Design Diary: Streamlining Fear and Panic
I like to think Fear and Panic is a pretty streamlined game: it has shorter, simpler rules than almost every other game in the d100 horror space, not counting some one-pagers (and of course Cthulhu Dark, which I count despite it using d6s). However, I’ve been running it a lot at conventions and local game nights recently, and I think I can make it even simpler. For now let’s call these alternate rules, but I’m thinking of combining them with Time of Monsters at some point for a standalone game.
First of all, it’s not really important to calculate Menace and Escape. That was always the clunkiest part of character creation. Most adventures I find myself actually running in Fear and Panic are about ordinary people, and for any game about ordinary people, it’s fine to just start both at 4 and let Scars change them if necessary.
Then there’s the skills list. I included Operate because Operate Heavy Machinery is a bit of an in-joke for Call of Cthulhu players, but it really could be covered by Career or Hobby. Same for Make, the skill for building things – that’s the kind of infrequent roll that Career and Hobby can cover, or maybe I could broaden the Repair skill a little to cover Make as well. That’s two skills down, dropping the list from 24 to 22. If I needed to I could probably hit an even 20 by getting rid of Intimidate and merging Superstition into Book Learning, but both those skills are such flavorful choices for a character that I’m not sure I’d want to see them gone.
One of my intentions with Fear and Panic is that it can be easily hacked for different settings just by making minor changes to the skill list. What would your preferred skill list look like?
Lyme Brackish,
8/31/2026