Ever wanted to take a hike in a lung? The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is a worldbuilding project by Trevor Roberts. It’s about a giant, disgusting flesh monster that gets turned into a US national park. Happy campers enjoy the sights and surroundings (occasionally getting eaten by oversized parasites), while a shady corporation profits in the background. Now it’s becoming a tabletop RPG, thanks to a new Kickstarter book.
For over four years, Roberts has worked on the Mystery Flesh Pit, creating documentation and images about the grisly attraction, from signage and leaflets to newspaper articles and ‘photographs’. A satirical work of horror fiction, its oddities cloaked in bureaucratic language, the project bears similarities to the technical document horror of the SCP Foundation.
Ganza Gaming is creating the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park RPG, powered by its Cypher RPG system. The Kickstarter began on May 2 and at time of writing has almost doubled its funding goal, raising $28,000. The game designer says “When we saw this magnificent online grotesquery, we immediately thought — this would be an awesome tabletop RPG!”
The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park RPG will be delivered as a hardcover print-on-demand book and a PDF, both of which will be sold on DriveThruRPG. You’ll take on one of three roles or ‘frameworks’: You can play as part of the Anodyne corporation, covering up shady secrets and wrongdoings. Or as a park ranger, going on rescue missions and working to preserve the ‘natural’ beauty. Or you can someone who’s developed strange abilities through exposure to the pit, and needs to lay low
You’ll also be able to play during different time periods, in the tourism boom or during a cataclysmic and mysterious event, that caused untold destruction and shut the flesh pit park down for good.
A video game adaptation of Mystery Flesh Pit previously came to Kickstarter in late 2022, but was scrapped early on, and all backers were refunded. A failed marketing push was one of the reasons cited, and the experience was enough for Trevor Roberts to state that “there will be no endorsed videogame adaptions of the Mystery Flesh Pit as long as I am alive”.
A pen and paper RPG seems less ambitious however, and the Kickstarter states that 90% of the manuscript is completed already. Currently the crowdfunder is gunning for its $35,000 stretch goal, a trio of adventures. Already, its hit one that will add 10 more monsters to the game’s bestiary.
For more wild and wacky adventures, check out the best tabletop RPGs of all time.