Corpses, Curses, and Corinthian Chaos

Story Mode Productions funded their horror RPG in two hours. Erebus Mythos: Vampyr is a Shadowdark adventure set in 1846, post-independence Greece, drawing from the terrifying Vrykolakas legend that inspired Stoker and Polidori before vampires became SFDW (safe for drawing rooms).

Occupying a different territory to the domesticated werewolf and common or garden vampire the Vrykolakas isn't a sophisticated count in evening dress, it's a bloated corpse spreading disease and fear through villages caught between their Ottoman past and an uncertain future. Superstition and the Orthodox faith created a tension that echoes contemporary social upheaval - the fear of the other, the shadows on the wall. Good old-fashioned generational dread.

Vampires

The mechanics reflect the belief systems of the time, push your luck by rerolling a failed die? You accumulate Stain - a measure of how much attention you've drawn from malevolent forces. Accumulate enough Stain and you attract the Evil Eye - an ancient curse where envy, bad luck, or divine displeasure manifests as misfortune. It's a push-your-luck mechanic much like sanity in Call of Cthulhu, survive now but pay later and the cost keeps mounting.

Five period-appropriate classes handle investigation and survival, ritual magic demands ingredients not slots, and your signature item provides one desperate save per day.

Nuns

An interestingly local production with books printed in Trikala, prayer ropes handwoven by actual Nuns in actual Crete, wooden tokens and charms crafted by artisans. The protective kit bundles contain the in-game signature items, and everything's hand-assembled rather than bulk-shipped from the usual logistics chains which is pretty cool and presumably a bonafide limited edition.

Corinthia

The campaigns are based on documented 1846 events in Corinthia where the word "vampire" appeared in official records. Folk horror doing what it should - creating dread rather than comfort, genuine cultural weight instead of borrowed aesthetics.

It's a pleasure to cover games that aren’t afraid to step off the scaffold of staid northern european mythos. While everyone else is rehashing something or adding tentacles to/in/on everything, Story Mode are finding monsters that frightened entire generations, breeding the kind of mass hysteria that the algorithms have only just perfected while the same monsters still prowl our social networks.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storymodeprod/erebus-mythos-vrykolakas-an-adventure-of-greek-folk-horror

Images and text courtesy of Story Mode Productions.