The Dark Knocking Trilogy: A 5E and 321RPG Adventure

Two Systems. One Book. Flip It Over.

What Dark Knocking Comes in the Still of the Night? is a three-episode adventure series for one GR and 2 to 6 players. Each book runs the complete adventure on the brand new 321RPG Fantasy ruleset. Flip the book over, and the whole adventure runs in 5E, written for 5E, not converted to it. No conversion math. No second purchase. Pick a side at the table and go.

One GR either way. On the 321RPG side, that is your Game Runner. On the 5E side, the same two letters mean Game Referee.

EP.1: Black Cats. Rivenedge is in ruins. A cat asks for help.

EP.2: Brown Rats. A city at the bottom of an ocean, and everyone in it thinks you are a criminal.

EP.3: Crawling Bats. The trail finally comes together. It points straight into the Ember Waste, and nobody comes back from there whole.

3 books. 2 systems. 1 epic adventure.

Adventure Synopsis

The heroes are away. The sky is falling. And in the ruined streets of Rivenedge, four untested trainees watch a black cat scratch two words into the ground.

HELP US

Two goblins have her cornered. Russ is all knees and elbows, quick, and always eating something he did not pay for. Otus is more goblin than the alley has room for, spiked from helmet to heel, dragging a club the size of a fence post. Tonight the cat was going to be dinner.

Save her, and she leads you to a cache of relics nobody told you existed. Pick them up and something changes. You can understand her.

Her name is Beatrice, and she needs your help.

Then she leads you into the city of Ool, where the harvest festival never ends, and the mayor never dies. Learn what it costs to help a stranger find what she lost.

Watch for Russ and Otus. Goblins hold a grudge, goblins travel fast, and they will reach the next city two days before you do.

What’s in the book

Sixty-four pages. Thirty-two for 321RPG, thirty-two for 5E.

Flip it over, and a second front cover awaits. Same art, different badge. Neither side is the back of the other.

Each half holds the complete adventure. Maps. Four pregenerated characters, ready to hand out. Creatures, magic items, NPCs, dungeons, and roll tables. Everything you need to run it is in the book you are already holding, in the system you already play.

Printed classic style. 8.5 x 11, black and white interiors, color cover.

Six tiers also come with bonus PDFs: maps, character sheets for both systems, and a one-page GR sheet for each system. Digital only. The Menu below shows which.

Your four pregens

Built, statted, and ready to hand out. Pick one, and you are playing inside five minutes.

Stretch Goals

UNLOCKED! $2,000: Two more pregens join the party: 321RPG’s fresh take on the monk and the ranger. Each one is a brand-new class. Flip the book, and they’re a 5E monk and ranger, built and ready to hand out. Plus a bigger haul of magic items.

$4,000: The party grows again: 321RPG’s fresh take on the druid and the bard. Two more brand-new classes. Flip the book, and they’re a 5E druid and bard, built and ready to hand out.

$6,000: ??? Unlock $4,000 to find out.

More goals to come.

The menu

The Tip Jar, $5: Our thanks and every project update.

Take-Out, $20: All three adventures in PDF.

The Short Stack, $25: EP.1: Black Cats in print, plus the PDF.

The Blue Plate, $60: All three books in print and PDF, plus the bonus PDFs.

The Deluxe, $85: The Blue Plate with The Little Green Rosetta Die. Gone when the campaign ends.

Everything On It, $100: The Deluxe plus Russ and Otus at 27mm.

The Whole Kitchen, $165: All three books in print and PDF, the bonus PDFs, Russ and Otus at 27mm and 70mm, A Girl Named Doom, the Galaxy Edition die, and a Private Party with your name in the credits.

Catering, $225: Six copies of each book for your store.

Add-ons: Russ or Otus from $10, the Rosetta dice from $30, A Girl Named Doom for $15, the Fast Play and Fantasy Rules in print for $7, and a Private Party for $75. Details below.

Never played a tabletop RPG? Good.

321RPG Fantasy is fast, cinematic, and rules-light. Built for players of all ages and all experience levels. You do not need to have played a tabletop game before. You need to show up ready to make decisions and see what happens.

The 321RPG Fast Play & Fantasy Quick Start Rules are free on DriveThruRPG. Not free with a pledge. FREE, and free since before this campaign existed. We've also just added a brand new starter adventure, Kitty Stew to the Rules download. 

Read it before you back a thing. Run Kitty Stew at your table this weekend. Then decide.

Want more than the Quick Start? The 44-page 321RPG Fast Play and Fantasy Rules land shortly after the campaign launches. The PDF is free. The full-color print edition is $7 a copy. Add one to your pledge and it ships with your books.

The tone

Think the eerie warmth of Over the Garden Wall and the strange beauty of The Dark Crystal. Things are not what they seem. The danger is real. The villain is compelling. But the heroes, even young and untested ones, always have a chance.

Meet Russ and Otus

Armored head to foot, spiked at every edge, Otus hauls a club that shatters whatever it touches. Russ keeps a blade slung over one shoulder and a plan he has not thought through. They are vicious. They are also cowards. Show them a little confidence, and they run screaming down the alley promising to come back.

They come back. Every time. Sometimes with a fire-breathing mechanical dog. Sometimes with a stack of wanted posters and an entire undersea village to paper with them. Once, memorably, riding a ravenous tube worm through the streets. Across all three books, whatever you are trying to do, Russ and Otus turn up to make it harder.

They are named for Russ Nicholson and Erol Otus, two artists who drew the monsters that pulled a generation into this hobby, and who both worked on the Fiend Folio.

Look at the two of them, and you can see it. Otus is built the way Erol Otus painted: big, ornate, gorgeous, and very obviously about to hurt someone. Russ is built the way Russ Nicholson drew: all angles and hard black ink, the kind of figure that looks scratched onto the page rather than placed on it.

We grew up on those pages. This whole thing is a thank you note.

The minis

Two resin minis of the trilogy’s most persistent problem, in two sizes.

27mm for the table. Put them in front of your party the night they arrive. 70mm for the shelf. Display scale, built for people who like to paint.

Original illustration by Zack Giallongo. Sculpted by Jaycee Fairclough of Red Nebular Miniatures. Printed by The Extruded Forge, a one-person shop a few towns over from us in New Jersey, in high-toughness Sunlu resin. Russ carries a scythe. Otus is covered in spikes. Neither of them should snap the first time the box gets knocked off the table.

Add Russ or Otus to any pledge for $10 each at 27mm or $20 at 70mm. The pair runs $18 or $36. Everything On It includes the 27mm pair. First Come, First Served and The Whole Kitchen include all four.

The Little Green Rosetta Die

The first DUAL20 die.

321RPG rolls a d10, and you want to roll under. 5E rolls a d20, and you want to roll over. Two systems, two dice, two ways of thinking about the same moment of risk.

One die does both.

Ten faces are marked plain. Ten more are marked with a plus. Read the plain faces alone, and you are holding a d10. Read the whole die, and you are holding a d20. Nothing to add, nothing to look up.

As a d10. Read the number. 0 is 10. As a d20. Plain is 1 through 10. Plus is 11 through 20. 0+ is your natural twenty.

Translucent green resin. Deep, crisp engraving. A modern take on a fifty-year-old classic, and your key between two systems.

Why Rosetta? In 1799, a slab of stone turned up in Egypt carrying the same decree three times over, in three different scripts. One of them was Greek, which scholars could already read. That overlap is what let Champollion finally crack hieroglyphs in 1822, after fourteen hundred years of nobody on earth being able to read them at all. One object. The same meaning in more than one language. Same idea, smaller, in your hand.

And why Little Green? Because “A Little Green Rosetta” closes out Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage, and neither of us has been able to say the word rosetta since without hearing it. Go listen to it. We will wait.

Two versions. The standard die is in translucent green resin, and the Galaxy Edition is in a galaxy finish, hand-cast in a small batch.

Both are made by Dani Gent of Bellum Creations, and both are exclusive to this campaign.

The standard die comes in The Deluxe and Everything On It. The Galaxy Edition comes in First Come, First Served and The Whole Kitchen. Or add either to any pledge: $30 standard, $50 Galaxy, 100 of each.

Where this world came from

More than ten years ago, Geo wrote A Girl Named Doom. It sat in a drawer until Ham & Egg finally put it out.

One day she had a name, a home, and a family. The next she had a spellbook, a backpack, and a new name. Orphaned when her village burns, she falls in with two young monster hunters and takes to the road in a rickety cart, killing monsters for money and playing music for everything else. Then a mask turns up on a dead guard, whispers start moving through the towns, and an old bedtime story begins to feel far too real. The three of them are well over their heads, tangled in secrets about magic, monsters, and maybe Doom herself.

268 pages. Cover and interior art by Zack Giallongo, the same hand drawing the books you are looking at now.

This is where the world came from, a decade before Beatrice ever scratched two words into the ground.

Physical copies are a $15 add-on and come with First Come, First Served and The Whole Kitchen.

Private Party

Have a private playtest session of What Dark Knocking Comes in the Still of the Night? for you and up to 4 friends for either 321RPG or D&D 5E, run by John “Hambone” McGuire. Everyone at the table gets their name in the credits as a playtester.* Limited to 10. Add it to any pledge for $75. It also comes with First Come, First Served and The Whole Kitchen.

*This reward is for 18+ and will take place over a 4-5 hour session on Zoom. No filming or recording is allowed. Sessions run as playtests while the books are in development, so your table plays it before anyone else.

We have done this before

321RPG started as a COVID project between two best friends from New Jersey. Six years on, that is a shelf of full-length adventures and four free solo pamphlets.

Escape From Point Nemo. Rocket to Russia. The Sunset Limited. The Devil in New Jersey. Children of UMA. Children of UMA: Minisub Mania. Children of UMA: Death By Dino. Hard Times on the Back 9. Kevin Saves Christmas. The Hotel Exorcist, and many more. All of them written, printed, and shipped.

We have crowdfunded before, and we have delivered before. We overdeliver on quality every single time, because we would rather eat the cost than put our names on something we are not proud of.

Your books will show up.

Contributors

Written by Geo Collazo and John McGuire. Cover and interior art by Zack Giallongo. Additional art by Sally Cantirino. Edited by Meghan Ball. Cultural consultant James Mendez Hodes. Graphic design and layout by Tracey Steele. Mini sculpts and STL by Jaycee Fairclough.

Geo Collazo is one half of Ham & Egg and writes much of the 321RPG line. He wrote the middle-grade novel A Girl Named Doom, the book that first opened up this world, and adventures like The Iron Cobra of Hellgrim Hall for Orange Cat Games, along with a long shelf of other Ham & Egg titles. He came up on punk records and photocopied zines, and it shows in everything the company makes.

John McGuire is the other half of Ham & Egg and co-writer of the whole 321RPG line. Outside the diner, he wrote Heresy of Rot with Levi Combs, a horror adventure for Necromancer Games that runs on 5E, Castles & Crusades, and old-school rules. John also co-created and co-wrote Zombie Braineaters! with Brian Shutter for 5Alive RPG. His other titles include Crowdfund Your F’n Life, Ponch & Judy Was A Punk for WHPA, and The Ballad of Dirtstache Wizard for Mystic Punks. He answers to Hambone.

Zack Giallongo is a New York Times bestselling cartoonist. His debut graphic novel Broxo was published by First Second in 2012. He wrote and drew Star Wars: Ewoks, Shadows of Endor for Dark Horse.

Sally Cantirino is a comic artist and illustrator from New Jersey who specializes in horror. She drew I Walk With Monsters with Paul Cornell and Human Remains with Peter Milligan for Vault, and The Final Girls with Cara Ellison for Comixology Originals. She has self-published comics and zines since she was a teenager. She has designed characters and monsters for 321RPG, Exalted Funeral, and World Champ Game Co., and drawn for bands like La Dispute and Murder By Death.

Jaycee Fairclough is a miniatures sculptor and the person behind Red Nebular Miniatures. She is best known for her sculpts for the Dungeon Degenerates range and her own Wasteman game. Her digital sculpts, and her goblin and orc ranges in particular, are renowned among old-school 3D printing collectors. Jaycee has also sculpted for Sally 4th, Forge of Ice, Trilaterum, and Hibbets & Heimer Toy Co.

More artists and surprises to be announced.

Shipping

Paper and postage keep climbing. We locked these rates anyway. You pay them after the campaign, in Kickstarter’s pledge manager:

The Short Stack: $7 US, $20 Canada, $31 UK and EU, $40 everywhere else.

The Early Bird, The Blue Plate, The Deluxe, and Everything On It: $10 US, $23 Canada, $34 UK and EU, $45 everywhere else.

The Whole Kitchen and First Come, First Served: $12 US, $25 Canada, $55 UK and EU, $66 everywhere else.

Catering: $12 US, $65 Canada, $81 everywhere else.

Add-ons: Minis, dice, and the Fast Play and Fantasy Rules ride free in your box. A Girl Named Doom ships free to the US and Canada, and adds $12 to the UK and EU and $17 everywhere else.

Canadian backers: Canada Post may collect GST/HST and a CA$9.95 handling fee when your box arrives.

If postage jumps before your box ships, that is on us. No surcharges later.

Thanks for reading this far. I hope you’ll join Geo and me on this awesome adventure and Kickstart What Dark Knocking Comes in the Still of the Night today!

Until we meet again, stay safe out there, and may the dice always roll in your favor.

John “Hambone” McGuire