Snakes And Wolves is a stealth action TTRPG inspired by Metal Gear.

The PDF is 12 pages, with no interior artwork but a very thematic and readable layout that matches the fonts and general presentation of the Metal Gear series.

Snakes And Wolves also has a unique mechanical structure, in that it defines as game terms Verbs and Nouns. Nouns are proper nouns, pieces of the setting. Verbs are ways players interact with the setting. Every player except for the GM has ownership of some Verbs and Nouns, and the GM fills in the gaps.

The game's dice are simple; D10 vs target number, with an extra die if you can apply one of your Verbs. The GM adjudicates success, and a lot of the way the game plays will be down to the GM's sense of pacing and scenario design.

Like a Belonging Outside Belonging title, Snakes And Wolves limits Verb use with a pool of tokens. Each player has tokens, and players can recover tokens by sitting out for a bit. Unlike Belonging Outside Belonging, though, doing this progresses the game towards its end state, lowering the players' Mission Integrity until it reaches a crisis point and they either succeed on the spot or fail catastrophically.

Overall, this is a very lightweight, flexible, mission-oriented game system that you could use to play the original Metal Gear Solid as a complete scenario. It's cool for that alone, but the Verbs and Nouns system is a very innovative way of framing the mechanics, and the layout is sleek and engaging. If you like narrative espionage rpgs, or if you're a Metal Gear fan, you should definitely check this out.

Minor Issues:

-Page 8, it seems like the intent is you succeed by rolling over the Challenge Level, but this isn't explicit. It's also not clear what happens if you tie the Challenge Level.

-Page 9, "Tokens allow you to act" suggests that you need them to do anything, Verb or not. However the consequences of running out of tokens are just that you can't leverage Verbs. I can broadly guess at the intent but some more clarity could be useful here.

-Page 10, tracking Mission Integrity but not mission progress feels like it removes a lot of the game's mechanical tension. The crisis point in a mission is very clearly mechanically defined, but the sense of how close a group is to succeeding is vague, and this might make missions that don't enter The Last Ditch Effort feel like victory was unearned, and missions that did enter The Last Ditch Effort feel like this was a requirement for finishing the mission.

-Page 12, "it's sequels and spinoffs" its

Sleepless Seas is a haunted solo fishing TTRPG.

The PDF is two pages with a fold across the first page, plus a map. The layout is clean and readable, and the art is black and white with some good photocopier-style graphical noise.

In Sleepless Seas, you are an insomniac fisher plying spooky waters, haunted by a nebulous past.

Gameplay consists primarily of random rolls, with an element of push-your-luck in whether you fully fish out each spot or move to the next spot when your catch starts to decline. You can also trade fish for coins and coins for ship upgrades, but these are both dependent on your base roll for fish.

The atmosphere of Sleepless Seas is excellent and, like The Wretched, this could be a fun game to get into character and stream. The plot is slightly open-ended, but it closes in a gloomy and satisfying way that lingers.

Overall, if you're looking for solo TTRPGs, fishing TTRPGs, or cozy horror, check this out. It's a fun little title.

Minor Issues:

-If your boat takes 3 damage, the text isn't clear if it heals after you come to, or if you have to purchase repairs.

Bilge is a vibes-y whalepunk body horror TTRPG about blood oceans and ambergris. It feels very influenced by Iron Lung, but treads new territory.

The PDF is heckin massive. It's almost 600 mb across 60 pages, with sludgy, low-fi art and a very consistently atmospheric layout. The text is sometimes a little tricky to read, and you can get really inured to all the background red, but the illustrations universally look great---horrifying sights seen imperfectly and at a distance.

Gameplay-wise, Bilge is a survival horror game, but with an emphasis on change and mutation. You have limited HP and stamina, your stats are randomized, and it's fairly easy to die if you commit to the wrong encounter, but also you can take on parasites to boost your stats and capabilities. The more parasites you have, the more likely other parasites are to leave you alone---but if you take too many, you start hemorrhaging HP and eventually turn into a monster.

There are also other factors to manage, like the discomfort of the dungeon around you (which can end the scenario if it goes too high, but otherwise unlocks new areas and makes monsters more hostile,) and combat with monsters. Combat is simple and involves attack and defense checks to grind down a monster's HP, but it can also be easily avoided by taking some damage and running away. Honestly, running away may be the best option most of the time, as it's guaranteed damage, but it's potentially a lot less damage than you'd take from getting tagged by one good attack.

No GM is needed for Bilge, as you draw the game's map with a pack of cards while playing, and monsters have their own simple AIs. However, I did find myself periodically squinting at the rules, trying to figure them out, so having a player who likes reading and deciphering rpgs serve as a sort of GM-adjunct may be worthwhile.

The book is rewarding just to read, and there's a lot of cool biohorror concepts and atmospheric flavor to soak in. The dungeon's areas are particularly good, and all change based on a variety of player-driven factors.

There's also a dang good character sheet, which adds a lot to the immersion.

Overall, if you like retro survival horror and you want a mildly crunchy GMless experience with a lot of variety and replayability, and if you don't mind staring at some pages a few times, you should check this out.

Specifically, if you're a fan of works like Iron Lung and Dead Space and maybe Dai Dark, you should really give this a look.

Minor Issues:

-Page 9, Stomatone, does this give you an extra 30% extension on your Parasite Purity cap? So you could go up to 110%? Or does this do something different? I couldn't quite be certain from the text.

-Page 10, do all members of a moving group spend 1 Fatigue or just the leader? My guess was all, but I wasn't certain.

-Page 11, "Doodle anything you might see if you must", I think this might be a sentence fragment.

-Page 16, listing all of the enemies without pictures before listing all of the enemies with pictures feels a little weird. I'm not sure these two pages are needed. Likewise with the nemasites section.

-Page 28, the "0s" here REALLY look like "05", which made it a bit tricky to figure out what this section meant until I read the "all zeroes" line on the next page.

All good! Thank you for creating it!

HECK. Good catch. It's fixed now.

Some of the page text stays consistent across the product line (like the third party license bit and the CW,) so I copypasted and made changes, but I did not make the most important change.

Maze Of The Spider is a survival horror TTRPG about hunting spiders in a sort of gothic Ghibli setting. 

The PDF is 2 pages of pamphlet layout, with clean, easy to read text and some great illustrations.

Atmosphere-wise, Maze Of The Spider is immaculate. It gives the players and GM just enough information to go on, but it leaves most of the world implied. The PCs are members of a village that survives by hunting giant spiders, and that has fallen. The island surrounding the village is hostile territory, so the players know little of it, but they're resourceful and brave even if they're out of their depth.

Mechanically, Maze plays a bit like a board game. The island has a limited number of locations and the players' starting point can be randomized, but in general there are specific objectives to accomplish and how many objectives the players accomplish directly affects the ending.

To surmount challenges, the players spend items from their inventory. If a challenge is also dangerous, they roll dice as well. Damage and status effects are consequences for failure, and craft materials are earned from victory. New items can be crafted from these materials, and the general feeling is of an old console game, where progress is gated through judiciously spending healing items and ammo.

For GMs, there are some randomization tools and hints about what's going on in the story, but this might be a little tricky to run as your first game. You need to feel a little comfortable with writing content on the fly as you GM it, and central characters like Tribute Maiden Aideen and Townmaster Camchak don't get more than their name to describe them in the pamphlet.

Overall, I think Maze would be an absolute banger of a playstation horror title, and it's really great as a TTRPG too. The setting is compelling and the stakes feel very meaningful. It's also easy to play, and only a little harder to GM. If you're looking for a oneshot and you like clever, self-contained systems, definitely give this a try.

Thanks!

No problem! It was fun to read!

Swineheart Motel is a system neutral slasher horror TTRPG similar in vibe to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, A Machine For Pigs, and The Devil In Me.

The PDF is 40 pages, with a plain but very readable layout, a helpful map, and some lovely and evocative interior art.

Lore-wise, Swineheart Motel is quite elaborate. There are beings from outside reality, massive god corpses, swimming pool witches, and a generally high-weirdness atmosphere. You could run a starting DnD party through it, and their powers and capabilities wouldn't feel 'too much' for the task at hand.

In terms of mechanics, Swineheart wants you to use a system that can track the PCs' stress, but otherwise is quite flexible. You could run this with just about any horror RPG, and there's lots of narrative room for the GM to back off from the serial killers and evil spirits and let the tension build again.

One thing the game's cover doesn't quite communicate is that the adventure takes place during a blizzard, so it's relatively easy for the GM to keep the PCs on site. And if containment fails, it's not a big deal. The adventure is on a time table, and there are consequences if the PCs simply leave.

The atmospheric writing is also very strong, with each area of the motel feeling distinctly lived in. Everything connects, and it's possible to infer a lot about the place just by visiting a few rooms.

Overall, if you're looking for a slightly surreal modern cosmic horror with slasher-y overtones, Swineheart Motel is a solid pick. There's lots of room for the adventure to head in different directions, but all of its moving parts are easy to interact with, and any player choice will produce tension and meaningful results. Regardless of which system you prefer, it's worth picking up.

Quibbles:

-Page 15, Jimmy worrying about the pool being closed feels weird, as it's midwinter.

-Page 16, Wesley sending the hunters after the PCs feels like it's inclined to fall apart. The hunters don't have a solid reason to just start shooting, and the PCs (probably) aren't carrying the motel's stolen money. The cocaine is an X factor, but doesn't feel to me like it'll escalate them to murder.

This might be the best, most impactful mechanical loop in TTRPGs.

Definitely don't play with any prized possessions nearby, but mixing the visceral play of a break room with tabletop storytelling is a really cool, boundary-pushing experiment!

He's in an illustration. There's also a Knellsong Whale that's one of the more dangerous things you can fish up, but in general I'm not familiar enough with his work to put in too many Herman Melville references.

I've updated the core rules to reflect this. It should now be a bit safer to fishblade.

Oh no! That's the first documented Fishblade speedrun!

I think I may have made the 'Ending Fishblade' penalty a little too severe. A friendlier version might be that if a player stops talking for longer than 3 seconds, they can't narrate again until Fishblade moves on to the next target. Fishblade is only defeated if all players cannot currently narrate.

Thank you for writing the game!

Chromatic Shadows is a feature length, d6 based, darkwave cyberpunk TTRPG. It feels like a throwback to the explosion of AAA-style indie core books from the 2000s, and I mean this in a good way.

The PDF is 94 pages, clean and well organized, with a conventional but really lovely layout. There's a lot of stock art, but it's all high quality and thematically appropriate. The handful of small Mork Borg-y flourishes look distinctive and nice without risking bothering anyone who had an outright allergic reaction to Borg's visual design.

In terms of content, Chromatic Shadows operates in the same sort of liminal design space as Shadowrun, CY_BORG, and Cthulhutech, but there's a little bit of SCP and Control in there too. It's a shared world of guttertech and horrors from beyond the stars, and the way in which individual players operate through it can be very asymmetric. 

Rules-wise, Chromatic Shadows uses a d6 pool. Checks have a Threshold, which is the number of dice hits needed to pass, and your effectiveness scales up the more hits you get. Dice don't explode---except in a limited fashion if you have an appropriate skill specialty--- and Effort, the system's bonus dice currency, is pretty limited, so having a low enough pool can lock you out of success in some situations.

Character creation is just as crunchy and nuanced as you'd expect from something like Shadowrun, but it's a *lot* easier to follow. It's mostly a la carte, selecting packages that assemble into a complete character, but you can also spend build points on some social stuff, and there's a long menu of items and cyberware you can buy. You have stats and derived stats and cyberware and magic, your body has a limit to the cyberware it can take, and you can sell XP for money. There's also a mental damage system called Shock which can be called by taking too much cyberware. Notably, cyberware and magic don't conflict, so you can go full Blood Net rather than having to pick a side.

Combat is largely Shadowrun rules, but without the granular initiative system. If you have bonus actions, they all spam out during your turn. Hacking happens at the same pace as regular combat, and everything feels broadly faster and more cohesive.

The setting has some weird beats. It's a decaying urban sprawl with eldritch societies skulking in the shadows, but there's also stuff like everyone being poor because the megacorps collapsed and couldn't provide jobs anymore. It's definitely in-genre in cyberpunk for there to be casually introduced setting facts that just bodily launch me out of my immersion, but I had to claw my way back from thinking about this approach to economics to thinking about the book.

Probably the most unique element of Chromatic Shadows is how it handles the occult. Every character has a brush with the occult in their backstory that changed them, and further brushes allow characters to buy up their Resonance and become spookier. A character's specific brush with the occult determines which weird powers they have, and these vary from "a normal accident at the cyberpunk factory" type experiences to being half necromorph.

For GMs, there's a bestiary and some artifacts that you can write hooks around, and there's a dang good character sheet, but for scenarios you'll have to write them yourself.

Overall, this is a *wildly* impressive work for a solo project. It's big and mechanically polished and should appeal to anyone who likes traditional rpgs and cyberpunk. The occult flavor adds a lot to the game, as does the stellar layout, and honestly I think the weakest part of the game's visuals is its cover.

So if you like your cyberpunk a little bit gloomy and ominous, or if you like your lovecraftian horror with monofilament blades, check Chromatic Shadows out. It's beefy, balanced, and there's more material for it on the way.

Minor Issues:

-Page 24, "One or more Daemon" should be Daemons

I hadn't planned on writing any supplements, but who am I to deny the whims of the market?

In all seriousness, if this game made at least one person laugh, I'm counting it as a success.

Thank you for writing the game!

The Dark Room is a surreal solo Firelights rpg. The closest thing I can think of to compare it to is maybe Yume Nikki or maybe Void/Tension, but this isn't exact. It feels liminal and personal, and it's about exploring a dreamscape.

The PDF is 2 pages, clean and well organized, with some really expressive and subtle visual design on the logo. 

Mechanics-wise, you play by drawing cards, rolling dice, and comparing the numbers on the cards against the numbers on the dice. This system is used to generate encounters, but it's also to make checks, and it feels both swingy and balanced. Results tend towards mixed success.

The game is mostly atmospheric, but it culminates in a very cool boss fight which is always tailored to your character. It's neat to see a solo game take this angle, and it makes the game feel not just introspective but purposeful.

Overall, if you like solo games where you develop a character, I think The Dark Room can be a pretty powerful experience. It has a good atmosphere and a strong conclusion, and it's definitely worth adding to any solo games library.

I'm glad you liked it!

+13 Archivist Points!

Thanks! I enjoy building minigames, so stuff like this is always fun for me to work on.

I got an accidental free Rattatosk: Squirrelfolk For 5th Edition via drivethru not too long ago, so I think their system just does that sometimes.

I hope you enjoy the Fisk Borg, though! Best of luck with your dark and gloomy fishing!

Thanks! I was thinking a bit about twitch voting while writing it, and I'd be psyched to see it played that way.

I hadn't thought of that, and I like it a lot!

 +23 Archivist Points for the review, +10 Archivist Points for the new rule, and the new rule is now canon.

Archivists can gain +5 Archivist Points for adding games to public collections.

Galgenbeck Sacrifice is is an adventure for Mork Borg that adds a lot more flesh to its titular region.

The PDF is 67 pages, with a layout style that perfectly matches the core book. The art is vibrant, splashy, detailed, and evocative. The layout breaks conventions in intentional ways, and pages that are dense with information are contrasted against pages with a lot of whitespace, giving the reader room to breathe.

Sacrifice's writing also perfectly mirrors the core book. It's punchy and short, but dense with information. Some information in the core book is recontextualized by Sacrifice (mostly concerning Josilfa Migol,) but the feeling is far more of a sequel than of a fan work.

Contents-wise, there's information about the atmosphere in Galgenbeck, local places to visit, rumors, encounters, and some fun NPCs, but the meat of the book is the adventure. It starts with a compelling hook, has a recurring superboss, and explores an interesting premise---an avatar of Nechrubel is harvesting citizens, erasing them from living memory.

It's somewhat easy for players to fall off of the intended track of the adventure, and the GM might need to do some creative freewheeling if they fall off but keep pursuing it, however in general the atmosphere is strong, the stakes are high, and there's a great sense of pacing. This is an adventure that matters for the setting, and will fit very well with groups that like a gloomy but still heroic tone.

Overall, Galgenbeck Sacrifice feels less like a standalone supplement and more like an extension of the core book. It's packed with content. It interacts with the central plot. It does a stellar job of bringing Galgenbeck and its strange inhabitants to life. If you like Mork Borg core, it feels safe to call this a must buy.

Dungeoneers Black Book is a 55 page adventure supplement for Mork Borg. And it commits with resolute force to the Mork Borg bit. Every page is striking and unique, and the tone is garish and gloomy and weird.

There are 16 dungeons in the Black Book overall, enough for months of oneshots. And while they're all fairly bite-sized, they each feel extremely distinct.

The most similar are the handful of caves, which are different more in theme than in structure, but there's also a lot of dungeons here that are experimental without losing their gameyness. The Dusty Catacombs is built out of cards, and this allows you to make it as big or as small as you want (within an overall cap of 52 rooms and corridors.) Dr Grigory's Laboratory Warren uses words as map pieces, so a hallway will be written as CORRIDORCORRIDORCORRIDOR, and this is a little tough to describe, but visually it's quite striking.

In terms of difficulty, everything feels calibrated for a standard Mork Borg party. The expectation of lethality is there, but it's consistent with the tone and feels earned, not forced.

Overall, if you like Mork Borg as presented in its core book, there's something here for you. And if you like gorgeous art and layout, there's definitely something here for you---every spread is a painting.

You can slide a copy to a teammate, though, in a pinch. Just make sure whichever of you is pulling more aggro is also holding onto this game.

Feel free to grab any tech from this that would fit the concept!

Thank you for your work!

Whoah, thanks!

Yes, absolutely! I'm going to wait at least a week to see if I catch any post-release bugs, and then there'll be a longer wait after that for print proofing and shipping, but I do plan to do a softcover and hardcover for Pharmagothica.

Thanks! I'm glad they're helpful!

Realized belatedly that I misread your post. Please disregard my previous.

Also, if you're using pixabay, you may want to try a few related search terms. I think I got some of the illustrations by looking for, like, 'botany' and 'flowers' and such. They might not all be properly tagged as plants.

Of course! You can list me as a source, and I'm glad you enjoyed the game!

I am definitely not a wargames or rpgs expert, but I'd be happy to provide advice too.

Ah, okay, do you have an email address you're comfortable posting here that I could reach you at? Or a discord?

Hi! The illustrations were sourced from pixabay. If you search plants -> illustrations -> black and white, it should bring up a lot. They're free to use, no attribution required.

Alternatively, if you message me on twitter, I can figure out a way to send you the specific plant illustrations I used. It's about 30mb of files.

I'll tinker with it!

I've already found a few things I want to adjust, mostly small stuff like some prepositions missing capitalization in the ToC. I'll collect feedback and then make some changes.

Whoah, thank you! That's the highest honor I could ask for. Glad you enjoyed it!

Thank you! I'm glad you like it!

I'd actually planned that for my original layout, and it ended up feeling kind of jumbled in its implementation. I have a whole folder full of public domain page borders from the attempt, and I just couldn't get it to work. Using the same page border gave the book a kind of a throughline, and then I used the seasonal photographs to indicate changes of content and tone between sections.

I am so sorry about the border! I wanted some kind of framing instead of just white space, and it fit with the antique faerie stories aesthetic. If you want, I can upload a version without the border.