Shores Of Night - Redux

Stretch Goals Update 2/26/26: 

$1000 (GOAL MET!) - A modular survivor horror expansion: pulpier variant rules for combat, dynamic enemy and location creation tools, provisions for inexplicably intricate and esoteric puzzles, doors, keys, and traps, and so on. If funded, all backers will receive a PDF version of this expansion, likely at the same time as the core rule-book is released. 

$1500 (IN PROGRESS) - Dwellers On The Shores Of Night: Foes Both Terrible And Mundane (title subject to change): simply put, it's a "monster manual," featuring foes, entities, and creatures, specific and archetypal, drawn from my twisted imagination, folklore, and popular culture. Featuring the black and white designs by yours truly, as seen in the examples below, as well as story hooks, ideas, and prompts to help incorporate these critters into custom scenarios at the table. If funded, all backers will receive a PDF version of this expansion, around the same time as the core rule-book is released.

Shores Of Night, But Make It "Redux"

Yes, there's a free quickstart document.

I've been writing Shores Of Night for quite a while, and at the time of the first Kickstarter campaign, which was intended to bring it to life in the form of one big, fancy book, in glorious technicolor, and maybe even in a sturdy hardcover format, the principal work on the game itself (give or take a few editing passes and optional bits and bobs) was already finished. I had also made a bunch of art for it, several examples of which are featured both here and on the original page. 

That particular Kickstarter campaign missed the mark, however. We didn't do it. Didn't raise the funds. It happens, and so it goes. 

But I figure it'd be kind of a shame to leave a basically finished system gathering dust between the floorboard just because capitalism really, really sucks, wouldn't it?

So, I'd like to do something a bit less flashy and ambitious, chop up the text of the game into a handful of smaller, modular book(let)s, starting with the core rule-book, featuring a more rough-and-ready, exhaustion-punk aesthetic (that's me, I'm the exhaustion punk). In other words, I just want to get the game laid out and make it available, so that people can actually play it, should they wish to, and so that I can maybe, possibly, make a bit of dosh off of it and fund further development in slow, incremental, manageable steps. 

So that's what we're trying to do here. I am nothing if not persistent, I suppose, but there is no use tilting at the same windmill with the same old lance over and over again. The fundamentals of the game are going to be distilled as much as possible into a zine-ish format, and the additional "fluff" (most of which has also already been written, if not edited) such as specialized GM resources, genre advice, compendiums of monsters and items, and so on, will have to come along at some point later down the line. 

What Is Shores Of Night?

Shores Of Night is a "traditional" tabletop roleplaying game (in that it implies, in its default mode, a clear dichotomy between Character Players and a Game Master) intended to facilitate collaborative storytelling and roleplaying in the closely connected genres of surreal horror, cosmic horror, and weird fiction. 

It does not preclude a "Lovecraftean" approach, but when it comes to touchstones and inspirations, it draws a lot more directly on media along the lines of Silent Hill, House Of Leaves, almost the entire filmography of David Lynch, the "Yellow Mythos" of Ambrose Bierce and R.W. Chambers, and so on. 

In terms of the rule-set, Shores Of Night takes a "rules-medium" approach centered around a versatile d6 resolution mechanic. Additionally, awe, horror, wonder, and mystery are underscored by an auxiliary Gnosis/Veil mechanic (also primarily d6 based) wherein the fluctuations of two independent meters, one representing knowledge and attunement to the the Mysteries of the Cosmos and the other representing the strength of the literal boundary between the Consensus Reality and all that lies beyond, are read and interpreted, both on their own and in relation to one another, to various narrative and meta-narrative ends and effects.

Shores Of Night does not feature mechanics that directly model "sanity," stress, trauma, mental illness, or disability.

Why Does Shores Of Night "Exist"

So, I obvious like weird, surreal, and cosmic horror, but I'd gotten kind of tired of the Cthulhu Mythos, and I happen to very, very much dislike "sanity mechanics" of any kind, which includes "trauma" mechanics and most kinds of "stress" mechanics. In the past, I'd mostly just gritted my teeth through those aspects of otherwise excellent games so I could get to the good stuff (mystery, awe, liminality, the unheimlich, the ineffable, the horrific and terrible, and so on). Over the years, however, the frustration only grew and compounded. So, basically, I couldn't quite find a game that did the things I wanted and also didn't do the things I really, really didn't want ... so I made my own. That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

As the word count mounted and the pages piled up, the game evolved, at least I think and hope it did, into its own thing, with its own vibes and idiosyncrasies, but it really did just start out with a reactive attempt to encapsulate my own preferences and needs.

Who Are You?

Aleks Samoylov, also known as Sasha Nox, is a Russian born painter, designer, game developer, poet, playwright, performance and conceptual artist, mental health advocate, and general multi-media and supra-media creator, currently residing on the Eastern Coast of the Northern American Continent. 

They received a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College Of Art in 2008 and went on to produce a steady stream of new work in a variety of media and formats. You may remember them as the creator of multimedia interactive experiences (video games) such as Pleroma, How To Die Like A Graceful Beast, Composition In A Minor Key, Every City Is The Same, and Egress. You may also know them as the designer of tabletop games such as Passage, This Town Is Full Of Monsters, Spiral, Parable Of The Pit, The Grizzle, By Hook Or By Crook, Errant, At The Crossroads, The Thing In Itself, Shut Your Eyes And You'll Burst Into Flames, etc. You might remember them as the artist and designer behind the Lacuna Tarot, and there is a very small chance that you know them by their painting or from one of their poetry chapbooks (such as A Beginner's Guide To Capnomancy). Basically, they do a lot of stuff.