Something unspeakable has crept into our world. And it’s lurking RIGHT BEHIND YOU!
Horror in DnD 5th Edition
We’re excited to announce the next project coming to Kickstarter from Mage Hand Press: Insomnia!
Insomnia is your very own horror toolkit, bringing the spine-tingling thrill of a Stephen King novel or slasher film to your 2024 5th Edition campaign. Explore three included settings, battle thirteen monsters with their own adventures, and above all—survive.
Here’s what inside, what makes Insomnia special, and how to play right away with the Mage Hand Press blog.
Can you Survive?
Each the thirteen monsters in Insomnia is the antagonist of its own bespoke horror movie—and you might be its next victim. Investigate the threat, uncover its mystery, track it back to its lair. Whether it’s the immortal Slasher or the blasphemous Herald, every monster has a bespoke weakness, a gap in its armor that allows it to be killed. If you can find it, you might just have a shot.
Get a sense of how Insomnia plays in 5th Edition with our rules for horror games and investigation scenes that go beyond a simple ability check.
Nowhere’s Safe: Three Horrific Included Campaign Settings
Insomnia includes three complete horror campaign settings. Though we explored each on the blog in early 2023, the Insomnia sourcebook adds a fully-illustrated cast of NPCs, a sprawling web of Factions, and a catalog of haunted and chilling Locations to fill your games. They also come with an entire suite of 5th Edition Rules that seamlessly adjusts 5th Edition to modern or futuristic settings.
Travel to Nowhere, USA, a rotting town in a remote corner of the American West or Midwest. (Our modern rules for things like skills and Armor Class add a whole new dimension to 5th edition!)
Land on Blackpost, a bleak, futuristic colony at the very edge of the galaxy. Play science horror a la Alien or The Thing in the furthest corner of the Dark Matter universe!
Or wander the city of Grismoor, a crumbling medieval metropolis, plagued by curses and verging on collapse.
Choose Your Survivor: Lights, Camera, Run.
Play one of 36 subclasses for D&D 5th Edition 2024! Become a Drifter or an Occult investigator in modern settings, a cyberwave musician or a hardlight wizard in futuristic settings, or an aberrant, shape-shifting fighter or jinxed sorcerer in medieval settings. You also find new spells, weapons, equipment, and skills that should help keep you alive a few hours longer.
More of these subclasses will be released on the blog for playtesting as we get closer to the Kickstarter, but you can already play as a monk following the Way of the Warped or a Path of the Drifter barbarian!
3 Ways to Play (Thousands of ways to die)
Insomnia is coming to three systems: 5th Edition 2014 and 2024, and also a brand new roleplaying game, Blood on the Lens!
Blood on the Lens takes the settings and monsters of Insomnia to their bloody extreme in a streamlined, hard-hitting package. Blood on the Lens is…
- Permanent. Everything in Blood on the Lens is written in ink or ripped permanently off your character sheet. Don’t bother bringing pencils.
- Streamlined. You can start playing in as little as ten minutes. Players need only their character sheets, a few d6s, and nerves of steel.
- Surprising. Whenever you roll doubles, the result is a twist. The game takes a turn that nobody, even the Director, was expecting.
What about Dark Matter?
The Dark Matter Mega Box, a revision and expansion of our sci-fi 5E sourcebook for 2024 rules, is still in the works! Many of the basic sci-fi rules that make the Blackpost setting run smoothly will also appear in the new Dark Matter. We want that sourcebook to remain the best sci-fi expansion for 5th edition using the 2024 rule set, so we’re continuing to work on it before launching its own Kickstarter campaign.
Each chapter of the Dark Matter sourcebook is being painstakingly revised and released to playtesters on our Patreon, with a full Kickstarter campaign planned for after it’s finished.
