The Thing

There are now tabletop games based on The Thing (From Another World) and its source novella as well as others showing its influence rather clearly.

It’s a natural fit for “traitor” style mostly-cooperative games with its smallish isolated cast and clear stakes - and the option to infect more people as it goes along.

For the same reasons it could make a good basis for a one-shot RPG session. Handing over notes, and maybe texts and so on to keep them even more hidden, tends to encourage suspicion and paranoia even when there isn’t a murderous doppelganger in the area.

(Also, what is up with Copper’s nose ring?)

If you wanted more than a one-shot, look at the prequel which both sets up the Norwegian base and basically functions as a different playthrough of the same adventure, or the comics, or the sequel the then SciFi Channel tried to make in 2005, which is... interesting. (The scene where they use electric shocks to make a captured Thing revert to previous forms, all the way back to a “dark whirlpool of seething flesh and blood”, does kinda work. And... wow, the theme from Aliens is way more, ah, referential than I knew.) Or to series like Helix where the danger spreads more slowly and the moral question of whether victims can be helped arises.

But ultimately I think sustaining the fear and distrust would be a tall order, and it makes a better one-shot.