The Asphodel Complex, hardback roleplaying game

£40.00

The Asphodel Complex, hardback roleplaying game, by Au & O’Beirne

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The Asphodel Complex, hardback roleplaying game, by Au & O’Beirne

“The Asphodel complex offers:

  • 12 environments to kickstart any adventure
  • A codex filled with 30 nightmarish creatures
  • 180 unique items
  • 24 disturbing mutations
  • 180 random encounter scenarios
  • An extensive hex-adventure creation kit

This is a game for Game Masters of any experience level, designed to be accessible to players who may be entirely unfamiliar with Tabletop Role-Playing Games. Character creation is optional and should take no longer than five minutes. Character progression is commodity-based, meaning there is no need to track or accrue experience points or comprehend sprawling research trees. Instead, you become more capable by purchasing or collecting objects from your environment. After a cursory read through the ruleset, you could start a game session with another player without them needing to understand the mechanics of the game at all. The dreamlike nature of the setting lends itself to learning and discovery through play.  ‘Dreamlike’ is a term that belies the propensity for this game to digress into something more terrifying. The environments you will explore within the Asphodel Complex are often commonplace despite being uncanny — environments that become more clearly simulacra the longer you consider them and more frightening the closer you press and test them. Travellers must choose their own path, either questing in search for an escape from the complex or finding a home and purpose within the endless cycle of dreams inter-cut with lucid interludes and terrible horrors.

The legendary author of Greek epics Homer was the first to describe the Asphodel Meadows. Post-Homeric writers would conjure imagery of burgeoning fields swept with flowers. A pleasant home for an untethered soul to live out their afterlife. Yet Homer himself alludes to it being a darker place. A gloomy and arid ash-filled wilderness. A place traversed by heroes, but otherwise the home of nightmare-like creatures.

Unlike the Elysian Plain where life was pleasant and easy, or the Isles of the Blessed where the fertile soils bore miraculous fruit at the whim of the most distinguished and heroic soul, the Asphodel Meadows was a strange and inhospitable wilderness. A place where the senseless and lost spirits of the dead wept, moaned and wandered without purpose like shadows in dreams. A deep wilderness wherein the mediocre and low existed without consequence. The ancients clearly imagined that the underworld reflected the world in which they lived, segregated as it was by similar social and ethical divides as the living world, yet seen through a mirror darkly. So now through our own mirror, the underworld takes on the form of a labyrinthine, urban warren. The once open wilderness of the Asphodel Meadows has become an inscrutable, ever tightening complex.”

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