Podcast veteran and ENNIE Award winner Chris Lackey is stepping away from traditional cosmic horror TTRPGs to launch a standalone tabletop system. Strange Stories: The Roleplaying Game, produced by Witch House Media, is scheduled to launch its crowdfunding campaign on BackerKit on 21 July 2026.
The project aims to alter how game masters approach session preparation. Rather than relying on heavy reading, the game leverages Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer’s 17 years of experience from The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (now Strange Studies of Strange Stories) to introduce passive, audio-based scenario preparation. The TTRPG focuses specifically on fast, rules-light, one-shot horror and speculative fiction designed to be completed in a single evening.
Shifting Prep From Text to Audio
The defining feature of the upcoming release is a series of dedicated audio guides designed to replace the traditional pre-game reading loop. Instead of scanning pages of descriptive text, game masters, referred to as “Story Guides” within the system, can passively digest structural plot details.
Chris Lackey, Co-host at Strange Studies of Strange Stories, said in a statement:
The audio guides are intended for the Story Guide (GM) to use when prepping for the game. They go over the plot points, scenes, and possible options, as well as what happened during the playtest. Hopefully, this preps you for your game, with the book serving only as a reference. We’re basing these on our podcast, where we cover a story and talk about its plot and themes. We thought it would be great if you could prep for a game while doing the dishes or commuting home from work.”
Early layout previews indicate that the physical book looks great, leaning towards the high art and contrast that we’ve seen in recent rules-light games. The game is engineered for one to six players, with self-contained narrative arcs that can be resolved within a single two- to three-hour session.
The Core Game Engine
The rules pages reveal the inner workings of The Strange Story System. Rather than using shifting mechanics or modular rulesets to differentiate between different speculative fiction genres, such as high-action sword-and-sorcery or slow-burn horror, the system relies on a unified dice pool engine.
Characters possess ten core skills: Cool, Drive, Fight, Machines, Move, Notice, Smarts, Sneak, Strength, and Talk. To resolve challenges, players roll a pool of six-sided dice determined by their skill rank, searching for matching sets rather than total numerical values:
- Pairs yield 1 Success
- Triples yield 2 Successes
- Quadruples yield 3 Successes
- Quintuples yield 4 Successes
Difficulty is handled by adding or subtracting dice from the active pool based on circumstantial narrative factors. A previewed sample character sheet for “Professor Paul Crabshaw” shows that character limitations are regulated by a track of four “Setbacks,” alongside narrative “Specialities” that grant situational mechanical advantages. One-shot horror scenarios are strictly paced out via five explicit structural phases: The Prologue (20 mins), The Plunge (30 mins), The Quest (30 mins), The Clash (30 mins), and The Epilogue (10 mins).
Chris Lackey said:
The rules don’t really change. There might be slight shifts, but the fundamentals are always the same. It’s very narrative-focused, so what’s happening in the story changes your odds. The game uses a pool of D6s, and you’re looking for any matching values. The more matches you get, the greater the success. Difficulty is adjusted by adding or subtracting dice. Each story is different, and characters have different capabilities; we’ve found that the system works for everything we’ve thrown at it.”
Independent Fulfilment Strategy
A challenge for modern crowdfunding projects rests on physical distribution. How on earth does the publisher get the books to people? While many first-time independent publishers secure external global logistics networks ahead of their campaigns, Witch House Media is currently planning an internal approach to distribution.
Chris Lackey told us:
We are planning on doing our own fulfillment. If the project is very successful, we may have to scale up. We’re chatting with a few fulfillment companies, so if it grows beyond what we expect, we can adjust accordingly.”
Opting for self-fulfilment gives small teams total oversight of packaging quality, but it introduces operational risks if a crowdfunding campaign surpasses its initial target tier and experiences high domestic or international shipping volumes. That’s why those scouting chats with other companies are a good idea.
