; it hits a very nice sweet spot between narrative and tension-inducing mechanics. It feels like a perfect game to pick up and run with little to no prep when not all of your regular crew can make it. However, I worry that with a series of bad rolls, TPKs could become frequent and occur very quickly. And while TPKs can fit some grim horror stories well, other scenarios might end too quickly, leading to an unsatisfactory, though blood-soaked, outcome. Overall, however, I fear not, as this feels like a solid entry into the horror genre, and I hope to see more like this from Paizo in the future.
