In October 2025 we presented the toothsome new Mystery Flesh Pit RPG Special featuring Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG, the Cypher System game from Ganza Gaming about the Permian Basin Superorganism. This bizarre natural geobiological feature, a living subterranean behemoth of unknown size and origin, was discovered in 1973 when a West Texas oil rig accidentally drilled into it. The PBSO has one large orifice abutting the surface; this giant opening gave the entity its common name, the Mystery Flesh Pit.
Spread over hundreds of miles just beneath the dusty West Texas plains, the Mystery Flesh Pit is a vast geobiological ecosystem filled with enormous anatomical systems and strange phenomena, all of which defy scientific understanding. In 1987 the Geobiologics Office of the United States Department of the Interior formally identified the Pit as a creature and designated it the Permian Basin Super Organism, or PBSO. Thus far, researchers have identified 14 surface orifices across an area of 187 square miles, though the largest remains the Pit itself. Recent estimates of the PBSO’s size have skyrocketed, especially after exploration of the mysterious blue tissue layer.
Though the PBSO’s full scale remains unknown, explorers have investigated sections of the entity’s internal anatomy, revealing an unsettling array of unusual, often disturbing elements: tunnels, tubes, cavities, and chambers; biological structures and lakes of organic fluid; intrapit parasites and creatures; and atmospheric and other effects that can injure visitors, sometimes in unprecedented ways. However, many internal elements have practical commercial applications. Suitable techniques can render them into unusually durable textiles, biochips for personal computers, medical, health, and beauty aids, and myriad other products.
Following entrepreneur James Jackson’s early investigations of the main orifice, the Anodyne corporation made its entrance more accessible. Anodyne pursued a twofold commercialization strategy: Even as they mined some sections of the Pit, they developed areas closer to the surface as a world-class visitor destination, refining the tourist attraction that Jackson first created. In the early 1980s the National Park System absorbed the public-facing parts of the concern. At its height, Mystery Flesh Pit National Park had something for everyone. Suspended deep in the organism’s main esophagus, the Lower Visitor Center let guests learn about the PBSO in climate-controlled safety. With interactive exhibits, an IMAX theatre, Ranger talks and tours, a food court, and picnic tables, young and old could marvel at the shifting tissues just outside the Center’s expansive windows. Adventurous visitors could hike along reinforced tunnels or through the famous bronchial forests. Many families started with a romantic couple’s retreat to the Amniotic Thermal Springs.
The Pit’s features can mutate, fade, or move unpredictably, sometimes abruptly. Once the Pit’s most popular attraction, the Circus Clown Chymus is typical. A group of performers at the Pit for a publicity stunt accidentally fell into a digestive sac. The attempt to retrieve them backfired horribly, and the Pit assimilated the mass of half-amalgamated humans as a tragic but fascinating multicolored calcium formation. The Park constructed a memorial to those who had died, but the formation itself was unstable and almost impossible to preserve, despite frequent applications of new calcium, restorative painting, and replacement of at least one figure that had unexpectedly crumbled overnight.
In 2007 a disaster forced the Park Service to close the area. Today the Pit is a government black site, a sprawling industrial complex of pumps and pipes that keep the slumbering giant from waking up.
For four years, on the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park website, artist Trevor Roberts meticulously visualized the Pit’s decades-long evolution through tourism signage, “wildlife” brochures, safety manuals, and bureaucratic-speak government memos documenting the entity. Ganza Gaming’s Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG, authorized by Trevor Roberts, lets you experience the park’s heyday as hundreds of thousands of visitors hike and tour through the dangerous fleshscape. Meanwhile, the secretive Anodyne Corporation exploits the pit’s resources, creating miracle drugs, organic computers, and the equipment necessary for plunging deeper into the abyss. Or can your PC survive the 2007 catastrophe that took thousands of lives?
Via the Cypher System Open License, the Mystery Flesh Pit RPG uses the Cypher System rules seen in Numenera and many other Monte Cook Games titles. You can be a Charming Person in Black who Operates Undercover or a Pit-Touched Park Guide Who Runs Away. Embrace your career as a Park Employee or Subcontractor, or keep your head down if you find yourself classified as a Special Contingency. Odds are you’ll fight off Conformity, or fill out incident reports as the screaming comes closer. Just keep in mind the Prototypes from R&D are a mixed blessing.
This new Mystery Flesh Pit Special presented the complete standalone Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG rulebook as a non-watermarked, DRM-free .PDF. You don’t need the Cypher System rulebook or any other rules to play – just morbid curiosity and a strong stomach.
