# Allegore – The Seven Sins *Created:* 2026-11-04, *Modified:* 2026-11-04 ![[Allegore - The Seven Sins (cover).jpg|600]] **Allegore** is a horror game with no interest in the monster. You are the thing that comes apart. Give a character an obsession they cannot walk away from, put them somewhere Hell has been quietly redecorating, and see how long they hold together before they turn on the people beside them. The book says it flatly up front: these stories have no happy endings, you don't become stronger, and the question was never whether you'd win — it's how much you can carry out with you before you collapse. It is "rooted in Trophy," as the cover says, which means a handful of d6s and one track that only ever runs out. **Trophy** is Jesse Ross's one-shot horror engine, adapted from [[Cthulhu Dark]] with Graham Walmsley's permission and built on [[Blades in the Dark]], and the credits page states all of that out loud with the licences attached. Good news for the table: nobody spends the evening looking things up. ## Setting **Allegore** has no setting. It has seven, one for each deadly sin, and every one of them is a complete **Incursion** — a self-contained descent with its own cast, its own rituals, and its own way of getting under your skin. The subtitle is the design brief, not decoration: allegory and gore, together, in all of them. Each Incursion prints its own trigger warnings, which is the honest way to do it. - **Pride — A Kingdom of Ice.** 19th-century Arctic. A doomed expedition of arrogant academics, megalomaniacal explorers, and bored nobles pushes north in search of Polaris, a lost city. Everyone wants the glory, everyone is certain they've earned it, and the ice is going to explain the arithmetic. - **Lust — The Cure.** Present day. An isolated, amoral clinic confines the characters in the name of a therapy that promises to cure desires it declines to name. It does not heal. It seduces, corrupts, and transforms. - **Wrath — Wrath City.** A violent, corrupt metropolis where the law is an illusion, ruled over by a Mr. Anger with absolute brutality. There's no redemption on offer, only the chance to become more bestial than the people around you. - **Envy — The Path of Gods.** A mythical East of swamps and temples, where rumor promises an ancient teaching that lifts the soul to the divine. Will the climb redeem you from mediocrity? That's the book's own question, and it's a cruel one. - **Gluttony — Charybdis 2089.** 2089. The world has devoured itself into a media spectacle with a grand prize, climate collapse left a barren wasteland, and the Charybdis Management Corporation solved hunger with synthetic food. That is not the good news. - **Greed — The Devil's Dung.** The characters wake in an ancient, luxurious mansion, dressed in precious garments and wearing jewel-studded metal masks locked onto their faces. Their memories are fragments, and the one constant is a ticking sound. - **Sloth — First, Do No Harm.** On the outskirts of a gray city stands an abandoned slaughterhouse, and the characters are there because they committed the quietest sin: they looked away while someone suffered. Now someone is demanding a price that can't be ignored. The book closes with **Notorious Sinners**, a gallery of people rather than sins — a fully written character for each, with a backstory, a description, an item, signs of ruin that progress as they decay, suggested skills, and a custom ritual. They're built to be dropped into the Incursion they belong to, which is a generous thing for a book this size to spend thirty pages on. ## Mechanics Everything is d6s, and they come in two colors. A risk check builds a pool: one light die for a relevant **Competence**, a second light die if you accept a **Devil's Bargain** from anyone at the table, and one dark die if you're willing to push past your limits by hurting yourself or risking your sanity. Whichever die comes up highest decides how the attempt went. Then comes the part the whole game is built around. If the dark dice came up highest and you don't like the result, you can add another dark die and roll everything again — and keep doing that until the dark dice come up highest anyway. That isn't a safety valve. It's the thesis in one sentence: you can always try harder, and trying harder is how you come apart. **Ruin** is a rating from one to six, and it starts at one. You make a Ruin Roll — one dark die — when you witness something traumatic (the GM is explicitly allowed to tell you it was written all over your face and make you roll anyway), or whenever your highest dark die equals or beats your highest light die. Beat your current Ruin and it goes up by one, and you and the GM describe how you're beginning to rot. At Ruin 5 you get one way back, and it's the ugliest rule in the book. **Reduction** means sabotaging your companions: hide information, damage their equipment, lie, steal. Each betrayal rolls a single light die, and if it comes in under your Ruin, Ruin drops by one. Once you've crossed that threshold you can keep doing it forever, even after the number falls back down. At Ruin 6 the character is lost. You play out their last moments, hand control to the GM, and then — this is the good bit — you join the GM in making life difficult for the survivors. Losing your character promotes you to antagonist. Devil's Bargains are the other half of the pressure. Anyone at the table can offer you an extra light die for something that happens no matter how the dice land: you give in to your sin, you hurt a bystander, you lose something important, you attract something worse. You're paying for the die, not for success. Rituals are the same trade made permanent: each one you start with raises your starting Ruin by one, and using one always adds a dark die. Power here isn't a build choice, it's a loan. ### Making a Character Five minutes, and the book means it. Name and face, an Occupation worth two Competences, a Past worth one, an Obsession, Rituals if you want them, and Ruin written down as 1. The Obsession is the load-bearing part — the book is emphatic that your character must never be tempted to abandon it, because the price and the danger are not the point. Every Incursion rewrites these lists to fit its sin: the Arctic expedition offers Explorer, Doctor, Missionary, Military Officer, Noble, Scientist, while Wrath City wants a gigolo or an ex-convict. ### The Shape of an Incursion Every Incursion runs as five concentric **Rings**, each one deeper, worse, and more corrupted than the last. The GM works two elements at every level: **Terror**, which threatens body and mind directly, and **Temptation**, the insidious lure that uses greed and desperation to pull the characters further in. **Moments** handle the pacing — an unsettling image, a strange sound, a grotesque event, a glimpse of something that shouldn't exist — dropped in whenever the tension starts to fade. No scenario comes with a plot. Each hands the GM a situation and a set of questions, and whatever the players answer becomes true. *"What's trapped beneath the ice?"* *"My brother's corpse."* Now it's there. That exchange is the tone of the whole book: the table builds the horror itself, and then has to live in it. ## Editions - **Allegore – The Seven Sins** (2026) — 149 pages, version 7.3 of the PDF, written and designed by Marco Ragni and published by Pizza Games. *In the library.* It funded on Kickstarter in the summer of 2025: 49 backers, €1,078 against a €1,000 goal. ## References - [Allegore – The Seven Sins — Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pizzagames/allegore-the-seven-sins) — the campaign, its funding history and its update log. - [Trophy](https://trophyrpg.com) — the system **Allegore** is rooted in, and a good read on its own if the ruin spiral appeals.