Umbriel Delacroix himself told me everything in New Year's Eve. Everything. He took me in his flier to cities whose buildings had their obscenities shrouded with black clouds. He took me to Bronze Age and medieval-like populations which often view Mega-City dwellers with awe, fear, and undisguised hate. He took me to cities that were no different from those of the late 20th century. Then he took me to Hell. And Hell was everywhere...

—Journal of Cassandra Kastrouni, January 1, 2909.

About the CHILL RPG

Still... let's talk about fear. We won't raise our voices, and we won't scream; we'll talk rationally you and I. We'll talk about the way the good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unraveling with shocking suddenness.
— Stephen King, Night Shift xi

I wasn’t acquainted with Chill during its Pacesetter years. I remember seeing its ads sometimes on Dragon Magazine© and, although I was interested, I never had the chance to play it. When Mayfair games bought Chill from Pacesetter and gave the game a facelift, I decided to give it a try. Many of my friends were head over heels with White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade© but,

First of all, its scope is too limited...and too trendy: I got tired of the repeated banquets, the savoir-faire orgies, and Mafia-like gatherings after a while. If you wanted to add some variety say, werewolves or magicians, you had to buy each individual expan$ion (I guess they learned a lot from T$R/WotC). Highly profitable for White Wolf, but absurd for me since I didn’t want to spend a fortune building an ongoing Horror campaign.

I wanted a very general and open-ended system to play the genre, a game that gave me tons of varied material to use from day one. A system I could use to build my own world with my own history, my own mythology, my own rules, just like TSR’s (now WotC's) AD&D©. Chill© filled that bill quite nicely.

I managed to collect most of Mayfair’s Chill© expansions, and would have gone on if they had not closed the project. One of the expansions I anticipated the most never came to light: CyberChill, whose campaigns were set on a future Earth. Obliviously, CyberChill will never be, so I decided to make my own version: Chiliad: Dark Millennium. If you wish a more thorough introduction to the original Chill RPG, go to Derek Croucher's website.

I do not claim originality for all of the material here. This is basically an eclectic mixture of the basic Chill© system, The Beast Within expansion, all the Macabre novels and films I have seen and liked (especially the Lovecraftian ones), and another Dark Future/cyberpunkish system gathering dust in my bookshelf called Dark Conspiracy^™. There is even a bit of (don't laugh) FASA's Battletech^™. You will see a bit of everything here. All in all, it is half my own invention, half an adaptation of other games and stories. I will not repeat Chill’s© rules, you’ll have to refer to the original books for that, which are still available from Mayfair even if the company is no longer publishing it. Look in Crossroads for links of places where you can still buy the game.

I wanted to make the few rules I list here as simple as possible. If anyone out there believe they can be made even simpler feel free to let me know. Finally, if anyone out there has any problem with the photos I used to create my roster of characters (or any other graphic), please let me know and I’ll remove them. Every piece of artwork that is not mine or royalty-free will have a copyright tag or a footnote with the author's name. I’m not making any profit from this: this is just a free resource I’m giving out to all those interested out there. I only ask anyone using my written material to keep my name and HTTP attached to it. I do the same with any written material I download from someone else: it is just a matter of simple courtesy. If I ever get the money for a scanner and a graphics tablet, I’ll substitute the photos with original drawings.

The Crossroads section (see link at the top of the sidebar) contains, among other things, links to sites dedicated to Chill©. And remember to visit the Works Cited section if you are curious about where I got my quotes (such as the Stephen King quote above). So, relax, have a look around. Just try not to get eaten alive.

Make sure to stop by the WebRPG Townhall Forums Chill page. We Chill revenants stop by every now and then to say "Hi."

About Chiliad: Dark Millennium

Although Chiliad has been completely uploaded (and with a couple million links so that you can navigate better and more wisely through the “book”), that doesn't mean it will be absolutely, totally, completely finished or that it will ever be. However, the meat of my game world is here. Feel free to e-mail me any comments, if you like. If you are curious about my current plans, follow this link. News about this site and anything related to horror will be posted in the Fragments of Mind page, which I'll update periodically (see link at left).

Warning about the Chiliad pages: each one has a LOT of information (and some graphics), so they may take a bit to load. Also, the data in some pages (especially the data in the tables of the Armor and Combat section) still needs fixing.

“Mind and Magic” deals with magic, mystical orders, orders of the Unknown, a new supernatural discipline called Loresavant, some comments about ESPers, and other miscellaneous material. “Science and Technology” deals with, well, science and technology, what else? There you'll find stats for two more creatures: the Replicants and the SiGoMechs. In the “Armor and Combat” section I detail the rules for combat using armor, SmartSuits, and Mechs, and introduce the concepts of "Armor Rank" and "Piercing Rank." I also include a couple of new weapons to the arsenal of Chill©. The “Appendix” consists of NPCs (allies and adversaries) I am currently using in my campaign and anything new that may come up. If you'd like to add your own ideas, monsters, etc., to the world of Chiliad, let me know.

One thing you’ll notice is that, even though the game takes place almost a thousand years from now, this is not a Star Trek© universe. Heaven forbid. After a devastating war (as always), Humans were pushed into a period not unlike the Dark Ages. Civilization managed to recover (or did it?), until we get the Blade Runner-like future of Chiliad. Humans are expanding their influence throughout our solar system but haven't done any extrasolar ventures yet (or so the governments say). Also, don't think that SmartSuits, Mechs, and other technological marvels will lessen the impact of the Unknown on PCs. The game can be as horrifying as you want it to be, rail guns notwithstanding. My play-testers at first salivate when faced with martial possibilities... until they face improved versions of Haywire, Mech-Entities, and White Metal, that is. Like I say elsewhere, PCs are not Quake™ 2 marines, nor any Quake™ 2 marine had to contend with Haywire (bye-bye BFG). The Unknown doesn't have to keep up with “progress” anymore than the Sun has to keep up with the stolen light of the Moon.

The way I designed it, there could be no such thing as “Ghostbusters-like” adventurers shooting particle accelerators at apparitions. Even though the science here is rather advanced, I don't let the supernatural be reduced to a set of wave equations. Where's the horror, mystery, and awe in that? When mixing science with the supernatural, I do it as a mad scientist would. Think Victor Frankenstein, Herbert West, Henry Jekyll, etc. Also, there are virtually no extraterrestrials (apart from the beings from the Unknown), since in Chiliad Humanity is basically alone in the universe. It is the rarity of life, and the spiritual light of Humanity, which attracts the creatures of the Unknown with such force to us, like monstrous moths to a candle flame.

Regardless of that, you may use this sourcebook in your Chill campaigns in any way you see fit, though. Or adapt them to GURPS Horror (as I plan to do soon), Alternities, etc. You may even fill it with alien cantinas, ghostbusters, whatever... just do me a favor and don't ever let me know you're doing that, or I'll start turning in my grave. :-P

Edwin Astacio,
Mayaguez, PR
September 7, 1999
(Rev. July 19, 2001)

P.S. If you are the squeamish type or came here by “accident” (even if I don't believe in coincidences) and think you have stumbled into the infernal part of the WWW, please read the following NOTE. Feel also free to visit the Night-Sea Crossing section and learn one or two things about Terror and Horror.

©1999-2001 Edwin Astacio

Chill© and the Chill© logo are trademarks owned by Iron Crown Enterprises, Inc. Chiliad© and the Chiliad: Dark Millennium© logo are copyrights of Edwin Astacio in 2000 A.D. Quake 2 is a registered trademark of Id Software, Inc. Star Trek ^TM, ® & © by Paramount Pictures.