Hexingtide: Back in Development as of June 2025

(This devlog is crossposted from my tabletop blog: tabletop.willphillips.org/2025/06/hexingtide-back-in-development-as-of-june-2025/

TL;DR? Work on Hexingtide is starting up again. Playtest 4 actually drops this summer, and a feature complete Playtest 5 with a robust appendix of example monsters and worldbuilding prompts is on deck for this fall.

• Sign up on the playtesting / email list: https://airtable.com/app8K3TksjngaAd0c/shry2SLqZ4ijAW9og
• Join the Discord server: https://discord.gg/KqgKbWmkeG
• Join the Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hexingtide

Would love to have you back on the spooky monster journey! -Will )

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Hexingtide is my unfinished TTRPG of Minimalist Monstrous Roleplaying – a love letter to the monsters of folklore, comics, and classic pop culture.

Inspired by (in no order): Mike Mignola’s Hellboy & the wider Mignolaverse, Dan Brereton’s Nocturnals, Eric Powell’s The Goon & Hillbilly, the Underworld films, Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Universal Studios Monsters, and the many incarnations of The World of Darkness.

Two years of professional, personal, and creative ennui have left Hexingtide in limbo. That’s changing, and I’m returning to work on the game.

The rulebook is expanding, but not in mechanics. It’s still a minimalist, open-ended game.

But they are brand-new, standalone rules… which is often harder for playtesters and would-be GMs to grok compared to hacks or SRD-based games (e.g. the variety of d20 and PBtA games out there).

I’m adding more examples and guidance. That means a bigger – more helpful – book that makes Hexingtide easier and clearer to run.

Dude, What Happened?

I released Playtest 3 in January 2023 (wow, that’s a long time ago) in the midst of a lot of burnout – which I parlayed into writing my minimalist Wild West outlaw murderhobo game The Devil’s Brand.

The plan was to return to Hexingtide with Playtest 4 in early 2024.

That… did not happen. (Although I did run a home campaign of Hexingtide using the Playtest 4 materials for all of 2024!)

Creative ennui, life getting in the way, chasing ADHD dopamine, and becoming intimidated at the size Hexingtide was becoming (after starting life as a 12pg zine). Blame any and all.

Every time I returned to design work on the game (or even my home campaign, for that matter), I got overwhelmed and discouraged.

I can’t say I’ve fully shaken those feelings, but I’m starting to regain my confidence – enough that I’ve been revisiting the rules again and have restarted the Hexingtide campaign with my home group after a six month pause.

What’s Changing?

The core of the game is solid: the single Inhumanity Die, the open-ended Powers, Portents, and Pacts, the Strong/Weak mechanic. All good.

Here’s the shift:

• More clarity around the procedure-heavy structure of Scenes in the game.
• More mechanical choices for Powers and Portents Checks – not to make the game remotely “tactical,” but to add some player decision making spice. 😉
• Easier to understand applications of the Strong/Weak mechanic that moves away from Chymoi, Social Reactions, and the half-dozen other terms used that have been hard for players to intuit and track. I think you’ll like it.
• A move from 5.5×8.5″ zine size to full sized American paper size of 8.5×11″. Also a shift back to greyscale printing… because hot damn, printing costs are crazy.
• Additional content, guidance, and examples – along with a new two-column layout that gives that content room to breath. A larger rulebook? Yes. More rules? No.

What to Expect

I’m planning two playtest releases up through Halloween 2025:

1. Playtest 4 Sneak Peak – end of June 2025: This is the first half of the rule book: introduction, character creation, and core rules. Approximately 35 pages. Enough to make a character and get a sense of how to roll the dice.
2. Playtest 4 – end of July 2025: This will add the GM-facing gameplay chapter to the rules, plus a small set of example enemies and scene rules. Approximately 45-50 pages. Similar in content depth as Playtest 3, this will be enough for the savvy GM to set up and run games of Hexingtide.
3. Playtest 5 – end of September 2025: While Playtest 5 will include any additions or revisions that come from Playtest 4, it primarily will focus on releasing the full appendix to the game, which will include a larger bestiary, sample scenes, pregen characters, worldbuilding prompts, example of play, and a starter adventure. My intent is that Playtest 5 should represent a “feature complete” stage of Hexingtide that allows me to move into final polish.

If the timing works out as above, my goal is to plan on publishing the game in time for Halloween 2026. I’m unsure if I’m aiming for finding a publishing, sticking to PDF and POD, or going the crowd-funding route.

With the release of Playtest 5, I’ll start to engage the wider community, soliciting example character builds (focusing on Krampus-like creations for December 2025) and adventurers. More info on that to come.

Get Involved

• Sign up on the playtesting / email list:
  https://airtable.com/app8K3TksjngaAd0c/shry2SLqZ4ijAW9og
• Join the Discord server:
  https://discord.gg/KqgKbWmkeG
• Join the Facebook group:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/hexingtide