Yokai Hunters Society is a light RPG by Chema González, based on Tunnel Goons by Nate Treme. I picked it up on a whim about two years ago because the premise looked cool and the print on demand version is very affordable (as is the PDF edition, which you can get from https://punkpadour.itch.io/yokai-hunter). It sat on my shelf before last year when I had a chance to run a Halloween one shot for my usual RPG party plus one more player who was entirely new to tabletop RPGs. I figured this very simple system would be a great way to play something on Halloween without it being overly taxing.
In that same vein, I want to keep this review relatively light. Unlike for my Forbidden Lands review, I haven’t been running Yokai Hunters Society as a big multi-year campaign. Instead, I have run one session, so my thoughts are general impressions rather than in depth analysis rooted in significant experience. I have also decided to include a (more polished) version of the session I ran as a scenario at the end of this review so that you can try it for yourself using that if you want. A copy of Yokai Hunters Society is only $4.00, so with a free adventure (either mine or one of several other available options written by others) you can just play it for yourself and see if you like it!
The core system of Yokai Hunters Society is incredibly simple. Player characters (PCs) have four stats and when they need to make a test players roll 2d6 and add the relevant stat – each one gives some guidance on when it is appropriate, and they are all wonderfully broad. You could also add a bonus to your roll if you have a relevant item and based on context you may have advantage or disadvantage, rolling one extra d6 and dropping the highest/lowest. You are looking to roll a 10 or higher to succeed, on a 9 you succeed but suffer for it, and on an 8 or lower you fail and some kind of escalation happens. There are a few more wrinkles to be added, such as the Cursed die which can boost rolls but penalises you for using it too often or how fighting monsters is harder than normal tests, but the core can be explained in one sentence.
Dice rolls are entirely player facing, the GM never rolls dice. While I am a fan of rolling dice, as a GM I do really like these kinds of systems for making the play easy to understand and taking out of my hands any feeling of responsibility for what the players may do to themselves. I think it encourages a level of collaborative feeling around the table and suppresses the malignant notion that players are in opposition to the GM.
While I love unnecessary crunch in RPGs more than anyone probably should, I also have a deep appreciation for systems that can get out of the way and let the game flow. I think particularly for a horror game it is important to have a system that keeps things moving – nothing breaks the tension in a horror scene like having to consult the rulebook. This is also a light system that I think works well for new players – some light systems are so light that they ask a lot of their players in terms of commitment to roleplay and bringing their own imagination to the game, which can be intimidating if you’ve never done them before. Yokai Hunters Society isn’t like that – it supports the players and doesn’t ask too much of them – you can bring as much as you want to the characters, but you can also play it as a straight dungeon crawl if you’re not comfortable roleplaying.
The setting is Meiji-era Japan with the PCs all members of the mysterious Yoka Gari Kai or Yokai Hunters Society. The book provides very little background, which is probably fine. I like the society being largely mysterious and unexplained – it leaves room for each gaming group to decide for themselves how the society works and who is behind it (if they even care about that in the first place). There is a list of prompt questions for GMs to answer that will let them flesh out the world and ensures that no two tables of Yokai Hunters Society play exactly the same.
Beyond that, the setting his historical Japan. Since players are expected to be Japanese people who live ostensibly normal lives when not engaging in secret monster hunts, it is beneficial if your players (or at a minimum the GM) knows a decent amount about Meiji-era Japan. As a historian and a huge weeb, this was not a problem for me, but I did find myself having to do a bit of an info dump on my players to bring them up to speed on some key aspects of Japanese society that they would need to know to fully immerse in the gaming experience. That’s not a complaint, I love historical settings for RPGs and would like to see more, but it is a bit of a warning if you’re considering running this as a minimal prep experience. I do worry a bit that without historical guidance there is a chance that groups could fall into potentially racist stereotypes, but also if a group of nerds are going to be racist in their basement there’s very little an RPG designer can do to stop them.
If I have one (minor) complaint about Yokai Hunters Society, it’s that I wish there was a little more GM facing material in the rulebook, with the recognition that this is a very short rulebook and so I am in fact just asking for it to be longer. This is a system that by design rewards flexibility in a GM and there are several pages of GM advice in the rulebook, so it’s not like it leaves you high and dry when you’re running it. However, as a huge fan of the generative tables included in games like Forbidden Lands, I wish there were a few more tables to provide ideas for cases – maybe more options that linked the supplied sample of yokai at the back of the book with potential types of case that the existing random table generates.
I would also have liked slightly more information on running combats, especially against yokai. The rules are in the book, combat works as any other test with only a few differences based on how dangerous the yokai, but as someone who has never been very comfortable designing combat encounters (it’s why I prefer exploration/investigation games when I GM) I would have loved a little more handholding. Overall, though, the GM information is good but while I think this is a good system for new players, I would recommend that GMs have some experience running games or at a minimum be comfortable winging it before running Yokai Hunters Society.
This is a very cool little game and given the price of entry it is well worth checking out. As I mentioned at the start, I have also included a punched-up version of the one-shot I ran for my table as part of this review. The full text is copied below, and there is a PDF version which I have tried to make a little nicer which you can download as well. This is a pretty light scenario, I ran it in about 2-3 hours including character creation as an introduction to the system and a nice way to spend a Halloween evening, but feel free to add to it or expand it if you want a bit more depth to its core structure. I also have minimal layout and art skills, so it is structured for function not so much for aesthetic - if anyone would like to improve that, please reach out and I’ll happily share the original word file!
If either this review or the adventure was of interest/use to you, maybe consider throwing me a few coins on Ko-Fi? There is a hovering donation link or you can go directly to https://ko-fi.com/stuartellisgorman. I really appreciate the support and in particular if this proves popular I will explore doing more RPG reviews and sharing more simple adventures. Thanks!
The Haunting of Kushu Kaido
The year is 1912 and travellers have been disappearing along the increasingly neglected Koshu Kaido, the mountainous road that traditionally connected Nagano Prefecture to Tokyo/Edo. The players must travel to the village/way station of Tsutaki-Shuku to investigate the disappearances and possibly eliminate any yokai responsible.
This is a simple introductory adventure meant to be played in 2-3 hours by new or still relatively inexperienced PCs.
The party are contacted by the Hunters Society with the following message:
Travelers are going missing on the Koshu Kaido near Tsutaki-Shuku in Nagano Prefecture, we suspect a yokai is responsible. Investigate the disappearances and, if a yokai is involved, stop them.
Travel to Tsutaki-Shuku is easy if the party chooses to travel along the Koshu Kaido. No roll is necessary to travel along one of the great highways of the Edo era, but should players choose to go over the mountains have each player roll either Sharpness or Wisdom. If most of the party succeeds, then they make their way safely to the town of Tsutaki-Shuku, gaining advantage on all future rolls to navigate the nearby wilderness to reflect their greater knowledge of the terrain. If a majority fails, the party becomes lost in the wilderness. Each player loses d3 health and they must roll again. If they fail three times, they meet the Shunobon (see below).
Tsutaki-Shuku
Once a relatively prosperous stopping point for nobles and their retainers traveling to Edo as part of the Shogun’s requirement that all lords spend half the year in the capital, under the new Meiji government and with the railroads making travel faster along other routes the village has fallen on hard times.
Tsutaki-Shuku consists of two inns, one of which has been boarded up, as well as a handful of houses. The main village’s purpose was hosting traveling guests and is designed almost entirely for that purpose, but further out in the mountains and woods are outlying homes for woodcutters, artisans, and recluses.
Inoue Inn
The open inn is run by a middle-aged woman named Inoue Yo and her son Toshio. Yo is happy to provide the party with basic meals and accommodation – she will attempt to charge them a premium (7 sen) but can be negotiated down.
Very few travellers pass through the town these days – those that do are usually local to the region, visiting elderly family she assumes.
The Samurai
An older samurai named Ueda Akihito is already staying at the inn. He is initially haughty and uninterested in company, but if the party spend a few coins on either sake (5 sen) or a good meal (7 sen) he can be persuaded to join them and share his story. If the party doesn’t want to or can’t pay the cost, they may attempt a Self-Control test to try and impress him with their demeanour. The first test is made straight, but if one player fails all subsequent attempts to impress him made by other members of the party are made with disadvantage due to their association with an obviously unpolished individual.
He is from Nagano and his younger brother was supposed to visit him from Tokyo, but it has been a month, and he has not shown up.
His brother has run off to Osaka to avoid debtors, but Akihito does not know this.
Akihito suspects bandits are responsible for waylaying his brother – he has no real basis for this belief but is convinced that as a member of the samurai class he must hunt down the bandits and drive them off, no matter how outdated that notion is.
He plans to march off into the woods with his sword tomorrow morning, the party are welcome to join him in his quest if they wish.
The Son
Yo’s son Toshio helps around the inn, cooking, cleaning, carrying guests’ possessions to their room and the like. He is also secretly stealing items of value from the guests, without his mother’s knowledge. He exchanges what he can with any merchants that pass through or with other tradespeople to help cover the inn’s costs.
He will attempt to steal from the players, either when they are out or if they let him take their stuff to their room for them. If the players catch him, he will beg for them not to tell his mother and promises to do whatever he can to make it up for them.
If asked about anything suspicious he may have seen he will tell them about a time last month when he got lost in the woods on a moonless night (while stashing some stolen property). In his wanderings he stumbled across a shack that he was sure he’d never seen before. He thought he heard a voice calling for him to come rest there, but he fled, eventually stumbling back on the road and making his way home in the early dawn.
With a successful pair of Sharpness and Wisdom rolls the PCs can determine where in the woods the shack was, but it has since moved. However, identifying this location will give them advantages later in tracking down the yokai as they can learn something about how it manifests.
The Abandoned Inn
The inn is boarded up, but only loosely. If the player’s break in they will find evidence of habitation, someone is staying in one of the rooms. If it is daytime the inn is empty, but at night the haunting sound of shamisen echoes out over the village from the inn.
The Goze
The goze[1] Toda Keiko has been staying in the inn, waiting for her nephew to come and take her to Tokyo. He is already several days late. During the day one of the villagers comes and takes her to their house to eat, but she insists on spending the night in this inn because that is where she told her nephew she would be – she did not know it was closed when she sent the letter weeks ago but nevertheless refuses to change her accommodation.
If asked about anything suspicious she may have encountered, she will say that someone came to her two nights before and told her that he could take her to her nephew – he wasn’t far. She didn’t trust the voice, though, and refused to join him. He said he would give her three days to change her mind and would return then (the night the day after the players arrive in the town).
The players can choose to bring her with them to Tokyo when their mission is finished, possibly earning a boon. Keiko has a Kenko Omamori that she could persuaded to part with if she can be reunited with her family in Tokyo.
The Yokai
Two yokai working in tandem are responsible for the disappearances along the road: a Shitanaga Uba and a Shunobon.
Shitanaga Uba
The Shitanaga Uba takes the form of an elderly crone, living alone in a shack. Her shack only exists from dusk until dawn, disappearing with the arrival of light to appear in a new location at dusk. She has an extremely long and agile tongue that she uses to strangle and devour the flesh from her victims.
If players stumble across her shack, they will find an old woman spinning cloth. She will welcome them into her hovel and feed them simple food and tea. They are welcomed to spend the night, but once they fall asleep, she will use her tongue to lick the flesh from their bones, devouring them while they are alive if she can or strangling them one by one and then eating them if she must.
Level: 1d6, Long Tongue, Flesh-eater (heals 1 the first time it damages a player).
Shunobon
The Shunobon is a shapeshifter who can grow to a height of two meters. He has a huge red head, far out of proportion with the rest of his body, which has a massive mouth full of shiny teeth and one big eye. Shunobon usually scare their victims, frightening them to death and then devouring their body. This Shunobon is working in conjunction with the Shitanaga Uba, leading or herding victims to her shack so she can kill them, and they can devour the victims together.
If the party come across the Shunobon in the wilderness he may attempt to drive them towards the Shitanaga Uba, or he may decide to try and eat them himself. He is far more likely to attack an isolated victim and steer any groups of individuals to the Shitanaga Uba so they can team up on them.
Level: 1d3, Shapeshifter, Frightening Beyond All Reason (Upon seeing his true form, the next Courage roll PCs make is with disadvantage).
Finding the Yokai
The players are presented with several options for tracking down the yokai, but they are also welcome to come up with their own solutions. Several of the most likely paths to the yokai are outlined below, but I advise you to be flexible and lean in to what the players’ want to do.
The Reckless Samurai
The party could choose to follow Akihito on his quest for “bandits”. Akihito will insist on leading the party but while he is well meaning his competence is lacking. He is quickly lost in the woods, and the PCs with him. The PCs may attempt a Sharpness role to orient themselves in the woods, and then a Wisdom roll to (politely) convince Akihito to follow their advice, including potentially returning to town.
If they stay out in the woods, roll a d6 at dusk. On a roll of 1-3, the players take d6 damage but stumble onto the road – they can return to the inn, but Akihito will insist on going out again tomorrow. On a 4 or 5 the Shunobon appears disguised as a bandit and leads them deeper into the woods before stranding them for the night (PCs take d3 damage from exposure, and must try and navigate their way home, potentially suffering more damage in the process). On a 6 they find a lone shack with the Shitanaga Uda inside – she welcomes them to stay for the night.
The Goze
Players may accurately guess that Keiko’s visitor was supernatural in nature. They can lie in wait for the arrival of the Shunobon. He will appear as a normal peasant but if ambushed will transform into his true monster form. If he is defeated, he will beg for mercy and try to place the blame on the Shitanaga Uba in the woods. If the players force him to lead them to the shack, both yokai will attack the party together. If the players kill the Shunobon without listening to him, Keiko will mention that Shunobon often work in tandem with other yokai.
Brave Explorers
The PCs could also choose to wander off into the woods looking for any potentially malign threat. Have the party collectively make a series of three rolls using either Sharpness or Wisdom. They gain Advantage on one roll for each of the following that is true:
They came here overland rather than by road.
Toshio told them where he found the hut.
They have wandered the woods with Akihito (but are not currently lost with him).
They met the Shunobon.
If their total successes are equal to twice the number of party members, they find the shack in time for it to magically appear at dusk – letting them know that something isn’t right.
If their total successes are equal to the number of party members, they find the shack soon after nightfall. They have no reason to believe it is suspicious but are awake enough to interact with the yokai and potentially be tipped off to the danger.
If they fail to even get that many successes, they arrive at the shack in the dead of night and collapse from exhaustion upon being invited in. They will have disadvantage on the subsequent encounter with the Shitanga Uba.
Showdown
There are two ways to deal with the Shitanga Uba: kill it via straightforward combat or burn its shack to the ground with it still inside.
If they burn the shack to the ground without entering it, the Shitanga Uba will be defeated but unless they found it earlier the Shunobon will escape and find a new ally somewhere else, potentially a future problem for the party.
If they enter the shack and meet the Shitanga Uba they can interact with her, eating her food and drinking her tea. She will attempt to lull them to sleep, but they may resist. If they are overly rude to her, she and the Shunobon (if it is still alive) will eventually just attack them, giving up the pretence entirely. Players may attempt Self-Control or Wisdom tests to get a read on the old woman – success will tell them that something is off but it will not definitely identify the woman as yokai, they have to make that logical leap themselves.
If the players fall asleep, the Shitanga Uba will attempt to eat one of them – starting with Akihito if he is with the party. Sleeping players must make a Sharpness test with disadvantage to wake up.
A PC that is being eaten takes d8 damage and then must test Courage to try and break free from the Shitanga Uba’s tongue. They cannot cry out to wake the others until they succeed in breaking free, but they may choose to kick a nearby PC, waking them, instead of making their Courage test against the tongue. On their next turn they will take another d8 damage from the tongue until they break free or the Shitanga Uba is killed.
If the players kill the Shitanga Uba and the Shunobon, they are successful in their mission! If they fail, then the yokai continue to devour travellers along this road or potentially elsewhere in Japan.
[1] A visually impaired woman who performs music