Products Under Development
Due to the nature of our design process, several products are always under development. These range from short adventures that our customers can try for free to a massive multi-adventure series that spans five years in-game time. Below you will find a few that are nearing the final production point and will be released in the near future.
Old Man of The Woods
“We, the last survivors, have been fleeing without rest for (three?) increasingly discomfiting days under this hellish dripping canopy of perpetual dusk and mist. The beings in the forest are relentless. They harass us constantly, dragging away screaming victims from the extremes of the caravan. So many times, we saw them go down under the blade of a mercenary or pin-cushioned by arrows to find them missing from where they fell. Making matters worse is the fact that my exhaustion lends itself to walking dreams and hallucinations. My body’s ability to self-regulate is failing, and I am sweating even while I shiver from the cold.
I see movement to the left in the fog and a copse of trees, and I turn to face it. I hear my mother offering me another gingerbread cake from the holiday table. It’s warm and inviting with the smell of wood fire and home cooking. Gasping like a man near drowning, I catch myself as I collapse to my knees. I must have fallen asleep again; I tried to stand and remembered the movement. I turn toward my hallucination in the trees, knowing it will only be the mocking gloom. But it is there, smiling at me; I smell ginger; perhaps my mother has a cake for us both…”
The Old Man of the Woods is a horror-themed forest encounter with a perpetual human cultist for a party of four to six (4-6) characters supplemented by NPCs. The challenge posed by the creatures to the party will be scaled based on the party level or development (depending on the game system being used). This will ensure that beginning characters and those heavily developed have an equal chance of success or failure in battle. Notes on the scaling of the power of the Old Man and creatures that the party will encounter are found in the Bestiary section, with a reference to the specific creature in question. All other game tests are not scaled for the level of the party nor the number of characters and non-player characters used. This will result in combats that are level—appropriate but will be more realistic for characters with superior skill development because they have a much higher chance of passing skills tests than those of a lower level of development.
Tears in the Snow
In the cold and unforgiving north, scarcity is a way of life, and life itself is weighed in expenditure of resources against labor possible for every individual. From this hard calculus of existence come the traditions of the old taking a last walk into the woods in the dead of winter or the newborn to be left in a cradle of snow. These sacrifices ensure the continued existence of the community, but at times ensure it’s destruction.
It is not unheard of for the spirit of the dead to come for one last visit to hearth and home before moving on. It is also recorded that some, less developed, return for warmth and sustenance refused to them in life. Of all, the tormented spirits of the children and babes left to freeze in the dead of night are the most terrible.
Completely unaware of self, family, or even their lack of life; these starving and freezing entities seek only sustenance and warmth. They are the scratching at the door on a moon lit night, the howl of the wind in the freezing snow. They are insatiable and even molten steel cannot warm them. They are also legend; few believe in such things in the practical north…Until they do.
It was on a freezing night in the dead of winter that Sven Johansson made the terrible decision. His family hungry; his ancient mother having already taken the last walk, it was not enough. The harvest was too small and the game absent from the countryside. He looked at his newborn daughter and the concerned look of his wife as she recovered from her labor. One more mouth was one too much; his wife could not live to support them both.
Sven picked up the swaddled and bloody bundle and walked into the frozen hell of the woods. We walked as far as his trembling, weak and cold body would allow before he found a small depression at the base of a tree. He took his unnamed child and placed her in the snow, not able to remove the blanket as if that was some kind of mercy. It was not; his walk back to the farmhouse was tormented by the crying then the screaming. It lived far longer than it should have in the cold, all because he was too weak to take its last comfort.
Sven sat in the night at the table in his home listening to the screaming, it would not stop and would not diminish. But what he did not know, what the child did not know; it had already died. Knowing nothing but its first hunger and the burning cold of the snow, its insatiable needs granted an unlife to the child.
In time Sven fell asleep and upon waking found the day warmer. He could hear nothing and chose to never go to the place where he left his infant. A full year passed and winter once again returned to the village and to the bones of a creature swaddled in a rotting blanket in the loam of the woods.
On a moonlit night, in the dead of winter; Svens child has come home for food and warmth.
Tears in the Snow is a horror-themed arctic encounter with the undead for a party of four to six (4-6) characters supplemented by NPCs. The challenge posed by the creatures to the party will be scaled based on the party level or development (depending on the game system being used). This will ensure that beginning characters and those heavily developed have an equal chance of success or failure in battle. Notes on the scaling of the power of the creatures that the party will encounter are found in the Bestiary section, with a reference to the specific creature in question. All other game tests are not scaled for the level of the party nor the number of characters and non-player characters used. This will result in combats that are level—appropriate but will be more realistic for characters with superior skill development because they have a much higher chance of passing skills tests than those of a lower level of development.
Tom’s Bones
Tom’s bones have lain deep in the earth for time out of memory. He was here before the coming of the villagers. He will be here when their pathetic dreams are forgotten and their bones rest in the earth. A king, warrior, master of fate; he was betrayed and left to rot by those who served him. In time, the beings that came to settle this land began to prosper. They built and improved while Tom slept the sleep of the dead.
It was that building that disturbed his slumber in the cold earth. For a time, he had no power to even perceive his surroundings, but as time passed, his power waxed, and he soared from his resting place into a place of life and warmth. Around him were living, breathing creatures that had vitality and pleasure, sickness and pain; it was all the same to Tom, it was sustenance.
Illness began to haunt the inn’s guests and workers, and after a time, few ventured there. Those who had few options were left to wither and pass away due to a wasting that could not be explained. They heard the passing of the spirit, and even felt his touch; they came to call him Tom, for he had no other. It came to pass that the innkeeper died, quickly followed by several of his children. The man’s wife begged for help, but none was forthcoming from those simple folk.
One day, the remaining family of the innkeeper fled the inn, never to return. Tom roamed the halls but could find nothing to nourish him. He tried to escape the inn, but found that he could not leave. His long-dead spirit felt something not known for hundreds of years: hunger. The hunger gave way to starvation, and the starvation gave way to madness. The madness had depths, and the depths had hells.
So it was in the grip of madness that the creature walked the empty halls of the inn seeking sustenance denied him by his solitude. His voracious appetite drained the lives of all things within the walls, the mice, the fleas, the worms below, even the failing life of leaves that fell onto the roof.
Ten crushing years of hunger passed until one day the door opened again. The family had returned to reclaim their home, and Tom rushed to consume them. He came as a gale of wind on a still day, screaming and gibbering. His passing caused the walls to ice over and the glass to shatter.
Then he hit the wall. It was not a physical wall but one of faith. A powerful priest forced his starving spirit into retreat. He fled to the cellar, and as they moved there, he fled to once again inhabit his worm-eating bones deep in the earth. The holy man erected a prison for the wretched spirit, sealing him in the earth for what he thought was all time.
But time is all that Tom had, time for the holy man to sleep in the earth like he did. Time for the family to forget he was real. Time for the prison to weaken enough for him to once again leave his bones and enter the cellar of the inn. Once again, he began to make noise and feed upon the family, but they were different now. They offered his starving spirit tribute in the form of victims in return for their lives. Being too weak to do otherwise, the spirit spared them by way of agreement.
So now Tom’s bones sleep while Tom does not. Vagabonds and adventurers, not to be missed, are his repast, and the keepers of the inn regularly provide them.
Tom’s Bones is a horror-themed town encounter with a demonic force for a party of four to six (4-6) characters supplemented by NPCs. The challenge posed by the creatures to the party will be scaled based on the party level or development (depending on the game system being used). This will ensure that beginning characters and those heavily developed have an equal chance of success or failure in battle. Notes on the scaling of the power of the creatures that the party will encounter are found in the Bestiary section, with a reference to the specific creature in question. All other game tests are not scaled for the level of the party nor the number of characters and non-player characters used. This will result in combats that are level—appropriate but will be more realistic for characters with superior skill development because they have a much higher chance of passing skills tests than those of a lower level of development.
City of Divine Judgement
The City of Divine Judgement; Coming Soon.
The City of Divine Judgement is a horror-themed extra-planar encounter with supernatural beings and the dead for a party of four to six (4-6) characters supplemented by NPCs. The challenge posed by the creatures to the party will be scaled based on the party level or development (depending on the game system being used). This will ensure that beginning characters and those heavily developed have an equal chance of success or failure in battle. Notes on the scaling of the power of the creatures that the party will encounter are found in the Bestiary section, with a reference to the specific creature in question. All other game tests are not scaled for the level of the party nor the number of characters and non-player characters used. This will result in combats that are level—appropriate but will be more realistic for characters with superior skill development because they have a much higher chance of passing skills tests than those of a lower level of development.