Adventures into the Unknown

It was in March of 1985 when I first discovered a certain tabletop roleplaying game that would forever change my life, and no it was not Dungeons & Dragons!

At that time, I was a pimple-faced teenager attending the annual SimCon gaming convention on the campus of the University of Rochester in my home city of Rochester, New York when my wide eyes fell upon a boxed game casually displayed on a wall in the dimly lit dealer’s room. The evocative cover art by the late, great Jim Holloway depicted a hapless explorer bedecked in Victorian attire and gripping a glowing lantern turning to face an approaching threat within a fog-laden cemetery.

The game? CHILL: Adventures into the Unknown released by a short-lived publisher known as Pacesetter Ltd out of Delavan, Wisconsin.

I asked to examine the shrinkwrapped box and found myself positively transfixed by it. I adored the cover art, I dug the grotesque font used for the simple five-letter logo, and I digested each word on the back of the box with ghoulish delight:

“Fear runs down your spine like ice water. Pressing your shoulder more firmly against the door of the rotting cottage, you hope that your strength can prevail against the beast that hunts you. It lurks somewhere outside – waiting, watching. If only someone else had been sent out into the night, into the swamp to battle this creature.

“All has been quiet for two hours now. The monster wants you to believe that it has given up, gone to hunt less wary prey. But you know it can't be far away, for the night is silent as a grave and the air is fitted with a deathly CHILL.

“CHILL™: Adventures into the Unknown takes the role playing game one step beyond, into the eerie realm of ghostly horror. In this box lies everything you need to create an entire world of terrifying adventure. Inside, you will find a 64-page Campaign Book, a 32-page manual of creatures, a 16-page adventure, three dice, playing pieces, a large color map and a special introductory rules folder which allows you to begin playing within minutes of opening this box.

“Cross the threshold. Venture out into the night fog and enter the world of CHILL.”

Y’see, back in the days before the interwebs, the only way to learn about new games was reading about them in publications like TSR’s The Dragon (or White Wolf from our friends across the Pond), trying them out at local conventions, or randomly discovering them on store shelves where you had to trust your eyes and instincts and risk spending your hard-earned money on the great unknown.

Without hesitation, I purchased the game and drifted off to an unoccupied corner of Wilson Commons to free it of its cellophane prison and discover what delights were contained within. There was no disappointment on that day apart from the unfortunate loss of the gorgeous red, white, and blue 10-sided Crisloid dice which I strongly believe are still haunting some dark corner of the campus to this day, buried beneath 40 years of accumulated cobwebs and dust.

It didn’t take long for me to fill out my CHILL collection with various releases from Pacesetter including a 64-page bestiary titled Things, several adventure modules, and a box of lead miniatures from Grenadier Models many of which I promptly painted to a somewhat acceptable standard.

I also had the great privilege of meeting up with the folks behind Pacesetter when I attended the Gen Con gaming convention held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin later that year. There I acquired a CHILL T-shirt, got my copy of the Vampires sourcebook signed by authors Michael Williams and Gali Sanchez, and played in a terrifying demo game run by Mr. Williams himself.

Back home, I ran several sessions of the game for my friends and wrote a number of my own adventures with titles like Ring for Nurse, L.A. Nights (years before I moved here to Los Angeles), New Years Eve, and Subway to Hell which I actually ran at Gen Con in 1986. I even adapted Ken Russell’s horror/comedy feature film, Lair of the White Worm into a playable adventure!

After an incredibly prolific couple of years, Pacesetter eventually folded. I remained a fan of the game and its setting and when it was announced that Mayfair Games was to publish a second edition in 1990, I set to putting a few adventure ideas down on paper with the goal of getting them published and hopefully securing my very first credit as a professional writer!

In June of 1991, I finally submitted two ideas to Mayfair:

1)      Airborne Horror: A Double Adventure for CHILL. The two linked adventures included The Rage of Amenemhet and Evil in Paradise.

2)      Leap Into Terror, an adventure that pitted the envoys against the legendary Spring-Heeled Jack.

Much to my surprise, I was contacted by Jeff R. Leason of Mayfair who expressed interest in Leap Into Terror! This led to a few follow-up phone calls and suggested edits, but then, sadly, everything went quiet and I later learned that Jeff had left the company and my adventure was no longer under consideration.

While this was certainly devastating for me at the time (and it would be a few more years before I would see my first professional publication), it was certainly a good learning experience and I still have everything that I wrote in my files, some of which you can see here.

After Mayfair abandoned CHILL following the publication of Unknown Providence: SAVE in New England in 1996, the game once again drifted off into obscurity, eventually seeing a third edition as well as a retro clone of the first edition (with specific references to various organizations, personalities, and noted original beasties removed for copyright reasons) known as Cryptworld and published by Goblinoid Games.

I reached out to Goblinoid a few years ago about writing some material for Cryptworld, but as of this writing, that company has also gone dark.

In 2023, my horror RPG, Pinebox Middle School for Savage Worlds (set in the Pinebox, Texas setting made famous in the college-age RPG, East Texas University) was published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. While most of the book was comprised of wholly original material, there are a few bits and pieces that I carried over from my experiences with CHILL. I suppose that was my way of finally making my college dreams of publication a reality, decades later.

And that, my friends, is the tale of how “a frightfully fun role playing game” had a significant impact on my creative life.