“Every cell in my body was telling me to run. Maybe I should have. The girl… Melissa…. just stood there, quivering slightly, her blind eyes seeming to focus on something beyond the walls of the room. She began to murmur to herself, and it was then I started to feel like something was pushing itself into my mind, slowly… steadily. I could hear the nurses arguing at the bottom of the stairs, and I knew it was now or never. I knew she couldn’t hear me, so I touched Melissa’s arm and that was when everything went wrong.”

A new tabletop RPG has come out that uses playing cards instead of dice called Hands of Destiny. The best part? Completely Open Source, free to download legally! Seriously, check it out. I did an asylum escape one-shot using a modified version of this system, and it was amazing. Sanity was represented with candles, and each time they lost sanity the whole room got darker. The tension was high and the game was a blast.

If you want to see the material I created to use for your own RPG, download it in docx format here: asylum-one-shot

I would recommend reading the Hands of Destiny core first.

If you do want to play it, here is the map to be printed out with creepy things written on it:

It might be helpful to inverse the colors to save on ink.

Let me know if you get inspired by any of this material!

Enjoy!