Collaborative horror with a beating heart.
A Horror Borealis turns role-play mechanics into serialized horror, moving between Revenant, Alaska and limited-run stories like LOSERS: A Love Story. The excerpts foreground table negotiation, supernatural threats, emotional history, and players shaping scenes in real time.
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A Horror Borealis is a horror-fantasy actual-play podcast where tabletop mechanics, character memory, and supernatural danger stay visibly connected. The show’s recent excerpts move between the world of Revenant, Alaska and the limited-run LOSERS: A Love Story, with players and the Keeper shaping scenes moment by moment. It has dice-table texture. Characters call on moves, find weapons, remember earlier clues, build flashbacks, and argue gently over what would make the scene sharper. That visible construction does not flatten the horror; it often makes the fear feel more intimate because the table is deciding together how far each moment should go. The stories include monsters, time loops, auras, totems, puppets, sewers, basements, attics, and clown imagery. They also linger on grief, identity, trauma, love, healing, and the strange courage of going toward the thing that hurts. One excerpt follows a town caught inside a repeating time cycle. Another watches players reason through who remembers the loop and whether others can be pulled free. LOSERS: A Love Story brings Derry, Pennywise, childhood bonds, Bill, Richie, Stan, Bev, Ben, Eddie, Mike, and Larry into a collaborative horror frame. The tone can snap from joking table chatter to a body-horror image in a single turn. That contrast is central to the appeal. The show lets players laugh, check in, and admire a good bit before returning to dread. It is also unusually explicit about safety and process, naming content warnings, lines, veils, and the work of negotiating violence around the table. Production itself is part of the listener’s view, with references to editing, sound design, music, cast roles, and the experiment of building a large story together. The main campaign and side projects give the feed multiple lenses without losing its core interest in monsters and emotional consequence. A Horror Borealis suits someone who wants actual play with visible collaboration and horror that makes room for tenderness. It is messy in a human way, but careful about what the mess is for.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants actual-play horror where table talk, safety practices, and character emotion are part of the experience. It also fits someone drawn to supernatural stories about memory, friendship, trauma, and frightening places.
What sets it apart: A Horror Borealis keeps the machinery of play on the surface: moves, flashbacks, content warnings, scene negotiation, and production notes all remain audible. That transparency gives the horror a collaborative charge instead of hiding the table behind the fiction.
It’s 1996: cell phones are a fantasy, JNCO jeans are in style, and there are monsters in the American wilds. In the town of Revenant, Alaska—just north of the Arctic circle and just south of the nation’s most untamed national park—three women from wildly different walks of life must come together in the face of monstrous beasts, unsavory politicians, and their own dangerous secrets in order to unite their community and discover the truth about a magic that just might save them all. Let’s play Monster of the Week!
A tossed puppet sends Richie flying; your favorite jump scare might start as a joke between friends.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Beverly's old spear makes the final fight feel like a reckoning with what the Losers survived.
The finale of Losers, A Love Story brings Beverly back to the spider fight with the weight of an older fear, now met with more life behind her. Running toward Ben, who is framed as support in the battle, she finds the rough spear she once carried into the sewers as a child.
A rock, a library memory, and a face-growing monster turn the Losers' fight into a sharp body-horror payoff.
The episode sends the Losers into a shifting monster fight where Mike turns an old library memory into something usable in the moment. A rock becomes the scene's odd little anchor: Richie mistakes it for another rock, Mike holds it up as his own meaningful object, and its…
A tossed puppet turns a creepy-doll gag into bodily horror beneath the basement.
A creepy-doll gag turns physical fast, as Stan reaches for a puppet and Richie hangs back just close enough to feel the wrongness before anyone can name it. One small joint movement seems to pass through Richie like a shock, and the tossed ragdoll sends him across the room.
Stan waits outside Kneebolt while Eddie's mistaken identity opens the door to a nightmare in the shadows.
LOSERS: A Love Story - Episode 13 locates its horror in the uneasy instant when a scene starts to take shape. Stan reads Bill's note, runs despite insisting he is not a runner, then waits outside Kneebolt, scrolling Twitter and wondering whether he has arrived too early.
A personal, uneasy turn as Bill moves toward his most painful choice.
LOSERS: A Love Story frames Alex's shift from building Revenant to playing inside this world as more than a change in seat. The opening reflection on trauma, identity, love, healing, and pain gives the episode its emotional weight before the group returns to Bill, his friends,…
Strange fiction, carefully displayed after dark.
Queer urban fantasy about living on after the story ends.
On St. Gaff's, the milk is the least of it.
A Horror Borealis closes Losers: A Love Story - Part 16 as a final, creator-led goodbye that calls the project "a tremendous and unpredictable experiment" shaped by the coronavirus pandemic.
Losers, A Love Story - Part 15 opens with Vel Patron reading credits for the OneShot Network, Paper Boat Productions, and a cast that includes Allison Peacock, Alex Flanagan, Andrew Giotta, J.V.
A Horror Borealis's 'LOSERS: A Love Story - Part 14' opens with JV's Pride Month intro, a cast note that he plays Mike, and a warning stack that includes choking, impaling, loss of autonomy, building fire, body horror, decapitation, decay, unreality, general violence, clown, and evil.
Losers: A Love Story episode 13 starts with Stan Uris's note under a dirty B&B door in Derry, then cuts into Beverly Marsh's coffee vision.
Bill Denbrough leaves Audra a voicemail from Derry that ends with, 'the man that you married isn't coming back from Maine,' then asks her to keep the house, the joint account, the cats, and the books.
The host introduces a new limited series spin-off using the Kids on Bikes RPG system, set in the same fictional Alaskan town.
Three women in 1990s Alaska discover they can remember a repeating time loop and must find a way to break others out.
Three women in a small Alaskan town discover a time loop and must confront monsters and secrets.
The host gives a pre-roll update about stickers and shipping before the fictional story begins.
The host gives a pre-roll update about supporting freelancers during a crisis before the fictional horror episode begins.
The host introduces a horror fiction podcast set in 1996 Alaska, where three women face monsters and secrets.
A pre-roll content warning and introduction to the finale of a supernatural horror audio drama set in 1990s Alaska.
Three women in 1990s Alaska face monsters and personal secrets in a role-playing game session.