If we lived in a world without adventure games, I think I’d still have written a catalog of monsters. It’s something I’ve been doing all my life. At six I would challenge friends to give me letters or numbers so I could transform those shapes into monsters. At ten I absentmindedly doodled a creature on a worksheet, and the devoutly religious kid I was partnered with got scared because I had invited a demon into our schoolwork. When I was twelve I wrote and illustrated a series of superhero comics, but spent more time drafting a massive codex of colorful bad guys than I did writing stories. My creative energies are perpetually drawn towards horrible creatures, and now I’ve finally turned that preoccupation into 45 pages of the best writing I’ve ever managed to produce.
The book’s cover is another gorgeous piece from Ian Hagan. Each of the twenty monsters within are illustrated by Blake Holland, and laid out in a two page spread designed to maximize the book’s usefulness at the game table. The PDF version is available both in portrait format similar to the print book, and in a landscape format which fits each full spread on a single screen, or sheet of paper if printed out.
With regards to the print edition, please note: Lulu does not have the systems in place that would allow me to provide a free PDF with every physical purchase. I will happily provide complimentary PDFs to anyone who contacts me directly with their Lulu order ID.
What people are saying about Miscreated Creatures:
“I haven’t been that into RPGs in 2020 – imaginary peril is less appealing to me with this much real peril, I guess? But I just read that cover-to-cover.”
Do you remember my old Deadly Dungeons posts? Each entry in the series described a tricky dungeon room for the players to unravel. They were meant to ready to drop into most any dungeon, and novel enough to challenge even a seasoned adventurer. They were the sorts of puzzles that didn’t have a single solution, but rather gave the referee a sense of their workings so the could best interpret the results of their players pokings and proddings.
If that sounds interesting to you, the old posts are still available on the site. Or, if you’d like to read the updated and refined versions of all the original 28 rooms, as well as 12 entirely new rooms, I’ve got a book for you to buy:
In addition to my writing and cartography, the book contains dozens of pieces of new interior art by my sister Roni Whelan, layout by Moreven B., and an absolutely gorgeous cover by Ian Hagen. For real, look at this thing. It’s way too good for me:
I’d love to have Ian make covers for more of my books in the future, but I’m fairly certain that once this cover gets out there I’ll never be able to afford him again. He’s going to be buried under new commissions. This dude’s talent needs to be recognized.
As is my wont, I created a bunch of goofy image edits to help promote the book on social media. Here’s a gallery of them if you’re a fan of hacky GIMPwork:
The first symptom is a popping sound from the belly. It can happen at anytime, and the afflicted never feel it coming. They’ll be having a friendly chat one moment, then pop, and now they’re trying to kill people.
Thus begins Faux Pas, the first in a series of adventures from HOCUS publishing. It’s also the first piece of writing I’ve asked anyone to pay for after 7 years of making free tabletop resources.
In addition to my writing, Faux Pas features the art of Anxy P., and layout from no less a figure than Christian Kessler (of Fever Swamp fame). I also got a lot of help throughout the process from Jarrett Crader (editor of numerous LotFP publications), and OSR luminary Evey Lockhart.
What is Faux Pas?
A system neutral adventure. The players discover a town beset by a mysterious illness with symptoms worse than death. It breeds violence, madness, and mutation. It turns people into things that are no longer themselves.
The Inquisitor General has been warned. He’s on his way here. When he arrives he’ll burn every building to the ground and torture everyone living until they confess to the devil worship that obviously brought this evil into the world.
Will the players discover what’s really going on, and how to stop it, before the Inquisitor arrives? Or will they just loot the place and run away?
What’s the deal with this audio recording?
I imagine ya’ll are familiar with Blogs on Tape? It’s a podcast where I record myself reading OSR blog posts, audio-book style. It allows people to engage with the hobby while they’re exercising, cooking, commuting, or vision impaired.
For the release of Faux Pas, I produced a full-on 30+ minute recording of myself reading the module from start to finish. It’s provided to anyone who purchases the module at no extra cost. For real, we decided we were going to sell this thing for $4 before the idea of throwing in a free recording ever occurred to me.
I’m interested to see how people feel about this. I’d like to do it for future HOCUS releases as well. Which brings us to the next point…
What is HOCUS?
To be honest, we’ve spent the last six months arguing about what HOCUS is, and I don’t know if any of us really understand what we’re doing.
We know we want to focus on pushing out small adventures. Stuff that is as pleasurable to read as it is to run. Rules light role playing for everyone. We’re all OSR people looking to move past the limitations of what it means to be “OSR.”
To quote our founder: “Who the fuck is Gary Gygax?”
How many of these images are there?
A lot. It had been awhile since I goofed around with editing images, and I kinda went overboard.
Plus, it always annoys me when I’m scrolling around on Google+ and I see the same post 10 different times spread across multiple communities. I get that spamming communities is just the unfortunate reality of what it takes to get peoples attention when you’re trying to make a few dollars. But, when I did it myself I hoped it would be perceived as less annoying if each post had its own unique image.
What about those of us who backed the Patreon campaign?
As soon as I’m done writing up this post, I’m going to send a free download link to everyone who supported the Patreon campaign; regardless how much or how long they pledged for. I appreciate your support so much, and I’m glad that I’m finally able to give you a little something back, even the campaign is over now.
Have you written a review of Faux Pas?
This is so in my wheelhouse that I doubt Nick Whelan’s existence. This is clearly some form of tulpa who produces exactly what I always wanted: the kind of thing I’d write, but that I didn’t write and so is a complete surprise to me. I would use this to kick off a campaign. I could see this very efficiently ending a campaign. I would use this in a hex crawl or I would use this as a complication for something a player wants to accomplish.
Short, pithy and punchy. Straight to the point. There is creepy weird shit happening and its about to get worse. No essays on the last century of local history, politics or religion – just stuff that is instantly interesting and fun.
All of this — the font size, the PDF bookmarks, the font styles — comes together to make possibly the most immediately readable RPG product I’ve seen in a long time. A single glance at a page can give you everything you need to run an entire encounter, no page-flipping or ctrl-f’ing required.
-David Shugars
Faux Pas is DOPE AF! I think my favorite niche-within-niche rpg stuff is like “weird art-house but table ready body horror and madness adventure zine” The writing and art provoke that quesy feeling that I fucking love. the addition of an audio track is gold.
The townsfolk are colorful enough that I could picture myself using the village several times through the course of a campaign, and have the events of the module occur during a second or third visit.
Offhand mentions of the practices of the ancient cult and the Creature that Lurks on Mars are the right kind of flavor-that-probably-won’t-come-into-play: short and evocative. Same with God-most-Censorious.
A gathering of cretinous alcoholics who only have two wholesome pleasures between the lot of them: pooping, and playing D&D. They spend all day in their secret clubhouse, yelling obscenities at each other and making jokes about genitalia. And if I told you any more than that, they’d probably kick me out, because we’re just juvenile enough to still think Fight Club references are clever in 2017.
“The first rule of the MBC is…”
Sometimes, between hangovers, the MBC makes books. The first three were Secret Munticore, PeePee Soaked Heck Hole, and Baseball #1. I’ve had some hand in all of these, but given the incestuous, shitstained style of the MBC, I haven’t made a point of really promoting them on Papers & Pencils.
So, what’s different about Potatoes and Rats?
P&R is a book that I pushed along, every step of the way. I was the one who posted the prompt. I organized people, edited what they wrote, and helped with the layout. Only a single room of the dungeon is completely my work. But just about every single sentence has been massaged by me in some way. That’s even a photo of me on the cover.
I don’t want any of your money. I just want you to read the wacky ravings of me and my fellows, chuckle once or twice, vomit three times precisely, and come away from the experience with a little less faith in humanity than you had going in.
As for what it is, well, it’s sort of a dungeon adventure. I say “sort of,” because it’s unplayable. It even says so, right there on the cover, next to the bit where we wrote the word “by” two times, and decided not to fix it as a joke.
The book is really more of a collection of weird, unfunny jokes, strung together in adventure module form because we’re all a bunch of hacks who are trapped in the conventions of our genre.
Anyway, I think I’ve written enough text to space out these images. So just go download it, and read it, and…like…tell me I’m good. Give me the love I never got from mommy or daddy.
The other day I was hanging out in an obscure little corner of the internet with one of my very oldest friends in the world. We’ve been buds for 15+ years now, and the only thing we have in common is the ability to pedantically blather on endlessly about any subject under the sun.*
On a whim, I asked him to give me a title for an adventure that I promised I would write.
And so I wrote it. I think it actually turned out pretty well, and it was a great excuse to spend some time with publishing software. I really need to spend more time doing that sort of stuff.
*With regards to said blathering, we actually have a whole podcast for doing that. I haven’t mentioned it on the blog before, because the podcast has nothing to do with D&D, and I’m bad with self promotion. But since it’s somewhat relevant here, allow me to humbly suggest you check out Dumb Stuff Taken Seriously. It’s terrible!
I made a thing! It’s a free adventure called The Bloodsoaked Boudoir of Velkis the Vile, available on DriveThru RPG. The Bloodsoaked Boudoir started life as a section of my Dungeon Moon campaign. My players loved Velkis and his Boudoir, so I’ve written them up with all the info you’d need to include them in any campaign setting.
The art was done by my (at the time) 17 year old brother Ronnie Whelan. It’s got an old school, DIY feel to it. Like the best of Arneson’s doodles in the original three little brown books. It’s a good fit for the adventure.
So, funny story.
My players killed Velkis multiple times and raided his Boudoir in its entirety way back in December 2013. This module was written by the end of January 2014. The art was all completed and delivered to me by sometime in March 2014 at the latest. During this period I told more than a few blog readers that I had a PDF coming out ‘in the next month or two.’ Meanwhile, this project sat on my hard drive rotting away as I put off the dreaded task of making a pdf.
I’ve got this bug in my thinking where I feel like any time I don’t spend writing is wasted time. So if I need to spend an entire day learning how to use Scribus, piecing together pages of work that I’ve already written, then at the end of the day I’ll feel like a failure. It’s ridiculous. No matter how much I write, my writing is worthless if it’s just sitting on my computer. A couple weeks back, I committed myself to working on more small projects. Finally getting Velkis out the door is the first step in that commitment.
So go download Velkis. Read it. Run it. Tell me what you think of it because mom and dad didn’t love me enough and I thrive off of the affirmation of others.
Reviews
“Bloodsoaked Boudoir is not an arrogant product, it’s small and can fit into another game with some ease, while still being interesting enough to give an evocative sense of it’s authors sort of game and game world that is different enough from the standard ‘orcs in a hole’ fantasy adventure to provide interesting ideas, and leave a reader with the sense that maybe they wouldn’t have thought of it themselves. With all these advantages the author is happy enough to simply publish his work as a pay what you want PDF, rather then promote it and clamber for your cash.” –Gus L. of Dungeon of Signs
“I keep playing the Trogdar lyrics in my head. Velkis the Vile is a man. I mean a undead man. I mean a demon man. I mean an evil wizard man. I mean … well. He’s a mystery … and that’s a good thing. NOT putting ah ard label on something, or describing it fully, or explaining the whys and hows of everything leaves room for mystery and that’s a powerful technique. The DM’s own imagination then run rampant and fills in the details. People call him “the undead man.” RUmors says he’s a demon or an evil wizard. All we know is that he’s tall, gaunt, sunken features and eyes that bulge. The entire description of him, from physical appearance to his speech patterns and topics is great and gives you an IMMEDIATE vibe of how to play him.” –Bryce Lynch of Ten Foot Pole.
It started early this year when I stumbled on to the website of fellow D&D blogger, Stonewerks. Stonewerks primarily makes maps, and his work has heavily influenced the way I’ve drawn the Deadly Dungeons maps over the last few months. At the time, his newest post was “The Hidden Tomb of Slaggoth the Necromancer,” a map which caught my eye, both for its lovely design, and compelling description:
“The long lost Tomb of the evil necromancer Slaggoth, is buried deep with in a cavern complex. The caves have become the home of a trio of ogres and their band of goblin henchmen. The goblins guard the entrance by watching through a small crack in the rock above the entrance, alerting the other goblins when anyone approaches the entrance. The goblins will then unleash a small pack of wolves that they have chained in the front caves against the intruders. If the wolves are not enough to repel the intruders, the goblins will send a runner across the wooden rope bridge to the ogre lair to warn their masters and will use ambush and retreat tactics to slow down the intruders. In the ogre cave is a massive steel door that leads to the hidden tome of the evil Necromancer Slaggoth. They have never been able to breach the door, so the tomb has remained untouched. Rumors of a key to the steel door is hidden somewhere in the caves, but has yet to be found. What horrers lie within Slaggoth’s tomb? Who is brave enough or foolhardy enough to find out?” -Stonewerks
Stonewerks and I got to talking in the comments, and then via email. What started as me filling a lazy evening by keying an empty dungeon turned into a full-fledged attempt to write my first module based on Stonewerks’ seed idea. I dragged several people through playtests and proof readings, and even got cbMorrie and Jacob Rain (both of whom have been featured on P&P before) to provide some free art for it.
The module proper has actually been done for several months now. The work of getting everything written, tested, re-written, and edited only took a few weeks. The art took a few weeks more than that. The hard part, as it turns out, was making a PDF. It’s not something I’d done before, and I found it a frustrating process to start with. One which I procrastinated over and over again. I’ve got a pretty fair handle on how to do it now, though, so hopefully future attempts won’t take quite so ridiculously long!
So please, download it! Let me know what you like or what you hate. Run it for your group if you are so inclined, and if you do, let me know how it goes! This is an experiment for me. One which will hopefully pave the way to future products.
“I’ve run Slaggoth’s a few times for people as an intro to OSR. I put it up there (with minor alterations) with Finch’s Tomb of the Iron God and Raggi’s Tower of the Star Gazer as awesome starting adventures.” -LBriar of Reddit, sent to me in a private message.
