Bluebeard's Bride + complimentary PDF
“Beauty…is pain.” The woman mouths the words, but no sound passes her lips.
As you back away, the curtains covering the walls slither down with a hiss. The walls are covered in mirrors. And the woman is in every single one of them. There’s no room for you. The woman steps out from the mirror.
She’s wearing the same wedding dress you are, but it fits her better. She smiles as she pads over the carpet towards you. The woman reaches out. All of the parts of yourself that you don’t like, she touches those places. And when she touches you, it hurts.
“You can make yourself better. Woman aren’t strangers to pain, after all.”
All of the mirrors on the walls shatter, and she turns from you to pick up a shard of glass. As she hands it to you, you find yourself whispering back… “I can take the pain.”
Bluebeard’s Bride is an investigatory horror tabletop roleplaying game, written and designed by Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, and based on the Bluebeard fairy tale.
In this game you and your friends explore Bluebeard’s home as the Bride, creating your own beautifully tragic version of the dark fairy tale. Investigate rooms, discover the truth of what happened, experience the nightmarish phantasmagoria of this broken place, and decide whether or not you are a faithful or disloyal bride.
Bluebeard’s Bride is based on the Powered by the Apocalypse system used in Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, Masks, and more. It’s a simple system; when your character takes an action that fits a move, the move tells you what happens, or you roll two six-sided dice to find out. Since this is a horror game, we have modified it so that the majority of moves use no dice; this harkens back to telling ghost stories around the fire.
Bluebeard’s Bride produces adult feminine horror fiction like Crimson Peak, American Horror Story, or The Company of Wolves, making it fun for horror fans and dark fairy tale fans alike. And the Powered by the Apocalypse system gives Bluebeard’s Bride the strong, yet flexible system necessary to tell your own flavor of horror.
