Running feminine horror was hard, dude

Today I want to talk about something that’s been percolating in the back of my brain for a little while now: running feminine horror at the TTRPG table.

It’s hard. Even for the kindest, most emotionally intelligent men. And I think I finally understand why.

Before we dive in, I want to set the stage. This might make some people uncomfortable, and I want to be clear: these are observations, not judgments. If something comes off as critical, that’s not my intention - I’m just a human trying to figure things out and probably phrasing something clumsily.

Secondly, this isn’t a critique of my players. They came to the table with generosity, care, and a real desire to help me tell the story I wanted to tell. I felt supported every step of the way. I consider them exceptional players and even better people. I’m even married to one of them.

This is long because I’ve been sitting with these thoughts for a while. They come from experience, reflection, and a few missteps along the way.

And just to be super clear: this isn’t about gatekeeping. It’s the opposite. I want to make something that can sometimes feel niche or gendered more accessible. This is about inviting people in — not keeping them out.

Feminine horror is a genre I love. It’s the kind of game I want to run. But it’s not for everyone, and that’s okay. What I’ve learned is: if I personally want this tone to land, I need to do a few things differently and I want to share that learning with you. Because that’s the whole point of this channel - I am trying to be better and I want to share what I’m trying to do to be better.

So let’s dive in - 

[What Is Feminine Horror?]
So first: what even is feminine horror?

At its core, feminine horror is horror told through a feminine lens - not just featuring women, but grounded in the specific fears, pressures, and contradictions that come with being raised as, perceived as, or identifying with femininity and womanhood, as constructs defined by society and individuals.

It’s not about jump scares. It’s about discomfort, about being too much or not enough, about being failed by things you trusted because you were told to trust them. It explores how identity, agency, and the body are controlled, dismissed, or punished by systems, relationships, and culture.

Some common themes include:

• Being reduced to a role: the virgin, the mother, the hag.
  

• Being expected to nurture, forgive, or stay silent and being punished or dismissed if you choose not to
  

• Fear of having too much or not enough desirability, or losing desirability through aging
  

• Powerlessness in systems that claim to protect you.
  

• The horror of being believed too late - or not at all.

And it’s important to say: feminine horror is not only for women. But the themes it explores often hit differently if you’ve lived in a body that’s been objectified, controlled, dismissed, or punished just for existing. That lived lens is what gives this genre its teeth.

It’s not just “what if the monster was a woman?”
It’s “what if the world made you the monster, and then told you it was your fault?”

It’s “what if the world broke you, and then called you dangerous for not smiling about it?”

It’s “what if every choice pushed you closer to being feared, or being erased?”

It’s “what if the horror was seeing yourself as something different than what you thought and realizing this is how everyone else already saw you?” 

Here are some examples:

• Jennifer’s Body – A teenage girl is killed by people she had no reason to distrust. Society wants your sexuality, then punishes you for it.
  

• Ginger Snaps – Puberty going from girlhood to womanhood is body horror. A girl turns into something unrecognizeable where even family has no idea how to manage or control.
  

• The Babadook – Repressed grief and motherhood as an unshakeable monster
  
  Teeth – This one is my personal favourite. A girl discovers a violent, supernatural defense mechanism in her own body and every time she uses it to protect herself, she’s punished. It’s a pretty visceral take on female sexuality being considered dangerous when it doesn’t serve men.
  

• The Substance – Beauty is currency but costs everything. Aging makes her invisible; desirability makes her disposable.
  
  Rosemary’s Baby – Marital rape, forced birth, and a woman gaslit by everyone around her.
  
  And with tabletops:

• Bluebeard’s Bride (TTRPG) – Players embody different aspects of one woman’s identity as she explores her new husband’s mysterious home. Every room asks: what are you willing to endure to live the kind of life you want?
  

• Thousand Year Old Vampire (TTRPG) – While not exclusively feminine horror, it can be. It’s a solo journaling game that plays with memory and identity. From a feminine horror lens, it’s about surviving by erasing yourself—again and again—until there’s nothing left but performance. Yes, you’re an immortal, but only in forms the world allows because you need to survive and the only way you can really do that is your slow erasure of personhood.
  

• Sleepaway (TTRPG) – A horror game about camp counselors protecting children from the Lindworm - a monster that leaves no trace, only absence. Through a feminine horror lens, the Lindworm becomes the embodiment of all the violence that goes unspoken. The fear isn’t about roaring monsters, it’s about being thought of as crazy and being disbelieved, violated invisibly, and losing spaces you thought you could trust.

So when we say “feminine horror,” we mean horror that centers the emotional, physical, and social terrors associated with being a woman — not just the presence of women in scary stories. Feminine horror isn’t even always visually grotesque - sometimes it's the horror of pregnancy, or the fear of being stuck in a marriage with no way out, or simply of walking home alone at night. It’s about powerlessness in systems that pretend to offer safety, that you are expected to trust but if you aren’t careful, what are you, stupid? Why would you go out wearing that?

And it’s worth noting: all this stuff absolutely does not mean it’s only for women. But the themes? The themes are deeply tied to womanhood, and often draw on lived experiences that don’t usually show up in traditional horror.

I’m including a great writeup about feminine horror that you should check out. I’ll stick it in the description: https://fate-srd.com/fate-codex/feminine-horror

[The Game That Didn’t Land]
I ran a feminine horror game a while back for a group of all men. And not bro-y guys - these were thoughtful, emotionally in-tune, genuinely excellent players who showed up deeply invested and with care and curiosity.

But the tone just didn’t hold. Somewhere along the way, it slid out of feminine horror and into something more like survival horror.

The fear I wanted - being stuck, being offered "help" you can’t trust - just didn’t click. They approached it more like: “Okay, let’s strategize, find an exit route, beat the system.” Which is a valid way to play, but it wasn’t the story I was trying to tell.

They just didn’t connect with the feeling of helplessness — of being unable to leave, and being too scared to accept the only help available.

They played the game I presented. I just didn’t make the emotional core clear enough.

That experience changed how I think about running genre-driven, emotionally layered games - especially ones rooted in something as specific as feminine horror.

[What can I do differently?]
Back then, I was still figuring out who I was as a GM. I mean I still am, and probably always will be but now I’m a lot clearer on what matters to me and what makes a game feel like it’s working.

At the time, though? I had internalized this weird idea that if you were really good, you didn’t need to have meta or above-the-table conversations. That tone, theme, emotional texture should just magically land if you run it right.

So being direct felt… kind of like cheating. Like I was doing it wrong.

And honestly, I still see that mindset pop up in TTRPG spaces, especially online. There’s this quiet stigma that over-prepping, or naming themes upfront, is “less cool.” Like the real pros just wing it and their table picks up the vibe without anyone ever saying it out loud.

Spoiler: That is minimum three kinds of bullshit.

[The Value of the Meta Conversation]

Meta conversations aren’t stupid. They’re part of your GM craft—especially if you’re aiming to run specific, nuanced stories. If that’s not your style, that’s fine. But if it is, then naming tone, themes, and expectations upfront is how you make space for the kind of story you want to tell.

You’re not spoiling anything—you’re giving your players the tools to help build it.

Feminine horror, in particular, often runs on tension that’s subtly uncomfortable and culturally coded: power dynamics, social expectations, the dread of being disbelieved and dismissed. These are things not every player will instinctively pick up on, especially if they haven’t lived them. And that’s not a flaw - it just means the game needs context. And as a GM you provide context to let your players make setting-appropriate decisions all the time anyway. This isn’t that different except that maybe the meta conversation is that context because it gives your players a roadmap, lets them know what emotional weight to give a moment, and shows you trust them with complex material.

So no - talking about theme, tone, or character arcs up front doesn’t make you less cool or capable. It makes you better. It’s how you get everyone telling the same story. Without the context, the game risks sliding back into generic horror tropes or surface-level choices that miss the deeper point.

These days, I don’t hesitate to spell things out clearly for players.

I’ll specifically say, "Your drive is to leave home and never return - unless it's entirely on your own terms. Everyone around you settled, got stuck, or gave in, and you're afraid of becoming just another version of that. Through play, we explore whether you’ll break free and the costs of that… or whether the weight of comfort pulls you back to safety, but not freedom."

By saying the words clearly and directly and framing it in a way that’s emotionally grounded but not gender-specific, it gives players something to hold onto - especially those who might not have lived some of the experiences the horror is drawing from. The hope is that it will make choices a little more complicated and helps steer the game away from default survival horror, where the instinct is to escape at all costs. Because in this kind of horror, escape isn’t freedom - it’s just a return to something familiar and quietly awful. You’re not just surviving the horror or escaping it anymore. You’re deciding what kind of life you’re willing to live with.

Players absolutely can still choose to leave. But the point is: leaving isn’t victory. It’s just a different kind of loss.

So just to summarize: Feminine horror is super vibe-heavy and thrives on tone and subtext. Because even the concept of safety is so nebulous, often even the stakes aren’t always clear, and especially when running this kind of thing for people who may not have experienced those specific tensions firsthand, you need to bring them into the emotional headspace deliberately.

Otherwise, it’s easy for the game to drift into more familiar territory - escape puzzles, monster fights, things with clearer and more familiar structure and payoff.

In addition to this, one personal guideline I’ve developed - and it may not be necessary for everyone but it is for me - is that I don’t run feminine horror unless there’s at least one other woman at the table.

Not because men can’t engage with it, but because I feel like I need at least one person who just gets it to help hold the emotional architecture in place. It’s like having someone else who speaks the same dialect of fear and that shared understanding helps hold the tone and focus of the game in place.

I hate to generalize, but for better or worse, people raised as female tend to recognize certain tensions instantly. I’m sure folks raised male have their own versions of that. And for horror this layered, that recognition matters.

Because this isn’t just fear. It’s a specific kind of fear rooted in control, vulnerability, and quiet expectation. And that can hit differently depending on where you’re coming from so in games like this, a range of perspectives helps keep the story rooted in what it’s actually trying to say.

So to wrap up, I think the idea of “shared context” has its limits. If you want to engage with certain kinds of horror - and certain kinds of storytelling - we may need a shared language. And sometimes, that language has to be built deliberately… or we have to decide we’re telling a different kind of story. Which is totally fine as well, to be clear.

For a theme of feminine horror though, I do think it takes a certain amount of care and clarity and I’ve tried to share what I think can help bridge the gap I’ve run into.