Dread is a horror indie role-playing game designed by Epidiah Ravachol and Nathaniel Barmore and published by The Impossible Dream in 2006. It is built to be played in a single session and has no fixed setting, so it can be used in any time or place that suits horror. It won three ENNIE Awards.
Instead of dice it uses a Jenga tower. When a character attempts something difficult, the player must pull a block from the tower; a clean pull is a success. Knocking the tower over usually means the character dies and the player is out of the game. Each pull makes the next one more precarious, so the tension builds physically on the table, and the expectation is that most characters will not survive to the end.
Characters are made from a questionnaire of ten to twelve questions written by the Host, the last of which is always “What is your character’s name?” RPG historian Stu Horvath called the tower a gimmick, “but it’s one that actually works.” The mechanic later carried over into Alex Roberts’s romance game Star Crossed.