The Horror Recognition Guide is not actually a guide, but a 2009 collection of short stories published by White Wolf. It is a companion book to their Hunter: The Vigil RPG game line. This book is straight fiction with no character sheets or rule mechanics present, so any fan of scary stories wouldn’t need to worry about paying for something they don’t intend to use. While the fictional framework of the book is laid out as a collection of classified case files for Task Force: Valkyrie (a US black ops group that focuses on combating the supernatural), the stories can be read without requiring any prior knowledge of the game.
There are sixteen stories in all written by Rick Chillot, Stephen DiPesa, Howard Wood Ingham, Matt McFarland, Malcolm Sheppard, and Stew Wilson. The stories cover vampires, ghosts, demons, and other things that go bump in the night.
The book was intended to be a source of inspiration for storytellers to create material for their own games, or to use the stories as in-game props, or as jumping off points for new campaigns. The stories make reference to White Wolf’s other new World of Darkness game lines that had been published to that point. Canonically, the stories take place in Philadelphia (the city where the flavor text and example campaign for H:tV is set), but the details are vague enough that they could take place just about anywhere.
White Wolf later published pdf campaign notes for each of the stories, some of them with imbedded audio files of in-game scenes preformed by members of the White Wolf staff.
ISBN: 1588463559 (ISBN13: 9781588463555)
13 O'Clock: The 2013 Halloween Horrorquest