His Majesty in Yellow

Man, I suck at this whole "blogging" thing. Been over a year since my last post, but I'm gonna make an effort to write more from now on (hopefully this doesn't age poorly).

As it happens, two events have inspiringly coincided. Rise Up Comus has announced a Worm Jam to make third party content for his tarot card-based RPG, His Majesty the Worm (which is excellent and you should all pick up). At the same time, I've been prepping to run the Impossible Landscapes campaign with my Delta Green crew. And it was while glancing at the campaign's King in Yellow tarot deck that I was struck with a sudden bolt of inspiration and knew what I had to do.

Arc Dream's King in Yellow Tarot Deck, illustrated by Kurt Komoda

You wake in a psychiatric hospital with precious few memories. You barely remember who you are, much less where you are or why you're here. The doctors and staff aren't helpful either - sometimes they seem more crazy than the patients. You could've sworn hospitals like this don't even exist anymore, that asylums were relics of the past - but it's hard to argue that when you're in one.

At night, a few hours after lights out and lockdown, something strange happens: the doors open - and where once was the corridor leading to the rest of the hospital, there is now a hallway with décor you'd expect from a Jazz Age hotel. You feel a desperate pull to dive deeper - the key to unlocking your memories lies somewhere within these midnight halls.

A surreal horror take on HMtW, based Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow. Most of the core mechanics will remain the same but be re-flavored. Character creation will be tweaked slightly to account for setting and genre expectations. The meat of this project will be a new liminal-space-hotel megadungeon, the City creation retooled into Asylum creation, and a host of new monsters.

My main inspirations outside of Chambers and Bierce are Dennis Detwiller's Insylum RPG, Jeff Lemire's run on Moon Knight, Kubrick's The Shining, Goblin Archives' Liminal Horror RPG, and William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration.

I'll be doing my best to post updates here as I work throughout the month. I'll post the minor mechanics changes and character creation tweaks hopefully within the week.

Is this project too ambitious for a one month jam? Probably.

Is that gonna stop me from trying? No.