Velstracs, Perfection Attained

A Catalog of Velstrac Character Options & Creatures

The fell beings known as velstracs stretch their shadowy chains from the Netherworld to spread their philosophy of pain and perfection. More than one mortal has come under their dark sway, willingly or otherwise, and this tome catalogs more tools for players and GMs to follow their own Ninth Truth.

Nephilim Shackleborn Ancestry

Play as a Shackleborn, a nephilim born of velstrac meddling. Includes tables for shackleborn features and origins to customize your character, as well as remastered and new ancestry feats.

The Ninth Truth & Velstrac Demagogues

Follow the philosophy of the Ninth Truth to live as the velstracs do, or devote yourself to one of the masters of their race known as the Velstrac Demagogues. Includes deity rules for the Ninth truth philosophy and nine demagogues, from the Voice in Screams to the Parasite Seed.

Augur Familiar

Gain mastery over your own velstrac augur familiar, those diminutive velstracs that stare unceasing at all torments.

Creatures

Bring velstrac horrors to bear against your players, including First Editions creatures like the venomous, iron maiden-bound Termagants and manic Suffragans, as well as new creatures like the suffocating Praefocar or the debased Chain Giant.

The petals fall whether you're welcome here or not.

The Blossom Shrine is this week's free Map Friday release from Mimicsmaps, a peaceful garden shrine turned quietly wrong. Cherry blossom trees line winding gravel paths, a red torii gate bridges the crossroads, and at the far end of the garden, something sits in the offering bowl that no one has the courage to look at too closely.

Beautiful, serene, and just unsettling enough to keep your players on edge.

• Shrine and garden encounter map
• System agnostic — works with any VTT or printed at the table

Enjoying the free maps? Follow Mimicsmaps on DriveThruRPG and check out the full catalogue for complete battle map packs with Foundry VTT support, multiple variants, and 4K resolution.

A suppliment for the Cohort miniatures skirmish battles game; A dark fantasy themed game that allows you to use whatever models you want! 

Big terrain features to enjourage you to craft big pieces of terrain!

Rules for duels between your characters during battle!

Off-Board investments for your cohort!

Wierd weather effects to make your games more interesting!

A talk about the next seven months of 'zines. Get a sneak peek at the creative direction of upcoming issues!

Enjoy the read and feel free to give your input using the contact information within.

This is an adventure for Cepheus Engine.

Zhen Murphy is a stock broker. He has been toiling away on the financial planet of Gorianz III for years with little to show for it. But he has a plan. A plan that he knows will get him to the riches that he deserves.

The Andromeda Mega Corporation has it’s tentacles in many industries in the Sonora sector. It own factories on several worlds that produce different types of goods. The company has been doing very well in recent years and it’s stock price is at an all time high. Zhen would like to change this, rather suddenly, and profit by it.

He approaches the travelers after doing a thorough investigation of their backgrounds. He believes that they are the sort of individuals who could do what he needs done with the discretion to keep it quiet. Besides....he intends to have them killed in any event......

He needs a few factories to be sabotaged so that the Andromeda stock price takes a plunge.

He offers CR 300,000 for the travelers to visit three different worlds and sabotage three different factories. He offers a bonus of CR 200,000 upon completion of the mission if the sabotage goes undiscovered.

THE STAINED HOUSES

A Sourcebook for the Deadwake Universe

For use with the Deadwake Role Playing Rules, the Deadwake Miniatures Rules, or both.

The official history of the Feedback Cascade has one version of the ending: the architects of the disaster were found, punished, and erased. The corporations built their arcologies on top of that story and called it justice.

The real ending is still unfolding. The architects' descendants are alive, organized, and patient. They have had seventy-five years to decide what to do about what their families built.

The Stained Houses expands the Deadwake universe into its most politically volatile territory yet: the shadow war fought beneath every corporate deal, every proxy conflict in the wastes, and every "routine" mission your crew has ever run. Three fallen dynasties, disgraced and driven underground after the Cascade, have spent three generations rebuilding from nothing. They are not myths or rumors. They are active players in the world your characters live in, and the moment your crew becomes useful to them, they will make contact.

This sourcebook introduces their world in full: the factions, the mechanics, the debts, and the consequences. It works equally as a deep layer of political intrigue for roleplaying campaigns, a source of shadow-war scenarios for the miniatures table, or a complete hybrid campaign framework that ties both modes of play into a single, escalating story.

THE THREE STAINED HOUSES

House Walker built the Cognitive Resonance Interface. Their engineering dynasty created the technology that made the Cascade possible, and their descendants have never stopped believing that the same technology could have prevented it. They operate through a secret network of researchers and operatives called the Dampers, pursuing a forbidden engineering project that CAD would erase entirely if they knew it still existed.

The Lin Compact gave the order. Descended from the military high command that pushed the Gorgon system past its safety threshold, the Compact has never accepted the dominant historical narrative of the disaster. They maintain hidden fortified positions in the wastes, run proxy armies through Waster militias, and spend their considerable military inheritance preparing for a war of vindication they insist is still coming.

The Elysian Remnant sold the dream. Their ancestor's media network provided the global infrastructure that the Cascade used to propagate. The Remnant's response was not guilt but a pivot: they now operate the largest underground network of SimStim dens in the wastes, weaponize perception as casually as others use firearms, and pursue a project they call the Simulacrum, a perfect virtual world that they intend to be the last one anyone ever needs.

WHAT'S INSIDE

The Blood Ledger: Faction Detail for All Three Houses

Detailed profiles of each House's history, philosophy, internal structure, and key NPCs, including handler contacts, power brokers, and the rival factions each House secretly manipulates or is manipulated by. Full Mechanical Hooks for each House cover operational Boons and Liabilities, miniatures Tie-in abilities, and scenario-ready Facilitator Ledgers that reveal exactly how each House's schemes look from the inside.

The Underlayment: A World Beneath the World

A complete covert operations system for tracking the shadow war across a campaign. The Underlayment introduces:

• The Influence Economy: each faction in the shadow war holds a rated pool of Influence that rises and falls with the outcomes of covert operations, Forbidden Bargains, and exposure events
• Shadow Actions: a framework for secret pre-session objectives that resolve mid-play without the rest of the table knowing what was at stake
• Calling in Favors: rules for characters to draw on their House's Influence, with escalating costs and the Exposure Track that makes every request a calculated risk
• Exposure Risk and the Exposure Track: a six-tick countdown that governs how visible a character's secret allegiance becomes, with defined consequences when the track fills
• Forbidden Bargains: high-stakes inter-faction agreements between Houses, with Hidden Clauses that detonate at the worst possible moment
• The Secrets Clock: a Facilitator tool for tracking how close the shadow war is to breaking into the open
• The Web of Betrayal: a campaign relationship diagram showing how every faction in the Underlayment is connected, opposed, and indebted

Players of Tainted Blood: Character Options

A complete suite of character mechanics for operatives with secret House allegiances:

• The Stained Bloodline Advanced Origin, which expands and supersedes the core rulebook's Stained House Scion origin, with Reputation Modifiers, Secret Triggers, and a three-tier Agenda Track of narrative milestones for each House
• Six new character traits including the Dampfield Whisperer, Simulacrum-Addict, Reality Architect, and Waking Exit, balanced across restrictive and proactive options
• The Blood Debt System: a structured mechanic for the debts a House can call in, the cost of paying them, and what happens when a character refuses
• The Flashback Bargain system, which allows players to spend Insight to retroactively establish past connections to the Houses at dramatically critical moments
• Full Revelation Mechanics covering the moment a character's bloodline is exposed, the Revelation Fallout Table, and detailed rules for Life After Revelation: how Shadow Actions, House Standing, and Underlayment access all change when secrecy is no longer possible
• The Phoenix Protocol: the formal transformation of a burned operative from covert asset to overt symbol, with defined mechanical consequences

House-Specific Resonance Tables

Three complete d6 tables, one for each House, governing what happens when a Bloodline character channels Resonance Unleashed. Each table entry carries a specific Benefit and a specific Cost written to the same format as the main Resonance Table in the core rulebook. Walker results trade in zero-day archive access and ancestral engineering clarity. Lin results surge with battlefield command, physical conditioning, and the particular danger of an ancestor's tactical fixation overriding your own judgment. Elysian results open doors into other people's minds and close the door between the real and the simulated.

Facilitator Toolkit: Playing in the Shadows

Complete Facilitator support including the Complication Table and Secret Motive Table for introducing mid-mission underlayment twists, the Narrative Crossfire resolution system for when two players' secret objectives collide, Resonance Storm rules for escalating psychic environmental events, and guidance for scaling integration across three campaign models: Shadow Threads (Houses as off-board influencers), The Double Game (Houses operating half-on-board with secret skirmish objectives), and the Full Resonance War (Houses as the central spine of the entire campaign).

Resonance of Blood: Adventure Hooks and Campaign Seeds

Three complete three-mission Legacy Protocol chains, one per House, each with escalating tactical stakes and interlocking consequences:

• Legacy Protocol: Containment Breach (House Walker) across Secure the Site, Hold the Line, and The Epicenter
• Legacy Protocol: The Lin Offensive across Recon, The Breach, and Hold the Prize
• Legacy Protocol: Elysian Infection across The Sleepers, Quarantine, and The Meltdown

Additional scenario seeds including Extraction Protocol, Field Test, SimStim Sweep, and three environmental zone scenarios: Protocol Black, Whispering Zone, and Phantom Market.

The Fractured Legacies arc framework for generational campaign play, including the full Inheriting Failure variant, which provides structured rules for playing the descendants of a previous campaign's characters in a world shaped by the decisions the players themselves made.

Appendices

• Appendix A: Pre-Cascade Technology Profiles, covering the CRI-Null Armor, SimStim Ciphers, and Metacognitive Damper with full RPG and miniatures mechanics for each
• Appendix B: Key NPCs for all three Houses with handler profiles, relationship hooks, and Facilitator guidance
• Appendix C: Secrets Cross-Reference Table mapping every House secret to the factions that would pay to know it
• Appendix D: Designer's Notes on the theoretical underpinnings of the Houses as philosophical systems
• Appendix E: Integration Guidance for using the Houses across both roleplay and miniatures play
• Appendix F: Full unit profiles for six Stained House operatives for miniatures play (Walker Key Operative, Walker Damper Specialist, Walker Engineer, Lin Compact Veteran Soldier, Lin Compact Commander, Elysian Escapist, Elysian Philosopher), complete with Core Stats, Attributes, Keywords, Weapons, Abilities, and Requisition Values following the Deadwake Miniatures Rules format; Quick Reference sheets for all three Houses; and the Shadow Protocol standalone cell rules for fielding an all-Stained-House miniatures force

REQUIRES: The Deadwake Role Playing Rules, the Deadwake Miniatures Rules, or both. Compatible with all existing Deadwake sourcebooks.

Why was your Barbarian exiled, feared, blessed, or cursed? Roll on this D100 table to uncover a rich prompt for a compelling origin story, with each entry crafted to provide players and Game Masters with memorable character hooks and endless roleplaying potential.

Welcome to the Cthulhu Cthorporation.

Mi-Gos and Yithians? Those are just your coworkers. Nothing to worry about. That shifting deadline and unmet quota? Make a sanity check.

Suffering through endless corporate exploitation, what could possibly be a bigger threat to our investigators/employees than just getting through their shift? I'm sure nothing will go wrong...

Call Center of Cthulhu is a short (~2.5hour) comedy horror one-shot about office workers who are numb to the mythos, but devastated by the nightmare that is capitalism.

Written for up to 6 players.

3D printable props are available here: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/game/call-center-of-cthulhu-props

Take your BILT Among The Stars campaign to the frontier! 

The 4th book in our launch line-up, Frontier Worlds features 11 worlds waiting to be explored by starfaring players. Each world contains unique challenges, plot hooks, adventure seeds, and NPCs, suitable for a mini-campaign, a planet of the week, or a recurring location your players can return to time and time again. 

So take to the stars and add these ports of call to your game today, and give your campaign a roaring start your players won't forget!

The second book in the Quintessential Class series. The Quintessential Rogue brings you new optional rules for your 5E Fantasy Rogue Characters!

TARNISHED SHIELD — Character Dossier No. V

Honour got the first unit killed. Idealism got the second disbanded. Dirt kept the third alive long enough to collect payment. The Tarnished Shield has fought in seven wars under six flags, switched sides twice, and arrived at a worldview that is not cynicism as pose but realism as survival mechanism; a precise, accurate understanding of incentives developed from necessity, which is the only reliable teacher.

They know things that cannot be learned from training manuals: which fortifications have the weakest supply lines, which officers can be bribed and at what rate, where a carefully placed word could cause structural damage to a hierarchy. The flag you fight under is a contractual detail. The payment is the point.

This dossier presents a character defined by the gap between the world as advertised and the world as it operates. It is fully compatible with System Agnostic settings, OSR, Fate Condensed, and D&D 5th Edition.

Features & Contents:

Deep Lore and Origins: Tables to determine what the first betrayal taught you, why you left the last contract, and what your scars tell anyone who knows how to read them.

Factions & Underworld Ecosystem: Navigate complex relationships with the Mercenary Compact, the Intelligence Services, and the survivors of your first unit. Establish your outstanding obligations with a 10-point former employer table.

Adventure Hooks: 12 unique contract complications designed to integrate the archetype into any campaign as a player character or recurring NPC.

Roleplaying Guidance: Core behaviours and scene-by-scene instructions on how to handle illegal requests, a colleague's idealism, crises of loyalty, and the affection you did not account for.

Fate Condensed Integration: Complete character construction mechanics including thematic Aspects, Skill pyramids, and custom Stunts like "Dirty Tactics," "Survivor's Instinct," and "The Back Door." Includes specific milestone advancement trackers.

D&D 5th Edition Build: A comprehensive integration guide building the Tarnished Shield upon a Rogue (Assassin) framework. Features homebrew features like "Lachrymatory Arsenal," "Seven-War Knowledge," and "Corrupt Contacts," and tailored tables dictating exactly what the blinding powder does and how downtime intelligence acquisition plays out.

All Who Wander Are Lost

Billboards and brochures litter the landscape, promising experiences found nowhere else. Roadside attractions, sites of interest, tourist traps – all tributaries to a bigger something beneath. Something hungry. The Tourist Hole.

An anytime, anywhere game exploring the weird organs along America's asphalt arteries.

• Bar dice mechanics with storytelling prompts
• 1 to many players
• 45 minutes to many hours
• Award-winning creator Mike Martens

The Tourist Hole

Imagine yourselves as tourists, lured by brochure copy and audacious billboards to the surreal mindflays of American roadside attractions.

Describe the strange things you find as you venture off the highway ... Each discovery gives you an opportunity to grasp, to bend, to break the hold of the attraction. To buy your ticket to freedom.

But each attraction is – indeed – the tendril of an eldritch fly trap, a feeder for some big soul-consuming void under all of us. As some tourists precariously hop from stop to stop, others will become new novelties within the Tourist Hole.

The game progresses as surviving tourists build up little menageries of souvenirs and scars, while the doomed ones draft their final postcards home and invent new tourists traveling these cursed highways.

The Game

Tourist Hole is a game of existential spookiness and escape from it, played in 45-minute rounds. Play one round and call it a day. Or play one more round, and then another, and then another, and call it a night. It can be played with one-to-many players, in bar mode (full game) or in car mode (stripped away of dice for improvised play on the go).

The Mechanics

The core rules build upon the traditional bar dice game Ship Captain Crew.

Each round is introduced by reading the flyer for one of the game's tourist attractions. Players take turns, receiving questions about their explorations and discoveries. Sharing an answer allows a roll of the dice, where the player tries to build a sequence of dice that will allow them to escape the attraction. Once all players have rolled their escape – or been lost forever in the Tourist Hole – they'll compare their leftover dice to a hidden cost, which determines what they leave this location with. Those who are lost describe the last postcard they send home.