Machines of Bone & Blood: Necroindustrial Adventures in 5E!

What's Inside

Machines of Bone and Blood will usher in a whole new era for your game! You can add two new terrifying classes, dozens of subclasses, plus more species, monsters, items, spells, and more! Machines of Bone & Blood will transform your game, whether you're playing 5E (2014) or 5.5E (2024).

The book details the terrors of the Necroindustrial Revolution — a massive upheaval as reanimation magic advances to the point of remaking society. 

Skeletal machinery operates itself and zombie attendants take over the jobs that can't be automated. As workers lose their livelihoods and rebel against the necromancer barons, they make common cause with wilder powers: savage abominations and forest-dwelling outlaws. All this takes place within the Ivory Empire, a powerful mercantile kingdom ruled over by an aloof queen.

All the player options within the book are usable in any setting, of course. You can adventure within the Ivory Empire, choosing sides in the workers' struggle, or cherry-pick what you need and drop it into your own game world. The only constant is the screaming smoke wafting up from the stacks, as souls are burned like kindling to power the bone machines.

The material in here has been subject to careful analysis, rigorous playtesting, and an enormous amount of care. You're getting 300+ pages, a hardcover book and PDF illustrated with original art by fantastic artists (all real humans, no AI involved).

In fact, while the design and content is primarily by somanyrobots, no project of this scale is a solo endeavor—we've got two editors, a layout designer, and whole teams of amazing artists and playtesters helping to make this awesome book. 

Player Options

Two new classes, each with 14+ subclasses:

• The Necromancer, a three-quarters caster who animates necromantic minions to do their bidding! Create and customize flexible minions, whose offense and defense both scale upward as you grow in power. Subclasses range from the pseudomartial Death Knight to the white-robed Resurrectionist to the drake-obsessed Dragonwraith.
• The Abomination, a versatile support character who builds up frenzy before transforming into a deadly monster! Start each combat by empowering your allies and aiding their attacks before building up into your own brutal transformation. Subclasses include the ever-classic Nature of the Beast, the carnage-creating Nature of the Slayer, and the heavens-channeling Nature of the Qilin. 

Necrografting: Build Yourself Better, With Bones

Augment your game by augmenting yourself, yoking the power of undeath to your very body. Craft dark and deadly necrografts and then attach them to yourself, gaining more power at a terrible price. Do you need an extra arm, a skeletal mantle, or eyes that see through the ether? Or will you gear your grafts towards becoming something more?

More than two dozen subclasses for the base game's classes, for heroes and rogues joining in the revolutionary struggle:

• The Path of the Machine-Breaker barbarian, intent on smashing the factories of death!
• The Spirits Domain cleric, intent on peaceful rest for the dead and able to summon willing shades!
• The Agitator rogue, stirring others to action and ordering allies to deliver deadly strikes on their behalf!
• The Industrial Soul sorcerer, imbuing their magic with the roar of the furnaces and the clamor of the machines!
• And many more! If we hit all our stretch goals, this number will shoot through the roof.

Four new species to range across your game, including:

• The Shadeborn lineage, individuals born under a black moon and with darkness entwined in their souls!
• Awakened Trees, mighty oaks inspired to march from their forests to tear down the belching factories!
• The Bonebound lineage, workers driven by desperation to necromantically augment their own bodies!
• Fenwyrms, bog-dwelling reptiles who take up arms after their homes are poisoned by soul-smoke!

Macabre Monsters

The Ivory Empire never runs short of nightmares. Dodge blasts from an Undying Cannon, a devastating self-operating siege weapon. Survive the rotten fury of the Necrotitan, twisted beyond recognition by necromancy. And pray you never cross paths with the Necromancer Baron: a merchant lord who will brook no interference with their bone factories.

With more than 40 monsters, this tome's bestiary is packed with original mechanics and gothic flavor, turning every street, fortress, and graveyard into a battlefield of macabre encounters.  

The Adventures

Explore the dreadful Ivory Empire! A powerful and reclusive island kingdom, its might is built on the back of naval power and far-flung merchant colonies. Today, its noble class is intoxicated with the possibilities of necromantic power—self-sustaining factories, autonomous machines, and no need to bother with pesky laborers ever again. 

Each mini-setting within the book acts as a gazetteer to a different region of the Empire, and comes with a series of adventure seeds you can use to write your own stories, as well as a full-length adventure about fighting back against the necromancer barons' power!

Real History

That's a lie, there's not any real history in this book (at least, I sure hope none of this happened in history). But the story of the Necroindustrial Revolution is heavily indebted to our world — in particular, the desperate struggle of Britain's Luddite movement to avoid poverty and starvation at the hands of rapid and devastating industrialization at the dawn of the 19th century. 

For centuries, "Luddite" was a byword for a person reflexively afraid of technology, but modern writers are making clear that the Luddites were just workers — not mindlessly opposed to progress, but advocates for a world where machines empowered people instead of the opposite. Machines of Bone and Blood aims to give you a way to incorporate and explore that struggle in your games, giving you a window into their rebellion against unrestrained greed by rapacious industrialists. Just, y'know, with zombies.

Exclusive Dice Sets

Spell and Magic Item Cards

Every one of the 100+ spells and each of the 50+ magic items for necrograft body-parts from Machines of Bone & Blood, in card form. Keep them behind the screen for quick reference, or hand them directly to your players to assemble abominations!

Deluxe Edition Cover

The ultimate Machines of Bone & Blood experience, available exclusively through this Kickstarter. Includes all the content in the standard edition, plus a stunning deluxe variant cover by artstation.com/ismatilustrats and artstation.com/sylleth.

Playtest Materials

Embark into Machines of Bone & Blood right now with our 20-page free playtest PDF, featuring the core Necromancer class, the Empire Domain Cleric, the Deathhunter Ranger, and a selection of items and spells.

Tiers

Take a look at all the different ways you can support the project, and all the goodies you can fetch for your party by doing so! When you find something you like, pick it from the sidebar to pledge at that tier.

PDF Tier - $30

• Machines of Bone & Blood - PDF

PDF & VTT Tier - $50

• Machines of Bone & Blood - PDF
• VTT Module - Foundry, Roll20, or Shard Tabletop

Book Tier - $65

• Machines of Bone & Blood - Hardcover
• Machines of Bone & Blood - PDF

Deluxe Tier - $95

• Machines of Bone & Blood - Deluxe Hardcover
• Machines of Bone & Blood - PDF
• Digital Maps & Tokens Bundle - PDF
• Digital Art Pack - PDF

Physical Core Tier - $120

• Machines of Bone & Blood - Hardcover
• Machines of Bone & Blood - PDF
• 100+ Spells - Card Deck
• 50+ Magic Items - Card Deck 
• Abomination Dice Set - Sharp Resin
• Necromancer Dice Set - Premium Liquid Core

Everything Tier - $200

• Machines of Bone & Blood - Deluxe Hardcover
• Machines of Bone & Blood - PDF
• Digital Maps & Tokens Bundle - PDF
• Digital Art Pack - PDF
• VTT Bundle - Foundry, Roll20, or Shard Tabletop
• GM Screen
• 100+ Spells - Card Deck
• 50+ Magic Items - Card Deck 
• Physical Map Pack - Print (approx. A1 in size)
• Abomination Dice Set - Sharp Resin
• Necromancer Dice Set - Premium Liquid Core

Build-A-Horror Tier - $400

• Machines of Bone & Blood - Deluxe Hardcover
• Machines of Bone & Blood - PDF
• Digital Maps & Tokens Bundle - PDF
• Digital Art Pack - PDF
• VTT Bundle - Foundry, Roll20, or Shard Tabletop
• GM Screen
• 100+ Spells - Card Deck
• 50+ Magic Items - Card Deck 
• Physical Map Pack - Print (approx. A1 in size)
• Abomination Dice Set - Sharp Resin
• Necromancer Dice Set - Premium Liquid Core
• Custom Piece of Content (Spell, Feat, Item, or other piece of content to go into the book)
• Your name in the credits! 
• And our eternal gratitude <3

Stretch Goals

Having blasted through our funding goal, we're into stretch goals territory! There's a ton of stuff I'm excited to add to this book. More subclasses! More monsters! More items! More of everything, basically. Some of our stretch goals will even add subclasses for the classes found in Songs of the Spellbound Sea (the Troubadour, Swashbuckler, and Bloodrager), helping tie those classes in to the Ivory Empire.

For Backer's Choice stretch goals, these will go out as polls after the campaign concludes, giving every backer the chance to vote on new content to add.

Add-ons

All pledges are eligible for a variety of add-ons, both physical and digital! Digital add-ons include VTT modules (Roll20, FoundryVTT, and Shard Tabletop) for online play, token packs for all the monsters and characters, digital map packs, and a beautiful digital art pack with high-resolution art. 

Physical add-ons include Machines of Bone & Blood-themed dice, spell and magic item cards (including necrografts!), map packs and a gorgeous GM screen! You can also grab any of the physical rewards of our previous project, Songs of the Spellbound Sea, while supplies last. Note that all images for new Machines of Bone & Blood add-ons are digital mockups and subject to change.

You can add on individual items to your pledge after you select a pledge level over on the right ->

The Team

Almost everyone involved in Songs of the Spellbound Sea is returning for this project!

Words

• Somanyrobots: Designer, author, and overall project lead, Robots is a big ol' nerd, based in Seattle WA.
• Mys Marie Post: A Salt Lake City based nonbinary fiction and TTRPG writer, long time DM/Keeper, and long suffering personal chef to their French Bulldog, Arlo. Mys was a proofreader for Spellbound Sea, and this time around will be helping with adventure writing.
• Gilly Kelleher: An editor, actor, and thespian-of-many-hats. Loves to wrangle words, play ttrpgs, and learn new things.
• Yami: Yami's been tearing people's homebrew apart like a wild animal for 10 years and counting.

Art

• Bora Haxhirai: A layout and graphic designer, Bora's worked on major TTRPG projects as a designer, art director, and all-around badass. Also, paints sometimes.
• Žana Arnautović: An illustrator and concept artist with a passion for fantastical characters and worlds, who's done a ton of book covers and TTRPG work.
• Duong Lam: A concept artist and illustrator based in Saigon, who's worked on wide range of TTRPG projects.
• Alifka Hamamm Nugroho: A prolific concept artist who's handled art for a number of card games and TTRPG projects, whose day job is at a major art studio in Jakarta.
• Olga Jaworska: A digital artist of Ukrainian origin, currently residing in Belgium, with an academic education in fine arts and illustration. Also a huge tabletop and video-game nerd.
• David Kovačič: A digital artist with experience on card games and fantasy illustration.
• Roberto Andreas: Digital artist, fantasy illustrator, and character design lover.
• Will Roqq: Brazilian 2D digital artist with 4 years in the international games market and participating in incredible TTRPG projects.
• Matt Francella: A cartographer and artist with decades of experience in the industry.

Video

• IDBN: A D&D homebrewer who dabbles in game design, screenwriting, animation, video production, and computer science; a Renaissance Nerd, you might say.

Special Thanks

• Eleanor Pender: A UK-based university lecturer and project consultant for a wide range of creative projects.
• Matt Olick: A marketer with deep experience working on crowdfunding campaigns. Designed the Kickstarter page, graphics and advertisements.

Shipping

The target is to get books in your hands by the end of 2027. That means content-complete by early 2027 and final files to the printers by late spring or early summer 2027. We're taking all the things we learned from our previous campaign, Songs of the Spellbound Sea, and putting it to work to ensure a smooth-as-glass delivery schedule here.

• United States: 12 USD
• UK: 13 USD
• Canada: 22 USD
• Europe: 24 USD
• Rest of the World: 34 USD

Shipping costs are a nightmare, we're not going to lie. With shipping routes fluctuating, trade wars burning and tariffs that can fluctuate by the day, it's extremely hard to predict. We'll give you estimates, but shipping won't be charged until it's time for books to go on boats. We do intend to curate our offerings and be careful about our manufacturing and shipping, to keep the odds down of being hit by big surprises.

Contact Us

Commenting and messaging on the campaign is awesome - we promise we will read every single comment. But that's not the only place to find Robots and the team!

• https://www.somanyrobots.com - A home for Robots's content, including an RSS feed and email newsletter.
• Discord is the best way to stay in touch and keep up to date.
• Patreon is the best way to provide ongoing support - obviously backing the campaign is amazing, but patreon backers also get to vote on regular free content releases, and higher tiers get credited on those free content releases.