Every year since 2021 I’ve released a serialised adventure throughout December, putting out one part a day every day from the 1st until Christmas. This year I decided that instead of writing an adventure, I’d write a novella.

The Mouth Of Winter is a serialised grimdark fantasy/horror novella releasing one chapter per day from December 1st through December 25th, 2025 – an advent calendar of grim decisions, ancient horrors, and the cost of survival, for readers who enjoy the atmospheric dread of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and the violence and moral complexity of Joe Abercrombie.

What You’re Getting Into

This is a story about a mercenary company that takes a winter contract to garrison a remote monastery. It’s a simple job for easy money – three months of cold work, then home. Except they arrive to find thirty prisoners staging a desperate escape, and the mercenaries do what mercenaries do; they cut them down efficiently in the snow.

Only afterwards do they discover those prisoners were the annual sacrifice, part of an eight-hundred-year covenant that keeps something ancient and hungry sleeping beneath the mountain. Now trapped by winter storms with no way down, Rhod and his company face an impossible choice – become murderers to honour the covenant, or maintain their humanity and doom everyone when the creature wakes.

This is grimdark fantasy with teeth. It’s about the ugly arithmetic of survival, the distance between necessary and right, and what happens when all your choices are bad but you still have to choose. There are no clever solutions. No last-minute saves. Just people making terrible decisions and living with the consequences. Or not living with them, as the case may be.

Free Sample

Below you’ll find the complete first chapter – roughly 2,000 words of mountain climbing, blizzards, near-death experiences, and at least one screaming horse. It’s a taste of what’s coming: visceral action, character dynamics that matter, and the creeping dread of something vast stirring in the dark.

If you like what you read, the second chapter is already available, with the others releasing daily through 25th December 2025. Twenty-five chapters. One long descent into choices that can’t be taken back.

Fair warning: this isn’t a story where the heroes save the day. This is about what people become when survival demands it.

Chapter One

The wind comes up the mountain like a living thing, claws at Rhod’s face, tears water from his eyes. He leans into it, one boot after another, the path narrow enough that his shoulder scrapes rock on the left side. To his right, nothing but white air and the memory of a drop that goes down further than a man wants to think about. Behind him the company strings out in a ragged line. Twenty-eight men and women, plus whatever supplies the horses can carry. Minus whatever the horses will lose when the storm gets worse.

And it will get worse.

“How much further?” Cadi’s voice cuts through the wind. She’s close behind him, always is, has been for seven years now. His second, his left hand, the one who’ll tell him when he’s being an idiot.

“Another hour,” he shouts back. “Maybe two.”

“Shit.”

He doesn’t disagree.

The monastery sits at the top of this pass, exactly where the monks wanted it close to a millennium ago when they decided that holiness required suffering. The contract had seemed simple enough on paper – three months over winter, protect the monks from bandits and the occasional curious warlord. Easy coin for cold work. The monks would feed them, house them, keep them dry and relatively warm until spring melted the passes and the company could march back down to civilisation. Simple.

Rhod’s father used to say that “simple” and “easy” weren’t the same thing, and the old bastard had been right about that if nothing else.

The path narrows further. Rhod presses himself against the rock face, inches forward. The wind screams past, tries to pluck him off the mountain and send him tumbling down into the white nothing below. His fingers find purchase in cracks in the stone, and he pulls himself along, boots scraping for grip on ice-slicked rock. His gloves are wet, frozen, slick. Can’t decide whether it’s better to keep them on and protect his fingers from the weather, or tear them off for better grip. Both seem like bad choices.

He glances back. Cadi is doing the same, and behind her the rest of the company. Tam is in the middle of the line, one massive hand wrapped around the lead rope of the pack horses. Three of them, loaded with gear, supplies, weapons they couldn’t carry. The big man’s face is set in concentration, his other hand pressed against the rock.

Further back, barely visible through the snow, Rhod can make out Jes and Alyn bringing up the rear. The recruits. Green as summer grass, both of them, signed on a month ago in the valley town where the monks had posted their notice. Good with a blade, Jes, and Alyn could shoot. That would have to be enough.

The wind drops for a moment. In the sudden quiet, Rhod hears someone muttering prayers. He can’t tell who. Then the gust hits, harder than before, and one of the horses screams.

Rhod whips around in time to see it happen. The rear pack horse, the one at the end of Tam’s lead, loses its footing. Its hooves skid on ice, scramble for purchase, find nothing. The horse pitches sideways, eyes rolling white with terror, and then it’s gone, tumbling over the edge with a shriek that the wind swallows almost immediately.

Tam hauls back on the lead rope, muscles bunching under his coat. For a terrible moment Rhod thinks the weight of the falling horse will drag the others over, drag Tam himself over. But the rope snaps, and the big man staggers back against the rock face, gasping. Then silence, except for the wind.

“Keep moving!” Rhod shouts. No time to mourn a horse. No time to mourn anything. They need to get off this mountain before the storm gets them all.

He turns back to the path and pushes forward. His legs are burning now, thighs screaming with each step. The cold is seeping through his coat, through his boots, settling into his bones. Behind him he can hear the company moving, boots scraping stone, harsh breathing, the occasional muttered curse.

The path widens slightly. Not much, but enough that Rhod can walk without pressing himself to the rock. He picks up the pace, Cadi matching him step for step.

“Lost a third of our supplies,” she says.

“Still have two horses.”

“For now.”

He doesn’t answer. She’s right, of course. She usually is.

They climb for another hour. The light is fading, what little of it penetrates the storm. Rhod’s hands are numb inside his gloves, his face raw and aching. Each breath burns in his chest, the air so cold it feels sharp. He’s starting to think about shelter, about finding somewhere to hole up until morning, when he hears Tam shout.

“Bridge! Snow bridge!”

Rhod stops. Ahead, the path seems to continue across a gap in the rock. But it’s not stone. It’s snow, a fragile span of ice and wind-packed powder stretched across empty space.

“How wide?” Cadi calls out.

Rhod edges forward, crouches, tries to see through the blowing snow. Ten feet. Maybe twelve.

“Could go around,” he says. “Find another route.”

“Could,” Cadi agrees. “Or we could be here three more hours, lose the light completely, freeze to death.”

“You always were an optimist.”

She almost smiles. Almost.

Rhod studies the bridge. It looks stable enough, if you squint and lie to yourself. The alternative is backtracking in a blizzard, trying to find a path they hadn’t seen on the way up, burning time and energy they don’t have.

“One at a time,” he says. “Lightest first. Rope between each person.”

Cadi nods, starts getting the rope out. Rhod watches the bridge, watches the snow blow across it in sheets. If it holds, they might make it to the monastery before full dark. If it doesn’t, someone’s going to die.

He goes first. Has to. Can’t ask anyone to do something he won’t.

The bridge creaks under his weight. He moves slowly, carefully, each step a negotiation with gravity and luck. How much weight can packed snow take? He’s about to find out. The wind pushes at him, tries to shove him sideways into nothing. His hands are spread for balance, and through the bottom of his boots he can feel the bridge shifting, settling, groaning.

Halfway across. The snow under his right foot gives slightly. Rhod freezes, shifts his weight to his left, keeps moving. Behind him, he can hear Cadi shouting something, but the words are lost in the wind.

Three-quarters. Almost there.

His left foot breaks through.

Rhod throws himself forward, hits solid rock on the other side of the bridge, scrabbles for purchase. For a moment he’s sliding backward, the rope around his waist going taut as Cadi and the others haul on it from the far side. Then his fingers find a crack in the stone and he drags himself up, rolls onto his back, chest heaving.

“Still intact!” he shouts back. “Come on!”

One by one, they cross. Cadi moves like a cat, quick and sure. Tam is slow but steady, his weight making the bridge groan and sag but holding. The others follow, some confident, some terrified, all alive.

Until Jes. The recruit is halfway across when the bridge goes. One moment he’s there, the next the snow is collapsing under him and he’s falling with it, arms flailing. The rope jerks tight, catches him, and he slams into the rock face below the bridge with a sound that makes Rhod’s teeth ache.

“Haul!” Cadi is already pulling, Rhod grabbing the rope beside her. They drag Jes up hand over hand, his weight making the rope cut into Rhod’s palms even through his gloves. The young man’s face appears over the edge, white with shock, blood streaming from his nose.

They pull him onto solid ground. He lies there gasping, eyes wide.

“Can you walk?” Rhod asks.

Jes nods, tries to stand, collapses. Tam catches him, hauls him upright with one hand.

“I’ve got him,” the big man says.

Rhod looks at the rest of the company. Exhausted, frozen, bleeding in Jes’s case, but alive. All of them alive.

“Another hour,” he says. “Maybe less. The monastery’s just up ahead.”

It’s a lie. He has no idea how far they still have to go. But sometimes a lie is what people need to keep moving.

They climb.

The darkness comes down like a fist, sudden and complete. Rhod keeps one hand on the rock face, feeling his way forward, the company strung out behind him on the rope. His legs have gone beyond pain into a kind of numb persistence. Each step is mechanical, automatic, divorced from thought. Then, through the swirling snow, he sees light. Torches. Dozens of them, burning in the distance, painting the mountainside in flickering orange and gold.

“There!” Cadi sees them too. “The monastery!”

The company surges forward, exhaustion forgotten, the promise of warmth and food and rest pulling them on. Rhod picks up the pace, squinting through the snow at the lights. The monastery is big, bigger than he expected, a sprawl of stone walls and towers clinging to the mountain like a barnacle to a ship’s hull.

They’re less than a hundred yards away when Rhod hears the screaming. It comes from below the monastery, from somewhere in the darkness beyond the torchlight. Dozens of voices, maybe more, shrieking and wailing in wordless terror. Then he sees them, figures pouring out of a lower entrance, running and stumbling through the snow, heading down the mountain toward the company. His hand goes to his sword.

“Arms!” he shouts. “Everyone arms! Now!”

The company drops the rope, scatters, everyone drawing weapons. Rhod’s sword hisses free of its sheath, the steel cold against his palm even through the thick leather and fur of his gloves. Beside him, Cadi has her blade out too, her face set in the hard lines of someone who’s killed before and will do it again.

The figures keep coming, closer now, their screams echoing off the rock. Rhod can’t see them clearly through the snow and darkness, but there are a lot of them. Too many.

“Ambush!” someone shouts behind him. “It’s a fucking ambush!”

Maybe. Or maybe something worse.

The figures are thirty yards away now. Twenty. The torchlight from the monastery casts their shadows long and distorted across the snow. Rhod raises his sword.

“Hold!” he calls out. “Wait for it! Wait for my word!”

The company forms up around him, a loose line across the path. Twenty-eight against however many are coming down the mountain. Bad odds. But then, odds have never been in his favour.

The figures are close enough now that Rhod can hear individual voices in the chaos, can see them stumbling and falling and pulling themselves up again. They’re not attacking with any kind of discipline. They’re not attacking at all.

They’re running. From what, Rhod doesn’t know. But whatever it is, it’s behind them in the monastery, and the company is standing directly in their path.

“Brace!” Rhod shouts.

The first figure crashes into him a heartbeat later.

What Happens Next?

If you want to read the rest of The Mouth Of Winter, chapters one and two are already available, with new chapters releasing daily through 25th December 2025.

You can follow along in two ways:

• Read the story on itch.io – The novella, with new chapters added daily throughout December
• Support me on Patreon – Get bonus chapters, deleted scenes, and behind-the-scenes development notes throughout the month

The Mouth Of Winter is brutal, unflinching, and asks uncomfortable questions about what we’re willing to sacrifice to survive. If you’re here for that, I think you’ll enjoy the descent.

See you in the deep places.

THE THING FROM THE SWAMP is now available from itch.io.

THE THING FROM THE SWAMP is a new adventure for Mörk Borg. Inspired by B-movie creature features and weird video nasties, the adventure features:

• A woman displaced in time
• A twisted mech suit powered by human hearts
• A partially-flooded research facility in the middle of a stagnant swamp
• A horrible root-creature powered by lightning and malice
• …and lots more!

Initially available digitally at an introductory price, THE THING FROM THE SWAMP will come to print in July. Customers who purchase the digital version during this launch period will receive a discount code upon release of the print version so that those who wish to upgrade to a physical copy won’t be out of pocket.

The adventure also comes with an original soundtrack album, available to customers who pay £10 or more. The album is available as a standalone purchase via Bandcamp.

Long live the Moss Mother. Long reign the Queen of Rot. Take your first look at the cover of The Moss Mother’s Maze, the first adventure for A Dungeon Game (web | itch)! You can pick up this standalone module in June 2023.

Cover design and illustration by Chris Bissette.

In the first adventure for A Dungeon Game, players descend into an ancient maze said to be a vault for great treasure. Local legends tell that it is protected by a hulking dragon, and eternal beast known as the Moss Mother, who guards the vault and ensures that no intruders return to the surface.

Get lost in the maze as the Moss Mother pursues you. Navigate fiendish traps, befriend the strange people lurking in the darkness, and escape with your lives – and, hopefully, newfound riches.

This adventure will be available to order in print and digital editions from mid-June 2023. A Dungeon game is available for free online, either at the website or on itch.

Buy WHALESONG on Loot The Room

Buy WHALESONG on Itch.io

Starwhales birthed the universe as we know it.

When a starwhale dies their body disintegrates, leaving behind a hot, dense heartstone that drops through the atmosphere and settles at the core of the gas planet that the whale called home. If left untended there, the heartstones of dead whales ignite the planet’s core and create new stars.

All stars are the products of dead starwhales.

Legend has it that if the heartstone of a dead starwhale is retrieved and returned to the upper atmosphere, it will summon the whale back from beyond death.

WHALESONG is a game for two players that takes the form of a back-and-forth conversation narrating a starwhale’s dive through the five layers of the gas giant, while interrogating a lost relationship. One of you will be the Starwhale, . The other will be the gas planet the whale calls home.

Over the course of WHALESONG you will learn to love, and grieve, and to allow yourself to move on.

This game was made possible by the support of my patrons on Patreon. For early access to monthly games, become a patron here.

Buy WHALESONG on Loot The Room

Buy WHALESONG on Itch.io

September’s Patron game Scare School is out now!

Buy Scare School on Loot The Room

Get the game on Itch

Scare School is a two-page RPG for as many players as you can get in a room together, inspired by Monsters University and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.

You are juvenile monsters in training to be Scarers. By day you attend Scare School, and by night you venture aboveground to do your Scarework assignments – tracking down targets, building Fear, and working together to pull off a Final Scare.

Create your monsters, do your Scarework, and try to beat your high score!

Scare School was made possible by the support of my backers on Patreon. Patrons get early access to games, exclusive content not available anywhere else, sneak peaks, and more. When we reach £200 per game in funding, all games released through Patreon will launch with Community Copies. At £300 per game, all Patreon-funded games will be released for free under a Pay What You Want model.

Become a Patron here!

Scare School is illustrated by Lore Evans.

Buy Scare School on Loot The Room

Get the game on Itch

I just released a new collection of backgrounds for Troika!, which you can buy here.

Jonne Murke was Troika!’s pre-eminent scholar of the esoteric, obscene, and transcendant. While most of his work concerned identifying and cataloguing the variant flora and fauna of the divergent spheres, his lesser-known passion was in identifying and cataloguing people.

Murke’s Peerage is his seminal work, a registry of noteable personages, a study of the transcendant and the bizarre, and what he called “the definitive account of remarkable noteworthies across Troika! and the Elsewhere Lands”.

Existing across several hundred volumes, a complete collection of Murke’s Peerage is said only to exist somewhere in the library sphere of Biblonsong. This volume represents a mere fraction of Murke’s work, and should be studied in conjunction with other surviving volumes if one wishes to come to a full understanding of the extent of Murke’s obsession.

This volume of Murke’s Peerage contains details of the following personages:

• Dragon Charmers
• Fellows of the Guild of Mechanical Artistry
• Florists of the Botanical Court
• Hunters of Heads
• Murderers of Wickercrows
• Tainsmiths

Buy it here!

Murke’s Peerage of the Manifold Spheres is an independent production by Loot The Room and is not affiliated with the Melsonian Arts Council.

Back in February I ran a Kickstarter campaign during ZineQuest 2 for my game Under The Floorboards – a roleplaying game based on The Borrowers.

I’m very proud to announce that the game is now complete and available for purchase from itch. Get it here!

The game comes as a 48 page A5 PDF, and there’s still time for you to pick it up in a gorgeous print edition.

Under The Floorboards is a tabletop roleplaying game for 2-5 players about tiny people living in a giant, hostile world, inspired by The Borrowers. The focus of the game is very story-driven, with an emphasis on collaborative storytelling and worldbuilding over stats and crunch.

Build your family and the house in which they live, then embark on an expedition into the land of giants in order to collect the things you need to survive – without being seen.

The game uses a simple 2d6 system for conflict resolution and an easy-to-pick-up story-building system to help GMs build engaging scenes on the fly.

Under The Floorboards is a low-prep game designed for one shot play but with tools to enable campaign play over multiple sessions. The game provides locations, hazards, and tools to quickly design your own content to keep surprising your players, and is perfect for convention play or to keep on your shelf for game nights when your whole group can’t be there.

Buy the game now!

A couple of weeks ago I released a new party game for you and 1-5 friends who don’t want to be eaten by bears.

You are Leonardo DiCaprio or another non-bear humanoid just going about your day when a goddamn bear appears and tries to eat you.

Don’t let it eat you.

Take turns telling your friends exactly how the bear tries to eat them and then listen to them try to desperately avoid getting eaten. Then let the Jenga tower decide what happens.

That’s it. That’s the whole game.

You can buy Exit, Pursued by a Bear now from Loot The Room, itch.io, or DriveThruRPG.

The game asks players to narrate what they’re doing when the bear attacks, and provides prompts for situations you might find yourself in that could be ruined by a bear. Today I’m giving you another 10 prompts to use with Exit, Pursued by a Bear.

When the bear attacked I was…

1. Asleep in bed. (Tell us about the otherwise very mundane dream you were having that contained one very, very strange thing that seemed perfectly normal to you.)
2. In line to buy a Venti Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks. (Tell us why you go to Starbucks over local independent coffee shops, and why you hate coffee so much that you’d rather turn it into a hot milkshake.)
3. Watching Star Wars for the 8,000th time. (Who shot first?)
4. Listening to your least favourite album by your favourite band. (Tell us about the time you almost saw them live but fate decided that you weren’t going to get there in time.)
5. Playing Dungeons & Dragons. (Tell us why THAC0 should make a comeback in 6th Edition.)
6. Skinny dipping in a secluded woodland pond. (Tell us who you’re with, and why your clothes are so far away that you’re going to have to run away from the bear in the nude.)
7. Hiking in the woods. (Tell us why it’s 100% your fault that you’re currently being attacked by a bear.)
8. Watching Saturday morning cartoons from the late ’80s and early ’90s. (Tell us what your favourite cartoon was and why it should absolutely get a reboot once this bear attack is over.)
9. Shaving your legs. (Tell us why you were removing fur from your body, and why the bear is completely justified in attacking you as a result of this.)
10. Drinking a vodka martini during a game of poker at the casino. (Tell us why you felt like spending big tonight, in your best Sean Connery voice.)

You can buy Exit, Pursued by a Bear now from Loot The Room, itch.io, or DriveThruRPG.

Back in 2018 Matt Sanders and I started working on the Shadepoint Cycle. I released a free city supplement, Shadepoint, and we began releasing adventures and player options for it.

For one reason or another (mostly me having to take an extended break from working) we never released all of the books we had planned, but one thing we did put out was Whispering Darkness, an adventure Matt wrote that takes place deep in the mines under Shadepoint (or any other location of your choosing).

I really love this adventure. The monster Matt created for it is supremely creepy, and the artwork we commissioned is some of my favourite art in any book we’ve put out.

As of today, Whispering Darkness is Pay What You Want on DriveThruRPG. Go pick up a copy and keep it in your GM folder for when you need a quick, creepy sidequest to drop into your game. Go grab a copy!