Player characters begin their lives as zero-levels, we call them “Extras”. You’ll have fun and enriching job titles such as math nerd, insurance agent, gas station clerk, police officer or music video director. All as well-equipped to fight the looming forces of evil as your average ’80’s B-movie extra. Zero Level Funnels, in HCC called a “Flick”, are all about survival. And many won’t.

But what if all your freaks and geeks die in the first scene? Well, thankfully there’s always another troupe of Q-Mart employees just waiting in the wings.

But wait…there’s more!

 

In Horror Cinema Classics those who survive that initial onslaught of terror find themselves touched a bit by The Darkness. Because of this, and for reasons unknown, something has seen fit to enable a choice few with the might, the knowledge and the mechanisms to serve as humanity’s salvation. They will be the Heroes. They will level into such classes as Junksmith, Esoteric, Faithful, Wayward and many more. 

And what evils will they face?

Astrology, tarot, thaumaturgy, rituals, and summoning circles; the Esoteric dabbles in obscure knowledge and seeks power through force of will.  They deal in lost tomes, scrolls, tablets, or even oral histories. The Esoteric also summons angels, demons or Lovecraftian monstrosities to investigate the ever-deepening mysteries of magic.  

Your encounter with The Darkness awoke something within you, a burning light of faith.  Typically, the Faithful follows some religious order or deity but are not limited to that.  A Faithful has faith in something, could be mother nature, crystals or even rock ‘n’ roll.  That faith gives them special abilities such as; Faith Healing, Theurgy and Not Today Darkness, however their faith is ever tested and at times they will Wrestle with Doubt! 

Part scrounger, part engineer, a Junksmith relies on the old scouting motto, “be prepared.” They’ve got a bag of tricks, and they’re not afraid to use it, usually in some combination never before known to humanity. They’re constantly collecting materials and working on their next life-saving, or ending, gadget. These are allies you want around when you need that just-right bit of tech in a pinch.

You were just living your life when The Darkness found you. It hurt you. It brought you pain. It would have killed you. Just as it seemed the abyss would claim you, a mysterious entity reached out, pulling you back from the precipice. Now, you and this enigmatic presence share the same body.  

Not all minds are swayed by the chaos that lurks in the shadows. Some, like the Profiler, thrive in it. Driven by an insatiable hunger for truth, they delve into the darkest corners of the human psyche and the supernatural world. Once, they might have been researchers, detectives, or even academics, but the encounter with The Darkness changed everything. Now, their sharp intellect and psychological insight are weapons in a war against things that lurk beyond reason.

Your battle with The Darkness broke your mind.  As you put the pieces back together there were new pathways, parts of the mind a normal person never uses.  Sympathetic, extrasensory and physical affecting powers reveal themselves allowing you tremendous influence on the world around you and in the battle the forces of evil. 

Slayers are exactly what they sound like, a killing machine. The Darkness has opened the Slayer’s mind and body, allowing them to tap into their full human biological potential.  They are slayers of The Darkness, definitely not someone you want to stand up at the Prom! 

Some people run from danger, others charge in, guns blazing. Whether they’re a veteran, a gun nut, or just someone who’s seen too many action flicks, the Survivalist believes that the best way to deal with monsters, real or imaginary, is through the application of overwhelming force.

Brilliant, obsessive, and just a little unhinged.  The Synthesist doesn’t just study The Darkness, they inject it into a syringe and see what happens next. Armed with unstable serums, experimental drugs, and a deep disregard for medical ethics, they push the boundaries of biology to uncover the truth.

Not all who walk the shadows do so for selfish gain. The Wayward is a rogue by trade; burglars, grifters, mobsters, outlaws. Someone who once lived by their own code. But after encountering The Darkness, they’ve now chosen a different path. Though still skilled in deception, stealth, and the art of the con, they now use their talents to outwit, and when necessary, outfight the minions of The Darkness.

While Horror Cinema Classics uses most of the same rules as DCC, there are a few new mechanics as well. 

The core mechanic revolves around the d20.  However, HCC also utilizes the Zocchi dice set (or “funky dice”) in a dice chain going from d3 to d30.  Instead of applying the usual plus or minus to your die roll, you may be directed to roll a die up or down the dice chain.

This is the 80’s. People in the 80’s had stuff and needed a place to keep it. During play, if your character needs something that would fit their occupation or class, they have a chance to pull it out of their “bag”.   This lessens the need for extensive equipment lists.  

In horror movies, characters often make decisions that aren't in their best interests, following well-known genre tropes. In contrast, RPG players typically want their characters to survive. The Trope Token bridges this gap by rewarding Actors who choose to embrace classic horror movie behavior, even when it puts their characters at risk.

In Horror Cinema Classics, as in many horror films, characters can sometimes die off-screen, especially during a Flick (zero level). This mechanic provides Actors with a consolation prize when one of their characters is killed off-screen without a chance to defend themselves or make a saving throw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wfjVU4gZyI&t=96s

Characters will encounter some scary stuff. As in many other horror games, HCC has rules governing how a character handles being confronted by the horrific. Test Your Mettle can be compared to a fear or sanity check.  However, madness and insanity themselves are less quantified and more a role-playing tool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrvkxP5PbM8

In times of need or desperation characters may choose to tap into the ever-present Darkness and receive aid. As characters reach for The Darkness, they become tainted by it.  Tap into it too far and they will be corrupted or even forever lost to it. 

While a familiarity with other Goodman Games products, specifically DCC, is helpful in playing Horror Cinema Classics it is not necessary: everything you need to play, other than a set of funky dice, is contained right here, in the gleefully horrid tome!

Those slashers, dread-head, horror enthusiasts that back a physical Pledge Level within the first 48 hours of the campaign will receive a limited issue Trope Token.  The standard Trope Token will be a 39mm "poker chip" size, but backers in the first 48 hours will receive one that is a full 3" diameter!

Horror and Halloween go together like slashers and butcher knives, so backers at all levels (except Patron Only) will be provided with a PDF copy of our most current Quick Start Rules (QSR) and a PDF copy of “Do You Know Where Your Children Are”, a Halloween themed Flick (zero level script) so that you can play the game on Halloween THIS year! 
 

The campaign ends on October 23rd, and we will email you a link to download them from DriveThruRPG soon after it ends. 

Additionally, if you send us a picture we can use on our social media of your table playing HCC sometime before November 30th, we will send you a PDF copy of a holiday themed adventure in time for the December holidays! 

Visit the Rewards tab for a full list of what is being offered through this campaign.  Please note, all artwork is currently a work in progress and subject to change. 

HCC Hardcover - Standard Edition ($60): Add an extra $60 to your pledge per book you wish to add to your order. The purchase of extra books will help you save on shipping costs which will be determined at the time of fulfillment.

HCC Hardcover - Limited Edition ($85):  Add an extra $85 to your pledge per book you wish to add to your order. The purchase of extra books will help you save on shipping costs which will be determined at the time of fulfillment.

Script - The Evil at Everson (0 lv) ($16): Add an extra $16 to your pledge per book you wish to add to your order. The purchase of extra books will help you save on shipping costs which will be determined at the time of fulfillment.
 
As a high schooler from a quaint rural Wisconsin town in the 1980's, you find yourself invited to classmate Nancy Everson's barn party at her family's isolated farm. With her parents away for the evening, the atmosphere is ripe for a night of teenage revelry. However, as the moon rises and the festivities kick off, classmates begin to vanish one by one, and it becomes chillingly clear that an uninvited guest is wreaking havoc. 

Can you uncover the truth behind the deadly party crasher and escape the farm before you become their next victim?

Script - Bloodball (1st lv) ($16): Add an extra $16 to your pledge per book you wish to add to your order. The purchase of extra books will help you save on shipping costs which will be determined at the time of fulfillment.

This is the sequel to The Evil at Everson Farm.  It’s 1980 something in Tangled Root Valley, a small town in Wisconsin. The high school’s football team has been on an amazing winning streak. This is just what the town needed after last year’s tragic events at Everson’s Farm. But the Darkness will not be stopped. It just found a new disciple.

Script - McCarthy's Revenge (2nd lv) ($16): Add an extra $16 to your pledge per book you wish to add to your order. The purchase of extra books will help you save on shipping costs which will be determined at the time of fulfillment.

McCarthy’s Revenge! is the 2nd-level Feature/sequel to Toy Store Terror!, a Flick (level 0) which appears in the HCC core book. It is now three years after the horrid events of a toy store tragedy in a small Midwestern town–and a murderous ventriloquist’s dummy has set up shop with a small army of like-minded dummies and porcelain dolls inside an H.H. Holmesian murder house to achieve one thing: claim his revenge!

Script - On a Pale Horse (3rd lv) ($16): Add an extra $16 to your pledge per book you wish to add to your order. The purchase of extra books will help you save on shipping costs which will be determined at the time of fulfillment. 

This Feature is for level 3 characters, and it is set in Alexander, MA, a small city on the east coast with a history of strange events.  The Characters are drawn to the town after discovering strange goings on, a three-day riot that made national news and now a series of unexplained deaths that has made international news.  People are dying in the city at an alarming rate.  While the deaths seem natural, the experienced Characters have been touched by the Darkness and these stories raise the hair on their necks.  

Something very wrong is going on, can you find out what or will you be the next victim!

HCC Reference Guide ($20): Add an extra $20 to your pledge per book you wish to add to your order. The purchase of extra books will help you save on shipping costs which will be determined at the time of fulfillment.

HCC Director's Screen ($20): Add an extra $20 to your pledge per items you wish to add to your order. The purchase of extra items will help you save on shipping costs which will be determined at the time of fulfillment.

Slaughter Dice set ($35): Add an extra $35 to your pledge per item you wish to add to your order. The purchase of extra items will help you save on shipping costs which will be determined at the time of fulfillment.

HCC Dice Tray ($15): Add an extra $15 to your pledge per item you wish to add to your order. 

Trope Token ($10): Add an extra $10 to your pledge per item you wish to add to your order. 

HCC T-Shirt ($25): Men's S-XL (2XL-5XL add $2). This is a black high quality t-shirt with the logo on the front.

HCC Patch ($5): Add an extra $5 to your pledge per patch you wish to add to your order.

HCC Dice Box ($60): Cherry dice box with a two color HCC logo on the cover, red felt inside.  Produced by Dirty Woods (www.dirtywoods.net). 

Wayward Studios Back Catalog - All of our previous releases are available for purchase as add-ons to this campaign.  See the Add Ons page for more information on all the Add Ons available! 

Upon reaching 20K, there will be a satin ribbon bookmark included in both physical versions (standard and limited edition) of the book.

We have secured several guest writers who are clawing at the gates to write a script for HCC!  Our first guest writer is Tim Snider; upon reaching 22K, all backers will receive the digital PDF version of the yet to be named adventure for free by way of DriveThruRPG at the time of fulfillment. The script will also be made available as a physical add-on at the discounted price of $14.00 (retail $16.00).

Tim Snider is an editor by trade and has been gaming since the early 1980s. Tim has written several adventures for Goodman Games' Mutant Crawl Classics RPG, including When Manimals Attack, Mayhem on the Magtrain, Crash of the Titans, and Rivers of Iron. He has self-published his own material for MCC RPG as well: Martian Crawl Classics, Dead in the Water, The Desk in Room 8-10, and Phage From Below. Tim also works behind-the-scenes as a freelance editor for Goodman Games.

However, he is no stranger to horror role-playing! Tim is co-author of Cryptworld for GoblinoidGames/Pacesetter; he is also author of Burial Plots and lead developer of Monsters Macabre for the system. Tim continues to support Cryptworld through his Creepy Comic Conversion series, where he converts 1950s horror comics into terrifying adventures for modern role-playing. He has also written several horrific DCC RPG supplements for his Country Meat-Grinder Classics line, including The Hellson Horror, Wasted, Harvest of the Wytch, and the upcoming Shrieks in the Night. Tim has also had short stories published in The Creeps and Cosmic Horror Monthly magazines.

Our second guest writer is Stephen Newton; upon reaching 24K all backers will receive the digital PDF version of the yet to be named adventure for free by way of DriveThruRPG at the time of fulfillment. The adventure will also be made available as a physical add-on at the discounted price of $14.00 (retail $16.00).

Stephen Newton has been a horror aficionado since his mom let him watch Night of the Living Dead at a disturbingly young age. For over 15 years, Stephen has been splashing the ink for Goodman Games and Thick Skull Adventures. He's best known for his horror-themed adventures and articles, including the inaugural title in the DCC Horror line, "They Served Brandolyn Red," as well as fan favorites like "Creep Skrag Creep", “The Last Will and Testament of Obediah Felkner”, and "The Corpse That Love Built." Stephen is very excited to see the Horror Crawl Classics reach out from the ground with its bony hand.

Our third guest writer is Bob Brinkman; upon reaching 26K, all backers will receive the digital PDF version of the yet to be named adventure for free by way of DriveThruRPG at the time of fulfillment. The adventure will also be made available as a physical add-on at the discounted price of $14.00 (retail $16.00).

Bob Brinkman is a Lovecraftian film scholar, podcaster (Sanctum Secorum), and RPG author who published his first adventure, Silent Night for Call of Cthulhu, in 2006. These days he spends much of his time writing in the Dungeon Crawl Classics universe (DCC, MCC, Weird Frontiers, Umerica, Heroic Adventure, HCC). His love of horror is on full display in his Halloween adventure Night of the Bog Beast, a nod to both Margaret St. Clair as well as classic comic monster The Heap.

When not writing role playing game materials, Bob is at work on a number of Lovecraftian film projects, with Shadows & Celluloid: A Viewer's Guide to 1,000 Lovecraftian Short Films nearing completion. Bob resides in Indiana with his wife, Judge Jen, and their four black cats.
 

Our fourth and final guest writer is Jon Hook; upon reaching 28K, all backers will receive the digital PDF version of the yet to be named adventure for free by way of DriveThruRPG at the time of fulfillment. The adventure will also be made available as a physical add-on at the discounted price of $14.00 (retail $16.00).

Jon is a Cthulhu cultist. His first published Call of Cthulhu adventure was Timeless Sands of India in 2012, the seventh adventure in Goodman Games' Age of Cthulhu line, (an official license of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG). Jon spent several years in the Goodman Games bullpen writing more Age of Cthulhu adventures, the 2017 Halloween adventure, Shadow Under Devil's Reef, and contributing to two of the alphabet books, Metamorphosis Alpha: Epsilon City, a couple of the DCC Annuals, and other system-neutral essays. Jon has also had a few Call of Cthulhu scenarios published with Chaosium, Inc, including Shadow Over Providence which premiered at the Necronomicon convention in 2019. 

Jon is also an ENNIE award winning podcaster. For nine years, he was one of the founding members of the Miskatonic University Podcast. In 2023, Jon, and his friend, (YouTube darling), Seth Skorkowski, founded Modern Mythos, a podcast that discusses horror and investigative role-playing games. You can find, follow, befriend, and stalk Jon on Facebook and Discord.

While it is hard to follow those four awesome guest writers, the show must go on!  If we reach 30K we will include a fold out Map of Tangled Root Valley, the small Wisconsin town that several current and future scripts take place in.  In addition, we will send a pad of extra sheets and a pad of character sheets!  These items will go out to all physical backers upon fulfillment and be available as a free download on DriveThruRPG for all backers. 

Upon reaching the 35K mark all physical backers will receive one folded 11x17 poster of the cover image free of charge at the time of fulfillment.  This cover, done by legendary DCC staff artist Bradley McDevitt, will be a fine addition to your horror shrine!

If we make it all the way to 45K, we will cancel all physical add-ons for the four guest scripts (adventures), because every physical backer will receive them for free automatically upon fulfillment!   This one is a huge thank you to all our backers!  (yeah, yeah, that will set us back under 45K, but we love you so we just have to do it!) 

The story of Wayward Studios starts, like so many great tales, in the mid-1980’s in a basement in Racine, Wisconsin. This small-town nirvana was where a group of high school kids, drawn together by a shared love of swords, sorcery, horribly unhealthy snacks, fantastical creatures, and most of all, storytelling, would gather. Every weekend, after their jobs flipping burgers and serving frozen custard, they’d meet in that basement to fight the legions of darkness, save worlds unimagined and find the mythical Table H treasure horde. They wrote and played epics tragic and ridiculous, haunting and hysterical.

After nearly forty years, that core group, (Mark Manchester, Randy Miller, Andy Patch and Eric Anderson), are still at it. They’ve saved worlds, slain mythical beasts and acquired more (imaginary) treasure than any of them could count.  They still love telling stories and they recognized that the world around them seems too as well. With the explosion of the tabletop gaming industry and the rise of third-party publishers, especially that of the Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics line of publications, they found themselves asking, “other creatives are doing it, so why can’t we?”

Wayward Studios has been going strong for a couple of years now and has published adventures and supplements for Dungeon Crawl Classics and Weird Frontiers, with several successful crowdfunding campaigns under our belt.  From the start, we talked about creating our own game, our own “-CC”.  It was Randy who came up with the name and concept we are presenting now, Horror Cinema Classics (HCC). 

Our history was not all fantasy gaming.  We’ve played plenty of Call of Cthulhu, Dead Lands, Dark Conspiracy, World of Darkness and other horror themed games across the years; but after growing up in the 80’s, it just made sense for us to “write what we know”.   HCC focuses on that era, the best era, and those fun, over-the-top cult-classic, campy B-movies. 

There’s still much lurking beneath the surface, our work is far from over, but just like the last survivor in a slasher flick, we’ve accepted what must be done to survive and we hope you’re brave enough to come along for the ride!

Thanks to you, Wayward Studios has several successful campaigns behind us and we’re building on that momentum.  HCC is still being furiously written and play tested.  We’re teaming up with a great group of artists and have exciting commissions underway.  Several well-known authors from the DCC community have reached out and want to be a part of the game.  

The biggest challenge right now is figuring out how long printing will take and how much it will cost, but we are carefully coordinating to keep everything moving forward smoothly.  We want nothing more than to see our visions come to life and we want this to become the first in a long line of products for your horror roleplaying enjoyment for many years to come! 

We are targeting Q4 of 2026 for product(s) completion. 

Shipping will be determined closer to completion of the project, rates have been all over the place recently.  Currently estimate shipping to be about $12.00 for the US.  While we certainly do not want to turn away our international customers and will offer to ship anywhere, international shipping costs are very high right now and it would probably cost around $80 to ship the hardcover book + add ons.   We will keep everyone updated on shipping as the campaign moves along.  Shipping fees will be collected post-campaign in Pledge Manager.

 

                                                                 www.Wayward StudiosRPG.com