Maledict

 Maledict is a low-fantasy survival horror tabletop role playing game designed to invoke a sense of terror, desperation, and deep character connection in its players. Drop the dice, pick up any deck of 52 cards and enter the Thicket, where a new breed of body horror and hand-drawn, dark western aesthetics await.  

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Maledict as an adjective refers to something which is cursed or deserving of a curse. Here in this forsaken land called the Thicket, the pious consider the very soil maledict; hexed by a tangle of lifeless, leafless trees that strangle the horizon as far as the eye can see. Few remember the Upheaval, when the cursed branches first wrenched their way up from the soil but all know the terror they inspire. 

Their sickening truth is revealed by the hair and teeth of those lost to the woods embedded in the oily gray bark. The smallest splinter or prick of the finger introduces a rather stubborn tenant to the skin known only as “The Pins.” Every desperate attempt to remove them only causes them to burrow deeper and multiply. Those so-called “Riddled” victims are soon to join the spreading Thicket, grotesquely twisted into a new tree adorned with their skeleton. In their final hours, the Riddled wander aimlessly in the woods, their minds poisoned with the lonesome desire to be held, to be close to their kind. Little do they realize, the Pins are driving them toward warmer flesh to stitch themselves into, whether their host still lives or not. 

While methods of stymieing the growth of the Thicket have been slowly refined, no cure for the Pins nor safe culling method for the trees has yet been found. Burning them casts up a killing smog called “Pinlung” that can persist for generations while the sap produced by cutting them is just as effective at converting bodies to bark. Refugees trample one another in a feverish charge toward what few walls can still separate them from the hungering wilds. Sealed on all sides, this place has become its own killing pen for those who continue to draw breath within it. 

And yet, the Thicket’s denizens still find shelter beneath a hostile canopy, even as it threatens to consume them. Settlements and factions have developed amidst the adversity (and at times opportunity) of the Thicket. The adventurous and foolish band together against twitching amalgams that drag themselves nightly from the treeline, stitched together by the needling Pins which seek life like hungering leeches. Shall you face the Thicket’s horrors and unearth its secrets? Or will you lie among lifeless roots, your soul another seed for humanity’s destruction.