%%
%%
%% Image selected via crowner in the Image Suggestion thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php?crowner_id=62fkj83o
%% https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1452266899092104700
%% Please don't change or remove without starting a new thread.
%%
[[quoteright:350:[[UsefulNotes/{{Fate}} https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/fatetoolkittabletopnightmarefuel_5.png]]]]
%%
This ain't your grandaddy's Candy Land anymore...

!! Sub-pages:
[[index]]
* NightmareFuel/{{Battletech}}
* NightmareFuel/BetrayalAtHouseOnTheHill
* NightmareFuel/CallOfCthulhu
* NightmareFuel/ContinuumRoleplayingInTheYet
* NightmareFuel/DontRestYourHead
* NightmareFuel/DungeonsAndDragons
** NightmareFuel/DarkSun
** NightmareFuel/{{Ravenloft}}
** NightmareFuel/ScarredLands
* NightmareFuel/{{Earthdawn}}
* NightmareFuel/{{Exalted}}
* NightmareFuel/MagicTheGathering
* NightmareFuel/PalladiumBooks
** NightmareFuel/AfterTheBomb
** NightmareFuel/DeadReign
** NightmareFuel/{{Rifts}}
* NightmareFuel/{{Pathfinder}}
** NightmareFuel/{{Starfinder}}
* NightmareFuel/PokemonTradingCardGame
* NightmareFuel/SentinelsOfTheMultiverse
* NightmareFuel/{{Shadowrun}}
* NightmareFuel/TwilightStruggle
* NightmareFuel/{{Warhammer}}
** NightmareFuel/WarhammerTheEndTimes
* NightmareFuel/WarhammerAgeOfSigmar
* NightmareFuel/{{Warhammer 40000}}
* [[NightmareFuel/OldWorldOfDarkness The World of Darkness]]
** NightmareFuel/ChroniclesOfDarkness
** NightmareFuel/ChicagoByNight
* NightmareFuel/YuGiOhCardGame
[[/index]]
----

'''Games below are listed in alphabetical order.'''

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: [[Tabletop Games Tabletop Roleplaying Games ]]
]]

* In ''3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars'' the Terran Empire is a perfect utopia and Player Characters have gone half-insane with tedium; they have become soldiers exploring the universe supposedly [[BugWar to kill all potential threats to the Empire]], but their true mission is [[AbsoluteXenophobe to exterminate]] [[OmnicidalManiac ALL extraterrestrial life in the universe]]. Just because. Oh, and you can't return, because deserters are killed. Isn't it a happy ride?
** The war is so brutal and pointless that literally the only way for those fighting it to avoid coming to despise Earth is to die before they get that far. It's far from unlikely for a long-enough campaign to end with the player characters seizing control of the Expeditionary Force, turning it around, and destroying or enslaving humanity.
* ''TabletopGame/AllFleshMustBeEaten''. Sure, the scenarios are designed to be one-shot and varied by the GM's plans... but they're pretty horrific. One sample flavor story is from the perspective of a scientist in a military base who's studying the zombie plague, and gets bitten. He describes what happens to him in graphic detail. Bad enough, sure, but another one has the zombie plague as an STD.
* ''TabletopGame/BlissStage''.
** You're fighting aliens that put [[ParentalAbandonment all the adults of the world]] [[LotusEaterMachine to sleep with ''those fucking creepy smiles.'']]
** Your only weapon with which to fight them is [[BlackBox made of alien brains.]]
** You must face the aliens in a bizarre nightmare world, where they can take any form.
** Your only weapon is [[ThePowerOfLove powered by lust]]. Did we mention that there's a single person over the age of 18 in the entire CrapsackWorld? [[{{Squick}} Imagine feeling up Sara Smith. Or better yet, don't.]]
** [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking And the one adult is]] [[JerkAss kind of a dick]].
* The ''TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu'' game, being based off Creator/HPLovecraft's works of horror, has this as its core quality. The modern-era conspiracy thriller version of the game, ''TabletopGame/DeltaGreen'', is the same. It is a dark, depressing RPG book, and very well-written. Conspiracy theories, UFO lore, and the Mythos all rolled into one makes for a very bleak view of the present and near-future indeed.
** The introductory fiction for the original ''Delta Green'' core rules is of a clean-up squad sent out to handle an incident of a retired Navy SEAL having gone insane and murdered his entire family. Why? Because he had a traumatic flashback to an old mission involving Deep Ones, triggered by the smell of his house's ''backed-up septic tank''. That detail alone hammers home just how much the touch of the Mythos never goes away, even years later.
** The entirety of anything inspired by the Cthulhu mythos is Nightmare Fuel. Even ''TabletopGame/CthulhuTech''. The good side: hey, [[InstantAwesomeJustAddMecha we've got mecha!]] The bad side: it's still a world where there are games between ancient evils and we are so pitiable and worthless that all of them but Dagon (and maybe Nyarlathotep) don't even consider us worthwhile pawns. Even when we have HumongousMecha.\\
For additional persective, we've got giant robots, the Guyver, and everybody knows they're fighting for the survival of the species. ''We're still losing.'' And if Cthulhu wakes up, it's an automatic GameOver.
* {{TabletopGame/Cyberpunk}} 2013 and 2020 had quite the nightmare fuel to pierce even the most jaded players.
** CyberneticsEatYourSoul if you're not careful. One supplement described people HearingVoices from their ''audio system'' (think an Ipod implanted in your head). Another said he couldn't stand “those sacks of blood and water hemming him in”.
** Made even worse for 'Borgs. Many full body conversions have a human brain as a plug-n-play WetwareCPU. They are like the Servitors of Warhammer 40K, but the brains can be put into another body. One conversion, the Dragoon, combines this trope with AndIMustScream. The cyberware and the drugs keep the thing (barely) controlled. It acts almost like a dumb robot. But your character can recover some humanity loss by moving into another body. Just now he/she has horrible nightmares and flashbacks from being was a 7 foot tall killing machine.
** The [[FallenStatesOfAmerica fall of the US]] and the “Collapse” was an economic depression ''worse'' than the crash of 1929. Then there was the [[BodyHorror Wasting Plague]].
** Gangs built on a theme: Bozos were AxeCrazy killer clowns, “Posers” were all altered to look like someone or ''something”. Others were gangs on the edge of cyber psychosis.
** The worst part was that some people would just ''snap'' and get AxeCrazy. No ideology, no goals.
* ''Dark Conspiracy'', the old GDW game, is basically made of NightmareFuel. Never mind TheGreys or TheFairFolk. No, take a Vrkolak, who is most likely based on the 1961 Mexican horror film ''The Brainiac'', except that it doesn't kill you when it sucks your cerebrospinal fluid out of the base of your skull though its hollow forked tongue -- it changes you into another of its own kind. And by that, we mean the computers made from the living brains of humans who cannot die, are fully conscious, and are totally aware of what is being done to and with them. That's just one of the more "PG" rated horrors.
* ''Dead Inside''. How would you like to lose your soul and become a gray, empty husk of a person? And that's not even the worst thing that can happen to you in this world. If you die while Dead Inside you become a zombie, lose what little emotion you had, and can ''never'' heal your soul, you're stuck like that for a long long time while you slowly rot away. And even worse than that is what happens if the last dregs of soul-stuff you have get lost or stolen, you become an OmnicidalManiac [[TheHeartless Quippoth]] intent on eating the souls of everybody and everything and turning ''them'' into monsters as well.
* The ''TabletopGame/{{Deadlands}}'' roleplaying game. The setting is in 1876 America with a few major changes. The Civil War has gone on for 14 years and the country is still divided into north and south with an uneasy truce. The men killed at the many great battlefields in the Civil War, like Shiloh and others, have risen as zombies and formed the Black Regiment. The world is suddenly infested with strange monsters that range from Bigfoot to pod-people replacements, one of whom happens to be [[spoiler:Confederate President Jefferson Davis]]. But even that is not the worst: as it happens, it is all the result of something much worse. [[spoiler:Four powerful demonic spirits are 'terrorforming' the earth by causing ungodly amounts of fear and paranoia in the populace that eventually makes the area an uninhabitable 'Deadland' filled with monsters and unnatural weirdness. Oh, and those spirits? They become the Four HorsemenOfTheApocalypse.]]
* ''TabletopGame/EclipsePhase'' is ''made'' of this.
** Anything and everything involving the Exsurgent Virus.
** Even the bits that don't involve the Exsurgent Virus or the [=TITANs=] can be incredibly creepy. ''Gatecrashing'' gives us the Iktomi ruins dotted with a warning to "Mind the Weave" and a picture of a Pandora Gate, and the virtual reality setup that could hold an entire planetary population but ''[[NothingIsScarier isn't]]'', to name just two.
* The German RPG ''Engel'' comes close, though. Unless you play it as a superhero/[[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons D&D]] hack-n-slay setting, which would totally kill the creepy.
** The creepy only really sets in when you ''get'' the fact that [[spoiler: the so-called 'angels' are actually brainwashed, nanomachine-infected children mostly aged 12-14 who were stolen from their parents and forcefully molded into androgynous 'angelic' figures meant to know nothing outside of service to their Himmel]]. And you know that age-range? Well, aside from the standards dangers of the world, there's a Papacy-sponsored reason as to ''why'' Engels never seem to get any older...
* The Swedish RPG ''TabletopGame/{{KULT}}'' may well be one of the creepiest roleplaying games in existence. "Death is only the beginning", indeed. Roll ''Franchise/{{Hellraiser}}'' and a twisted version of Gnosticism into one, add evil angels and insanity-induced mutation into monsters, and you understand why most ''[=KULT=]'' characters start out already fucked up. Or cursed.
* Much of the artwork that comes in the newest edition of ''TabletopGame/LamentationsOfTheFlamePrincess'' is purely intended to be Nightmare Fuel. The "oopsie" effects of the Summoning Spell are also quite chilling, especially the abstract entities with names like 'Collective Unconscious Desire for Suicide' and 'Lament of a Mother for her Dead Child.'
* The original edition of ''TabletopGame/LittleFears'', where the players play children and one of the opponents is the AnthropomorphicPersonification of sexual molestation.
* ''TabletopGame/LegendOfTheFiveRings'' has all sorts of freaky Asian mythology-inspired nastiness, from Oni to Penanggalan. The ''Bearers of Jade'' sourcebook is a guide to horror-role-playing in the setting, and does a very good job of invoking just how nightmarish the Shadowlands can be.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Paranoia}}'' is known for playing horrible events for [[RuleOfFunny laughs]], but the Straight style plays them straight by focusing on just how horrible they are. Thousands of citizens may be killed or mindwiped for nothing even vaguely resembling a good reason, and it's probably all the fault of the [=PCs=]. And because it's always "year 214", pretty much no one knows how long this has been going on, or how long it will keep going on; one pre-written adventure actually examines this question over the course of [[spoiler: billions of years]].
** The best example of this is a Straight mission where the players are put in charge of a food factory with a new process that shows record levels of production. Of course, this is a lie and the "food" is mostly empty boxes, but if the players expose the lie then they'll be executed along with the rest of the staff, so they're encouraged to continue the lie and buy or steal food from other sectors to fill their quota. This works, the players get promoted, and as a reward for their incredible production the quota for the factory is increased. And so the players lie again about how much food is being produced, buy or steal it from elsewhere, are promoted again, etc. until eventually their factory's defective methods are imposed all over Alpha Complex. All fun and games, until the players realise that their actions have caused all the food production factories that worked fine to be replaced with factories that only produce a fraction of usable food. Mass starvation is the result, and pretty soon the only remaining solution is to [[ImAHumanitarian shove half the citizens of Alpha Complex into food processors to feed the rest]].
** And then there's [=MemoMax=] technology. Whenever someone dies, his clone picks up where he left off, having downloaded all his memories. [[MindRape Including how he died]].
* Whilst the depictions of the part of Hel's home set aside for punishing the damned dead in Myth/NorseMythology are never pleasant, the version from TabletopGame/{{Scion}} 1e is particularly nasty. In Hel's hall, the roof is woven of serpent spinal columns that drip an endless rain of venom as the damned are forced to wade incessantly through thick, sucking, cloying, thigh-high blood; to stop moving is to pulled under the gore and drown without respite until they can struggle back to the surface. A massive table in the center of the room is laden only with foul and oft-putrid foodstuff, and drinking horns filled only with the urine of the massive, filthy, vicious-tempered goats that roam the hall and occasionally attack the damned - especially those who try to climb onto the table for relief from the blood - and the damned are cursed to still suffer from hunger and thirst. Above it all, upon her ash-and-rotwood throne, Hel sits and revels in their punishment, calling names at random and mocking them by reminding all present of that chosen victim's sins. Should an audience come to visit Hel from other realms, she makes the blood boil and suck the damned down under its gory surface until it is done, with the souls screaming in fear all the way.
* ''TabletopGame/SLAIndustries'' is practically made of the stuff. Start with an already CrapsackWorld in which more than 80% of the population is unemployed, and mental illness, serial murder and gang crime are at astronomical highs, but everything is owned by a somewhat malevolent corporation who want things to ''stay'' that way.
* In ''Tribe 8'' almost anything about the [[BodyHorror Z'bri]]. Josef Mengele had nothing on these things, and they became the ''masters of humanity''.