Liminal Ark

  I find myself about to run a pretty big campaign using Kult: Divinity Lost taking more from the survival horror sphere ala Resident Evil and Silent Hill. To that end (But also because practice is good) I have need of some of my old monsters re-imagined in this style. So without further ado here is a reinterpretation of the Wraith Hound. (As for mentions of The Dream, this will be a liminal horror space revolving around the central antagonist of the story known as the Muse. I’ll get a write-up for Her in at some point in the future when I’m closer to talking about the rest of this.) WRAITH HOUNDS Eyeless canid horrors that exist only to hunt down and torture beings lost in the darkness beyond the light of their dreams. Mewling, pathetic beasts with bodies of old cracked leather, and wretched guttural howls out of blackened throats of whirling teeth. These entities were borne of malicious violence and intense animalistic desire now unfettered by flesh and free to inflict their pe...

I'm working on an adventure using Best Left Buried (Or hacking it?) based in the home setting my brother and I have played for years. The gist is an industrial fantasy setting based on the American West where a theocracy run by dragons has fallen into ruin and caused a schism in the country where disparate factions and city states want to remake it in their own image. You are Damned, people who are buried in debt meaning that they cannot enter heaven and their only way out is to plunder the riches of the golden age within the technomagical hellscape known as the Perdition. Inspired by STALKER, Hunt Showdown, and the Myth (And Death) of the American Dream. Also Late Stage Capitalism. I've decided to begin by creating Bounty Targets; special monsters the Damned will be hunting in the Perdition. So first up, the Burrowing Railbird. Burrowing Railbird A terrestrial bird of prey the size of a large bear who makes its lair out of abandoned saloons and casinos using the remains to dec...

Best Left Buried has quickly become one of my favorite dungeon crawlers for its quick conflict resolution and survival horror ethos which straddles the line between story games and the OSR (At least for this casual.) My favorite part are the Adaptations which are monster abilities that can also be taken and made into magic items or mutations for the PC's to use as well. This created a dynamic in my games where as the players grew more powerful they became more and more like the monsters they were trying to slay. Love it.  Recently, I've been creating a mega-dungeon inspired by molds, vampires, and Resident Evil which while far from finished has given me more cause to experiment with these Adaptations. Though creating your own Adaptations is a painless process often I end up enjoying a simple reskin or reinterpretation of existing ones just as much. As a demonstration here is a big moldy monstrosity I made for the kitchen section of my dungeon.   THE COOK Theme: Taste. It ...

Group Background This is more of a prototype than a complete idea but I thought I could take a crack at creating a group background feature that you could add onto a group of characters with a feature they could all use as well. The idea came from Pathfinder 2E's group backgrounds, Dark Secrets from Avernus, and Shadow of the Demon Lord's Group Frameworks. Developing the ideas further for a specific adventure is probably the way to go but sometimes it can be helpful to have these kind of generic frameworks ready to riff of in the moment. It's especially useful as a device to mesh character concepts together around the adventure's main goal which normal backgrounds don't do so well. Anyhoosers here is the Shared Nemesis Group background. "Wanted Poster at Holburn Station (London, UK)"   by  takomabibelot  is marked with  CC0 1.0 Shared Nemesis You have been drawn together by the trespass of a powerful foe that has become your Nemesis. Rather than sit by and...