This list used to send under the name Postcards from The Dark Peak, and back in the far distant murk-neet, you signed up for it, or someone signed you up -- both amount to the same thing really. The Solophon is a minor pivot to solo tabletop RPGs, built around the games we've actually been building. Hey, but it's all still set in Hellsborough and The Dark Peak, and the mini-adventures are called Postcard Adventures, so there's plenty of lore from The Dark Peak too. Hopefully you'll not be disappointed.

You can use the links to demonspawnbg.itch.io to access anything mentioned below, or, as a long suffering subscriber, you can also use the email address this newsletter has been sent to get access to the full archive of Postcard Adventures, Hellsborough Exposed, the bestiary, The Chronicles and all the rest, by going here: https://hellsborough.com/welcome-back.

Foked is a solo RPG set in the Dark Peak, the wilderness beyond Hellsborough, where the murk doesn't lift and the things in it are not metaphorical. Pick a species, pick a type, go in.

The whole engine is one roll: 2d6 plus a stat, against the Cut. Beat it clean and you're CLEAN. Scrape past it and you pay a TOLL. Miss and you're FOKED. Miss badly and it's RUIN. Your stats double as your health, so every hit costs something you'll actually notice, and at zero you're dead, changed, or someone else's problem now.

There's no GM required. A solo oracle procedure handles what one would. Bring a second player if you've got one; the rules don't mind either way.

Core Rules and Scenario 01 (Three Murkneets Dark, Tier I) are free on itch.io. The full boxed set, bestiary, hex toolkit, four scenarios, and the Coker campaign run start to finish, is coming as a $5 box. More on that next issue.

→ Get Foked free: demonspawnbg.itch.io/foked

Postcard Adventures are the shorter format: one location, three creatures, one bad night, no prep. Three are live on itch.io now.

Something in the Hole. A courier drops something into the pool under Walkley Lane and the rats go quiet. Free, and the one to start with. It walks you through a full turn before you've spent a single roll.
→ demonspawnbg.itch.io/postcard-adventure-something-in-the-hole-dark-peak-solo-rpg

All Good Things Come to Moss. A stranger's paying too much for a job that's too simple: carry a sealed envelope down the Bradfield Dale road and don't open it. You already know how this goes.
→ demonspawnbg.itch.io/postcard-adventure-all-good-things-come-to-moss-dark-peak-solo-rpg

Revenge of the Tards. No briefing, no job to accept. You wake on a hillside above Storrs with forty wooltards standing over you and a clock that never resets. Rougher than the other two, and it ends in an Oldbrownhorn.
→ demonspawnbg.itch.io/postcard-adventure-revenge-of-the-tards-dark-peak-solo-rpg

Since Revenge of the Tards puts you up against one, here's what the field notes actually say about the beast.

Say oldbrownhorn to a stockman old enough to have had it from his own father and he'll correct you before you finish the sentence: not a kind of bull, the bull, twice the shoulder height of a working demonspawn and horned in a shape no wandering genetics produced unassisted. It's never once set a hoof on farmed ground. It stands at its own side of the wall and calls, two notes dragged up from somewhere lower than a bull's bellow has any right to reach, and every demonspawn and wooltard inside the fold answers whether the gate holds or not. Fight it and you've misunderstood the encounter. Nobody's ever been given the meeting, only the herd it calls and whatever's standing between that herd and the wall.

More field notes like this run daily at Hellsborough Exposed (https://hellsborough.com/daily-vomit)

Foked is free. The Postcard Adventures are free. None of it needs a group, a table, or an evening you don't have. Most of these run in under an hour, alone, with two dice and something to write with.

The Solophon goes out when there's something worth saying, not on a schedule. Next issue: the boxed set, and 3 scenarios we haven't announced yet.

Everything here lives at hellsborough.com.

Cheers

Bull Stuart