Took an extended break from the day jeorb to play with that horror RPG thing. Found a couple neat storygame options (thanks, @001zlnv ) but wound up tinkering with my copy of the Silicon Dawn and putting together a system.

I kinda like where it's going. You draw a hand of seven. All the court cards, tarots, and specials go back into the deck but go onto your character sheet as plot connections, unpleasant fates, and occult abilities you can buy _later_ in the campaign.

Then you redraw to seven cards and (scene missing) until you've got five Minor Arcana left in your hand. Their suits determine your PC's starting dots in Safety (swords), Insight (wands), Humanity (cups), and Authority (coins).

Their *ranks*, however, determine how good your PC's starting position is and how much they have to lose. Those cards start outside the deck and in the player's sideboards-- but each gets tagged with something of importance to the PC, proportional to its number value, and they have to sacrifice it to add that card to a skill roll.

Cards that get sacrificed in this way go back into the deck... and trigger "hauntological" effects (bad memories, hallucination scenes, EVP phenomena, undeath etc.) that bring the lost thing back into the PC's life when they're dealt randomly, giving the system a bit of a Legacy board-game feel. Cards accumulate histories, usually icky ones, over time.

Skill checks are built such that you MUST throw one or more cards (from your regular hand, not your Sideboard of Doom :) ) at some kind of challenge each turn. You can throw as many cards as you like at something, but the lower their value and the more mismatched suits, the more collateral damage is inflicted on your world and its stability in the process.

Obviously there's a ton more work do to, but I've always wanted to try a card-based system for an online narrative RPG, and this feels like a pretty good start for randomly generating Videodrome-type reality breakdowns...

Next stop is to put together a bibliography, I guess, and figure out exactly what kind of horror I'm going for, then start breaking it down into tropes and pasting them onto card mechanics...