Howard David Ingham. DriveThruRPG, 2018.
3–5 players including a Game Master | Variable | Adult
The Shivering Circle is an independent tabletop roleplaying game by Howard David Ingham, available on a pay-what-you-want basis from DriveThruRPG. The game is set in and around the fictional Hoddesham Down, a composite of the British landscape’s half-remembered mythologies, with the nearby communities of Hoddesford and Hoddeston serving as its human geography. Players take the role of ordinary people with ordinary desires and fears, drawn into contact with a landscape that harbours sinister presences: an illegal hunt that finds other animals to pursue, a shadowy figure whispering to estate kids, an austringer who has lived in the same shed for two hundred years. The game draws explicitly on the folk horror genre, citing The Wicker Man, Nigel Kneale, Ben Wheatley, and The League of Gentlemen as influences, and is designed to capture the mode’s characteristic juxtaposition of the prosaic and the uncanny. Ingham describes the setting as an island where there are ‘no untrodden places, only abandoned ones’, and designs around a ‘grim inevitability’ that positions players as people who were always already claimed by the landscape. A significant portion of the rules text is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, with an invitation for other designers to produce compatible games in folk horror settings beyond Britain. The game was the subject of an MGC actual play recording, featuring Jennifer Cromwell, Chloé Wake, and Paul Wake, with audio production by Chris Gregory of the Alternative Stories podcast, produced to accompany the 2021 Manchester Game Centre and Game in Lab event ‘Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers: Roleplaying Games and the Environment’, which brought together Ingham, Jesse Ross, Dr Nicholas Mizer, Paul Baldowski, and Kathryn Jenkins in a panel discussion of horror RPGs and the climate crisis.
The Shivering Circle belongs to a tradition of horror TTRPGs that engage ecological thinking through dark fantastic aesthetics rather than explicit environmental thematics. As Ingham explains, at the ‘Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers’ panel, the folk horror source traditions feature an openness that allows GMs and players to fill the gaps with concerns that are important and relevant to them as a group, a quality that makes the game particularly generative for ecological reflection. The haunted, ‘abandoned’ landscape of the Hoddesham Down is precisely the landscape of the Anthropocene: a world fully saturated with human history, marked by extraction, enclosure, and neglect, where the non-human persists not as pristine nature but as something older, stranger, and more aggrieved. Folk horror as a genre navigates a productive tension, however, since it risks reinscribing ecophobia and casting the non-human as a vengeful antagonist (as in the reactionary climax of many folk horror films), but at its best it fosters uncanny intimacy with damaged environments, revealing the human as always already entangled in the landscape it imagines itself to master (Germaine 2023). The Shivering Circle leans towards the latter. Its design is organised around the sense that ‘it was you they wanted all along’: players are not agents conquering an inhospitable environment, but people who were always part of it. This positions the game in relation to what Morton (2016) calls ‘dark ecology’: an ecological awareness that requires being ‘sufficiently creeped out’, that comes through intimacy and entanglement rather than mastery or separation. TTRPGs of this kind allow us to take concepts that are important but frightening and address them in a structured and supported way, making difficult conversations more accessible through the imaginary. The game’s open-licence design ethos reflects a related commitment: the British folk horror landscape is common land, and Ingham’s invitation for others to build on his system extends that commons into game design.
Content written by Chloé Wake. Informed by the Manchester Game Centre actual play and event ‘Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers: Roleplaying Games and the Environment’ (May 2021), featuring Howard David Ingham, Jesse Ross, Dr Nicholas Mizer, Paul Baldowski, and Kathryn Jenkins. Panel summary written by Nicola Branch and Chloé Wake.
Further resources
Actual play: ‘It Was Always Going to End Here’.
Panel discussion: Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers:
Panel video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1obKRRjUhBo
References
Estok, S. 2018. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. London: Routledge.
Germaine, C. 2023. ‘Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers: An Ecocritical Reading of Horror Roleplaying Games’. In Torner, E. et al. (eds.) GENeration Analog 2021 Proceedings. Pittsburgh: ETC Press, pp. 129–139.
Morton, T. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press.