Mage Hand Press posts
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Complete Vagabond
Just Leo and me out on the road. Of course, Leo don’t make good conversation, on account of bein’ a dog.The Complete Vagabond is the definitive version of our Vagabond class, retooled and expanded to give you more compelling characters than ever. The quintessential vagabond is the mysterious fig...
Insomnia 0.8
Insomnia is officially over 175 pages! This month, we’ve finished the base set of twelve monsters with:The Seraph. The heavens burn with a hellish radiance. An angel arrives to proclaim that the end of all things is nigh.The Cult. The kids are playing a dangerous new game. It involves dice, rolepl...
Heist at Squengi’s | Czepeku Sci-Fi
Contractor Corps is back! Your mission, if you choose to accept it (and you really don’t have a choice) is to head over to Squengi’s Diner and rob the safe. Oh, and we’re sending a half-dozen other contractors as well. If you must kill a coworker, do so quietly.This is perhaps the longest of t...
Path of the Drifter
The first of four subclasses for Insomnia, this one written for the modern setting Nowhere USA. Contemporary-style barbarians are fairly common in pop culture, especially in action movies. This one should evoke some of those Loganvibes to hammer the design home.
Way of the Warped
An Insomnia/Dark Mattercrossover! The Blackpost setting in Insomnia is a cozy little horrific corner of the Dark Matter universe, all the way at the edge of space, where horrible monsters seep out of the black nothingness beyond the stars. This subclass for Monkhas seen a little too much of one of t...
Skathári
These resilient, luddite insectoids seem to instantly connect with Dark Matter players everywhere. It's a good joke, everyone knows how to tell it, and it's always funny!“Gid’down!” I shouted and pulled Mor’rak, the new Skathári hire, behind a concrete barrier, just as a repulsor gr...
Dark Matter Orc
Orcs are a staple of fantasy literature, for better or worse, so for the science-fantasy world of Dark Matterwe wanted to provide a new take on the species. This version is polished to perfection from the one printed in the Dark Matter hardcover.Once the rig was loaded on the lift, Dame’re could s...
Decommissioner
Of course you can play Deckard! Blade Runner is one of those seminal influences that runs through Dark Matter’s veins, and we even have a perfect stand-in for the replicants in the book. Now, however, you get to roleplay your favorite dreams of electric sheep with a subclass for the Investigator!
Insomnia 0.7
Insomnia continues to creep toward its final form. Here’s the tl;dr of what it gains this month: Art for every single faction in all three settings The Herald, a nyarlathotep sort of eldritch being who presages the terrible Dread Leviathan. This is the fourth and final Eldritch monster! The Imp, a...
The Deal | Czepeku Sci-Fi
Plenty of time to bargain later. You’re either in or you’re out. Make your choice.In our tradition of rolling out these adventures in a completely random order, here’s the first adventure of Contractor Corps, in which you and your cellmates must stage a prison break from the Odobenus, a ship t...
Burden of Awakening
If you’ve read Dune: Messiah, you should understand the shape of this particular Martyr's Burden—foresight, godhood, and sacrifice. For everyone else, this subclass is an attempt to meld the influence of Dune’s Paul Atreides and Star Wars’s Jedi Order into something cohesive that retains...
Revised Nautilid
The nautilid is a stone-cold Dark Matterclassic, and its design almost entirely holds up. However, a bulleted list for the Aqua Suit was a must! It should be 90% easier to digest your racial traits now.“His heavy footfalls shook the deck as he stomped up from engineering—Titus Octavius didn’t ...
Revised Avia-Ra
As we revise races from their first printing in Dark Matter, we're avoiding skills and proficiencies that make your character’s traits seem totally inborn and biologically-determined. A dragonborn’s breath weapon is alright, but not all elves, for example, are born with weapon training. As a...
Star Wolf Banner
AStarfox reference, you say? I plead the fifth. And the second. I mean, it COULD be a reference to Harlockor Cowboy Bebop, if you prefer. Command squadrons of fighters with this subclass for the Captain built for the ship combat rules in Dark Matter!
Repo at Robo-Rumble | Czepeku Sci-Fi
Yes, we’re back with more Dark Matter! This adventure is yet another collaboration with CzePeku Sci-Fi, but this one’s a little different. Now that we’re done with the goodie-two-shoes Freelancer Corps, we’re signing a contract with the Firm and embarking on a crime spree of mini-adventures!...
Mage Hand Press Custom Character Sheets | Races
After playtesting our new custom character sheets for a few weeks, I’ve decided to push the idea even further! These single-page sheets contain everything the original sheets omitted: space for background details, a full column for personality traits, and every trait offered by your choice of race...
Revised Amoeboid
Welcome back to the ‘Verse! For the next few months, we’ll be digging back through some of Dark Matterin preparation of a new print run with a revised edition of the book. Don’t expect anything too drastic: just smoothed-out edges, better cohesion with our other products, and a dose of future-...
Cyberghoul
Comments from the Designer: The word “cyber lich” has been kicking around in our Dark Matternotes for as long as the setting has existed, but we haven’t had a cool way to implement it until now! Hack responsibly (both bodies and systems).There’s more than one way to imbue a corpse with the s...
Insomnia 0.6
Happy new year!The three settings of Insomnia are officially complete. This release includes a suite of drag-and-drop NPCs for Nowhere, Grismoor, and Blackpost, as well as new locations and factions throughout. I've also massively reworked and expanded the introduction to the monsters chapter, f...
Freelancer Corps | Czepeku Sci-Fi
It's hard for a freelancer to make ends meet. Just keep taking jobs and maybe you'll hit paydirt.Here's Freelancer Corps, the first Dark Matter campaign built around ship maps from CzePeku. Feel free to take this as-is for a short excursion into the 'Verse or dabble these adventures ...
Mage Hand Press Custom Character Sheets
This pack of custom character sheets gives you a nearly-instant character for any base class in Valda's Spire of Secrets. Just add some ability scores, pick a race, pop it into the microwave for sixty seconds, and voila! The pre-listed features, custom form-fillable trackers, and clean design me...
Insomnia 0.5
Surprise, surprise! This month's releases are the same as the last: even more Insomnia and another Dark Matter adventure.This update to Insomnia adds four brand new subclasses to the remote galactic station, Blackpost, also usable in any Dark Matter game! You can embrace your Green Lantern fanta...
Unidentified Falling Object | Czepeku Sci-Fi
Though far from advanced, these weapons and their panicked wielders seem sufficiently dangerous.This Dark Matter adventure is sure to be an all-time classic. Cze-Peku Sci-Fi had a phenomenal flying saucer map that made perfect sense for our setting, since amoeboids fly their very own saucers and abd...
Insomnia 0.4
Bam! With this update, Insomnia is over a hundred pages long. The whole project is really coming together!This month, we've fleshed out the modern setting rules with four subclasses and a bunch of necessary information on how to run each of the 5E base classes in Nowhere, USA. The warlock is por...
Every Life Worth Saving | Czepeku Sci-Fi
A downed hospital ship, a ticking clock, and worms. So many worms.It's another Dark Matter one-shot adventure, in collaboration with Cze-Peku Sci-fi! This time, the party must explore a downed hospital ship, the Caladrius, and rescue anyone still alive on board. But a titanic number of psi-worms...
Last Haul of the Tenrec | Czepeku Sci-Fi
A Hyperdrive Fleet by any other name would smell as sweet!That's right, we're back with another Hyperdrive Fleet collaboration (even though they've since rebranded to the clearer CzePeku Sci-Fi label)! This month has been just cripplingly busy, so the rest of the cool Insomnia subclasses...
Insomnia 0.3
I believe that last month I implied that we'd have a low-content month coming up, as we catch up on writing and art. Not yet, though! Because we basically worked nonstop all month, we've got a bumper crop of new subclasses and monsters ready to show off.This month, we've expanded Insomni...
Extinction Subclasses
There’s a massive update to the Book of Extinction coming today if you’re a backer, but we’re going to show off the subclasses chapter here today. It’s been a little while since we’ve had the chance to really flex our subclass skills, but this lineup really slaps: druids riding dinosaurs, ...
Insomnia 0.2
Boom! Thirty extra pages of Insomnia!BlackpostThis month, we've got everything about Blackpost -- a terrifyingly distant corner of the Dark Matter universe, complete with blaster rules, factions, and so forth. Fleshing out just one little colony as its own setting has been a rewarding challenge,...
Insomnia 0.1
It’s time to dive into Insomnia!Revisiting this project has been an absolute joy -- I hope that shows in the chunk I have for you today. Last time I approached this project, I had the same overall outline: create a horror conversion for D&D 5e in much the same way that Dark Matter represented a sc...
