Welcome back to the Epic Table! Today’s article has been preempted by something that has entirely taken over my brain. There’s been some interesting news in the community since last week, though, so I’ll be touching on that a little bit before we get into the main topic: the weirdest, most bizarre idea for an RPG on Kickstarter I’ve seen yet. Which is really saying something.
But First, The News
Before we get into that, though, I do want to acknowledge two bits of news to come out over the last ten days or so. I might be looking at both of these a little more thoroughly once the RPG community’s response to them has gelled a little more.
- The second draft of Paizo’s Open RPG Creative License–more commonly known as the ORC license–has been released for public comment. At first glance, little appears to have changed in the license itself. Most updates appear to be to the Answers and Explanations (“AxE”) document. These updates seem to have targeted making the license easier to understand for casual readers, including a nonbinding “plain English” version of the license. So far, the general reaction to this change has been mildly positive.
- As you may know, Michael Shea, better known in the RPG world as Sly Flourish, announced on Reddit last month that he was releasing a few of his books under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. In that post, he mentioned he was compiling a purely Creative Commons document to share to the community. That document, The Lazy GM’s Reference Document, was released via Reddit several days ago. The document is also available on Sly Flourish’s own site. While it obviously isn’t as comprehensive as the books, at first glance it looks like a great intro to SF’s principles and a handy reference for someone who’s already familiar with the work.
Now, to be fair, both of those are pretty interesting events. I’d planned to write on Sly Flourish until the ORC update happened, and I’d planned to write about that until I found out about today’s topic. So what in the world could displace them?
Brace yourself. It’s about to get weird.
Mysteries of the Flesh
What’s your opinion on the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park in Gumption, TX?
That probably wasn’t a sentence you were expecting to read today, and it certainly wasn’t one I was originally planning to write. But here we are: there’s a Kickstarter for The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park RPG going on right now. I feel compelled to say that 1) obviously please be careful with that link if you have struggles with body horror, and 2) this is one of the weirder things I’ve come across, so be warned.
Is there, in fact, a Mystery Flesh Pit National Park in Gumption, TX? Of course there isn’t. There isn’t even a Gumption, TX (at least as far as I can find). The whole thing is what the Kickstarter calls a “fictional alternate dimension.”
The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is… I think it’s probably best to call it “an art project” because it’s pretty difficult to accurately describe it in any other way. It originally started as a single fake national park poster on Reddit’s r/worldbuilding submitted by one Trevor Roberts. (In an eerie coincidence, I didn’t notice until I was writing that previous sentence that this blog will in fact go live on the precise four-year anniversary of the post. Ominous!) A fake National Park Service brochure came soon after. Both were very well-received in the community, and a fandom was born.
Roberts has continued to create content for the park ever since, which you can find on the project’s official website. There are all kinds of “artifacts” of the park there. Posters and brochures, of course, but also photos, notes, legal documents–there’s even the fake presidential authorization for the park’s creation, “signed” by Jimmy Carter. All of it is meticulously well-researched–according to the various articles on the matter, Roberts makes a strong effort to include as many realistic details as possible from the documents he’s imitating.
This has, inevitably, led to the obvious twist: there are apparently some people who believe that the park is, in fact, real. There’s a Snopes page explaining that no, this is not a real place, despite what the Facebook and TikTok memes would lead you to believe. (Because of course there are Facebook and TikTok memes.) Of course, the viral nature of this disinformation has brought the project to some mainstream attention. There was even a USAToday article. Roberts himself puts it best, however, when discussing with Snopes why some people have been fooled:
Much of the Mystery Flesh Pit project is, at least in the words of others, a very obvious critique of both the oil industry and the nature tourism industry, so if some people are so ready to accept it as fact, maybe that speaks to some aspects about the real world.
True or not, however, the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is a sensation. There’s a subreddit. And a Discord. And a TVTropes page. And, inevitably, a “gift shop” on the official website where you can buy all sorts of fake souvenirs. Maybe it’s no wonder that the Kickstarter was funded in all of eight hours.
The RPG Kickstarter
Once you’re familiar with the sheer amount of worldbuilding Roberts has poured into the Flesh Pit world, the concept of the Kickstarter begins to make more sense. Making a TTRPG about any national park would be a little bit odd, but Roberts has given more than enough dangling questions in his worldbuilding to make the whole thing work.
Part of the lore of the park, for example, is a mysterious incident that shut the whole thing down in 2007. Apparently, there was some kind of disaster that cost hundreds of lives… so now the whole thing is a secret government black site. It’s designed to keep the behemoth beneath the ground from awaking, and is totally locked off from civilians. And if you wanna talk great adventure hooks, that’s a pretty good start.
Christopher Robin Negelein certainly seems to think so. Negelein is the sole force behind Ganza Gaming and has taken on the design duties for the project. The Flesh Pit RPG is, according to the Kickstarter, going to be run on the Cypher System, which is probably best known for being the engine behind Monte Cook’s Numenera. Negelein has had some success publishing adventures and supplements for Cypher via online storefronts, so it seems as though the project is in good mechanical hands.
As mentioned above, the Flesh Pit Kickstarter blew through its funding goals in only eight hours. At the time of this writing, it’s currently sitting pretty at just over $48,000–more than three times its original ask and more than enough to cover the already announced stretch goals. Still, if you want to hop on board there’s still time left–the Kickstarter runs through the end of May. The highest pledge levels are unfortunately already full, but you can still get your hands on an exclusive patch in addition to the physical and PDF products by pledging at the Vice President level.
All Fleshed Out
The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park RPG is a hell of thing to experience unprepared. The source material is weird beyond belief, and it’s not clear at first glance how it’d make a good RPG. But few RPG settings get four solid years of worldbuilding behind them, and the creators are clearly passionate about the project. Give the Kickstarter a look. Who knows? It may wind up the next big thing in horror gaming!
The contents of this post are © 2024 H. Tucker Cobey. All rights reserved.
