First off, is there one? If so, which one would you say it is? I remember some cool-looking one with some neat comic-bookish art that had a hot slayer-type chick, but I can't remember what it was called (I think it was based on a graphic novel).

Poo. It was a comic. It's called Hack/Slash. Hmm, I could've sworn it was an RPG, or at least being made into one.

Any zombie rpg should work. So would Angel or Buffy.

For more hi-tech big guns splatter, SLA Industries would work.

For Splatterpunk with monsters, Nightlife was actually made for it. It came out right before Vampire did, inspired by the rise of vampire popularity in the late 80s. The game is like 90% attitude by weight. Unfortunately, the actual system is garbage. Like: you roll large piles of polyhedral dice and add them together to get point totals that you then distribute between categories. It plays like one of those stream of consciousness games from 1990, because that is exactly what it is.

-Frank

And I remembered Dread and Spite. I haven't played them, but they scream (pun intended) atmosphere, cool and are very gory. "Tastefully gory", if that's possible.

Quote from: Talking_Muffin;481005Poo. It was a comic. It's called Hack/Slash. Hmm, I could've sworn it was an RPG, or at least being made into one.

Correct. Eden Studios has this in their pipeline. But I'd much rather see them release print versions of Ghosts of Albion and the Extraterrestrials Sourcebook first.

As for the OP, mightn't Bedrock Games' new Horror Show be able to pull it off? Another option would be Steampower Publishing's Dead of Night 2nd Edition, though I suppose this may be considered somewhat storygame-ish by some here...

If it's Eden Studios, don't hold your breath. They've really gone downhill over the last 10 years.

Quote from: Talking_Muffin;481037And I remembered Dread and Spite. I haven't played them, but they scream (pun intended) atmosphere, cool and are very gory. "Tastefully gory", if that's possible.

These are the ones that I would put up as 'Best Splatterpunk RPG' as well.

Quote from: Kinetic;481100These are the ones that I would put up as 'Best Splatterpunk RPG' as well.

I owned the PDFs, but as I loathe reading books at my computer, I only skimmed them and never actually played either. I've heard that the system's very cool and the while Spite has cleaner rules and more options, Dread is an overall better setting. How much experience with them?

The real question is what you want the game to provide you with. Splatterpunk is an in-your-face attitude and an extra helping of gore. It could be generated in Dungeons & Dragons or even Toon if you really wanted. When you want splatterpunk, the primary thing that you're going to need is a willingness to describe injuries in gruesome and offensive detail. But that could be set in a modern backdrop or a futuristic one. Or even medieval fantasy. Not every splatterpunk movie or novel has supernatural elements. Some of them are just really gory expressions of supposedly non-magical men with non-magical chainsaws.

So we need to hone in on the other genre conventions you want to emulate. Do you want the splatterpunk to take place against the backdrop of modern New York? Futuristic Tokyo? Ancient Greece? Are the slashers going to be normal men with long knives? Werewolves? Dragons? Tentacle demons? And what about how the player characters react to this? Should they be having bits chopped off left and right only to fight on after losing so much blood that you run out of red dye and start having to use the other color packets like green and blue for the monster blood (as so famously happened during the shooting of Evil Dead 2)? Are the player characters going to be dying left and right to be replaced by new Red Shirts? Are they to be action heroes, noire heroes, or food for the meat grinder?

The system to pick is not one that says it is "for horror". Horror is an attitude that you bring to the table or you don't. The system to pick is the one that has rules for the kinds of situations you envision taking place during the campaign so that the game master has the least amount of work to do before the game starts. And next to have a game that actually generates the results you are looking for in situations that can be expected to arise so that you have to come up with the minimum number of house rules.

If I were going to run a game based on late 80s Splatterpunk, i would be pretty tempted to bust out Feng Shui.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;481016For Splatterpunk with monsters, Nightlife was actually made for it. It came out right before Vampire did, inspired by the rise of vampire popularity in the late 80s. The game is like 90% attitude by weight. Unfortunately, the actual system is garbage. Like: you roll large piles of polyhedral dice and add them together to get point totals that you then distribute between categories. It plays like one of those stream of consciousness games from 1990, because that is exactly what it is.

-Frank

I ran a long-running solo NightLife splatterpunk PBEM that was great fun.  I ignored the rules system and just used modified AD&D, though (Fighter PC with some Werewolf powers).    The extensive NPC listings were great.

Edit: Creating sympathetic and/or interesting NPCs before viscerally ripping them apart was fun, too.  Didn't exactly help with long-term worldbuilding though...

I don't know if it's the best splatterpunk game out there but Blood! got me where I wanted to go in a sloppy way.

Regards,
David R

I was only peripherally aware that such a thing as "splatterpunk" existed, and if the Wikipedia article is anything to go by, it's not even an "attitude", but more of an aesthetic. Window dressing. "Color", in Forge parlance (one of the few useful terms to come out of that particular mess, I think, even if I feel its actual importance was downplayed).

Quote from: FrankTrollman;481140The real question is what you want the game to provide you with.

Frank's got the gist of it, I think.

Regardless of system, though, I strongly recommend World of Darkness: Slasher. It's nominally for the core/Hunter line of the nWoD. I cannot claim great familiarity with the genre, but it struck me as a fantastic RPG-oriented study of the slasher movie genre.

Quote from: The Butcher;481486Regardless of system, though, I strongly recommend World of Darkness: Slasher. It's nominally for the core/Hunter line of the nWoD. I cannot claim great familiarity with the genre, but it struck me as a fantastic RPG-oriented study of the slasher movie genre.

Holy crap! I'd completely forgotten about that one. That was an amazing book.

My WFRP games are always fantasy splatterpunk.

I had high expectations for Kult and the world was definitely everything you'd want in a splatterpunk setting, but the system crunch got in the way.