Open Tables

The last thing you remember was you were in the hospital. Deathly ill, perhaps an hour left to live. During the last hour of your life a strange man in a suit walked up to you and offered you a second chance. You'll wake up the next day healthy as can be. All you have to do is sign this one little contract in blood. Don't sweat the details. You signed. Then the next day you woke up. As promised you were healthy as you were at the prime of your life. But it wasn't exactly anywhere you recognized...

Normally you would expect to wake up in an inn, or a tavern. However, today you woke up in a shallow grave with your name on the headstone. You don't remember how you got here. You don't remember much about what happened before at all. But maybe the people of the town of Boarsburgh can help you out?

Designed for 3-5 players, running approximately 15 sessions. You fell asleep reading too late. The words swam. The room went soft. And then there was a warm reading room with no far wall, a chair already pulled out, and a book open to a page that knew your name. The Library collects unfinished stories. Getting in is easy: anyone lost enough in a tale, a regret, an old want they never resolved, can slip through without trying. Getting out requires finding your Last Page, the true ending of the story that brought you here, and paying the price of finishing it for real. The Library is not interested in helping you do that. It is, however, very interested in keeping you comfortable while you stay. This is a mystery and exploration campaign with a horror undertone, built around a voyage structure across a dark and lightless sea between the shelves. Players will build and crew a ship, navigate between strange ports, negotiate with an entity that always has a reasonable offer, and slowly lose pieces of themselves to a clock they cannot stop, only slow. Combat exists and matters: the things you have lost do not disappear, they walk off into the dark and get stitched into something, and fighting your way back to yourself is one of the only ways to buy time. The tone starts cozy and gets stranger. The Library is beautiful. That is part of the problem. Content Warnings Memory loss and identity erosion. The central mechanic involves progressively losing specific memories of people you love, skills that define you, and eventually your sense of self. This is mechanical and deliberate, and some moments are designed to land hard. If this is a sensitive topic for anyone at the table, discuss handling before play begins. Grief and unresolved loss. Characters are drawn into the Library by unfinished emotional business. The campaign asks players to engage with what their characters want and cannot have, and to make choices about letting go of it. This may touch on real experiences of grief, estrangement, or regret. Psychological horror. The horror in this campaign is quiet rather than violent: wrongness that accumulates, characters who are not quite themselves, and a place that is kind in ways that turn out to be predatory. There are no jump scares but there is sustained dread. NPCs in permanent harm. Not every NPC makes it out. Some losses are the result of player choices rather than dice, and the campaign is designed so that at least one of those lands with weight. Players who need all NPCs to be rescuable should flag this at session zero. Body horror, mild. Some creature descriptions involve wrongness of form: things with too many limbs, faces in the wrong places, familiar shapes that are not quite right. Nothing is described in graphic detail but the uncanny is intentional. Open endings and ambiguity. Several questions raised by this campaign are never answered definitively, including questions about specific NPCs and the nature of the Library itself. If unresolved mystery is frustrating rather than satisfying for your table, this is worth discussing. This campaign uses a lines and veils system and an X-card. Any player can use the X-card at any time without explanation. The Luxton Technique is also always in play so that if a triggering event does occur the effected parties can choose to discuss it or not based on their own needs.

The writer's guild has found a problem. The lands of storybooks and fairytales are in trouble. Somebody has tipped the villains off to their roles and now they are taking initiative and winning the fights they were supposed to lose. Stories are being retold and rewritten in their image. All the writer's guild can do right now is watch in horror as books get rewritten and stories get changed, as it's too dangerous for them to travel into the land of stories themselves. But then they had an idea. With the help of the mage's society, they have summoned up heros from stories whose books are far beyond saving. You are these heros, and it's up to you to find out just what's going on.