undead
Barghuest
Content: Not the ghuest you’d want to visit.
Writing: An absolutely brutal curse wrapped in a canine-shaped package.
Art/design: Dynamic and high contrast three-tone red/black/white layout with a cursed illustration.
Usability: Don’t just murk your high-level scvm. Make them suffer.
Basilica of the False Prophet
Content: A desperate descent. An unexpected plunge. A shattered hope?
Writing: Miserable and descriptive encounters, backed by elegant mechanics, make a narrative descent into madness.
Art/design: A masterful balance of utility, consistency, and style. Haunting yet austere illustrations and maps fill but do not dominate the pamphlet.
Usability: Pairs well with Western Wall (also by Rugose Kohn).
Beinfjäll
Content: A room a day Mörktober 2023 dungeon.
Writing: Decisive bulleted room descriptions establish clear ecology, encounter context, and pace.
Art/design: A dreary isometric map of giant vampire bones and horrible little surprises.
Usability: A Twitter thread mini-map (for now)
Bergen Chrypt
Content: One Bergen Crawling Campaign, d10 occult treasure, 4 new factions, 7 locations, 7 encounter tables, and 8 new monsters.
Writing: A morbid tapestry of factions, locations, and personalities that won’t leave your players out in the cold.
Art/design: Richly textured illustrations integrated into dynamic spreads with dreamlike consistency.
Usability: Consistency in basic principles, coupled with a practical table of contents makes for a stylistic, but navigable design.
Bestiary
Content: 40+ nightmarish monsters, a vampire-like class, lore, tables, a dungeon.
Writing: Renford P. Logan’s journalistic endeavors frame this collection of strongly themed creatures and locales. Realistic portrayals of disturbing events lend weight to the creatures and locales. It is enjoyable to both read and reference.
Art/design: Characterful two-tone illustrations and text elements in a balanced layout. Reserved but impactful use of color.
Usability: Thematic organization in a strong table of contents make for low prep referencing.
Betrayed Phantom
Content: A ghostly character class with some distinctive characteristics
Writing: Very sharp, efficient, and evocative
Art/design: Effective layout with brighter colors adding emphasis against a cool ground and image
Usability: Versatile; some special features are purely narrative-oriented
Beyond Deep
9 contributors
Content: A company town atop a Black Rock pit of horrors. 6 locations, 6 side quests, 11 artifacts (14 if you count cursed ones), 7 NPCs, and 10 monsters.
Writing: A moral quagmire inspired by the complex relationships and power imbalances of mining communities.
Art/design: Coarse, gritty, and at times dark illustrations and isometric maps in a rich black and white format. Organized two-column layout.
Usability: Highly legible. Available as a soft cover or pdf.
Black Lady
Content: A retributive, relentless night-haint
Writing: Lore and mechanics are both delivered clearly and efficiently
Art/design: Clearly delineate segments of text and uses color and typeface to add emphasis
Usability: Escapable but not killable; has the potential to debilitate long-term guests
Blood Feast
Content: A trio of musical vampires.
Writing: History and heavy characterization personalize the daughters of Nechrubel.
Art/design: AI-generated vampire triplets standing before the blood moon.
Usability: A Babymetal tribute.
Blood of SHE
Content: A pamphlet dungeon made for the Crossword Dungeon Jam.
Writing: A dramatic legend of heroic magic turned to a dark purpose. With rules for your scvm to bring this blasphemous tale to an end, or open a new chapter.
Art/design: A pleasant compromise of style and function, a simple design with visual flourish around mechanical text to keep the eye engaged in multiple readings.
Usability: A well-structured pamphlet dungeon for easy reference at the table.
Blood Sucker
Content: A blood sucker. Obviously
Writing: Flavor saturating every last drop.
Art/design: Frightfully elegant characterization and design.
Usability: Simple and legible typeface choices.
Bog Iron
Content: Includes bog-iron weapons, a map of the area, various encounters, and 7 creatures
Writing: Adds lots of local color that’s in line with the larger character of the Dying Land
Art/design: Draws lots of visual tropes from Mörk Borg but still maintains a distinct style
Usability: Keep it handy in case the party ever ventures through the region (or if you want some nasty weapons and monsters)
Bogfolk’s Silver
Content: Like normal silver, but probably fvcked.
Writing: Seven shiny new miseries* for those greedy scvm.
Art/design: Cursed silver coins fall, casting angled shadows across a plastered page.
Usability: *Not “Miseries” in that sense. That fate is sealed.
Bone Idiots
Content: A group of skeletons played as a single character
Writing: Standard class profile with some additional features and d6 special features that change daily
Art/design: Text is presented readable blocks differentiated by color and arrayed around a dans macabre
Usability: The skeletons really like getting drunk
Bone Slave
Concept: “You roam the gods-forsaken realms in your true skeletal form.”
Content: A skeleton character class with some innovative options
Writing: Clear, clean, and concise
Art/design: Would scream “Mörk Borg” if it had any vocal chords
Usability: Easily readable and navigable
Bonfire Bound
Content: A souls-like setting with “undead player characters, dodging, parrying, backstabbing, invading phantoms and the looming threat of going hollow.”
Writing: Rules that place emphasis on equipment attributes and a risk-reward reaction system to abstract strategic gameplay.
Art/design: A two-columned structure with dark and opulently recolored prints.
Usability: A functional but ongoing work in progress. Still in development.
Boni, your bone companion
Concept: “A disembodied skull with a penchant for rambling stories of old exploits and griping about how things were better in the good old days.”
Content: Some descriptive text, simple mechanic, and sample commentary
Writing: Straightforward with humor as dry as an old bone
Art/design: Text laid out intuitively around the central image
Usability: Somewhere between an NPC and a magic item; works well as both
Bony Knuckles to the Face
Concept: “At any time and place in this doomed world, a sarcophagus could appear that was not there the day before.”
Content: Hook and mechanics for an undead (but surprisingly good-natured) fighting pit
Writing: Lots of descriptive details, a stable of fun mechanical features, and some interesting variables
Art/design: Art and layout are very on-brand but with their own unique flavor
Usability: Logical, efficient sequential flow
Book of Misery Volume 2: Mork Borg
Content: A witch’s tome of classes, monsters, artifacts, followers, adventures—and misery.
Writing: Provides exposition to provide backstory to the various monsters, artifacts, and followers to facilitate the unprepared storyteller.
Art/design: Coarse and violent textures produce evocative creature illustrations. Variety in overall design decisions produce a collaborative zine aesthetic.
Usability: Enough content to sprinkle a little variety into your Mörk Borg if you find yourself in need of inspiration.
Broken Table
Content: Fourteen corrupted puppets of chivalry, six dying orders, and a quixotic scvm.
Writing: An encyclopedia of chivalric failures, starting with the individual, moving to the institutional, and ending at the personal.
Art/design: A gritty and lightly edited cover illustration, with classic prints organized throughout this distressed (and yellowed) tome.
Usability: Yellow text sections may hinder the reader over textured backgrounds.
Burn Your Dead
Content: A 5-room dungeon infested with the undead
Writing: Concise descriptions with strong imagery
Art/design: Text is arranged around the central map; color emphasizes monsters and important actions; and the flame image reinforces the title and creates a sense of advancing danger
Usability: Provides no hook, but easy to drop into a game at an appropriate (or unexpected) time
Böeser
6 contributors
Content: A basilisk-bonding, child-abducting, palace of a flesh crawl.
Writing: A full-bodied blend of humor and horror that spares no raw material.
Art/design: A well-built manor of an adventure design, with tormented sketches, and fleshy full-color illustrations.
Usability: Easily referenced adventure design. A follow-up to Den of Disarray.
Carmine, blood-drenched skeleton
Chamber of Screams and More
Content: Five fatal mistakes for your next group of scvm.
Writing: Humorous and harrowing. With deadly accommodations for particularly resilient scvm.
Art/design: Art-heavy poster layouts with detailed adventure text on the reverse side.
Usability: Clean and calculated for reading and reference.
Chapel of Pain
Content: A dark temple crawl through a cult of shadows.
Writing: A gory supernatural survival horror. Makes use of light as a resource to maintain suspense.
Art/design: Traditional adventure layout. Gridded, un-gridded, and notated map. Handout images for significant adventure features.
Usability: Not actually a pain.
Clockwork Phylactery
Content: What it says on your chassis.
Writing: A storied production of a tragic automaton, human consciousness trapped in a clockwork frame.
Art/design: Some bright, color-coded text over a muted gray framework, with simple evocative illustrations of cogs and skulls to drive home its theme.
Usability: Not likely to make your gears slip.
Colour of the Void
Content: Missing persons in the valley of unfortunate undead. Desecrated tomb. Horror unleashed.
Writing: Cinematic style narrative encounters. Flexible dungeon crawl descriptions.
Art/design: Mix of comic style art & open-source images. Experiments with borders and breaks.
Usability: Cinematic style adventure. Clear maps with traditional indexes. Referenceable mechanics.
Compost
Content: A walking tree with a surprise inside.
Writing: A unique take on armor that reinforces an amusing concept.
Art/design: A dead tree creeps up behind boxed text.
Usability: Clean text boxes make for easy reference.
Corpse Collective
Content: Your friendly local cult of corpse grinders and soul stealers.
Writing: A discursive introduction to a resurrection cult for scvm with discontinuity issues.
Art/design: Robed figures tend to corpse grinding over plain text.
Usability: Written in setting, but easy to adapt to simple rules.