Oh, Chill, you seem to be suffering under a curse. The original Chill (1984), from Pacesetter, was a horror RPG line that was either a straight faced emulation of classic horror, or a campy send up of classic horror, depending on what page you happened to be on. It never really found a market and ended after nearly two years when Pacesetter went belly up. Despite this, I have a soft spot for the system and its B-movie vibes.

This is the second edition of Chill, by Mayfair Games (1990). Billed as “A scary game for scary people,” it does have a much more consistently dark tone than its predecessor. The art here, all by Joe DeVelasco, is emotive and scratchy and rather good (though the cover art always reminded me of Thanos, but maybe that’s because the book sat unbought for years on the shelf at my local comic shop). The system is substantially different from its predecessor and it seems clunky as hell.

This version of Chill beat Vampire: The Masquerade to the market by about a year, but it never saw the same success, probably mostly because of the system. Like the Pacesetter Chill, this version doesn’t feel as smart as it should. The approach to horror feels generic and not terribly thought out. It all has the air of a knock-off, really. SAVE – the world spanning anti-supernatural secret organization – still exists in this edition, but seems out of place with the original’s sense of Scooby-Doo camp missing. By 1993, the line was shuttered, mercifully sparing us the release of Cyber Chill.